Your Face Tomorrow 2

by Javier Marías

  The man who was Reresby that night moved away, holding his sword in one hand and the hairnet in the other, earned like a miserable little trophy, much less impressive than a scalp, a mere sweaty rag; he left the cubicle and winked at me - but it was not a reassuring wink, I took it to mean: 'That was just for starters' — and he went over to the overcoat he had left hanging up, and which now hung less stiffly, and then I realised that in the lining, at the back, there must be a very long inside pocket and inside it a sheath, because that is where he stowed his Landsknecht sword, and as it slid in, it made a metallic noise, and if there had been no sheath, the point would have torn the bottom of that long, narrow pocket, at least seventy centimetres in length if it was to hold the blade of the Katzbalger and with, perhaps, the grip protruding so as to make it easier to take it out, I couldn't quite see the actual pocket, but there was no other possible explanation. I gave a deep sigh - or perhaps more than a sigh — when I saw that deadly piece of metal disappear, at least for the time being. The fact that he had put it back in its sheath did not necessarily mean that he would not have recourse to it again - it was still to hand - and it might simply be a precaution typical of Tupra, not leaving the weapon within reach of the enemy, which was entirely the wrong word, for the poor nonentity of an attaché was certainly not putting up a fight, he was not even resisting; but if Reresby had placed the sword on the cistern or deposited it on the floor, there was no guarantee that, in a moment of desperation and panic, De la Garza would not have flung himself upon it and grabbed it, and then what, the tables would have been turned, the two-edged blade was fairly light and easy to handle, and danger lurks in the weakest and most insignificant of beings, in the most cowardly and most defeated, and you must never underestimate anyone or give him the chance to recover or pull himself together, to screw up his courage or muster a little suicidal valour, that was one of Tupra's teachings and that is why he immediately understood -he appreciated it, even made a mental note of it — a Spanish expression that so perfectly defines us and which I mentioned to him one day and translated for him: 'Quedarse uno tuerto par dejar al otro ciego' — "To put out your own eye while trying to make another man blind' - he dreaded such a response like the plague. I was grateful that it did not occur to him to ask me to hold it, the 'cat-gutter', I would not have relished the idea, that is, of holding it, although I would, of course, have picked it up and brandished it while I had the chance. Or perhaps he didn't trust me with it either, he couldn't be sure that events wouldn't take a different turn, and that I might not end up using it against the wrong person, I never knew if I had his full trust or not, in fact, one never knows that about anyone. Nor should anyone ever entirely win our trust either.

  And so he walked back to the cubicle, wearing a pair of gloves that he had taken from one of the ordinary pockets in his overcoat - good black leather gloves, perfectly normal - and he passed me again carrying the hairnet or spoils in one hand and with his right hand free; he maintained his resolute, pragmatic, dispassionate air, as if everything he was doing at each moment were programmed and, what's more, belonged to a programme that was tried and tested. He winked at me again, and again it was not in the least reassuring, these winks did not imply a smile, they were merely announcements or warnings that bordered on being instructions or orders, this time I understood it as 'Right, let's get down to business, it won't take long and then we'll be done', and that is why I found myself saying: 'Tupra, that's enough, leave him be, what are you going to do now, he's already half dead with fright.' But there was much less alarm in my voice than when I had only shouted out his name and little else, because I was feeling much less alarmed, now that the sword was out of the way; indeed, such was my relief, and so quickly had my feelings of anxiety and horror and heaviness abated, that almost anything that happened now seemed to me light, welcome, unimportant. I don't know, a few slaps, a few punches, perhaps the odd kick (even in the mouth): in comparison with my certainties of only a moment ago they seemed almost like manna from heaven, and to be honest, I didn't feel particularly disposed to stopping them; or only with my voice, I suppose. Yes, that was it: I felt grateful that he was going to hit him, as I imagined he would, with his gloved hands. Just hit him, that was all. Not cut him in two or into pieces or dismember him, what luck, what joy.

  'It'll only take a minute. And remember who I am, that's three times now.'

  I didn't grasp the meaning of those last words and didn't have time to think about it either or to reflect on my worrying feeling of gratitude and that anomalous sensation of a weight having been lifted from me, a near-criminal sensation of lightness, because Tupra went straight to work: he picked up the packet from the toilet-seat lid, resealed the top and put it back in his waistcoat pocket - of his varied collection I will never forget that particular waistcoat, intense watermelon green - then with the same two fingers he picked up the Visa card, placed it in De la Garza's wallet from which it had come and put that in his other jacket pocket along with the rolled-up banknote. With one hand he swept away what remained of the line of cocaine, or talc, and the dust scattered and fell onto the floor, Rafita had not even got a snort, had never had the benefit of it, after all his preparations. Then Tupra looped the hairnet around De la Garza's neck and tugged, and immediately my sense of relief went on hold — 'He's going to strangle him, he's going to choke him,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' — before I realised that this was not his intention - he didn't wrap it around De la Garza's neck, he didn't pull it tight or twist it— he was merely forcing him to lift his head, the attaché was still pressed so close to the lid that he was almost embracing the toilet bowl, and he would have embraced it, I think, if he had not chosen to keep his hands over his ears, he preferred not to see or hear anything in the vain hope that he would then not know much about what was being done to him, even though his sense of touch would be sure to inform him, and the pain and the hurt would tell him.

  Once Tupra had lifted De la Garza's head high enough, he pushed up both lid and seat and plunged the latter's head into the bowl with such violence that De la Garza's feet lifted off the ground, I saw his loose shoelaces waving in the air, neither he nor I had got around to tying them. I did not, at first, fear that the water in the bowl would drown him, because it was too narrow at the bottom for his broad, full-moon face, which nevertheless got battered against the porcelain - and slightly stuck - every time Tupra pushed it back in again after puffing it up for a while, and he also flushed the toilet three or four times one after the other, the rush of blue water was so strong and so prolonged that I was once more briefly filled by terrible alarm -'He's going to drown him, he'll fill his lungs,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' - and it occurred to me that, anyway, all it takes is two inches of water, a puddle in which to submerge mouth and nose and thus stop someone ever breathing again; and that the momentary rise in the water level, with each flush, would bring Rafita a sure sensation of drowning, or, at the very least, of choking; and in the toilet for the disabled too: with luck there would be no remnants of fetid smells, and with even more luck, it would never have been used.

  'I don't want to see Tupra as Sir Death,' I thought, 'with the cold arms of a disciplined sergeant, always brisk and busy; but that is how I'm beginning to see him, given his many abilities and the variety of his threats, decapitation, strangulation, drowning, to name but three, how many more are there, which one is he going to choose, if he does choose, which one will he select to finish his expert work or task, which one will become accomplished fact and not just a feint or an attempt.' He did not hold De la Garza under the water for very long, therefore that would not, it seemed, be the definitive form, although he might at any moment change his mind and all it would take would be for him to allow the seconds to pass, a few more, just a few, the seconds that normally pass so quickly that we don't even notice them, time's crumbs, he would only have to let those seconds pass while my compatriot's face was in the water - nose and mouth, that was all it would take -
and life and death often depend on those scorned, wasted seconds or on a few centimetres that are often given away, or conceded to our rival for nothing - the centimetres that the sword declined to travel. 'You had two henchmen plunge me head first into a butt of your disgusting wine and drown me, poor me, poor Clarence, held by the legs, which remained outside the butt and flailed ridiculously about until my lungs' final intoxication, betrayed and humiliated and killed by the black, opaque cunning of your hideous, indefatigable tongue.' But this was not stagnant wine in a butt, it was blue water falling in torrents, and he was not George, Duke of Clarence, but the idiotic De la Garza, and we were not two henchmen, still less those of a murderous king. Or perhaps I was Tupra's or Reresby's henchman, I received small-scale orders from the former every day, and those issued by the latter that night were on a larger scale and of an unforeseen nature, utterly different from the kind of work I was paid to do, they had either released me from my normal commitments or had violated my contract, not that anything had ever been set down in writing or clearly stipulated. Or perhaps we were both henchmen, even though I didn't know it, of the State, of the Crown, of MI6, of the army, of the Foreign Office, of the Home Office, of the navy, I could be at the service of a foreign country and not even be aware of it in my foreign dream, and in a way, perhaps, that I would never have agreed to had it been my own country. Or we might be the henchmen of Arturo Manoia (according to Pérez Nuix, our employers, at the time, varied) and there we were beating Rafita to a pulp on his orders, wreaking revenge on his behalf, I had no idea how Manoia had reacted to his wife's return to the table with, on her cheek, a sfregio or scar, she had gone off to have fun and to dance and come back with a mark on her face, Manoia would not have liked that at all. And make-up could only do so much.

  Suddenly, I heard the sound of squeaky, tinny music, like the tone of a mobile phone, it took me a while to recognise it - it wasn't easy - the hackneyed notes of a famous and terribly Spanish paso doble, it was probably that tired old tune 'Suspires de Espana' which is so often used in my country by novelists and film-makers in order to create a certain tacky, ersatz emotion (people with left-winger stamped on their foreheads love it as much as cryptofascists do), a ghastly thing, he must have chosen it for his mobile phone out of pure racial pedantry, De la Garza I mean, poor De la Garza, and to think only a while ago I had thought 'I'd like to smash his face in', I had thought it on the dance floor and afterwards too, with that business of the shoelaces, and perhaps before as well; but it was just a manner of speaking, a figurative use of words, in fact, it's very rare that anyone actually means, literally, what he or she is saving or even thinking (if the thought has been sufficiently clearly formulated), almost all our phrases are in fact metaphorical, language is only an approximation, an attempt, a detour, even the language used by the most ignorant and illiterate, or perhaps they are the most metaphorical of all, maybe only the technician and the scientist are safe from it, and even then not always (geologists, for example, are very colourful in their use of language). Now I was watching as he was being beaten — not slapped, Tupra had not once attacked him directly with his hands, not even now that he had his gloves on, they were getting wet, they would have to be thrown away - and I was very frightened and shaken, not only because I didn't know just how much harm Tupra was going to inflict on him - if he would be transformed before my eyes into Sir Death or if he would remain plain Sir Blow, which was quite enough, or Sir Wound or Sir Thrashing (he was, in any case, already Sir Punishment), it was unpleasant to discover any of these characters in someone who was a close acquaintance, and even more so to have to observe his actions - but also because the long habit of seeing violence on screen, and of hearing every punch and kick as if it were a thunderbolt without the lightning or a dynamite blast or a collapsing building, has led us to believe in a rather venial form of violence, when there is nothing venial about it at all, and seeing it for real, perceiving its emanations from close to, feeling it physically throbbing beside you, smelling the immediate sweat of the person getting angry and hitting out and of the person who shrinks back and is afraid, hearing the creak of a bone as it dislocates and the crunch of a broken cheekbone and the tearing of flesh, seeing fragments and slivers and getting spattered with blood, isn't just horrifying, it simply makes any normal person feel ill, physically sick, apart, that is, from sadists and those who are used to it, those who live with it every day or every so often, and, of course, those who make a profession of it. I had to assume that Tupra belonged to this latter category, having seen how determined and expert he was, his movements almost routine.

  My father had spoken to me about it once, during one of our conversations about the past or rather about his past and not mine, about the Civil War and the way people were trampled upon during the initial Franco era, which lasted so very long and, indeed, seemed eternal because we weren't really sure when it had finished and because, now and then, it came back.

  'Your generation and the generations after you,' he had said to me, using, as he often did, the second-person plural, always aware that he had four children, and when he spoke to one of us, it was, more often than not, as if he were addressing us all, or as if he were sure that his current interlocutor would later pass on his words to the others, 'have been fortunate enough to experience very little real violence, it's been absent from your day-to-day existence, and if you have encountered any, it's been the exception and never anything very grave, someone getting beaten up at a demonstration or during a brawl in a bar, the kind of thing that always comes to a natural halt and is never given free rein and doesn't tend to spread; a mugging perhaps, or a robbery. Fortunately, and I very much hope this continues, you haven't been in situations where violence was unavoidable, I mean, where it was certain, where you knew it was bound to surface at some point during the day or the night, and if there happened to be one day when there was no violence or you didn't yourself come face to face with it and only heard about it - no one was free from that, from stories and rumours - you could be sure that this was a gift that would not be repeated the following day, because the law of probabilities did not allow for such excellent good fortune. The threat was always there, as was the state of alert. For example, one afternoon, my room was shelled, a direct hit, a huge hole in the wall and the interior completely destroyed. I wasn't in, although I had been shortly before and was about to return. But it could have fallen on me somewhere else, walking down the street or travelling in a tram, in a café, at the office, while I was waiting for your mother outside her house, at the radio station or in the cinema. During the first months of the War, you saw arrests everywhere, people being pushed around or hit with rifle butts, or else there were raids on houses, they would take away whole families along with anyone who happened to be visiting, on any corner you could come across a chase or a shooting, and, at night, on the outskirts, you'd hear the so-called paseos, the random executions, or a few isolated shots from the pacos (the sharpshooters I mean) on the rooftops in the evening or very early in the morning, especially during the first few days, and any shots you heard at dawn would be shots fired point-blank into the head or the back of the neck of a victim who, sometimes, but not always, would be kneeling in the gutter, if you were very unlucky, you might actually witness this and see someone kneel down and have their brains blown out, and I don't mean that metaphorically, you'd actually see their brain matter spill out. It was best just to keep walking and not to look, to get away from there as quickly as possible, there was nothing you could do, and if you did only see it out of the corner of your eye, you could count yourself lucky. Other executioners started work at nightfall, they couldn't be bothered to go very far if they didn't have a car available or were short of fuel, and so they would slip down an alleyway where there wasn't much traffic and finish people off there, they were impatient and couldn't wait until the city had half fallen asleep, because it never did entirely fall asleep, not during those three long years of siege, hunger and cold, nor afterwards
either, because from 1939 onwards, Franco's police would burst into people's houses in the middle of the night, just as their first cousins, the Gestapo, were doing in the rest of Europe. Others were more organised and carried out their shootings in cemeteries when they were closed or when they themselves had closed them for that purpose; and so for a long time afterwards, when peace had supposedly been declared, there were some areas where you would go on hearing shots late into the night. There wasn't a great deal of peace or only for those on the other side, they could sleep peacefully enough. I'll never be able to understand how they could do that, with so much killing going on. There were a few decent people among them, but most were just really proud and smug.'

  I remember that my father paused at that point or, rather, only afterwards did I realise it was a pause. He had fallen silent, I wondered if he had forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about or tell me, although I doubted that he had, he, too, always used to pick up the thread, or it was enough for me to give the thread a short tug for him to return to the subject. He sat staring straight ahead of him at nothing, his clear, blue eyes gazed back at that time, a time he could doubtless see with absolute clarity, as if he were able to observe it through a pair of supernatural binoculars, it was very like the gaze I had noticed on occasions in Peter Wheeler, or, to be precise, on the occasion when I went up the first flight of his stairs to point out to him and to Mrs Berry where I had found the nocturnal bloodstain that I'd taken so much trouble to expunge and for which neither he nor she had any explanation. It is a gaze one often sees in the old even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off, back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It isn't an absent or a crazed look, but intense and concentrated, focused on something a very long way off. I had noticed it, too, in the bi-coloured eyes of the brother who kept his surname, Toby Rylands. I mean that each of his eyes was of a different colour, his right eye the colour of olive oil and his left that of pale ashes. One keen and almost cruel, the eye of an eagle or a cat, the other the eye of a dog or a horse, meditative and honest. But when they adopted that gaze, his eyes became the same, as if they were, somehow, above mere colour.