Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

And having said this, he stretched out his arm and pointed with his index finger at some imprecise place in the living-room, doubtless indicating to me that I should fetch something for him. Since I needed an ashtray for my cigarette, I did not hesitate and fetched one for me and another for him and his cigar, the ash of which was growing perilously long. He took it and placed it on the stair beside him, but he still failed to make long overdue use of it, instead, he shook his head and continued pointing in the same vague direction with his now tremulous finger. His lips were pressed tight shut, as if they had suddenly become glued together and he could not open them. His face, however, remained unchanged.

'A port? Do you fancy a last glass of port, Peter?' I suggested, the various bottles with their little chains and medals were still there. He again shook his head, as if the word in question eluded him, a slip, a blockage, perhaps old age however well borne (old age mocked) occasionally plays these tricks. 'A chocolate? A truffle?' The respective trays had not been removed from the living-room. He again shook his head, but kept his finger outstretched, moving it up and down. 'Do you want me to bring you a scarf? Are you cold?' – No, that wasn't it, he shook his head, his elegant tie was keeping his neck perfectly warm. 'A cushion?' – He nodded at last with relief and then raised his middle finger too, he wanted two cushions.

'Of course, "cushion", honestly, I don't know what's wrong with me, but sometimes the most stupid words just get stuck, and then I can't get another word out until I've said the one I can't remember, like a kind of momentary aphasia.'

'Have you seen a doctor about it?'

'No, no, it's not a physiological thing, I know that. It only lasts a moment, it's like a sudden withdrawal of my will. It's like a warning, a kind of prescience…' He did not go on. 'Yes, get them for me, will you, they would greatly ease my lower back.'

I took two from one of the sofas and gave them to him, he positioned them behind his back, I asked if he would prefer us to go and sit in the living-room, but he made a negative gesture with the hand holding the cigar (the ash fell at last on to the carpet), as if to indicate that it wasn't worth it, that he wouldn't delay me much longer (with the side of his hand he rolled the still intact ash safely into the ashtray, which he had placed at the foot of the stained stair), I returned to my place, but first fetched a small ladder of five or six steps that was kept in the study for getting books down from the higher shelves, placed it in the doorway and sat down on that at the same distance from him as before.

Wheeler had said the last few words in English, we spoke more in that language because it was the language of the country we were in and the one we heard and used with other people all day, but we alternated it with Spanish when we were alone, and passed from one to the other according to necessity, convenience or caprice, all it took was for one of us to slip in a couple of words from one or other language for us to shift automatically into the language thus introduced, his Spanish was excellent, accented, but only slightly, fluent and quite fast – although, naturally, much slower than my rapid-fire native Spanish, full of strings of crude elisions which he avoided – too precise in his choice of words, too careful perhaps to be a native speaker. He had used the word 'prescience', a literary word in English, but not as uncommon as 'prescienda' is in Spanish, Spaniards never say it and almost no one writes it and very few even know it, we tend to prefer 'premonition' or 'presentimiento' or even 'corazonada', all of which have more to do with the senses, a feeling, 'un palpito' – we use that too in colloquial speech – more to do with the emotions than with the intelligence and with certainty, none of them implies a knowledge of future events, which is what 'prescience' and, indeed, 'prescienda' mean, a knowledge of what does not yet exist and has not yet happened (though it has nothing to do with prophecies or auguries or divinations or predictions, still less with what modern-day quacks call 'clairvoyance', all of which are incompatible with the very notion of 'science'), 'it's like a warning, a kind of prescience, a foreknowledge of that withdrawal of the will,' I thought Wheeler had been about to say, had he completed the sentence. Or perhaps he would have been still clearer in his thought, which he would have completed by saying: 'it's like a warning, a kind of prescience, a foreknowledge of what it's like to be dead.' I remembered something that Rylands had said to me about Cromer-Blake once, when we were both very worried about that unmentionable illness of his. 'To whom does the will of a sick man belong?' he had said beside the same river, the Cherwell, that could be heard now nearby in the darkness during the silences, when we were trying to understand the way our sick friend had been behaving. 'To the patient? To the illness, to the doctors, to the medicines, to the sense of unease, to pain, to fear? To old age, to times past? To the person we no longer are and who carried off our will when he left?' ('How strange not to go on wanting,' I paraphrased to myself, 'and, even stranger, not to want to want. Or perhaps not,' I immediately corrected myself, 'perhaps that isn't so very strange.') But Wheeler wasn't ill, he was just old, and almost all his times were now past, and he had had ample opportunity not to be the person he had been, or any of the various possible selves he might have gone on to be. (He had even, early on, abandoned his own name.) He had not even said 'prefiguration', he was used to that, to the prior representation of all the things and scenes and dialogues in which he intervened, he had probably prefigured and even planned the conversation we were having, the two of us sitting on our respective steps after the party, when everyone else had gone and Mrs Berry was upstairs, tossing and turning in her sheets, unable, unusually for her, to get to sleep, going over all her tasks and preparations, tormented perhaps by some mistake that only she would have noticed. This conversation was probably evolving according to Wheeler's criterion and design, doubtless he was directing it, but that didn't really matter to me in principle, it intrigued and amused me, and I never begrudged him these pleasures. Peter had used the word 'prescience', a Latin word that has reached our languages almost unchanged from the original praescientia, a rare, unusual word and, therefore, a difficult concept to grasp.

'Like a warning of what, Peter? What kind of prescience? You didn't finish what you were saying.'

Neither he nor I was the sort to allow ourselves to be distracted or tricked or to lose sight of our objective or of what interested us. We were not the sort to let go of our prey. I knew this about him and he about me, though I was still unsure as to the extent of his knowledge, I would have a clearer idea the following day. Perhaps that is why he laughed quietly, as if he had caught me out, and the smoke escaped from between his teeth, not this time indicating a paragraph break.

'Don't ask a question to which you already know the answer, Jacobo, it's not your style,' he replied, still smiling. He was also not the sort to allow himself to be easily cornered or trapped, he was the kind who would say only what he had set out to communicate or confess. He was the kind who called me Jacobo; others, like Luisa, called me Jaime, it's the same name, but neither of them was mine exactly (perhaps, aware of this, my own wife would sometimes call me by my surname). I was the one who introduced myself using one or the other or the more authentic name, depending on people, place and what seemed appropriate, depending on which country I was in and which language was being spoken. Wheeler liked what was possibly the most pretentious form, or the most artificially historical, being familiar with the old Spanish tradition of translating the names of the Stuart King Jameses in this way.