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

When I first met Tupra, I had thought or feared that I might acquire that relationship with him through Luisa, in some bizarre, unreal way-or, rather, I had been glad that she was in Madrid and that they would never meet and that this would never happen-when I saw that almost no woman could resist him and that I wouldn't stand a chance against him if I ever had to compete with him in that field, regardless of whether I got there first, or second, or at the same time. And now it seemed that I had probably acquired such a relationship through another unexpected and more frivolous activity, one that made me the person who came afterwards not the person who was or had been there before : the former is in a slightly more advantageous position, because he can hear and find out things from the latter, but he is also the one most at risk of contagion if there's any disease involved, and that-a disease if there is one-is the only tangible manifestation of that strange, weak link to which no one gives a thought any more, even though it exists without being named and hovers unnoticed above the relations between men and between women, and between men and women. No one speaks that medieval language any more and hardly anyone knows it. And when you think about it, there is, in some cases, something else that is transmitted by the person in the middle, from the one who was with her before to the one who was with her afterwards , but which is neither tangible nor visible: influence. Throughout my conversation that night with young Pérez Nuix, I had now and then had the feeling that Tupra was speaking through her, but this could also have been because they had worked and been in continual contact for several years, not necessarily because they were ex-lovers. The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own.

From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.

'Believe me, I wouldn't have either, if I'd had the choice,' I said to Tupra when we'd finished our shared, disinterested laughter, with me laughing despite myself, about the 'bulwarks' onto which he had thrown me. 'But you made me do it, just as you've made me do everything else tonight, including still being here at this unearthly hour,' I said in my sometimes rather bookish English, literally 'a una hora no terrenal ' in Spanish. 'I don't know if you realize, but you've done nothing all day but give me orders, most of them after hours. It's time I left. I need to sleep, I'm tired.' And so I shifted again from brief treacherous laughter to a more enduring seriousness, if not annoyance. And I made a movement as if to suggest that I was thinking about getting up, but no more than that, because he wouldn't let me leave just yet: he wanted to talk to me about Constantinople and Tangi-ers in centuries past, there are always more exhausting voices and stories that we have not yet heard. However, he didn't start again and probably wasn't going to, there are some things that are mentioned but never returned to, that are sown and then abandoned, like verbal decoys; and he was supposed to be showing me his private tapes, or perhaps DVDs. That didn't happen either. 'If you don't tell me about Tangiers and Constantinople right now, Bertram, I'm leaving. I've had enough. I'm dog tired and I'm in no mood to go on chatting.'

Tupra emitted a kind of dull roar, halfway between a brief guffaw and a stifled snort of scorn. He stood up and said:

'Don't be impatient, Jack, this is no time to be in a hurry. I'm going to show you the videos I told you about, you'll learn a lot from them and it will be useful for you to see them. Not immediately useful, they're not at all pleasant and they may well drive away any current desire for sleep that you feel, at least for the next few hours, but I've already given you permission not to come to work tomorrow, or rather today, so let's waste no more time.' He glanced rapidly at his watch; so did I: it was an unearthly hour for London, but not for Madrid. The children would be asleep, but I had no idea what Luisa would be up to, she might still be awake, with someone else or with no one. 'But it'll be useful to you later on to have seen them. In a matter of days really, and they'll always come in handy. It may be that you are already someone who gives no importance to the unimportant, because that's the first thing everyone should be taught and yet everyone behaves as if exactly the opposite were true: people are brought up nowadays to think that any idiot can make a great drama out of any kind of nonsense. People are brought up to suffer for no reason, and you get nowhere suffering over everything or tormenting yourself. It paralyzes, overwhelms, stops growth and movement. As you see, though, people nowadays beat their breast over harming a plant, and if it's an animal, what a crime, what a scandal! They live in an unreal, delicate, soft, twee world.'-' Cursi ',' I thought, 'English doesn't have that useful, wide-ranging word'-'Their minds are permanently wrapped in cotton wool.' And he briefly made that strange roaring noise again; it sounded this time like a short sarcastic cough. 'In our countries, that is. And when something happens here that's perfectly normal in other places, common currency, we find ourselves vulnerable, at a loss what to do, helpless, easy prey, and it takes us a while to react, and we do so disproportionately and blindly, missing the target. And with too much retrospective fear as well, as happened with the attacks here and in your own city of Madrid, not to mention the attacks on New York and Washington.'

'Nothing much has changed in Madrid,' I said. 'It's almost as if it had never happened.'

But he wasn't listening, he had his own agenda. His deep voice had grown mournful. It always did sound slightly mournful, like the sound made by a bow moving over the strings of a cello. Sometimes, though, that tonality was more marked and it produced in the person hearing it a gentle, almost pleasant feeling that eased all affliction; at least in me it did.

'I'm not saying there's nothing to be afraid of, you understand. It's just that we should have been frightened before and to have taken fear as much for granted as the air we breathe, and to have instilled fear too. Instilling and feeling fear, all the time, that's the unchanging way of the world, which we've forgotten. It's normal in other countries that are more alert to these things. But no one here realizes it and we fall asleep without keeping one eye open, we get caught unawares and then we can't believe it's happened. Retrospective fear is useless, even more so than anticipatory fear. That's not much good either, but at least it puts one, if not on one's guard, at least in a state of expectancy. It's always best to be in a position to instil fear in others. Anyway, let me show you these scenes, they're not long. Some I'll fast-forward for you.'