Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

And whenever I've brought a woman home, before, when I was single, or during that time in London (I mean brought someone back to spend the night or at least spend some time in my bed), I have always feared that she might later revisit the place uninvited and unsolicited: precisely because she had once set foot there and had seen me inside my apartment, seen how I lived and then stored away the image. And sometimes I have been quite right to fear this. And if someone has returned to this territory because I wanted them to and with my permission, or even because I summoned them and desired their presence, then, if we don't want them to move in, if we're not prepared for that, there is one room we must never allow them to enter, not even to keep us company while we fix a drink or prepare a snack, and that room is not the bedroom, where it doesn't even matter if they spend the night, nor the bathroom, a single man's bathroom is hardly a place to fire the imagination, but the kitchen, because if a woman enters the kitchen to continue the conversation while we're busy or to help us without our asking or suggesting that she does; if she follows us there on her own initiative, or almost instinctively, the way ducks do, she will probably want to stay by our side sine die – for a moment, she experiences or even smells what it would be like to live together – even though she may not know it and it is only her first visit, and even though she would genuinely deny it if someone were to predict it. This was perhaps one of the more trivial things learned from my gift or my curse, assuming I possessed either.

Tupra wasn't a woman and wasn't going to stay, he wasn't even coming upstairs to my apartment, he was merely going to drive into the square in his speedy Aston Martin and leave me at my door. Nevertheless, I didn't like the idea, because I could so easily imagine him afterwards, or on another night, another evening, another day or at dawn, spying on me from behind the trees or the statue, watching my window, or lying in wait in the hotel opposite, eyes trained on my lights or my window and on the possible woman who might have come to see me, although not necessarily to spend time in my bed. Waiting for her to leave. No wonder he had, from the first, struck me as a man who spent more time padding streets than carpets, more time out of the office than slaving away inside.

I opened the passenger door properly and got back into the car, without saying a word. He walked round to his side. I simply gave him my exact address, rather sarcastically I imagine, as if he were a taxi driver, and that was all. I knew I wouldn't be able to contain myself during the next few minutes that we would spend alone, but I wasn't sure how to begin, perhaps it would be best if I didn't rush things, despite my anger, by saying the first and possibly trivial words of recrimination that sprang to my lips, a mere detail in comparison with the real gravity of what had happened. I had not yet decided to leave this job for good, I needed to think about it more coolly and get myself used to the idea of going back to the BBC, with its ill-paid tedium. I waited for a few long seconds, with the car already moving off" and accelerating, to see if he would say something and thus give me an opening. 'He won't do that,' I thought, 'he's very good at withstanding silences, especially those he initiates.' He was the one who had wanted to give me a lift, but perhaps it was not in order to lecture me or to tell me off (it was my fault that we had got stuck with De la Garza), nor to clarify anything to me, but to hear me venting my rage in the heat of the moment, and thus gauge my capacity for anger. After a while, the silence became that of two people who do not wish to speak to each other.

'It's not exactly a cheap area where you live,' he said eventually; the silence, therefore, was not, I judged, one he had decided upon and chosen, and he was not so good at withstanding those: his permanent state of vehemence and tension demanded that he fill every moment with some palpable, audible, recognisable or computable content. The whole car, free now from the interference of Flavia's rival fragrance, smelled of his aftershave, it was as if the lotion impregnated his skin or as if he were constantly, secretly, applying more. I hadn't seen him do so in front of the cripples' mirror. I wound down my window slightly.

'No, it's not cheap, in fact, it's rather expensive,' I replied almost reluctantly. 'But I prefer to spend my money on that, I avoid squalor like the plague.' Suddenly I realised that Tupra wasn't wearing his overcoat and hadn't been for a while, not even draped over his shoulders or over his arm, I hadn't noticed when he had taken it off or where he had put it, it must have been when we left the disco, or perhaps, unbeknown to me, he had switched coats in the cloakroom. I turned my head to see if the coat was lying on the shelf behind the back seats, but I couldn't see it, so where was the wretched sword? 'What about that sword?' I said.

Tupra – he was no longer Reresby, even though the night was not yet over – took out a cigarette and lit it with the lighter in the car, illuminating for a moment his smooth cheeks the colour of beer, he looked as if he had just shaved. This time he did not offer me one of his precious Egyptian cigarettes. To underline this, I got out one of my own Peloponnese brand, but did not immediately light it.

'It's in the boot.’

'No, I mean what was it for? Why do you carry it with you? That was a monstrous, brutish thing to do, I thought you were really going to cut the guy's head off, I nearly died, you must be mad, I mean what is all this about, where do you think we are, you're nothing but an animal, and why did you need to…" It all came out in a rush, in a torrent, despite the fact that his answer ('It's in the boot') had been spoken in the same concluding or conclusive tone with which he had once answered me in his office ('Yes, I have') when I asked him if he had heard about the coup d'etat against Chavez in Venezuela (and had added: 'Anything else, Jack?'). My tone was not yet furious, but if I had continued my disjointed litany, that tone would inevitably have come to the fore, we tend to generate our own heat, everything happens inside our head, especially if there is a pause, a condensation, an enforced wait between the events and the explosion. Tupra seemed unaffected, as yet, by my bitter outburst – he did not appear to feel uncomfortable or even moderately upset – and he dammed the current, only barely begun, with a calm, tangential sentence which I only partly understood. Not understanding is what most effectively brings us up short, and the need to understand is more urgent and more potent than any other.

'I learned it from the Krays,' he said, using that plural which is redundant in Spanish when used with surnames or the names of families (the plural is indicated by the article, for example, 'los Manoia') and which more and more of our idiotic compatriots are transferring into our language out of pure copy-cat ignorance: they'll end up saying 'los Lopeces' or 'los Santistebanes' or 'los Mercaderes' – but I didn't understand the word at the time, nor did I imagine it as having a capital letter or even know that it was a surname, still less how it was written ('erase', 'craze', 'kreys', 'crays', 'crease', 'creys', or even 'krais'? Most Spaniards have difficulty distinguishing the different kinds of Y in English). That is why I abruptly stopped the deluge, at the same time as he stopped at a traffic light.

'From what?’

'From whom, you mean,' he replied. 'The Kray brothers, k-r-a-y.' And he spelled it out, as people so often do with English words and names. 'There's no reason why you should have heard of them, they were twins, Ronnie and Reggie, two pioneering gangsters from the 1950’s and 1960’s, they started out in the East End, they were from Bethnal Green or thereabouts; they took over the respective turfs of the Italians and the Maltese; they prospered and expanded and eventually ended up in prison at the end of the 1960’s, one died behind bars and I think the other one is still in there, he must be pretty old by now and he'll probably never be let out. They were the most violent and the most feared and the most vicious of the lot, sadists really, and they did little to curb their cruelty, and to start with, they used swords. Obviously, in their first attempts at punishment beatings and intimidation, they did so out of necessity, because they didn't have the money for more expensive weapons. They provoked terror with those swords, they would slice their victim's face from ear to ear with a single cut, or slit them down the spine or lower still. They'd sometimes make a second cut too, and it's said that they sliced one woman in four. There are a number of books about them, and there was a film as well, I thought you were a cinema-goer. Although it probably wasn't shown in Spain, too parochial to be of interest in other countries, a minor London story. I've seen it, though, and in one or two scenes they showed them sowing panic with their swords. I remember one scene took place in a pool hall. It wasn't a bad film, well documented, and the actors were twins too. Biographical cinema, they call it.' I had never heard that term. I'd heard of ‘biopic', but never 'biographical cinema', yet that was what he said.