Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

and bring her back here.' He used the polite formulae I had learned to dread in him, they were usually a bad omen, a prelude to a rebuke or a reprimand if you didn't shape up and do as he asked. They constituted one of his few interpretable signs, at least as far as I was concerned. 'Don't linger or delay. Bring her back here.' At least, I think that's what he said in English, or perhaps he said something else, perhaps he said 'loiter' or 'dally', but I don't think so. Of one thing I am sure, the expression 'Hurry up' never left his lips. He was as conscious as I was of what is easy and difficult in languages, and those two words, 'Hurry up', were all too recognisable. He knew that Manoia would have understood them at once, even if mumbled and in the midst of all that clamour, or with his mouth obscured by darkness.

No, you are never what you are – not entirely, not exactly – when you're alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your first language. However prolonged the absence and however unforeseeable its conclusion, because no time limit was set at the beginning or because that limit has become vague or unlikely to be met, and when there is no reason to think that its conclusion and your subsequent return home will one day arrive or hove into view (a return to a before that will not, meanwhile, have waited for you), and thus the word 'absence' loses meaning, depth and force with each hour that passes and that you pass far away from home – and then the expression 'far away' also loses meaning, depth and force – the time of our absence accumulates gradually like a strange parenthesis that does not really count and which shelters us only as it might commutable, insubstantial ghosts, and for which, therefore, we need render an account to no one, not even to ourselves (not, at any rate, a detailed or complete account). To some degree you feel no responsibility for what you do or see, as if it all belonged to a provisional existence, parallel, alien, or borrowed, fictitious or almost dreamed – or, perhaps, merely theoretical, like my whole life, according to the unsigned report about me which I found in an old filing cabinet; as if everything could be relegated to the sphere of the purely imaginary and, of course, to the sphere of the involuntary; everything thrown into the bag of illusions and suspicions and hypotheses, and, even, of mere foolish dreams, about which, unusually, there has been almost permanent and universal consensus throughout the centuries of which any memory remains, be it conjectural or historical, invented or true: dreams do not depend on the intentions of the dreamer, and the dreamer can never be blamed for the contents of his dreams.

'What can I do, I don't choose them and I can't avoid them,' we say after each murky dream which, once we are awake, seems to us improper or illicit or which, we feel, it would have been better not to have dreamed at all and certainly not remembered. 'I didn't want to feel that anomalous desire or that baseless resentment,' we think, 'that temptation or that sense of panic, that unknown threat or that surprising curse, that aversion or that longing which now sit heavy on my soul each night, the feeling of disgust or embarrassment which I myself provoke, those dead faces, forever fixed, that made a pact with me that there would be no more tomorrows (yes, that is the pact we make with all those who fall silent) and which now come and whisper dreadful, unexpected words to me, words that are perhaps inappropriate, or perhaps not, while I am asleep and have dropped my guard: I have laid down my shield and my spear on the grass.' Any idea that emerges from the dream-world is often dismissed or invalidated for that very reason, because of its dark, uncertain provenance, because such ideas seem to emerge out of a dream smokescreen, but do not always disappear once consciousness returns, indeed consciousness takes them up and sometimes even feeds them, and thus consciousness coexists with things it did not itself engender; it welcomes them into its bosom and nurtures them and gives them a face and even a name, and incorporates them into its safe, diurnal world even if that means relegating them to a lower category, labelling them as merely venial and gazing upon them paternally, as if every dream that survives the night must inevitably provoke the kind of ironic comment Sir Peter Wheeler made when he finally went to bed, up the stairs and to the left, on the night of that Saturday buffet supper: 'What nonsense,' he said and added, scornfully repeating my words: 'An excellent idea, indeed.' But despite this condescending attitude towards such dream nonsense, I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have learned to fear, therefore, not only what is thought – the idea – but also what precedes it or comes before.

We perceive and experience the parenthetical time of our absence and all that it involves in much the same way as we do simulacra and fantasies: our deeds or crimes, our own actions and those of others; not only those we commit or endure, but also those we witness or provoke, either unwittingly or deliberately; and during that time nothing is ever truly serious, or so we believe. How right he was, the great playwright and counterfeiter, the poet-spy and blasphemer Marlowe about whose obscure death so little is known, except that it was violent and has become the stuff of legends and has been reconstructed numerous times with impossible exactitude, which is to say that it has been entirely imagined, with the gaze of the imaginer turned towards the dark back of time: he was stabbed to death in a tavern before he reached thirty, at the hands, as has lately been discovered, of one Ingram Frizer, who proved quicker or more vicious or more skilful with a dagger on that 30 May more than four hundred years ago, in Deptford, near the River Thames, which is how the Isis is known in every other place and time apart from when it passes through Oxford, that foreign city which, ages ago now, seemed to be or was my city too and where they call it the River Isis, which is why that is what my memory calls it, the River Isis. How right he was the great poet-traitor, so quick to quarrel, and who never ran away from a fight and who had travelled abroad and who was speaking from his own experience when he had a character from one of his tragedies say: 'Thou hast committed fornication: but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.' And for once there is no doubt that here 'country' does not mean 'patria' or 'fatherland'.

Yes, whatever happens in another country grows immediately faded and faint the moment you return to your own, if not at the very moment when the events themselves are taking place, as if our extreme transience deprived them of all gravity and substance, or as if they hadn't really happened, or had not fallen and weighed upon the world or become etched upon it, or only on the tortuous smokescreens of dreams, from which, afterwards, it is so easy to emerge and which are so easily disowned ('Oh, no, it had nothing to do with me'). And if, moreover, those involved are dead, then what happened becomes even less substantial and less poignant, more ghostly and more preterite, almost as much as the things you read about in novels or see in films, and sometimes you cannot tell the two things apart or distinguish them from what we experience in the nightmares that overwhelm us or from the delirium brought on by pain and fever. Unless, of course, you were the person who killed those dead people or were the cause of their expulsion from the earth and of their definitive silence, whether direct or indirect, unwitting or deliberate, although perhaps the expression 'indirect cause' is meaningless anyway or is merely an acceptable contradiction in terms.