Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  Custardoy had half-opened his eyes to gauge the damage done and I had not placed the barrel of the gun against his head again since dealing the second and third blow to his hand. His gaze was dull, stunned, almost oblique, but there was also a hint of vengefulness. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that any desire for revenge was muted and purely hypothetical, as if he understood that he would have to give it up however much he wanted it, or could see it only as a distant hope or postponed reward or deferred justice, rather as, during many centuries, people of steadfast faith would imagine and nurture the idea of the Final Judgment as something that would be given to them during their long death and which they could never have in life. I had removed the gun from his head when I struck him with the poker, and now it occurred to me that I didn’t even need it, the threat of destroying his right hand had cowed him completely, overwhelmed him, especially as he didn’t know if that was going to happen right there and then, and because he already had before him the vision of his left hand, and could feel it—the pain must have been terrible. In the state he was in, his ponytail looked even more ridiculous, as did his tie, his sparse mustache, his aspiration to elegance; at that moment he was an angry man, but fearful, too, almost imploring, his rage curbed indefinitely. However, I still didn’t put the pistol away. And he did plead with me, although his tone of voice masked the fact. His words sounded more like a reproach than a plea, but they said what they said:

  ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t do that. I earn my living with my right hand. Stop playing fucking games with me. What the fuck do you want?’ Swearwords are good at masking feelings, of course, which is why almost everyone uses them in Spain—the most puerile, blustering country I know—in order to appear big and brave. But Custardoy had asked a favor of me (‘Don’t do that’) and I did not, on that occasion, feel involved or enmeshed or entangled; on the contrary, I would happily have used a razor or a knife to cut the disagreeable bond joining us, him, Luisa and me, although she had created that bond of her own accord. All I had to say to the guy was: ‘I want this in exchange.’

  ‘I’m going to leave now and you’re going to stay here quite still for thirty minutes from the time I leave, without moving and without phoning anyone, however much your hand hurts; you’ll have to put up with it. Then call a doctor, go to a hospital, do what you like. It will take time for that hand to heal, if it ever does completely heal. Always remember that it could have been worse, and that we can always do the same to the other hand, or cut it off with a sword, I have a very clever friend in London who loves swords. While it’s healing, leave Madrid, I know you’ve got enough money to be able to spend some time at a hotel, in a place that you like, somewhere with museums, and have a real rest. And if none of these ideas appeal, then do something else. I don’t want Luisa to see you in this state; she must never ever associate what has happened to you with my stay in Madrid. You phone her and tell her that you’ve had to go away unexpectedly. Some important, urgent commission, copying or restoring some painting, or several, in Berlin, Bordeaux, Vienna or St. Petersburg, I don’t care. Or better still, Boston, Baltimore, or Malibu, with an ocean between you, after all, there are famous museums aplenty over there with no shortage of cash to pay you for your work; anyway, I’ll leave you to invent something. Call her from a cell phone or some number that can’t be traced, just so that she can’t find out where you really are. You can go and convalesce in Pamplona for all I care, but you must tell her that you’re far away and very busy and that you’ll phone her when you can, just in case, because if she thinks you’re somewhere near, she might try and leave the kids with someone for a few days and come and join you.’

  ‘She won’t just let me go off like that without saying goodbye, especially if I’m going to be away for a while,’ said Custardoy, interrupting me. I didn’t mind because this meant he was accepting my plan and was prepared to obey it, and that I wouldn’t have to damage his other hand or even consider doing so, because I would then have no other hold over him and would have to shoot him and that now seemed to me impossible. I had lost all my heat, what little I’d had. I had taken on Tupra’s coldness only momentarily and half-heartedly. Perhaps not even Tupra was so very cold: after all, he hadn’t, in the end, cut off De la Garza’s head.

  ‘Don’t you understand? She won’t be able to say goodbye to you, however much she wants to, because when you phone her, you’ll already have left, you’ll call her from somewhere else, do you see?’

  ‘She’ll think that very odd.’

  ‘Try to make it seem perfectly normal. Emergencies do happen, as do unforeseen events. Besides, you don’t see each other every day, do you? Or phone each other on a daily basis?’ I wasn’t expecting an answer, and I preferred him not to give one. ‘While you’re away, only call her now and then, and make those calls less and less frequent, until, in two weeks or so, you’ll have stopped phoning altogether. After two weeks, you give no sign of life at all, none, and if she does manage to locate you, be evasive with her, impatient. And when your hand has healed and you come back (if that wretched hand of yours ever does heal after what I’ve done to it), you won’t call her then either. Sooner or later, she’ll hear from someone that you’re back, and if she’s still interested, she’ll be the one to seek you out or phone you or demand an explanation. And you can tell her then, bluntly and arrogantly, it should come easily enough to you, you’ve probably done it hundreds of time. As far as you’re concerned, you’ll say, she’s history, you never even give her a thought. Tell her that on the beaches of Malibu you’ve met the new Bo Derek or a lady security guard or Getty’s daughter or whoever. Or an heiress from Boston whom you’re about to marry. You make it clear to her that it’s all over, that she should leave you alone, that you don’t want to see her. And you won’t see her. As of today, you’ve said your farewells, do you understand? And if you utter one word to her about what has happened here, about this visit, if you lead her to suspect or, however remotely, imagine what went on, now or later, even if it’s in ten years’ time, you can say farewell to your right hand as well.’ The words of the ‘Streets of Laredo’ came into my mind: ‘But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.’

  Custardoy opened his coarse eyes a little wider, he looked suddenly older, as if the weariness that follows immediately on relief had put ten years on him. He was cautiously stroking his crippled hand, he must have been impatient for this to be over, to be rid of me once and for all, so that he could go to a doctor or a hospital, where they could do something to take away the pain.

  ‘I’m not the marrying kind, I’m not like you,’ he said with a tiny, barely perceptible remnant of scorn, which I nonetheless noticed. It didn’t matter, it afforded him some small compensation. He didn’t know that I was like him, even though I had gotten married, contrary to my father’s expectations. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Like I said, you stay here for half an hour without moving and without phoning anyone. You never lay a hand on her again. You never see her again. I’ll know if you don’t do as I say, and London is only two hours away. It would be easy enough for me to fly over and cut off your hand.’

  I flung the poker into the fireplace, it had a little blood on it, but I’d leave him to clean it off. I removed the third unused bullet, put the pistol in my raincoat pocket and headed for the door without taking my eyes off him, until he disappeared from my field of vision. There he was sitting on his sofa, with his clothes all rumpled, his hand shattered and a mark on his face. He held my gaze, despite his sudden tiredness, his abrupt senescence. No one has ever looked at me with such hatred. Nevertheless, I wasn’t afraid that he would try anything, that he would grab the poker and hit me on the back of the head. The terror and humiliation he had experienced might have made him risk doing something like that. His hatred, however, was impotent, frustrated and without consequences, it was tinged with fear and shock; or it was like the hatred of a child condemned to remain too long in t
he incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumes him, but which he will no longer remember when he does finally grow up. He was looking at me in the knowledge that I was no longer within his grasp and would not be for a long time, possibly never: like a furious adolescent looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter; or like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there, and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him, and that he can do nothing about it; it’s a common experience among the dying too, only far more tragic.

  When I left the living room, he disappeared from my view. His eyes, dark with hatred, had followed me right until then, and he may have kept his gaze fixed for a few seconds more on the door through which my gloved figure had departed. It would take him a while to get used to the idea of what he had to do. And then he would find it hard to believe that what had happened to him had really happened, but he had a useful reminder, or two; now he would feel on his hand and cheek what Luisa had felt with her black eye and its thousand colors and perhaps before that, according to her sister, the cut, also on her face. He would have many days ahead of him to observe the evolution of his scar, and to hope that the small bones in his hand were knitting together under the cast or whatever it is they use now, although an operation might also prove necessary. He would look at his good hand and think perhaps: ‘I’ve been lucky. At least this hand is still intact.’ And he would remember the metal barrel against his forehead and then he would think: ‘I’ve been lucky. He could have shot me, I thought he was going to. But we would always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies, every man for himself. I was saved and here I am.’

  I hurried down the stairs (“‘Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair …’), anxious to leave the building and get away from there, to take a taxi and return Miquelín’s old pistol to him as soon as possible, having first replaced the three bullets I had removed from the magazine, and to say to him: ‘A thousand thanks, Maestro, I’ll never forget this. Don’t worry, here it is, there’s not a bullet missing. It hasn’t even got my fingerprints on it. It’s as if you had never lent it to me, as if it had never left your apartment.’

  None of the taxis passing by were free, the sky was still cloudy, full of thunderless lightning about to strike but never doing so, and so I set off, walking briskly, following the same straight route back, along Calle Mayor to my hotel, still with my gloves on, I wanted to get away from that place. I felt the lightness one feels on getting what one wants and a little of the conceit I had experienced when I discovered that Rafita was afraid of me, that, quite unwittingly, I filled him with fear. Seeing yourself as dangerous had its good side. It made you feel more confident, more optimistic, stronger. It made you feel important and—how can I put it—in charge. And, this time, that small rush of vanity did not immediately repel me. However, I also had a sudden feeling of heaviness, a feeling that can be triggered by various combinations: alarm and haste, the sense of tedium experienced at the prospect of having to carry out some cold-blooded act of reprisal, or the invincible meekness one feels in a threatening situation. I did feel something of that tedium, as well as haste, but my act of reprisal was over and done with. Only when I reached Plaza de la Villa and saw again the statue of the Marqués de Santa Cruz (‘I was the scourge of the Turk at Lepanto, the Frenchman at Terceira, the Englishman o’er all the seas …’ ‘And in short, they were afraid’) did I begin to think repeatedly, over and over: ‘You can’t go around beating people up, you can’t go around killing them. Why can’t you? You can’t go around beating people up … Why can’t one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them? Why not? According to you.’ And I remembered, too, what Tupra had said when we were at his house, after our session watching his store of videos: ‘You’ve seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can’t.’ And I gave myself the answer that I managed to give him just before we were interrupted by Beryl or whoever that woman was, the person at his side, his weak point just as Luisa was mine: ‘Because then it would be impossible for anyone to live.’ I had received no response to those words of mine, but by the time I reached Puerta del Sol, my thoughts had changed, and this was all they were repeating: ‘What a lot of one-eyed, one-handed people there are in these old streets, but at least he’s out of the picture. What a lot of cripples and what a lot of dead people there are in these old streets, but at least he’s out of the picture. Yes, at least he’s out of the picture and he’d better not try and climb back in.’

  I didn’t in fact think much about anything until I was in the plane on my way back to London, by which I mean that I postponed any form of ordered thought and, during the few days that remained of my stay in Madrid, restricted myself to feelings, sensations and intuitions. I devoted those days to the children and to taking them out and about (they were as insatiable as all children are nowadays, I suppose they’ve lost the habit of being at home, which feels to them like imprisonment, and require constant distractions in the exhausting outside world) and to visiting my father, who was getting very slowly, but perceptibly, worse.

  The last time I went to see him, on the eve of my departure, he was, as he almost always was, sitting in his armchair, fingers interlaced, like someone who waits patiently without knowing what exactly it is he’s waiting for—perhaps for night to fall and for day to come again—and now and then he would unconsciously raise his fingers to his eyebrows and smooth them, or use thumb and forefinger to rub or stroke the skin beneath his lower lip, a characteristic gesture of his, a meditative gesture. But I found it quite distressing to see him like that, in that strange waiting state, barely speaking to me, with me having to do all the talking and trying to draw from him the occasional word, racking my brain for questions and topics of conversation that might make him react and come to life—and without him putting into words or spontaneously offering me the results of his meditations, as he normally would; he had suddenly become as impenetrable as a baby, for babies must think about their surroundings, since they’re equipped to do so, but it’s utterly impossible to know what those thoughts are. At last, after various failed attempts to interest him in recent news and events, I asked:

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘About the cousins.’

  ‘What cousins?’

  ‘Whose do you think? Mine.’

  ‘But you don’t have any cousins, you never have,’ I said, feeling slightly alarmed.

  He looked somewhat taken aback, as if he were making a mental correction, then immediately adjusted his expression and did not insist, but answered again as if for the first time.

  ‘About my Uncle Víctor,’ he said. ‘Ask him to please tell my father that I’m coming home.’

  There had been an Uncle Víctor, but both he and my grandfather had been dead a long time, so long that I’d never even known them, either of them. This was the first time his mind had strayed like that, at least when I’d been with him. Although, perhaps that isn’t the right way to put it—what had strayed was time itself, which, contrary to what we tend to believe, never entirely passes, just as we never entirely cease to be what we once were, and it’s not that odd to slip back into the past so vividly that it becomes juxtaposed with the present, especially if it’s the present of an old man, which offers him so little and is so unvaried, its days indistinguishable. Anyone who waits patiently or without knowing what exactly it is he’s waiting for is perfectly justified in deciding to install himself in a more pleasing or more appropriate time; after all, if today chooses to ignore him, he’s perfectly within his rights to ignore today—there’s no room for complaint on either side.

  ‘But your father’s dead,’ I said, correcting him again,‘he’s been dead for years, as has your Uncle Víctor.’

  Again he did not insist, but replied:
>
  ‘I know they’re dead. You’re hardly telling me anything new, Jacobo.’ And he gave an indulgent laugh as if I were the person whose mind was rambling.

  Perhaps my father now came and went in time with great facility and speed. Perhaps he was now the master of time and held in his hand the hourglass or clock, of himself or of his existence, and while he calmly watched time advance he was traveling wherever he pleased. Maybe that’s the only thing left to the very old, especially if they’re not astute old men, as Wheeler is, and no longer struggle to fill the vacancies, to seek out substitutes or replacements for the many people they have lost throughout their life; and are no longer part of the universal, continual, substitutional mechanism or movement—which, being everyone’s lot, is also ours—and they stop accumulating and surrounding themselves with poor imitations, choosing instead to rediscover the originals in all their plenitude. They have no further need of flabby, pale, elusive life, only of thought, which becomes in them ever more potent and clear and all-embracing, since it only occasionally has to live alongside reality.

  ‘You’ve got a pistol, haven’t you?’ it occurred to me to ask him then. It would turn up when he died, and I feared that his death would not be long in coming; and one of us, my brothers, my sister or myself, would inherit it as Miquelín had inherited from his father the Llama I had just held in my hands. Perhaps it would, in the future, be useful for me to know where to find another ‘clean’ pistol, without having to borrow it from someone.