Thus Bad Begins

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This story didn’t happen so very long ago — less time than the average life, and how brief a life is once it’s over and can be summed up in a few sentences, leaving only ashes in the memory, ashes that crumble at the slightest touch and fly up with the slightest gust of wind — and yet what happened then would be impossible now. I mean, above all, what happened to them, to Eduardo Muriel and his wife, Beatriz Noguera, when they were young: rather than what happened to me and them when I was a young man and their marriage was a long, indissoluble misery. The latter would, of course, still be perfectly possible: what happened to me, I mean, given that it’s happening to me now, or perhaps it’s all part of the same ongoing story. And I suppose what happened with Van Vechten and so on could also occur. There must always have been Van Vechtens and they won’t suddenly stop existing, they will always be there, in real life and in its twin, fiction, because the nature of the characters never changes, or so it seems, they continue to be repeated over the centuries as if the two spheres lacked imagination or had no alternative (after all, both spheres are the work of the living, perhaps the dead are more inventive), sometimes it’s as if, like very young children, we can only really enjoy one drama or one story, albeit with infinite variations that disguise both drama and story as either ancient or modern, but always essentially the same. Therefore, throughout the ages, there must also always have been Eduardo Muriels and Beatriz Nogueras, and the same applies to the bit-part players too; there have been endless Juan de Veres, because that was and is my name, Juan Vere or Juan de Vere, depending on who is saying or thinking my name. There’s nothing original about me.

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