Dance and Dream

by Javier Marías

  And Tupra fell silent, he was definitely not Reresby any more, his lecture was over, he must have studied fear first hand, must have experienced and lived it as well, presumably because he had made great use of it during his life, here and there, who knows, on his missions to various countries or on field trips, there are insurrectionists everywhere especially if one is working for an old empire that is in ruins and in retreat, which leaves behind it only a few sturdy outposts to take stock and to transfer powers and to organise not entirely dishonourable departures, future business deals and belated withdrawals. The dark thought crossed my mind that he might have been a torturer himself and witnessed as much panic as Orlov and Bielov and Contreras, who, in their day, had tortured Andres Nin (the first man's real name was Nikolski and the third was really Vidali and later, in America, Sormenti: Tupra had his aliases too) in a cellar or a barracks or a house or a prison or a hotel in the Russian colony in Alcala de Henares, the town where Cervantes had been born; one sombre and unspecified informant suggested that these three comrades had flayed him alive; but this version or idea filled me with such fear that I flatly rejected it for no other reason than my own incredulity or my struggle against that fear, just as I immediately rejected this dark thought about my comrade, Tupra; after all, I saw Tupra nearly every day, on workdays anyway, during that London time of mine.

  He suddenly fell silent, as if he had run out of verbal rather than respiratory puff, his hands still on the wheel, as if he were a child playing in a pretend car or in his father's stationary, immobilised car. He was staring absently into space, at nothing in particular, he was certainly not seeing what his eyes were seeing, my front door, my square, the trees, the offices, the hotel, the street-lamps, the statue, or the scene that he had just invented, in which he was pursuing me in order to kill me - it was odd to see those eyes at rest, so to speak, eyes that were normally so aware and never idle - or the lights in my dancer-neighbour's windows, Tupra knew nothing of his existence, nor that he was my entertainment when I was alone at home, tired or depressed or nostalgic, and sometimes also a solace, the happy, carefree dancer with his two women, and an extra one now and then. The square was empty during almost all of this time, only the occasional car or passer-by, several minutes apart; and because it was a secluded place, a semi-oasis, the footsteps of the latter rang out loudly on the pavement. Some noticed this and tried to silence them, to muffle them, as if they suddenly missed having a carpet beneath their indiscreet feet. Not the cars though, cars are always inconsiderate everywhere. They didn't even slow down. Nor had we, in the Aston Martin, when we drove into the square.

  'Anyway,' I said, because, like Wheeler and like Tupra too, I did not let go of my prey if I was interested in what I was being told. 'You were talking about your apprenticeship, about the sword.' I had dropped the wounding tone, or perhaps it had merely been one of friendly mockery.

  He immediately emerged from his absent state, lit another Rameses II and this time he did offer me the open, predominantly red, Pharaonic packet; he did so mechanically, without, I think, realising that he had not done so before. We had carefully extinguished our previous cigarettes in the ashtray; in London people don't throw matches or cigarette ends out of the car window. He began talking again with the same vigour and conviction. He had clearly studied and weighed his methods, he had pondered them or else experts had pondered them for him and he had adopted them after listening to their explanations and fully conscious of the implications; almost nothing happened by chance, nothing was mere outlandish caprice, judging by what he said next (and for once he did not change the subject from sentence to sentence): 'Exactly. If I draw a gun or a knife on someone, they're bound to be scared, but only in a conventional, or, as I said, common-or-garden way, yes, perhaps that's the word. Because it's the norm these days and has been for a couple of centuries, quite ancient really. If someone mugs us or kidnaps us, if they threaten us in order to make us talk or want to force us to do something or to teach us a lesson, in almost every case they will do so at gunpoint or knifepoint: those are the easiest weapons to get hold of and, besides, they're simple to use and practical, they fit in the pocket and can be pulled out quickly with one hand, and they're what we expect the other person to be carrying when we sense that something bad is going to happen. When, for example, we come across a gang of football hooligans or skinheads and we just have time to wonder whether or not to cross over to the other side of the road, almost always too late, if they've already seen us, it's not usually worth it and may even make matters worse. Or if someone is following us with suspicious intent, for example, the woman who suspects she's going to be raped both fears and assumes that the point of a knife will be pressed to her chest or her throat; the man who is home when his house is broken into expects the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple or the back of his neck, it's normal and predictable and, in a way, you get used to the idea. Getting used to the idea may not help much, but it does to some extent, because, almost unwittingly, you're already thinking about ways of escaping or of limiting the damage, even though, given the circumstances, such thoughts are pure fantasy; but at least you're one step ahead, and, more importantly, you're not quite so terrified or so surprised, or, rather, you're surprised to find yourself in this predicament because you never thought such a thing could possibly happen to you, that you weren't even in the running, our optimism is infinite when, confronted by someone else's misfortune, even that of someone close, you can still say to yourself after all the words of condolence and lamentation: "It's not me, it didn't happen to me." Nowadays, there are gangs, you'll have read about them in the press, most of them from Eastern Europe, Albanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovans, Poles, who, without warning, burst into people's houses carrying machine guns, they kick the door down and make everyone lie on the floor and start beating them with their machine-gun butts, all very brutal, and sometimes they go too far and kill someone. The old KGB techniques, or those of the even older NKVD, and not so very different from the Gestapo's techniques.' - 'Because they knew nothing of the machinations of Orlov and his boys at the NKVD': this quote surfaced in my memory, I had read it in Wheeler's house, during my long night of research into the mysterious disappearance of Nin. - 'That already creates more fear because it's so unexpected, and the violence is seen at once as being totally out of proportion to that required to subdue and rob an ordinary, peace-loving family, who are not going to put up any resistance; and so they start to fear that something even more disproportionate might happen. I believe that in Spain, as well as these ungrateful Slavs, there are Colombians and Peruvians who do the same, the fact that they speak the same language helps enormously, well, it's what tempts them over there in the first place, and since language isn't a problem for them in your country, they're unlikely to move elsewhere. So at least here we're pretty safe from them for the moment. We get Arabs, Chinese, Rastas and Pakistanis, but that's another matter. But the fear provoked by a machine gun is still not that terrible, not what I would call terrible, the kind of fear that cancels out and overwhelms everything, leaving no room to think about anything but that, about the fear filling your whole being. Because a machine gun is difficult to use, and they won't use it if they can avoid it. It's noisy and flamboyant, there's a lot of vibration and the recoil is so powerful that it shakes you and tires you, and the gun's very hard to conceal if you have to run away. Its function, then, is more to intimidate than anything else, and the victim knows or senses this from the very first moment and he takes comfort in that, and consoles himself thinking that his assailants will only fire if things start to go badly wrong for them.' Tupra paused again, only very briefly this time, as if to start a new paragraph, but not a new chapter. - 'A sword, on the other hand,' he went on. 'Oh, you can laugh now and say it's theatrical or anachronistic or even rusty, but you didn't see the look on your face when you saw that sword in my hands. You saw the look on the monkey's face, though, and that should give you an idea.' — He used the word 'monkey'
to describe De la Garza, and I translated this to myself as macaco, although the English equivalent macaque would sound ludicrous as an insult. - 'It's probably the weapon that instils the most fear in people, precisely because it seems so out of place in a day and age when hand-to-hand fighting barely exists, or only as some curious sport. They hurl bombs and projectiles from unimaginable distances, it's as if the explosives simply fell from the skies, often you don't see the planes or even hear them, perhaps they don't have a pilot at all, or so it seems to the populations below. They suffer the appalling consequences, but rarely see who caused them, that's been the tendency ever since the invention of the crossbow, which Richard the Lionheart and others considered dishonourable, because it gave too much of an advantage to the crossbowman and exposed him to so little risk, much less than with the ordinary longbow, because that, at least, required a greater degree of skill and effort and didn't use any kind of mechanism, and it reached - if I can put it like this - it reached only as far as a man's arm, never much further or much quicker or with much more precision. For centuries now, everything has been tending towards the concealment and anonymity of the person doing the killing, and towards dishonour; and that is why the sword seems to be more in earnest than any other weapon. It seems impossible to wield it in vain; it seems impossible to do anything else but use it, and to use it immediately.'

  And it was true that I had wondered about it when I saw it in his hand - or perhaps that was later on, when I finally got home (not then, not during that car journey or while sitting in the car) and it took me so long to get to sleep (therefore, he may have formulated it for me, may have put it into words for me in the car and my thought might have been a mere echo of those words) — and I had done so in these terms: 'Where did that come from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out-of-keeping with these times, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just intense fear, but an atavistic fear, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that has caused the most deaths throughout most centuries; that it has killed at close quarters and face to face. Earlier, Tupra had alluded to Homer and now he was talking about the second Plantagenet king and the first of the Richards, born in Oxford of all places, although it is highly unlikely that he knew any English, even broken English, and during the ten years of his reign, he spent, altogether, no more than six months in the country of that language, the rest of the time being taken up with the Third Crusade or with familial wars in France, where he was killed as he was besieging Chalus in 1199 by - to add insult to injury - an arrow from a crossbow, as I was able to confirm later on in a couple of history books: another British foreigner, yet another bogus Englishman and another one who had his aliases: not just the famous 'Lionheart', but also 'Yea and Nay', which, understandably enough, tends to be forgotten; well, Richard Yea and Nay sounds rather comical, even if he was called that because of his sudden and continual changes of mind and plan, even in the midst of battle (he must have been infuriating, that cruel king). I inevitably found these cultural references coming from Tupra rather surprising, in normal conversation he didn't usually make such references, either historical or literary, although perhaps it was because there was no need for them at work: we were always talking about other people, most of whom were present and none of whom was fictitious, although the majority of them were strangers to me. Perhaps, for professional motives, he knew the entire history of weapons. Or, more likely, it was because he had studied at Oxford and been a disciple of Toby Rylands, eminent emeritus professor of English Language and Literature, and was more educated than he seemed. But sometimes I wondered whether Rylands's tutorship had taken place more within the group with no name, which provided a more practical training, rather than at the renowned university to which we had all belonged. Even I had belonged to it during those two now distant years of which barely a trace remained, as I had confidently predicted when I still lived there, conscious that I was just passing through and would leave no mark. Now, in this other London time, I thought the same sometimes, only more so, despite never being very clear as to where I would go if I left or whether I would return: 'When I leave here, when I return to Spain, my life during these real days — and some pass very slowly — will become a "Yea and Nay" or like a banal dream, and none of it will be of any importance, not even the gravest events, not even that temptation or that sense of panic, not even the feelings of disgust or embarrassment that I myself provoke, not even the sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. A day will have arrived when I will have said a farewell to these days perhaps similar to that written by Cervantes and of which I tried to remind Wheeler, although without entirely daring to, in his garden by the river. Doubtless a less cheerful farewell, but definitely more relieved. For example: "Farewell, laughter and farewell, insults. I will not see you again, nor will you see me. And farewell, passion; farewell, memories."'

  'What did you study at Oxford, Bertram?' I suddenly asked him, although it was probably not the best moment, especially when there had been (and would be) so many other moments, during our sessions and dialogues and pauses to ponder or consider, and idle moments too, in order to find this out. The fact is that I didn't know because I had never got as far as asking him, and in England that is always one of the first things one asks in order to break the ice between strangers and even between colleagues. That was how it was whenever I met some Oxford don outside of our teaching or administrative activities, having a coffee in the Senior Common Room at the Taylorian, between classes, or in between lectures or seminars; or at one of the hellish high tables held by one of the thirty-nine colleges (elevated and eternal tables), in which one might find oneself seated and immobile for several hours beside a young economist whose sole topic of conversation was a peculiar cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767 and on which he had written his thesis (this is a true example from my previous Oxford experience, the name of this glorious individual was Halliwell), as I found out by politely asking the simultaneously fatal and inaugural phrase: 'What's your field?', literally, in Spanish, '¿Cual es su campo?', but meaning 'What's your specialty?' or 'What do you do?', although in Oxford it could also mean 'What do you teach?' However, none of these variants was an appropriate way of interrupting Tupra in the middle of a discussion about swords.

  If I still remember even Halliwell, obese and with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, how could I not remember all the other people from then, the old, time-travelling porter Will with his clear, limpid eyes, and Alec Dewar - the Butcher, the Ripper, the Inquisitor or the Hammer — a selfless Dickensian teacher beneath his proud facade and his unjustified nicknames; or the inebriated Lord Rymer - the Flask - who had since reappeared with his all too justified nickname, and Rook, the gossipy expert in Slavonic languages, a man with a large head and a slender body - an egghead, in short - who claimed to have been friends with Nabokov and who had, for about a thousand years, been translating Anna Karenina as it should be translated, although with no visible result; the Alabasters, who used to spy on me with bated breath via the closed-circuit television in their second-hand bookshop when I went down to their basement to snoop around in the dust; and the head of my department, Aidan Kavanagh, whom I saw once wearing a waistcoat, as my boss Tupra always did, except that Kavanagh wasn't wearing a shirt underneath his or only some strange sleeveless variety; the fat girl called Muriel — who wasn't really fat — with whom I spent one night, and one night only, and who told me that she lived between the rivers Windrush and Evenlode, in an area which was once a forest, Wychwood Forest; the gypsy florist, Jane, with her high boots, and Alan Marriott with his docile, three-legged dog, who had visited me with his master one morning, just as, many years afterwards, late one night, the white pointer had visited me with his mistress, Pérez Nuix; my best friend Cromer-Blake, my guide in the city and who had
sometimes been both father- and mother-figure to me, alternating between health and sickness during my time there and dead four months after my departure (I still have his diaries); and the great authority Toby Rylands so like Wheeler but, as far as I knew then, unrelated, and who might well have got me into all this by means of a report written then and filed away just in case; the young woman with the rhythmic, well-shod feet and perfectly turned ankles, to whom I had not dared to speak with sufficient emotion, the emotion I felt in her presence, on a late-night train journey from Didcot station, and Clare Bayes, my lover. All those people existed in my life before Luisa, whom I met only on my return. While I might not have left any mark on Oxford, my time there had certainly left a mark on me. As this other period of London solitude would too, even if, one day, it appeared to me like a daydream never lived and shorn of consequences, and I could misquote those lines from Milton each morning: 'I wak'd, time fled, and day brought back my day.'