Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  It’s as if he didn’t know himself very well. He doesn’t think much about himself, although he believes that he does (albeit without great conviction). He doesn’t see himself, doesn’t know himself, or, rather, he doesn’t delve into or investigate himself. Yes, that’s it: it isn’t that he doesn’t know himself, merely that this is a kind of knowledge that doesn’t interest him and which he therefore barely cultivates. He doesn’t examine himself, he would see this as a waste of time. Perhaps it doesn’t interest him because it’s all water under the bridge; he has little curiosity about himself. He just takes himself for granted, or assumes he knows himself. But people change. He doesn’t bother recording or analysing his changes, he’s not up to date with them. He’s introspective. And yet the more he appears to be looking in, the more he is, in fact, looking out. He’s only interested in the external, in others, and that is why he sees so clearly. But his interest in people has nothing to do with wanting to intervene in their lives or to influence them, nor with any utilitarian aim. He may not care very much what happens to anyone. Not that he wouldn’t regret or celebrate what happened, he’s a caring person, not indifferent to others, but always in a rather abstract way. Or perhaps it’s just that he’s very stoical, about other people’s lives and his own. Things happen and he makes a mental note, not for any particular reason, usually without even feeling greatly concerned most of the time, still less implicated. Perhaps that is why he notices so many things. So few escape him that it’s almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows. About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do. About our characters I mean. Or, more than that, about what shaped us. With a knowledge to which we are not a party. He judges little. The oddest thing of all is that he makes no use of his knowledge. It’s as if he were living a parallel theoretical life, or a future life that was awaiting its turn in the dressing-room. Waiting for its moment in another existence. And as if all the discoveries, perceptions, opinions and verifications ended up there. And not in his present, real existence. Even what does affect him, even his own experiences and disappointments seem to split into two parts, and one of the two is destined for that merely theoretical or future knowledge of his. Enriching it, nourishing it. Not, strangely enough, with a view to anything. Not at least to anything in this real life of his that does move forward. He makes no use of his knowledge, it’s very odd. But he has it. And if he did one day make use of it, he would be someone to be feared. He’d be pretty unforgiving I think. Sometimes he seems to me to be a complete enigma. And sometimes I think he’s an enigma to himself. Then I go back to the idea that he doesn’t know himself very well. And that he doesn’t pay much attention to himself because he’s given up understanding himself. He considers himself a lost cause upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought. He knows he doesn’t understand himself and that he never will. And so he doesn’t waste his time trying to do so. I don’t think he’s dangerous. But he is to be feared.

  To be honest, all this left me fairly cold, although it did make me think that somewhere there must be a proper file on me, with dates and information, verifiable facts and detailed characteristics, along with my conventional CV (or, who knows, my unconfessable one), and with rather less ethereal and unverifiable observations and descriptions. There must be files on all of us, it would have been strange if there weren’t, and I promised myself that I would one day quietly seek them out, those on Rendel and young Nuix might be of interest to me, though not so much Mulryan’s; and Tupra’s, of course, assuming he had a file. Before closing the drawer, I rested my thumb on the upper edge of the files and riffled through a few of them, not too quickly, just out of curiosity, stopping occasionally at random. I came across some very famous entries: ‘Bacon, Francis’, ‘Blunt, Sir Anthony’, ‘Caine, Sir Michael (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite)’, ‘Clinton, William Jefferson “Bill”’, ‘Coppola, Francis Ford’, ‘Le Carré, John (David Cornwell)’, ‘Richard, Keith (The Rolling Stones)’, ‘Straw, Jack’ (the British Foreign Minister, formerly Home Secretary, the one who so shamelessly let Pinochet go, he was the person I needed information on that morning, about his improper past), ‘Thatcher, Margaret Hilda, Baroness’. Those were the files that my thumb stopped at, some were already dead. A lot of other names meant nothing, being unknown to me: ‘Booth, Thomas’, ‘Dearlove, Richard’, ‘Marriott, Roger (Alan Dobson)’, ‘Pirie-Gordon, Sarah Jane’, ‘Ramsay, Margaret “Meta”, Baroness’, ‘Rennie, Sir John’, ‘Skelton, Stanyhurst (Marius Kociejowski)’, ‘Truman, Ronald’, ‘West, Nigel (Rupert Allason)’, my gaze fell on them, how many people there were who called themselves by other names, and I have an excellent memory for names.

  It was pleasing that, in such company, they should take so much trouble over me; that they should want to get to the bottom of me, that they should take notice. The thing I found most intriguing was the moment in the report when the writer or thinker, whoever it was, openly addressed another person, indicating that his impressions or conjectures were directed at someone in particular: ‘About me, about you, about her’, he said. ‘He knows more about us than we ourselves do,’ and, by a process of elimination, I thought that young Nuix must be ‘her’, although I couldn’t be absolutely sure. But who was that ‘you’, who was that ‘I’? There were various possibilities, but there was no way I could find out. Nor could I imagine who it was, therefore, who believed I should be feared, that too struck me as very odd, because I didn’t myself believe it at the time. (Unless the ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘her’ were metaphorical, hypothetical, interchangeable, as if the expression had been ‘It’s almost frightening to imagine what he knows, how much he sees and how much he knows. About Tom, Dick or Harry.’) Needless to say these notes were unsigned, like all the others in the file, or at least those in that drawer. They seemed to have been written rapidly, judging from the brief time I dared to spend looking at them, when my thumb lingered over some: the notes on me were as vague and speculative as were those devoted to ex-President Clinton or to Mrs Thatcher, which I glanced through quickly.

  ‘Yes, I think he could,’ I replied, having given a few seconds’ thought to Tupra’s questions regarding the host of that celebrity supper (the host was himself a singer-celebrity, I’ll call him Dick Dearlove, one of the unknown or unlikely names I had seen in the file, and who, I learned, was a very high-ranking, very important civil servant in some ministry or other, I had only read a couple of lines about him, but with a surname like that he should really have been a great idol of the masses treading the boards of a thousand stages, like our ex-dentist singer-host). ‘In a dangerous situation, he would, of course, get his blow in first, if he had the chance. Or even beforehand, I mean before the risk to his own life was imminent and certain. The mere suggestion of a grave threat would turn him into a man of excess, render him almost uncontrollable. He would, I believe, be quick to react violently. Or, rather, he would anticipate that violence: I don’t know if the saying exists in English, but in Spanish we say that he who gives first gives twice. But that wouldn’t be the reason, he wouldn’t react in a calculating fashion, or out of bravery, or even out of nerves or, strictly speaking, panic. He’s so pleased with his own biography and with the life he leads, so astonished and proud of what he has achieved and continues to achieve (he can’t as yet see it ending), his fairy-tale is turning out so picture-perfect that he couldn’t bear for it all to be destroyed in a matter of seconds, prematurely, by mistake and through bad luck, through recklessness or some unfortunate encounter. It’s the idea he couldn’t bear. Let’s say burglars got into his house, ready for anything; or if he was mugged in the street; no, he wouldn’t ever walk down a street. Let’s say his car broke down while he was driving through a really rough area, that it conked out late one night as he was returning from his country house, alone at the wheel or accompanied by a bodyguard, he probably always has at least one with him, he wouldn’t go a hundred yards without some protection. And that t
he moment they stepped out they were surrounded by a large, aggressive, armed gang, a band of desperadoes against whom two men could do nothing, especially when one of them was accustomed only to being flattered and pampered and to a complete absence of nasty surprises.’

  ‘They would immediately call for help on their cell phones or would already have done so on the car phone, to the police or whoever,’ Tupra said, interrupting me. It amused me the ease with which he joined in or participated in my fantasies. I think he rather enjoyed listening to me.

  ‘Let’s say that the car phone died at the same time as the car did, and that their other phones were out of range, or had been taken off them before they had time to use them. I don’t know about in England, but in Spain that’s the very first thing criminals steal, they go for your cell phone first and then your wallet, and that’s why all muggers, even the really pathetic ones still clutching a needle in one trembling hand, all have cell phones. You won’t see a single pickpocket in Madrid, or even a beggar, who hasn’t got his own cell phone.

  ‘Really,’ said Tupra, tempted to smile. He was familiar with my exaggerations, and did not really disapprove of them.

  ‘Yes, really. Just go to Madrid and you’ll see that I’m right. Well, in that situation, if Dearlove was carrying a knife, or even a pistol (he’d be quite capable of owning one, licence and all), he would probably start shooting or lashing out without even trying to negotiate and without gauging the precise nature of the threat, the degree of the desperadoes’ desperation or hatred, they might well turn out to be admirers of his who, when they recognise him, would end up asking for his autograph, it could happen, you can’t overestimate his popularity. He’s a huge star in Spain as well, especially, as you may or may not know, in the Basque Country.’

  ‘I can imagine. Nowadays any buffoon is guaranteed universal acclaim,’ said Tupra. ‘Go on.’ At the time, he used to call me Jack, although I still called him Mr Tupra.

  ‘What Dearlove could not bear,’ obviously I didn’t call him Dearlove, but by his real name, ‘is that his life should end like that; in short, he would find the manner of his death almost more unbearable than death itself. He would, of course, be terrified to see his successful existence truncated and to lose his life, as would anyone, even if that life had been a failure; what’s more, I don’t, as I said, believe him to be a brave man, he would be terribly afraid. What most horrifies Dearlove, though, as it does other show-business people (although they may not know it), is that the end of his story should be such that it overshadows and darkens the life he’s lived and accumulated up until now, eclipsing it, almost erasing and cancelling out the rest and, in the end, becoming the only fact that counts and will be recounted. If he were capable of killing (and I believe he is), that would be the reason, narrative disgust, if I can put it like that. You see, Mr Tupra, if someone like him were killed by a group of criminals in Clapham or Brixton, or, even more conspicuously, if he was lynched, that kind of death would create such a scandal, it would so shock the world, that it would be brought up every time his name was mentioned, on every occasion and in every circumstance, even if they were talking about him for some other reason, because of his contribution to the popular music of his time or to the history and heyday of buffoons, or because of the vast fortune he amassed with his voice or as one of the more worrying examples of mass hysteria. It would make no difference, they would still always mention the tale of how he was lynched in Brixton due to some awful misunderstanding, or in Clapham one fateful night along with his best bodyguard, or at the hands of a few unspeakably cruel felons from Streatham. A time would come, indeed, when that would be all that was remembered of him. Mothers would even use it to scold their children with when they strayed into the wilder parts of town or into other dodgy areas: “Just you remember what happened to Dick Dearlove, and he was famous and had a bodyguard with him.” A real posthumous curse, for someone like him I mean.’

  Tupra, who was smiling broadly now, improved on this by saying: ‘Remember Dickie Dearlove, darlin’, and ’ow they did ’im in,’ adopting a cockney accent (or possibly a half-educated South London accent, I can’t really tell the difference) and putting on a mother’s voice. ‘Good grief, I’m sure he could never in his life imagine a more sordid epitaph for himself. Not even in his most humiliating nightmares. What else, though, go on.’

  ‘I don’t know if such a phobia has ever been recorded, or if it has a rather less pedantic name than the one I gave it. Dearlove himself, of course, would never use such terms. He wouldn’t even understand what I was talking about, I might as well be speaking Greek. And yet that is what it is: narrative horror or disgust; a dread of having his story ruined by the ending, wrecked for ever, destroyed, of its complete ruination by a finale too spectacular for the world’s taste and hateful to himself; of the irreparable damage done to his story, of a stain so powerful and voracious that it would spread and spread until it had, retrospectively, wiped out everything else. Dearlove would be capable of killing in order to avoid such a fate. Or such an aesthetic, dramaturgical or narrative doom, as you prefer. I’m sure he would be capable of killing for that reason. At least so I believe.’ When I finished, I would sometimes retreat a little, shrink back, not that it made any difference, I had spoken, I had said my piece.

  ‘You’ll all end up like Dick Dearlove, every one of you,’ said Tupra, pursuing his imitation for a while longer, laughing briefly and wagging an admonitory finger. Then he added: ‘The only thing is, Jack, that someone like him would never drive through Clapham or Brixton, either to enter the city or leave it.’

  ‘All right, but he could get lost, take the wrong freeway exit and end up there high and dry, couldn’t he? It does happen. I saw something similar in a film called Grand Canyon, have you seen it?’

  ‘I don’t go to the movies much, unless obliged to by my work. I used to, when I was young. But I’m afraid you haven’t quite grasped the economic level of these people, Jack. For short trips Dearlove probably travels around in a helicopter. And for longer trips he uses his private jet, with an entourage that would make the queen’s look positively puny.’ He fell silent for a moment, as if recalling a journey made in just such a private plane. Tupra was always very scornful of Dearlove and similar figures, but the fact is that he mixed on occasions with quite a few of them, from the worlds of television, fashion, pop music and the movies, and whenever I had seen him with them, he had always appeared to treat them with easy sympathy and trust. Sometimes I wondered if these contacts, difficult to achieve for most people, were provided from on high, as part of his job and to make his work easier. Naturally, I never knew exactly what his job was. On the other hand, he never seemed uncomfortable in the company of even the most frivolous of celebrities. It could just be part of his training, of his trade, it didn’t necessarily mean he enjoyed it. The truth is that he never seemed uncomfortable in any social situation, with the brainy or the serious, with the pretentious or the idiotic, with the marginalised or with the simple, he was clearly a man who adapted to whatever was required of him. Then he returned to the subject: ‘Tell me, do you think he would be capable of killing in any other circumstance, apart from one in which he saw that his life might not only be in danger, but also, according to you … called into question? You may be right, he might well be horrified to think that his end could prove ugly, inappropriate, onerous, humiliating, sarcastic, turbulent, dirty…’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, slightly put out by his realistic rigour, and I immediately regretted having spoken those words, the words most guaranteed to disappoint in that building, or the most despised. I quickly covered them up. ‘That seems to me the principal motive, but I suppose it wouldn’t be necessary for his life to be in danger, if, as I believe, he is, in a sense, more concerned with his history, with the story of his life than with that life itself. Although he is probably unaware of this. That priority has, I believe, less to do with any future or present biographers than with his need to rete
ll the story to himself every day, to live with it. I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear.’

  ‘No, not entirely, Jack. Be more precise, please. Try a bit harder. Don’t get yourself in such a tangle.’

  Such comments spurred me on, a slight infantilism on my part, from which I’ve never managed to free myself and probably never will.

  ‘He likes his image, he likes his story as a whole, even the odontological phase; he never loses sight of it, never forgets it.’ I was trying to be more precise. ‘He always has in his mind his entire trajectory: his past as well as his future. He sees himself as a story, whose ending he must take care of, but whose development he must not neglect either. It isn’t that he will allow no upsets or weaknesses or stains in his story, he’s not that naïve. However, these must be of a kind that do not stand out too stridently, that do not inevitably leap out at him (a horrible protuberance, a lump) when, each morning, he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks about “Dick Dearlove” as a whole, as an idea, or as if he were the title of a novel or a film, which has, moreover, already achieved the status of a classic. It has nothing to do with morality or with shame, that’s not it, indeed most people find it easy enough to look themselves in the face, they always find excuses for their own excesses, or deny that they are excesses; bad consciences and selfless regret have no place in our times, I’m speaking of something else. He sees himself from outside, almost exclusively from outside, he has no difficulty admiring himself. And perhaps the first thing he says when he wakes up is something like: “Goodness, it wasn’t a dream: I am Dick Dearlove, no less, and I have the privilege of talking and living with that legend on a daily basis.” This isn’t really so very rare, whether you leave the word “legend” in or take it out. It has been known for writers who have won the Nobel prize to spend what remains of their life thinking all the time: “I’m a Nobel prizewinner, I won the Nobel Prize, and, my, how I shone in Stockholm,” sometimes even saying this out loud, they’ve been overheard doing so by their anxious loved ones. But I know quite a lot of other people of no objective significance or fame, who, nevertheless, perceive themselves in just such a way, or similarly, and who watch their life as if they were at the theatre. A permanent theatre, of course, repetitive and monotonous ad nauseam, which does not scant on detail or on even two seconds of tedium. But those people are the most benevolent and easily pleased of spectators, not for nothing are they also the author, actor and protagonist of their respective dramatic works (dramatic is just a manner of speaking). This form of living and seeing oneself has become fact on the Internet. I understand that some people even earn money showing every soporific, wretched moment of their existences, endlessly filmed by a fixed camera. The astonishing, intellectually sick, seriously unhealthy thing is that there are people willing to watch this, and who even pay to do so; I mean spectators who are not also the authors, actors and protagonists, whose behaviour is not entirely anomalous or even incomprehensible.’