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

it's possible that the man commanding them let fall the white handkerchief he's holding in his left hand, or attached it perhaps to the point of his saber, at the same time shouting 'Fire!' ('Amongst the sound of the waves the rifle shots rang out, and he lay dead upon the sand, bleeding from three wounds… Death, being death, did not wither his smile'); and I remembered, too, those who were executed without trial or given, at most, a sham version of justice, on those same Malaga beaches by the man who took the city more than a century later with his Francoist and Moorish hordes and with the Blackshirts of Roatta or 'Mancini': the Duque de Sevilla was his untimely title, the man who strewed with corpses the shore and the water and the barracks and the prisons and the hotels and the walls, about four thousand, it was claimed, and so what if it was fewer; and in front of the condemned men and woman stood two men with machine-guns or something similar, I don't know much about these things, two men wearing ties and with their hair neatly combed, I bet they always carried a comb in their pocket as I do, as do most southerners, and when one of them said ' Dai ,' they both unleashed interminable bursts of gunfire, they fired and fired, squandering bullets as if they had to get rid of them all, while the bodies were falling and once they had fallen too, the woman and one man face upwards and the other two on their sides, the gunmen moved closer, still firing, holding their weapons almost vertically now, the sand jumped and it seemed as if the flesh and the modest clothes of the already very dead dead, bleeding from twenty wounds, also jumped at every gratuitous shot. 'This is a settling of accounts on some secluded beach on the Golfo de Taranto, probably not far from Crotone in Calabria, a few years ago now,' murmured Reresby, correctly stressing the first syllable of Taranto, and he spoke so very softly now, it was as if his voice were emerging from inside a helmet. 'It's interesting. One of the executioners has since carved out a career for himself, first in the construction industry, then in politics, and he now has an excellent post in the current government. The other man, however is dead, he was bumped off straight away, in reprisal for this. It's useful for us to have this video, don't you think?' And I sensed in that question a kind of collector's pride, and maybe he was right to feel proud.

Nor had I ever seen, or even conceived of, an arranged bestial rape, with spectators as if they were at a tryout for young fighting bulls, a small arena, or perhaps the central courtyard of a group of houses, well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, a vicious sun, thick mustaches and Texan hats and not a few Havana cigars clenched between teeth, there was the festive sound of a brass band in the background, encouraging shouts in Spanish and in English, and in the arena, a woman, a horse, a few mamporreros -men employed to help stallions mate with mares-and something tearing, I couldn't bear it, I closed my eyes, 'Don't close your eyes!' and so I looked away, 'Don't look away!' But I did, except for the odd moment, this I really couldn't stand because I couldn't believe it, I'd never imagined such a thing were possible in the world, purely as a form of entertainment, and it really was a mortal poison, the images-what I glimpsed of them, for my eyelids and my turned-away face were quick to save me-entered my mind as if they were an ugly reptile or a kind of serpent, or perhaps an eel, or leeches under the skin, how can I put it, internal leeches, the images slipped inside me like a foreign body that caused me immediate pain and a sense of oppression and suffocation and the urgent need for someone to remove it ('Let me sit heavy on thy soul'), but you cannot root out what enters through the eyes, nor what enters through the ears, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done about it, or else you have to wait some time in order to be able to persuade yourself that you did not see or hear what you did see or hear-there's always a doubt or the trace of a doubt-that it was imagination or a misunderstanding or a mirage or a hallucination or a malicious misinterpretation, we are none of us immune from them when our thoughts and our perceptions become twisted and we judge everything in the same slanted sinister light. 'This is Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, in Mexico,' murmured Tupra in his ever more sunken voice and in a tone that wasn't in the least indifferent, but almost sorrowful, grave, and it didn't sound to me as if he were putting it on, 'and there you have one of the thousand women who have disappeared and about whom so much has been written in the press. That, however, is not what matters to us, important though it is, but, rather, that man there, to the right in the second row, the one all in white and wearing a red tie.' This forced me to look for a moment, reluctantly and out of the corner of my eye-how hard it is to resist curiosity when someone points a finger at something-I saw a man in the audience, a fat, smiling, middle-aged man with shiny skin and thick hair, though I couldn't help but see, as well, the terrible irrationality and more tearing and some blood now-like a sword or a spear-and I turned away again, towards where Reresby was sitting, his eyes fixed on the screen, but screwed up now, as if he needed glasses or were preparing to close them at any moment, perhaps that episode, even though he had seen it before and knew how it would end, really set his teeth on edge or provoked anguish or even repugnance ('Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake'), no one can bear everything and, as I said, he was not a sadist. 'At the time, and this is a few years ago now, he was a very rich businessman, not yet a tycoon. Now he is, though, and he's standing for the post of mayor in an important town, in another region, in another state on the border with the United States, Coahuila. And he'll get it too. It will be useful for us to have this film of him enjoying the show.' He mispronounced Coahuila, saying it as if it were an English word-it's less well known than Chihuahua-something like 'koh-hoo-why-lah.' The worst thing was that the event seemed not to be a single episode, I certainly didn't get the impression that everything had been arranged for this one occasion, the band, the awnings, the horse and its experienced handlers, the invitation, doubtless made over the Internet and in code, or through messages left on cell phones, doubtless in a whisper. What I glimpsed had probably happened before, perhaps with minor variations, with a different animal perhaps, but I didn't want to go down that road and I tore out all further imaginings by the roots.

'It's pronounced koh-ah-wee-lah,' I said, unable to resist the desire to correct him, a further example of that mysterious impulse to impose good order and unnecessary precision at all costs. I said this while looking at him. But he wasn't looking at me, he still kept his eyes glued to the screen for a few more seconds, almost half-closed now, his expression one of scorn and disgust for what he was seeing, his wasn't the face of a man unmoved by cruelty and by the suffering of others, he was judging them severely; then he fast-forwarded again and, after a while, froze the image.

'It's all right, you can look now. I've stopped at another scene, the next one. But Jack,' he added with barely suppressed irritation, yet almost kindly, 'I'm not showing you all this in order for you not to look at it, quite the opposite. Otherwise, what's the point?'

'I don't want to see any more, Bertie,' I said. 'If it's all like that, I don't want to see anything. I think I understand where you're going with this, and I don't need to know any more; besides, why don't you use these images to do something about it? You could use them to find out, through that fat man you appear to know so well and who's been so very successful, just what's going on in that place and to stop it. I don't understand your passivity, the organization's passivity.'