Your Face Tomorrow
Page 23
Nostalgia, or missing some place or person, regardless of whether for reasons of absence or abandonment or death, is a very strange and contradictory business. At first, you think you can’t live without someone or far from someone, the initial grief is so intense and so constant that you experience it as a kind of endless sinking or an interminably advancing spear, because each moment of privation counts and weighs, you feel it and it chokes you, and all you want is for the hours of the day to pass, knowing that their passing will lead to nothing new, only to more waiting for more waiting. Each morning you open your eyes—if you’ve had the benefit of sleep which, while it doesn’t allow you to forget everything, does at least numb and confuse—thinking the same thought that oppressed you just before you closed them, for example,‘She’s not here and she won’t be coming back’ (whether that means her coming back to you or back from death), and you prepare yourself not to trudge through the day, because you’re not even capable of looking that far ahead or of differentiating one day from another, but through the next five minutes and then the next, and so you’ll continue from five minutes to five minutes, if not from minute to minute, becoming entangled in them all and, at most, trying to distract yourself for just two or three minutes from your consciousness, or from your ponderous paralysis. If that happens, it has nothing to do with your will, but with some form of blessed chance: a curious item on the television news, the time it takes to complete or begin a crossword, an irritating or solicitous phone call from someone you can’t stand, the bottle that falls to the floor and obliges you to gather up the fragments so that you don’t cut yourself when out of laziness you wander about barefoot, or the dire TV series that nonetheless amuses you—or that you simply took to straight away—and to which you surrender yourself with inexplicable relief until the final credits roll, wishing another episode would start immediately and allow you to keep clinging on to that stupid thread of continuity. These are the found routines that sustain us, what remains of life, the foolish and the innocuous, that neither enthuses nor demands participation or effort, the padding that we despise when everything is fine and we’re busy and have no time to miss anyone, not even the dead (in fact, we use those busy times to shrug them off, although this only works for a short while, because the dead insist on staying dead and always come back later on, the pin prick pressing into our chest and the lead upon our souls).
Time passes, and at some ill-defined point, we go back to being able to sleep without suddenly starting awake and without remembering what has happened in our dreams, and to shaving not at chance moments or at odd times, but each morning; no bottles are broken and we remain unirritated by any phone call, we can make do without the TV soap opera, the crossword, the random soothing routines that we look at oddly as we bid farewell to them because now we can scarcely understand why we ever needed them, and we can even make do without the patient people who entertained us and listened to us during our monotonous, obsessive period of mourning. We raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We’re filled by a kind of retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of ever giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. ‘I was abandoned,’ we think,‘by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They’ll regret it in the end, because it’s nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one’s been forgotten, and now I’m forgetting them, and anyone who dies knows more or less what fate awaits him or her. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away.’ Then you quote these words to yourself: ‘Memory is a tremulous finger.’ And add in your own words: ‘And it doesn’t always succeed when it tries to point at us.’ We discover that our finger can no longer be trusted, or less and less often, and that those who absorbed our thoughts night and day and day and night, and were fixed there like a nail hammered firmly in, gradually work loose and become of no importance to us; they grow blurred and, yes, tremulous, and one can even begin to doubt their existence as if they were a bloodstain rubbed and scrubbed and cleaned, or of which only the rim remains, which is the part that takes longest to remove, and then that rim, too, finally submits.
More time passes, and there comes a day, just before the last trace vanishes, when the mere idea of seeing the lost person suddenly seems burdensome to us. Even though we may not be happy and may still miss them, even though their remoteness and loss still occasionally wounds us—one night, lying in bed, we look at our shoes alone by the leg of a chair, and we’re filled with grief when we remember that her high heels once stood right next to them, year after year, telling us that we were two even in sleep, even in absence—it turns out that the people we most loved, and still love, have become people from another era, or have been lost along the way—along our way, for we each have our own—have become almost preterite beings to whom we do not want to return because we know them too well and the thread of continuity has been broken. We always view the past with a feeling of proud superiority, both it and its contents, even if our present is worse or less fortunate or sick and the future promises no improvement of any kind. However brilliant and happy our past was, to us it seems contaminated with ingenuousness, ignorance and, in part, silliness: in the past we never knew what would come after and now we do, and in that sense the past is inferior, in objective, practical terms; that’s why it always carries within it an element of hopeless foolishness and makes us feel ashamed that we lived for so long in a fantasy world, believing what we now know to be false, or perhaps it wasn’t false then, but which has, anyway, ceased to be true by not resisting or persevering. The love that seemed rock solid, the friendship we never doubted, the living person whom we always relied upon to live forever because without him the world was inconceivable or it was inconceivable that the world would still be the world and not some other place. We cannot help looking down slightly at our most beloved dead, the more so as more time passes and in passing wastes them, not just with sadness but with pity too, knowing, as we do, that they know nothing—how naïve they were—of what happened after their departure, whereas we do. We went to the funeral and listened to what was said there, as well as to what people muttered under their breath, as if afraid the departed might still be able to hear them, and we saw those who had harmed him boasting that they had been his closest friends and pretending to mourn him. He neither saw nor heard anything. He died deceived, like everyone else, without ever knowing enough, and that’s precisely what makes us pity them and consider them all to be poor men and poor women, poor grown-up children, poor devils.
Those whom we left behind or who left our side know nothing about us either, as far as we’re concerned they’ve become as fixed and immovable as the dead, and the mere prospect of meeting again and having to talk to them and hear them seems to us like hard work, partly because we feel that neither they nor we would want to talk about or hear anything. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ we think, ‘it’s been far too long since she was a witness to my days. She used to know almost everything about me, or at least the most important things, and now a gap has opened up that could never be filled, even if I were to tell her in great detail all that has happened, everything of which she did not have immediate knowledge. I can’t be bothered with having to get to know each other again and explain ourselves, how upsetting to recognize at once the old reactions and the old vices and the old anxieties and the old tones of voice in which I addressed her and she me; and even the same suppressed jealousies and the same passions, albeit unspoken now. I’ll never be able to see her as someone new, nor as part of
my daily existence, she’ll seem simultaneously stale and alien. I’ll go home to see Luisa and the children, and once I’ve spent a good long time with them and they’re starting to get used to me, I’ll sit down beside her for a rather shorter time, perhaps before going out to supper at a restaurant, while we wait for the babysitter who’s late arriving, on the sofa we shared for so many years, but where I sit now like a visiting stranger, dependable or otherwise, and we won’t know how to behave. There’ll be pauses and clearings of the throat and, given that we’re face to face, extraordinarily inane remarks such as ‘So, how are things with you?’ or ‘You’re looking really good.’ And then we’ll realize that we can’t be together without really being together, and that we don’t want that. We will be neither completely natural nor completely artificial, it’s not possible to be superficial with someone we’ve known deeply and since forever, nor deep with someone who has lost all track of us and covered her own tracks completely, for both of us there is so much that is now unknown. And after half an hour, perhaps one, two at the most, over dessert, we’ll consider that there’s nothing more to be said and, even stranger, that once is quite enough, and then I’ll have thirteen days’ holiday left to kill. And even if the unthinkable happened and we fell into each other’s arms and she said the words I’ve been wanting to hear for so long now: “Come, come, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me again. I haven’t yet shooed away your ghost, this pillow is still yours, I just couldn’t see you clearly before. Come and embrace me. Come to me. Come back. And stay here for ever”; even if that happened and I gave up my London apartment and said farewell to Tupra and Pérez Nuix, to Mulryan and Rendel and even to Wheeler, and began the swift task of transforming them into a long parenthesis—even seemingly interminable parentheses close eventually and then they can be jumped over—and returned to Madrid to be with her—and I’m not saying that I wouldn’t, given the opportunity, if that happened—I would do so knowing that what has been interrupted cannot be resumed, that the gap would remain there always, hidden perhaps but constant, and knowing that a before and an after can never be knit together.’
And so, despite my genuine desire to return to my city and to see my family again, even the one person who no longer considered herself mine, to see yesterday’s faces, having absented myself from today and from their today, and to find myself, without preparation or warning, confronted by tomorrow’s faces, I not only planned a stay of two weeks rather than the three my boss had offered me, I also postponed my departure for a little longer on our return from Berlin, in order to find out first what had happened to De la Garza.
I thought of simply phoning him out of the blue and enquiring after his health, but it occurred to me that if I gave my name, he might not even want to speak to me, and that if I gave a false name or invented an excuse or some fabricated query, it would be difficult then to move the conversation on and ask about his physical state, suddenly and for no reason, given that I was supposedly a stranger. So I decided instead to pay him a surprise visit, that is, without making a prior appointment. However, since nowadays no official organization will allow in anyone unless they have first specified the purpose of their visit or proved that they have some legitimate business there, I phoned an ex-colleague at the BBC with whom I had worked on various tedious programs about terrorism and tourism at the start of my life in London—before I was recruited by Tupra or, rather, by Wheeler—and who, like me, had managed to escape his boring post and had doubtless improved his lot by taking on a vague although not entirely insignificant job with the Spanish Embassy at the Court of my patron saint St. James, or San Jacobo. The name of this unctuous, treacherous individual, part-despot, part-serf (despite the apparent contradiction, the two often go together), was Garralde and when it came to ensuring his own well-being he lacked all scruples; he was always ready to be servile, not just with the powerful and the famous, but also with those he reckoned would one day enjoy a little power and fame, however minimal, enough, at any rate, to do him some future favor or for him to feel able to ask for one; in just the same way, he was scornful of those who, in his view, would never be of any use to him, although he had no qualms about suddenly and cynically turning on the charm if he discovered later on that he had been wrong. He had a broad face, like an almost full moon, small eyes, very porous skin, like pulp, and rather widely spaced teeth, the latter giving him a highly salacious appearance which, as far as I know, accorded only with his greedy mentality—he looked as if he were constantly secreting juices—but not with his activities: he was the kind of man who laughingly pays everyone amorous compliments—probably both women and men, although he would do so only implicitly and, how can I put it, interrogatively with the latter, by taking a great interest in them—but on the rare occasions when one of his flatterees responded in kind, he would, equally laughingly, make his escape, fearful that he would not be able to oblige. He had the strangest hair too, it looked just like Davy Crockett’s hat (without the beaver or racoon tail or whatever it was, there were quite enough dangly bits in that Embassy with De la Garza; although the latter didn’t wear his hairnet to work), and I always wondered if that hairstyle-cum-cap wasn’t in fact a wig, so thick and flamboyant that no one dared suspect it was false. Whenever I saw him, I felt like giving it a good tug, under the guise of masculine affection or in manly, boorish jest, just to see if it came off in my hand and, in passing, to find out what it felt like (it bore a creepy resemblance to velvet).
He had never paid me much attention—poor radio hack that I was—when we first knew each other—he always thought he was better than that, even though he was a hack too at the time—but now he had me down as someone with influence and a touch of mystery. He didn’t know exactly what I did or who I worked for, but he knew something about my occasional appearances at chic discos, expensive restaurants, racecourses, celebrity suppers, Stamford Bridge, as well as ghastly dives no Spaniard would ever venture into (Tupra’s sociable spells sometimes went on for weeks), and all of this in the company of the natives, which is rare in England for almost any foreigner, even diplomats. (On this occasion, moreover, he would have noticed me wearing those extraordinary shoes made by Hlustik and Von Truschinsky, and Garralde had a keen eye for such things and an infuriating tendency to copy them.) He felt what it best behooves acquaintances to feel about oneself: confusion and curiosity. This led him to imagine that I had all kinds of contacts and powers, which meant that he would do anything I asked. And so, offering no explanation, I asked if I could come and see him at the Embassy and, once I was there at his desk, immediately clarified the situation (in a prudently low voice, for Garralde shared a room with three other functionaries; if he was thinking of staying there, he still had quite some way to go before he made it to the top).
‘I haven’t actually come to see you, Garralde. I made the appointment so that I wouldn’t have any problems getting in. I’ll just spend a couple of minutes with you, if that’s all right. We can have a proper chat over lunch another day, I’ve just discovered this fantastic new place, you’ll love it, you see lots of people there, fresh out of bed. They skip breakfast, you see.’—For him ‘people’ meant ‘important people,’ the only kind he was interested in. He spattered his Spanish with really ghastly foreign expressions like ‘the cream of society’ or even worse ‘la crème de la crème,’ ‘the haut monde’ and ‘the jet set’; he talked about ‘big names’ and people being ‘top-notch,’ and said that at weekends he was ‘unplugged.’ He might climb quite high with his blend of groveling and abuse, but he would never be anything more than a social yokel. He would also exclaim ‘Oro!’ whenever he thought something particularly wonderful or remarkable, having heard an Italian friend use the expression and finding it highly original. ‘As soon as we finish here (it will only take two minutes), I want you to tell me where I can find the office of a colleague of yours, Rafael de la Garza. He’s the person I really want to see, but I don’t want him to know I’m coming.’
‘I don’t think so. He’s upset with me over some nonsense or other. I want to make up with him, it was all a misunderstanding. But he mustn’t know that I’m here. Just show me where his office is and I’ll turn up there on my own.’
‘But wouldn’t it be best if I told him you were here? He’s a higher rank than me.’
It was as if he hadn’t heard what I’d said. He may have been clever when it came to manipulating friends and acquaintances, but he was basically an oaf. He irritated me, and I was on the point of hurling myself on his abundant hair, its similarity to the legendary hat of Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, was really quite incredible (although it looked more matted than on other occasions, perhaps it was beginning to bear more of a resemblance to a Russian fur hat). I once again restrained myself, after all, he was about to do me a small favor that he would soon ask me to pay back, he was not the sort to wait.
‘What did I just say, Garralde? If you announce me, he’ll refuse to see me, and besides, it might get you into trouble.’
Since he was a base creature, this last argument sharpened his wits a little. He would never want to make an enemy of a superior, or to annoy him, even if that person wasn’t his direct superior. For a moment, I felt sorry for him: how could he possibly consider Rafita de la Garza his superior? Our world is very badly ordered and unfair and corrupt if it allows other people to be at the orders of that prize dickhead. It was just pathetic. Of course, it was equally shocking to think that someone might have Garralde as their superior and have to obey him.