Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

'You said it. In theory,' agreed young Perez Nuix, and she uncrossed her legs and lit a cigarette, one of mine, she took it without asking, as if, in this respect, she were a pure-bred Spaniard. They weren't Rameses II, just Karelias from the Peloponnese, far from cheap, but not that rare either, I never skimp on cigarettes. With that movement, the ladder in her tights advanced a little further, but she still didn't see or feel it. (Or perhaps she didn't care.) (Or perhaps she was offering it to me: a minimal, insignificant, progressive nakedness; no, that I didn't believe.) 'Look, in all the years I've been here, I've never seen anyone who wasn't a private individual.' – That 'here' I took to mean 'working here'; as far as I knew, she had spent most of her life in her mother's country. – 'Not even in the army, which is mostly about obeying orders and very little about taking decisions, a machine they call it. But it isn't, nothing is. It doesn't matter what posts people occupy, or whom they represent, whether they have high responsibilities or are mere errand-boys, whether they've been elected or chosen arbitrarily, it doesn't matter where their authority, however large or small, comes from, or whether their sense of the State is great or non-existent, their loyalty is beside the point, as are their venality and their proclivity for changing sides. It doesn't matter if the money that passes through their hands belongs to the Treasury and that not a penny piece of it is theirs. It doesn't matter, they will handle huge amounts of money, never mind insignificant sums, as if they were their own. I'm not saying that they keep the money, not all of them, or not necessarily; but they distribute it according to their whim or convenience and only afterwards find reasons for that distribution, never before. There are, as you know, always reasons a posteriori for any action, even for the most gratuitous and most unspeakable actions, reasons can always be found, ridiculous, improbable and ill-founded sometimes and which deceive no one or only the person who invents them. But you can always find a reason. And sometimes those reasons are good and convincing, impeccable; in fact, it's easier to find a reason for some thing that has happened than for plans and intentions, for proposals or decisions. What has already happened provides a very strong, solid starting point: it's irreversible, and that provides a standard, a guide. It's something to hold on to. Or more than that, something to adhere to, because it binds and obliges, and so half your work is done for you. It's far easier to give reasons to explain something that is past (or, which comes to the same thing, to find them or even, why not, provide them) than to justify beforehand what you want to happen, what you're trying to achieve. Anyone in politics knows that, as does anyone in diplomacy. As do wet gamblers, or criminals when they decide to eliminate someone and do eliminate them, knowing that they will deal later on with any previous considerations and with examining the pros and cons when they meet them as consequences; but the eliminee has been eliminated, you see, and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and there's nearly always gain, not pain. And everyone who occupies some post of responsibility knows this, even if they're the last policeman in the last village in the remotest of shires.' -'She didn't use our Spanish word condado,' I thought, 'but then it isn't much used nowadays.' After all, it was her language too. And she had used the English term 'wet gamblers' too, an expression I had never heard and didn't understand, perhaps it had no real equivalent in Spanish, given that she had not even attempted to find one: it meant literally jugadores humedos, or tahures mojados, I had a sudden anachronistic image of waistcoats on Mississippi riverboats. – 'And they're all private individuals, I can assure you, under the uniforms and outside of their offices, and inside too, when they're alone.' – I remembered Rosa Klebb, SMERSH's ruthless murderess in From Russia with Love, who, according to that novel, might have killed Andres Nin; I remembered the description of her that I had read in Wheeler's house, on that night of improvised, feverish study by the river of calm continuity: 'She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant… to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform…" And there was still time for this thought to cross my mind: 'Few people are exactly appealing when they get out of or into their warm bed, when they relax or let themselves go or lower their guard; but I know that Luisa is, and this young woman seems as if she would be; or perhaps neither of them ever does lower her guard, despite that ever-growing ladder in her tights.' – 'To a greater or lesser degree everyone allows themselves to be led by their impulses, they are oriented, guided by their sympathies and antipathies, by their fears, their ambitions, their conjectures and their obsessions; by their preferences and their grudges, biographical or social. So I don't see the difference, Jaime. But then it's better for me that you do see the difference, because that means you won't mind so much doing me the favour I'm asking. Because this commission comes from private individuals and not from the State, that much I know. I mean that it comes from private private individuals.’

I said nothing for a moment, neither of us did. I was aware that young Nuix had still not asked me the favour, not strictly speaking, not entirely, not completely. And she had not, therefore, contradicted or disagreed with me at any point, she had merely set out her point of view, based on her experience, which appeared much greater than seemed possible given her youth, at what age did she start, at what age would she have left behind that youth which she preserved only when she remained silent or when she laughed, not, of course, when she argued or held forth, nor when, in the building with no name, she interpreted people with such discernment, she would long since have plumbed my depths, she would already have turned me inside out? Unless there were still times when she saw me as an enigma, as did the person who had written my report, the one about me. Unless she considered me 'a lost cause' upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought, as, according to that text, I myself did. ('He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will,' the writer of the report had said of me. 'And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so.’)

I wondered to what extent Tupra was speaking through her; some of her arguments sounded like him to me, or rather (I hadn't actually heard him use them) they sounded like his way of being in the world, as if he might have silently inculcated her with them during their many years of proximity or, perhaps, intimacy. 'So I don't see the difference, Jaime,' she had said, for example, doubtless in order not to upset me, instead of 'I don't agree with you, Jaime', or 'You're wrong, Jaime', or 'You really haven't thought it through, try again', or 'You have no idea'. I had several questions troubling me, but if I gave voice to them all, we would never end. 'What do you know about criminals?', 'Who are these "wet gamblers"?' and 'Who do I have to lie or keep silent about in order to please you?' and 'You still haven't asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly', and 'How long have you been working here, how old were you when you started, who were you or what were you like before?' and 'Which private private individuals do you mean, and how is it that this time you know so much about this particular commission, its origin and provenance?' In fact, I could have asked all these questions, one after the other, I was in charge of the conversation, that was my privilege. There was no way now that it would take only the 'moment' that she had promised, everything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carries within itself its own prolongation and every phrase leaves a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too. It often astonishes me that there should always be an answer for everything or that an answer can always be attempted, not just for questions and mysteries, but for assertions and things known, for the irrefutable and the certain, as well as for doubts and looks and even for gestures. Everything persists and continues on its own, even if you yourself decide to withdraw. This was definitely not going to take a 'moment', nothing is brief unless cut short. But it clearly depended on me now as to whether it became a whole night plus its ensuing dawn, or the drunken loquacity of a shared insomnia.