Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  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 Victor,' he said. Ask him to please tell my father that I'm coming home.'

  There had been an Uncle Victor, 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 Victor.'

  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.

  A little surprised, he looked at me with those clear eyes of his that now saw only dimly.

  'Yes. Why do you ask?' And this topic seemed to rouse him or return him to today.

  Where did it come from? Why have you got it?' I asked, not answering his question.

  He raised one hand to his eyebrows, not this time in order to smooth them abstractedly, but in order to think or remember.

  'Well, my father was very keen on guns. He wasn't just a hunter, he was a marksman. He loved that and was very good at it. He was a member of the National Shooting Club and owned a lot of weapons. A Mauser carbine; a Baker rifle; a very ornate Le Page target pistol; and even a Monkey Tail, although I can't recall now why they called it that; pistols and revolvers, some of them very old, from the Wild West era; there was an American LeMat and an English Beaumont-Adams and a couple of Derringers, one of them with a double barrel, and pistols from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and I can remember him having a heavily gilded Blunderbuss, a Miquelet dueling pistol, and a silver-inlaid "Queen Anne," a really fine collection. And then there were knives and swords as well from exotic countries: gumias and yatagans, bolos from the Philippines, a Malay kris… As well as rapiers of course.' He paused and then remembered two more. 'Oh, and a Nepalese kukri and even an Indian bhuj, which was very rare, half-knife, half-axe, it was also known as an "elephant head," because it had a brass likeness of an elephant's head between blade and haft, which was long and narrow…' He was seeing it, I realized that he was actually seeing that bhuj from his childhood as well as all the other weapons, with that gaze so frequent in the old even when they're in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It's not an absent look, but a focused one, focused on something a very long way away. And after a brief moment's absorption in thought, he went on: 'He passed on that enthusiasm to both my brother and me, but especially to me. He used to show them to us and explain all about them, and we got used to handling them with scrupulous care.'

  'But what did he want with knives and swords? You can't shoot with them, can you? In the National Shooting Club, they don't let you fling a Malay kris at someone, do they?'

  Now he was genuinely interested in the conversation, or at least in that remote reminiscence, and so he reacted quickly to my joke, amused but pretending not to be:

  'Honestly, you are a silly lot, you never miss a chance to make some foolish remark.' He used the plural 'you' to encompass all four of his children, as he often did even when only one of us was present. 'Of course he couldn't use them to shoot with, he just liked them, I suppose. He was born in 1870, and people then had a liking for weapons in general. It was quite normal. And they were rarely put to criminal use as they are now'

  'Hm,' I said, 'although it doesn't seem very sensible to let children handle them. You and your brother could have blown each other's heads off or cut each other's throats. You say he owned rapiers as well. I know how sharp they can be. Nowadays, the authorities, no, what am I saying, the neighbors would have hit the roof over something like that. They'd have had your father locked up.'

  The expression 'locked up' applied to his father must have annoyed h
im, even though I was the one using it and only jokingly.

  'People do a lot of stupid things nowadays,' he replied reproachfully, as if I were one of those authorities or neighbors. 'Nowadays, everyone's afraid of everything, and people have very little freedom in their personal lives and less and less freedom in how they bring up their children. Before, we used to teach children all kinds of things as soon as they reached the age of reason, which is why it's called that, things that could be useful when they grew up, because in those days you never forgot that a child would one day be an adult. Not like now, it seems that adults are supposed to continue being children into old age, and idiotic cowardly children at that. That's why there's so much silliness everywhere.' He raised his fingers to his lips again and murmured: 'It's sad watching an era in decline, when one has known other far more intelligent eras. Where's it going to end? It will be one of the reasons I won't overly regret my departure, which, I believe, is quite close.'

  'No, not that close, besides, who knows,' I answered, 'you'll probably outlive us all. No one knows who will die when, do they?' And when he didn't reply, I asked again: 'Do they?'

  'No,' he agreed, 'but there is something called the calculation of probabilities, which works with some degree of accuracy. It would be an act of gratuitous cruelty if, at this point in my life, one of you were to die before me. It would be for all of you, but most of all for me. God forbid.' In his place, I would have touched wood. Not because I believe in wood, but simply as a gesture.

  The conversation had taken a melancholy turn, which was precisely what we tried to avoid with any topic or subject that might serve to distract him while he waited for the night and for the day, and for all the subsequent nights and days, until there were no more. This was my last visit before going back to London, and I would not be back in Madrid for a while. 'Perhaps I'll never see him again,' I thought with dismay. (And I realized as I did so, that I was thinking the Spanish word 'desmayol meaning 'fainting fit,' but meaning the English word 'dismay.') And so I placed one hand on his shoulder, a gesture he liked and that calmed him, but this time I did so to calm myself, to feel his bones and to accompany his breathing.

  'Anyway, what were you saying?' I went back to what had roused and entertained him a little. 'That your pistol is from your father's collection?'

  'No, of course not. The whole collection disappeared years ago, when the lean times came. My father would make a few big business deals and in the ensuing euphoria spend all the profits and, as you know, invest them in foolish things. Then, when common sense returned, he'd more or less recover those losses, but there came a point when recovery was impossible. The few remaining pieces were sold at the start of the Civil War, and his collection of clocks and watches suffered the same fate. Some may even have been confiscated.'

  'So where does the pistol come from?'

  'I've had it since the War, it's a 7.65 caliber Astra De Luxe. It's quite nice for a Spanish pistol, rather ornate, with the barrel etched in silver and a mother-of-pearl handle. Why do you ask?'

  'Oh, nothing, just curious. May I see it? I've never seen you handling it. Where is it?'

  'I don't know,' he said at once, and it didn't sound like an excuse not to have to show it to me. 'The last time I had it in my hands, years ago now, I decided to hide it away somewhere, so that the grandchildren wouldn't ever stumble across it when they come here and start rummaging around in everything. You had your mother to keep a check on you, but she's not here any more. And I must have hidden it so well that I now have no idea where I put it. I've forgotten. It was complete with bullets, well-preserved and well-oiled. What do you want it for?' It's odd, it was as if he knew that I wanted it for myself. This wasn't quite true, I had done what I had to do with another borrowed weapon, and so I no longer needed it, but carrying a gun in one's pocket certainly gave a sense of security.

  'No. I don't want it," I said. 'I was just curious. Why did you take the risk of keeping it after the Civil War? If they'd caught you with it during the Franco regime, if they'd searched the apartment, you'd have had it, especially with your record. Why did you keep it? Why do you still keep it, even though you can't remember where it is?'

  My father remained silent for a moment, as if, perhaps, it was hard for him to give an answer or as if he needed to ponder his reply, I'm not sure. Then he said succinctly:

  'You never know'

  'You never know what?'

  What you might need.'

  He had always told me that, during the War, he'd been lucky- in one respect-to be able to stay in Madrid, consigned to administrative duties because of his short sight. And although he wore the uniform of the Republican Army, he had never been sent to the front and never fired a single shot. And he used to say how happy he was about that, because he could also be absolutely certain that he had never killed anyone, that he had never been in a position to kill anyone. I reminded him of this:

  'You've always said how glad you were that you could be certain that, in the War, you'd never killed anyone, that you never had the chance. That doesn't quite tally with hanging on to a pistol afterwards, when things weren't so bad. I mean when life was less exposed and less chaotic, although during a dictatorship, of course, no one is safe. Why didn't you hand it in or get rid of it?'

  'Because after you've lived through a war, you never know,' he said again. And then he fell silent, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, as if he were gathering the momentum to say something more, and so I waited. And he did say something more: 'Yes, I'm very glad that I never killed anyone. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't have if there'd been no other option. If any of you or your mother had been under threat of death and I could have prevented that, I'm sure I would have done so. When you were small, I mean, because now it's different, you can look after yourselves. I don't imagine I would kill for you now. Apart from the fact that I'm hardly in a position to do so-I mean, look at me-you're perfectly capable of doing whatever might be necessary. You don't need me for that any more. Besides, I wouldn't know if you deserved saving now, you lead your own lives and I don't know what you get up to. Before, it was different, I knew everything about you, when you were little and living at home. I had all the facts in hand, but not now. It's odd how your children become semi-strangers, there are lots of parents who won't accept that and stand staunchly by their children whatever the situation, even against all the evidence. I know the person you were and I think I can still recognize that person in you now. But I don't really know you as I knew that child, not at all; and it's the same with your brothers and your sister. Your mother, on the other hand, I knew until the end, and I would have killed for her until the end.' Now both mind and time were working perfectly, and after the briefest of pauses to mark the parenthesis, he returned to what we had been talking about before. 'You never know, never, and it may be that one day you might have to use a pistol. Look what happened in Europe during the Second World War. For a long time, we had no way of knowing if it would spread to Spain, despite Franco's promises, as if we could trust those, and the endless evasions and delaying tactics he used with Hitler. I don't know if you realize it, but during that War they had to use every resource they had, whatever it was, no one could keep back so much as a cartridge, whether legally or illegally acquired. It was much worse than our war in one sense. In another way, of course, it wasn't so bad. In a qualitative sense, the war here was worse.' Again he stopped and looked at me hard, although I had the feeling then that he wasn't seeing me at all, that he was looking as the blind do, without calculating distances. I noticed that he was excited by what he was about to say. 'But the thing I feel happiest about, Jacobo, is that no one ever died because of something I said or reported. Shooting someone, during a war or in self-defense, is bad, but at least you can go on living and not lose your decency or humanity, not necessarily. However, if someone dies because of something you said or, worse still, invented; if someone dies needlessly because of you; if you could have remained silent and allowed
that person to go on living; if you spoke out when you should or could have said nothing and by doing so brought about a death, or several… I don't believe that's something you could live with, although many do, or seem to.'-'That was perhaps how it was before,' I had time to think or thought later on when I was flying back to London and remembering our conversation, 'my father still imagines he's living in a world in which deeds left some trace and in which conscience had a voice-not always, of course, but for the majority of people. Now, on the other hand, it's the other way round: it's easy to silence or gag the majority, sometimes it's not even necessary: it's even easier to persuade them that there's no reason to speak out. The tendency nowadays is to believe that one is innocent, to find some immediate justification for everything, and not to feel one has to answer for one's actions or, as we say in Spanish, "cargarse de razón," I don't know how exactly one would say that in English, but it doesn't matter, I've lost the habit of speaking that other language all the time, although tomorrow I'll have to. Of course, people nowadays can live with that and with far worse things. People whose consciences torment them are the exception, as are old-fashioned people who think: "Spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams," and other similarly pointless thoughts.'-My father went on: 'And in our War there was so much of that, so much treachery and so much poison, so many slanderers, defamers and professional rabble-rousers, all tirelessly dedicated to sowing and fomenting hatred and viciousness, envy, and a desire to exterminate, on both sides, especially on the winning side, but on both sides… it wasn't easy to be entirely clean in that respect, perhaps in that respect least of all. And it was even more difficult for anyone who wrote for a newspaper or spoke on the radio, as I did during the War. You can't imagine the things that were read or heard, not just during those three years, but for many years afterwards. One sentence was all it took to send someone to the firing squad or the gutter. And yet I'm sure that I never said or wrote one word that could have proved seriously prejudicial to anyone. Nor later either, in the strictly personal sphere of my life after that. I never gave away a secret or a confidence, however small, I never told anyone about what I knew from having seen or heard something if that might do harm and if I didn't need to tell it in order to save or exonerate someone. And that, Jacobo, is what pleases me most.' My father was, I thought, drawing up a balance sheet of his life before he died. And for a second I wondered if it really was as he said or if he was deceiving himself like a man of my time rather than a man of his, and that he might perhaps have let something slip which, later, had terrible consequences. It was impossible to know. Even he couldn't know that, it's simply not possible to remember everything, as if you were the Judge of that old and steadfast faith. And sometimes we never find out about the consequences. I thought of those 'careless talk' cartoons that Wheeler had shown me: how could a sailor possibly imagine that something he had told his girlfriend could result in the sinking of a ship full of his compatriots? There's never any way of knowing this, that one is saying farewell with no weight on one's conscience. Then I remembered something else and it occurred to me that it was a memory that would help him to convince himself.