Your Face Tomorrow 2

by Javier Marías

  'It seems odd that it should be the same life,' I thought. 'It seems odd that I should be one and the same, that boy with his three siblings and this man sitting in the half-darkness, with his own distant children whom he never now sees, a little alone here in London.' 'How can I be the same man?' Wheeler had wondered out loud in the garden of his house beside the river, just before lunch on that Sunday. How could that old man — he said to himself and to me - be the man who was married to a very young girl who had stayed forever young because she had died when she was still that age? Peter had preferred to leave the story for another day ('How did your wife die, what did she die of?' was my question), doubtless a day that would never arrive, at least not on earth but, with any luck, on Judgement Day, if that ever took place: it was clear that he found it hard to talk about her, or preferred not to. I, on the other hand, could still recognise myself as the man who married Luisa, on my return from my stay in England, and which I now had to call my first stay, the wedding took place not long afterwards. Years had passed, but not so very many, and unlike what had happened to Wheeler with his wife Val or Valerie, Luisa had kept me company through almost all the days of my slow ageing, at least until my expulsion and exile. I realised that my lightness that night was due less to the music or to my unpremeditated dance than to the whole of my conversation with her, especially the latter part, with that optimistic suspicion of mine, possibly without foundation, that no-one had yet entered her life, not fully, and had not therefore yet installed himself in my house to rest his head on my pillow and to occupy all those places that had once been mine.

  'Perhaps I should hang on to this job for a while longer, despite everything, despite Pérez Nuix, despite Tupra,' I thought as I began to doze off, sitting in my chair again, still dressed, my binoculars on my lap, in almost total darkness, lulled by the hurdy-gurdy or pianola which was playing out its melody in a series of endless farewells (Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, laughter and farewell, insults), convinced that I would at last enjoy a night without insomnia or unpleasant surprises, without any crushing nightmares, without that sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. 'That was her advice to me, that I should hang on to this job about which she knows nothing, absolutely nothing. It wasn't because of how much I earn, she wasn't serious about that, and I do send her more than I need to, as she said with her usual honesty, she hasn't changed now that she's alone. But it's good that they're living in the lap of luxury, or nearly, that's what she said, it pleases me to be able to make that possible, although she's probably exaggerating, and it's all thanks to this job of which there is still more to come, there is always something, just a bit more, and so why not continue, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and dreams (but afterwards there is always pain and the sword, and days and weeks and months and possibly years will have passed). What happened the night before last, what I saw and heard, is already beginning to grow blurred on this other night and will doubtless fade with the passing of the days, thanks to our ability to erase all things, we have an enormous capacity for that, as we do for temporary denial and transitory forgetting, and it will end up perhaps like the drop of blood at the top of the stairs, which I can no longer swear that I saw because by cleaning it up so very thoroughly, I opened the way to doubt, however contradictory that may seem: if I know I got rid of it, how can I doubt it; and yet that is how it is, you erase or delete something and what was erased or deleted no longer exists; and if it no longer exists, how can you be sure that it did actually once exist or if it never existed at all; when something disappears without leaving a rim or a trace, or someone vanishes without leaving a corpse, then it is possible to doubt their actual existence, even an existence that happened and had witnesses. It is therefore possible to doubt the existence of my uncle Alfonso, of whom my mother found only a photo of him dead, which I still have, but not his body. It's possible therefore to doubt that of Andres Nin, for no one knows where he is buried or, indeed, if he was buried (perhaps in a little inner garden in the palace of El Pardo, and there, for thirty-six years, his bones would shudder whenever they felt the leisurely steps of his enemy above his anonymous or, rather, unrecorded grave). It's possible to doubt the existence of Valerie Wheeler, who, as far as I am concerned, has neither death nor life if no one tells me about them, she's just a name and might well be an invention and perhaps it would be better if she were (and maybe that's why her eternal widower gave me that warning: "One should never tell anyone anything"). What happened the night before last, and in which I participated, in this country which for me will one day revert to being "other", will become increasingly hazy, unreal, especially if it doesn't happen again or if I don't tell anyone else and don't keep thinking about it, then it will come to be remembered as, at most, a bad dream, and after every dream in which some appalling or violent act occurs, caused by me or which I did nothing to prevent, I can always say: "I didn't want it, that wasn't my intention, I took no part, it had nothing to do with me, I didn't choose it, what can I do about it..." That is what the dreamer thinks and what we all think, and who, from time to time, hasn't done the same? While the illusion lasts, we are safe, and it isn't a question of truncating the illusion, but, rather, of allowing it to have its full time to be believed.'

  Suddenly — no, that isn't true, it took me a while to realise — I saw that the lights opposite, the dancers' lights, had gone out and the windows were now closed. They had, at some point, brought the session to an end, while I was drowsing or dozing to the sound of 'Tana's Theme', the pianola would not stop until I made it do so with my remote control, if not; it would never cease saying goodbye (Farewell, dear, delightful friends, for I am dying; I will not see you again, nor will you see me; and farewell, passion, farewell, memories). I had not been aware of what was going on outside, I had not gone back over to the window to see who came out, which of the two women, if one or both or neither, I could still peer out now and see if a bike was parked there, but if there wasn't, it wouldn't mean anything anyway, its owner might not have brought it tonight, she might have come by bus, Underground or taxi, there's no reason why what happens once should necessarily happen again, although we have the foolish tendency to believe otherwise, especially if what happens pleases us; and if there was a bike there, it wouldn't mean anything either, since it could belong to anyone. It really didn't matter to me at all, I wasn't going to go out and scan the square, all I cared about, at least a little, was who did or did not leave my house, that is, Luisa's and the children's house in far-off Madrid, or who did or did not enter it, and who stayed; and that was something I could not see, the eyes of the mind were not enough, they have limits. 'It's none of my business, I should get used to the idea once and for all,' I thought. 'Just as it's none of my business how Luisa spends my unnecessary money, the "excessive amount" I send without her asking me to, she knows what asking entails, for both parties involved, and now that we're no longer together, she prefers to wait and to avoid asking: nor is it my business if she succumbs to the same temptation as her female acquaintances and friends, deciding not to run the risk of ending up a pariah or one of the careless, and not wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow to have some treatment or other were she to want to, and submit herself to incisions and implants or to plump herself up like Mrs Manoia with those vile Botox injections if that makes her happy, although I can't see her taking that route, not yet, not the person I left behind, the person I know, she can't have changed that much, not enough to betray her own face; anyway, I probably should hang on to this job, so as to continue earning what I earn now and even a bit more, to defray or cover the costs of any more serious needs or emergencies, although it's no longer my role to try and protect her or try and make her happy, but how do you free yourself of that tendency, that habit; how do you expunge it from your thoughts?' I pressed the remote-control button and silenced the hurdy-gurdy or pianola, it was high time, I had got carried away, I had opened myself up too much to evocations, al
though without ever becoming bored hearing the same tune over and over. If I stayed in the armchair and went to sleep there fully dressed, I would wake in the night oppressed by leaden dreams, stiff-limbed and feeling grubby and cold. But I couldn't muster the energy to get up and go to the bedroom and at least lie down. And I thought this without the benefit of music, in total silence, it was late now, not by Madrid standards, but for London and that was where I was, one more inhabitant of that large island which was home or patria to some people, like Bertram Tupra, but not to me, to me it was simply that other country where there are no blinds or shutters and often no curtains, and so, if the sky is clear, the moon slips into all the rooms, or the lunar street-lamps do if it's cloudy, as if you always had to keep one eye open as you fell asleep: 'I must get used to the idea that I have no role now and that I am nothing in that apartment, between those sheets that no longer exist because they've been torn up to make rags or dusters long before they grew old and thin, or, indeed, on that pillow. I am just a shadow, a vestige, or not even that. An aphasic murmur, a dissipated smell and a vanished fever, a scratch without a scab, the scab came off long ago. I am like the earth beneath the grass or even deeper down, like the invisible earth beneath the still more sunken earth, a dead man for whom there was no mourning because he left no corpse, a ghost whose flesh is falling away and who is only a name for those who come afterwards and who will never know for sure if that name was invented. I will be the rim of a stain that vainly resists removal when someone scrubs and rubs at the wood and cleans it all up; or like the trail of blood that is so hard to erase, but which does, in the end, disappear and is lost, so that there never was any trail or any blood spilled. I am snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops falling. Nothing more. Or rather this: "Let it be changed into nothing, and let it be as if what was had never been." That is what I will be, what was and has never been. That is, I will be time, which has never been seen, and which no one ever can see.'

  IV Dream

  'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common', that was the exact quotation, as I discovered later on in Madrid, and which I had murmured to myself when I was with Wheeler in his garden by the river, just after he had said: 'Speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods . . . The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.' I have never really understood that first quotation, and Wheeler, with his broader knowledge, might perhaps have been able to explain it, but he didn't hear me say it or chose not to, or assumed it was merely some idea of my own and so ignored it, but those words belonged to someone far more deserving of respect than me, the words of a dead man spoken when he was alive, he wrote them in, 1967 and died in 1993, but now he was as dead as the poet Marlowe, although the latter had a four-hundred-year lead over him in death, for he was stabbed in 1593, that son of a cobbler born in Canterbury (the city of the bandit-Dean Hewlett Johnson, who was the absurd and indirect reason why my father could so easily have been shot long before I was born), and who had studied, in fact, at Benett's College in Cambridge, which was later called Corpus Christi. Perhaps not talking any more has an equalising effect, perhaps that immediate levelling out and becoming alike is a consequence of being definitively silenced, which binds one with a strong and previously unknown bond to the already silent from every age, to the first and to the last, who will immediately become the second to last, and the whole of time becomes compressed and does not make divisions or distinctions or create distances because time ceases to have any meaning once it is over - once each person's life is over - even though those left behind continue counting, their own time and the empty time of those who have departed, as if one day the latter might be able to undo their leaving and be absent no longer. 'It's twenty-six years since my mother died,' we say, or 'It's nearly a year since your son died.'

  When the person who wrote these lines wrote them that was more or less what he was talking about, he was a compatriot of mine, a madrileno like me, from that same hated city of Madrid, and, indeed, had lived through the blockade. Once, on a visit to Lisbon, he went to the leafy cemetery of Os Prazeres, with its avenues flanked by tiny mausoleums, a small fairyland of strange, low, grey, miniature houses, with ornamental pitched roofs, silent, immaculate and arcane - at once inhabited and uninhabited — and he began noticing the bare little living rooms which you can just make out through the glass-paned door which is set into so many of these tombs, each room furnished with 'a few chairs or two small upholstered armchairs next to a table covered by a lace shawl on which lies open some pious book, a silver-framed photograph of the deceased, a vase containing everlasting flowers and, on occasion, an ashtray'. In one of those small living rooms 'which are intended to look cosy', the traveller saw a pair of shoes, some socks and some dirty laundry peeping out from beneath one of the coffins; in another, some wine glasses; and in another, he thought, a deck of cards. 'It seemed to me,' my fellow countryman wrote, 'that the purpose of this decor was to give a familiar, ordinary, comfortable feel to any visits made to the dead, so that it would not be so very different from visiting the living.' He could see no relationship with the customs of the ancient Egyptians, who tried to ensure that the dead person, in his eternal isolation, signed and sealed, did not go without any of the things he had enjoyed and loved in life - although this, of course, applied only to those who were considered important - he related it, rather, 'to a desire not so much to make the dead person's stay in that place pleasant and homely, but to the need of the living to feel they will receive a warm welcome there'. And he added, clearly aware of the grave irony: 'One imagines that in this case it is the living who seek the company of the dead, who, as Comte would suggest, are not only in the majority, they are also a more influential and more animated majority.'

  But what most shocked this traveller was the 'perfect composition' which he observed, 'with a degree of indiscretion', in one of these sepulchral rooms: as well as the small rug, the two armchairs and the table bearing the family photograph, the crucifix and a few artificial flowers, he saw 'an alarm clock, of the kind we used to see in our parents' kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet'. He and his companions all, naturally, pressed their ear to the door to hear 'a loud tick-tock which was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice'. And it was seeing this scene and hearing that loud ticking which sparked the reflection that culminated in the quotation I have never quite understood, which is why I remember it and why it makes me think. 'Was it,' he wondered, 'that, like the people buried alive in Poe, the clock was trying to remind the living of the macabre act of forgetfulness that had left it there? Or did it need that extra volume in order to keep the deaf people around it aware of time being measured out?' Then he went to the heart of the matter, to the real question provoked by that antiquated clock, apparently the most pointless and superfluous of alarm clocks: 'What was it actually measuring, I wonder?' wondered the man from my own city; yes, that was the main question, 'was it the amount of time they had been dead, or was it the countdown, as they call it now, the time yet to elapse before the final judgement? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come? No other clock - and such a humble clock too - has ever seemed better placed or provided more food for thought. It occurred to me, with some surprise, that a religion which has always placed such emphasis on that precarious waiting time has not taken the trouble - not even the person who put the clock there - to give the soul the relief of knowing how long its anguish will last; for if the soul is waiting for the resurrection of the flesh, what better than a clock to give an idea not so much of how long the wait will be, but how much time has already been spent in waiting?' And it was here that the enigmatic words appea
red or were inserted: 'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension . . .' as given in full above. The passage continues, but does not help to elucidate these words, not that it really matters, it is often impossible to understand Shakespeare, to understand him exactly that is, and yet whenever he produces some obscure metaphor or dazzling ambiguity, he opens up ten paths or turnings down which one can plunge further (that is, he opens up these paths if you continue looking and thinking beyond what is merely necessary, as my father used to urge us to do, and you drive yourself on and say 'What else' at the point where you would normally say that there can be nothing more); 'in that sense,' added the traveller, 'within the confines of that comfortable, musty little living room, that troubling alarm clock is the only deus ex machina which allows the celebration of the mysterious dialogue which exists between the living and the dead'. There was no further comment, or, rather, there was: as is compulsory after these incursions into ghost time or dead time, before bidding farewell to his text, the traveller returned for a moment to the living and recalled how, 'as they were leaving', he had asked these two questions of one of his companions (someone, by the way, who bore the name of a character straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, Valdemar, no less): 'What happens, do you think, if it rings at night? Do the people sleeping here stir?' One might ask those same questions now of him, my fellow countryman, who died twenty-six years after that visit or that piece of writing, although he was not buried in the small, leafy world of Os Prazeres, but, as he had wanted, in the tidy cemetery of La Almudena in the city of our birth, where my mother has been for twenty-six different years, her years. And one might well ask the same question of all of them: what if, instead of remaining silent, they talk among themselves while they wait, and the strong, unknown bond that places them on the same level and makes them alike and joins them together is not a definitive descent into silence but that indefinite counting throughout the interminable time which the stubborn clock measures and measures with its loud tick-tock, and during which its extravagant bell never rings even once? More than enough time to tell each other what they recall of their private dream - rather than of their consciousness - what they did and what happened to them and what they said, over and over, until they know everyone's story by heart, that is, each individual knows everyone's story and everyone knows each individual's story. Time enough for every man who has trodden the earth since the earth began and every woman who has traversed the world to tell the others their whole story, from beginning to end, the end being what carried them to the tomb or drove them from the living to join this other more numerous and influential company, more animated and perhaps also wittier and jokier, and certainly more indolent and more light-hearted, with fewer worries and responsibilities. Time, even, to contribute information and invent stories about beings that never existed and to recount deeds that never happened, fictions and fantasies and games with which to pass that long waiting time, and without ever once repeating themselves. And thus we would be back to our normal state, to not knowing what is true or, rather, what really happened.