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

'What are you thinking about?'

'About the cousins.'

'What cousins?'

'Whose do you think? Mine.'

'But you don't have any cousins, you never have,' I said, feeling slightly alarmed.

He looked somewhat taken aback, as if he were making a mental correction, then immediately adjusted his expression and did not insist, but answered again as if for the first time.

'About my Uncle Victor,' he said. Ask him to please tell my father that I'm coming home.'

There had been an Uncle Victor, but both he and my grandfather had been dead a long time, so long that I'd never even known them, either of them. This was the first time his mind had strayed like that, at least when I'd been with him. Although, perhaps that isn't the right way to put it-what had strayed was time itself, which, contrary to what we tend to believe, never entirely passes, just as we never entirely cease to be what we once were, and it's not that odd to slip back into the past so vividly that it becomes juxtaposed with the present, especially if it's the present of an old man, which offers him so little and is so unvaried, its days indistinguishable. Anyone who waits patiently or without knowing what exactly it is he's waiting for is perfectly justified in deciding to install himself in a more pleasing or more appropriate time; after all, if today chooses to ignore him, he's perfectly within his rights to ignore today-there's no room for complaint on either side.

'But your father's dead,' I said, correcting him again, 'he's been dead for years, as has your Uncle Victor.'

Again he did not insist, but replied:

'I know they're dead. You're hardly telling me anything new, Jacobo.' And he gave an indulgent laugh as if I were the person whose mind was rambling.

Perhaps my father now came and went in time with great facility and speed. Perhaps he was now the master of time and held in his hand the hourglass or clock, of himself or of his existence, and while he calmly watched time advance he was traveling wherever he pleased. Maybe that's the only thing left to the very old, especially if they're not astute old men, as Wheeler is, and no longer struggle to fill the vacancies, to seek out substitutes or replacements for the many people they have lost throughout their life; and are no longer part of the universal, continual, substitutional mechanism or movement-which, being everyone's lot, is also ours-and they stop accumulating and surrounding themselves with poor imitations, choosing instead to rediscover the originals in all their plenitude. They have no further need of flabby, pale, elusive life, only of thought, which becomes in them ever more potent and clear and all-embracing, since it only occasionally has to live alongside reality.

'You've got a pistol, haven't you?' it occurred to me to ask him then. It would turn up when he died, and I feared that his death would not be long in coming; and one of us, my brothers, my sister or myself, would inherit it as Miquelín had inherited from his father the Llama I had just held in my hands. Perhaps it would, in the future, be useful for me to know where to find another 'clean' pistol, without having to borrow it from someone.

A little surprised, he looked at me with those clear eyes of his that now saw only dimly.

'Yes. Why do you ask?' And this topic seemed to rouse him or return him to today.

Where did it come from? Why have you got it?' I asked, not answering his question.

He raised one hand to his eyebrows, not this time in order to smooth them abstractedly, but in order to think or remember.

'Well, my father was very keen on guns. He wasn't just a hunter, he was a marksman. He loved that and was very good at it. He was a member of the National Shooting Club and owned a lot of weapons. A Mauser carbine; a Baker rifle; a very ornate Le Page target pistol; and even a Monkey Tail, although I can't recall now why they called it that; pistols and revolvers, some of them very old, from the Wild West era; there was an American LeMat and an English Beaumont-Adams and a couple of Derringers, one of them with a double barrel, and pistols from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and I can remember him having a heavily gilded Blunderbuss, a Miquelet dueling pistol, and a silver-inlaid "Queen Anne," a really fine collection. And then there were knives and swords as well from exotic countries: gumias and yatagans, bolos from the Philippines, a Malay kris… As well as rapiers of course.' He paused and then remembered two more. 'Oh, and a Nepalese kukri and even an Indian bhuj, which was very rare, half-knife, half-axe, it was also known as an "elephant head," because it had a brass likeness of an elephant's head between blade and haft, which was long and narrow…' He was seeing it, I realized that he was actually seeing that bhuj from his childhood as well as all the other weapons, with that gaze so frequent in the old even when they're in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It's not an absent look, but a focused one, focused on something a very long way away. And after a brief moment's absorption in thought, he went on: 'He passed on that enthusiasm to both my brother and me, but especially to me. He used to show them to us and explain all about them, and we got used to handling them with scrupulous care.'

'But what did he want with knives and swords? You can't shoot with them, can you? In the National Shooting Club, they don't let you fling a Malay kris at someone, do they?'

Now he was genuinely interested in the conversation, or at least in that remote reminiscence, and so he reacted quickly to my joke, amused but pretending not to be:

'Honestly, you are a silly lot, you never miss a chance to make some foolish remark.' He used the plural 'you' to encompass all four of his children, as he often did even when only one of us was present. 'Of course he couldn't use them to shoot with, he just liked them, I suppose. He was born in 1870, and people then had a liking for weapons in general. It was quite normal. And they were rarely put to criminal use as they are now'

'Hm,' I said, 'although it doesn't seem very sensible to let children handle them. You and your brother could have blown each other's heads off or cut each other's throats. You say he owned rapiers as well. I know how sharp they can be. Nowadays, the authorities, no, what am I saying, the neighbors would have hit the roof over something like that. They'd have had your father locked up.'

The expression 'locked up' applied to his father must have annoyed him, even though I was the one using it and only jokingly.

'People do a lot of stupid things nowadays,' he replied reproachfully, as if I were one of those authorities or neighbors. 'Nowadays, everyone's afraid of everything, and people have very little freedom in their personal lives and less and less freedom in how they bring up their children. Before, we used to teach children all kinds of things as soon as they reached the age of reason, which is why it's called that, things that could be useful when they grew up, because in those days you never forgot that a child would one day be an adult. Not like now, it seems that adults are supposed to continue being children into old age, and idiotic cowardly children at that. That's why there's so much silliness everywhere.' He raised his fingers to his lips again and murmured: 'It's sad watching an era in decline, when one has known other far more intelligent eras. Where's it going to end? It will be one of the reasons I won't overly regret my departure, which, I believe, is quite close.'

'No, not that close, besides, who knows,' I answered, 'you'll probably outlive us all. No one knows who will die when, do they?' And when he didn't reply, I asked again: 'Do they?'