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

'No, nothing. And we talk at least once a week.'

'Well, I'm surprised she didn't. It was a really nasty cut, a superficial one, but it went from one side of her nose to halfway across her cheek, you couldn't miss it.'- 'Uno sfregio,' I thought, that recently learned word sprang immediately into my mind, 'a gash.'-'And she had a graze on her chin. From the way she talked about it, I just didn't believe her, and it looked more like a scratch or a welt or as if someone had slapped her, I know a bit about these things because a woman I was vaguely friendly with some years ago used to get beaten up by her husband; in fact, he killed her in the end, after I'd stopped seeing her luckily, which is something.' I instinctively knocked on wood. 'So I asked her straight out if Custardoy had hit her, if he'd beaten her up. She denied it, of course, and said I must be mad, how could I even think such a thing. But she blushed when she said it, and I can tell when my sister is lying from years of watching her face whenever she lied as a child. And I've heard other things since.'

What things? Do you know the guy?'

I realized that I preferred not to mention his name, although I had it stored away in my memory, as if it were a find, a treasure. It was a valuable piece of information.

'Yes, by sight. And by hearsay too. A few years ago, he was often to be seen drinking in smart bars like the Chicote, the Cock, or the Del Diego, or in others, he's an arty type, a nocturnal womanizer, although apparently he didn't restrict his activities to the nighttime only, he's the kind of man who can tell at once who wants to be chatted up and for what purpose, the kind who's capable of creating the necessary willingness and purpose in someone else, that is, in women. At least so I've heard. I don't know if he still goes to those places, because I don't go any more myself. You probably saw him once or twice there yourself, in the eighties or nineties.'

'What does he look like? Has he got a ponytail?' I asked, I couldn't help myself. I was burning to know this.

'Yes, how did you guess?'

'Oh, it was just something someone said. But in that case, no, I've never seen him. I mean, I can't remember anyone in particular with a ponytail. Then again, I pretty much stopped going out at night when Guillermo was born, and the guy probably didn't have a ponytail before that. And of course the surname doesn't mean anything to me either. What things have you heard?'

'Well, after seeing that cut on Luisa's face-which left me with a really bad feeling-I asked an acquaintance of mine, Juan Ranz, about Custardoy, who he's known since they were children. They never got on well and have had hardly any contact for years, but their parents were friends and used to leave them together to play and entertain each other, so he had to put up with his company quite often. He says Custardoy was one of those very grown-up kids, impatient to enter the adult world, as if he wanted to climb out of his as yet unformed body. Then, when he was older, Custardoy used to make copies of paintings for Ranz's father, who's an art expert (apparently, Custardoy's a brilliant copyist and can make a perfect copy of anything from any period, in fact, it's hard to tell them from the originals, which, of course, is where his reputation as a forger comes in), and so he still used to see him from time to time, through his father. Juan is an interpreter at the United Nations, and, as a matter of fact, his wife's name is Luisa too.'

'What else did he tell you?'

'The most notable or perhaps the most troubling fact, and the one that most concerns us, is that, although he's a great success with the ladies, there's obviously something slightly sinister about the way he treats them because Ranz knows of some women who've emerged from a night with Custardoy feeling really scared, after having sex I mean (some of them were prostitutes, and so it was purely sexual). And afterwards, they didn't even want to talk about it, as if they needed to forget it as quickly as possible and shake off the whole experience. As if the experience, or even the mere memory of it, had burned itself into them and didn't lend itself to being turned into a story. And even when there were two prostitutes involved at the same time (apparently he's into threesomes, although always with women), both had emerged feeling equally scared and refusing to say anything about it. And inevitably, there are lots of other women, prostitutes or not, who feel an irresistible desire to know just what it is he does or doesn't do. There's no shortage of stupid women out there as you know.'

This was the worst possible news. A ladies' man who was also into whores, and who left his mark on women, even if that mark was only a mark of terror. A man like that won't even have to bury me or dig my grave still deeper, the grave in which I'm already buried,' I thought, 'because he will have erased my memory at a stroke, with the first terror and the first entreaty and the first fascination and the first command, and Luisa could already be under his thumb.'

'But Luisa isn't stupid, at least she didn't used to be, no, she's never been stupid,' I said. 'Perhaps he's different with women who aren't whores. Perhaps when he has more than one night at his disposal his behavior changes to the exact opposite, purely in order to ensure that there will be more nights to come. Or do you think that's precisely what is so sinister about him, that he beats up all the women he goes out with? I can't believe that. Someone would have said something, someone would have found out, the women he'd been with would have warned each other. You women talk about such things, don't you, I mean details? Spanish women do. In what sort of terms has she spoken to you about him? Is she in love or infatuated? Desperate, mad, distracted, flattered? Just how serious is she? She can't be in love. And how did she meet him? Where did he spring from?' The information provided by this Ranz fellow had perhaps made me even more uneasy than Luisa's now yellowing black eye. 'What else did this friend of yours say?'

'Nothing very good, except that he's brilliant at his job. According to Ranz, though, he's a slippery customer, not to be trusted under any circumstances. And he's not the sort to fall in love, or didn't use to be, he said. But who knows, love is an area in which people can change at any moment. When I told him that my sister was going out with him, he said: "Oh God" like someone heralding a disaster. That's why I was trying to find out more, well, because of that and her supposed collision with a bollard and that worrying cut. In fact, I asked him outright if he thought Custardoy would be capable of hitting a woman.' And Cristina paused, as if she'd completed that particular sequence of sentences.

'And what did he say? Tell me.'

'He wasn't categorical about it, but nevertheless…He thought about it for a moment and then said: "I suppose so. I don't know that he has, no one's ever told me he has and he wouldn't tell me so himself. It's not the kind of thing you boast about. But I suppose that, yes, he would be perfectly capable of doing so." You see what I mean. (Of course, Ranz doesn't like the man and so can't be taken as the oracle.) That was when he told me about the prostitutes and, well, I assumed it wasn't only prostitutes. Now you tell me that Luisa has another injury, one she hasn't even mentioned to me. If she'd bumped into a door and given herself a black eye, the normal thing would be for her to tell me about it, we may not have seen each other lately, but we've spoken on the phone. And she didn't tell you about the incident with the bollard. Yes, now I really am very worried. And Jaime, Luisa may not be stupid, but you've only known her in a stable situation, when she was with you. Apart from the last few months before you left, of course, but there was still a remnant of stability while you were at home, a kind of postponement, an inertia. But how long have you been away now? Nine months, twelve, fifteen?