Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

Tupra!' I shouted his name, I didn't have time to do anything else, not even to add 'What are you doing?' or 'Are you mad?' or 'Stop!', as they do in old-fashioned novels and in comic strips, nor to come out with any kind of exclamation which would prove utterly futile in the face of something that is not just imminent but has actually begun, and is already happening and is an arrow flying. De la Garza turned his head for a fraction of a second – it would roll like a globe -just as he had done shortly before, when he had been on the point of asking me for a banknote so that he could roll it into a tube and stick it up his nose, that is, he didn't really turn his gaze on me, didn't focus, and would only have seen the blurred gleam of what hung or hovered over him, but he must have caught a glimpse or a glance of the steel, recognised the blade and the edge, but without recognising that recognition, not believing and at the same time believing, because you are always instantly aware of any real danger of death, even if, in the end, it turns out to be something that merely frightens you half to death. As when, in a dream, a life-threatening situation goes on for far too long, or there is a prolonged sequence of being chased and caught, then chased and caught again, and the sleeping consciousness succumbs to panic and to fatalism and, at the same time, knows that something is not quite right and that your fate is not necessarily sealed, because the dream is still going on without stop or respite or resolution, and the blow that began its descent some time ago has not yet fallen: it delays and lingers and dallies and loiters, the blow, the sword-strike, the dream, it pauses and waits and everything sits heavy on the soul, it freezes and plays for time while the conscious mind struggles to wake up and save us, to dissipate the terrible vision or to shatter it, and to drive away or staunch the pent-up tears that long to burst forth, but cannot.

I saw the look on his face, the look of someone who thinks or knows he is dead; but since he was still alive, the image was one of infinite fear and struggle, mental struggle, perhaps of desire; of childish, undisguised terror, his mouth must have dried instantly, as instantly as his face turned deathly pale, just as if someone had given his face a quick lick of grey or off-white or queasy-coloured paint, or had thrown flour over him or perhaps talcum powder, it was rather like when swift clouds cast a shadow over the fields and a shudder runs through the flocks below, or like the hand that spreads the plague or closes the eyes of the deceased. His top lip lifted, almost folded back on itself in a rictus, revealing his dry gums on which the inner part of his lip got stuck for lack of saliva, he would never be able to lower that lip, it would be fixed like that until the end of time on a tormented face separated from its body, he did lower his head as soon as he caught sight of the blurred gleam of metal overhead, above him and above me, up there, a double-edged sword, two hands, a grip, he pressed his head against the lid of the toilet seat as if hoping it would give way and disappear, and he instinctively drew in his neck, hunched up his shoulders as if in a spasm of pain, the deliberate or unwitting gesture made by all the victims of the guillotine over two hundred years or of the axe over hundreds of centuries, even those satisfied with their guilt and those resigned to their innocence, even chickens and turkeys must have made that gesture.

The sword fell with great speed and force, that one blow would be enough to make a clean cut and even splinter or split the lid, but Tupra stopped the blade dead, about one centimetre or two from the back of the neck, the flesh, the cartilage and the blood, he was in control of what he was doing, he knew how to gauge it, he meant to stop it. 'He hasn't done it, he hasn't decapitated him,' I thought with some relief and not in so many words, but this thought lasted barely a moment, because he immediately raised the sword again, in keeping with the terrible nature of weapons that are not loosed or thrown and can therefore be used repeatedly, and can strike over and over, can threaten first and then cut afterwards or pierce right through, a mistake or a sudden change of mind are not the same as the breathing space, the momentary reprieve or ephemeral truce one would get with a thrown spear that misses the target or an arrow that goes astray or gets lost en route to the sky or simply falls to earth, because it takes a few seconds for the archer to remove another from the quiver and place it in the bow and steady himself again to aim better and carefully pull the bow taut without straining a muscle, and that minimal pause allows you time to take cover or run zigzagging away, in the hope that the nervous archer who has flushed you out has only javelins left to throw, three, two, one, none. Every movement Tupra made continued to be or was resolute, not improvised, he must have planned and calculated each one before he even entered the toilet, when, on the dance floor, he ordered me to bring the attache here and for us both to await his return with the promised cocaine, he had kept his word, he had brought it, always assuming it wasn't just talc, the powder that now lay scattered, swept aside by De la Garza's fleeing head, wishful thinking, for he had nowhere to flee to, nowhere to hide. But while Reresby might know what he was going to do, I did not, still less De la Garza, and so I didn't know how to interpret the half-smile – or not even that, only a quarter-smile, at most, or perhaps it was just his usual mocking expression – which I thought I saw on his fleshy lips, lips that were rather African or perhaps Hindu or Slav, when he stopped the sword and raised it again and thus once more appeared to be about to kill him, this seemed to me even more likely than the first time, because when one opportunity has been used up, that leaves one less chance that you will be saved, and the odds have narrowed. That is how it is, never the other way around.

'Tupra, don't!' Now I did have time to add a syllable, it would have been four in my own language, 'No lo hagas!', although I could have just said, '¡Tupra, no!', I thought him both capable and incapable of doing it, both things, which meant, as I thought much later on in bed, that on this occasion he wasn't going to do it, but that he was certainly cold-blooded enough – or was it that he was cruel enough, or was it merely a question of mettle or nerve or character, or indifference, or was it something closely bound up with 'his line of work' – and that he might have done it before, in his youth and in the distant past, or in adulthood and only a short time before, perhaps only months or weeks or days before, and I knew nothing about it, could not even imagine such a thing; possibly in other countries and in the service of ‘his line of work', even though everything he did was, more than anything, to his own advantage; in remote places where a blow with a sword is sometimes necessary to put out or stir up major conflagrations and to cover up or create large holes, to sort out messy pre-bellum situations and to calm down or urge on insurrectionists, invariably by deceiving them. And what was a blow with a sword compared to spreading outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague, as Wheeler had done years ago, or so he said, or compared to a single act of treachery that takes hold and is passed on, that becomes an unstoppable, all-consuming fire, or an epidemic that eliminates all those in its path or merely close by and even on the very fringes, all those who cannot leave or seek refuge, so often there is nowhere to run and no shelter to be found, and not even a wing under which to hide your head.

De la Garza had resorted to both his wings, his two arms folded over his neck, as useless as an umbrella in a storm at sea, and he had closed his eyes tight shut, they were trembling or pulsating – perhaps his pupils were racing about madly beneath the lids – he must have understood the situation even without looking, the sword had fallen very fast, but stopped before it touched his neck and now had resumed its previous position, perhaps to correct its path by a millimetre and to check the trajectory, to make sure the blade kept to the perpendicular or else to hone its aim, the threat was not only still there, it was even greater (although if the first threat had been fulfilled there would have been no more, no more of anything). De la Garza preferred not to look again in any direction, not even with his gaze unfocused, or out of the corner of his eye, he did not want to see another blurred gleam or anything else, his final image was of a toilet with the seat lid down, and they are all alike, with his wallet on top and the Visa card he had used as a blade, he knew he was a dead man and considered himself still deader, he had been given a few seconds of awareness or life to feel the fear even more intensely and to understand that what was happening really was happening to him, that – unexpectedly, ridiculously, without, as far as he knew, having done anything to provoke such an extreme response – this is what he had come to, to this stopping-place, to this end. I thought that given a few moments more he could have dropped asleep, with his head pressed against the plastic, however flat and uninviting it may have been as a pillow, sometimes it is the only way to escape from pain and to rest from despair, a form of narcolepsy, that's what they call it, but who has not experienced that sudden, unseasonable, inappropriate sleep, who has not fallen asleep or wanted to fall asleep in the midst of fear or in the middle of weeping, it's the same when you sit down in the dentist's chair or as you're being wheeled to the operating room, you try to anticipate the careful work of the anaesthetist – irresistible sleep as the ultimate denial and flight – in the hope that dreaming what happens will transform it into fiction.