Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  I saw more flurries of activity, perhaps I shouldn’t describe them, I saw worse things, more confused, almost run together. Reresby had increased the speed, he needed to sleep too, yes, maybe he was growing sleepy, although he sounded wide awake, perhaps he was at last in sympathy with my desire to get it over with as quickly as possible, I wanted an end to the fever, my pain, the word, the dance, the image, the poison, the dream, at least for that day and for that very long night, the things that compromise or accuse are not very varied—weird sex, violent sex, adulterous or merely laughable sex, beatings, drug consumption, a bit of torture, cruelty and sadism, corruption, bribes, con tricks and betrayals and debts, failed conspiracies and treacheries exposed, improvised homicides and planned murders, and not much else really, almost everything can be reduced to that, but then there are the massacres, I saw another machine-gunning, on a larger scale this time, of civilians in some African country, twenty or so women and men and children and old people, they fell in quick succession, like dominoes, and thus it seemed less grave or even less true, executed by black soldiers or marksmen under orders from a white officer in uniform, whether regulation or half-invented I don’t know, perhaps he was a mercenary who later rejoined his army, there are Englishmen and South Africans and Belgians who have made that return journey, and Frenchmen too, I believe. If that were the case, Tupra had that European soldier exactly where he wanted him, he would have allowed him to rise, make a career for himself, he certainly wouldn’t have warned him of the existence of that film nor would he have denounced him, he would be waiting until he reached some lofty position, in his own country, in NATO, so that he could then ask him an enormous favor, or, rather, in the light of that video, force him to grant the favor.

  And finally he stopped, I mean that he resumed normal speed for one particular sequence and with it restored the sound, he had to rewind a little to catch the beginning.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘This is what I want you to see before you go home. Take a good look, and when you’re lying in bed think about me and think about this.’

  It was, like all the others, a short scene, he hadn’t lied about that, even though I seemed to have been there forever, almost all the episodes had been edited together onto that one DVD with barely any preamble, what mattered was the brutality, the crime or the farce, not what came before or afterwards, but what could be used to blackmail the subject of the film. Three men were in a kind of hut, in the background I could make out the tail of an animal whisking back and forth, probably a cow or an ox, there was straw scattered about the floor, I could imagine how it must have smelled in there. Two of the men were standing and they had tied up the third man, who was sitting on a wicker chair, his hands behind his back and each foot tied to a chair leg, to the front legs, of course. There was a cassette or a radio playing, I could hear a tune that I half-recognized, with my reliable memory for music: Comendador had taken a liking to the local songs during his prison stay in Palermo after being arrested by customs because of a drop of blood that trickled from his nose at an inopportune or perhaps opportune moment and aroused the suspicions of a border guard with a very sharp or deductive eye, and who literally set the drug-sniffing dogs on him. He had sent me a couple of CDs as a present, one by Modugno and the other by someone called Zappulla, and I was almost sure that it was the latter’s voice I could hear at full volume in the cowshed, singing a song that appeared on my CD, I could remember some of the titles: I puvireddi,’ ‘Suspirannu,’ ‘Luntanu,’ ‘Bidduzza,’ or ‘Moro pe ttia,’ pretty, pleasant songs, slightly tacky in their melancholy, and I had enjoyed listening to them, over and over, during a melancholy and rather tacky period of my own life, that cowshed must then be in Sicily, an idea confirmed by the presence of the weapon one of the men standing guard wore slung over his shoulder on a chain, a lupara, the sawn-off shotgun once used there for hunting and for settling scores, and perhaps still used for both, the other man had a large pistol in a holster under his arm, his jacket draped elegantly over his shoulders, the sleeves hanging empty, and his shirtsleeves rolled up, a large square watch on his wrist, his hand resting on the back of the chair in which sat the prisoner, stouter and older than the two younger and thinner men, and all three were mouthing the words of the song, they all knew it by heart and were singing along with Zappulla, and although each was doing this of his own accord, so to speak, absorbed and isolated, as if to himself and not in unison, there was nonetheless something very odd about them all momentarily sharing that melody, as if they weren’t two guards and their captive or two executioners and their victim, and as if nothing bad awaited the latter, and the tails of the animals in the background seemed to move to the same rhythm, all the living beings in that out-of-the-way place were strangely and incongruously in tune, the man carrying the lupara was even swaying slightly, not lifting his feet, but just moving his legs and his torso and the twin-barreled shotgun, dancing to the lilting melody of ‘I puvireddi’ or ‘Moro pe ttia,’ which mean, in dialect, ‘The poor devils’ or ‘I’m dying for you.’

  This lasted only a few seconds, then the door was flung open—a glimpse of grass, a pleasant field—and three other men came in, closing the door behind them, and the first man, the man in charge, was Arturo Manoia. There he was with his glasses—the glasses of a rapist or of a civil servant—which he kept pushing up with his thumb even when they had not slipped down, I noticed that he was doing the same thing there, while standing up and active and occupied, and his gaze, almost invisible due to the reflected light and to his incessantly shifting, lusterless eyes (the color of milky coffee), as if he found it hard to keep them still for more than a few seconds, or else could not stand for people to be able to examine them. I recognized him at once, I had just spent a whole unforgettable evening with him and he didn’t look very much younger, so it must have been a recent video or else he was one of those men who don’t age and who, unlike his wife, don’t change either, there he was with his invasive, too-long chin, perhaps not long enough to be termed prognathous, but still meriting the word bazzone. And there he was, with his evident readiness to take revenge. The moment I met him, I thought he would be likely to lash out without the slightest provocation or on the slightest pretext or even with no need for either, that he was an irascible man, although he would doubtless be considered, instead, as measured, because he would almost never give vent to that anger. But I had also thought that on the few occasions when his rage did surface, it would doubtless be terrifying and best not witnessed. And now, having said goodbye to him and seen the last of him in person, there, unexpectedly, at the end of the night, I was about to witness one of his attacks of rage on screen. It was almost, it seemed to me, a curse and I knew this as soon as I saw him, in suit and tie, come in through the door of the cowshed. I prepared myself, I told myself that, whatever happened, I would not look away or cover my eyes. I wanted to show Tupra that I had toughened up during our late-night session or had created inside myself an antidote to his poison, or at least some resistance.

  The music didn’t stop when the three newcomers arrived, they didn’t even turn down the volume, and so I heard little of what Manoia was saying to the bound man and understood still less, he seemed to me to be speaking with an exaggerated southern accent or else mixing dialect and Italian. I could tell, though, that he was speaking to him proudly, indignantly, scornfully—his wounding voice raised in anger now—waving his hands around and giving the man the occasional smack across the face as if this were simply another gesture made in passing, a way of underlining each reproof, almost involuntary or as if he were barely aware of what he was doing, which is a sure sign that the person being slapped is now worthless and has become a mere thing. The other man answered as best he could, and he was definitely speaking in dialect, because I couldn’t understand a word, he managed only truncated sentences, constantly interrupted by the swift ceaseless flow of words from Manoia, I tried not to look too much at the prisoner, the less I perceived him as an indi
vidual, the less it would matter to me what happened to him in the end, because something horrible was about to happen, that much was certain, the situation demanded it and, besides, the scene was part of that specially chosen and edited DVD of embarrassing or downright vile episodes, but I did look at him despite myself, out of habit, he was a plump man, with a small mouth and a large head, short, curly, straw-colored hair, bulging eyes, and the weather-beaten skin of a small landowner who still walks his own fields, well-dressed in a country way, and about forty or so years old. Finally, Manoia’s cascade of words ceased—but not his rage—or else he made a brief pause, and then I did understand what he said: ‘Tappategli la bocca,’ he ordered his henchmen, although it sounded more like ‘Dabbadegli la bogga,’ with unvoiced consonants converted into voiced, or perhaps I understood this a posteriori from the images, when I saw how the man with the pistol and the man with the shotgun stuffed two wads of cloth into the man’s mouth, one after the other, I don’t know how there was room, and on top of that placed a large strip of adhesive tape, from ear to ear, so that he couldn’t cough freely as he needed to, his face grew red and inflamed, his eyes seemed, for a moment, about to pop out of their sockets, his cheeks puffed up like boils, the henchmen used red-and-white checked cloths, perhaps napkins from a trattoria, and the ends stuck out above and below the tape, what could he have done that was so very terrible or so grave, had he been an informer like Del Real, had he betrayed someone, lost his nerve, failed, fled, fallen asleep, he did not seem like a mere enemy, although he could well have been, perhaps someone had died because of him, some agent from the Sismi who wasn’t due to die, always assuming Manoia belonged to the Sismi. Manoia then took an object out of his jacket pocket, I couldn’t see what it was, something short, a small penknife, a teaspoon, a sharp metal file, a pencil. ‘Adesso vedrai,’ he said, ‘Now you’ll see,’ and those words I did hear clearly despite the music. The seated man’s head was at the same height as Manoia’s chest and arms. Manoia moved closer, only a couple of steps, and with whatever he was holding in his hand he made two rapid movements over the man’s face, the gesture of an old-fashioned dentist preparing to pull out a tooth by main force, first one, then the other, and he did pull them out, he really did, by the roots, but not the man’s teeth, he sliced them out the way someone uses a dessert knife to cut out the stone from a peach half, or the seeds from a watermelon, or walnuts from their shells after the initial struggle to open them, and then I had to close mine, despite my earlier resolution, what else could I do, but I tried not to cover them with my hand so that Tupra might think that I had kept them open, while Zappulla kept singing and I caught only the occasional word, ‘sfortunate,’ ‘mangiare,’ ‘cerco,’ ‘soffro,’ ‘senza capire,’ ‘malate,’ ‘unhappy,’ ‘eat,’ ‘I seek,’ ‘I suffer,’ ‘without understanding,’ ‘sick,’ not enough to make any sense of them, although one can always give meaning to anything, unhappy the empty sockets of my eyes, they force me to eat napkins or cloths, I seek to save myself and I suffer mutilations, without understanding the cruelty of these sick beasts … ‘E quando son le feste di Natale,’ that didn’t help in the least even though it was the longest phrase my ears had caught, because I could still hear the inhuman snorts of incredulity and despair and pain, but no screams, there could be no shouts with those checked cloths stuffed in his mouth, but at least I couldn’t see, which was something, even though I was trying to make Reresby believe the opposite and possibly succeeding.

  And in short, I was afraid (‘O that I could forget what I have been or not remember what I must be now’). Afraid of Manoia and afraid of Tupra and also vaguely afraid of myself, because I was mixed up with them (‘Yes, O that I could not remember what I must be now’). Tupra used the remote control to freeze the image, he had inoculated me with the last drop of his poison and through the eyes too, as indicated by its etymology. I knew he had stopped the film because I could no longer hear the sound. I opened my eyes, I dared to look, fortunately the film was frozen at a moment when Manoia’s back was covering the face of the now blind man.

  ‘You’ve seen enough,’ said Tupra, ‘although the scene isn’t over yet: our friend heaps further insults on his victim and then slits his throat, but I’ll spare you that—there’s a lot of blood—-just as he could have spared that man, I mean, why make someone suffer like that when you’re going to kill him anyway, and only a few seconds later?’ He said this in a tone of genuine perplexity and horror, and as if he had given much thought to that ‘why’ but never managed to get beyond it. ‘I don’t understand it, do you, Jack? Do you understand it, Jack?’

  I had fallen silent, I preferred not to say a word for a few moments because I was afraid that if I spoke, I would crumble and my voice would shake, and I might even cry, and I couldn’t let that happen under any circumstances, I wouldn’t allow myself to do so in that place and at that time. I clenched my jaw and kept it clenched, and finally I felt sufficiently composed to respond with what I intended to be an imitation of sarcasm:

  ‘You should have asked him. You missed an opportunity there. You had all night to find out.’ This seemed to disconcert him slightly, he obviously hadn’t been expecting such a response. I went on: ‘Perhaps when he did that first thing he didn’t know he was going to kill him. Maybe he hadn’t yet decided. Sometimes a first punishment isn’t enough to satisfy one’s fury and you have to go still further. Perhaps he had no option but to kill him. For some people even that isn’t enough, and they try to kill the person twice, to vainly try and kill the already dead. They mutilate the corpse or profane the tomb—they even regret having killed him because they can’t now kill him again. It happened a lot during our Civil War. It happens now with ETA, for whom once isn’t enough.’ Then I went back to my first question: ‘But why ask me, he’s your friend, you should have asked him.’

  Tupra lit another cigarette, I heard the sound of the lighter, I had still not turned around to face him. He stopped the DVD, got up, removed the disk, stood in front of me, holding it delicately between his fingers, and said:

  ‘Certainly not, Manoia doesn’t even know I have this video, he hasn’t a clue. Well, he’ll assume I have something on him, but he won’t know what. And it would never occur to him that it would be this. Anyway, as you can see, I very likely saved that imbecile Garza’s life. Instead of getting angry with me, you should be grateful that I took charge of his punishment, to use your word. He would never have gotten away scot-free, that’s for sure.’

  I had known for some time now where he was heading. ‘I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I believed; I killed one so that ten would not be killed, ten so that a hundred would not fall, a hundred in order to save a thousand,’ and so on, ad infinitum, the old excuse that so many would spend centuries preparing and elaborating in their Christian and non-Christian tombs, waiting for the Judgment that never comes, and many still believe in that Judgment at the hour of their departing, certainly almost all murderers and instigators of murder throughout history. However, I wasn’t concerned so much with heaping more blame on him as with holding myself together, which I was managing only with difficulty, how I would love to have appeared completely indifferent. And so I asked him a genuine question, that is, one I would have wanted to ask him anyway, when I was more myself.

  ‘If he assumes you have something on him and you’ve got something like that, how come you were pussyfooting around him all evening? It looked like you were trying to placate him, not making any demands. According to what you’ve just told me, these videos are used above all to make it easier to wheedle concessions out of people, to blackmail them, but my impression was that you were having a hard time persuading him to do whatever it was you were trying to persuade him to do, or getting out of him what you wanted.’

  Tupra looked at me in a slightly amused, slightly irritated way. I had still not moved from the ottoman, and so he was looking down on me.