Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  And so I also kept delaying my return to Madrid, I mean, to see my children and my father and my siblings and my friends, too many months had passed without my setting foot in my own city and, therefore, without seeing or hearing Luisa, which was what most attracted and frightened me. I had told her, two days after that night when I'd phoned to consult her about botox and the blood stains left by women, that I would not be back for a while. 'The kids have been asking when you'll be coming to see them,' she had said, taking great care not to include herself and making it plain that she wasn't the one doing the asking. 'Not in the immediate future I shouldn't think,' I had replied and mentioned that I had a trip with my boss coming up, I didn't know exactly when yet, but it could be any time, so I was busy until then. And it was true, Tupra had told me this, although, in the end, he dragged me off, instead, on several different trips during that month, short hops lasting only a couple of days, three within the large island itself and one to Berlin, to the Continent. We went to Bath with Mulryan, to Edinburgh on our own and to York with Jane Treves, who, it seems, was from Yorkshire and knew the terrain, although it didn't seem to me that you needed to be an expert to find your way around those very human-sized cities. He didn't take Pérez Nuix with him, perhaps to punish her for trying to deceive him in the matter of Incompara and her poor beaten father, in which he must have considered me to be merely a naive and secondary accomplice, or perhaps, it occurred to me, so that she and I did not end up in the same hotel: sometimes I had the feeling that there was nothing he didn't know about, and that he was therefore sure to know what had happened in my apartment, in my bed, in silence and as if it hadn't happened, on that night of constant rain.

  In each of those cities we only ever had one meeting at which I could prove useful as an interpreter, of languages or people, and if Tupra saw more people, as I imagined he did, he did so on his own and never invited me to join him. In Bath, he stayed at a very fine hotel, the Royal Crescent if I remember rightly (Mulryan and I stayed in another which was pleasant rather than fine—we, after all, occupied a different place in the hierarchy), in which there lived 'on an almost permanent basis,' according to my boss, a Mexican millionaire, 'officially retired but still very active from a distance and from the shadows,' with whom he wished to come to some agreement. This elderly man—with white hair and mustache, the vestiges of what was, by then, a very precarious elegance and a resemblance to the old actor Cesar Romero, and whose two surnames were Esperon Quigley—spoke impeccable English with a thick Spanish accent (it happens to many Latins on both sides of the Atlantic), and my help was only necessary on a few occasions, when the gentleman's diction proved so opaque to the purely English ear of Tupra and to the half-Irish ear of Mulryan that perfectly correct words became completely unrecognizable in Esperon Quigley's eccentric pronunciation. As usual, I paid no attention to what they were discussing, it was no business of mine, I was bored by it a priori and preferred not to know. The rest of the time I was free, and I spent it walking, looking at the River Avon, visiting the Roman baths and a few antique shops, and rereading Jane Austen in a place where she had spent a few years of scant literary productivity, as well as the odd page by William Beckford, who'd shut himself away there for a long time and where he reluctantly lived and died, far from his beloved Fonthill Abbey, which had led him to his ruin. On one of my strolls about the city, I was amazed to come across a shop, a rather average jeweler's, which, implausibly, bore the name of Tupra. It wasn't far from another shop with larger pretensions and which, if memory serves me right, declared itself in its window to be a supplier to the Admiralty (I imagine this referred only to watches, and not to precious stones and glass beads for the navy). When I mentioned this coincidence to Tupra, he replied tartly:

  'Oh, yes, I know. Nothing to do with my family though. No relation at all. None.' This might have been true or totally false, and the watchmaker might have been his father. However, I didn't dare press the matter further.

  Even so, I couldn't resist making a private joke: 'Nevertheless, it would be more appropriate for Tupra's jeweler's shop to be made supplier to the Admiralty rather than that other shop nearby which, I noticed, lays claim to just that. Even if only because of your connections, or, rather, our connections with the former OIC, don't you think?' I remembered what Wheeler had said that Sunday before lunch, in Oxford, when he spoke to me about the difficulties they'd had recruiting the first members of the group, just after it had been formed: 'It was necessary to comb the country for recruits as quickly as possible. Most came from the Secret Services, from the Army, a few from the former OIC, which you've probably never heard of, the Navy's Operational Intelligence Centre, there weren't many of them, but they were very good, possibly the best; and, of course, from our Universities.' And I saw a look of surprise and slight suspicion appear on Tupra's face (as if hearing that old acronym in my mouth—an odd thing for a twenty-first- or even late-twentieth-century Spaniard to know—made him wonder what else I knew and if he had underestimated how much I had learned).

  He also allowed me some free time during the two days we spent in Edinburgh, and there, too, I walked and reread the work of two of that city's finest sons, Conan Doyle and Stevenson, just a few of their stories, and climbed up Calton Hill to see the view which so enthused the latter, and which is still astonishing even after all the time that has passed. I also took away with me a few poems by Stevenson and a little book about the city, subtitled Picturesque Notes and published in 1879 no less. In it he talks about Greyfriars, telling of how, close to this verdant cemetery, from the window of a house since demolished, but whose site was pointed out to him by a grave-digger, the body-snatcher Burke used to keep watch, for he and his mate Hare would disinter the still-fresh bodies from their graves in order to sell them to scientists and anatomists, and had eventually taken to murdering people so as to speed up the process and to prevent business from falling off: 'Burke, the resurrection man,' as Stevenson noted with irony, 'infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green.' Now there, I thought, was a man who lacked the patience to wait for tomorrow's faces to be revealed to him, no, he preferred to sit, smoking, and watch them file past, as they had been yesterday and would be always.

  And on the train journey up to Edinburgh, the two of us alone, I read out to Tupra some lines that Stevenson had written towards the end of his life in the South Seas, in Apemama, lines filled by a strange and yet very real nostalgia for 'our scowling town': 'The belching winter wind, the missile rain, the rare and welcome silence of the snows, the laggard morn, the haggard day, the night, the grimy spell of the nocturnal town, do you remember? Ah, could one forget!' he wrote, genuinely nostalgic for that desolate scene. And further on, he added: 'When the lamp from my expiring eyes shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears, what sound shall come but the old cry of the wind in our inclement city? What return but the image of the emptiness of youth, filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice of discontent and rapture and despair?' Another poem is infused with the same spirit, scorning the warm distant seas he had so diligently sought out and yearning terribly for the 'inclement city' of Edinburgh: 'A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, environs and confines their wandering child in vain. The voice of generations dead summons me, sitting distant, to arise, my numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, and all mutation over, stretch me down in that denoted city of the dead.' And so I read him those lines, in his language of course, in the language of Tupra and of the lines themselves: 'The belching winter wind, the missile rain, the rare and welcome silence of the snows, the laggard morn, the haggard day, the night . . .'

  'Do you think that always happens, Bertram?' I asked; he was sitting opposite me, with him facing the engine and me with my back to it. 'You know a lot about deaths,' I added somewhat cruelly, 'do you think that, in the end, we all turn to that first place, however humble or depressing o
r gloomy it was, however much our life has changed and our affections have been transformed, however many unimaginable fortunes and achievements we have amassed along the way? Do you think that we always look back at our earlier poverty, at the impoverished quarter we grew up in, at the small provincial town or dying village from which we peered out at the rest of the world, and which for so many years it seemed impossible to leave, and that we miss it? They say that the very old remember their childhood most clearly of all and almost shut themselves away in it, mentally I mean, and that they have a sense that everything that happened between that distant time and their present decline, their greeds and their passions, their battles and their setbacks, was all false, an accumulation of distractions and mistakes and of tremendous efforts to achieve things that really weren't important; and they wonder then if everything hasn't been an interminable detour, a pointless voyage, all merely to return to the essence, to the origin, to the only thing that truly counts at the end of the day'—And I thought then: '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, and all those doubts, all that torment?'—'You must know a lot about that, you must have seen many people die. And you can see how it was with Stevenson: he traveled halfway around the world and yet in the end, in Polynesia, there he was thinking only of the city where he was born. Look how this one begins: 'The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, from Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again…'

  'Those are hills close to Edinburgh,' Tupra said, interrupting me as if he were a footnote, and then fell silent again. I waited for him to reply to my questions and for him to add something more. I hadn't read those lines to him purely for pleasure or to pass the time. I had mentioned impoverished quarters and provincial towns trusting that he might take the hint and think of Bethnal Green, if that's where he came from, or of the watchmaker of Bath, if he had spent part of his childhood with him, for example, and that he might tell me a little about them. Tupra, however, as I should have known, only answered the questions he wanted to answer. 'As I remember,' he said after a few seconds, 'Stevenson went to Samoa chiefly for his health's sake, not in search of adventures. Besides, he wasn't old. He died when he was forty-four.'

  'That doesn't matter,' I said. 'When he wrote those poems, he must have known that the end was not far off, and all he could think about, with enormous nostalgia, was the inhospitable city of his childhood. Listen to what he says: "When ... the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears . . ." You see, not even having his wife near will count for much, or so he imagines, in his final consciousness of the world, in his final seconds, only those momentary pictures from the past that "gleam and fade and perish." He set this out clearly in the closing lines: "These shall I remember, and then all forget," that's what he says.'

  Tupra remained thoughtful for a while. I know from experience that no one can resist analyzing texts.

  'How can that be? Read me the bit about insignificant love again.'

  And I did:

  'When ... the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears . . .'

  'Nonsense,' said Tupra, again cutting me off. 'Nonsense. That's not Stevenson at his best. Poetry wasn't his forte really' He fell silent again, as if to underline his verdict, and then, to my surprise, added: 'Read me a bit more, go on.'

  Almost everyone likes being read to. And so I did: 'Far set in fields and woods, the town I see spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagg'd.' And as I read I stole occasional glances at Tupra and saw that he was enjoying it, even though he didn't like Stevenson's poetry. 'There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, my dead, the ready and the strong of word. Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; the sea bombards their founded towers; the night thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers, one after one, here in this grated cell, where the rain erases and the rust consumes, fell upon lasting silence.'

  Who knows, perhaps no one had read to him since he was a child.

  There in Edinburgh, by the Firth of Forth, to the south of Fife, Tupra only required my services on one night, for another supper -aim-celebrities or -aim-buffoons, which was also a supper-omt-Dick Dearlove, that is, the global singer to whom I've chosen to give that name. Fortunately, Tupra did not also oblige me to go to the concert Dearlove was giving at the Festival beforehand, although he did force me to pretend that I'd watched the concert from the first chord to the last with indescribable enthusiasm: 'Remember to mention his fantastic renditions of "Peanuts from Heaven" and the miraculous "Bouncing Bowels," he always comes up with strange new versions, and they sound different every time, even though they're two of his all-time classics,' he warned me, just in case anyone or even Dearlove himself should ask, for Tupra had engineered things so that I would be sitting near the singer. 'On the pretext of entertaining those two compatriots of yours who are often in his entourage now, try to get him talking, even at the risk of appearing nosy and boring, the worst that can happen is that he'll ignore you or change places to avoid you. Talk to him about the tremendous success he enjoys in Spain, but, whatever you do, don't say "especially in the Basque Country": even though that's true, it might offend him, as being too local, too limited. Get his attention, charm him, encourage him to confide in you, draw him out as much as you can on his supposed role as a universal sex symbol wherever he goes, or so he believes. Make him feel flattered and in the mood to boast, invent Spanish people you know who've got the hots for him, who would love to get their hands on his basket, acquaintances of yours, real people, anything to inflame his imagination, any young things you happen to know, your own children perhaps, how old are they, oh no, they're far too young, well, then, your nephews and nieces, whoever, but probe him to see what you can get out of him, he's always exhausted after a performance, but euphoric too, his guard's down, and he's eager to talk, what with all the excitement and the acclaim plus whatever he took before the concert to cope with the whole insane affair, I'm surprised he's lasted this long really, after all these years of supercharged love-fests. He knows me too well, but with a stranger he'll never see again (I don't think he remembers you from last time), with someone like you, he might reveal much more than he would to me or to some other Englishman, he'll feel less vulnerable, besides, stars love to show off to newcomers, they're always in need of a fresh influx of the easily impressed. With luck he'll describe an affair he's had, some striking sexual triumph, some exploit, anyway, that's the route you need to pursue, even if it seems impertinent—as I say, the worst that can happen is that he'll turn his back on you and refuse to take the bait. Let's see if we can get some confirmation, a clearer idea, of just how capable he is or would be of endangering the way people see him and his life, to what extent he would risk exposing himself to that narrative horror of yours and end up swelling the ranks of the Kennedy-Mansfield fraternity, from which there is no possible escape.' That's how Tupra often spoke, especially when he was giving us instructions or asking us to do something, with that mixture of colloquialisms and old-fashioned turns of phrase, some peculiar to him alone, as if he brought together in his speech his probable origins in some slum and his undoubted Oxford education as a medievalist under the tutelage of Toby Rylands, of which I frequently had to remind myself, or was it just that the figure of Toby was gradually fading from my mind, absorbed by that of his brother Peter, sometimes the living do incorporate or embrace or superimpose themselves on the dead to whom they were close, and even cancel them out.

  I felt that what Tupra was asking was an impossible enterprise: to get Dick Dearlove to talk to me in those terms, and about such things, much less with other people around, at a supper for twenty or more guests, all gazing at him reverently. Nevertheless, I had a go; Tupra was determined that I sho
uld get results. He placed me almost opposite the idol, and while the people on either side tried to capture his attention through flattery, I managed to slip in a few remarks that aroused his curiosity, more because of their peculiarly Spanish nature than because of me.