Then, from among the people who had stopped to watch this minor incident (of whom I was one) I noticed a man step forward, the kind of spectator who is prone to jump into the ring at bullfights, who always seems to be around eager to take center stage, whenever there's an altercation, a bit of trouble, and whose whole posture seems to be saying: I'll have this fixed in no time' or 'I'll knock some sense into these madmen and restore peace and amaze the onlookers.' His intervention was entirely unnecessary because the policewoman had by now managed to pacify her mount, yet the man strode over to them and, as if he were a wrangler or something, was patting the horse's neck and stroking its muzzle and whispering mysterious or trivial words. The first thing that alerted me was the glove, the black leather glove that stood out against the horse's white coat; it was a spring day, overcast but not cold, and covering your hands seemed odd, and even odder to have just one hand covered, because when he reached out his other hand and placed it on the horse's back, I saw that it, the right one, was bare, and that made me think: 'What a lot of one-handed people… Perhaps his left hand never healed properly and that's why he wears the glove, to hide a deformity or scars, who knows, perhaps he never shows it to anyone.' Then he turned to face me just as I was thinking this, it was simultaneous-he didn't turn to look at anyone else, but at me, as if he had seen me before the incident with the horse and knew where I was, or perhaps he'd been following me-and he gazed straight at me with those unmistakable eyes, crude and rough and cold, two enormous, very dark eyes, rather wide-set and lashless, and both those factors, the lack of lashes and the wide-apartness, that make his obscene gaze unbearable or possibly irresistible when turned on the women he seduces or buys and possibly also when turned on the men with whom he competes, and we were not just rivals, he hated me with the same fierce intensity as when we had seen each other for the last time on the sole occasion that I visited his apartment, with an old Llama pistol and a poker in my hand and wearing gloves like the ones Reresby had worn in the handicapped toilet and like the single glove he was wearing now. But it wasn't the same hatred, not identical: there, in front of the Palacio Real, it wasn't old or impotent, frustrated and without consequences, it wasn't tinged with fear and shock; nor was it like the hatred of a child imprisoned in a childish body, nor like a furious adolescent who watches whirling past him the world he is still not allowed to climb aboard; nor like the prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or abstaining from anything because he is not there; and his gaze was no longer murky, but unequivocal and clear.
It had taken me a few seconds to recognize him because Custardoy wasn't wearing a hat now or a ponytail or even a mustache, or only the merest shadow of one, as if he were starting to let it grow again after a period of shaving it off. He was stroking the horse with his gloved left hand and murmuring short sentences, but I didn't know now whether he was addressing these to the animal or to the policewoman-who happily let him carry on, perhaps she was already won over, with her high leather boots like those of a distant English gypsy girl in Oxford-or to me, knowing that I wouldn't be able to hear what he was saying. And when I saw the way he was looking at me, with utter loathing, I saw that there was insolence in that gaze too, and a threat, not one that was in any hurry to be carried out, but one that was prepared to linger and delay for as long as he chose or needed to; my expression must have changed and I thought: 'Damn. I didn't remove him from the picture, not entirely, I didn't make absolutely sure. This man might come after me one day or after us both, after me and Luisa, or all four of us, perhaps the children too. I humiliated him, I hurt him, and I took from him the person he loved. I should have removed or erased him from the picture for good, as if he were a drop of blood.' And suddenly an image flashed into my mind-like lightning in its brevity but not its brilliance, for it was terrifying, nauseating and sordid; or like thunderless lightning that strikes in silence-an image I had seen in one of Tupra's videos, a tethered horse, a defenseless woman, and I couldn't help but associate Custardoy with those well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, sporting thick mustaches and Texan hats most of them, although Custardoy no longer had a hat or much of a mustache, but I had seen them and the marks left by his abuse. That's the trouble once you've been inoculated with any kind of poison, whether through the eyes or the ears, there's no way of getting rid of it, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done and it comes back to penetrate and contaminate any thing or person, saying each time, repeating, insisting: 'Let this sit heavy on your soul.'
I stood there for a few seconds, before turning and continuing on my way. I don't know if I looked at him with equal hatred, but I might have, it's very likely, more than anything because what I saw him do next troubled me greatly, I didn't like it at all: with his right hand, his bare uninjured hand, his painting hand, he took from his trouser pocket a watch and chain and checked the time with strange intensity. At first, I thought this was just some new eccentricity; having given up his ponytail, he had to find some other way to underline the fact that he was an arty type, as my sister had described him before I had even seen him; and from his stupidly archaic bohemian point of view, carrying such a watch in the twenty-first century was doubtless in keeping with that. Then I thought of another possibility: 'Perhaps he doesn't wear a wristwatch for the same reason that he wears a glove,' I thought, 'because he would have to lift up his hand whenever he wanted to know the time. Perhaps his hand really is irrecoverable, ruined, although there's no sign of the gash I made on his cheek. Whatever the truth of the matter, I don't like the image of him holding that old-fashioned watch in his hand and studying it; he may be measuring out my time.' I didn't want to look at him any longer, and when I was already a few paces away, I thought again, perhaps to exorcise him from my mind or perhaps to raise my spirits: 'But now I know that in my angry mood, I, too, am capable of measuring out his time; I counted it once and stopped the count, and he knows that; he was lucky, but I very nearly counted him out. That will dissuade him from coming near. And if he ever does, we'll see then who will be the first to leave his own first name behind.'
You can live with a threat hanging over you because there is always the possibility that it will never be carried out, and that's what you have to think. Sometimes we see what is approaching and nevertheless we pay no attention, and perhaps not only for the reason Wheeler gave: because we hate certainty, because no one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there; and because no one wants to know, and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror; because we all prefer to be utter necios in the strict Latin sense of the word that still appears in our dictionaries: 'Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known,' that is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning. 'Un satisfecho insipiente, a nincompoop,' as Wheeler had said with a pedantry I now often miss. No, perhaps it's also because we fear wasting our life on our precautions and suspicions and our visions and alarms, and because it is clear to us that everything will have its end, and then, when we say goodbye, when we are already the past or our end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, it will all seem to us vain and naive: 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, our poison, the shadow, and all those doubts, all that torment?
Before opening the door, I could hear her humming to herself inside, she often does that now and she laughs a lot too, with me and without me, I suppose; she no longer rations out her laughter, and I trust this will remain so, if possible forever, or so I think. Her return is nothing like Beryl's return to Tupra, according to my distant interpretations and always assuming they did, in fact, get back together, which was something I never found out: there's no self-interest, not a spurious self-interest, and there's nothing clandestine about it either. It's clear that Luisa benefits from and enjoys us seeing each other like this, just now and then, and not living together, although she might grow tired of that one day; she has already started leaving clothes here. And it suits me too. After all, in London, I got used to being very alone, as Wheeler paternally said to me early on, and sometimes I need to continue to be alone because I don't think I could bear someone's company all the time and never be able to look out at the world from my window on my own, the living world that knows where it's going and to which I imagine I still belong. I opened the door and saw on the coffee table in the living room the package that the porter had given to Luisa, who was in the kitchen, still humming and not aware that I had come in. I saw that it came from Berlin, shoes by VonTruschinsky, from whom, since they have all my measurements, I still occasionally order a pair, even though they are very expensive. I always think of Tupra when I receive them, but then he's always vaguely in my thoughts, as if he were a friend on whom I continue to count-which is odd-and to whom I could turn for help. I haven't done so yet.
That afternoon, he was even more in my thoughts after my silent encounter with Custardoy, with two or three animals as indifferent witnesses. On the way home, something else had occurred to me, I had thought: 'I didn't want to frighten De la Garza when I went to see him at the Embassy, and I was horrified to see the panic my mere presence instilled in him, but, on the other hand, I would have liked to see that same fear on Custardoy's face and in the way he behaved. He's completely recovered from his fright now or if a little remains-as it must- he doesn't show it. Nothing ever works out as we want or as we think, or perhaps I'm still too hesitant; such a thing would never have happened to Tupra, he would have removed him from the picture when he had him in the frame, and now I'll have to watch every corner, just in case he slips back in again, this time with sword or spear, although that might take some time, because once you've experienced fear, you never entirely lose it.' These thoughts continued to preoccupy me. Luisa noticed that I was quiet and was perhaps even a little worried because I wasn't responding much to her jokes, for she's gone back to poking gentle fun at me.
'What's wrong?' she asked. 'Has something happened?'
'What do you mean?' I replied, half-suspicious, half-distracted. 'What sort of thing?'
'I mean, something bad.'
Yes, something bad had happened to me, and no, nothing bad had happened to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Someone hurts you and you become an enemy. Or you hurt someone and create an enemy It's as easy as breathing, both things happen much more frequently than we imagine, often by chance and without our realizing, it pays to stay alert and watch people's faces, but even then we don't always notice. I had noticed that afternoon, which is an advantage. But I couldn't say anything to Luisa, I couldn't talk to her about it, I couldn't tell her about that meeting. We have barely asked each other anything about our time of absolute separation, best not to. She has never spoken to me about Custardoy, nor have I to her, and I will never know how much she loved or feared him. That is perhaps the only thing about which I will never be able to say anything to her, not even when I am already the past or my end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, because I think I know her face and I stake everything on that, even the way she will remember me. Perhaps because of that, and also because I am usually perfectly content, I sometimes sing or hum to myself at times, as she does, and I have a tendency to sing or whistle that song of many titles, from Ireland or the Wild West ('Nanna naranniario nannara nanniaro,' that's how the melody goes), 'The Bard of Armagh' who forecast: And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me'; or 'Doc Holliday' who first justified himself by saying: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today'; or 'The Streets of Laredo,' which is the version whose words I know best and which is therefore the one I sometimes sing out loud or to myself, perhaps, who knows, as a reminder, especially the last verse that ends by asking: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'
'No,' I said, 'nothing bad.'
May 2007
Acknowledgments
Throughout the writing of the three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow, various people have helped me at some point or other: with a fact, an image, a foreign word, some piece of historical or geographical information, a medical query, a bullfighting term, a few lines of poetry, some advice that contributed to clarifying the narrative, or by looking after my only two copies of the original (I still use a typewriter) until it was completed. They are as follows: Julia Altares, John Ashbery, Antony Beevor, Ines Blanca, Nick Clapton, Margaret Jull Costa, Agustin Diaz Yanes, Paul Ingendaay, Antonio Iriarte, Mercedes Lopez-Ballesteros, Carme Lopez Mercader, Ian Michael, Cesar Pérez Gracia, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Daniella Pittarello, Alvaro Pombo, Eric Southworth, Bruce Taylor and Dr. Jose Manuel Vidal. To all of them, my heartfelt thanks.
Separate mention must be made of my father, Julian Marias, and Sir Peter Russell, who was born Peter Wheeler, without whose borrowed lives this book would not have existed. May they both rest now, in the fiction of these pages as well.
JAVIER MARIAS
Javier Marias
***
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Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell Page 58
