Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

On the occasional sleepless night spent in that house, I had browsed a little in that small room, I remembered having seen works by classic detective novelists, Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, Van Dine and Van Gulik, Woolrich, Highsmith and Dexter, and, of course, Conan Doyle, Simenon and Chesterton, names I knew from my father – who was of a much more speculative bent than me – although not their actual creations (with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Maigret, who are part of basic general culture). Perhaps I would be in luck – curiosity is very pressing when it gets us in its grip – and Fleming would be there amongst them, although he wasn't, properly speaking, a detective novelist, I imagine all the above-named would have sneered at him, there are always plebeians for the plebeians, and pariahs for pariahs (just big-fish-eats-little-fish voracity, I suppose). I hesitated for a few seconds. If I went up those two flights of stairs now, I would run a greater risk of waking Wheeler and Mrs Berry, but I would have to go up them later anyway in order to go to bed (although I wouldn't then come down and go up them again), and the noise of the old typewriter I had been blithely using had already represented a considerable risk, I realised. I wasn't sure whether or not I should first impose some kind of order on the mess in the study; but I wanted to continue leafing through that Doble Diario with its ridiculous news items and unfamiliar articles written by my young, very young father, when he had no idea that the red-ink side would lose the War nor that, after the defeat, he would be betrayed by his best friend, in cahoots with another man whom he did not even know – possibly hired for the task, possibly happy to add his signature and thus get into the good books of the pro-Franco victors – nor that, because of this, his main vocations and aspirations, in the teaching and speculative lines, would all be dashed. So without so much as an attempt to put anything to rights, I left the junk room into which the study had now been transformed and went slowly and cautiously up the stairs, like an intruder or a spy or a burglar (there is no specific word for this in my language, for the kind of thief who sneaks into houses), I held on to the banister as Peter had done, my balance wasn't perfect, I had, without even trying, had quite a lot to drink, by which I mean that with those last few solitary drinks I had unwittingly slid into the very early stages of emulation of The Flask.

Despite all my precautions, I nevertheless turned on various lights, it would have been a great deal worse to trip and roll down far more stairs than the ashtray had simply because I couldn't see clearly enough to make those inebriated, silent steps. Wheeler had a good collection of detective novels, larger than I remembered, he was clearly very keen, also represented were Stout, Gardner and Dickson, MacDonald (Philip) and Macdonald (Ross), Iles and Tey and Buchan and Ambler, the last two belonged more to the spy sub-genre or so it seemed to me – again I knew all these names from my father – so I had high hopes of finding Fleming there, and these were fulfilled when I realised that the books were in alphabetical order, allowing me to focus my search: it didn't take me long to spot the spines of the complete collection containing the famous missions of Commander Bond, there was even a biography of his creator. I picked up From Russia with Love, it looked like a first edition, as did the other volumes, all of them in faded dust jackets, and when I looked for the imprints page to verify this, I saw that the book was dedicated to Wheeler in the author's own hand, so they must have known each other, Fleming's handwritten note did not allow one to infer any more than that, that they were perhaps friends: ' To Peter Wheeler, who may know better. Salud! from Ian Fleming 1957', the year of publication. The very brevity of the phrase 'who may know better' was highly ambiguous – that, at least, was partly the reason – which could be translated or even understood in various ways: 'Who may know more', 'Who may be better informed', 'Who may be more up to date', even 'Who may be wiser' (about something in particular in this case). But there was also a whole range of less literal interpretations, given the sense that the expressions 'to know better' or 'to know better than' often have, and in all those possible versions there would have been a touch of warning or reproach, something like, 'For Peter Wheeler, who would be advised not to…' or 'who should be careful not to…' follow whatever course of action he was referring to; or 'who would be better off; or 'who presumably knows what he's doing'; or even 'who can make his own choices' or 'who can do what he likes', or some other such hint or suggestion. I looked at the other novels, from Casino Roy ale, 1953, to Octopussy and The Living Daylights, 1966, published posthumously. The five oldest all had written dedications, the one in From Russia with Love was, in fact, the last, and those published afterwards bore no dedication at all, and none of the four previous ones was any more expressive, on the contrary, they were either more anodyne or frankly laconic, 'To Peter Wheeler from Ian Fleming', 'This is Peter Wheeler's copy from the Author and so on. Perhaps Wheeler and Fleming had stopped seeing each other around 1958. And Fleming – as I learned from the blurb on a book about his life – had died in 1964, at the age of fifty-six, at the height of his success or, rather, that of the Bond films starring Sean Connery, which were the real impetus behind the success of his novels. As for the Spanish word 'Salud!', I assumed there was nothing more mysterious behind this than the simple fact that the dedicatee was a Hispanist. That relationship or friendship between the eminent Oxonian and the inventor of 007 didn't match up at first, but then, lately, almost nothing did match up. And Wheeler had not, after all, been as eminent in the 1950s – not to speak of the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War – as he was later on (the title of Sir had been given to him after we met, for example, he was still plain 'Professor Wheeler' when Rylands had introduced me to him).

I was getting tired standing up, I felt uncomfortable and was not a little unsteady on my feet, so I decided to take the copy of From Russia with Love downstairs with me so that I could read it quietly in the study – I carried it down, clutched to me as if it were a treasure – and it was as I was going down, and as I was turning out the lights I had switched on in order to go up the stairs without stumbling, that I discovered a large drop of blood at the top of the first flight of stairs. I mean it wasn't a small drop: it was on the wood, not the carpet, and was circular, about four or five centimetres in diameter or about an inch and a half or two, it was more like a stain than a drop (luckily it hadn't reached the dimensions of a pool), and I couldn't understand what it was doing there when I saw it initially or, perhaps, afterwards either. The first thing I thought, when I finally thought using my thinking faculties (which I hadn't initially), was that it belonged to me, that perhaps it had come from me without my noticing as I climbed the stairs; that I had hit or scratched myself or scraped against something and had not even noticed – it happens to everyone – absorbed as I was in my bookish snooping, not to mention being rather drunk. I looked back and up, at the next flight of stairs, where I once more turned on the light, I looked at the stairs below as well, but there were no other drops and that was odd, because when you drip blood, you always leave several drops, what's called a trail or a trace, unless you notice it as soon as the first drop falls and immediately staunch the wound – the gaping wound, but then there would be no staunching that – so as not to cause further stains. And in that case you always take care to clean up the drop you saw on the floor, once you have stopped the haemorrhage, of course. I felt myself, I looked at myself, I touched my hands, my arms, my elbows – I had taken off my jacket and rolled up my shirt-sleeves during my furious researches – I could see nothing, not on my fingers either, which bleed profusely at the slightest prick or scratch or cut, even a paper cut, I touched my nose with my thumb and index finger, sometimes your nose can bleed for no apparent reason, I remembered a friend whose nose had bled for a very good reason, he had taken rather too much cocaine over a number of years and had dealt in it as well, albeit in small quantities, and, once, having successfully smuggled a modest consignment through the Italian customs (the cocaine had been perfumed with cologne to put the dogs off the track, that is, the packaging had been perfumed) and just as he was about to leave the area, a slow dribble of blood began to emerge from one nostril, so slow that he didn't even feel it: there's nothing unusual about that, certainly not in a customs shed, but this small detail was enough for a keen-eyed border guard to stop him and carry out a thorough search with all the dogs on hand to help, that drop of blood cost him a long spell in a Palermo jail, until Spanish diplomacy managed to obtain his release, that particular slammer turned out to be a hellhole, a hornet's nest, it brought him suffering and scars, but it also furnished him with contacts and important alliances and a way of continuing his disreputable life indefinitely and, I suppose, of extending it, the last I heard he was leading a wealthy and respectable existence as a building magnate in New York and Miami, having started in the business in Havana, renovating hotels, although he had never done anything in that line before. It's amazing how a single drop of blood that didn't even fall – it only appeared – can betray someone and change his life, simply because of the place where it appeared, for no other reason, chance is never very discerning.