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

And I thought and continued to think on the train back to Paddington: 'He's chosen me to be his rim, the part that resists being removed and erased, that resists disappearing, the part that clings to the porcelain or the floor and is the hardest bit to get rid of. He doesn't even know if he wants me to take charge of cleaning it up-"the constitution of silence"-or would rather I didn't rub too hard, but left a shadow of a trace, an echo of an echo, a fragment of a circumference, a tiny curve, a vestige, an ashy remnant that can say: "I was here," or "I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before: you saw me then and you can see me now," and that will prevent others from saying: "No, that never occurred, never happened, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it never existed, never was.'"

Mrs. Berry also spoke in her letter about the drop of blood on the stairs. She couldn't have helped hearing part of our conversation as she bustled around in the kitchen and came and went, on that last Sunday when I visited them (the verb she used was 'overhear,' which implies that it was involuntary), and how Wheeler referred in passing to the stain as if it had been a figment of my imagination ('Just there, where you say you saw…'). She felt bad about having lied to me at the time, she said, to have pretended to know nothing, perhaps to have made me doubt what I had seen. She asked me to forgive her. 'Sir Peter died of lung cancer,' she wrote. 'He knew deep down that he had it, but he preferred not to. There was no way he would go to the doctor and so I brought one, a friend of mine, to the house when it was already too late, when there was nothing to be done, and that doctor kept the diagnosis from him-after all, what was the point in telling him then?-but he confirmed it to me. Fortunately, he died very suddenly, from a massive pulmonary embolism, according to what the doctor told me afterwards. He didn't have to endure a long illness and he enjoyed a reasonable life right up until the end.' And when I read this, I remembered that the first time Wheeler had suffered one of his aphasic attacks in my presence-when he had been unable to come out with the silly word 'cushion'-I had asked him then if he'd consulted a doctor and he'd replied casually: 'No, no, it's not a physiological thing, I know that. It only lasts a moment, it's like a sudden withdrawal of my will. It's like a warning, a kind of prescience…' And when he didn't finish the sentence and I asked him what kind of prescience, he had both told me and not told me: 'Don't ask a question to which you already know the answer, Jacobo, it's not your style.'

'In fact, the only symptom, during almost the whole time he was ill,' Mrs. Berry went on, using a term doubtless learned from her medical friend, 'was the occasional hemoptoic expectoration, that is, coughing up blood.'-And I thought when I read that paragraph: 'So much of what affects and determines us is hidden.'-'This used to be quite involuntary and only happened when he coughed particularly hard, and sometimes he didn't even realize; remember, although he may not have seemed it, Sir Peter was very old. So although it's impossible to be sure, that might be what you found that night at the top of the first flight of stairs and that you took such pains to clean up. I'm very grateful to you, because that, of course, was my job. On a normal day, it would have been most unusual for me to miss something like that, but I was so busy that Saturday getting ready for the buffet supper, with all those people, and, if I remember rightly, you pointed to the wood, not the carpet, where it would have been much more visible. Anyway, on your last visit, when I heard Sir Peter telling you about his wife's blood at the top of that first flight of stairs, sixty years before and in another house, well, I was afraid you might think you'd had a supernatural experience, a vision, and I had to let you know about this other real possibility. I do hope you'll forgive my pretense at incredulity, but I couldn't, at the time, mention something that Sir Peter preferred not to acknowledge. Well, the truth is he chose not to do so right up until the last. Indeed, he died without knowing he was dying, he died without believing that he was. Lucky him.' And then I recalled two things I had heard Wheeler say in different contexts and on different occasions: 'Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenseless, lost.' And he had also stated or asserted: 'And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were infected with the plague. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'

Yes, now I'm living in Madrid again, and here, too, everything points towards that, or so I believe. I've gone back to working with a former colleague, the financier Estevez, with whom I worked for a few years after my Oxford days, when I married Luisa. He no longer refers to himself as 'a go-getter' as when we first met, he's grown too important for such nominal vanities, he doesn't need them. I contacted him from London, to sound him out regarding job opportunities, given my imminent return: I had saved quite a lot, but could foresee a lot of expenses on my return to Madrid. And when I told him briefly over the phone what I had been up to, I noticed that he was impressed when I said I'd worked for MI6, even though I'd been employed by a strange unknown group in a building with no name, which never gets a mention in any book-so ethereal and so ghostly that it didn't even require its members to have British nationality or to swear an oath-and even though I couldn't give him any proof, but only tell him what I knew. Not that I wanted to give him too many details, and those I did were invented. Anyway, he took me on at once to help with his various projects and he trusts my judgment, especially about people. And so I do still interpret people, just for him, now and then, and given my previous experience-given my record-he always listens to me as if I were the oracle. Thanks to him I earn enough money to be able to pay for Luisa to have some botox treatment, if one day she should ever want to, or indeed anything else that might improve her appearance, if she ever starts to get obsessed, although I don't think she will, it's not in her nature. To me it looks as good as before I left, before I left my home for England, her appearance I mean. And what I didn't see for a long time-but which was seen by another in my absence-that, too, seems just as good. And when I say I don't live alone but half-alone, that's because I either take the children out or visit them almost daily, and on some afternoons Luisa comes to my apartment, leaving the kids with another babysitter, not the stern Polish Mercedes, who has married and set up on her own-she's apparently opened her own business.

This is how Luisa wants it, with each of us in our own apartment, which is perhaps why she has never said what I wanted her to say or write to me during my solitary and, subsequently, troubling time in London: 'Come, come, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me, here's your pillow which now bears not a trace, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come here. Come with me. There's no one else here, come back, my ghost has gone, you can take his place and dismiss his flesh. He has been changed into nothing and his time no longer advances. What was never happened. You can, I suppose, stay here forever.' No, she hasn't said that or anything like it, but she does say other occasionally disconcerting things; during our best or most passionate or happiest moments, when she comes to see me at home as she must have gone to see Custardoy over a period of many months, she says: 'Promise me that we'll always be like this, the way we are now, that we'll never again live together.' Perhaps she's right, perhaps that's the only way we can remain properly attentive and not take each other or our presence in each other's lives for granted.