‘I’ll lend you one, man, just as I would have lent you the sword or whatever else you might want. But where were you going to put a sword, my friend, I mean, really, what an idea! A gun, on the other hand, fits in your pocket.’ This hadn’t occurred to me either, that I didn’t own an overcoat with a sheath in the lining at the back or even a raincoat. And it wasn’t the weather for overcoats. Miquelín added: ‘I’ll get you one now. Eulogio, would you mind fetching me my father’s Llama. And the other one as well, the revolver.’
‘Where do you keep them now?’ asked Cazorla.
‘They’re in the library, behind The Thousand and One Nights and a little to the left, behind several books with brown bindings. Go and get them for me, will you?’
The manager left the room (I wondered what kind of library the Maestro would have—I had certainly never seen it during those nights spent playing cards; but he was, like other bullfighters, quite well-read) and returned shortly afterwards carrying two boxes or packages wrapped in cloth which he placed before Miquelín on the coffee table.
‘Would you be so kind as to bring some gloves for Jacobo, Eulogio?’ he said. Then turning to me: ‘If you’re going to use one of them, it’s best you don’t touch them. Not being used to handling guns, you might forget to clean it afterwards.’
Cazorla was as helpful as ever, his admiration for the Maestro being infinite, bordering on devotion. He again left the room and came back with a pair of white gloves, like those a headwaiter might wear, or a magician. They were made of very fine cloth; I put them on, and then Miquelín unwrapped the boxes carefully, almost solemnly, less perhaps because they were guns than because they had belonged to his father. Many fathers who had lived through the Civil War still had a gun or two, standard issue and otherwise, indeed my own father had a Star or an Astra, of the sort that used to be made in Éibar. I had never seen it myself, however, and I wasn’t going to ask him about it now or start rummaging through his apartment. ‘He must have taken a risk after the War,’ I thought, ‘by keeping it and not surrendering it. Given that he was on the losing side and had been in prison.’ Miquelín’s father, who would, of course, have been older than mine, might well have been on the winning side, but we had never spoken about this, after all, it didn’t matter any more. In fact, we had never talked about anything serious or personal. These Madrid-style friendships really are most unusual, often inexplicable.
‘Is it all right to pick them up now?’ I asked. They were very handsome objects, the revolver with its striated wooden grip, and the pistol forming almost a right angle.
‘Wait just a moment,’ he said. ‘They both belonged to my father, and so those thieving bureaucrats have never got their paws on them. If they ever did, they’d probably sell them. The revolver dates from before the War, I think; it’s English, an Enfield. It was a present from an English writer who was interested in bullfighting for a time, and my father persuaded one of the matadors in his group to let him travel around with them. He wanted first-hand experience for something he was going to write; his main character was called Biggies, a pilot I think, it was a series, and in one of the books the author thought he might send his hero off to have some adventures in Spain. My father was very proud of this, because apparently this Biggies fellow was very famous in his country.’ There it was again, that word ‘patria’; perhaps it wasn’t such a loaded word, Miquelín hadn’t laid any special emphasis on it, maybe because he wasn’t talking about his own patria, our country. ‘The pistol dates from later on, a Llama, which is Spanish, an automatic. The revolver takes six bullets, the Llama ten. Not that this will matter to you if you don’t foresee having to shoot. But if push comes to shove, you’ll have more than enough with either gun: if not, it will be because you’re dead. One magazine should be enough for the pistol. Here’s your ammunition. Well-preserved and well-oiled, and all in working order, as my father taught me. The pistol can jam, of course, like all pistols. But on the other hand, look how big the revolver is, with the drum and the long barrel. I think you’d be better off with the Llama. Don’t you agree, Eulogio, that a pistol is better for giving someone a fright?’ Miquelín handled both weapons with ease.
‘If you say so, Miguel. You know more about it than I do,’ Cazorla replied with a shrug.
‘Do you know how to use it?’ Miquelín asked me. ‘Do you know how it works? Have you ever held one before?’
‘When I did my military service,’ I said. ‘But not since.’ And I thought how odd that was, and how new, for there must have been many periods when it would have been unusual for a middle-class male not to have a weapon in his house, always close to hand.
‘The first thing to remember, Jacobo, is never put your finger on the trigger until you know you’re going to shoot. Always keep it resting on the guard, OK? Even if the pistol isn’t cocked. Even if it’s not loaded.’
He used what was to me an unfamiliar, seemingly old-fashioned word for ‘guard,’ ‘guardamonte,’ but then Miquelín was himself in the process of becoming old-fashioned too, a relic, like his generosity. I didn’t need to ask any questions, though, because he showed me what to do and I could see where he placed his forefinger. Then he handed the pistol to me, so that I could do the same, or copy him. I had forgotten what a heavy thing a pistol is; in the movies, they hold them as if they were as light as daggers. It takes an effort to lift one, and still more of an effort to hold it steady enough to aim.
And then the Maestro taught me how to use it.
I don’t know, but I think perhaps by then I had absorbed Wheeler’s dictum about how we all carry our probabilities in our veins and so on, and I was more or less convinced that I knew how to apply this to myself; I had, or so I thought, a pretty good idea of what my probabilities were, although not as clear an idea as Wheeler would have of his, given that he could draw on far greater experience: he’d had more time than me, more temptations and more varied circumstances in which to guide those probabilities to their fulfilment; he’d lived through and been involved in wars, and in wartime one can be more persuasive and make oneself more dangerous and more despicable even than one’s enemies; one can take advantage of the majority of people, who were, according to Wheeler, silly and frivolous and credulous and on whom it was easy to strike a match and start a fire; one can more easily and with impunity cause others to fall into the most appalling and destructive misfortunes from which they will never emerge, and thereby transform those thus condemned into casualties, into non-persons, into felled trees from which the rotten wood can be chopped away; it’s also the best time to spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague and, often, to set in motion the process of total denial, of who you are and who you were, of what you do and what you did, of what you expect and what you expected, of your aims and your intentions, of your professions of faith, your ideas, your greatest loyalties, your motives …
No, you are never what you are—not entirely, not exactly—when you’re alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your mother tongue; but nor are you what you are in your own country when there’s a war on or when that country is dominated by rage or obstinacy or fear: to some degree you feel no responsibility for what you do or see, as if it all belonged to a provisional existence, parallel, alien, or borrowed, fictitious or almost dreamed—or, perhaps, merely theoretical, like my whole life, according to the anonymous report about me that I’d found among some old files; as if everything could be relegated to the sphere of the purely imaginary or of what never happened, and, of course, to the sphere of the involuntary; everything tossed into the bag of imaginings and suspicions and hypotheses and, even, of mere foolish dreams, about which, when you awake, all you can say is: ‘I didn’t want that anomalous desire or that murderous hatred or that baseless resentment to surface, or that temptation or that sense of panic or that desire to punish, that unknown threat or that surprising curse, that aversion or that longing which now lie like lead upon my soul each night, or the feeling o
f disgust or embarrassment which I myself provoke, or those dead faces, forever fixed, that made a pact with me that there would be no more tomorrows (yes, that is the pact we make with all those who fall silent and are expelled: that they neither do nor say anything more, that they disappear and cease changing) and which now come and whisper dreadful unexpected words to me, words that are perhaps unbecoming to them, or perhaps not, while I’m asleep and have dropped my guard: I have laid down my shield and my spear on the grass.’ What’s more you can repeat over and over Iago’s disquieting words, not only after taking action, but during it too: ‘I am not what I am.’ A similar warning is issued by anyone asking another person to commit a crime or threatening to commit one himself, or confessing to vile deeds and thus exposing himself to blackmail, or buying something on the black market—keep your collar turned up, your face always in the shadows, never light a cigarette—telling the hired assassin or the person under threat or the potential blackmailer or one of many interchangeable women, once desired and already forgotten, but still a source of shame to us: ‘You know the score, you’ve never seen me, from now on you don’t know me, I’ve never spoken to you or said anything, as far as you’re concerned I have no face, no voice, no breath, no name, no back. This conversation and this meeting never took place, what’s happening now before your eyes didn’t happen, isn’t happening, you haven’t even heard these words because I didn’t say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I’m not saying them’; just as you can tell yourself: ‘I am not what I am nor what I can see myself doing. More than that, I’m not even doing it.’
What I had absorbed less well, or simply didn’t know, was that what one does or does not do depends not just on time, temptation and circumstance, but on silly ridiculous things, on random superfluous thoughts, on doubt or caprice or some stupid fit of feeling, on untimely associations and on one-eyed oblivion or fickle memories, on the words that condemn you or the gesture that saves you.
And so there I was the following morning—the day was threatening rain—with my borrowed pistol in my raincoat pocket, ready to take some definitive action, but without really knowing what exactly, although I had a rough idea and knew what I was hoping to make clear: I had to get rid of Custardoy, get him off our backs, make sure he stayed out of the picture; not so much out of my picture, which was little more than a daub at the time or perhaps a mere doodle—‘You’re very alone in London,’ as Wheeler used to tell me—but out of Luisa and the children’s picture, into which that unwholesome individual was trying to worm his way and where he was perhaps about to take up long-term residence, or at least long-term enough to become an affliction and a danger. Indeed, he already was both those things, for he had already spent far too much time prowling round and circling the frame and making incursions into the picture or canvas, and he had already laid a hand on Luisa and given her a black eye and left her with a cut or a gash—I had been told about the second and had myself seen the first—and nothing would stop him closing his large hands around her throat—those pianist’s fingers, or, rather, those fingers like piano keys—one rainy night, when they were stuck at home, when he judged he had subjugated and isolated her enough and little by little fed her his demands and prohibitions disguised as infatuation and weakness and jealousy and flattery and supplication, a poisonous, despotic, devious type of man. I was quite clear now that I didn’t want to have the luck or the misfortune (luck as long as it remained in the imagination, misfortune were it to become reality) of Luisa dying or being killed, that I couldn’t allow this to happen because once a real misfortune has occurred there’s no going back and it cannot be undone, or, contrary to what most people believe, even compensated (and there is, of course, no way of compensating the person who has died or even the living left behind, and yet nowadays the living often do ask for money, thus putting a price on the people who have ceased to tread the earth or traverse the world).
As I walked along, I couldn’t help touching and even grasping the pistol, as if I were drawn to it or needed to get used to its weight and to feel and hold it in my hand, sometimes lifting it up slightly, still inside my pocket, and whenever I did grip it properly, I always took great care to keep my finger resting on the guard and not on the trigger, as Miquelín had recommended me to do even when the pistol wasn’t cocked. ‘How easy it must be to use it,’ I was thinking, ‘once you’ve got one. Or, rather, how difficult not to use it, even if only to point it at someone and threaten them and just to be seen with it. Firing the thing would be harder, of course, but, on the other hand, it cries out to be brandished about and it would seem impossible not to satisfy that plea. Perhaps women would find it easier to resist, but for a man it’s like having a tempting toy, guns should never be given to men, and yet most of those that are made or inherited or that exist will end up in our hands and not in the more cautious hands of women.’ I also had a proud feeling of invulnerability, as if, as I walked past other people in the street, I were thinking: ‘I’m more dangerous than they are right now and they don’t know it, and if someone got cocky with me or tried to mug me he’d get a nasty fright; if I got out the pistol, he’d probably back off or throw down his knife or run away,’ and I remembered the momentary feeling of pride that had assailed me on seeing the fear I unwittingly inspired in De la Garza when I went into his office (‘You should feel very pleased with yourself: you had him scared shitless,’ Professor Rico had said to me afterwords, neither mincing his words nor resorting to onomatopoeia). And I recalled, too, that immediately afterwards it had filled me with disgust that I could possibly feel flattered by such a thing, I had judged it unworthy of me, of the person I was or had been, of my face past and present, and which were both perhaps changing with the tomorrow that had now arrived. ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was,’ I quoted to myself as I walked. ‘I have turn’d away my former self. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast. Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, not to come near our person by ten mile …’ These were the words of King Henry V immediately after being crowned and many years before the night when he disguised himself to go among his soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, with everything pitched against him and at great risk of being misjudged, or, as one of his soldiers says to him, not realizing it’s the King he’s talking to, if the cause be not good, the king himself will have a heavy reckoning to make. Such words were unexpected coming from the man who, until only a short time before, had been Prince Hal, dissolute, reveler and bad son, especially when addressed to his still recent companion in revels, the now old Falstaff whom he was denying: ‘I know thee not, old man,’ for all it takes is a few words to abjure everything one has experienced, the excesses and the lack of scruples, the outrageous behavior and the arguments, the whorehouses and the taverns and the inseparable friends, even if those same friends say pleadingly to you, ‘My sweet boy,’ as Falstaff does to his beloved Prince Hal when the latter has just abandoned that name to become forever, with no possible way back, the rigid King Henry. Such words serve not only to mend one’s ways and to leave behind the life of a debauchee or a roué avant la lettre, of a rake and an idler, but to announce that one is setting off along new paths, in new directions, or to announce a metamorphosis: I, too, could say mentally to Luisa and to Custardoy and to myself as I walked along: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was. I have turn’d away my former self. I am carrying a pistol and I am dangerous, I am no longer the man who never knowingly frightened anyone; like Iago, I am not what I am, at least I am beginning not to be.’
And so I stationed myself exactly where I had waited two days before, at the top of the short double flight of steps leading up to the monstrous cathedral, behind the papal statue that seemed always about to join the dance, and once there I paced back and forth between that point and a point nearby, behind the railings and to the left of that shop incomprehensibly selling souvenirs of the monstrosity; it was only a few steps between those two poin
ts and from both I could see the four corners formed by Calle Mayor and Calle de Bailén, as well as the ornate wooden door that was immediately opposite the shop, albeit lower down, and so whichever direction he came from I would be sure to see Custardoy arrive, although I was convinced he would take the same route as when I had followed him, if, that is, he had gone back to the Prado, though it was quite possible that he hadn’t yet finished his note-taking or his sketches of the four faces painted by Parmigianino, each of them looking in a different direction, or that, on another occasion, he would have to study the portrait of the husband and father, in which the Count stands alone and isolated, like me, or that he would have to study other paintings for some other commission or project. And if he hadn’t gone out that morning, it was likely that, just before lunch, he would stroll over to El Anciano Rey de los Vinos to enjoy his usual couple of beers and some patatas bravas(it was hardly surprising that, despite being thin, he had a bit of a belly on him), so I would be able to observe him there too if he went and took his usual seat. I would, at any rate, see him enter or leave his house, whenever he did that, and I would have time to go down the steps, cross the road—there wasn’t much traffic along that stretch—and meet him at the front door as he was opening it. At first, I was surprised to see that, for the first time, the door stood open, and I deduced that there must be a doorman, but that could present me with a problem, a witness. However, after a few minutes, I saw the man come out and shut the door (he obviously lunched early) and this reassured me, because the seconds it would take Custardoy to put his key in and turn it and push or pull the door open and then give it a shove from inside or a tug from outside could prove vital, my idea being that he would complete neither action. I was trusting that he would not arrive or leave with anyone else, certainly not with Luisa. ‘You’ll never see her again,’ I thought, ‘unless she happens to be with you today,’ it’s odd how we address our thoughts to anyone we have it in for or whom we’re preparing to harm in some way, addressing them familiarly as ‘tú,’ as if what we were about to do to them were incompatible with any form of respect or as if any show of respect would, in view of our plans for them, seem utterly cynical.
Your Face Tomorrow Page 38
