Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  'K-M?' I asked, ignoring his final prophetic, oracular words. 'What's that? Killing-Murdering?'

  'No, it doesn't mean that, although it could, it had never occurred to me,' replied Tupra, smiling slightly through the smoke. It means Kennedy-Mansfield. Mulryan insisted on the second name because he's always been fascinated by the actress Jayne Mansfield, a favorite of his since childhood, and he bet us that she would linger in everyone's memory and not just because of the singular way in which she died; he was quite wrong of course. The truth is that she was the dream of every boy or adolescent. And of every truck driver. Do you remember her? No, probably not,' he went on, without giving me time to reply, 'which is yet further proof of how inappropriate and gratuitous and exaggerated that "M" was when it came to giving a name to the complex. Anyway, we've called it that for quite some time now, it's become the custom, and it's used almost exclusively in-house. Although, believe it or not,' he said, correcting himself, 'I've known some high officials use it too, having picked it up from us presumably, and the term has even appeared in the odd book.'

  'I believe I do remember Jayne Mansfield,' I said, taking advantage of that minimal pause.

  'Really?' Tupra seemed surprised. 'Well, you're certainly old enough, but I wasn't sure if such frivolous films would have made it into your country. During the dictatorship, I mean.'

  'The only thing we weren't cut off from was the movies. Franco loved films and had his own projection room in the palace of El Pardo. We saw almost everything, apart from a few things that the censor strictly forbade (they weren't forbidden to Franco, of course: he enjoyed being shocked, the way priests do, at the vile deeds committed in the outside world from which he was protecting us). Others were cut or had the dialogue changed in the dubbing process, but most movies got shown. Yes, I think I do remember Jayne Mansfield. I can't quite recollect her face, but I can recall her general appearance. She was a voluptuous platinum blonde, wasn't she, very curvaceous. She made comedies in the fifties and possibly the sixties. And she had fairly big boobs.'

  'Fairly big? Good grief, you clearly don't remember her at all, Jack. Wait, I'm going to show you a funny photo, I have it here.' Tupra had little difficulty in finding it. He got up, went over to one of the shelves, wiggled his fingers about as if he were trying the combination of a safe and then took from the shelf what seemed to be a hefty volume but which turned out to be a wooden rather than a metal box, disguised as a book. He took it down, opened it there and then, and rummaged for a couple of minutes among the letters kept inside, heaven knows who they were from, given that he knew exactly where to locate them and kept them so easily to hand. While he was doing this, he tapped the holder of his Rameses II cigarette and nonchalantly tipped ash onto the carpet, as if it didn't matter. He must have had servants. Permanent staff. Finally, he carefully removed a postcard from an envelope, using his index and middle finger as tweezers, then held it out to me. 'Here it is. Take a look. You'll remember her clearly now, as clear as clear. In a sense, she's unforgettable, especially if you discovered her as a boy. You can understand Mulryan's fascination. Our friend must be more lecherous than he seems. Doubtless in private. Or in his day perhaps,' he added.

  I took the black-and-white photo from Tupra—like him with index and middle finger—and it immediately made me smile, even while he was commenting on it in words very similar to those going through my own head. Seated at a table, elbow to elbow, in the middle of supper or before or possibly afterwards (there are a few disorienting bowls), are two actresses famous at the time, to the left of the image Sophia Loren and to the right Jayne Mansfield, whose face ceased to be vague the moment I saw it again. The Italian, who was herself far from flat-chested— she had been another dream for many men, a long-lasting one too—is wearing a dress with a very modest neckline and she's giving Mansfield a sideways look, but making no attempt to conceal the fact, her eyes drawn irresistibly, with a mixture of envy, perplexity and fright, or perhaps incredulous alarm, to the far more abundant and far barer breasts of her American colleague, which really are very eye-catching and prominent (they make Loren's bust seem positively paltry in comparison), and even more so in an age when augmentative surgery was unlikely or certainly infrequent. Mansfield's breasts, as far as one can judge, are natural, not stiff and hard, but endowed with a pleasant, mobile softness—or so one would imagine ('If only I'd encountered breasts like that tonight and not Flavia's rock-hard pair,' I thought fleetingly), and must have caused a tremendous stir in that restaurant—whether in Rome or America who knows—the waiter who can be seen in the background, between the two women, maintains a praiseworthy impassivity, although we can only see his body, his face is in shadow, and one does wonder if

  he isn't perhaps using his white napkin as a shield or screen. To the left of Mansfield is a male guest of whom one can see only a hand holding a spoon, but his eyes must be turned as sharply to the right as Loren's are to the left, although probably somewhat more avidly. Unlike Loren, the platinum blonde is looking straight at the camera with a cordial but slightly frozen smile, and although not totally unconcerned—she's perfectly aware of what she has on show—she's quite at ease: she is the novelty in Rome (if they are in Rome) and she has put the local beauty in the shade, made her look almost prim. A childhood memory of that pretty woman, Jayne Mansfield, came to me then and with it a title, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (or La rubia y el sheriff—The Blonde and the Sherriff-—as it was known in Spain): a large mouth and large eyes, she was all large, vulgar beauty. To a boy at any rate, and to many grown men too, like me.

  This was what Tupra was saying and what I was thinking, while he continued to enlighten me. He gave occasional short laughs, he found both the photo and the situation amusing, and they were.

  'May I look to see what caption they gave it? May I turn it over?' I asked, for I wasn't going to read, without permission, what had been written on the back by the person who had originally sent it.

  'Yes, please do,' Tupra replied with a generous gesture.

  There was no noteworthy or imaginative or saucy caption, only 'Loren and Mansfield, The Ludlow Collection,' that much I saw, I didn't bother trying to read the message someone had scrawled for him in felt-tip years ago, two or three sentences, punctuated by the odd jokey exclamation mark, in a possibly feminine hand, large and rather round, my eye caught the signature for a second, just an initial, 'B,' perhaps for Beryl, and the word 'fear.' A woman with a sense of humor, if it was a woman who had sent it to him. A very unusual sense of humor, out of the ordinary, because a photo like that mainly causes amusement among men, which is why I laughed out loud at Sophia Loren's apprehensive sideways look, at the way she distrustfully shrinks back from that triumphant, intimidating, transatlantic decolletage, Reresby and I laughed in unison with the kind of laughter that creates a disinterested bond between people, as had happened once before in his office, when I was telling him about the hypothetical clogs worn by some minor tyrant—albeit elected, voted in—and about the patriotically starry print on the shirt I saw him wearing once on television, and when I said 'liki-liki,' that comical word which it's impossible to hear or read without immediately wanting to repeat it: liki-liki, like that. I had asked myself then, apropos of that disarming laughter, his and mine united, whether, in the future, he or I would be the one to be disarmed, or if, perhaps, both of us would.

  'He's got some balls,' I thought crudely, in De la Garza style, feeling irritated, 'he's managed to make me laugh out loud. Only a while ago I was furious with him and still am, those feelings won't just go away; a while ago I was witness to his brutality, afraid he was going to kill a poor wretch with methodical coldness, that he was going to cut his throat for no real reason, if there ever can be a reason for doing so; that he was going to strangle De la Garza with his own ridiculous hairnet and drown him in the blue water; and I saw from up close the beating he gave him without ever using his own hands to deal a single blow, despite the threatening gloves he was wearing.' Tupra
hadn't forgotten about those gloves: the first thing he'd done after getting the fire going again was to take them out of his overcoat pocket and throw them on the flames along with the pieces of toilet paper he'd wrapped them in. The smell of burning leather and wool was finally fading and what predominated was that of burning wood, the gloves must have dried off considerably since we left the handicapped toilet, 'The smell won't last,' he'd said as he threw them onto the fire with an almost mechanical gesture, like someone putting down his keys or loose change when he arrives home. He had kept them with him until he had the opportunity to destroy them, I noticed, and in his own house too. He was cautious even when he had no need to be. 'And now there he is, perfectly at ease, showing me a funny photo and cheerily commenting on it. (The sword is still in his overcoat, when will he take it out, when will he put it away?) And I'm equally at ease, seeing the funny side of the scene in the photo and laughing with him—oh, he's a pleasant fellow all right, in the first and the next-to-last instance, we can't help it, we get on well, we like each other.' (He wasn't so pleasant in the last instance, but that didn't usually occur, although that night it had.) I quickly traced back in my mind (it did little for my recovered anger, but it was better than nothing) why he had shown me the postcard in the first place. For a few moments, I'd forgotten what that photo was doing there, and what he and I were doing there. It was no night for laughter, and yet we'd laughed together only a short time after his transformation into Sir Punishment. Or Sir Revenge perhaps. But if the latter, what had he been avenging? It had been so over-the-top, so excessive, and for what? A trifle, a nothing.

  I returned the postcard to him, he was standing next to my armchair, looking over my shoulder at me looking at the two actresses or bygone sex symbols—one far more remote than the other—sharing or rather studying my unexpected amusement.

  'Why Jayne Mansfield?' I asked. 'What's she got to do with Kennedy? I presume you mean President Kennedy? Was he her lover too? Isn't it Marilyn Monroe who was supposed to have had an affair with him—didn't she sing him some sexy version of "Happy Birthday" at a party? Mansfield must have been an imitation of her.'

  'Oh, well, there were several of them,' said Tupra, while he was returning the photo to its envelope, the envelope to the box and the box to the shelf, all in order. 'We even had one in England, Diana Dors. You probably don't remember her. She was pretty much for national consumption only. She was coarser, not bad-looking or a bad actress, but with a rather stupid face and eyebrows too dark for her platinum blonde locks, I don't know why she didn't have them dyed as well. In fact, I met her when she was in her forties, we went to some of the same places in Soho that were fashionable then, in the late sixties and early seventies, she was already beginning to get a bit matronly, but she'd always been drawn to the bohemian lifestyle, she thought made her more youthful, more modern. Yes, she was coarser than Mansfield, and somehow darker too, not so jolly,' he added, as if this were something he had pondered for a moment. 'But if she'd been sitting at the table in that postcard, I don't know who would have been most startled. In her youth, Diana Dors had a real hourglass figure.' And he made the familiar movement with his hands that many men make to indicate a woman with a lot of curves, I think the Coca-Cola bottle imitated that gesture and not the other way round. I hadn't seen anyone do that for a long time, well, gestures, like words, fall into disuse, because they're nearly always substitutes for words and therefore share the same fate: they're a way of saying something without using words, sometimes very serious things, which, in the past, might have proved the motive for a duel, and even nowadays can provoke violence and death. And so even when nothing is said, one can still speak and signify and tell, what a curse; if I'd patted myself under my chin two or three times with the back of my hand in Manoia's presence, he would have understood me to be making the Italian gesture indicating scornful dismissal of one's companion and would have unsheathed his sword against me, if he, too, had one hidden about his person, who knows, compared with him, Reresby seemed reasonable and mild.

  Yes, Tupra was distracting me with his anecdotes, his conversation—or was it merely chatter? I was still furious, even though I sometimes forgot to be, and I wanted to show him that I was, to call him to account for his savage behavior, properly and more thoroughly than I had during our false farewell opposite the door to my house in the square, but he kept leading me from one thing to another, never getting to the point of what he had announced or almost demanded that I should hear, and I doubted if he would ever tell me anything about Constantinople or Tangiers, places he had mentioned while sitting at the wheel of his car, he'd specialized in Medieval History at Oxford, although you'd never know it, and in that field he might well have been an unofficial disciple of Toby Rylands, who, to his regret, had very briefly been Toby Wheeler, in that distant, forgotten New Zealand, just like his brother Peter. Tupra had also promised to show me some videos which he kept at home and not at the office, 'they're not for just anyone's eyes,' he had said, and yet he was going to show them to me, what could they possibly be about and why did I have to see them, I might wish I never had; I could always close my eyes, although whenever you decide to do that, you inevitably close them just a little too late not to catch a glimpse of something and to get a horrible idea of what's going on, too late not to understand. Or else, with your eyes screwed tight shut, once you think that the vision or scene has finished—sound deceives, and silence more so—you open them too soon.

  'What happened to Jayne Mansfield, then? What did she have to do with Kennedy?' I asked again. I wasn't going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead. Tupra was capable of keeping you distracted indefinitely, of arousing your interest in a subject totally lacking in interest and entirely incidental, for he belonged to that rare class of individuals who seem themselves to be the embodiment of interest or else have the ability to generate it, they somehow carry it around inside them, it resides on their lips. They are the most slippery characters of all and the most persuasive.

  He eyed me ironically, and I know he gave in only because he wanted to, he would have been perfectly capable of sustaining a protracted silence, withstanding it long enough for my two questions to dissolve in the air and thus be erased, letting them vanish as if no one had ever asked them and as if I were not there. But I was.