We set off briskly, one step at a time, with me right behind him, holding onto his ponytail at each turn in the stairs so that he wouldn't take advantage of the one second when I stopped pointing at him full on to run up the stairs and shut himself in his apartment if, that is, he was quick enough putting the key in the lock (there was no way he would manage that, but I preferred him not to try), it must have been humiliating for him to have me touch his hair, I abstained from giving it a good tug, although I could have. We were lucky, that is I was and he wasn't, because we made it up to the third floor without meeting anyone; his was one of the apartments with a balcony looking onto the street.
'Here we are,' he said, standing outside his door. 'Now what?'
'Open the door.' He did so, a long key for the bolt and a smaller one for the lock. 'Let's go into the sitting room. You lead the way. But no funny business. I'm pointing at your spine, remember.' I could still feel the barrel of the gun against his bones, nice and central, if a bullet entered there it would take out his atlas vertebra.
We went down a short corridor and emerged into a spacious sitting room or studio with plenty of light despite the cloudy sky outside. ('Luisa has been here,' I thought at once, 'she'll know this room'). Then I saw the paintings lined up against the wall, in groups of three or four, their faces turned away, some might have been blank canvases, as yet untouched. Either he received a lot of commissions or he made numerous drafts before creating a final version; he was clearly in great demand and had no problem selling his work, for the room was comfortable, well-furnished and even luxurious, albeit slightly untidy; I particularly liked the fireplace. There were some paintings on the walls too, face out, of course, probably not his, although if he really was such a good copyist, who knows; I noticed a small Meissonier of a gentleman smoking a pipe and a larger portrait by Mane-Katz or someone like that, some Russian or Ukrainian who had spent time in Paris (if they were originals, they certainly wouldn't be cheap, although they weren't as expensive as the paintings I'd seen in Tupra's house). I noticed an easel, and the canvas resting on it was also face down, perhaps Custardoy always removed from his sight the thing he was working on as soon as he took a break, so as not to have to look at it while he was resting, perhaps it was the portrait of the Countess and her children on which he had already started work. Since I was the master of time and everything else, I could have looked at it. I didn't, though; I was otherwise occupied.
It was the moment for him to turn round and, therefore, to see my face. I didn't know whether he would recognize me from somewhere, from the Prado or from our shared walk or from photos that Luisa might have shown him; people are very keen on showing old photos, as if they wanted you to know them before the time when you actually met, it's something that happens especially between lovers, 'This is what I was like,' they seem to be saying to each other, 'would you have loved me then, as well? And if so, why weren't you there?' Before allowing him to turn round and before ordering him to sit down, I suffered a moment of confusion: 'What am I doing here with a pistol in my hand?' I thought or said to myself, and I immediately responded: 'There's absolutely no reason to feel surprised. There is a good reason for me to be here and even perhaps a real need: I'm going to rescue Luisa from anxiety and menace and from an unhappy future life, I'm going to ensure that she breathes easily again and can sleep at night without fear, I'm going to make certain my children don't suffer and come to no harm and that no wounds are inflicted on her, or, rather, no more harm, and that no one kills her'; and as I gave myself this answer, another quote came into my head, the words spoken by the ghost of a woman, Lady Anne, who slept so uneasily between the sheets of her second husband's 'sorrow-haunted bed,' cruel Richard III, who had stabbed her first husband at Tewkesbury, 'in my angry mood,' as he, the murderer, once put it; and so she, after death, cursed him on Bosworth Field at dawn, when it was already far too late to flee the battle, and in his dreams she whispered this: 'Richard, thy wife, that wretched Anne thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee, now fills thy sleep with perturbations: Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword: despair and die!' I couldn't allow the same thing to happen to Luisa and for her never to sleep a quiet hour with Custardoy if, one day, he occupied my pillow and my still-warm or already cold place in her bed, I was the first husband, but no one in their angry mood was going to stab me or dig my grave still deeper than the one I was already buried in, my memory reduced to the first terror and the first plea and the first order, all of me changed into a poisoned shadow that little by little bids farewell while I languish and am transformed in London, expelled from her time and from that of my children (foolish me, insubstantial me, foolish and frivolous and credulous). 'No, she is not yet a widow and I am not yet a dead person who deserves to be mourned,' I thought, 'and since I'm not, I cannot so easily be replaced, just as bloodstains will not come out at the first attempt, you have to rub hard and diligently to remove them, and even then it seems as if the rim will never go, that's the most difficult part to remove, the part that resists—a whisper, a fever, a scratch. She probably has no wish and no intention of doing so, but she will find herself obliged to say to this present or future lover, or to herself: "Not yet, my love, wait, wait, your hour has not yet come, don't spoil it for me, give me time and give him time too, the dead man whose time no longer advances, give him time to fade, let him change into a ghost before you take his place and dismiss his flesh, let him be changed into nothing, wait until there is no trace of his smell on the sheets or on my body, let it be as if what was never happened." But I'm still here, and so I must have been before, and no one can yet say of me: "No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened." Indeed, I am the person who could kill this second husband right now, with my gloves on and in my angry mood. I have a pistol in my hand and it's loaded, all I would have to do is cock it and squeeze the trigger, this man still has his back to me, he wouldn't even see my face, today or tomorrow or ever, not until the Final Judgment, if there is one.'
In fact, it didn't really matter whether he saw my face or not; after all, I was going to talk to him about Luisa and as soon as I did, he would know without a shadow of a doubt who I was, and she would probably have told him about my sudden return to the city after so many months away, indeed, it was highly likely that he had already guessed it was her wretched imbecile of a husband who was pointing the gun at him, what a pain, what a cretin, what a madman, why hadn't he just stayed put where he was? 'Unless I'm the one who would rather not see his face and his eyes, his gaze,' I thought, 'nor say any more to him than I said at the front door, those were mere indifferent words, impersonal orders, not an exchange between two individuals. It's always said that killers avoid looking their victim in the eye, that to do so would be the only thing that might sow a seed of doubt or stop them slitting their victim's throat or firing a bullet or at least delay them long enough for the victim to say something or to try and defend himself, that's the only thing that can sabotage their mission or make them miss their target, so perhaps it would be best to finish the thing here and now, in keeping with Tupra's motto not to linger or delay, without giving any explanations or showing any curiosity, just as Reresby gave no explanations and showed no curiosity about De la Garza—without Custardoy even turning around, a bullet in the back of the neck and that would be that, goodbye Custardoy, out of the picture, guaranteed, and as with any deed once done, no going back, but if I speak to him and look him in the face, I'll find it harder and I'll start to get to know him and he'll become "someone" for me just as he is for Luisa, because he's important to her, someone for whom she probably feels a mixture of fear and devotion, so perhaps I should see him and hear him in order to imagine that, which is all I can aspire to, because I never will know how she looks at him, that's my eternal curse . . .'
The truth is I didn't know what I should do to be certain, to 'just deal with him and make sure he was out of t
he picture' as a scornful Tupra had told me with a paternalistic laugh; if only he had been more explicit or if only I were bilingual and had understood him with total exactitude, or perhaps such insoluble ambiguities exist in all languages. 'If you really don't know how, Jack, that means you can't do it,' he had said. I didn't know how, but I was in too deep by then. I couldn't just shoot Custardoy in the back and leave him for dead, not without first getting into my angry mood, not without being absolutely certain: Luisa had denied to me and to her sister that he'd hurt her, and I hadn't seen the act only the results, which, in a trial, wouldn't have helped me prove anything against him. 'But this isn't a trial,' I thought, 'or anything like it, men like Tupra, like Incompara, like Manoia and so many others, like the people I saw in those videos, like the woman who appeared in one of them, with her skirt hitched up and wielding a hammer with which she was smashing a man's skull, and who knows, perhaps like Pérez Nuix and like Wheeler and Rylands, they don't hold trials or gather evidence, they simply solve problems or root them out or stop them ever happening or just deal with them, it's enough that they know what they know because they've seen it from the start thanks to their gift or their curse, they've had the courage to look hard and to translate and to keep thinking beyond the necessary ("What else? You haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking," my father used to say to me and my siblings when we were children, when we were young), and to guess what will happen if they don't intervene; they don't hate knowledge as do most of the pusillanimous people in this modern age, they confront it and anticipate it and absorb it and are, therefore, the sort who issue no warning, at least not always, the sort who take remote decisions for reasons that are barely identifiable to the one who suffers the consequences or is a chance witness, or without waiting for a link of cause and effect to establish itself between actions and motives, still less for any proof that such actions have been committed. Such men and women need no proof, on those arbitrary or well-founded occasions when, without the slightest warning or indication, they lash out with a saber; indeed, on such occasions, they don't even require the actions or events or deeds to have occurred. Perhaps for them it's enough that they know precisely what would happen in the world if no pressure or brake were imposed on what they perceive to be people's certain capabilities, and they know, too, that if they don't act with their full force, it's only because someone—me, for example—prevents or impedes them, rather than because they lacked the desire or the guts; they take all that for granted. Perhaps for them to adopt the punitive measures they deem to be necessary, they simply have to convince themselves of what would happen in each case if they or other sentinels—the authorities or the law, instinct, crime, the moon, fear, the invisible watchers—did not put a stop to it. They are the sort who know and adopt and make theirs—like a second skin—the unreflecting, resolute stance (or one based perhaps on a single thought, the first) that also forms part of the way of the world and which remains unchanged throughout time and regardless of space, and so there is no reason to question it, just as there is no need to question wakefulness and sleep, or hearing and sight, or breathing and speech, or any of the other things about which one knows: "that's how it is and always will be."
It was assumed that I was like them, one of them, that I possessed the same capacity to penetrate and interpret people, to know what their face would be like tomorrow and to describe what had not yet occurred, and as far as Custardoy was concerned I knew him inside out, I had no proof of anything, but I knew I was right: he was the dangerous, seductive, all-enveloping, violent type, capable of making someone dependent on the horrors he perpetrated and on his lack of scruples, his despotism and his scorn, and I mustn't give him an opening, I mustn't give him an opportunity to explain himself, to deny or refute or argue or persuade, not even to talk to me. Tupra was right: 'I think you do know how,' he had said to me before hanging up. 'We all know, even if we're not used to the idea or can't imagine ourselves doing it. It's a question of imagination.' Perhaps it was just a question of me imagining myself as Sir Death for the first time, after all, I had the pistol in my hand and that was my hourglass or clepsydra, and I had my gloves on, and now all I needed was to cock the gun, move my forefinger from the guard to the trigger and then squeeze, it was all just a step away and there was so little physical difference between one thing and the other, between doing and not doing, so little spatial difference ... I didn't need certainties or proofs if I could convince myself that I was entirely, at least for that day, a member of Tupra's school which was the way of many and perhaps of the world, because his attitude was not preventative, not exactly or exclusively, but, rather, and depending on the case and the person, punitive or compensatory, for Tupra saw and judged when dry, with no need to get himself wet—to use Don Quixote's words when he announced to Sancho Panza the mad feats he would perform for Dulcinea's sake even before being provoked into them by grief or jealousy, so just imagine what he would do if provoked. Or perhaps Tupra understood them—the various cases—even though they were pages as yet unwritten, and perhaps, for that very reason, forever blank. 'But if I fire this pistol, my page will no longer be blank,' I thought, 'and if I don't, it won't be either, not entirely, after all the build-up and having thought about it and pointed the gun at him. We can never free ourselves from telling something, not even when we believe we have left our page blank. And even if there are things of which no one speaks, even if they do not in fact happen, they never stay still. It's terrible,' I said to myself. 'There's no escape. Even if no one speaks of them. And even if they never actually happen.' I studied the old Llama pistol at the end of my arm much as Death looked at his hourglass in that painting by Baldung Grien, the only thing by which he was guided, not by the living people beside him, after all, why would he be guided by them when he can already see their faces tomorrow? 'What does it matter then if things do happen? "You and I will be the kind who leave no mark," Tupra had said to me once, "so it won't matter what we've done, no one will bother to recount or even to investigate it." And besides,' I went on, still talking to myself, 'the day will come when everything is levelled out and life will be definitively untenable, and no one will care about anything.' But that day had not yet arrived, and I felt both curious and afraid—'And in short, I was afraid'—and had, above all, time to wonder as those familiar lines assured me I would: And indeed there will be time to wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair . . .' Even time to ask the whole question that comes later in the poem—'Do I dare disturb the universe?'—the question no one asks before acting or even before speaking because everyone dares to do just that, to disturb the universe and to trouble it, with their small quick tongues and their ill-intentioned steps, 'So how should I presume?' And that's what kept my finger on the guard and my hand from cocking the gun, that is what happened, and besides I knew there would still be time to place my finger on the trigger and fire, having first cocked it with one simple gesture, as Miquelin had showed me.
'Turn around and sit down over there,' I said to Custardoy, pointing with my free hand at the sofa, a sofa on which he would probably often have sat or perhaps lain with Luisa. 'Put your hands on the table where I can see them.' In front of the sofa was a coffee table, as there is in most of the world's living rooms. 'Spread your fingers wide and don't move a muscle.'
Custardoy turned around as ordered and I finally saw his face full on and unimpeded, just as he did mine. He had a faint smile on his lips, which irritated me, and that long-toothed smile lit up his sharp-featured face and lent it a look almost of cordiality. He seemed quite calm, even amused in a way, despite that blow to his ribs, which must have hurt and frightened him. But, by then, he probably knew who I was, even if only by intuition or by a process of elimination, and relying perhaps on his own interpretative capacities, which were good enough for him to be sure that Luisa's husband wasn't going to shoot him, at least not yet, that is, without first speaking to him. (But then no one is ever
totally convinced that someone is going to shoot him, not even with the gun barrel there before him.) His huge, dark, wide-set, almost lashless eyes really were most unpleasant and I immediately felt that grasping quality, how they quickly looked me over, with, how I can I put it, a kind of intimidatory intent, which, in the circumstances, was both strange and inappropriate. His half-smile, on the other hand, was perfectly affable, as if he were able to be two people at once. I couldn't understand how Luisa could possibly like him, even if there was something cocky and common about him—crude and rough and cold—a quality which, as I've seen and know, a lot of women find attractive. Before sitting down, he stroked his mustache, repositioned his ponytail with a gesture that was unavoidably feminine, threw his hat down on the sofa and said:
'May I light a cigarette? If I'm smoking, you'll still be able to see my two hands.' And then he sat down, taking care not to crease the tails of his raincoat. He had begun addressing me as 'tú' now, and that confirmed me in my suspicion that he had identified me.
'Have one of mine,' I replied, not wanting him to put his hand in his pocket. I offered him a Karelias and took another for myself. I lit both from the same flame and we inhaled the smoke at the same time, and for a moment we resembled old friends, taking that first puff in silence. We had both suffered a fright, and a cigarette was just what we needed. But the fright was not yet over, and his must have been far greater than mine, after all, I had merely frightened myself when I saw what I was doing, and that always supposes a lesser, more controlled fear, one you can bring to an end yourself. The conversation that followed moved very quickly.
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