Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  And as soon as I thought this, and despite Miquelín’s warning, I cocked the pistol. It was only a test and only for an instant, just to see a spark of panic in those strange dark eyes, it was only a spark, but I saw it. And then I immediately put my thumb on the hammer and lowered it and removed the projectile that had passed into the barrel or chamber or whatever it’s called and put it away in my pocket; I uncocked the Llama. But he had seen how quick the pistol was to cock and how, once cocked, the bullets could fly out—a single gesture, then another and another—towards his head or his chest, towards an arm or a leg, towards his codpiece which would be reduced to a few fine hairs like the vanished codpiece of Death in the painting, or towards whatever part I chose to point it at. ‘What a very odd feeling,’ I thought,‘having a man at your mercy. Deciding if he should live or die, although it’s not even really a matter of deciding.’

  Custardoy, however, put on a brave face, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to be right, or, given that he had no weapon with which to defend himself, that he was trying to dissuade or terrify or destroy me, or to dig my grave still deeper with his ugly words and with his voice. His voice did not emerge cleanly, it was slightly hoarse, as if there were tiny pins in his throat similar to those on the revolving metallic disc or cylinder in a music box, which strike the tuned teeth of the comb and determine or mark the one repetitive melody. What he said emerged slowly, as if the spikes slowed down his speech. At any rate, he kept his hands on the table. He had finished his cigarette, but hadn’t forgotten my earlier order, which was a good sign.

  ‘Look, Jaime.’ And it bothered me unutterably that he should call me by my first name, the name that Luisa used and which he had doubtless heard her say (how embarrassing) when she spoke to him about me. ‘This is all total bullshit, and in a while, when you’ve left here, you’ll be the first to see that. What is it that bothers you so much? Is it the fact that I screw her now and then? It’s a bit late for you to be complaining about that. You probably do the same in London with whoever takes your fancy, and you’re going to have to get used to it, if you aren’t already, for Chrissake, there was whatever there was between you two and now there isn’t. It happens all the time. But this I really can’t believe.’ He stopped and gave a short laugh, the laughter that made him almost pleasant and more attractive, he was still not fully aware of the danger, of the danger I represented. ‘I mean, it’s funny really, this is the last thing I would have expected. It’s like a scene straight out of an opera, dammit!’ Again he said this as if he were talking to a third party, to a ghost present in the room and not to me, and that drove me wild. He was probably looking forward to telling the story later on to a friend (‘You won’t believe what happened to me today? Christ, it was weird’) or perhaps to Luisa herself (‘I bet you can’t guess who came to see me today, and toting a gun as well. Fucking hell! You married a really nasty piece of work there, he’s nothing like you said, he’s a complete headcase’). But he wouldn’t be seeing Luisa again, he didn’t know that, but I did. I doubted that he would talk quite like that to her, although he did when she wasn’t there, of course; foul language came naturally to him, much more than it does to me: I have no problem using swearwords when the situation calls for it, but I lacked his fluency in that particular register, with which I was as familiar as almost everyone else, but which I didn’t often use.

  ‘You know exactly what bothers me. You know precisely what I find unacceptable, you bastard. Like I said, from today on, you’ll never touch her again.’

  He was still unbowed. He was playing a dangerous game. As he must have noticed, he risked heating up my lukewarm blood and provoking hand and finger into action. Perhaps this was a useful stratagem: perhaps he was trying not only to show that he was right, but also to show me that I was not, to open my eyes, to rid himself of this stupid unexpected problem and get on with his life by making me give in.

  ‘What? Oh. The bruises,’ he said, and each rasping word was dragged out like the music from a music box, each one emerged slowly as if it kept snagging on something, there was also perhaps a little madrileño bravado in his way of speaking. Then he added a trite remark, which, nonetheless, wounded me when I realized what he was saying; it took me a few seconds because I found it hard to grasp or preferred not to grasp what he meant, or maybe it took me that amount of time to absorb the meaning. ‘Look, pal,’ again that hateful belittling term, ‘everyone has their own sexuality, and with some partners it comes out naturally and with others it doesn’t. Didn’t the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either. It just happened and you have to give people what they want. Or don’t you think so? Look, I didn’t do anything to her she didn’t want me to. Is that clear? So don’t damn well go blaming me for something I’m not guilty of, all right?’

  Yes, it took me a few seconds. ‘What is this guy saying?’ I thought. ‘He’s telling me that Luisa enjoys being knocked around, he’s telling me that? That’s impossible. It’s a lie,’ I thought, ‘I’ve known her intimately for years, although less so lately, and I’ve never seen the slightest suggestion of that, I’d have noticed it, however slight, a hint, a question mark, a glimpse, this guy’s trying to slither out of it, trying to justify himself, to escape, he knows why I’m here and that my reason is a grave one and he’s been thinking up this false explanation for a while now, he knows for certain that I’m not going to ask Luisa about it and he’s taking advantage of that to tell me he only hurts women who want to be hurt, or something of the sort, but Cristina told me how frightened the women were who had slept with him, some at any rate, and their subsequent silence about or concealment of what went on, why wouldn’t they speak, if he was a violent brute, they’d report him, they’d alert other women, they’d forewarn them, for example those prostitutes he goes with, sometimes two at a time. No, it can’t be true, it’s not,’ I thought, shrugging off the idea. It’s dreadful to be told anything, anything at all, it’s dreadful to have ideas put in your head, however unlikely or ridiculous and however unsustainable and improbable (but everything has its time to be believed), any scrap of information registered by the brain stays there until it achieves oblivion, that eternally oneeyed oblivion, any story or fact and even the remotest possibility is recorded, and however much you clean and scrub and erase, that rim is the kind that will never come out; it’s understandable really that people should hate knowledge and deny what is there before their eyes and prefer to know nothing and to repudiate the facts, that they should avoid the inoculation and the poison and push it away as soon as they see or feel it near, it’s best not to take risks; it’s understandable, too, that we almost all ignore what we see and divine and anticipate and smell, and that we toss into the bag of imaginings anything that we see clearly—for however short a time—before it can take root in our mind and leave it forever troubled, and so it’s hardly strange that we should be reluctant to know anyone’s face, today, tomorrow or yesterday. ‘What face am I wearing now?’ I wondered. ‘And what about Luisa’s face, one I thought I had plumbed and deciphered and knew, to all intents and purposes, from top to bottom, from past to future and from tomorrow to yesterday, and then along comes this son-of-a-bitch talking about her sexuality and telling me she likes him to get rough with her in bed, it’s a joke, I mustn’t believe him or think about it, but people do change and, above all, make discoveries, the kind of wretched discovery that takes those people from us and carries them far away, as with young Pérez Nuix when I discovered the pleasure of pretending that I wasn’t doing what I was doing or of making believe that what was happening wasn’t happening, which is not, I think, quite the same thing, that had been political, a tacit game, but that’s what this bastard would say, damn him, that it’s all a game, an erotic game, anything is possible, but it can’t be true. Luisa’s black eye wasn’t the result of some game, like hell it was, and yet Custardoy said: “What? Oh. The bruises,” why did he use the plural when I’ve only seen one bruis
e, perhaps there are more underneath her clothes, on her body, I haven’t seen Luisa naked on this visit nor will I, I’ll probably never see her naked again, but this bastard will unless I stop him and make sure he’s out of the picture now and for good, with no going back and no further delay, don’t ever linger or delay, just cock the gun again and squeeze the trigger, it’s a simple matter of running my hand over the slide to release it and moving a finger, this and then this, forward and back and a bullet in the head and that will be that, I am, after all, wearing gloves, he’ll be out of the picture forever and no more bruises, no more bed, no more wit or charm, it’s in my hands to do all of that and I don’t even have to listen to him or speak to him again.’

  And so I did cock the pistol, and for the first time I moved my index finger from the guard to the trigger, remembering Miquelín’s warning and believing that I was following his advice, ‘Never put your finger on the trigger until you know you’re going to shoot.’ And for a few seconds—one, two, three, four, five; and six—I did know, but not afterwards. I have no idea what saved him that time, it wasn’t his silence, perhaps there were several things—thoughts, memories, and a recognition—all crowded together into six or possibly seven seconds, or perhaps other things came to me later and so had more time to be thought or remembered once I was back in my hotel room. ‘What face am I wearing now?’ I thought again. ‘It’s the face of all those men and rather fewer women who have held someone else’s life in their hands and it could, from one moment to the next, come to resemble the face of those who chose to take that life. Not Reresby’s face, who did not, in the end, snatch away De la Garza’s life, and who, if he has killed other people, did not do so in my presence, like Wheeler with his outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague. But it would join the face of that vicious malagueño who baited and killed Marés, the face of that Madrid woman who boasted on the tram of having killed a child by smashing its head against a wall, of those militiamen who finished off my young Uncle Alfonso and left him dead in the gutter, even the faces of Orlov and Bielov and Carlos Contreras, who tortured Andreu Nin in Alcalá and possibly flayed him alive; of Vizconde de La Barthe, who ordered Torrijos and, according to the painting, seventeen of his followers to be shot on the beach as soon as they disembarked, but in reality and in history there may have been many more; the faces of the Czech resistance fighters or students who made an attempt on the life of the Nazi Protector Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and the face of Spooner, the director of the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, who planned it all; the faces of the German occupiers who, in reprisal and with their hatred of place, destroyed the village of Lidice and killed either instantly or slowly one hundred and ninety-nine men and one hundred and eighty-four women on June 10, 1942; the faces of the thugs who machine-gunned those four unfortunates on another hidden beach, in Calabria this time, not far from Crotone, on the Golfo de Taranto, three men and a woman, a killing I myself watched; and the face of the man who screamed at another man in a garage, his mouth so close to the other’s face that he sprayed him with saliva, and then shot him at point-blank range beneath the earlobe, as I could do now to Custardoy with no one here to cry out ‘Don’t!’ as I did to Reresby and probably stopped him, I could put the barrel right there and that would be it, blood spurting out and tiny bits of bone; the face of the woman in green, her skirt all rucked up and wearing a sweater and a pearl necklace and high heels but with no stockings, who crushed the skull of a man with a hammer and sat astride him to strike his forehead over and over; the face of the European officer or mercenary who ordered the massacre of twenty Africans who fell in swift succession, like dominoes; the face of Manoia, yes him too, who scooped out the eyes of his prisoner as if they were peach stones and then, according to Tupra, slit his throat; and all those centuries before, the face of Ingram Frizer, who stabbed to death the poet Marlowe in a tavern in Deptford, even though his face is unknown and his name, too, remains uncertain; and, of course, the face of King Richard, who ordered his two little nephews in the Tower to be strangled, and had many others killed too, whether in his angry mood or not, including poor Clarence, drowned by two henchmen in a butt of disgusting wine and held by the legs, which remained outside the barrel and flailed ridiculously about in the air he would never breathe again … My face will resemble and be assimilated into that of all those men and rather fewer women who were once masters of time and who held in their hand the hourglass—in the form of a weapon, in the form of an order—and decided suddenly, without lingering or delaying, to stop time, thus obliging others no longer to desire their own desires and to leave even their own first name behind. I don’t like being linked to those faces. On the other hand, I must remove Luisa from all danger and suffering and torment, so that her ghost will not one day say to this man what Lady Anne’s ghost said to her husband on the eve of battle, nor hurl at him the curse that I am failing to carry out despite being in a position to do so: “Thy wife, that wretched Luisa thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee … Let me sit heavy on thy soul, and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die!” Yes, it would be best to kill him while I still have time,’ I thought, ‘I might not have another opportunity in the future, perhaps there is no other way of removing him from the picture forever and this is the only way to make us safe.’ That ‘us’ surprised me. And it gave me strength and encouragement to discover that I still thought of us as ‘us.’

  And although I was no longer at all sure that I would shoot him, I kept my finger on the trigger, and still more seconds passed. And as they passed and the risk remained that I might accidentally fire the gun, I was conscious that Custardoy was looking paler and less kempt, it was as if his immaculate appearance had somehow suffered a breakdown, his tie was crooked and he made the mechanical gesture of straightening it, reminding me of that other—unavoidably feminine—gesture he had made when repositioning his ponytail, then he obediently returned his hand to the table; his raincoat was creased now, the cloth seemed of poorer quality, and what I could see of his shirt looked grubby with sweat. As for his hair, it gave the impression of being plastered to his head and even his sideburns had lost their curl; he was trying hard to maintain his smile—obviously aware of its affable nature—but it no longer lit up his face; his nose had grown sharper, or perhaps it was simply that I had shifted position and the angle had changed; his eyes, I thought, were clouded and closer together, as if his whole being were striving to shrink and thus offer less of a target, a purely unconscious reaction, since, given the short distance separating us, it made no sense at all, for I certainly couldn’t miss.

  ‘Have you ever met my children?’ I asked suddenly.

  ‘No, I’ve never even seen them. I don’t like getting kids involved.’

  ‘How long have you been going out with her? How long have you known each other? And don’t lie to me. I know her better than you do.’

  The fact that I spoke to him and asked him civilized questions with no insults thrown in calmed him slightly, although he still kept glancing at the barrel of the primed pistol—‘primed,’ as I understand it, being another term for ‘cocked’—with his large dark eyes, still cold and crude despite the fear in them, any roughness being attributable now only to his mustache and his nose.

  ‘About six months.’ And he allowed himself to add: ‘Although longer isn’t necessarily better. Look, why don’t you just leave us alone? I’ve never liked a woman as much as I like her. You’re out of the frame, we thought that was clear.’—‘Ah, so I’m the one who’s out of the picture now,’ I thought. ‘He’s right. But that’s going to change. He talks about “us” as well, meaning Luisa and him.’—‘Anyway, that’s clear to Luisa, and she assumed it was to you as well.’

  ‘I don’t know why you use the past tense. She’s going to continue assuming that because you’re not going to tell her anything about what’s happened here.’

  With a pistol in my hand, this sounded like a serious threat, a
lthough it wasn’t, at least I didn’t say it with that intention, but simply because I was sure they wouldn’t be seeing each other again after that day. Custardoy was less mouthy now, I noticed, and was growing increasingly apprehensive. And then another thought or memory came into my mind, one that should have condemned him and yet, strangely, helped to save him: ‘Good God, this man is my , Luisa has made of him and me unwitting co-fornicators or co-fuckers, just as Tupra and I probably are as well through the intermediary or link of Pérez Nuix, and as I, all unawares, must be of many other men through other women; we never think about that the first time we have sex with someone, about who we’re bringing together and who we’re joining forces with, and nowadays, these phantasmagorical relationships, undesired and unsought, would be a story without end. But according to that dead language, this man and I are related, indeed, according to any language, we have an affinity, and perhaps for that very reason I should not kill him, yes, for that reason too, because we have something very important in common, I’ve never liked another woman as much as I like Luisa either, so what it comes down to is that we love the same person, and I can’t blame him for that, or perhaps he simply has sex with her, it’s impossible to gauge what his feelings are.’ I could have tried to find out and ask him if he loved her, but the question struck me as absurd, and besides, with a pistol cocked and pointing at him, I knew what he would answer but not if that answer would be true. At that moment, the truth would be the last thing he would tell me, if he really thought the truth might kill him.

  ‘I don’t want anyone to disappear,’ was my next thought. ‘I don’t believe in the Final Judgment or in a great final dance of sorrow and contentment, nor in some kind of rowdy get-together at which the murdered will rise up before their murderers and present their accusations to a bored and horrified Judge. I don’t believe in that because I don’t belong to the age of steadfast faith, and because it’s not necessary: that scene takes place here, on earth, in a fragmented individual form, at least it does when the dead person knows or sees who is killing him and can then say with his farewell glance: “You’re taking my life more for reasons of jealousy than justice, I haven’t killed anyone, not as far as you know, you’re putting a bullet in my forehead or beneath my ear lobe not because you think I’m beating up the woman who is no longer your wife, as if I were some vulgar wife-beater, although you can’t and don’t want to avoid that suspicion and at least part-believe it for your own momentary justification which will be of no use to you tomorrow, but because you’re afraid of me and are going to fight for what is yours, as do all those who commit crimes and have to convince themselves that their crimes were necessary: for your God, for your King, for your country, for your culture or your race; for your flag, your legend, your language, your class or your space; for your honor, your religion, for your family, for your strongbox, for your purse and your socks; or for your wife. And in short, you are afraid. I died in my apartment on a cloudy day, among my paintings and without even taking off my raincoat, when I least expected it and at the hands of a stranger who intercepted me at the front door and gave me a last cigarette which I did not enjoy. I will no longer go to the Prado to look at the paintings, I will no longer study them or copy them or even forge them, I will no longer walk through Madrid with my ponytail bobbing and my fine hat on or drink another beer or eat another portion of patatas bravas, I won’t go into the bookshop or greet my female friends or stop to look at statues or the legs of some passing woman, nor will I ever make anyone laugh again. You’re putting an end to all of that. It may not be much, but it’s what I have, it’s my life and it’s unique, and no one else will ever have it again. Let me sit heavy on your soul each night and fill your sleep with perturbations, may you feel my knee upon your chest, while you sleep with one eye open, an eye you will never be able to close.” No, I don’t want anyone to disappear,’ I thought again, ‘not even this man. I do not dare, and there will still be time to turn back and descend the stair, I do not dare disturb the universe, still less destroy anything in it, in my angry mood. There will be room for Custardoy in these streets for a while yet, they are already awash with blood and no one should tremble as they leave them, and they are perhaps already too full of men brimming with rage and with thunderless lightning that strikes in silence, I should not be one more such man. “We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine,” Tupra said to me once. My face would become one with that of Santa Olalla and, even worse, that of Del Real, two names that have always been for me the names of treachery; because when they betrayed my father at the end of the Civil War, what they wanted was his execution and his death, that was the usual fate of any detainee, for they were the masters of time, they held the hourglass in their hand and ordered it to stop, except that it didn’t stop and didn’t obey them and, thanks to that, I am here, and my father did not have to say as he died: “Strange to see meanings that clung together once floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work …” No, I will not be the one to impose that task on this unpleasant man for whom I feel a strange blend of sympathy and loathing, he is part of this landscape and of the universe, he still treads the earth and traverses the world and it is not up to me to change that; at the end of time there are only vestiges or remnants or rims and in each can be traced, at most, the shadow of an incomplete story, full of lacunae, as ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary as pieces of tombstones or the broken inscriptions on ruined tympana, “past matter, dumb matter,” and then you might doubt that it ever existed at all. Why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, and all those doubts, all that torment.’