Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  It had been some time since I visited Madrid, from which I, too, had evaporated or faded, leaving not a trace behind or so it seemed, or perhaps all that remained of me was the rim, (which is the part that takes longest to remove), and also my own first name, which I had not yet left behind me, not having yet reached that state of strangeness. I hadn’t ceased to exist, of course, in my father’s house, not there, but I wasn’t referring to his home, but to the home that was once mine. And now I would perhaps find out who had replaced me, even if he was only temporary and had no intention of staying, the permanent replacement takes his time or patiently awaits his turn, the one who will truly replace us always hangs back and lets others go ahead to be burned on the pyre that Luisa one day lit for us and which continues to burn, consuming all who come near, and which does not automatically extinguish itself once we’ve been burned to a cinder. I wouldn’t need to worry that much about whoever happened to be by her side now, or only a little, just a touch, because of the mere fact that he was by her side and by the side of my children too.

  I had decided not to give them prior warning from London, but to wait until I arrived, so that my phone call could be followed immediately by a semi-surprise visit. I wanted to make sure they were home—I knew the hours they kept, but there are always exceptions and emergencies—and then turn up a few minutes later, full of smiles and laden with presents. To see the children’s excitement and, out of the corner of my eye, Luisa’s amused, perhaps briefly nostalgic expression, that would allow me a simulacrum of triumph and a flicker of illusory hope, enough perhaps to sustain me during that artificial two-week sojourn, which seemed to me far too long the moment the plane touched down.

  I stayed at a hotel and not at my father’s house, for I had learned from my brothers and my sister—rather than from him, for he never spoke about his problems—that his health had deteriorated badly over the last two months, after the doctors discovered that he’d had three mini-strokes—as they called them—of which he had been entirely unaware, not even knowing when they’d occurred; and although my brothers, my sister, some of his grand-daughters and my sisters-in-law often dropped in to see him, there had, in the end, been no alternative but to provide him with a live-in caregiver, a rather nice Colombian lady, who slept in the bedroom I would have occupied, and who relieved his maid, who was getting on in years now, of some of her tasks. I didn’t want to upset the new order with my presence. With my current salary, I could easily afford the Palace Hotel, and so I booked a suite there. It was easier for me to stay at a hotel than in someone else’s house, even that of my father or of my best friends, male and female, the women being rather more hospitable: with them I would not only have felt like an intruder but also an exile from my own home, whereas in a hotel, I could pretend I was a visiting foreigner, although not a tourist, and feel less acutely that unpleasant sense of having been repudiated and then offered shelter.

  I spoke to my father on the phone, as usual a brief conversation, although now he didn’t have the excuse that I was calling him from England, which he assumed must be a very expensive thing to do (he belonged to a thrifty generation who only used the phone to give or receive messages, although Wheeler wasn’t like that, so perhaps it was a generation that existed only in Spain), and I arranged to see him the next day. His voice sounded normal, just as it had on the last few occasions when I had called from London, I phoned him every week or even more frequently sometimes; he sounded slightly tired, but no more than that, and disliked having to hold the phone to his ear for too long. The strange thing was, though, that he made no fuss about the prospect of seeing me and expressed no excitement, as if we had seen each other only a couple of days before, if not yesterday. It was as if he suddenly had little sense of time or its passing, and kept those people closest to him, those he knew best, always in his thoughts, either so as not to miss them quite so much, their palpable presence I mean, or so as not really to notice their absence. I was simply me, one of his children, and therefore unchanging and sufficently established in his mind for him not to feel my physical absence or my distance or the unusually long gaps between visits or, rather, the non-existence of those visits. He hardly went out now. ‘I’ve flown over from London, Papa,’ I said,‘I’ll be here for a couple of weeks.’‘Good. And how are things?’ he asked, showing no particular surprise. ‘Oh, not too bad. But we’ll have a proper talk tomorrow when I come and see you. Today, I want to go and see the kids. I probably won’t even recognize them.’‘They were here a few days ago with their mother. She doesn’t visit that often, but she comes when she can. And she phones me.’ Luisa was not as fixed and stable as I was, which is why he could remember when she came to see him and when she didn’t—she was, up to a point, still new to him. ‘She must be incredibly busy,’ I said as if she were still part of my life and I had to apologize for her. I knew there was no need, she was very fond of my father, and, besides, her own father had died a few years before, and she had, insofar as such a thing is possible, replaced that lost figure with my father. If she didn’t go and see him more often, it must be because she really couldn’t find the time. ‘Was she looking pretty?’ I asked stupidly. ‘Luisa is always pretty. Why do you ask? You must see her more than I do.’ He knew about our separation, I hadn’t hidden it from him, as one does occasionally hide potentially upsetting news from the elderly. ‘I’m living in England now, Papa,’ I reminded him, ‘and I haven’t seen her for a while.’ He said nothing for a moment, then: ‘I know you’re living in England. Well, if that’s what you want. I hope your stay in Oxford is proving fruitful.’ It wasn’t that he didn’t know I was living in London, but now and then he got the different times confused, which isn’t that surprising really, since time is a continuum in which we are all caught up until we apparently cease to be.

  I had to phone Luisa before going to her house, not only to make sure the children would be there, but out of respect for her. I still had the keys to the apartment and she wouldn’t necessarily have changed the locks; I could probably just walk in, without warning, causing first shock and then surprise; but that seemed an abuse to me, she wouldn’t like it at all, and besides I risked bumping into my temporary replacement, whoever he was, assuming she had granted him habitual access. It was unlikely, but when in doubt, it’s best to do nothing: it would have been embarrassing and I would have liked it even less than she. It turned my stomach, the mere idea of finding a complete stranger sitting in my place on the sofa or preparing a quick supper in the kitchen or watching television with the children in order to appear all fatherly and friendly, or making out he was Guillermo’s buddy. I was prepared to be told this as a fact, but not actually to see it and then, unable to forget it, have that picture in my mind once I was back in London.

  I dialed her number, it was mid-afternoon, the children would be back from school. She picked up the phone, and when I told her I was in Madrid, she was really shocked and took a while to respond, as if she were rapidly taking stock of the situation in the light of this unforeseen event, and then: why didn’t you warn me, how could you, it’s not fair; I wanted to give you all a surprise, well, the kids mostly, and I’d still like it to be a surprise, so don’t tell them I’m here, just let me walk through the door without them knowing a thing, they’re not going out this evening, I assume, can I come over now?

  ‘They’re not going out, but I am,’ she replied hastily and somewhat flustered, so much so that I even wondered—I couldn’t help it—if it was true or if she had just made a last-minute decision to leave the house, I mean, to skedaddle, so as not to be there when I arrived, so that she wouldn’t have to see me or meet me.

  ‘You’ve got to go out now?’ I had counted on her presence, on her benevolent gaze when the four of us met once more, it wouldn’t be the same without her as witness.

  ‘Yes, any moment actually, I’m just waiting for the babysitter,’ she said. ‘In fact, let me phone her right now, before she sets off, to warn her that you’re coming. S
he doesn’t know you, and she might not want to let you in unless she’s forewarned, I’ve told her not to open the door to strangers under any circumstances, and you, I’m afraid, would be a stranger to her. Hang up now so that I can call her, and I’ll call you right back. Where are you?’

  I gave her the numbers of the hotel and my room. It was as if she were in the most terrific hurry, besides, nowadays you can track down a babysitter anywhere and at any time even if they’re not at home, they all have cell phones. It occurred to me that she had not in fact yet spoken to the babysitter and was phoning her now so that the babysitter could race over to deal with this unexpected situation—hence the urgency—and have time to arrive, and give Luisa time to leave, before I appeared. Even if this was a genuine spur-of-the-moment decision to go out, she would never just assume that my key would still work and thus leave the children alone, not even for a minute, to wait for me there unaware they were waiting. I had the awful feeling she was trying to avoid me. But I couldn’t be sure, perhaps I’d grown too used to interpreting people, those I came across at work and outside as well, to analyzing every inflection of voice and every gesture and to seeing something hidden behind any show of haste or delay. This was no way to go about the world, all it did was feed my imaginings.

  She took what seemed an age to call back, long enough for me to grow impatient, to rekindle my suspicions, and to hope she would dispel them by telling me she’d cancelled her date. And to think, too, that she was playing for time, I mean, allowing time for the babysitter to get there and so delay me setting off in the same direction, towards our apartment which was no longer mine. I sat motionless on the bed, which is what you do when you’re expecting something to happen from one moment to the next, a wretched expression that makes every second seem an eternity and leaves us dangling. More than a quarter of an hour had passed when the phone finally rang.

  ‘Hi, it’s me,’ said Luisa, as young Pérez Nuix had done when she rang my doorbell on that night of heavy, sustained rain, but with much more justification, after all, as far as I was concerned she had been an unequivocal ‘me’ for many years—that’s usually taken for granted in marriages, that there is only one ‘me’—and, by then, I had been waiting for her call for some time. She was also within her rights to assume that I would recognize her without any need for further identification—who else would it be, who else but me, but her—from the first word and the first instant, and she could be almost sure of occupying most or many of my thoughts, although that wouldn’t be high on her agenda just then, her mind was elsewhere, or she was trying to combine that elsewhere with my unwanted presence, for I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was just that, a nuisance. ‘Sorry, the babysitter’s phone was busy, and I’ve only just managed to get through to her. Anyway, she knows you’ll be coming and that she’s not to spoil your surprise, so she won’t say anything to the children. How long will it take you to get here?’

  ‘I don’t know, about twenty minutes I should think, I’ll take a cab.’

  ‘Then would you mind not leaving for another fifteen or twenty minutes, that will give her time to settle in and sort the kids out. And please try not to keep them up too long past their bedtime, otherwise they’ll be worn out tomorrow and they’ve got school in the morning. If possible, make sure they’re in bed by eleven at the latest, which is already much later than usual. You’ll have other opportunities to see them. How long are you staying?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ I said, and again it seemed to me that this created another unforeseen problem for her, that it was even an annoyance, a bother, something she would have to wrestle with.

  ‘That long?’ She couldn’t suppress her feelings, she sounded more alarmed than glad. ‘How come?’

  ‘As I think I told you, I had to accompany my boss on a trip. In the end, it turned out to be four trips, one after the other. Anyway, he’s rewarded me, I suppose, with a longer trip just for me.’ And I added: ‘So I won’t see you tonight, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, by the time I get back the children will be in bed. The babysitter will stay as long as she needs to, so don’t worry about that; as soon as they’re in bed, you can leave, don’t wait up for me. If you’d warned me you were coming, I’d have arranged things differently. We’ll talk later, when we’ve got more time.’

  The same city, which, just the day before, was faded and dim, becomes suddenly crystal-clear as soon as you set foot in it again; time condenses, yesterday disappears—or becomes just an interval—and it’s as if you had never left. You suddenly know once more which streets to take, and in which order, to get from one place to another, wherever they may be, and how much time to allow. I had reckoned on twenty minutes by taxi to my apartment through the abominable traffic, and I was almost exactly right. And instead of thinking excitedly about my children, whom I would be seeing at last after a long absence, I couldn’t help worrying about Luisa instead during the whole disenchanted journey. It wasn’t that I had expected her to give me a wonderful reception, but I’d thought at least she’d show a little curiosity and sympathy, as she had on the phone whenever I’d spoken to her from London, what had changed, why had she turned against me, was it because I was now breathing the same air as her? Perhaps she had only felt that sympathy and that vague curiosity about me from a distance, as long as I was far away, as long as I was just a voice in her ear, a voice with no face, no body, no eyes, no arms; then she could allow herself those feelings, but not here, not where we had lived happily together and where, later on, we had wounded each other. This was where she had survived without me, become unaccustomed to me, and so she didn’t quite know what to do with me any more: I hadn’t been around for quite some time. She said not a word about her date, which had arisen, or so it seemed to me, as soon as she learned that I was there in the flesh. She was under no obligation to tell me, of course, and I hadn’t asked, nor had I suggested that she cancel, which is easy enough and perfectly free and something that people do on the slightest pretext, simply because they feel like it (‘Oh, please, please, today’s a really special day, I would so love to see all of you together, surely you can change it, go on, why don’t you try?’); and people usually do give explanations even if they’re not asked, and provide needless excuses, and tell you about their inane life and speak at length and babble on, out of the sheer pleasure of using language, or so as to provide superfluous information or to avoid silences, or to provoke jealousy or envy or so as not to arouse suspicions by being enigmatic. ‘The fatal word,’ Wheeler had called it. ‘The curse of the word. Talking and talking, without stopping, that is the one thing for which no one ever lacks ammunition. That is the wheel that moves the world, Jacobo, more than anything else; that is the engine of life, the one that never becomes exhausted and never stops, that is its life’s breath.’ Luisa had held in that breath and said only: ‘They’re not going out, but I am,’ without even adding the minimal excuses usual in such cases,‘It’s an appointment I can’t break, I made it weeks ago,’ or ‘It’s too late to cancel,’ or ‘I can’t postpone it because the people I’m meeting are visiting Madrid and they’re leaving tomorrow.’ Nor had she expressed polite regret at the clash, even if that regret was false (it still gives some small consolation to the jilted person and makes him feel better): ‘Oh, how annoying, what bad luck, what a shame, I would love to have seen the children’s reaction when they saw it was you. If only I’d known about it beforehand. Are you sure you can’t wait until tomorrow? It’s been such a long time.’ She had kept her mouth shut, just as if she didn’t know who her date was or where she was going, more as if she had just made it up than as if she wanted to keep it secret. That was my suspicion, an occupational hazard perhaps, acquired in England. She must have somewhere to go, somewhere to spend a few hours, the hours I would spend in her apartment. She was sure by now to have a boyfriend, a lover, however transient. It would just be a matter of finding him, or probably not even that if he’d already given her the keys to his pla
ce. ‘It’s as if she doesn’t want to see me,’ I thought in the taxi. ‘But she’s going to, that’s for sure. I didn’t come here to spend yet another day without seeing her, without once more seeing her face.’