Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

'No, Mr Reresby has it,' I replied, and it occurred to me that Reresby could as easily have some as none at all; it wouldn't be difficult for someone like him to get hold of it, being able to hand around a bit of cocaine can prove very useful these days and he knew how to handle himself in any territory. 'He said he wouldn't be long. He was going to see if he could do something about the whipping you gave our bit of pussy with that whacko string bag you've got on your head, that basket.' At this point, I had no hesitation about telling him off, besides, when abroad one acquires a rapid and baseless intimacy with one's compatriots, usually to ill or even worse effect, but it has the advantage that, when necessary, you can come straight to the point. De la Garza was causing me too many problems, all of which, and this was the worst of it, had been entirely avoidable. I had instantly adapted my speech to his customary brand of fake slang (normally, I would never myself use words like 'whacko' or 'pussy'); in terms of gaining familiarity, this was the equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. 'I mean imagine wearing a ridiculous thing like that and then whipping your dance partner across the face with it, I dread to think how her husband will react when he sees that welt on her face.' Horrified, I suddenly remembered one of the words Manoia had asked me about – 'uno sfregio'. 'We're going to return her to him with a kind of sfregio, if, that is, I understood his gesture correctly, the thumbnail drawn across his cheek; this could be very tricky, he's not going to like it one bit, although it would have been worse if the scratch had been on her bazza rather than on her guancia, then Manoia might have taken it as an allusion, a joke, a revenge on my part for his rudeness, although poor Flavia's chin isn't at all protuberant and so isn't properly speaking a bazza.' – 'He'll crucify you, De la Garza. I told you the guy had a lot of influence at the Vatican, well, in the whole of Italy really, including Sicily.' -I myself was surprised to find myself using that expression (about crucifying), one I would never normally use, it must have been an association of ideas with the Vatican, I suppose, which must be crammed with crucifixes, at least one in every room – 'You wouldn't want to cross him, he's a real snake in the grass' – I was clearly still making associations, and slipping into the mode of speech, part crude, part high-flown, of that terrible perfumed boor – 'I just hope Reresby can explain it away: that it wasn't deliberate, that you didn't realise. You didn't do it on purpose, did you, Rafita?' – I had never before, it seemed to me, addressed him like that directly; in fact, I had first heard Peter use the diminutive form of his name only after the attache had left his house that night empty-handed and without dipping his wick, to drive off and crash his car on the road somewhere, along with the Mayor and Mayoress of Thame or Bicester or Bloxham or Wroxton (except that we did not have such luck).

'Of course I didn't do it intentionally, come off it, I don't I want to miss out on dipping the old wick, you know, I don't want to ruin my chances of a quick fuck. I hope you two haven't screwed things up for me, you've broken my concentration, you have, all that hard work down the drain, you arseholes. I was just going in for the kill too.' – That's what he said, he had a real knack for mingling vulgarity and prissiness, 'dipping the old wick' and 'broken my concentration', and 'down the drain' and 'going in for the kill', that terrible jumble of registers and references so typical of Spanish nowadays, and much in vogue with many Spanish writers, including certain depressingly old-fashioned young people, who positively reek of the old days, perhaps because contemptible traditions are so easy to adopt, they're very tenacious. I wasn't prepared to go that far, to adapt to such a fashion, to join in: imitating such an affectation would be a concession too far.

'What quick fuck are you talking about? God, De la Garza, you're obsessed with dipping your wick. Just forget it, will you? It doesn't make any difference to you who it is, does it? It could be your old aunt, for all you care – and I warned you that her husband was watching. Why don't you just go to a prostitute now and again, I'm sure your salary would stretch to that. I mean the idea wouldn't even have occurred to her. And then, to top it all, you lash her face with that hairnet of yours. She won't even want to say goodbye to you.’

'Bah,' he said disdainfully, 'of course I didn't mean to, in fact, I think I'm going to take this snood off, it's no good if you're dancing, a bit of a bummer, really.' He ran his whole hand over the hairnet from top to bottom, as if squeezing out a cloth. 'Not that she'll have noticed anyway, not with her face packed with Botox like that. In any case, I don't know what you're talking about, she was there for the taking, man. It was just a question of manoeuvring her into position and then in I'd go, the coup de grace, in with sword, up to the gunnels. Two ears and a tail to me and fuck everyone else.' He mimed a bullfighter driving the sword in. He was beginning to string together total non sequiturs, a sign that he was recovering. I wondered if he actually knew what 'gunnels' meant, but I had no intention of asking him.

'Botox?' That was when I heard the neologism for the first time. 'What's that? What kind of word is that? Botox,' I said it again to get used to it, as one tends to do with words one doesn't know. De la Garza had referred to his dangling hairnet as a snood, although I bet he had never seen one in his life. What with that and his enigmatic 'gunnels', I held out little hope of his offering me the etymology of Botox. He insisted on the bullfighting analogy, with gestures and everything, something typical of our home-grown fascists – I use the word in its colloquial sense, and, indeed, in the analogical. The gestures in themselves, of course, are not necessarily fascistic (even I can manage a fair imitation, as well as a pass made with two hands and a pass made only with the right – when on my own, needless to say), but the sheer presumption of comparing (shall we say) the labour involved in seducing a woman with entering an arena and facing an enraged bull in front of a crowd of spectators definitely was fascistic. Perhaps he was, after all, a fascist at heart, analogically speaking.

'You mean you don't know?' And he said this with the puerile sneer of a hard-bitten thug, as if my ignorance were proof of his greater worldly wisdom (I had no argument with that, there are worldly-wise louts by the thousand, and their numbers are on the increase) and of his permanent place in the land of chic that was so precious to him (he could stay there until the last day for all I cared, I had no intention of disputing the territory with him, or even setting foot in it). 'You mean you don't know,' he repeated. He was delighted to be able to teach me something, if you can call it teach. 'Rich chicks have it injected all the time, and some guys do, too. Your friend's a likely case, if you ask me, he looks like he's had it in his cheekbones, his chin, his forehead and his temples, to ward off crow's feet. Yeah, that Reresby guy's skin is suspiciously tight and smooth, he probably has a hypodermic stuck in him every few months, and the Italian woman every few weeks I would think, assuming they let her.’

It was true that Tupra's skin was disturbingly lustrous and firm for a man of his probable years, and was the lovely golden colour of beer, almost peachy sometimes, but it had never seemed to me that this was due to artifice or to some special treatment, rather, it would simply never occur to me that men would resort to such things, or not then at least. Who knows, though. I was becoming old-fashioned in some respects: I knew nothing about the existence of Botox or, doubtless, about other products, that was just one example. In fact, I still didn't really know about it, and Rafita was hardly the best person to explain it to me.