Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'But you didn't come to this house, did you, Peter?' I asked.

'No, I went to my rooms in college and lived there for three years, I preferred to have people around me. But you see, the one night, the one and only night, that I failed to watch over her sleep or non-sleep, Valerie went and killed herself. She couldn't live with what she had done. And I didn't foresee it. It never crossed my mind, not even when she sent me upstairs to the chambre de bonne. It was a perfectly reasonable excuse, and I wasn't prepared: it was the first time she had ever deceived me. You can't imagine the times I've wondered if I would have gotten there in time had I only been quicker to realize where she was when I woke up'-'Don't linger or delay,' I thought-'if I hadn't picked up the book or turned out the light or put on my dressing gown or if I'd gone down those two flights of stairs more quickly or gone down them just as quietly but without opening my mouth, without saying her name, without letting her know I was there. All nonsense of course. But you think those things over and over.'-'Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake,' I remembered.-'Some time afterwards, I wrote to Maria Mauthner and introduced myself, because she knew nothing about me. I told her that Valerie had died, but not how or why. The War, I said, and that was enough. I helped her nephew come to England, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with him, it would have been like looking at Valerie's rifle. And I've helped his son, too, the Rendel that you know: apparently he's pretty good, but not as gifted as Tupra or you, he lacks vision. At least he has a good job, though. My vision, I can assure you, has improved greatly since then. I promised myself that such a thing would never happen to anyone again simply because I couldn't or didn't dare to see. Not that anyone was ever as important to me again, of course: most of the people I observed and interpreted subsequently, on whom I reported, of whom I said whether or not they might be useful and for what, haven't mattered to me one jot in comparison. But now at least I can say to you, with no fear that I might be wrong, that you can live with what has happened to you, with what you came here to talk to me about, because, unlike her, you find it hard to believe that you were responsible.'-'Yes,' I thought, 'I will always be able to say to myself tomorrow: "Oh, I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, in the tortuous smokescreens of fever and shadow and dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, of my vague parallel existence that doesn't really count, it only half-happened and without my full consent, in short, as it said in the report I found among those old files and which was headed "Deza, Jacques," I don't see myself or know myself, I don't delve into or investigate myself, I don't pay much attention to myself and I've given up trying to understand myself. And besides, that was in another country." And then the judge would say: "Overruled, case dismissed.'"-'And anyway, you're made of very different stuff and you belong to a different age, Jacobo, a much more frivolous age. No, don't worry, you're not like Valerie. In fact, no one ever has been, during all these years without her. Or only occasionally, in my dreams.'-'Give me your hand and let us walk. Through the fields of this land of mine…'-Wheeler removed his hand from his eyes and looked at me with surprise, or fright, as if he had just emerged from a long dream. Or perhaps it was more that he opened his eyes very wide, as if seeing the world for the first time, with a gaze as inscrutable as that of a newborn child, born only weeks or days before, and who, I imagine, observes this new place into which he has been hurled and tries perhaps to decipher our customs and to work out which of those customs will be his. He looked very tired and very pale, and I suddenly feared for his health. I felt like putting my hand on his shoulder, as I had with my father a few days earlier. He noticed the olives, picked up two and ate them both. Then he drank a little more sherry, and the color returned to his cheeks, maybe he had suffered a brief drop in blood pressure. When he spoke again and I heard a different tone in his voice, I felt completely reassured, realizing that the evocation, the story, was at an end: 'Go and ask Mrs. Berry if it's time for lunch yet,' he said. 'I don't know why she hasn't called us, she stopped playing a while ago now'

I still live alone, not in another country, but back in Madrid. Or perhaps I live half-alone, if one can say such a thing. I think I've been back now for almost as much time as I spent in London, during my second English sojourn, which had been more bewildering than the first but less transforming, because I was of an age when it's harder to change, when almost all you can do is ascertain and confirm just what it is you carry in your veins. Now I am a little older. Both my father and Sir Peter Wheeler have died, the former only a week after that last Sunday in Oxford, not so much in exile from the infinite as from the past. It was his death, in fact, that precipitated my return to my home city, to be with his grandchildren, my brothers and my sister, and to attend the funeral. There was a space for him in my mother's grave. No one else will fit in there now. It was my sister who told me, she phoned me in London and said: 'Papa has died. His heart stopped half an hour ago. We knew his heart was weak, but it was still very unexpected. I was talking to him only yesterday. He asked after you, as usual, although he was convinced that you were in Oxford, teaching. You'll come, won't you?' I said that I would, that I'd come immediately. And so I went, I consoled and was consoled, I only saw Luisa at the funeral and there she embraced me in order to console me too and then I returned to London, to sort out that ingenuously furnished apartment and leave everything in order before my definitive departure, which it would now be best to hasten; a great many things required my attention in Madrid: house, furniture, books, a few paintings-that copy of the 'Annunciation'-my own bereft children, a modest or possibly not so modest inheritance; and the task of remembering. Both alone and in the company of the others.

There were no matters pending with Tupra, everything had been pretty much resolved and, indeed, settled the day after the Sunday I spent with Wheeler, in Tupra's office in the building with no name (and which, I assume, remains nameless). As predicted by Beryl or by the person who refused to tell me if she was Beryl or not, Tupra, having returned from his trip or weekend absence, was already in his office when I arrived on Monday. Our conversation was very brief, partly because it turned out to be a repetition, I mean that we'd had that identical conversation before, in the distant days when I still called him Mr. Tupra. I went straight to his door as soon as I arrived, saying a quick good morning to Rendel and young Pérez Nuix as I passed; I didn't see Mulryan, perhaps he was with Tupra. I knocked.

'Yes, who is it?' asked Tupra from inside.

And I replied absurdly:

'It's me,' omitting to give him my name, as if I were one of those people who forget that 'me' is never anyone, who are quite sure of occupying a great deal or a fair part of the thoughts of the person they're looking for, who have no doubt that they will be recognized with no need to say more-who else would it be-from the first word and the first moment. I suppose I confused my point of view with his, for we sometimes erroneously believe our own sense of urgency to be universal: I had spent many hours impatient to see him, to demand an explanation and even to confront him. But Tupra wouldn't be the least impatient, I was probably just another matter or another person to deal with, a subordinate returning to work after two weeks' leave in his country of origin, I think he often forgot that I wasn't yet English. When I didn't receive an immediate response, and suddenly aware of my own naiveté or presumption, I added: 'It's me, Bertram. It's Jack.' I accepted calling myself by a name that wasn't mine right until the end; it was the least important of the compromises I made while I was earning my living listening and noticing and interpreting and telling. But at least I didn't call him Bertie on that occasion.