Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

Suddenly I wanted to hear more from him, from De la Garza, more chatter and more nonsense and more comical similes (perhaps I was missing my own language more than I realised), despite the fact that his chauvinistic side kept reappearing like a stigma, without his necessarily intending it to: 'one of our Spanish actresses' he had said – that terrible sense of belonging. I wondered if how I was feeling about him was similar to how Tupra felt about me (although obviously there was no real comparison): I amused Tupra, he enjoyed our sessions of conjecture and examination, our conversations, or even just listening to me ('What else?' he would demand. 'What else occurs to you? Tell me what you're thinking and what else you noticed'), perhaps he liked the sound of the Canadian accent he had attributed to me on the night we first met, or, to be more precise, the accent he thought came from British Columbia, the man had been everywhere. It's all a question of suddenly seeing the funny side of someone, even someone who really gets on your nerves, that, too, is possible, but dangerous, seeing in the person you most detest a smidgeon of previously unsuspected wit (most people's solution – or, rather, precaution – is not to admit the tiniest spark, and to pretend to be blind). Tupra doubtless saw my funny side, almost immediately; it was unexpected and much stranger that I should find a funny side to Rafita after just two infuriating encounters, but it might, of course, be only a short-lived illusion.

As for the Botox, I decided it must in fact be what I had deduced, because botulinum toxin did, indeed, produce muscular paralysis, it attacked the nervous system, you ended up unable to speak or to swallow (ah, an illness that could suppress speech) and, later, unable to breathe, and the idea of a death like that, from asphyxia, brought back familiar warnings from my childhood, when you still feared the tiniest dent in a tin, or any gases that might escape when you opened it, or a can that gave off even a minimally questionable smell when still sealed, canned goods were in no way a novelty then, but neither were they particularly widespread, and all grandmothers distrusted them, mothers no longer did or, under the influence of their mothers, only a little; I had never, in my entire life, heard of a single person in Spain (or perhaps only in some very backward rural area) who had been struck down by botulism; however, a phrase expressive of the prevailing anxiety had remained with me, for what impresses you as a child never really fades, it was something my maternal grandmother used to say, I think, and what impresses the child is always remembered by the adult who replaces him, right up until the final day, and it was one of those threats which, at the time, you take absolutely literally, terrified by the instantaneous effect attributed to the poison, dazzled by the glamour of anything so devastating and so extreme, which allowed one unlimited scope for fantasy and from both sides of the trenches too, as victim and as murderer: 'Under no circumstances must you ever eat the contents of a can or tin which looks even slightly dubious, which is to say most of them,' the four of us had heard her warn the maids, 'because if the contents have gone off, the toxin is so strong that sometimes it can take fatal effect even if you only touch it with the tip of your tongue.’

We imagined something as normal and trivial as a spoon whose edge or tip is carried to the tongue of the woman stirring the stew, to see if it needs more salt or if it's warmed up and hot enough to eat, and she does this so calmly, as she softly sings or hums to herself or even whistles (although only men used to whistle then, or girls who were so young that they were still almost children), perhaps without even looking at the casserole or pot, but, instead, peering through the window and down at the courtyard where other women or other maids are leaning out over windowsills, shaking rugs or pegging out the damp clothes (with always at least one peg held between the teeth), or indoors lazily flicking a feather duster around or standing on a stool unscrewing a burnt-out light bulb. When you heard the warning, which was also directed at us in the future ('Don't even touch the suspect contents, just in case. Not until they've been thoroughly boiled'), you imagined the contaminated spoon touching tongue or lips and the woman being instantly felled as if by a lightning bolt or a bullet, and lying lifeless on the kitchen floor while her stew continued to simmer, and then you feared for your own mother if she was the one who did the cooking, because when you heard the word 'fatal' it never occurred to you to think of something deferred and slow, something not immediately perceptible and whose effects would appear later, but a kind of spectacular, murderous electrical charge, a flash, children can only conceive of the immediate and the very swift, if something is fatal it is fatal now, never in the long or medium term, like a blow from a tiger's paw or a musketeer's sword-thrust to the head or a Moor's arrow piercing the heart, we played at these fictions, and if a danger wasn't imminent, then it wasn't truly a danger, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it', that is the motto of the child when something does not arrive immediately or fails to happen today or even tomorrow – that mere prolongation of today – of course there is no irony in the child, nor does he say it in those words, but in a more childish version: 'That won't be for ages yet', more often than not in the form of a repeated question when faced by any wait or delay: 'Will it be much longer?' 'Will it be much longer until summer?' 'Christmas?' 'My birthday?' 'The start of the film?' 'Tomorrow?' followed, five minutes later, with the impatience that denies or eats up time, with: 'Is it tomorrow yet?' 'No, dear, it isn't tomorrow yet, it's still today, which takes a long time to pass.' 'And will it be much longer until I go back home to Madrid and the children, until I go back to Luisa?' Or the question that becomes more common in adulthood and keeps nagging at us, although without ever formulating itself quite so clearly: 'And will it be much longer until my death?' That is why I asked her, when I phoned her two days after that night with the Manoias and Reresby and De la Garza, before she could angrily hang up on me, I asked her about Botox, in case she knew about it, Luisa had loads of female friends and acquaintances and some, to use the attache's expression, were rich chicks, although it seemed to me both incredible and ironic that a solution or dose of that once-feared toxin with which they smeared the most fatal of bullets, those destined for the very few Nazi tyrants whom they tried to lay low, should now be used to the advantage of the wealthy, to pander to their every caprice and luxury, to postpone their wrinkles or eliminate them for a few months, using the same elements of muscular paralysis or anaesthetised or damaged nerves – whichever was required, or both, or one as a consequence of the other – the same elements which in days gone by brought on dizziness and growing immobility and a lack of coordination and double vision and serious intestinal problems, followed by aphasia and then asphyxia and total paralysis and which, in the end, killed. Yes, everything is painfully ridiculous and subjective and partial, because everything contains its opposite and depends entirely on the moment and the place and the virulence and the dosage, delivering either sickness or vaccination, either death or beautification, just as all love carries within itself its own staleness and every desire its own satiety and every longing its own ennui, so the same people in the same position and place love each other and cannot stand each other at different moments in time, today, tomorrow; what was once a long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissible – it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it – and the merest contact, a touch once taken for granted, becomes an affront or an insult, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for would now poison the air or provoke nausea and must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition, whether it knows it or not, whether or not it realises this). And even to phone home you have to come up with a reason to present or put forward.