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

And as soon as I thought this, and despite Miquelin's warning, I cocked the pistol. It was only a test and only for an instant, just to see a spark of panic in those strange dark eyes, it was only a spark, but I saw it. And then I immediately put my thumb on the hammer and lowered it and removed the projectile that had passed into the barrel or chamber or whatever it's called and put it away in my pocket; I uncocked the Llama. But he had seen how quick the pistol was to cock and how, once cocked, the bullets could fly out-a single gesture, then another and another-towards his head or his chest, towards an arm or a leg, towards his codpiece which would be reduced to a few fine hairs like the vanished codpiece of Death in the painting, or towards whatever part I chose to point it at. 'What a very odd feeling,' I thought, 'having a man at your mercy. Deciding if he should live or die, although it's not even really a matter of deciding.'

Custardoy, however, put on a brave face, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to be right, or, given that he had no weapon with which to defend himself, that he was trying to dissuade or terrify or destroy me, or to dig my grave still deeper with his ugly words and with his voice. His voice did not emerge cleanly, it was slightly hoarse, as if there were tiny pins in his throat similar to those on the revolving metallic disc or cylinder in a music box, which strike the tuned teeth of the comb and determine or mark the one repetitive melody. What he said emerged slowly, as if the spikes slowed down his speech. At any rate, he kept his hands on the table. He had finished his cigarette, but hadn't forgotten my earlier order, which was a good sign.

'Look, Jaime.' And it bothered me unutterably that he should call me by my first name, the name that Luisa used and which he had doubtless heard her say (how embarrassing) when she spoke to him about me. 'This is all total bullshit, and in a while, when you've left here, you'll be the first to see that. What is it that bothers you so much? Is it the fact that I screw her now and then? It's a bit late for you to be complaining about that. You probably do the same in London with whoever takes your fancy, and you're going to have to get used to it, if you aren't already, for Chrissake, there was whatever there was between you two and now there isn't. It happens all the time. But this I really can't believe.' He stopped and gave a short laugh, the laughter that made him almost pleasant and more attractive, he was still not fully aware of the danger, of the danger I represented. 'I mean, it's funny really, this is the last thing I would have expected. It's like a scene straight out of an opera, dammit!' Again he said this as if he were talking to a third party, to a ghost present in the room and not to me, and that drove me wild. He was probably looking forward to telling the story later on to a friend ('You won't believe what happened to me today? Christ, it was weird') or perhaps to Luisa herself ('I bet you can't guess who came to see me today, and toting a gun as well. Fucking hell! You married a really nasty piece of work there, he's nothing like you said, he's a complete headcase'). But he wouldn't be seeing Luisa again, he didn't know that, but I did. I doubted that he would talk quite like that to her, although he did when she wasn't there, of course; foul language came naturally to him, much more than it does to me: I have no problem using swearwords when the situation calls for it, but I lacked his fluency in that particular register, with which I was as familiar as almost everyone else, but which I didn't often use.

'You know exactly what bothers me. You know precisely what I find unacceptable, you bastard. Like I said, from today on, you'll never touch her again.'

He was still unbowed. He was playing a dangerous game. As he must have noticed, he risked heating up my lukewarm blood and provoking hand and finger into action. Perhaps this was a useful stratagem: perhaps he was trying not only to show that he was right, but also to show me that I was not, to open my eyes, to rid himself of this stupid unexpected problem and get on with his life by making me give in.

'What? Oh. The bruises,' he said, and each rasping word was dragged out like the music from a music box, each one emerged slowly as if it kept snagging on something, there was also perhaps a little madrileño bravado in his way of speaking. Then he added a trite remark, which, nonetheless, wounded me when I realized what he was saying; it took me a few seconds because I found it hard to grasp or preferred not to grasp what he meant, or maybe it took me that amount of time to absorb the meaning. 'Look, pal,' again that hateful belittling term, 'everyone has their own sexuality, and with some partners it comes out naturally and with others it doesn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either. It just happened and you have to give people what they want. Or don't you think so? Look, I didn't do anything to her she didn't want me to. Is that clear? So don't damn well go blaming me for something I'm not guilty of, all right?'

Yes, it took me a few seconds. 'What is this guy saying?' I thought. 'He's telling me that Luisa enjoys being knocked around, he's telling me that? That's impossible. It's a lie,' I thought, 'I've known her intimately for years, although less so lately, and I've never seen the slightest suggestion of that, I'd have noticed it, however slight, a hint, a question mark, a glimpse, this guy's trying to slither out of it, trying to justify himself, to escape, he knows why I'm here and that my reason is a grave one and he's been thinking up this false explanation for a while now, he knows for certain that I'm not going to ask Luisa about it and he's taking advantage of that to tell me he only hurts women who want to be hurt, or something of the sort, but Cristina told me how frightened the women were who had slept with him, some at any rate, and their subsequent silence about or concealment of what went on, why wouldn't they speak, if he was a violent brute, they'd report him, they'd alert other women, they'd forewarn them, for example those prostitutes he goes with, sometimes two at a time. No, it can't be true, it's not,' I thought, shrugging off the idea. It's dreadful to be told anything, anything at all, it's dreadful to have ideas put in your head, however unlikely or ridiculous and however unsustainable and improbable (but everything has its time to be believed), any scrap of information registered by the brain stays there until it achieves oblivion, that eternally one-eyed oblivion, any story or fact and even the remotest possibility is recorded, and however much you clean and scrub and erase, that rim is the kind that will never come out; it's understandable really that people should hate knowledge and deny what is there before their eyes and prefer to know nothing and to repudiate the facts, that they should avoid the inoculation and the poison and push it away as soon as they see or feel it near, it's best not to take risks; it's understandable, too, that we almost all ignore what we see and divine and anticipate and smell, and that we toss into the bag of imaginings anything that we see clearly-for however short a time-before it can take root in our mind and leave it forever troubled, and so it's hardly strange that we should be reluctant to know anyone's face, today, tomorrow or yesterday 'What face am I wearing now?' I wondered. 'And what about Luisa's face, one I thought I had plumbed and deciphered and knew, to all intents and purposes, from top to bottom, from past to future and from tomorrow to yesterday, and then along comes this son-of-a-bitch talking about her sexuality and telling me she likes him to get rough with her in bed, it's a joke, I mustn't believe him or think about it, but people do change and, above all, make discoveries, the kind of wretched discovery that takes those people from us and carries them far away, as with young Pérez Nuix when I discovered the pleasure of pretending that I wasn't doing what I was doing or of making believe that what was happening wasn't happening, which is not, I think, quite the same thing, that had been political, a tacit game, but that's what this bastard would say, damn him, that it's all a game, an erotic game, anything is possible, but it can't be true. Luisa's black eye wasn't the result of some game, like hell it was, and yet Custardoy said: "What? Oh. The bruises," why did he use the plural when I've only seen one bruise, perhaps there are more underneath her clothes, on her body, I haven't seen Luisa naked on this visit nor will I, I'll probably never see her naked again, but this bastard will unless I stop him and make sure he's out of the picture now and for good, with no going back and no further delay, don't ever linger or delay, just cock the gun again and squeeze the trigger, it's a simple matter of running my hand over the slide to release it and moving a finger, this and then this, forward and back and a bullet in the head and that will be that, I am, after all, wearing gloves, he'll be out of the picture forever and no more bruises, no more bed, no more wit or charm, it's in my hands to do all of that and I don't even have to listen to him or speak to him again.'