Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  I heard them whispering for a few moments, I got up from the sofa, but didn’t dare to join them; then I heard the door close, the Polish babysitter had gone. After that came the sound of Luisa’s footsteps in the corridor—she was wearing high heels, I recognized the click-clack on the wooden floor—she always wore them to go out—heading towards the bathroom and her bedroom, she didn’t even look in at me, she must be desperate for a pee, I assumed, as one so often is on arriving home; that seemed quite normal really, if she’d been with other people and not wanted to get up, for example, during a meal, either at someone’s table or in a restaurant. Or perhaps she wanted to tidy up before showing herself to me, assuming she had spent the evening with my ephemeral replacement and was returning as women sometimes do return from such prolonged encounters, with her skirt all wrinkled and slightly askew, her hair disheveled, her lipstick erased by kisses, a run in her stockings and the signs of all that impetuosity still in her eyes. Or perhaps she was so angry with me that she had decided to go to bed without even saying hello and to leave me in the living room until I got fed up or until I understood that when she had said she wasn’t going to see me that night, she had meant it. She’d probably decided to shut herself in the bedroom and not come out, to get undressed, turn off the light and climb into bed, pretending that I wasn’t there, that I was still in London and did not exist in Madrid, or that I was a mere ghost. She was perfectly capable of that and more—I knew what she was like—whenever anyone tried to impose something on her that she didn’t want. But she would have to leave the bedroom before she closed her eyes, at least once, and if the worst came to the worst, I could intercept her then, for it would be quite beyond her powers not to go in and see the children and make sure they were safe and sleeping peacefully.

  I continued to wait, I didn’t want to rush anything, still less go and pound on her door, beg her to let me see her, bombard her with awkward questions through that barrier, and demand explanations I had no right to demand. That would have been a bad start, after such a long separation, it would be best to avoid anything that smacked of confrontation or reproach, unnecessary and absurd and not at all what I wanted. From now on, the initiative lay with her, I had already made things awkward for her by refusing to leave, once the excuse of enjoying spending time with my children had lapsed. On hearing the key in the door, I had muted the TV, but could still see the antics of that porcine emulator of De Niro and John Wayne—he was an extremely polite little pig—and his co-stars: a few dogs, some sheep, a horse, a bad-tempered duck, all of them superb actors.

  After a few minutes, I heard the door of her bedroom open and a few footsteps, she was still wearing her high heels, so she obviously hadn’t changed her clothes, but she walked more quietly, trying not to make noise: she peered into Marinas room and then into Guillermo’s, she didn’t go right in or only a little way, just far enough to see that everything was in order. I still didn’t want to get up and go and find her, I preferred for her to come into the living room, if she did, and when at last she did—her footsteps firmer, normal, now that she had breathed in the sound of the children’s deep sleep, which had been enough to reassure her that she ran no risk of waking them—I thought I understood, despite any efforts at concealment she may have made in the bathroom that had once been mine, why she had wanted to avoid me, and that it hadn’t been because she didn’t want to see me, but because she didn’t want me to see her.

  At first sight, she looked very good, well-dressed, well-shod, although rather less well-coiffed, and yet wearing her long locks caught back in a ponytail suited her, gave her a youthful, naïve air, almost that of a young girl caught in flagrante on returning home late, but who was I to say anything, or even to feel surprised. Before I noticed anything was wrong, she had time to say a few words, with an expression on her face of mingled pleasure to see me and annoyance at finding me there, but also of fear that I had caught her out or perhaps it was embarrassment doing battle with defiance, as if I had surprised her doing something I wouldn’t like or that would seem to me reprehensible, and, realizing that, she didn’t know whether to strike her flag or to run it up the flagpole and stand and fight, it’s odd how former couples, long after they have ceased being a couple, still feel mutually responsible, as if they owed each other a certain loyalty, even if that amounts only to knowing how they’re coping on their own and what’s going on in their life, especially if something strange or bad is happening. Things were happening to me about which I, being far away, had said nothing: I had clearly lost my footing or lost both grip and judgment, employed as I was in a job about whose consequences I knew nothing, not even if it had any consequences, and being paid a suspiciously large salary too; I had, by then, been injected with strange poisons and was leading an existence that grew ghostlier by the day, immersed in the dream-like state of one who lives in another country and is starting not always to think in his own language, I was very alone there in London, even though I was surrounded by people all day, they were just work colleagues and never really developed into pure friendships, even Pérez Nuix had turned out to be no different—not even my lover, which she wasn’t, since there had been no repetition and no laughter—after that one night I had shared with her carnally, a fact we had kept concealed and excessively silent, from others and from ourselves, and when one pretends that something hasn’t happened and it’s never spoken of, it ends up not having happened, even though we know the opposite to be case; what Jorge Manrique wrote in his ‘Lines on the Death of His Father’ some five hundred and thirty years ago, and only two years before his own early death when he was not yet forty, wounded during an attack on a castle by a shot from a harquebus (even worse and more dishonorable than that of Richard Yea and Nay, felled by an arrow from a crossbow),‘If we judge wisely, we will count what has not happened as the past’ is as true as the contrary position which allows us to count the past, along with everything else we have experienced, our entire life, as also not having happened. Then what does it matter what we do in our lives, or why it does it matter so very much to us?

  ‘You just had to stay, didn’t you, Jaime?’ Luisa said before I could say anything. ‘You just had to wait up to see me.’

  Now, though, after that initial glance, I spotted what was wrong at once, it was impossible not to, at least for me. She had tried to cover it with make-up, to conceal it, hide it, perhaps in the same way that Flavia would have tried unsuccessfully, with the unlikely help of Tupra in the ladies’ restroom, to make the wound on her face invisible, the mark of the rope, the weal left by the whip, the welt caused by De la Garza’s clumsy lashings during his wild gyrations on the fast dance floor. That wasn’t what Luisa had on her face, it wasn’t uno sfregio, not a gash or a cut or a scratch, but what has always been known in my language as un ojo morado’—literally ‘a purple eye’—and in English as ‘a black eye,’ although since the impact or cause was not recent, the skin was already growing yellow, the colors that appear after such a blow are always mixed, there’s never a single color, but several, which combine at every phase and keep changing, perhaps the disagreement between the two languages stems from that (although mine does lean more to English when it refers to such an eye as ‘un ojo a la funerala’—more or less ‘an eye in mourning’), they always take a long time to fade, it was just our bad luck that not enough time had yet passed. When I saw it, I no longer had to respond to her words, nor to apologize. Unfortunately, I couldn’t greet her either or give her a kiss or embrace her, I had waited so long for this meeting and now I couldn’t even manage a smile or an ‘Hola, niña’—‘Hello, love’—as I used to when we were still together and on good terms. I immediately went over to her and the first thing I said was:

  ‘What’s that? Let me see? What happened? Who did it?’

  I took her face in my hands, taking care not to touch the affected area, she had clearly just been in the bathroom applying various creams, to no avail. Her eyelid was no longer puffy or only a little, but it
obviously had been. I calculated that the injury must have occurred about a week or perhaps ten days ago, and it was the result of a blow, I was sure of that, dealt by a fist or a blunt instrument like a bat or a blackjack, I had seen such bruised eyes and cheekbones and chins years before, under the Franco regime, when students who had been arrested and beaten up would emerge from the police station, from the headquarters of the security forces in Puerta del Sol or from Carabanchel prison, my fellow university students who’d had much worse luck than I did during the small semi-spontaneous street demonstrations that we called ‘saltos’ and at illegal rallies that were broken up with the aid of very long, flexible truncheons, which really hurt because the truncheon flexed on impact, they were used by the police or ‘grises’ who charged on horseback, sometimes it seems incredible to me that it was only in the mid-seventies that we used to flee their hooves every few days or weeks, as we left our classes. Although, of course, everything can come back.

  She moved away, avoided me, retreating two steps in order to re-establish the distance between us, smiling as if my questions amused her, but I could see that they didn’t.

  ‘What do you mean? No one did anything to me. I collided with the garage door about a week ago. It was my wretched cell phone's fault. Someone called me, I got distracted and misjudged the distance when the door was closing. It hit me full on, it’s really heavy, it must be made of solid iron. It’s nearly better now, it looked worse than it was. It doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘Your cell phone? So you’ve got a cell phone now? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you give me the number?’ And while, in my surprise, I was asking her all this, I thought or remembered: ‘Reresby made me say the same thing to De la Garza, I had to translate it for him while he was lying motionless on the floor, bruised and beaten: “Tell him that if he has to go to the hospital, then he should give them the same line drunks and debtors do—that the garage door fell on him.” Luisa has become neither of those things, neither a drunk nor a debtor, as far as I know. But Tupra was obviously aware that blows from garage doors are almost always inventions.’ And thanks to him I was even more convinced that she was lying to me. She lacked the kind of imagination that a habitual liar develops, and so she had resorted to cliché, like any inexperienced liar who avoids the implausible, which is precisely the thing most likely to be believed.

  ‘It’s because of the kids,’ she said. ‘I realized that, however much we might hate cell phones, there’s no sense in a babysitter or my sister, for example, or the school, not being able to locate me immediately if anything should happen to them.’—So the Polish babysitter could have called Luisa’s cell phone from the kitchen and warned her that I was refusing to shift from the apartment, and also found out with some degree of accuracy when she would arrive.—‘Especially since you’re not here. I bought it for my own peace of mind. Now that I’m alone with them, now that I’m the only person anyone can contact in an emergency. And anyway why would you need the number in London? It’s not as if we still spoke every day …’—Unfortunately, I sensed no reproach in these last words, I wished I had. I couldn’t stop looking at her purple, yellowish, bluish black eye, the white of which was still slightly red, it would have been crisscrossed with red veins during the first few days after the blow. She was pretending that she wasn’t even aware of it, but she could see me staring at it and this made her slightly nervous, as became apparent when she turned to look at the television so that she was in profile, to escape my scrutiny. And she tried to change the subject too. ‘What were you watching, a movie about pigs? Is this some new interest of yours?’ she added with the amiable irony that was so familiar to me and so attractive. She must have seen my fleeting smile. ‘I’m sure the children would enjoy it. How did you think they looked, by the way? Have they grown a lot? Do they seem very different?’

  While I did want to talk to her about the children, to tell her what impression they’d made on me after such a long time, I wasn’t going to let myself be diverted so easily. I was the way I was, and now I had the examples of Tupra and Wheeler, who never let go of their prey as long as there was something to be got out of him or her, after all the digressions and evasions and detours.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Luisa, you and I haven’t changed that much. That business about the garage door is so old hat, they’re always rebelling and hitting people,’ I said, and again I noticed that I only called her by name when we were arguing or when I was angry, rather as she only called me Deza in similar situations, as well as in other very different ones. ‘Tell me who did this to you. I hope it’s not the guy you’re going out with, because if it is, we’ve got a problem on our hands.’

  ‘Our hands? Just supposing I was going out with someone, what’s that got to do with you?’ she said at once, parrying my remark not sharply, but firmly; and she had enough spirit to recover her irony and immediately soften the blow: ‘If you’re going to continue down that road, you’d better go back to watching your little animal friends while I tidy up, but once it’s over, you leave; the children have to get up early, and it’s already very late. We’ll talk another day when we’re both a bit fresher, but not about this. I told you what happened, so don’t insist on seeing phantoms. And if that was just a way of asking me if I’m going out with someone, that’s none of your business, Deza. Go on, finish watching your pig, and then go back to the hotel and sleep, you must be tired from your trip and from the children. They’re exhausting, and you’re out of practice being with them.’

  She could always make me laugh and could always win me over. I still had a soft spot for her, and that hadn’t changed during my time spent in London. This was hardly news—it was something that would probably never change—but being there with her only confirmed and made still plainer to me that I should, at all times, be careful not to allow myself unwittingly to be charmed, while she bustled around and took no notice of me. Quite apart from our conjugal life and our unforgotten love, Luisa was for me one of those people whose company you seek out and are grateful for and which, almost in itself, makes up for all the heartaches, and which you look forward to all day—it’s our salvation—when you know you’ll be seeing her later that evening like a prize won with very little effort; one of those people you feel at ease with even when times are bad and about whom you have the sense that wherever they are, that’s where the party is, which is why it’s so hard to give them up or to be expelled from their society, because you feel then that you’re always missing out on something or—how can I put it—living on the margins. Thinking that such people could die is unbearable to us: even if we’re far from them and never see them any more, we know they’re still alive and that their world exists, the world that they themselves create merely by being and breathing; that the earth still shelters them and that they therefore retain their space and their sense of time, both of which one can imagine from a distance: ‘There’s the house,’ we think, ‘there’s the atmosphere filled by her steps, by the rhythm of her day, the music of her voice, the smell of the plants she tends and the pause of her night; I no longer play any part in it, but there is the laughter, the wit and charm and the dear departed friends to whom Cervantes bade farewell when he was dying, “hoping to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.” And knowing that therein lies all help, that we possess a memory not shared by everyone, which, as far as I’m concerned is the past, but not truly so, not in the absolute sense—that it’s only by accident, or bad luck, or my own fault that I daily perceive it as the past—a place where others come and go and enjoy themselves without ever giving it much thought, just like us when we were part of that atmosphere and that rhythm, that wit and charm, part of the music of that house and even the pause of its quiet night. Knowing that it was not just a pleasant dream or something that existed in another imagined life.’ And there I was, a witness to its permanence and not wanting to leave. There stood the person who was, for me, where the party was happening, with her good humor and her steadfastness and h
er frequent smiles, and even her high heels. That was enough, up to a point, knowing that she had not ceased to be, that she still trod the earth and still traversed the world, that she was not safe more or less in one-eyed, uncertain oblivion or already on the side of time where the dead converse.

  And yet now there was a threat, or worse still there was an already visible wound that someone had inflicted and that might be repeated, possibly something worse next time, who knew (who knows when anything will stop once it’s begun). What I did know was that nagging would get me nowhere: if she had decided not to tell me something or talk about it, there was no way I could twist her arm, I would have to find out by other means, but by what means, just then I could think of none apart from the kids, but I didn’t want to use them, and then I was surprised to find myself thinking: ‘I could always ask Tupra for help.’ If, as I assumed, he had found out about the night Pérez Nuix had spent at my apartment and about the agreement we had reached behind his back; if, therefore, my favor to her had proved useless and Incompara had gained nothing from it, and young Pérez Nuix’s father had received the inevitable beating for his recurring debts, a beating that Reresby had made me watch (the billiard cues—doubtless to inform me of my failure and to teach me a lesson), he would have no difficulty in finding out the name of the man Luisa was going out with, even though it was in another country and the wench, fortunately, was not yet dead. That had been one of my fears during my time in London, since my departure, when I thought about who would, sooner or later, replace me, and of the various possibilities that had always terrified me, the figure of the despotic possessive man, who subjugates and isolates and, little by little, quietly insinuates his demands and prohibitions, disguised as infatuation and weakness and jealousy and flattery and supplication, a devious sort who declines her first invitations to share her pillow in order not to appear intrusive and who reveals not a trace of any invasive or expansionist tendencies, and who initially appears always deferential, respectful, even cautious; until one day after some time has passed—or perhaps on a rainy night, when they’re stuck at home—when he has conquered the entire territory and doesn’t allow Luisa a moment’s peace, he closes his large hands around her throat while the children—my children—watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. In the face of that nightmarish scene, I had always thought, in order to dispel it: ‘But no, that won’t happen, that isn’t happening, I won’t have that luck or that misfortune (luck as long as it remains in the imagination, misfortune were it to become reality) …’ Now I was faced by a real mark left by that imagined horror, in the form of a black eye or an eye of changing colors, and by the knowledge that in this area of reality there wasn’t a single drop of luck, only a vast sea of misfortune drowning everything and driving out all trace of the imaginary, such a sphere would no longer exist, or is it just that it can never coexist with real danger: there are far too many poisonous cowards in Spain who, each year, kill their wives or the women who were their wives or who they wanted to be their wives, and sometimes they kill their own children as well in order to inflict more pain on the women, it’s a plague that remains unquelled by persuasions, threats, laws, or even the most severe prison sentences, because such men take no notice of the outside world and they get carried away because they love these women so much or hate them so deeply that they cannot, like me, simply live without them, content in the knowledge that cheers me in my sadness (that consoles me as regards Luisa), that they continue to exist in the world and will be or are the past only for us, but not for everyone else. ‘I can’t take any risks in a country like this,’ I thought. ‘I can’t take any risks with a black eye inflicted by a punch, I can’t just leave the matter entirely in her hands and to her possibly weakened will and not get involved, it’s enough that I know she’s put herself in danger and therefore the children too, even if only because they might lose her, and they’ve already suffered a semi-loss with me leaving home.’