Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

Then I heard Tupra's commanding voice:

'Stand clear, Jack.' And at the same time, he grabbed my shoulder, firmly but not roughly, and drew me aside, removed me, I mean, from the doorway of that cubicle which was more like a small room, perhaps the same size as those minuscule mausoleums in the cemetery of Os Prazeres, summarily decorated and intended to be welcoming, at once inhabited and uninhabited. 'Stand clear, Jack' were his words, or perhaps 'Clear off' or 'Step aside' or 'Out of my way, Jack', it's hard to remember exactly something which, subsequently, disappears into nothing because of everything else that comes after, at any rate, I understood what he meant, whatever the phrase he used, that was the sense and it was, moreover, accompanied by that gesture, his firm hand on my shoulder, which allowed itself to be pushed out of the way; viewed positively, the phrase could have been understood as 'Step aside', more negatively as 'Out of my way, Jack, clear off, don't get involved and don't even think about trying to stop me', but his tone of voice sounded more like the former, a very gentle voice given that it was issuing an order that brooked no disobedience or delay, no hesitation in its performance, no resistance or questioning or protest or even any show of horror, because it is impossible to object to or to oppose someone who has a sword in his hand and who has already raised it up in order to bring it down hard, to deal a blow, to slice through something, when that is the first time you have seen the sword and have no idea where it came from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out of keeping with the times we live in, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just visceral fear, but atavistic fear too, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that caused most deaths throughout most centuries – it has killed at close quarters and when face to face with the person killed, without the murderer or the avenger or the avenged detaching or separating himself from the sword while he wreaks his havoc and plunges it in and cuts and slices, all with the same blade which he never discards, but holds onto and grips even harder while he pierces, mutilates, skewers and even dismembers, never a bag of flour, but always a bag of meat that gives and opens beneath this skin of ours that resists nothing, which offers no protection and is so easily wounded that even a fingernail can scratch it, and a knife can cut it and a spear rip it open, and a sword can tear it even as it slices through the air – that it is the most dangerous and tenacious and terrible of weapons, because unlike something that can be thrown or hurled, the sword can strike again and stab repeatedly, over and over, again and again, each strike worse and more vicious than the last, it isn't an arrow or a spear which may wound, but which will not necessarily be followed by others that will hit and penetrate the same body, one may be enough, it may cause only a single gash or a wound that will subsequently heal, unless the weapon has been dipped in some deadly poison, whereas the sword slices insistently in and out and in and out, it is capable of slaying the healthy and finishing off the wounded and dismembering the indefinitely dead, only stopping when the person wielding it drops from exhaustion, but who will otherwise never let go or lose it, unless he, in turn, is killed or has his arm torn off; which is why the gesture of unsheathing was enough of a threat and never a vain one, it was best to leave it half unsheathed as a warning or a doubt or a signal that one was alert, a visual message that one was on guard, because once the whole blade was out in the air, once the tip was free and looking around, that was a sign that bloodshed would inevitably follow.

I hadn't seen Tupra unsheathe the sword, always assuming he had a sheath, yet, suddenly, as if by magic, there he was holding the bare blade, not a very long blade, certainly much less than a metre in length, but cruel and very sharp, the grip was not a medieval one, although, at a first glance, all swords look medieval apart from those that have a guard or a cup hilt, it was perhaps more Renaissance in style, it reminded me of a Landsknecht sword, at the time and later on too, when I returned home and remembered it in my state of half-sleep or sleeplessness, not that I'm an expert in these matters, but during my time teaching in Oxford I had to translate, among many a pretentious, ancient text with absolutely no practical application, one by Sir Richard Francis Burton – known as 'Captain Burton' to second-hand booksellers – about the different types of sword, an illustrated passage what's more, and the name and its corresponding image stuck in my head, as did a few others ('Papenheim', for instance), the Landsknecht sword also had a German nickname, Katzbalger or some such thing, a word that meant 'cat-gutter', a modest undertaking involving little risk, or else frankly profitable and base, after all, the Landsknechts were German mercenaries in the infantry, of whom my country nevertheless made full use in its imperial regiments, or perhaps that absurd translation had been from Spanish into English and not vice versa, The Siege of Vienna by Charles V, why else would that tide by the infinite Lope de Vega ring a bell, why else would I know by heart these lines (although it was just possible that I had heard them spoken by my father, who loved reciting, as much as or more than Wheeler, they were almost contemporaries): 'I go, victorious Spaniard of lightning and fire, I leave you. I leave you too, sweet lands, I leave Spain and tremble as I go; for these men, full of rage, are like thunderless lightning that kills silently.' A highly patriotic, arrogant, eloquent passage, spoken by an invader put to flight, although this wasn't the case in that siege laid in order to destroy and put an end to another, the Ottomans' siege of Vienna under the command of Suleiman the Magnificent, there the 'cat-gutters' must have fairly burned in the hands of those mercenaries, more callous than angry, they appear in engravings by Duerer and Altdorfer, which show their weapons too, that not particularly long sword, seventy centimetres, worn diagonally across the belly, or sometimes they carry pikes, rather like the ones in Velazquez's painting of the surrender at Breda, had Tupra been wielding one of those as well he would have filled us with even more dread, me, of course, but especially his victim, De la Garza, against whom he had raised his sword, Reresby was holding it in one hand when he pushed me aside to get past, but he was gripping it now with both hands to raise it, ready to unleash the blow. I noticed that his waistcoat rode up when he had both arms raised, he was creating as much momentum for himself as possible, underneath, above his belt, I could see his shirt with its very fine, pale, elegant stripes.

'He's going to kill him,' I thought, 'he's going to cut off his head, slice through his neck, no, he can't, he won't, yes, he is, he's going to decapitate him right here, separate his head from his trunk and I can do nothing about it because the blade is going to come down and it's a two-edged sword, he can't just deal him a blow, even a hard blow, with the blunt edge, just to frighten him, to teach him a lesson, because there is no such edge, but two equally sharp edges which would cut through him anyway, De la Garza will die immediately and then we will have to wait an infinite amount of time before we see him whole again, all in one piece, until the day when, out of respect, the two parts into which he is about to be transformed will be joined together, so that he can come to Judgement as he should, not like some freak-show monster, but with his head on his shoulders and not under his arm as if it were a ball or a globe of the world, and there cry: "I died in England, in a public toilet, in a Disabled toilet in the old city of London. This man killed me with a sword and cut me in two, and this other man was there, he saw it all and didn't lift a finger. It was in another country, the country of the man who killed me, but for me he was a foreigner, which is what he would have been in my country; on the other hand, the man who watched and did nothing spoke my language and we were both from the same land, further south, not so very far away, albeit separated by the sea. I still don't know why I was murdered, I hadn't done anything very bad, nor did I constitute a danger to them. I had half a life or more before me, I would probably have become a minister or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington. I didn't see it coming, I was left without life, without anything. They came like thunderless lightning: one did the destroying, while the other kept silent." But perhaps De la Garza would be incapable of speaking like that even on the last day, for on that day each man and each woman will continue to be exactly as they always were, the brutish will not become delicate nor the laconic eloquent, the bad will not become good nor the savage civilised, the cruel will not become compassionate nor the treacherous loyal. And so the likelihood was that Rafita would make his complaint in his usual coarse, affected way, and bawl at the Judge: "You know, the way I snuffed it was really nasty, I mean, along comes this guy and slices my head off on the lid of a toilet seat in a public lav for cripples, can you believe it? The great British bastard, the son-of-a-bitch. I was fucking innocent, I was, I hadn't a clue what was coming, I was pretty much out of my head and pretty much danced out too, and feeling distinctly under the weather, I was just minding my own business and hadn't a clue what was going down, but I hadn't done him any harm, I swear it, he just turned up there in psychopath mode, in inexplicable enigma mode, anyway, the brute produced this sword out of nowhere and chopped off my head with one blow, I don't know, the nutter must have come over all Conan the Barbarian, or El Cid, or Gladiator, a guy in a waistcoat for Christ's sake, a waistcoat, and suddenly he goes and whips out this sword, and his little private fantasy cost me my neck, and my life ended right there and then, I mean, what a bummer. And the other guy just stood there like a statue, his face frozen in horror, a guy from Madrid, would you believe, a fellow Spaniard, one of us, and he didn't even try to grab the other guy's arm, well, his two arms, because the swine was holding this cutlass thing with both hands so as to bring it down on me with all his might, so much for world medieval literature, although it was probably better like that, you know, a clean cut, imagine if he'd only sliced halfway through and left me hanging, still alive and watching it all and knowing that I was being killed for no reason. I died in London, I died when I was out one night partying, I didn't even get to enjoy the whole evening, didn't even have time to drain it to the dregs, those two set a trap for me. And do you know the last thing I did, I knelt down, dammit. And then it was all over." No, there's nothing to be done,' I thought, 'he's going to kill him. The voice is the quickest thing there is, all I can do now is shout.’