Your Face Tomorrow 1

by Javier Marías

  'No, nothing else, Mr Tupra.'

  No, they didn't usually tell me when I had been right and when I had been wrong.

  'I might be going out on a limb here, but . . .' 'I could be wrong, but nevertheless . . .' That 'but' and that 'nevertheless' are the cracks that end up flinging all the doors wide open, and soon the actual verbal formulae we use betray our insolence: 'I bet you anything you like that he'd change sides as soon as things got even slightly difficult, and change back again as many times as he needed to, his biggest problem being that neither side would want him because he's such a manifest coward,' one says of a functionary face — gleaming bald head, smeared glasses — seen for the first time half an hour ago and whom one is observing now through the false window or false oval mirror in a state of mind that is a mixture of superiority and defencelessness (the defencelessness of believing that others are always out to deceive you, the superiority of looking while unseen, of seeing everything without risking one's own eyes).

  'The woman is desperate for attention, she'd invent the craziest fantasies just to be noticed, she has a need to show off to anything that moves, in any situation, not just to people with whom it might be worth the effort and who might do her some good, but to the hairdresser and the greengrocer and even the cat. She isn't even capable of curbing her enthusiasm or selecting her audience: she just can't distinguish, she wouldn't be much use to anyone,' says Tupra of a famous actress — with beautiful long hair but a very tense chin, hard as stone; bewitched by her own vanity — on seeing her in a video, and we all know that he's right, that he is, as always, spot-on, although there isn't a shred of — how can I put it — credible judgement to support his assertions.

  'The guy has principles and would definitely never succumb to a bribe, I'd stake my life on it. Or rather, it's not even a matter of principles, it's more that he aspires to so little and is so dismissive of everything that neither flattery nor reward would lead him to adopt views he didn't find persuasive or, at the very least, amusing. The only way you could get at him would be by threatening him, because he might be susceptible to fear, physical fear I mean, he's never had his ears boxed in his life, well, not since he left school. He would go to pieces at the first hint of pain. He would be completely taken aback. He would crumble at the first scratch, the first pinch. He could be useful in some cases, as long as he didn't have to run that kind of risk,' says Rendel of a pleasant, youthful-looking, fifty-something writer — with sharp, elfin features, a slow way of talking, a slight Hampshire accent, according to Mulryan, round-rimmed spectacles, an unaffected way of speaking — on seeing and hearing an interview filmed almost entirely in close-up, we didn't see his hands once; and it seems to us that Rendel is right, that the novelist is a valiant man in his attitudes and his words, but that he would flinch from the merest threat of violence because he cannot even imagine it in his daily reality: he is capable of talking about it, but only because he sees it as an abstraction. As in the videotape, he would have no hands with which to defend himself.

  'I wouldn't even cross the street with this man, he might push me under the wheels of a car if the mood took him, in a fit of rage. He's impetuous and impatient, it's hard to understand how he can exercise authority over anyone, or how he's managed to build up a business, still less a prosperous one, let alone an empire. His natural bent is for mugging passers-by at dusk or beating the living daylights out of someone, a hired killer on the rampage. He's a bundle of nerves, he can't wait, doesn't listen, takes no interest in what other people tell him, can't bear to spend even five minutes alone, but not because he wants company, just an audience. He probably has a really nasty temper, too, it wouldn't take much to make him blow his top, and then there's his voice, he must spend all day and night bellowing at his employees, at his children, at his two ex-wives and his six lovers (or possibly seven, there's some doubt about that). It's a complete mystery how he ever came to be a businessman or the head of anything, apart perhaps from some Soho dive threatened with closure on a daily basis. The only possible explanation is that he must instil a great sense of panic in people, and his hyperactivity reaches such heights that some, at least, of his innumerable plans and sordid deals must inevitably turn up trumps: probably, and by sheer chance, the most profitable ones. He may also have a nose for it, although that doesn't really fit well with his general recklessness: since the former takes persistence and calm, and he doesn't know the meaning of the words: he just abandons anything that resists him or proves difficult, that's his way of gaining time. God knows what he'll get up to if he goes into politics, as he assures us he will. Apart from outrages and abuses, of course, aimed at the electorate, I mean, because he would insult any potential voters at the first hint of criticism, the slightest slip and he'd heap insults on them,' says Mulryan of a multimillionaire who can be seen smiling in almost every shot taken at various events, sporting, charitable and monarchical, about to climb into a hot-air balloon, at the Ascot races and the Epsom Derby, suitably and grotesquely attired for each, signing a contract with a record company, or with another American movie-cum-fairground company, at the University of Oxford in some exotic ceremony involving colourful robes (a one-off occasion perhaps, I certainly never saw anything like it), shaking the hand of the Prime Minister and of various secondary figures and that of some spouse ennobled precisely by his or her conjugal status, at premieres, inaugurations, concerts, ballets, at vaguely aristocratic gatherings, encouraging talent in all the most eye-catching arts, those that bring with them audiences, performances and applause; and although he's always smiling and contented in the television report or documentary — a receding hairline that nevertheless fails to make his forehead appear any higher, instead it appears horizontal, elongated; very strong, invasive, almost equine teeth; an anomalous tan; a tempting suggestion of curls hovering above his collar and even slightly below it as a vestige of his plebeian roots; the right clothes for every occasion, but which always look usurped or even hired; his body imprisoned, toned and furious, as if at odds with itself — we all believe that Mulryan is quite right, and we have no difficulty imagining this wealthy man slapping members of his entourage (and, needless to say, bawling at his subordinates) as soon as he could be quite sure that he wasn't being filmed.

  'That woman knows a lot or has seen a lot and has decided not to talk about it, I'm sure of that. Her problem or, more than that, her torment is that it is there before her all the time, the terrible things she has witnessed or that she knows about and her personal vow to say nothing. It's not as if she had one day made a resolution which had subsequently brought her peace, however dear that resolution cost her. It's not as if from then on she has been able to live with the acceptable tranquility of at least knowing what she wants — or, rather, doesn't want — to happen; that she has been able to stow those facts or that knowledge away in one corner of her mind, to deaden them, and gradually give them the consistency and configuration of dreams, which is what allows many people to live with the memory of atrocities and disappointments: by doubting, at least, from time to time, that they ever existed; by blurring them, wrapping them in the smoke of the accumulated years, and thus devaluing them. On the contrary, this woman thinks about it constantly, intensely, not only about what happened and has been proved to have happened, but about the fact that she must or chooses to keep silent. It's not that she's tempted to go back on her word (she would only say this inwardly, to herself); it isn't that she feels the decision she took is permanently provisional, it isn't that she's considering reneging on that decision and spends sleepless nights going over and over it. I would say that it's irrevocable, indeed, if you pressed me, I'd say more than irrevocable, because it has nothing to do with a commitment made. It's always as if she had taken the decision only yesterday. As if she were under the troubling influence of something eternally new and that never grows old, when it's likely that now it's all very remote, both what happened and her initial desire that it would never become public knowledge, or not,
at least, because of her. I'm not referring to events relating to her profession, although there will be some such events that are equally safe, but to her private life: events that affected her and affect her every day, or that wound and infect her and provoke a fever in her every night, when she goes to bed. "No one will find out anything about it from me, not from me," she must think all the time, as if those previous experiences were there pulsating beneath her skin. As if they were still the nucleus of her existence and as if they still required her maximum attention, they will be the first thing to greet her when she wakes, the last thing she says good night to when she falls asleep. Don't get me wrong, though, there's nothing obsessive about this, her daily life is light and energetic; she's very open, not embittered at all. It's something quite different: a kind of loyalty to her own story. Such a woman would be of great service to many people, she's a perfect receptacle for secrets and therefore perfect for administering or distributing them too, she's completely reliable in that respect, precisely because she remains alert all the time and because, for her, everything is always alive and present. However remote in time her secret becomes, it never grows dim, and it would be the same with any secrets transmitted. She doesn't miss a single detail. Once the roles have been distributed, she would never forget who knows what and who doesn't. And I'm sure she remembers every face and every name that has passed before her bench,' says the young Pérez Nuix of a female judge of a certain age and with a bright, placid face, whom we are observing together from our hiding-place while Tupra and Mulryan ask respectful, devious questions, ladies are always offered tea in the afternoon, if, given their position and poise, they really are ladies, but not the gentlemen, unless they're bigwigs or could be influential in a particular matter, at most a cigarette (although never of the Pharaonic variety), and, exceptionally, an aperitif or a beer if it's that time of day and things are dragging on (there's a minibar concealed amongst the bookshelves); and despite her serene appearance and jovial expression — the warm smile; the very white but healthy complexion; the quick, bright, albeit very pale blue eyes; the dark shadows under her eyes, so deep and so becoming she must have had them since childhood; her ready, generous laughter, with just a hint of politeness, which, while it in no way impedes spontaneity, banishes any suggestion of flattery, of which there is not a trace; her amused awareness that Tupra feels for her a degree of desire, despite the unpropitious age-difference (a theoretical desire perhaps, or else retrospective or imaginary), because he can still see the young woman she was, or can sense it, and this is seen in turn by the woman who is no longer young, and it pleases and rejuvenates her — when I listen to young Nuix everything she says and describes seems plausible, because I, too, can see in that judge something akin to the excitement or vitality which comes from knowing an important secret that you have sworn never to divulge.

  Naturally, young Nuix does not talk like this while both of us are watching and taking notes in the compartment, not so fluently or precisely (I am ordering it and shaping it now, as we all do when we talk about something, as well as complementing it with her subsequent written report), instead she makes occasional remarks to me across the table, they cannot see or hear us, although they know where we are, posted here by Tupra himself. And when I listen to her, I remember — I remember it every time, not just when she's interpreting this judge, Judge Walton — the words that Wheeler attributed to Tupra that Sunday: 'He says that in time she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough,' and each time I wonder if she isn't already the best, the most exacting and the most gifted, the one who takes the most risks and who sees more deeply than any of the five of us, young Pérez Nuix, with a Spanish father and English mother, brought up in London but as familiar as I am with her father's country (not for nothing has she spent every summer for the last twenty or so years in Spain), and completely bilingual, not like me, for me the language that always prevails is the one in which I first began to speak, just as Jacques will always be for me the name, because it is the one I first answered to and the one by which I was called by the person who most often called to me. Her smile, too, is warm, her laughter ready and generous, the smile and laughter of a young woman, and her eyes, too, are quick and lively, all the more for being dark brown and as yet unburdened by tenacious memories that will not go away. She must be about twenty-five, or perhaps two years older or one year younger, and when our eyes meet, across the table or in any other situation, I notice that Luisa and my children begin to fade, whereas the rest of the time they seem all too clear even though they're so far away, and even though children's faces change so much that they never have one fixed image; I realise that the image that is taking root or that predominates is the one in the most recent photos I brought with me to England, I carry them in my wallet like any good or bad father, and I look at them too. I notice also that, despite the difference in our ages, young Nuix does not rule me out; or perhaps I should use the conditional: I cannot rid myself of the idea that she has or has had some sexual bond with Tupra, although there is nothing to indicate this unequivocally, and they treat each other with deference and humour, and with a kind of reciprocal paternalism, perhaps that is the main indicator. (But I can't get rid of the idea, and I know that one does not compete with Tupra.) The idea that she doesn't or won't or wouldn't rule me out is something I see in her eyes, as I have in the eyes of other women over the last few years without once being mistaken — when you're young, you're more myopic and more astigmatic and more presbyopic, all at the same time — and I breathe it and hear it in the brief gathering of energy that takes place, out of shyness or some lurking embarrassment, before she comes over to talk to me, that is, beyond the initial greeting or the isolated question or answer, as if she had to gather momentum or take a run-up, or as if she mentally constructed the whole of her first sentence (which, oddly enough, is never short), as if she structured it and memorised the whole thing before pronouncing it. This is often what one does when speaking a foreign language, but when we are alone or in any private exchanges, this young woman and I, we always opt for Spanish, which is also her language.

  And I was left in no doubt of this one morning when, in a situation in which she should, by rights, have been assailed by blushes, there was no sign at all of any lurking embarrassment. I had been given the keys to the building with no name, and, believing myself to be the first to arrive that morning on the floor we occupied (a bout of dawn insomnia had driven me out of the house to begin the day in earnest and to finish off a report I was writing), and believing therefore that I was the first to turn the key (the night-time bolts still undrawn), I was puzzled to hear noises and a gentle humming coming from one of the offices, the door of which I opened not violently exactly, but with verve and élan, with the vague idea of disconcerting the potential intruder, the early-rising spy or surreptitious burglar, and thus having the advantage if it came to a confrontation, although this seemed unlikely given the apparently tranquil humming. And then I saw her, young Nuix, standing by the desk, naked from the waist up and with a towel in the hand with which, just at that moment, she was drying one armpit, her arm raised. On her lower half, she was wearing a tight skirt, the skirt she had had on the day before, I always make a note of her clothes. I was so surprised by this vision (and yet, at the same time, not very surprised, perhaps not surprised at all: I knew it was a woman's voice doing the humming) that I did not do what I should have done, mutter a hurried apology and close the door, with me, of course, on the outside. It was only a matter of seconds, but I allowed those seconds to pass (one, two, three, four; and five) all the while looking at her with, I think, an expression that was part questioning, part appreciative and part falsely embarrassed (and therefore decidedly stupid), before saying 'Good morning' in an entirely neutral tone, that is, as if she was as fully dressed as I was, or almost, I still had my raincoat on. In a sense, I suppose, I behaved hypocritically as if nothing was amiss, and as if I had seen nothing; but I was helped in t
his — I would like to think — by the fact that young Nuix did exactly the same and also behaved as if nothing was wrong. For those few seconds in which I held the door open before withdrawing, she not only did not cover herself up, out of fear or modesty or, at the very least, surprise (she could easily have done so with the towel), she remained quite still, like a freeze-frame in a video, in exactly the same posture as when I had burst into the office, looking at me with a questioning but not remotely stupid expression, neither falsely nor truly embarrassed. All she did, though, was to cease her humming and her movement: she was rubbing herself dry with a towel, and she stopped doing that, the towel arrested at rib-height. And in that position she not only did not conceal her nakedness (which she didn't, not even as a reflex action), she kept her arm raised and thus allowed me to observe her armpit, and when a naked woman allows you to do that, uncovering one or both, it's as if she were offering up to you an additional nakedness. It was, of course, a clean, smooth and, I deduced, newly washed armpit, and, needless to say, shaved, without that awful bush of hair that some women insist on preserving nowadays as some strange protest against the traditional taste of men, or most men. 'Good morning,' she said in the same neutral tone. It was only a matter of seconds (five, six, seven, eight; and nine), but the calm and nonchalance with which we behaved during their passing reminded me of the time when my wife, Luisa, shortly after our son was born, stood stock-still half-way through getting undressed (her upper body bare, her breasts still swollen with milk, she was just about to go to bed) and answered some absurd questions I was asking her about our newborn child ('Do you think this child will always live with us, as long as he is a child or at least while he's still very young?'). She was getting undressed, in one hand she held the tights she had just removed, in the other the nightdress she was about to put on ('Of course he will, don't be so silly, who else would he live with?'; and she had added: As long as nothing happens to us, that is'), while young Nuix held in her hand the towel with which she did not even think of covering herself and, indeed, did not cover herself, and the other hand free and held up high, like a statue in antiquity. They were both half-naked ('What do you mean?' I had asked Luisa then), and the nakedness of one had nothing to do with that of the other (I mean as far as I was concerned, because clearly there was, objectively speaking, a resemblance): that of my wife was familiar to me and even customary, which doesn't mean I was indifferent to it, far from it, in fact, even in that fleeting, domestic moment, I glanced at her swollen breasts; but it was normal for us to go on talking as if it didn't matter, and not to interrupt our conversation because of it ('Nothing bad, I mean,' she had replied); that of my young work colleague was, on the other hand, new, unexpected, unprecedented, entirely unforeseen and even undeserved and, from my point of view, furtive, the product of a misunderstanding or of carelessness, and so I looked at her differently, not shamelessly or lasciviously but with an attention that sought both to discover and to memorise, with the apparently veiled eyes of the time we live in and that were always the norm in England, where we were living and where that mode of looking without looking and that way of not looking yet looking has been developed and honed to perfection, and from which I only ever saw one person almost escape or step free, and that was Tupra; and she allowed me to look without looking, she did nothing to prevent it, but neither was there shamelessness or exhibitionism in her eyes or in her attitude, and when she added something more, an explanation that was neither expected nor necessary, and which, despite being the first phrase she had addressed to me that day, did not appear to have been composed beforehand in her head ('I slept here, well, I didn't exactly sleep much, I spent the night wrestling with a particularly fiendish report'), her voice and her tone did not sound so very different from the tone and voice of the married existence I know so well. And so once the remaining seconds had elapsed (nine, ten, eleven and twelve: 'Oh, don't worry, I came in early to see if I can finish a report of my own,' I said in turn, not so much in order to explain myself, but more by way of a belated and implicit apology), I finally closed the door, with one resolute, almost hasty movement (I hadn't let go of the handle), and withdrew to my office, which was next door and which I shared with Rendel, she shared hers with Mulryan. Young Nuix belonged to a different generation, I told myself; I told myself that she probably spent the summers bare-breasted on the beaches and beside the swimming-pools of Spain, that she would be used to being seen like that and admired, her sense of modesty diminished. I also thought that we were compatriots and that when abroad that was almost the same as being related; it creates unusual complicities and solidarities and gives rise to baseless confidences, as well as to friendships and loves that would be unimaginable, almost aberrant, in the common country of origin (a friendship with De la Garza, Rafita, the great moron). But she was probably more English than Spanish, I mustn't forget that. Besides, I know very well that when a woman surprised in her nakedness makes no immediate attempt to cover herself up, even if only instinctively (unless, of course, she's a striptease artiste or something, and I've known a few in my time), it is because she does not rule out the person who has taken her by surprise and is now looking at her, and that goes for all living generations, or at least for the adults of those generations. It isn't that the woman feels attracted to that person or necessarily desires him, my theory would never entertain such ingenuous suppositions. It is simply that she does not rule him out, or does not exclude him, not entirely, and it is highly likely that it is only then that she finds out or realises, in that moment of being seen by someone and deciding not to cover herself up for him, always assuming, of course, that any decision is involved. Young Nuix's raised arm did not, in the end, remind me of the arm of a statue, at least not in my memory: instead I imagined her as if she were gripping the rail on a bus, or strap-hanging in the carriage of an underground train. There she remained, still holding tight, her arm in the air, when I closed the door and ceased seeing both her arm and the smooth armpit that set off the rest. She must have put it down immediately afterwards. It lasted twelve seconds in all. I did not count them at the time, only afterwards, in memory.