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

People believe what they want to believe, and that's why it's only logical-and so easy-that everything should have its time to be believed. We'll believe anything: even something that's manifestly untrue and contradicts what we can see with our own eyes, yes, even that has its time to be believed, each separate event in its own time and, in the fullness of time, everything. Everyone is prepared to look away and turn a deaf ear, to deny what's there before them and not to hear the shouting, and to maintain that there are no screams only a vast peaceful silence; to modify events and what has happened as much as they need to- the one-legged man still able to feel his leg and the one-armed man his arm and the decapitated man staggering three steps forward as if he hadn't yet lost both will and consciousness-but above all their own thoughts, feelings, memories and their anticipated future, which is sometimes mistaken for prescience. 'It wasn't like that. This isn't going to happen or won't have happened. This isn't happening' is the constant litany that distorts the past, the future and the present, and thus nothing is ever fixed or intact, neither safe nor certain. Everything that exists also doesn't exist or carries within itself its own past and future nonexistence, it doesn't last or endure, and even the gravest of events run that same risk and will end up visiting and traveling through one-eyed oblivion, which is no steadier or more stable or more capable of giving shelter. That's why all things seem to say 'I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before' while they are still alive and well and growing and have not yet ceased. Perhaps that's their way of clinging grimly to the present, a resistance to disappearing put up by the inanimate, by objects too, not only by people, who hang on and grow desperate and almost never give in ('But it's not time yet, not yet,' they mutter in their panic, with their dwindling strength), perhaps it's an attempt to leave their mark on everything, to make it harder for them to be denied or erased or forgotten, their way of saying 'I have been' and to stop other people saying 'No, this was never here, no one saw it or remembers it or ever touched it, it simply never was, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it didn't exist and never happened.'

It was nothing very grave, almost insignificant given the times we live in, and pleasurable too, the thing that happened without happening between young Pérez Nuix and me late that night, perhaps at the hour the Romans called the conticinio and which doesn't really exist in our cities now, for there is no time when everything is still and silent. She gave a sigh of satisfaction or relief and thanked me for my promise that was not a promise, for my declaration that I would do my best, which is hardly a major commitment. She seemed suddenly very tired, but this lasted only a moment, she immediately sprang to her feet, went over to the window and looked more closely at the tireless rain. She stretched discreetly-just her hands and wrists, not her arms; and her thighs, but without standing on tiptoe or rocking back on her heels-and then she asked me if she could stay. She couldn't face going home at that hour, she said, and I needn't worry, she'd get up very early to take the dog out, she'd leave in time to go back to her place and shower and change ('And put on a new pair of stockings,' I thought at once), and we wouldn't have to go together to the building with no name, like some strange married couple who, when they set off to work, don't go their separate ways. No one there would guess that we had met outside of work to conspire nor that we had said goodbye only a short time before. I agreed, how could I refuse such a minor request after granting the major one (well, at least its attempt), even though they were quite different in nature; it was a filthy night to be heading off out into the street again and who knew how long it would take for a taxi to come, and I'd have to phone for one first, if, that is, anyone answered the phone. Besides, I would prefer, for reasons of dramatic delicacy, that she didn't just leave as soon as she'd got what she wanted (or at least a declaration of intent), which would have made her visit exclusively utilitarian. It was, of course, utilitarian, as we both knew, but it would be best not to draw attention to that, nor was it appropriate given how much remained to be done in the next days, especially by me, for I would have to interpret and perhaps meet Incompara. I offered to sleep on the sofa and let her have the bed; she, however, wouldn't allow this; she, after all, was the intruder, the unexpected guest, she couldn't possibly deprive me of my mattress and my sheets.

'No, I'll take the sofa,' she said. But when she looked at it properly and saw how uncomfortable it was, and possibly still wet from her and the rain she'd brought in, she made the only suggestion someone of her age and self-assurance could make: 'I don't see what's wrong with us sharing the bed, as long as you don't mind, that is. I don't. Is it fairly wide?'

Of course I didn't mind, I had been young during an age when you were happy to sleep in any bed and alongside new acquaintances wherever you happened to find yourself after a night of wild excess or induced ecstasy or supposed spirituality or partying-the seventies, so effortfully spontaneous and so unhygienic, not to say downright grubby at times, and part of the eighties, which continued in the same vein. And of course I did mind, I no longer was that young man nor was I accustomed to sleeping anywhere but in my own bed, and I had spent too many years getting used to sleeping only beside Luisa, not even by the side of that stupid short-lived lover who ruined much of what I had, or what I treasured, even though Luisa never knew for certain about her existence; and later, in London, only beside a few sporadic women-three, to be exact-with whom the unhygienic or, if you like, grubby part had happened earlier and with whom, therefore, there was no danger that I'd want to grope them for the first time in dreams or while half-asleep, nor that I'd try to brush up against them, holding my breath and pretending to have done so purely by chance, nor that I'd want to observe them in the dark with my five senses alert and my eyes wide open, and with poindess intensity.

So it was that I found myself in bed with young Pérez Nuix, so aware of her warmth and her presence that I couldn't really get to sleep, and what made it even more difficult was the question that kept going round and round in my head as to whether the same thing was happening to her, if she was waiting or fearing that I would move closer, a slow, stealthy approach, so gradual at first that she would doubt it was happening, just like those men who used to feel women up on buses or trams or on the underground, using as their excuse the crush of people and the swaying motion, and who would rub and even press themselves against the uncomplaining bosom of the chosen woman, but never using their hands-so 'feeling up' is perhaps not quite the right phrase-and always with the excuse that any contact was entirely involuntary and attributable to the overwhelming pressure of the crowd and the bends in the road and the jolting. I speak of this in the past, because it's been ages since I saw this embarrassing spectacle on any form of public transportation and I don't know if it still happens in this day and age, which is more respectful at least in that one area; I often saw it during my childhood and adolescence, and I can't rule out having timidly done the same myself when I was thirteen or fourteen, when, in the minds of we fledgling men, everything is imaginary or frustrated sex. And I suppose it's because I associate such scenes with the remote past that I mention trams, which have been ghosts for decades now, as are those nice Madrid doubledeckers that they withdrew only a short while ago, and which were identical to the London ones, except that they were blue not red, and had the same doorless entrance, just an open platform at the rear with a vertical bar to grab hold of and haul yourself aboard-on the right rather than the left, in keeping with the side of the road we drive on in my country.