When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías Page A

sunbathing lying on her back: a youngish woman, she was reading a newspaper, she had the top part of her bikini undone, but hadn’t removed it entirely (that’s still rather frowned upon in San Sebastián). The second person was sitting down, she was older, plumper, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a straw hat, she was smearing suncream on herself: she must be a mother, but her children were nowhere to be seen, perhaps they were playing bythe sea. The third person was a man, possibly her husband or her brother, he was thinner, he was pretending to shiver as he stood on his towel, as if he had just emerged from the sea (he must have been pretending to shiver because the sea would certainly not be cold). The fourth person was the easiest to make out because he was wearing clothes, at least his top half was covered: he was an older man (the hair at the nape of his neck was grey) sitting with his back to us, erect, as if he, in turn, were watching or surveying someone on the shore or some rows ahead, the beach his theatre. I fixed my gaze on him: he was evidently alone, he had nothing to do with the man to his left, the man who was pretending to shiver. He was wearing a short-sleeved, green T-shirt, you couldn’t see if he had swimming trunks on or trousers, if he was fully dressed, most inappropriate on a beach, if he was, that would certainly attract attention. He was scratching his back, scratching his waist, he had a lot of fat around his waist, it must have weighed on him, he was one of those men who have great difficulty getting to their feet, to do so they have to throw their arms forward, with their fingers outstretched as if someone were pulling them. He was scratching his back, almost as if he were pointing to it. I didn’t have time to find out if he would get to his feet like that, with difficulty, nor if he was wearing trousers or swimming trunks, but I did find out that he was the man my neighbour was looking at, because suddenly, with my binoculars fixed at last on his thick waist and his broad back, I saw him collapse, fall forwards in a sitting position, the way puppets fall when the hand holding diem lets go of the strings. I had heard a brief, muffled noise, and I just had time to see that what was disappearing from the balcony to my right was not the arm of my neighbour with the binoculars, but his arm and the barrel of a gun. I don’t think anyone realized what had happened, although the man who had been shivering abruptly stopped, no longer cold.

WHEN I WAS MORTAL
    I OFTEN USED to pretend I believed in ghosts, and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal. For they do return. Very rarely are they or we noticed, the houses we lived in have changed and the people who live in them do not even know of our past existence, they cannot even imagine it: like children, these men and women believe that the world began with their birth, and they never wonder if, on the ground they tread, others once trod with lighter steps or with fateful footfalls, if between the walls that shelter them others heard whispers or laughter, or if someone once read a letter out loud, or strangled the person he most loved. It’s absurd that, for the living, space should endure while time is erased, when space is, in fact, the depository of time, albeit a silent one, telling no tales. It’s absurd that life should be like that for the living, because what comes afterwards is its polar opposite, and we are entirely unprepared for it. For now time does not pass, elapse or flow, it perpetuates itself simultaneously and in every detail, though to speak of “now” is perhaps a fallacy. That is the secondworst thing, the details, because anything that we experienced or that made even the slightest impact on us when we were mortal reappears with the awful concomitant that now