Javier Marias: Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

And it was true that I had wondered about it when I saw it in his hand – or perhaps that was later on, when I finally got home (not then, not during that car journey or while sitting in the car) and it took me so long to get to sleep (therefore, he may have formulated it for me, may have put it into words for me in the car and my thought might have been a mere echo of those words) – and I had done so in these terms: 'Where did that come 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 these times, 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 intense fear, but an atavistic fear, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that has caused the most deaths throughout most centuries; that it has killed at close quarters and face to face." Earlier, Tupra had alluded to Homer and now he was talking about the second Plantagenet king and the first of the Richards, born in Oxford of all places, although it is highly unlikely that he knew any English, even broken English, and during the ten years of his reign, he spent, altogether, no more than six months in the country of that language, the rest of the time being taken up with the Third Crusade or with familial wars in France, where he was killed as he was besieging Chalus in 1199 by – to add insult to injury – an arrow from a crossbow, as I was able to confirm later on in a couple of history books: another British foreigner, yet another bogus Englishman and another one who had his aliases: not just the famous 'Lionheart', but also 'Yea and Nay', which, understandably enough, tends to be forgotten; well, Richard Yea and Nay sounds rather comical, even if he was called that because of his sudden and continual changes of mind and plan, even in the midst of battle (he must have been infuriating, that cruel king). I inevitably found these cultural references coming from Tupra rather surprising, in normal conversation he didn't usually make such references, either historical or literary, although perhaps it was because there was no need for them at work: we were always talking about other people, most of whom were present and none of whom was fictitious, although the majority of them were strangers to me. Perhaps, for professional motives, he knew the entire history of weapons. Or, more likely, it was because he had studied at Oxford and been a disciple of Toby Rylands, eminent emeritus professor of English Language and Literature, and was more educated than he seemed. But sometimes I wondered whether Rylands's tutorship had taken place more within the group with no name, which provided a more practical training, rather than at the renowned university to which we had all belonged. Even I had belonged to it during those two now distant years of which barely a trace remained, as I had confidently predicted when I still lived there, conscious that I was just passing through and would leave no mark. Now, in this other London time, I thought the same sometimes, only more so, despite never being very clear as to where I would go if I left or whether I would return: 'When I leave here, when I return to Spain, my life during these real days – and some pass very slowly – will become a "Yea and Nay" or like a banal dream, and none of it will be of any importance, not even the gravest events, not even that temptation or that sense of panic, not even the feelings of disgust or embarrassment that I myself provoke, not even the sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. A day will have arrived when I will have said a farewell to these days perhaps similar to that written by Cervantes and of which I tried to remind Wheeler, although without entirely daring to, in his garden by the river. Doubtless a less cheerful farewell, but definitely more relieved. For example: "Farewell, laughter and farewell, insults. I will not see you again, nor will you see me. And farewell, passion; farewell, memories."'

'What did you study at Oxford, Bertram?' I suddenly asked him, although it was probably not the best moment, especially when there had been (and would be) so many other moments, during our sessions and dialogues and pauses to ponder or consider, and idle moments too, in order to find this out. The fact is that I didn't know because I had never got as far as asking him, and in England that is always one of the first things one asks in order to break the ice between strangers and even between colleagues. That was how it was whenever I met some Oxford don outside of our teaching or administrative activities, having a coffee in the Senior Common Room at the Taylorian, between classes, or in between lectures or seminars; or at one of the hellish high tables held by one of the thirty-nine colleges (elevated and eternal tables), in which one might find oneself seated and immobile for several hours beside a young economist whose sole topic of conversation was a peculiar cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767 and on which he had written his thesis (this is a true example from my previous Oxford experience, the name of this glorious individual was Halliwell), as I found out by politely asking the simultaneously fetal and inaugural phrase: 'What's your field?', literally, in Spanish, '¿Cual es su campo?', but meaning 'What's your specialty?' or 'What do you do?', although in Oxford it could also mean 'What do you teach?' However, none of these variants was an appropriate way of interrupting Tupra in the middle of a discussion about swords.

If I still remember even Halliwell, obese and with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, how could I not remember all the other people from then, the old, time-travelling porter Will with his clear, limpid eyes, and Alec Dewar – the Butcher, the Ripper, the Inquisitor or the Hammer – a selfless Dickensian teacher beneath his proud facade and his unjustified nicknames; or the inebriated Lord Rymer – the Flask – who had since reappeared with his all too justified nickname, and Rook, the gossipy expert in Slavonic languages, a man with a large head and a slender body – an egghead, in short – who claimed to have been friends with Nabokov and who had, for about a thousand years, been translating Anna Karenina as it should be translated, although with no visible result; the Alabasters, who used to spy on me with bated breath via the closed-circuit television in their second-hand bookshop when I went down to their basement to snoop around in the dust; and the head of my department, Aidan Kavanagh, whom I saw once wearing a waistcoat, as my boss Tupra always did, except that Kavanagh wasn't wearing a shirt underneath his or only some strange sleeveless variety; the fat girl called Muriel – who wasn't really fat – with whom I spent one night, and one night only, and who told me that she lived between the rivers Windrush and Evenlode, in an area which was once a forest, Wychwood Forest; the gypsy florist, Jane, with her high boots, and Alan Marriott with his docile, three-legged dog, who had visited me with his master one morning, just as, many years afterwards, late one night, the white pointer had visited me with his mistress, Perez Nuix; my best friend Cromer-Blake, my guide in the city and who had sometimes been both father- and mother-figure to me, alternating between health and sickness during my time there and dead four months after my departure (I still have his diaries); and the great authority Toby Rylands so like Wheeler but, as far as I knew then, unrelated, and who might well have got me into all this by means of a report written then and filed away just in case; the young woman with the rhythmic, well-shod feet and perfectly turned ankles, to whom I had not dared to speak with sufficient emotion, the emotion I felt in her presence, on a late-night train journey from Didcot station, and Clare Bayes, my lover. All those people existed in my life before Luisa, whom I met only on my return. While I might not have left any mark on Oxford, my time there had certainly left a mark on me. As this other period of London solitude would too, even if, one day, it appeared to me like a daydream never lived and shorn of consequences, and I could misquote those lines from Milton each morning: 'I wak'd, time fled, and day brought back my day.’