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

'Everything about young De la Garza is odd,' he said scornfully, playing down the importance of the episode, he had probably seen worse; and he stood up, not in order to shake my hand, but to leave. His anger had passed, the situation had nothing to do with him, and his mind was already wandering pastures new. 'Wait, I'm leaving too. I'll see you this evening, Rafita. I doubt I'll have the good fortune of you missing my lecture.'

And there we left De la Garza, still barricaded behind his desk, not daring even to sit down. He didn't say goodbye, he obviously still wasn't capable of articulating any civilized words. And while we, the Professor and I, walked back along those slightly labyrinthine corridors towards the exit, I couldn't help at least attempting an apology:

'You see we had a bit of a falling-out and he still hasn't got over it.'

'No,' he said. 'You should feel very pleased with yourself: you had him scared shitless. You're lucky you can keep him at arm's length like that. He's terribly clinging. I'm vaguely friendly with his father, which is why I put up with the son. Only from time to time, fortunately, and only when I come to London for one of these dull official dos.'

Once we were out in the street and we went our separate ways, I noticed (strangely enough, I hadn't noticed before) that Rafita's fear had cast me in a rather flattering light. Imposing respect, instilling fear, seeing oneself as a danger had its pleasurable side. It made one feel more confident, more optimistic, stronger. It made one feel important and-how can I put it-masterful. But before I hailed a taxi, there was time for me to find this unexpected vanity repugnant too. Not that the latter feeling drove out conceit, they lived alongside each other. The two things were mingled, until they dissipated and were forgotten.

When you haven't been back for some time to a place you know well, even if it's the city you were born in, the city to which you're most accustomed, where you've lived for the longest time and which is still home to your children and your father and your siblings and home even to the love that stood firm for many years (even if that place is as familiar to you as the air you breathe), there comes a moment when it begins to fade and your recollection of it dims, as if your memory were suddenly afflicted by myopia and-how can I put it-by cinematography: the different eras become juxtaposed and you start to feel unsure as to which of those cities you left or departed from when you last set off, the city of your childhood or your youth or the city of your manhood or maturity, when where you live dwindles in importance, and, hard though it is to admit, the truth is you'd be happy enough with your own little corner almost anywhere in the world.

That's how I'd come to see Madrid during my now prolonged absence: faded and dim, accumulative, oscillating, a stage-set that concerned me very little despite having invested so much in it-so much of my past and so much of my present, albeit at a distance-and, more to the point, one that could get along without me quite happily (it had, after all, dismissed me, expelled me from its modest production). Of course any city can do without anyone, we're not essential anywhere, not even to the few people who say they miss our presence or claim they couldn't live without us, because everyone seeks substitutes and, sooner or later, finds them, or else ends up resigned to our absence and feels so comfortable in that mood of resignation that they no longer wish to introduce any changes, not even to allow the lost or much-mourned person to return, not even to take us in again… Who knows who will replace us, we know only that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in every role, and the void or gap we believed we left or really did leave is of no importance, regardless of how we disappeared or died, whether far too young or after a long life, whether violently or peacefully: it's the same with love and friendship, with work and influence, with machinations and with fear, with domination and even longing itself, with hatred, which also wearies of us in the end, and with the desire for vengeance, which darkens and changes its objective when it lingers and delays, as Tupra had urged me not to do; with the houses we inhabit, with the rooms we grew up in and the cities that accept us, with the corridors we raced madly along as children and the windows we gazed dreamily out of as adolescents, with the telephones that persuade and patiently listen to us and laugh in our ear or murmur agreement, at work and at play, in shops and in offices, at our counters and our desks, playing card games or chess, with the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and with the streets that grow exhausted from seeing so many fade away, generation after generation, all meeting the same sad end; with restaurants and walks and pleasant parks and fields, on balconies and belvederes from which we watched the passing of so many moons they grew bored with looking at us, and with our armchairs and chairs and sheets, until not a trace, not a vestige of our smell remains and they're torn up to make rags or cloths, and even our kisses are replaced and the person left behind closes her eyes when she kisses the easier to forget us (if the pillow is still the same, or so that we don't reappear in some sudden, treacherous, irrepressible mental vision); with memories and thoughts and daydreams and with everything, and so we are all of us like snow on shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops…

It had been some time since I visited Madrid, from which I, too, had evaporated or faded, leaving not a trace behind or so it seemed, or perhaps all that remained of me was the rim, (which is the part that takes longest to remove), and also my own first name, which I had not yet left behind me, not having yet reached that state of strangeness. I hadn't ceased to exist, of course, in my father's house, not there, but I wasn't referring to his home, but to the home that was once mine. And now I would perhaps find out who had replaced me, even if he was only temporary and had no intention of staying, the permanent replacement takes his time or patiently awaits his turn, the one who will truly replace us always hangs back and lets others go ahead to be burned on the pyre that Luisa one day lit for us and which continues to burn, consuming all who come near, and which does not automatically extinguish itself once we've been burned to a cinder. I wouldn't need to worry that much about whoever happened to be by her side now, or only a little, just a touch, because of the mere fact that he was by her side and by the side of my children too.

I had decided not to give them prior warning from London, but to wait until I arrived, so that my phone call could be followed immediately by a semi-surprise visit. I wanted to make sure they were home-I knew the hours they kept, but there are always exceptions and emergencies-and then turn up a few minutes later, full of smiles and laden with presents. To see the children's excitement and, out of the corner of my eye, Luisa's amused, perhaps briefly nostalgic expression, that would allow me a simulacrum of triumph and a flicker of illusory hope, enough perhaps to sustain me during that artificial two-week sojourn, which seemed to me far too long the moment the plane touched down.

I stayed at a hotel and not at my father's house, for I had learned from my brothers and my sister-rather than from him, for he never spoke about his problems-that his health had deteriorated badly over the last two months, after the doctors discovered that he'd had three mini-strokes-as they called them-of which he had been entirely unaware, not even knowing when they'd occurred; and although my brothers, my sister, some of his grand-daughters and my sisters-in-law often dropped in to see him, there had, in the end, been no alternative but to provide him with a live-in caregiver, a rather nice Colombian lady, who slept in the bedroom I would have occupied, and who relieved his maid, who was getting on in years now, of some of her tasks. I didn't want to upset the new order with my presence. With my current salary, I could easily afford the Palace Hotel, and so I booked a suite there. It was easier for me to stay at a hotel than in someone else's house, even that of my father or of my best friends, male and female, the women being rather more hospitable: with them I would not only have felt like an intruder but also an exile from my own home, whereas in a hotel, I could pretend I was a visiting foreigner, although not a tourist, and feel less acutely that unpleasant sense of having been repudiated and then offered shelter.