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

I had fallen silent, I preferred not to say a word for a few moments because I was afraid that if I spoke, I would crumble and my voice would shake, and I might even cry, and I couldn't let that happen under any circumstances, I wouldn't allow myself to do so in that place and at that time. I clenched my jaw and kept it clenched, and finally I felt sufficiently composed to respond with what I intended to be an imitation of sarcasm:

'You should have asked him. You missed an opportunity there. You had all night to find out.' This seemed to disconcert him slightly, he obviously hadn't been expecting such a response. I went on: 'Perhaps when he did that first thing he didn't know he was going to kill him. Maybe he hadn't yet decided. Sometimes a first punishment isn't enough to satisfy one's fury and you have to go still further. Perhaps he had no option but to kill him. For some people even that isn't enough, and they try to kill the person twice, to vainly try and kill the already dead. They mutilate the corpse or profane the tomb- they even regret having killed him because they can't now kill him again. It happened a lot during our Civil War. It happens now with ETA, for whom once isn't enough.' Then I went back to my first question: 'But why ask me, he's your friend, you should have asked him.'

Tupra lit another cigarette, I heard the sound of the lighter, I had still not turned around to face him. He stopped the DVD, got up, removed the disk, stood in front of me, holding it delicately between his fingers, and said:

'Certainly not, Manoia doesn't even know I have this video, he hasn't a clue. Well, he'll assume I have something on him, but he won't know what. And it would never occur to him that it would be this. Anyway, as you can see, I very likely saved that imbecile Garza's life. Instead of getting angry with me, you should be grateful that I took charge of his punishment, to use your word. He would never have gotten away scot-free, that's for sure.'

I had known for some time now where he was heading. 'I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I believed; I killed one so that ten would not be killed, ten so that a hundred would not fall, a hundred in order to save a thousand,' and so on, ad infinitum, the old excuse that so many would spend centuries preparing and elaborating in their Christian and non-Christian tombs, waiting for the Judgment that never comes, and many still believe in that Judgment at the hour of their departing, certainly almost all murderers and instigators of murder throughout history. However, I wasn't concerned so much with heaping more blame on him as with holding myself together, which I was managing only with difficulty, how I would love to have appeared completely indifferent. And so I asked him a genuine question, that is, one I would have wanted to ask him anyway, when I was more myself.

'If he assumes you have something on him and you've got something like that, how come you were pussyfooting around him all evening? It looked like you were trying to placate him, not making any demands. According to what you've just told me, these videos are used above all to make it easier to wheedle concessions out of people, to blackmail them, but my impression was that you were having a hard time persuading him to do whatever it was you were trying to persuade him to do, or getting out of him what you wanted.'

Tupra looked at me in a slightly amused, slightly irritated way. I had still not moved from the ottoman, and so he was looking down on me.

'How do you know he doesn't have some footage of us? We could lose our advantage or it could be cancelled out.' He said 'of us,' not 'of me,' I thought that it could be footage of Rendel or Mulryan, although the latter seemed a very cautious type, and I couldn't imagine Pérez Nuix behaving like Manoia in that cowshed. Or it could be Tupra, of course, or someone above him or, rather, above us, for I, too, was 'us.' Or a compromising video of another sort, not equivalent, not comparable, not as vile, or so at least I hoped. What I had seen in that film from Sicily was utterly repellent, as were the scenes shot in Ciudad Juarez and other places, I would never be able to forget them or, better still, erase them: as if they had never existed or trod the earth or strode the world, or passed before my eyes.

'That was in Sicily, wasn't it?' I asked then, adopting a technical tone of voice, which is the most helpful when one is on the verge of collapse.

'Very good, Jack, you get better and better,' he replied and made as if to applaud me, although he couldn't do so while holding the disk in one hand and his cigarette in the other. 'How did you glean that, from the song, the language or both things?'

'Three things-there was the guy with the lupara as well. It wasn't that hard.' I assumed he would know that word, even if he didn't know Italian. I was wrong, and this surprised me.

'The what?'

'The lupara! And I spelled it out for him. 'That's what they call that kind of double-barreled shotgun in Sicily'

'Well, you do know a lot.' Perhaps he was bothered because I was managing to put on a semblance of composure; after spending so much time covering my eyes, he must have felt sure that I would completely fall apart when I saw the man with whom I had shared both supper and drinks, whose hand I had shaken, with whose wife I had danced, gouging out a person's eyes. And of course I had fallen apart, I was trembling inside and I wanted to get out of that room as quickly as possible, but I wasn't going to let Tupra see that, he had tormented me quite enough for one night and I wasn't prepared to give him still more pleasure. Flavia would have no inkling of her husband's sadistic side, it's astonishing how little we know the faces of those we love, today or yesterday, let alone tomorrow.

'What I'd like to know is how come there was a camera in what I assume to be a remote cowshed somewhere in the back of beyond? Isn't that rather strange?' I tried to maintain that technical tone of voice, and I was doing quite well with my efforts to pull myself together.

Tupra again looked down at me from above, more amused now than irritated.

'Yes, it would have been very strange, Jack, if the fellow with the lupara, you see what a quick learner I am'-he pronounced the word as if it were English, 'looparrah,' he didn't have a very good ear-'hadn't hidden it there beforehand. If they'd discovered it, he might have ended up just like the man in the chair.'

I didn't really want an answer to my next question, but I asked it purely in order to shore myself up, until the moment when I could leave, and I asked it in that same technical tone:

'You're not telling me that guy's English, are you, looking like that? You're not telling me he's our agent?' I almost said 'your,' but I corrected myself or changed my mind in time, possibly ironically, possibly because in some way it suited me.

The answer was obvious, 'What else do you think we spend our money on?' or 'Why else do we have contacts?' or 'Why else do we resort to blackmail?' but Tupra, at that late hour, wanted to draw the attention back to himself. The fact is he had been doing this intermittently all night.

'That's a big question, Jack.' He moved away from me, went to the desk from which he had taken the disk, carefully put the disk back inside, and locked the drawer with the key, the key to his treasures. Then he turned to ask me the question again, from the other side of the desk, in the near-darkness. He said it with his large mouth-with his overly soft and fleshy mouth, as lacking in consistency as it was over-endowed in breadth-at the same time blowing out smoke: 'You've had plenty of time to think about it, so answer the question I asked you in the car. Now that you've seen things you'd never seen before and, I hope, never will again. Tell me now, why, according to you, one can't go around beating people up and killing them? You've seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can't.'