Your Face Tomorrow 2

by Javier Marías

  Or, rather, when I think about it, it isn't so very hard: such fears are not unknown to me either, I suppose. Such feelings are felt not only by women, but probably by anyone who suffers some setback late in life or experiences a first real sense of weariness, I myself believe I feel it every day, that fear or some inkling of it, especially in this foreign time in which I am without a partner and a little alone here in London, not greatly alone, as Wheeler believes, only a little and only sometimes; 'But women recognise it, they confront it without ennobling it or looking for some meaning in it, while we men, most men, think of it with a more deliberate and therefore somewhat phoney bleakness, our way of thinking being both sadder and more definitive, but, on the other hand, we thus manage not to see ourselves as either frivolous or fearful of solitude — which is incidental — nor of the loss of love — which is fundamental, but, at the same time, insignificant.' And so we ask ourselves, in order not to blush: 'And how much longer until I die?' I listened more closely because it seemed to me that the music was clearer now, they must have turned the volume up, and when I looked again — really looked this time, rather than while absorbed in thought - I saw that the three of them had finally begun their much-discussed dance. It was an elegant dance, they weren't jumping or running around, instead, they were taking short and, how can I put it, sinuous and, yes, synchronised steps, the same steps at the same time, all the movement was in their feet and hips, heads nodding in time, arms accompanying those movements only lightly and minimally, slightly bent and held out to the side, as if each pair of hands were holding an open newspaper. They, the trio, travelled swiftly across the floor, but the impression they gave with their tightly controlled steps was that each of them maintained their position, as if their respective positions or allotted areas of floor moved with them, and each of them were stepping always on the same boards; I said to myself — or perhaps it was because I could hear more clearly now, in the distance — that they must be dancing to some Henry Mancini tune, it could be the famous 'Peter Gunn', hardly anyone remembers now that it was originally written as the theme tune for an old TV detective series, I don't know if it was ever shown in Spain, I think it was on in the 1950's (that is, almost prehistoric) and, of course, in black and white, but the music has not aged and has gone on to become an elegant modern-dance classic, assuming people know how to dance it elegantly, as these three did. Otherwise, it might be the beginning of the soundtrack to Touch of Evil, a film from the same period made by Orson Welles, in which Charlton Heston, no less, played a Mexican, it was astonishing that anyone could possibly believe he was a Mexican however large the moustache he sported from the first frame to the last, but people did. But that music is much less famous, and so I decided it must be 'Peter Gunn'. There are a few essential pieces of music that always travel with me if I'm well prepared (I wasn't when I left Madrid, I brought very little with me) or which I buy again if I'm staying in a country for any length of time, and among them are three or four pieces by Mancini because they almost infallibly cheer up even the gloomiest of days, and so I got it out and programmed the machine to repeat the first track, which is what the three people opposite must have done (the track lasts only two minutes and their dance was going on for much longer than that), and I played it in my apartment, as I had with other melodies on other occasions when I thought I could guess the music my dancing neighbour was dancing to, partly to amuse myself, partly to save him from the ridiculous fate of flailing around and moving and making absurd leaps before a spectator who cannot hear the music provoking them, who hears nothing, not that he would care anyway, for he was oblivious to the fact that he had any spectators, but one should show even more respect than normal to those who cannot demand it.

  'Luisa's interest may mean,' I thought, 'that she hasn't been out much lately and hasn't received any stimulating visitors, that she hasn't got much to do, and this in turn may — just possibly — mean that she has not as yet entirely replaced me, otherwise she would have some distraction or would nurture some small, more or less daily hope, even if it was only a phone conversation with one particular person at the end of the day, if, for whatever reason, it wasn't easy for them to see each other — I don't know — perhaps because of his wife or his children, or our children. I realise that this is a baseless deduction to make, without foundation. But it may perhaps mean, at least, that no one has as yet entered her life to the extent that he has also gained access to the apartment, I mean not on a daily basis and not frequently enough for her to expect it, or for her not to be surprised if he turns up without warning, simply phoning from downstairs and saying "Luisa, it's me, I'm here, open the door", as if "me" were his unmistakable name, and for her, moreover, to be glad if he should decide to appear there as night falls or as evening comes on. No, he cannot yet have arrived, the flattering, sibylline man, diligent and even hard-working to begin with, the one who wants to help with supper and take down the rubbish and put the children to bed in order to seem - how can I put it -domestic, and then gradually move in on a permanent basis, restricting himself to filling a gap and trying not to upset whatever arrangements he already finds there. Nor has that other fellow, the jolly, laid-back one, the restless type who is terrified of leaving the landing and coming inside, of going in and meeting my children or even catching a glimpse of them in their pyjamas from his position at the front door, where he stands leaning while he waits for Luisa to finish giving instructions to the babysitter before she can finally leave to go out partying, the one who hopes, little by little, to remove her from there, night after night to lure her away or, by force of habit, to distance her from all that, so that she can then follow him everywhere and in everything, without ties. Nor has this third type as yet entered the apartment, the one who pretends infatuation, the weak tyrant in disguise, who will gradually isolate her from the external world with his melodramatics and his guile, in order to enclose her and keep her to himself, with only him as final horizon, the one who plays the poor sap in order, later, to possess and dominate her totally, the one who always finds a justification for his deep feelings and his intense suffering and who, in that respect, is like almost everyone else, so many people believe that strong feelings or, indeed, suffering and torment, make them good, deserving individuals and even give them rights, and that they should be compensated for these feelings incessantly and indefinitely, even by those who did not arouse the feeling or cause the suffering, who had nothing whatsoever to do with either, because, as far as they're concerned, the whole earth is always in their debt, and they never stop to think that one chooses a feeling or, at the very least, agrees to it, and that it is almost never imposed on one, nor is fate necessarily involved; nor do they think that you are as responsible for your feelings as you are for whomever you fall in love with, contrary to the general belief which, over the centuries, declares and tirelessly repeats the old fallacy: "I can't help it, it's not in my power to stop it", and that merely exclaiming "But I love you so much" as an explanation for one's actions, as an alibi or an excuse, should always be met with the words that few dare to utter even though it is the only fair response when love is unrequited and, perhaps, when it is requited too: "So what, that's got nothing to do with me." And that sometimes - yes, it's true — even unhappiness is an invention. No, no one is obliged to concern themselves about the love someone else feels for them, still less about their depression or their spite, and yet we demand attention, understanding, pity and even impunity for something that concerns only the person who has those feelings, "It's understandable really," we say, "he's having a really hard time at the moment, that's why he's being so horrible to everyone," or "He's really hurt, he's at odds with the world because his heart is broken, he just can't live without her," as if not loving someone or ceasing to love them were an attack on the person who does love or continues to love, a plot or a reprisal, a desire to harm them, which it never is. So I can't really complain, indeed I mustn't: when Luisa wanted me by her side, I benefited from a grace tha
t she renewed in me each day, just as I renewed in her an equal amount of grace; and if, one morning, that grace was no longer confirmed, there was no question of my throwing it in her face or seeing it as a wilful act of hostility or even dislike - that never even occurred to me -what I felt was more a sense of surrender, and great sorrow. Nor was there any question of appealing to those despicable modern notions which meddling laws use to protect the millions of opportunists who nowadays travel and populate every path and field of life: acquired rights, the years invested, cherished plans, force of habit or custom, standard of living reached, the future on which we were counting and the amount of love given, everything becomes measurable. And then, of course, there are the children born and the contracts signed. Or those not signed, but only verbal. Or those that were not even verbal, but merely implicit, those outrageous implicit contracts which, according to our pusillanimous world, the mere passing of time prepares and draws up behind our backs and even takes it upon itself to sign, as if time could ever be accumulative, when, in fact, it begins again from zero with each dawn and even with each moment... I suddenly felt lighter, possibly for the first time since - two nights before — I had got up from the table occupied by Manoia and Tupra at the disco to carry out the latter's orders and go in search of De la Garza and Flavia, I had stood up and pushed back my chair with an instantaneous, overwhelming feeling of heaviness, of unease and foreboding, the pinprick in the chest and the sense of impending doom, all of which was emanating from Tupra rather than from myself, as if just by issuing that order he had transferred to me the caught breath or feigned breathlessness of someone about to deal a blow, or as if he had poured lead into my awakened soul and thus plunged it into sleep, and it had not left me since, that heaviness which I had sensed beforehand and experienced afterwards, that burden which had been growing in me hour upon hour, so much so that I had asked myself over and over, during the forty-eight hours that had passed so slowly (no, not even forty-eight hours), if I should resign and leave, give up, abandon that very attractive and comfortable job in the building with no name, working for the group with no name which, more than sixty years before, had been created by Sir Stewart Menzies or Ve-Ve Vivian or Cowgill or Hollis, or even the celebrated traitor Kim Philby or the loyal Winston Churchill himself, little would remain of them and of the mettle or intention or courage with which they conceived it; or perhaps that mettle and that courage have survived without diminution, and it is simply that the group was, at its foundation, as radical and unforgiving as it had seemed to be since the day before yesterday or as I sensed it was only two nights ago: perhaps all of them, the original group as a whole, including Peter Wheeler and his younger brother Toby Rylands, carried their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance had led them at last to their fulfilment. Perhaps those circumstances and temptations, perhaps that undesired time, had arrived now, only a short while ago, when most of them continued to live on only in their disciples and heirs (Tupra, for example, was Rylands's heir), in the recent empty years of disintegration and apathy, or of compromise and confusion, orphanhood and idleness, for those private private individuals, as young Pérez Nuix had called them when she was telling me about them and describing them to me on that night of eternal rain when she visited me with her dog, having trailed me for far too long. Those circumstances and temptations had simply coincided with my arrival on the scene, that was all. Or they had, perhaps, merely proved more enduring. Pure chance, nobody's fault; not mine, that's for sure, not at all. Perhaps everything that had happened, everything I had seen and heard, at the disco and later on at Tupra's house, in reality and on screen, was not yet reason enough for me to withdraw or to leave.

  I realised that I felt lighter, in part thanks to the music, to 'Peter Gunn' which never fails and works in all situations, and at the same instant I saw that it was also - or even more so -thanks to the dance into which I had unconsciously slipped, doubtless in instinctive, mechanical, almost unthinking imitation of the three carefree individuals on the other side of the square: sometimes your feet move of their own accord, or as we say in Spanish with more metaphorical exactitude, cobran vida, they take on a life of their own, they just won't keep still, and you barely notice. I had started dancing, it was incredible, there I was alone in the house, as if I were no longer me, but my agile, athletic neighbour with the bony features and neat moustache, a clear case of visual and auditory contagion, of mimesis, encouraged, in fact, by my own musings. I found myself (in a manner of speaking) moving around my living room, which was encumbered with furniture and much smaller than the one opposite, taking short, quick steps, although whether or not they were sinuous, I don't know, furiously jiggling feet and hips and with my head keeping time, my arms accompanying these movements only lightly and minimally, slightly bent and held out to the side, and in my hands an open newspaper which, of course, I wasn't reading, I had picked it up, I suppose, to provide an element of balance required by the dance. And then I felt embarrassed, because when I turned to look properly at the original dancers, when I looked again - really looked this time, rather than while absorbed in my own thoughts -I had to assume that they, in turn, had heard my music during a brief pause in theirs - my window was open as were two of theirs -and they would have located me without difficulty, by tracing where the music was coming from; and, of course, they were amused to see me (the watchman watched, the hunter hunted, the spy spied upon, the dancer caught dancing), because now not only were the four of us dancing absurdly and wildly according to their choreography, there had been another contagion too, from me to them: they must have found my idea ingenious or imaginative, and so each of them was now holding an open newspaper, as if they were dancing with the pages, with the newspaper as partner.

  I stopped at once, I felt my face grow hot, fortunately, given the distance, they would not be able to see that, they weren't using binoculars as I occasionally did to spy on their dance studio. They too immediately stopped, they came over to the windows and signalled to me, waving, in fact they made explicit gestures to me to go over there and join them, to go to their apartment and not dance alone any more, but to form part of a jolly quartet. That made me feel even more embarrassed: I slammed the window shut, stepped back, switched off the light and turned the music down. I made myself invisible, inaudible. From now on, it would not — alas — be so easy for me to watch them or, rather, him, since, more often than not, he was alone. But it made me smile too, and I saw that it had one advantage: I thought that if ever a day or night should seem so desolate that even one of those infallible Mancini melodies, or another of those tunes that had the same effect, should prove incapable of raising my spirits, I at least had the possibility of going in search of company and dancing on the other side of the square, in that happy, carefree household whose occupant resisted all my deductions and conjectures, and inhibited or eluded my interpretative faculties, something that happened so infrequently that it bestowed on him a slight air of mystery. The prospect of a hypothetical visit, of his possible or future support, made me feel lighter still. I picked up my racing binoculars and looked across at them from behind the window, safe inside, safe from their eyes, and it seemed to me, judging from the way they were moving, that they had changed the music (they had gone back to their own dance, after my eclipse and flight), and so I altered the track on my machine as well and replaced it with a tune from Touch of Evil called 'Background for Murder', not as sombre as its title would suggest. But I made a mistake when trying to programme it in the dark or lit only by the thrifty light of the lunar street-lamps, and in its place another unexpected and entirely different tune began to play, it wasn't jazz this time, but a pianola, 'Tana's Theme' by name, as I later saw on the back of the disc, a tune I barely remembered from the soundtrack and from the film (I had a still fuzzier memory of the film, I should buy myself a DVD player without delay, in London I hardly ever went to the cinema), although gradually, through those notes so like a hurdy-gurdy, emerging from
the mists, came the figure of a mature Marlene Dietrich with black hair, dressed as a fortune-teller or something of the sort, also playing the role — even more improbably, and yet one believed in her too - of a Mexican woman I suppose, or perhaps a stateless gypsy in the eponymous frontier town of Tana.

  It was a melancholy tune, difficult to dance to on your own, a valedictory melody, and bore no relation — indeed it was utterly incongruous — to the long strides and leaps my neighbours were performing over there in the distance, although I could see them close to through my lenses. However, I let the music play, I stood listening to it; hurdy-gurdies always bring back memories of childhood, they were common in the Madrid of the time, you still occasionally see one now, but it's not the same, they're not part of the natural landscape, but an intentional lure for tourists; and hearing the hurdy-gurdy music which I had accidentally programmed on my CD player, which was repeating slowly and calmly over and over (as if it really were a pianola, whose keys move on their own, as if played by ghostly fingers), images of those childhood streets appeared before me, Geneva and Covarrubias and Miguel Angel, the image of four children walking along those streets with an old maidservant or with my young living mother (both of them now ghosts), my siblings and me, three boys and a girl, she by my side, holding my hand, she was the youngest and I was the second youngest, and that had doubtless drawn us together.