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

I closed the window, I was starting to feel a little chilly and, more to the point, I noticed that she was too: she was no longer wearing stockings, and I saw that she was tempted to pull her skirt down over her thighs, thus depriving me of that pleasant view. However, I stayed where I was, with my back to the street, the sky and the rain. And I thought: As she doubtless foresaw, this woman is well on the way to persuading me. But it's still up to me to answer "Yes" or "No" or "Maybe."'

'Before, you said that I wouldn't really have to lie about anything very much,' I said. 'What exactly is that "nothing very much"? What should I tell Tupra that I see or don't see in Incompara and that I probably will or won't see? In any case, won't he also see or not see the same thing?'

Young Pérez Nuix was hardly drinking at all now. Either her furious thirst had passed or she knew exactly how much she could drink and how fast. She was, however, smoking. She lit another Karelias cigarette, she must have liked the slightly spicy taste. With the lighter still in her hand, she uncrossed her legs and left them slightly apart, and from where I was, I thought I could see as far as her crotch, a flash of white panties. I was careful not to let my eyes remain fixed on that point, she would have noticed at once. I merely allowed myself the occasional fleeting glance.

'There are some fundamental things that are not at all easy to pick up on at a meeting, during a conversation or on a video, and I don't know if there is a video of Incompara that Bertie could show you. It's unlikely, but possible-he can get hold of video footage of almost anyone. It isn't easy to see, for example, that a person is a coward, and that in a moment of great danger he'll leave you in the lurch, especially if there's some physical danger or, let's say, a risk of prison. But that's certainly been my impression on the couple of occasions I've met Incompara. I may be wrong, however, and it would be inadvisable for the report to reflect that; it would cause him irreparable harm. The people who have commissioned the report would want nothing to do with Incompara if such a characteristic were attributed to him, that's for sure. Well, it's not a characteristic anyone likes, it makes you feel vulnerable, unsafe. In fact, it's everyone's worst nightmare, thinking that if things were to take an unexpected turn or if a situation got nasty, the person who should be helping would simply take off, duck out and leave us high and dry or, worse, pin the blame on us in order to save himself. If you get that feeling too, you mustn't mention it to Bertie, that's where you would have to lie, or, rather, say nothing. And if Bertie also picks up on it, you'll have to try, very carefully, to persuade him that it isn't so.' She paused very briefly and her gaze grew abstracted, as if she really were thinking or puzzling something out even as she was speaking, and people rarely do that. 'It's one of the hardest things to identify, as is its opposite. It's where we're most likely to slip up, and even when we think we know, there's always a nagging doubt that won't go away until we've had a chance to put it to the test. Not that one has to try very hard to sow that seed of doubt. People's forecasts or declarations on the matter, regarding their valiant or pusillanimous character, are almost no use at all. It's the thing they hide best, although the verb "hide" is inappropriate really: most of the time, they conceal it so well because they themselves have no idea how they'd reactjust as a new recruit doesn't know how he'll react to his baptism of fire. People tend to imagine what they would do in accordance with their hopes or fears; but almost none of us knows just how we'd respond if placed in a dangerous situation. At most, we find out when we're put to the test, but that doesn't happen very often in our normal lives and might never happen, we usually get through the day with no major upsets or dangers. Not that the discovery that we behaved with valor or cowardice in a particular circumstance proves anything anyway, because the next time we might behave quite differently, possibly in exactly the opposite way. We can never guarantee either boldness or panic, and if we ourselves know nothing about this facet of our character, it would take enormous skill on the part of an observer, an interpreter, to discern it in someone else, that is, to manage to foresee a response about which even the person in question has his doubts, and to which he is, indeed, half-blind. That, among other reasons, is why you're here: you have a good eye for that characteristic, better even than Rendel, and that's not just my opinion, I've heard Bertie say so and he's not exactly lavish with compliments. He clearly trusts you in that field more than anyone, including himself. So it wouldn't be hard for you to make him waver, anything you said certainly wouldn't go unheeded. You would have more difficulty when it came to other aspects, for example, Incompara's relative lack of scruples, his harshness towards those over whom he has power, the brutality by proxy that I mentioned before. You wouldn't have to lie about those things, though, nor even keep quiet about them; as I said, they wouldn't prevent the people who've asked for this investigation from taking him on or letting him in or whatever, such qualities would be seen, rather, as advantages and virtues. Cowardice, on the other hand, brings no benefits at all. No one thinks of it as a desirable quality. I mean other people's cowardice, of course, not our own. We all have to come to terms with our own.' She didn't use the normal Spanish expression here either, but translated it literally as 'llegar a términos.' Maybe, although it didn't show, she was a bit tired or slightly drunk, which is when language tends to falter.

It's true, almost no one knows, not even when put to the test. If that night someone had asked me how I would react when confronted by a man who suddenly produced a sword in a public toilet and threatened to cut off another man's head in my presence, I wouldn't have had the slightest idea or, if I had ventured an opinion, I would have been quite wrong. It would have seemed to me so improbable, so anachronistic, so unlikely that I might perhaps have dared to respond, with the optimism that always accompanies our imaginings of something that isn't going to happen, or which is purely hypothetical and therefore impossible: 'I'd stop him, I'd grab his arm and block the blow, I'd force him to drop the sword, I'd disarm him.' Or else, if the image had seemed real and I had believed it or, for a moment, fully accepted it, I would have been able to reply: 'God, what a nightmare, how dreadful. I'd run away, without a backward glance, take to my heels so that no two-edged sword fell on me, so that I wouldn't be the one for the chop.' The incident in the toilet had happened not long after that night of rain, and I had, so to speak, been caught between those two extremes. I had neither confronted him nor fled. I didn't move and didn't close my eyes as De la Garza had closed his and as I closed mine later on at Tupra's house, where I was not so much in real or physical danger, but perhaps in moral danger, or perhaps my conscience was; I had stood there astonished and terrified and had shouted at him, I had resorted to words, which are sometimes more effective than the hand and quicker and sometimes quite useless and go entirely unheeded, and I had also looked on impotently, or perhaps prudently, more concerned about saving my own as yet unscathed skin than about the already condemned man, who couldn't be rescued from his fate. I don't know if such a reaction is natural or pure cowardice.

Yes, Pérez Nuix was right: you can almost never precisely pin down the nature of such a reaction or what it consists of because it wears an infinite number of masks and disguises, and never appears in its pure state. Most of the time, you don't even recognize it, because there's no way of separating it from everything else that makes up our personality, of splitting it off from the nucleus that is us, nor of isolating or defining it. We don't recognize the reaction in ourselves and yet, oddly enough, we do in others. I wasn't at all convinced by what she and apparently Tupra believed, that I had a particular ability to spot and predict this in a person before it even revealed itself. What I knew for sure was that I couldn't see it in myself, any more than I could see courage, before or after either had shown its face. It's burdensome having to live with such ignorance, knowing, too, that we will never learn, but that is how we live.