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

'And besides, everything has its moment to be believed, isn't that what you think?'

'You don't know how true that is, Jack,' he replied, then immediately took up his story again. 'It was then, after her death, that LaVey started to boast in public about his affair with her (as you know, the dead are very quiet and never raise any objections) and to put it about in the press that the spectacular accident had been the result of a curse he'd put on her lover Brody, a curse so powerful that it had blithely carried her off too, since she was seated beside him, in the place of highest risk. And people love conspiracies and settlings of scores, the weird and the wonderful and the dangers that come to pass. Most people deny the existence of chance, they loathe it, but then most people are stupid.' I remembered hearing him say the same thing or something similar to Wheeler, perhaps it was one of the beliefs on which our group had always based itself, as does every government. 'If Jayne Mansfield had been attracted by or flirted with the Church of Satan, no less, it was hardly odd that her pretty face should have ended up like that, in a swamp, being nibbled by animals until it was picked up; or with her celebrated platinum blonde hair snatched from her skull, for it had always been her second most striking feature, the first being the one on such conspicuous display in the postcard I showed you. The rabble demands explanations for everything'-Tupra used that word 'rabble,' which is so frowned upon now-'but it wants explanations that are ridiculous, improbable, complicated and conspiratorial, and the more those explanations are all those things, the more easily it accepts and swallows them, the happier it is. Incomprehensible as it may be, that's the way of the world. And so that bald, horned grotesque LaVey was listened to and believed, so much so that those who still remember Mansfield and worship her (and there are plenty of them, just take a look on the Internet, you'll be surprised), what survives of Jayne Mansfield are not the four or five amusing Hollywood comedies she made, nor her two flamboyant Playboy covers, nor the wilful, dissolute scandals she was involved in, nor her crazy pink mansion on Sunset Boulevard, nor even the bold fact that she was the first star of the modern era to show her tits in a conventional American film, but the dismal legend of her death, so humiliating for a sex symbol like her and created perhaps by a satanist, a pervert, a wizard. This, ironically, caused more of a sensation and brought her more publicity than anything she ever did during a lifetime spent pursuing the limelight, daily renouncing all privacy and what the overwhelming mass of people would call dignity. What a shame she couldn't enjoy the thousands of reports about her and the accident, and see whole pages devoted to her horrible death, like something out of a novel. It made no odds that the coffin in which she was buried was pink: her name was forever swathed in black, the blackness of a fatal, diabolical curse and a sinful life crowned by punishment, a dark road surrounded by mud, and a lovely head separated from its voluptuous body until the end of time. If she hadn't died in that way, with the possibly invented details that so fire the rabble's imagination, she would have been almost completely forgotten. Kennedy wouldn't, obviously, if he'd simply suffered a heart attack in Dallas, but you can be quite sure that he would be remembered infinitely less and with only slight emotion if his name were not immediately associated with being gunned down and with various convoluted, unresolved conspiracy theories. That, in essence, is the Kennedy-Mansfield complex, the fear of having one's life forever marked and distorted by the manner of one's death, the fear that one's whole life will come to be viewed as merely an intermediary stage, a pretext, on the way to the lurid end that will eternally identify us. Mind you, we all run the same risk, even if we're not public figures, but obscure, anonymous, secondary individuals. We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine.'

'But not everyone fears such an ending,' I said. 'There are those who desire and seek out theatrical, spectacular deaths, even if, lacking any other recourse, they can only achieve this with words. You have no idea the care many writers have taken to utter a few memorable last words. Although, of course, it's hard to know which will truly be your last word, and more than one writer has blown the opportunity, by being over-hasty and speaking too soon. Then, at the final moment, nothing suitable has come to mind and they've spouted some utter nonsense instead.'

'Yes, I agree, but it's still a response based on fear. Anyone who yearns to die a memorable death does so because he fears not living up to his reputation or his greatness, whether assigned to him by others or by himself in private-it makes no difference. The person who feels, to use your term, narrative horror, as you believe Dick Dearlove does, is as afraid of someone spoiling his image or the story he's been telling as someone might be who's planning his own brilliant or theatrical and eccentric denouement, it depends on the character of the individual and on the nature of the blot, which some will confuse with a flourish, but death is always a blot. Killing and being killed and committing suicide are not the same thing. Nor is being an executioner, or being mad with despair, or a victim, or being a heroic victim or a foolish one. Obviously, it's never good to die before one's time-and, still worse, foolishly-but the living Jayne Mansfield wouldn't have disapproved of the legend of her death, although she would might well have wished she hadn't worn a wig on that particular car journey. And I don't think your Lorca or that rebellious, provocative Italian filmmaker, Pasolini, would have been entirely displeased with the kind of blot that fell on them, from an aesthetic or, if you like, narrative point of view. They were both of them somewhat exhibitionist, and their memories have benefitted from their unjust, violent deaths, both of which have shades of martyrdom about them, don't you think? In the minds of yokels, that is. You and I know that neither one nor the other consciously sacrificed himself for anything, they were just unlucky'

Tupra had used the word 'rabble' twice and now he was using the word 'yokel' (or was it 'fool,' I can't quite remember now). 'He can't think much of people,' I thought, 'to use such words so easily and so casually, and with a kind of natural, unaffected scorn. However, in the latter category he's including both the cultivated and the common, from biographers to journalists and sociologists, from men and women of letters to historians, all those people, in short, who view those two famous murder victims-made even more famous by their murders-as martyrs to a political or even a sexual cause. Reresby clearly doesn't think much of death either, he doesn't see it as anything extraordinary; perhaps that's the reason he asked me why it was that one couldn't go around dealing it out, or maybe he thinks it's just another instance of chance, and he neither denies nor loathes chance, nor does he require explanations for everything, unlike stupid people who need to see signs and connections and links everywhere. It could be that he loathes chance so little that he doesn't mind joining forces with it now and then, and setting himself up as Sir Death with his sword and playing serf to that efficient slave. He must have been a yokel himself once, possibly even for quite a long time.'

'You don't think much of people, do you?' I said. 'You don't think much of death either, of other people's deaths.'

Tupra moistened his lips, not with his tongue but with his lips themselves, as if pressing them together would be enough-they were, after all, very large and fleshy and would always have a little saliva on them. Then he took a sip from his glass, and I had the disquieting sense that he was licking his lips. He again offered me some port, and this time I accepted, my palate felt as if it were covered by a communion wafer or a veil, he poured from the bottle until I raised my hand to say 'Enough.'