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

'You never wanted to tell me the name of that writer who took part in the baiting of your friend Mares, for example,' I said. And there was no reason why you shouldn't tell me or anyone.'

He looked slightly surprised, as if he had completely forgotten about that conversation we'd had a long time ago, when I was still living in Madrid. And from what he went on to say, it did seem that he'd forgotten I even knew about that episode.

'You know about that.' And this was a mixture of statement and question.

'Yes. You told me once.'

'And I didn't want to tell you, eh?' This was clearly a question. 'I didn't want to tell you the name, eh?'

'No. Because of his wife and his daughters. You said you didn't want to risk being the indirect cause of someone later dragging the whole business up and rubbing their noses in it. Even though, if I remember rightly, his wife is dead now too.'

'Yes, they're both dead. But that doesn't change anything.' And he said in a murmur intended more for him than for me: 'I didn't want to tell you, you say. Good, yes, very good…'

He sat there thinking, and his blue eyes took on the fixed intense gaze that did not, in a way, see me. And a few seconds later, I had the impression that the act of recalling those people had again transported him back to a distant time when my mother was alive, and the kindly cheerful wife of that infamous man was being so very very good to us and, in particular, to her. I let two or three minutes pass in silence. He was not speaking now and he looked tired. Perhaps I should leave, even if that might be the last time we would see each other.

'I'm going, Papa,' I said, and I got up and kissed him on the forehead.

'Where?' he asked in astonishment, as if he thought it utterly absurd that I or any of his children should go anywhere.

'To my hotel and then tomorrow I'll catch the plane back to London.'

'Oh, you're off on a trip. Well, have a good journey, son.'

'I live in London now, Papa. Have you forgotten?'

'Ah, so you live in exile,' he said, without giving that last word any solemnity at all. 'Like the Greek gods.'

'The Greek gods?' I didn't know what he was referring to or what that remark had to do with anything. But he never lost the thread, at least I never saw him do so. He might abstract himself from time and people and circumstances, but his mind and his memory were always working, albeit, at the end, very much after their own fashion. Then again, all minds and memories do that.

'Don't you remember that Heine poem?' he said, and immediately began to recite the lines in German, from memory. He had learned the language as a boy, at school, which was possible in the 1920s, but unimaginable now, and he had always prided himself on being able to recite whole poems, by Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, the giants of German literature.

'No, Papa,' I said, interrupting him, 'I can't possibly remember something I've never known, and, besides, I don't understand what you're saying. I never learned German, remember?'

'Honestly. You never learned German,' he replied with slight paternal scorn, as if not knowing German were an oddity, almost a defect. 'What kind of education did you have?' And he went on to explain, out of sympathy for my ignorance and out of enthusiasm for this poem from his youth: 'The poet sees a bank of white clouds in the middle of the night and these seem to him, as he puts it, like "colossal statues of the gods made out of luminous marble." Then he realizes that they are the gods, Chronos, Zeus, Hera, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Phoebus Apollo, Hephaestus and Hebe, grown old and at the mercy of the elements, cast down and numb with cold in their exile. "No," exclaims the poet, "these are no clouds!'" And my father began translating the poem for me, drawing it slowly out of his memory. 'They are the gods of Hellas, the very gods who once so blithely ruled the world, but who now, supplanted and deceased, ride like giant specters the clouds of midnight…' But the words insisted on coming to him in the German of his childhood, or perhaps he found it wearisome having to translate, and so he lapsed back into German, and, at the time, I understood nothing more.

Later on, after his death, I tried to identify the words I had listened to without understanding them. I searched out a bilingual edition of 'The Greek Gods,' in German and English (I couldn't find one in Spanish), and it was doubtless this verse that he had translated into my language in tentative extempore fashion: 'Nein, nimmermehr, das sind keine Wolken! Das sind sie selber, die Götter von Hellas, die einst sofreudig die Welt beherrschten, dock jetzt, verdrangt und verstorben, als ungeheure Gespenster dahinziehn am mitternachtlichen Himmel …' I assume he had a good accent. And I also noticed two other brief passages that he must have recited in German that day. In one, the poet addressed Zeus and said to him, more or less: 'Not even the gods rule eternally, the old gods are driven out and supplanted by the youngjust as you yourself once deposed your grey-haired father…' The other was an image applied to that troop of disoriented deities adrift in the dark, whom he describes as: 'Dead shadows who wander the night, fragile as the mist that the wind drives away.' Those words must have come from his lips when I was there with him, even though, at the time, I couldn't understand them. And I wondered what he would have thought then, as he spoke them.

While he sat, absorbed in his own recitation, I bent down and kissed him again before leaving, this time on the cheek, as if we were bullfighters, and I placed my hand once more on his shoulder for a moment, like a silent farewell, while he was walking into the mist that the wind drives away, or into that exile in which one has to leave even one's own first name behind.

I had also managed not to think too much about Luisa until I was on the plane, in business class, an Iberia flight, which was, characteristically and infuriatingly, an hour late in leaving. My not thinking about Luisa had been helped by the fact that she didn't once suggest we have lunch or supper together, and I didn't insist or protest or express regret; after what I had done, I preferred to avoid such a meeting-I didn't feel I deserved it, and although I very much wanted to see her, I found it easy enough to resist and to pretend. And so we only met briefly and occasionally at the apartment when I went to pick up or return the children or stayed with them for a while until they went to bed. And once they were in bed, she never offered me a drink or invited me to sit down for a moment to chat. She didn't eject me with excuses or with words, but by her attitude: she was constantly doing things, going back and forth, cleaning, washing dishes and glasses, answering the phone, tidying, picking up toys and clothes and notebooks and pencils-children always leave everything in a mess and never cease creating chaos-and it wasn't as it used to be when we lived together, when I would follow her from room to room, talking about something or other or telling or asking her something, as husbands often do trail through the house or apartment after their wives, who are more active physically and tend not to sit still in one place for very long, especially if they are mothers. I no longer felt I had that right, I mean, to go into just any room, not even into the kitchen, even accompanied by her or, rather, following in her footsteps. And so we would simply exchange a few words about the children or about my father's health, for she always asked after him, adding with feeling, 'I really must go and see him, I'll go this week without fail, be sure to give him my love,' and I would leave, having given her a discreetly affectionate, that is almost friendly, kiss on each cheek, to which she responded passively and rather mechanically, hardly noticing.