Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

'Thank you, I take that as a compliment.' 'Oh, you should, believe me, that was my intention. I mean it. The cultivated Canadian accent is the one that most closely resembles ours, especially, as the name suggests, the English spoken in British Columbia. So what other languages do you know?' Tupra did not allow himself to be distracted by the to-ing and fro-ing that make conversations so erratic and undefined, until tiredness and time put an end to them, he always returned to where he wanted to be.

He had drunk his coffee down in one (that large mouth) and, with real urgency, had immediately placed the empty cup and saucer on the low table next to the sofas, as if what had already been used and therefore served no further function made him impatient or troubled him. As he bent down to do so, he shot a rapid glance at his girlfriend Beryl, whose minuscule skirt barely covered her legs which were now uncrossed (and this was perhaps the reason behind the glance), so that from lower down than we were you might have been able to see, how can I put it, the crotch of her knickers, if she was wearing any, I noticed that De la Garza was sitting on a pouffe at just the right height, and it seemed highly unlikely that this was pure chance. Beryl was talking and laughing with a very fat young man, slouched on the sofa, who had been introduced to me as Judge Hood and about whom I knew nothing except that, despite his plumpness and his youth, he was presumably a judge, and she continued to pay scant attention to Tupra, as if he were the dull husband who no longer represents for her diversion or fun and is just part of the house, not quite part of the furniture, more perhaps like a portrait, which, even though it is generally ignored, still has eyes to see and to watch what we get up to. Tupra also exchanged a glance with Wheeler, who was concentrating on applying a very long match to a cigar that was already very much alight (if not positively ablaze) and was speaking to no one while thus engaged, by his side the ecclesiastical widow of York appeared sleepy and rather less pneumatic, she probably rarely stayed up late or wine perhaps diminished her. I noticed no gesture or signal pass between Wheeler and Tupra, but the eyes of the former permitted themselves a moment of elevation and fixity, through the flames and the smoke, which seemed to me to suggest some implied meaning and recommendation, as if with that unblinking look he were advising him: 'Fine, but don't delay much longer', and as if the message were referring to me. Just as Peter had singled out Tupra for my attention, so he must have told Tupra something about me, although I didn't know what or why. But the fact was that Tupra had said 'and if you've had it up to here with the job already', and I hadn't mentioned how long I had been at the BBC or back in England – how could I possibly be back, my previous stay belonged to the remote past that can never be re-created, or, indeed, to the past from which no one returns – so he must have found out from Wheeler that it was only three months. Yes, only three months ago I had still been in Madrid and had normal access to my home or our home, since I still lived and slept there, although Luisa's increasing remoteness from me had already begun and was advancing with frightening speed, an advance that was troubling, disturbing, and daily – if not hourly – it's astonishing how swiftly what is and has endured suddenly ceases to be, and becomes null and void, once the last line of light has been crossed and the processes of darkness and ambiguity begin. You lose the trust of the person with whom you have shared years of continuous narrative, that person no longer tells you things or asks or even responds and you yourself don't dare to ask or tell, you grow gradually more and more silent and there comes a time when you don't talk at all, you try to pass unnoticed or to make yourself invisible in the home you share in common, and once you know and it has been agreed that it will soon cease to be the common home and which one of you will have to leave, you have the feeling that you're living there on sufferance until you find somewhere else to seek refuge, like an impertinent guest who sees and hears things that should not concern him, goings-out and comings-in that are not commented on before or talked about afterwards, enigmatic phone calls that remain unexplained, and which are possibly no different from those which, a short time before, you didn't even listen to or register, nor, of course, did you retain them in your memory as you do – every one of them – now, because then you weren't alert, you didn't wonder about them or think they concerned you or constituted an implied threat. You know all too well that the phone calls do not concern you now and yet you jump every time the phone rings or you hear her dial a number. But you say nothing and listen fearfully and say nothing, and there comes a point when your only means of communication or contact are the children, whom you often tell things purely so that she will hear you in the next room, or so that they'll reach her ears eventually, or in order to make amends, although this will never now be perceived as that, just as feelings will be disregarded too, and, besides, no child in the world can be entirely trusted as an emissary. And the day that you finally leave you feel a touch of relief as well as sadness and despair – or is it shame – but even that meagre sense of mingled relief will not last, it disappears at once, the moment you realise that your relief is as nothing compared with that felt by the other person, the one who stays and does not move and breathes easily at last to see you leaving, disappearing. Everything is so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other, what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissible – it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it, the person who built a home finds himself barred from entering it, the merest contact, a touch so taken for granted it was barely conscious, becomes an affront or an insult and it is as if one had to ask permission to touch oneself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed-for would now poison the air or provoke nausea, they must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition); the reverse is true too: what was once mocked is taken seriously, and the person once deemed repugnant is told: 'I was so wrong about you, come here.' 'Sit down here beside me, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before.' That is why one must always ask for a postponement: 'Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!' I quoted to myself. Tomorrow you might want me alive, even for only half an hour, and I won't be there to grant your wish, and your desire will be as nothing. It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there is only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still travelling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, insubstantial and unfinished me, no one should trust me either… Of course I had had it up to here already and even before it began, I'd never been interested in that job with the BBC, it had merely been the one reasonable way of ceasing to be irrelevant and phantasmagoric and so very silent, the one way of leaving there and disappearing.

'I've only ever dared translate from English and I didn't do it for very long. I have no problem speaking and understanding French and Italian, but I don't have a good enough command of them to be able to translate literary texts from those languages into Spanish. I can understand Catalan pretty well, but I would never even attempt to speak it.'