Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  Then I strode quickly into the room and spoke. I walked into the office and said confidently, almost jovially:

  'So, how are you doing, Rafita? I can see you've made an excellent recovery.' And I added at once, so that he would see I was keen to keep up appearances and that my intentions were not violent or aggressive. 'Forgive me bursting in like this. Won't you introduce me?' And I went straight over to Professor Rico, who made not the slightest effort to get up, but merely held out one hand to me, the way grand ladies used to do, reaching out as far as he could without actually moving, he had a most distinguished hand and a most elegant shirt-cuff, by Cupri or Sensatini at the very least, excellent brands, I shook it warmly (his hand that is). And since De la Garza still did not respond or utter a word (he just stared at me, terrified, so afraid that he didn't even stop me approaching Rico, in fact, he wouldn't have stopped me doing anything, I could, I realized, do what I liked), I introduced myself: 'Jacques Deza, Jacobo Deza. You're Don Francisco Rico, aren't you? The celebrated scholar.'

  It pleased him to be recognized and he deigned to answer, doubtless for that reason alone, for his general attitude revealed no actual interest (whoever I might be, I was, after all, already stigmatized as someone he associated with that rapper-attaché).

  'Deza, Deza . . . Aren't you a friend or acquaintance or student ... or, er, whatever ... of Sir Peter Wheeler? Your name rings a bell.' Both men were great scholarly figures, and I was aware that they knew and admired each other.

  'Yes, I'm a very good friend of his, Professor.'

  'I knew the name rang a bell. I recognized it. He must have mentioned you to me once, although I've no idea why. But it definitely rang a bell,' he said, pleased with his own retentive memory.

  De la Garza wasn't listening to this superficial exchange. He had moved away from me and was now standing behind his desk as if his desk would protect him and so that he could run away if necessary.

  'What the fuck do you want?' he asked suddenly, but despite the expletive, his tone was neither hostile nor ill-tempered, but imploring, as if all he wanted was for me to magically disappear (for the terrible vision, the bad dream to go away) and wishing with all his might that I would reply: 'I'm off now. I don't want anything. I was never here.'

  'Nothing, Rafita, I just wanted to reassure myself that you'd recovered from your accident, that there weren't any aftereffects. I happened to be passing and it occurred to me to pop in and ask you, I've been worried. It's a purely friendly visit, I won't stay long, so don't get uptight about it. So, are you all right? Completely better? I'm really sorry about what happened, I mean it.'

  'What happened? What accident?' asked Rico skeptically

  'Having seen what I've seen and heard what I've heard, no accident could possibly be serious enough,' he added under his breath, but perfectly audibly.

  Rafita, however, paid no attention to this harsh comment, he had relegated the Professor and his annoyance to the background, he was too preoccupied with me, alert and tense, as if he feared that at any moment, I would leap at his throat like a tiger. This was an odd sensation for me, almost amusing at first, because I knew myself to be incapable of harming him and had no wish to do so. J knew that, but he did not and contrary to what teachers believe, knowledge is not transmissible; one can only persuade. I found the gulf between his perception and my knowledge almost funny, and yet, at the same time, it was distressing to have someone see me that way, as a danger, as someone threatening and violent. De la Garza was almost beside himself, on tenterhooks.

  'Believe me, I just wanted to find out how you are,' I said, trying to calm him, convince him. 'I know you made a real nuisance of yourself and really put your foot in it, but I certainly didn't expect my boss to react like that, and I'm sorry. It took me completely by surprise and was totally disproportionate. I had no idea what he was planning and could do nothing to avoid it.'

  'What boss? Sir Peter, you mean? I'm completely lost, what are you talking about, élgar. If he did turn nasty, I'm not surprised, Sir Peter's far too old for such imbecilities.' Rico returned to the charge, not so much because the matter interested him, but because he was bored. He appeared to be the sort of man who cannot bear his brain to be inactive for a moment, because if you don't understand something immediately, you soon will if you wait, but such waiting is unbearable for people who are constantly thinking. That 'élgar' denoted a need to know.

  'Look, go away, just go away,' said the nincompoop childishly. He took no notice of what I was saying, he wouldn't listen to reason, he probably hadn't even heard me. He'd lost his nerve completely and so very quickly that it reaffirmed me in my view that Tupra and I must often have strolled through his nightmares, in which we were probably inseparable. 'Please leave, I beg you, leave me alone, shit, what more do you want, I haven't said anything, I haven't told anyone the truth, surely that's enough.'

  Rico lit another cigarette, having realized that this obscure conflict was a matter exclusively and perhaps pathologically between De la Garza and me, and that he was not going to glean anything more. He made a dismissive gesture, indicating that he was happy to abandon any further attempts at clarification, and he gave vent to one more of his varied repertoire of onomatopoeia.

  'Esh,' he said. It sounded to me exactly like: 'To hell with these two idiots, I'm going to think my own thoughts and not waste any more time on them.'

  I saw how shaken Rafita was—his clenched fists still held close to his body (not as a weapon, but as a shield), his eyes wild, his breathing agitated—gripped by a panic that he was now reliving and which he had perhaps been dreading for months, he had also developed an intermittent cough, which, when the fit took him, proved uncontrollable. That cloud of perpetual fear would last for some time yet, it wouldn't be quick to clear. He must have suffered greatly that night, because one is always instantly aware when there is any real danger of death, even if, in the end, it turns out to be something that merely frightened one half to death. It was pointless trying to talk to him. I wondered what state he would have been in if it had been Reresby and not me who had appeared unexpectedly at the door of his office. He would have fainted, had a seizure, a heart attack. I had gone there out of consideration for him (insofar as that was possible), and there was no sense in making him suffer further with my continued presence. On the other hand, I could leave with a clear conscience. He looked fine physically. He might still suffer some pain or other damage, but he had, on the whole, fully recovered. His present and future feelings of insecurity were, however, quite another thing, and they would stay with him for a long time. He would feel uncomfortable in the world, with the added inconvenience of fear and a permanent sense of unease. Not that this would prevent him spouting nonsense, but it would have dealt a fatal blow to his sense of pride at its deepest level.

  'Anyway, I'll go now, so don't upset yourself. I can see that you're fine, although not perhaps at this precise moment. It's my fault, I suppose. You seemed in pretty good form while you were singing your rhyming couplets. I'll come and see you again some other time.' I realized that these last innocent words had terrified him still more. From his point of view it was the equivalent of a threat. I let it go, however, I didn't try to put him right, he wouldn't have listened, and I didn't really care. In a moment of weakness and guilt I had chosen to visit him and had paid the price for both weakness and guilt. 'Goodbye, Professor. It's been an honor to meet you. I'm only sorry it was so brief and so . . . odd.'

  'Everything about young De la Garza is odd,' he said scornfully, playing down the importance of the episode, he had probably seen worse; and he stood up, not in order to shake my hand, but to leave. His anger had passed, the situation had nothing to do with him, and his mind was already wandering pastures new. 'Wait, I'm leaving too. I'll see you this evening, Rafita. I doubt I'll have the good fortune of you missing my lecture.'

  And there we left De la Garza, still barricaded behind his desk, not daring even to sit down. He didn't say goodbye, he obvi
ously still wasn't capable of articulating any civilized words. And while we, the Professor and I, walked back along those slightly labyrinthine corridors towards the exit, I couldn't help at least attempting an apology:

  'You see we had a bit of a falling-out and he still hasn't got over it.'

  'No,' he said. 'You should feel very pleased with yourself: you had him scared shitless. You're lucky you can keep him at arm's length like that. He's terribly clinging. I'm vaguely friendly with his father, which is why I put up with the son. Only from time to time, fortunately, and only when I come to London for one of these dull official dos.'

  Once we were out in the street and we went our separate ways, I noticed (strangely enough, I hadn't noticed before) that Rafita's fear had cast me in a rather flattering light. Imposing respect, instilling fear, seeing oneself as a danger had its pleasurable side. It made one feel more confident, more optimistic, stronger. It made one feel important and—how can I put it—masterful. But before I hailed a taxi, there was time for me to find this unexpected vanity repugnant too. Not that the latter feeling drove out conceit, they lived alongside each other. The two things were mingled, until they dissipated and were forgotten.

  When you haven't been back for some time to a place you know well, even if it's the city you were born in, the city to which you're most accustomed, where you've lived for the longest time and which is still home to your children and your father and your siblings and home even to the love that stood firm for many years (even if that place is as familiar to you as the air you breathe), there comes a moment when it begins to fade and your recollection of it dims, as if your memory were suddenly afflicted by myopia and—how can I put it—by cinematography: the different eras become juxtaposed and you start to feel unsure as to which of those cities you left or departed from when you last set off, the city of your childhood or your youth or the city of your manhood or maturity, when where you live dwindles in importance, and, hard though it is to admit, the truth is you'd be happy enough with your own little corner almost anywhere in the world.

  That's how I'd come to see Madrid during my now prolonged absence: faded and dim, accumulative, oscillating, a stage-set that concerned me very little despite having invested so much in it—so much of my past and so much of my present, albeit at a distance—and, more to the point, one that could get along without me quite happily (it had, after all, dismissed me, expelled me from its modest production). Of course any city can do without anyone, we're not essential anywhere, not even to the few people who say they miss our presence or claim they couldn't live without us, because everyone seeks substitutes and, sooner or later, finds them, or else ends up resigned to our absence and feels so comfortable in that mood of resignation that they no longer wish to introduce any changes, not even to allow the lost or much-mourned person to return, not even to take us in again . . . Who knows who will replace us, we know only that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in every role, and the void or gap we believed we left or really did leave is of no importance, regardless of how we disappeared or died, whether far too young or after a long life, whether violently or peacefully: it's the same with love and friendship, with work and influence, with machinations and with fear, with domination and even longing itself, with hatred, which also wearies of us in the end, and with the desire for vengeance, which darkens and changes its objective when it lingers and delays, as Tupra had urged me not to do; with the houses we inhabit, with the rooms we grew up in and the cities that accept us, with the corridors we raced madly along as children and the windows we gazed dreamily out of as adolescents, with the telephones that persuade and patiently listen to us and laugh in our ear or murmur agreement, at work and at play, in shops and in offices, at our counters and our desks, playing card games or chess, with the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and with the streets that grow exhausted from seeing so many fade away, generation after generation, all meeting the same sad end; with restaurants and walks and pleasant parks and fields, on balconies and belvederes from which we watched the passing of so many moons they grew bored with looking at us, and with our armchairs and chairs and sheets, until not a trace, not a vestige of our smell remains and they're torn up to make rags or cloths, and even our kisses are replaced and the person left behind closes her eyes when she kisses the easier to forget us (if the pillow is still the same, or so that we don't reappear in some sudden, treacherous, irrepressible mental vision); with memories and thoughts and daydreams and with everything, and so we are all of us like snow on shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops . . .

  It had been some time since I visited Madrid, from which I, too, had evaporated or faded, leaving not a trace behind or so it seemed, or perhaps all that remained of me was the rim, (which is the part that takes longest to remove), and also my own first name, which I had not yet left behind me, not having yet reached that state of strangeness. I hadn't ceased to exist, of course, in my father's house, not there, but I wasn't referring to his home, but to the home that was once mine. And now I would perhaps find out who had replaced me, even if he was only temporary and had no intention of staying, the permanent replacement takes his time or patiently awaits his turn, the one who will truly replace us always hangs back and lets others go ahead to be burned on the pyre that Luisa one day lit for us and which continues to burn, consuming all who come near, and which does not automatically extinguish itself once we've been burned to a cinder. I wouldn't need to worry that much about whoever happened to be by her side now, or only a little, just a touch, because of the mere fact that he was by her side and by the side of my children too.

  I had decided not to give them prior warning from London, but to wait until I arrived, so that my phone call could be followed immediately by a semi-surprise visit. I wanted to make sure they were home—I knew the hours they kept, but there are always exceptions and emergencies—and then turn up a few minutes later, full of smiles and laden with presents. To see the children's excitement and, out of the corner of my eye, Luisa's amused, perhaps briefly nostalgic expression, that would allow me a simulacrum of triumph and a flicker of illusory hope, enough perhaps to sustain me during that artificial two-week sojourn, which seemed to me far too long the moment the plane touched down.

  I stayed at a hotel and not at my father's house, for I had learned from my brothers and my sister—rather than from him, for he never spoke about his problems—that his health had deteriorated badly over the last two months, after the doctors discovered that he'd had three mini-strokes—as they called them—of which he had been entirely unaware, not even knowing when they'd occurred; and although my brothers, my sister, some of his grand-daughters and my sisters-in-law often dropped in to see him, there had, in the end, been no alternative but to provide him with a live-in caregiver, a rather nice Colombian lady, who slept in the bedroom I would have occupied, and who relieved his maid, who was getting on in years now, of some of her tasks. I didn't want to upset the new order with my presence. With my current salary, I could easily afford the Palace Hotel, and so I booked a suite there. It was easier for me to stay at a hotel than in someone else's house, even that of my father or of my best friends, male and female, the women being rather more hospitable: with them I would not only have felt like an intruder but also an exile from my own home, whereas in a hotel, I could pretend I was a visiting foreigner, although not a tourist, and feel less acutely that unpleasant sense of having been repudiated and then offered shelter.

  I spoke to my father on the phone, as usual a brief conversation, although now he didn't have the excuse that I was calling him from England, which he assumed must be a very expensive thing to do (he belonged to a thrifty generation who only used the phone to give or receive messages, although Wheeler wasn't like that, so perhaps it was a generation that existed only in Spain), and I arranged to see him the next day. His voice sounded normal, just as it had on the last few occasions when I had called from London, I phoned him every week
or even more frequently sometimes; he sounded slightly tired, but no more than that, and disliked having to hold the phone to his ear for too long. The strange thing was, though, that he made no fuss about the prospect of seeing me and expressed no excitement, as if we had seen each other only a couple of days before, if not yesterday. It was as if he suddenly had little sense of time or its passing, and kept those people closest to him, those he knew best, always in his thoughts, either so as not to miss them quite so much, their palpable presence I mean, or so as not really to notice their absence. I was simply me, one of his children, and therefore unchanging and sufficiently established in his mind for him not to feel my physical absence or my distance or the unusually long gaps between visits or, rather, the non-existence of those visits. He hardly went out now. 'I've flown over from London, Papa,' I said, 'I'll be here for a couple of weeks."Good. And how are things?' he asked, showing no particular surprise. 'Oh, not too bad. But we'll have a proper talk tomorrow when I come and see you. Today, I want to go and see the kids. I probably won't even recognize them."They were here a few days ago with their mother. She doesn't visit that often, but she comes when she can. And she phones me.' Luisa was not as fixed and stable as I was, which is why he could remember when she came to see him and when she didn't—she was, up to a point, still new to him. 'She must be incredibly busy,' I said as if she were still part of my life and I had to apologize for her. I knew there was no need, she was very fond of my father, and, besides, her own father had died a few years before, and she had, insofar as such a thing is possible, replaced that lost figure with my father. If she didn't go and see him more often, it must be because she really couldn't find the time. 'Was she looking pretty?' I asked stupidly. 'Luisa is always pretty. Why do you ask? You must see her more than I do.' He knew about our separation, I hadn't hidden it from him, as one does occasionally hide potentially upsetting news from the elderly. 'I'm living in England now, Papa,' I reminded him, 'and I haven't seen her for a while.' He said nothing for a moment, then: 'I know you're living in England. Well, if that's what you want. I hope your stay in Oxford is proving fruitful.' It wasn't that he didn't know I was living in London, but now and then he got the different times confused, which isn't that surprising really, since time is a continuum in which we are all caught up until we apparently cease to be.