Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

There was still one woman, a different one from before, waiting to enter the busy toilet reserved for women and, who knows, possibly for transvestites too (I had seen a couple of them around, and I'm not sure which toilets they're supposed to use when out in public). I walked past her so quickly and with such resolve that she could only have noticed my contravention of the rules when the first door was already closing behind me. 'Hey, you,' I heard her begin to exclaim, the second word almost abandoned as if she had suddenly run out of steam – so it was not an exclamation – and she certainly wouldn't follow me in. I pushed out my chest, took a deep breath, squared my shoulders and with the same apparent sangfroid (a complete act) opened the second door, -the door that gave directly onto the toilet area and a sudden vision of a host of ladies standing before the mirrors or near them awaiting their turn or taking advantage of a space between two manes of hair to primp themselves from a distance; a kind of half-silence fell, there was a movement of heads turned in my direction, I caught the occasional perplexed or amused or frightened or even appreciative eye. I took the safe option of muttering several times the absurd word 'Security' and each time I tugged at or lifted one lapel of my jacket as if it bore an insignia which was not there: not that it matters, what matters is the gesture or the drawing of attention to something even if there's nothing to draw attention to, as when one points with one finger at the sky and everyone looks up, at the blue and the clouds, as empty and tranquil as they were a moment before; I had no idea if that repeated word 'Security' was plausible in English or if it would sound even more foolish than it did in Spanish, or if that was what a British policeman or hitman would say when pursuing someone or when engaged on some urgent mission.

I had a quick look round at the mainly attractive faces, if Rafita and Mrs Manoia had gone in there, they were not only stupid, they were imbeciles (he, of course, was a complete imbecile anyway, but not even he would be that imbecilic: in a crowded Ladies' loo, when there was a deserted toilet for the crippled right next door); but now that I was there, I had to make sure, so I strode over to the cubicles with the firm step of an inspector or a hired gun (following orders, doing something on someone else's say-so and not in your own interest or on your own initiative helps, it exempts you from responsibility, rendering a service to someone instils ease and thoughtlessness and even cruelty); there were eight cubicles, all, of course, occupied as was only to be expected given the permanent queue outside. I cast a panoramic eye over what was revealed below the abbreviated doors, two pairs of concertinaed trousers and six skirts, no – the skirts would be pulled up and therefore invisible – six pairs of legs festooned with tights and knickers (there was the odd thong and one of the women wasn't wearing tights at all, which is unusual in England, even in summer; she must have been a foreigner. 'What a palaver,' I thought, 'what a lot of minor complications, we men have it much easier'), there was nothing odd about any of the eight, the eight pairs of legs, I mean, they all appeared to be in the same normal posture, the expected, ordinary posture. It took only a moment, at most two, that sliding glance, but I couldn't help recalling the imagined image from a story my mother used to tell me when I was a child: one of the seven tests that a hero had to pass in order to rescue his beloved – a country girl or a kidnapped princess, I'm not sure which, imprisoned in a castle – consisted in recognising her by her legs alone, the rest of her body and face were hidden behind a long screen or a similarly truncated door, as were those of the six or thirteen or twenty other women lined up, an identity parade like the ones they hold in police stations except that the aim in the story was liberation rather than accusation and involved only legs, not sitting down like those in the cubicles, but standing up, the hero was thus able to see only the six, thirteen or twenty pairs of calves and thighs, and he had to guess which belonged to his shepherdess or damsel; if I remember rightly there was some trick, some detail – not a scar, too obvious even for the imagination of a child – that would lead him to give the right answer and so pass the test, even if that meant being set another far more difficult one. My mother was no longer in the world for me to ask her what that clue to recognition had been, and my father certainly wouldn't remember the tale, he might never even have heard it or asked for it since he was not her son but her husband, perhaps my sister or my two brothers would, although that was unlikely, I generally had a better memory for childhood things, and if even I couldn't remember… ‘I’ll never know, not that it really matters, most people fail to realise that not knowing everything doesn't matter in the least, because even then we always know too much, so much so that, unwittingly or deliberately, we forget most of what we know, but without worrying about it or regretting it, even if finding it out in the first place may have cost us tears and sweat and toil and blood.’

So there it was, that line of legs, and it seemed to me that Flavia's were not among those sixteen much younger legs, almost all of whose feet were very well shod – that I did notice: they were wearing party shoes -I was particularly struck by the elegant high heels of the woman who was not wearing tights or had taken them off along with her knickers before sitting down – there was nothing around her ankles, they were bare – obviously I only had a very quick look, the women by the mirrors were not protesting or hurtling out of the door, I sensed behind me more expectation or curiosity than indignation or alarm, the opportunistic people who govern us have made people so afraid that we have rapidly grown docile, especially when confronted by someone wielding the terrifying, omnipresent word – 'Security' – that justifies everything, even supposedly ironic uses and abuses of it and humiliations that pretend not to be humiliations, but, how can I put it, purely functional.

Perhaps I did not think this then, but only afterwards, when I finally went to bed much, much later that night or, rather, that morning, but the germ of those thoughts did surface then, during that urgent, absurd visit to the Ladies' toilet, sometimes such thoughts come to us in a flash and we put them off because we haven't time to consider them at that precise moment, and then we recover them afterwards and develop them at our leisure and in a spirit of false calm; and yet it could be said that such a flash is already the thought, concentrated or almost unacknowledged (or perhaps it is a kind of prescient prescience).

'I would have recognised Luisa's legs out of sixteen or twenty-one other pairs of legs, even though I haven't seen them for a while now and they seem sometimes to fade and become muddled with other legs in the here and now that will certainly prove transient and will, in time, be forgotten,' I thought. 'I might also be able to pick out those of Clare Bayes, my former lover in Oxford, but it's years since I've seen them and they might have changed, they might be scarred or she could be lame in one of them like Alan Marriott or they might have become puffy and swollen or there might be only one of them, just as there were only three on the dog whose fourth leg was not cut off by the gypsy Jane – I have constantly to remind myself of that, that she did not cut it off, because whenever I recall her and the dog, that, initially, is what I always believe and what always assails me, for the hypothesis, the invented story with its horrific couple and horrible conjunction of ideas is more vivid to me than the true story with its train station and its drunken Oxford United fans – the young florist who was there when Clare Bayes used to visit me with her strange collection of purchases, with her constant need for fragments of eternity or her expansive notion of time about which there was always something utilitarian, I can say that now without feeling hurt by the word or the fact, for that was in another country and who knows, who knew, what might have happened to the wench (and that other country is once again this one), all it takes is a car accident and that can happen to anyone, the amputation would come later and then she would have to use the spacious, deserted toilet for the disabled. But it's hard to imagine Clare Bayes without a leg, because both were so very striking, with their feet always shod in Italian shoes or else barefoot, she took them off when indoors, a kick, one for each shoe, would send them flying, and later we would have to hunt for them.' I thought all this as I stood before the closed cubicles with their eight pairs of shining shoes peeping out from beneath the doors, and also before I went to sleep weighed down by the terrible unease I took with me to bed; I must have done both things – relived the scene in the Ladies' toilet and recalled the story, so furled in mists, which my mother used to tell me – in order to drive from my mind everything that happened later and to ease the pinprick pressing into my chest. And I even managed to go on to think: 'On the other hand, I wouldn't recognise Perez Nuix's legs, not yet, if that word "yet" has any intention or meaning.’