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

'Just out of curiosity, what language were you and Mr. Von Truschinsky speaking when you and he were alone?'

He looked at me with such an accomplished show of surprise that I even thought it might be real.

'What language would we be speaking? English, of course. The same language in which I was speaking to you. Why would I change? Besides, I hardly know any German.'

It wasn't true that they had been speaking in English, but I didn't want to argue. So I changed the subject, or perhaps not that much:

'Listen, Bertram, I can understand why you asked me to accompany you to Bath and Edinburgh, and I hope I proved useful to you there. But I can't understand why you wanted me to go with you to York nor why I came to Berlin. You didn't set me any task, and I can't see what use I was. And don't tell me that it was to keep you company, that you don't like traveling alone. In York, you had the company of Jane, although in the end we hardly made use of her at all.' Jane Treves hadn't been part of the excursion to Coxwold nor had she walked for a long time around the medieval city wall. We had merely had supper with her. It could be, why not, that he had made use of her and that she had slept in his room.

'She was very busy seeing relatives. I included her in the trip more than anything so that she would have the chance to see them. She hasn't visited them for ages. I'm very pleased with her work. She's hardly stopped lately.'

'And yet, on the other hand, with all these short trips, you're forcing me to postpone my journey to Madrid. You may not realize it, but it's been ages since I saw my kids; I'll hardly recognize them. Or my father. My father's very old, you know, he's only a year younger than Peter. Sometimes I'm afraid I won't see him again.' And here I did insist. 'Why did you ask me to come with you to Berlin? To buy shoes? To renew my footwear?'

Tupra smiled with his thick lips that hardly grew any thinner when stretched.

'I wanted to introduce you to Clemens von T, he's an old friend of mine now and provides a magnificent service, you can trust him absolutely. I'm sure that, from now on, you'll be much better shod. And you'll be able to deal with him direct. Anyway, I have no trips planned for next month, so if you want to spend a few weeks in Madrid-two or three if you like-that will be fine.'

Such a generous amount of leave. I was taken aback. I thanked him. But there was no way he was going to reply to a question to which he was determined not to reply, I knew that all too well, nor would he explain something he either shouldn't or couldn't explain. I gave up. I assumed that when he mentioned my being able to deal direct with Clemens von T, he was not refering to shoes, and that in future he would ask me to consult him about something other than footwear. Nevertheless, the truth is that even now, when that time of fever and dream has long passed, I continue to order my handsome long-lasting pairs of shoes from that tiny shop in Berlin.

Tupra meant what he said on the plane, and so I arranged my trip to Madrid for the following month, a stay of two weeks, I realized this would be quite long enough, possibly even too long, I mean, once I had seen everyone, I wouldn't know what to do with my time.

Nostalgia, or missing some place or person, regardless of whether for reasons of absence or abandonment or death, is a very strange and contradictory business. At first, you think you can't live without someone or far from someone, the initial grief is so intense and so constant that you experience it as a kind of endless sinking or an interminably advancing spear, because each moment of privation counts and weighs, you feel it and it chokes you, and all you want is for the hours of the day to pass, knowing that their passing will lead to nothing new, only to more waiting for more waiting. Each morning you open your eyes-if you've had the benefit of sleep which, while it doesn't allow you to forget everything, does at least numb and confuse-thinking the same thought that oppressed you just before you closed them, for example, 'She's not here and she won't be coming back' (whether that means her coming back to you or back from death), and you prepare yourself not to trudge through the day, because you're not even capable of looking that far ahead or of differentiating one day from another, but through the next five minutes and then the next, and so you'll continue from five minutes to five minutes, if not from minute to minute, becoming entangled in them all and, at most, trying to distract yourself for just two or three minutes from your consciousness, or from your ponderous paralysis. If that happens, it has nothing to do with your will, but with some form of blessed chance: a curious item on the television news, the time it takes to complete or begin a crossword, an irritating or solicitous phone call from someone you can't stand, the bottle that falls to the floor and obliges you to gather up the fragments so that you don't cut yourself when out of laziness you wander about barefoot, or the dire TV series that nonetheless amuses you-or that you simply took to straight away-and to which you surrender yourself with inexplicable relief until the final credits roll, wishing another episode would start immediately and allow you to keep clinging on to that stupid thread of continuity. These are the found routines that sustain us, what remains of life, the foolish and the innocuous, that neither enthuses nor demands participation or effort, the padding that we despise when everything is fine and we're busy and have no time to miss anyone, not even the dead (in fact, we use those busy times to shrug them off, although this only works for a short while, because the dead insist on staying dead and always come back later on, the pin prick pressing into our chest and the lead upon our souls).

Time passes, and at some ill-defined point, we go back to being able to sleep without suddenly starting awake and without remembering what has happened in our dreams, and to shaving not at chance moments or at odd times, but each morning; no bottles are broken and we remain unirritated by any phone call, we can make do without the TV soap opera, the crossword, the random soothing routines that we look at oddly as we bid farewell to them because now we can scarcely understand why we ever needed them, and we can even make do without the patient people who entertained us and listened to us during our monotonous, obsessive period of mourning. We raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We're filled by a kind of retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of ever giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. 'I was abandoned,' we think, 'by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They'll regret it in the end, because it's nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one's been forgotten, and now I'm forgetting them, and anyone who dies knows more or less what fate awaits him or her. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away' Then you quote these words to yourself: 'Memory is a tremulous finger.' And add in your own words: 'And it doesn't always succeed when it tries to point at us.' We discover that our finger can no longer be trusted, or less and less often, and that those who absorbed our thoughts night and day and day and night, and were fixed there like a nail hammered firmly in, gradually work loose and become of no importance to us; they grow blurred and, yes, tremulous, and one can even begin to doubt their existence as if they were a bloodstain rubbed and scrubbed and cleaned, or of which only the rim remains, which is the part that takes longest to remove, and then that rim, too, finally submits.