While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marías Page A

reason, after death, wished to find repose in fictions, but also fearful that this was not the case and that his presence had somehow been mysteriously linked to the old lady—a love affair with Zapata required more secrecy than any other, a secret that would have to be kept forever—she decided to go back to reading out loud in order to call him back, and she read not only novels and poetry, but books on history and the natural sciences. The young man took some time to reappear—perhaps ghosts go into mourning, for who else has more reason to or perhaps they are still wary, perhaps words can still wound them—but he did finally return, attracted perhaps by the new material, and he continued to listen with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the chair back, but comfortably installed in the now vacant armchair, his hat dangling from his hand, and sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit cigar, like the patriarch he never, in his numbered days, had had the chance to become.
    The young woman, who was growing older, jealously guarded her secret and spoke ever more confidingly to him, but never received a reply: ghosts cannot always speak nor do they always want to. And as that one-sided intimacy grew, so the years passed, and she was always careful not to mention the name ‘Jesus’ again in any context and to avoid any words that resembled ‘ guajiro or ‘Guajardo’ and to exclude forever from her readings any references to China or Mecca. Then one day, the man failed to appear, nor did he in the days and weeks that followed. The young woman, who was now almost old herself, was worried at first like a mother, fearing that some grave accident or misfortune might have befallen him, not realising that such things only happen to mortals, that those who are no longer mortal are quite safe. When she understood this, her worry turned to despair: evening after evening, she would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence, she would ask sorrowful questions of the void, hurl reproaches into the invisible air, and curse the past to which she feared he had returned; she wondered what mistake or error she could have made and searched eagerly for new texts that might arouse the guerrilleros curiosity and make him come back—new topics and new novels, new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for she put more faith in Conan Doyle’s narrative skills than in any other scientific or literary bait. She continued to read out loud every day, to see if he would come.
    One evening, after months of desolation, she found that the bookmark she had left in the Dickens novel she was patiently reading to him in his absence was not where she had left it, but many pages ahead. She carefully read the pages he had marked, and then, bitterly, she understood, experiencing the disappointment that comes in every life, however quiet and recondite. There was a sentence in the text that said: ‘And she grew old and lined, and her cracked voice was no longer pleasing to him.’ Don Alejandro de la Cruz says that the old lady became as indignant as a rejected wife, and that, far from accepting this judgement and falling silent, she reproached the void thus: ‘You are most unfair, but in life, so they say, you always tried to be scrupulously fair. You do not grow old, and want to listen to pleasant youthful voices, and to contemplate firm luminous faces. I can understand that; you’re young and always will be, and you may not have had much time, and many things escaped you. But I have educated and amused you for years; and if, thanks to me, you have learned much, possibly even how to read, it hardly seems right that you should leave me offensive messages in the very books I have shared with you. Bear in mind that when the old lady died, I could easily have read in silence, but I didn’t. I could have left Veracruz, but I didn’t. I know that you can go in search of other voices, nothing binds you to me and it’s true