The children were hugely surprised. At first, Marina gave me a hard, distrustful stare, then she got used to me, but more in the way that small children get used to strangers—it takes only a matter of minutes if the adult in question has a way with kids—than as if she really remembered me clearly and in detail. It also helped that her brother filled her in right from the start (‘It’s Papa, silly, don’t you see?’). The presents helped to ease matters too, and the babysitter’s approving, almost beatific smile, she was a very able young woman who came to open the door to me: I didn’t dare try my key in the lock, in case it had been changed, I rang the bell like any other visitor. Marina asked me absurd questions (‘Where do you live?’ ‘Have you got a dog?’ ‘Does it always rain there?’ ‘Are there any bears?’), while Guillermo was in charge of asking questions of a more reproachful kind (‘Why don’t we ever see you?’ ‘Do you like it better there than here?’ ‘Have you met any English children?’) as well as of the bookish-adventure film variety, he read quite a lot and watched films all the time (‘Have you visited Harry Potter’s school?’‘And what about Sherlock Holmes’ house?’ ‘Aren’t you afraid to go out at night with all that fog and with Jack the Rippers about, or aren’t there any Jack the Rippers in London now?’ ‘Is it true that if the real person stands next to his wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s, you can’t tell which is which?’) I hadn’t visited Harry Potter’s school, but I had been to 221B Baker Street, because I lived nearby and often popped in; and in York, I had discovered the dark, neglected grave of Dick Turpin, the highwayman in the red jacket, mask, three-cornered hat and thigh-high boots, and next to him was buried his faithful horse, or rather mare, Black Bess, and I had seen the place where, still elegantly dressed, he had been hanged at the Tyburn, just outside York. One night, a white dog had followed me, tis tis tis, through the streets and squares and parks to my house, he was all alone in the heavy rain, for children it would be much more mysterious if I didn’t mention his mistress; I let him dry himself and sleep in my apartment, and yes, I would have kept him, but he left the following morning when I took him out for a walk, and I’ve never seen him since, perhaps he didn’t like my human food, well, I didn’t have any dog food. On another night, I saw a man take out a sword in a disco, a two-edged sword, he produced it from inside his coat and threatened people, who drew back in terror; he sliced through several things with great skill and mastery, a table, a couple of chairs, some curtains, he shattered a few bottles and ripped the skirts of two women without causing them the slightest harm, he judged things perfectly, he was a real artist; then he put the sword back in the sheath inside his long coat, put the coat on—this made him walk very stiffly, like a ghost—and he left just like that, and no one dared to stop him; I didn’t either, what do you mean, are you mad, he would have made mincemeat of me in seconds, he was so fast with that sword (like thunderless lightning that kills silently). I was about to tell them that I had spent a third night at the house of Wendy, Peter Pan’s girlfriend, but I held back: Marina was young enough to believe it, but not Guillermo, and I didn’t want to recall the videos I had been shown there, in fact, I didn’t want ever to remember them and yet I thought of them constantly (‘The wind moves the sea and the boats withdraw, with hurrying oars and full sails. Amongst the sound of the waves the rifle shots rang out … Cursèd be the noble heart that puts its trust in evil men! … Aboard the boats, all the sailors were crying, and the most beautiful women, all in black and distraught, walk, crying, through the lemon groves.’ That poem about Torrijos would always be associated in my mind with that string of evil scenes). And I realized—I had forgotten, it was such a long time since I’d spoken to Guillermo and Marina—that almost everything that happens to one, can, with very few changes, easily be converted into a story for children. Intriguing or sinister tales, the kind that protect and prepare them and make them resourceful.
Once they had gone to bed, I was sure for the first time in many months that they were safe and sound; time again condensed or concertinaed, and for a few seconds I felt as if I had never left their side and never known Tupra or Pérez Nuix, Mulryan or Rendel; when, shortly afterwards, I tiptoed into their respective rooms, to turn out the lights and to check if they were all right, the Tintin book the boy must have been reading just before he fell asleep had slipped to the floor without waking him, and the girl was embracing a little bear destined once more to be smothered by the diminutive arm of her simple dreams. Almost nothing had changed in my absence. Only Luisa, who wasn’t there, and although I was, I still hadn’t seen her. In her place was a discreet babysitter, and she had kept out of the way, hadn’t interfered in the reunion at all, she had merely helped with the children when it was time for supper and bed. She said her name was Mercedes, even though she was Polish: perhaps it was an adopted name, to hispanicize herself more quickly. She spoke good Spanish, she had learned it during the three years she had been there, before that, she hadn’t known a word, she said, but her boyfriend was from Madrid, and she was thinking of getting married and settling there (I noticed she wore a little crucifix around her neck), she told me all this while I was playing for time. ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ Luisa had warned, well, it had sounded to me rather like a warning. She was perfectly within her rights not to want me there while she was not, I might have started snooping, looking for anything that might have changed and poking around in her mail, opening her wardrobes and sniffing her clothes, going into her bathroom and smelling her shampoo and her cologne, checking to see if she still kept a photo of me in her bedroom (unlikely), although in the living room there were still a few family snapshots in which I appeared, the four of us together, she wouldn’t want the children to forget me completely, at least not my face.
‘Do you often come here?’ I asked Mercedes. ‘The children seem to know you well and they do as they’re told.’ This wasn’t an entirely innocent question.
‘Yes, sometimes, but not that often. Luisa doesn’t go out much at night. Although she has gone out more lately, usually in the evening.’ And then she betrayed Luisa, although she certainly didn’t intend to, but she did, without lingering or delaying—people just have to start speaking in order to tell too much, even when they don’t seem to be telling anything; they supply the listener with information as soon as they open their mouth, without being asked and without realizing that it is information, and so they give someone away without intending to, or they betray themselves, and no sooner are the words out than it’s too late: ‘Oh, I didn’t realize, how stupid of me, I didn’t mean to’—‘She was lucky to find me in. She doesn’t normally leave it so late to call me, she always phones at least the day before. I might have been booked somewhere else, because I babysit for four different families. Four, excluding Luisa.’
‘She was lucky then. How much notice did she give you?’
‘None. Just enough time for me to get here. I normally have to catch a bus and a metro, but tonight she said she’d pay for my taxi. The thing is, there aren’t that many taxis where I live, which is why it took me so long. “Come as soon as you can,” she said, “something urgent’s cropped up.” She told me about your visit and that I should let you in. But I would have looked through the peephole and let you in anyway, because I know you from the photographs.’And she gestured shyly towards them, as if she were embarrassed to have noticed.
So my suspicions had been right, perhaps all that practice in the office with no name had not been in vain. Luisa hadn’t intended to go out, she’d done so in order not to see me. She hadn’t dared make me postpone my meeting with the kids, she would have found it far harder to come up with a credible excuse (‘That long,’ she had said, aware that it really was a long time). Where would she have gone, it isn’t easy to spend hours away from home if you’ve nothing planned, when evening starts to come on, at twilight. She could have gone to the movies, any film would do, or gone shopping downtown, although she really hated that; she could have sought refuge with her lover, or gon
e to see a friend or her sister. She would have to kill an awful lot of time until I left, until she reckoned that I would have left the apartment and the coast would be clear, and she would know, too, how hard I’d find it to drag myself away, I felt very comfortable there, almost nothing had changed.
It was past eleven o’clock, which was the very latest the children were allowed to stay up on special occasions, we’d had a very entertaining few hours, but I could see they were tired too, it hadn’t been particularly hard to persuade them that it was high time they went to bed, and Mercedes was in equal parts persuasive and firm. It wouldn’t be long before Luisa was back. If I hung on for another half an hour, we’d almost certainly meet. I could at least say hello, give her a kiss on the cheek, perhaps a hug if that seemed appropriate, hear her voice, no longer disembodied, see how she had changed, whether she had grown slightly faded or was perhaps more beautiful now that I was far away and she had someone more flattering closer to hand; I could at least see her face. I wanted no more than that, so very little, but I was filled with impatience, an unbearable impatience. Added to that were feelings of insecurity, intrigue, possibly rancor, or perhaps wounded pride: she didn’t even share my elementary curiosities, but how could that be after we had been each other’s main motive for so many years, it seemed positively insulting that nothing should remain, that she was quite happy to wait another whole day and not even necessarily see me tomorrow—there was no guarantee that, on various pretexts, she wouldn’t also avoid me tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and so on, during the whole of my stay; she might even suggest I pick up the kids downstairs at the entry door on my next visit and take them out somewhere or arrange it so that when I arrived, she’d always be out, or else she might drop them off at my father’s apartment so that I could spend time with them there and they’d get to see their grandfather as well. Yes, it was rude of her to be in so little hurry to recognize me in the changed man, the absent man, the solitary man, the foreigner returned; not to immediately want to find out what I was like without her, or who I had become. (‘What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow,’ I thought.)
‘Do you mind if I stay a bit, until Luisa comes?’ I asked the false Mercedes. ‘I’d like to see her, just for a moment. She won’t be much longer, I shouldn’t think.’—‘What a painful irony,’ I thought,‘here I am asking the permission of a young Polish babysitter whom I’ve never seen in my life to stay a little longer in my own apartment or what was my apartment, and which I chose and set up and furnished and decorated along with Luisa, in which we lived together for a long time, and which I still pay for, indirectly. Once you abandon a place you can never go back, not in the same way, any gap you leave is instantly filled or else your things are thrown away or dumped, and if you do reappear it’s only as an incorporeal ghost, with no rights, no key, no claims and no future. With nothing but a past, which is why we can be shooed away.’
‘Luisa said I should stay until she got back,’ she said. ‘She’s going to pay for my taxi home as well, if she’s very late. So that I don’t have to wait to catch a buho, there aren’t many during the week.’—The word buho rang a bell in that context, they were, I seemed to recall, the late-night buses or metros, I’d forgotten all about them.—‘There’s really no point in waiting,’ she added. ‘She’s likely to be some time yet. I’ll be here if the children should wake up, if they need anything.’
She was very discreet, but her words sounded discouraging, almost like orders. As if Luisa had briefed her when she phoned and what she was really saying to me was: ‘No, the best thing would be if you left, because Luisa doesn’t want to see you. And she doesn’t want you hanging around when she’s not here, unchecked and unwatched—my presence isn’t enough; I don’t have any authority—she doesn’t trust you any more, she stopped trusting you some time ago.’ Or else: ‘She’s erased you, all these months she’s been scrubbing away at the stain you left and now she’s struggling to remove the rim, the final remnant. She doesn’t want you to leave any more stains and to see all her hard work ruined. So please be so kind as to go, if not, you’ll be considered an intruder.’ And these last two interpretations of her words were what made me decide once and for all to stay.
‘No, I think I’ll wait for her anyway,’ I said and sat down on the sofa, after first having taken a book from the shelves. The books hadn’t changed, they were in the same arrangement and order in which I had left them, there was my entire library, I mean, our library, we hadn’t divided the books up, and I had nowhere to put mine, everything in England was provisional and, besides, I had no space, and I wasn’t going to start moving things if I didn’t know where I was going to live, either in the short term or the long. Mercedes wouldn’t dare oppose me, she wouldn’t dare throw me out if I sat down and read and said nothing, if I asked her no more questions and didn’t bother her or try to worm things out of her. She hadn’t realized that was what I was doing, or perhaps only when it was too late. ‘I’m in no hurry,’ I added,‘I’ve just arrived from London. This way I’ll be able to say hello to her—in Madrid and in person.’
I waited and waited, reading in silence, listening to the small noises that seemed either eerily familiar or instantly recognizable: the fridge with its changing moods, occasional distant footfalls in the apartment above and a sound like drawers being opened and closed—the upstairs neighbors obviously hadn’t moved and kept up their nocturnal customs; there were also the faint notes of a cello coming from the boy who lived with his widowed mother across the landing and who always practiced before he went to bed, he might well be almost an adolescent by now, his playing had improved a lot, he got stuck or stopped less often from what I could hear, which wasn’t much, the boy always tried not to play too loudly, he was well-brought-up and used to say ‘Good afternoon’ to us even when he was only small, but in a friendly not a cloying way, I tried to work out if he was playing something by Purcell or by Dowland, but I couldn’t, the chords were very tenuous and my musical memory was out of training, in London I listened to music at home and rarely went to concerts, not that I spent much time at home, where I couldn’t rely on the consoling daze that sustained me daily and liberated me from the curse of having to make plans. The only thing I knew for sure was that the music being played wasn’t Bach.
The Polish babysitter got out her cell phone and made a call, retreating into the kitchen so that she could talk to her boyfriend where I wouldn’t hear her, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps in order not to bother me with a schmaltzy or perhaps obscene conversation (however Catholic she was, you never can tell). It occurred to me that if I hadn’t been there, she would have used Luisa’s landline, on which she could talk at greater length because she would be saving herself the expense, for that reason alone it must have really irritated her that I hadn’t left when I should have. I had taken Henry V down from the shelves, because Wheeler had quoted from it and referred to it in his house by the River Cherwell, and since then I had kept it handy and dipped into it or leafed through it now and then, even though I had long since found the fragments he’d alluded to. Or, rather, what I picked up was King Henry V, to give it its full title, a copy of the old Arden edition, bought in 1977 in Madrid according to a note I had written on the first page, and at some point I had written in it, although I couldn’t remember when—but before I would have met Luisa—and my mind was in no fit state to pay due attention to the text or to trawl back through the past, I merely glanced through it, looking at the underlinings left by the young reader I had been on some distant day, so long forgotten that it no longer existed. My mind was concentrating on one noise only, which is why I heard all the other noises too, my ear cocked and waiting for the sound that mattered to me, that of the elevator coming up, followed by the key in the door. I heard the first several times, but it always stopped at other floors and only once at ours, and on that occasion it was not accompanied by the second sound and wasn’t Luisa returning.
Your Face Tomorrow Page 27
