Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

I looked at my shirt, at my trousers, from waist to ankle, it's terrifying to think how many places one can bleed from, any or all of them probably, this skin of ours is so unresisting, so useless, everything wounds it, even a fingernail can breach it, a knife can tear it and a spear can rip it open (it can also pierce the flesh). I even raised the back of my hand to my lips and spat on it, to see if the blood came from my gums or from further back or further down and the blood had been spat up by a cough I had forgotten about or simply failed to register, I stroked my throat and my face, I sometimes cut myself when I'm shaving and a nick which I thought had healed over could have reopened. But there was not a trace of blood on my body, it was apparently closed, without a single fissure, the drop of blood was not mine, therefore it was perhaps Peter's, he had turned to the left when he went up to bed, I looked over there but in the brief distance between the stairs and his bedroom door I saw no other stains, perhaps, then, it had come from a guest, someone who had come up to the first floor during the buffet supper in search of a second toilet, when the one downstairs was occupied, or else accompanied and in search of a handy room. It could also belong to Mrs Berry, I thought, to that utterly opaque and silent figure, of whom for years, on and off, I had caught glimpses, so discreet she was almost a ghost, serving first Toby Rylands and then Wheeler who had employed her or taken her on, I had never given her any thought at all, she was just taken for granted, reliable, ever since I had known her, she had attended satisfactorily to the provisioning and to the needs of those two single and already retired professors, first one and then the other, but I could know nothing about her needs, or her problems, or her health, her anxieties, any family she might have, her origins or her past, about a probable and probably late Mr Berry, that was the first time I had thought about that, about a Mr Berry by whom she had been widowed or perhaps divorced and with whom, who knows, she still remained in touch, there are people who we assume were always destined for their jobs, who were born for what they do or for what we now see them doing, when no one was born for anything, there is no such thing as destiny and nothing is assured, not even for those who were born princes or very rich, for they can lose everything, not even for the very poor or slaves, who can gain everything, although this rarely happens and almost never without recourse to plunder or larceny or fraud, without tricks or treachery or deceit, without conspiracy, deposition, usurpation or blood.

I thought that I should, anyway, clean it up, that stain at the top of the first flight of stairs, it's odd – irritating – how responsible we feel for whatever we find or discover, even though it's nothing to do with us, how we feel that we should concern ourselves with or remedy something which, at the time, exists only for us, and about which only we know, or so we believe, even though it's nothing to do with us and we have had no part in it: an accident, a difficult situation, an injustice, an abuse, an abandoned baby, and, of course, a dead body or someone who could easily become one, someone badly injured, something of the kind had happened to that friend of mine who dealt a bit in drugs – a schoolfriend, Comendador his name was and still is if he hasn't changed it to something else in America or wherever it is he has gone, he spent years and years sitting immediately in front of me when the register was called, if it was his turn to answer or to be punished, I knew that I was next, he was my straw in the wind throughout my childhood – and he had both run away and not run away: he had gone to pick up a package from the house of the dealer who usually supplied him and also sent him on the occasional assignment, like the one that got him banged up in that Palermo pen; he rang the doorbell several times without success, which was strange because he had told the man that he was coming round, then, at last, the door opened, but the man wasn't in, he had had to go out unexpectedly, at least that is what he gleaned from the woman who answered the door, the dealer's girlfriend of the moment, he, like Comendador, changed girlfriends every few weeks, he didn't want them to get suspicious, and sometimes they even swapped girlfriends, a form of amortisation. The young woman seemed completely out of it, she could barely speak and only just managed to recognise my friend ('Ah, yes, I've seen you at the Joy, haven't I?') and she staggered towards the bedroom where her partner of only a few days had left the package ready for her to hand over, she knowing nothing of its contents, but two seconds later and before she had even reached the bedroom, she and Comendador having exchanged only a few disconnected phrases ('What's wrong, what have you taken?' he asked, 'Ah, yes, now I recognise you,' she replied), he watched her trip and apparently rush headlong down the corridor, two or three running steps under the wild impetus of that stumble, and run straight into the wall, with a thump ('A sharp sound, like wood being chopped') then drop to the floor, unconscious. He immediately noticed a small gash, the young woman was dressed only in a long T-shirt that reached- her thighs and which she had probably put on in response to the insistent ringing of the doorbell and a vague awareness of a duty to be performed, but she had nothing on underneath, as Comendador observed the moment after that fall, that death, that faint. He also saw a spot of blood on the floor, perhaps similar to the one I had before my eyes now, but fresher, as if it really had come from the girl, from between her legs, maybe she was menstruating and, in her dreamy, absent state, drugged perhaps, she had not noticed, or perhaps she had wounded herself on something pointed or sharp when she fell, something on the floor, a splinter, but that was unlikely. The most worrying thing was not that or the gash, but her air of derangement and confusion following her loss of consciousness, which had happened at the same time as the blow, but was clearly not due to that or, at least, not solely, but to whatever the girl had been taking shortly before or, who knows, for some hours already, she might well have combined a whole morning of excesses with a compulsory previous night of partying. Comendador crouched down and carefully sat her up, she appeared completely lifeless, he propped her against the wall, on the wooden floor, did his best to cover her bottom, the tail of her T-shirt was all spotted with red, tried to bring her round, slapped her face, shook her by the shoulders, saw that her eyes were half-closed or, rather, half-open, and yet as if frosted over, veiled, lacking focus, vision or life, she looked like a dead woman and he did, in fact, think she was dead, inexorably and permanently dead, right there in front of him, and he was the only one who knew. He stopped trying to revive her. He realised that the apartment door had been left open, he heard footsteps on the stairs and once they had gone, he walked back to the door and closed it, returned to the corridor, saw from there the small package he had come to pick up, it was on the bedside table in the adjacent bedroom, towards which the young woman had been heading in her somnambular state before she stumbled and slammed her head against the wall. The bed in that room was unmade, there was a bloodstain on the sheets too, not that big, perhaps her period had started while she was dozing or dying without realising what was happening, she had not noticed or had lacked the will or the strength to check the flow, although I'm not quite sure that is the right expression. Comendador pondered various possibilities, but not carefully, very quickly, slightly panic-stricken, it would be best to take the package anyway, because if, by some misfortune, nurses or policemen arrived before the dealer got back, it would be really bad news for him if they saw it. He didn't think twice, he stepped over the legs of the sullied, seated girl, went into the bedroom, grabbed the goods, stuffed the package in his pocket, stepped over her legs again and made his way to the front door without a backward glance. He opened the door, made sure there was no one around, discreetly closed it behind him and in four bounds and three strides he was down the stairs and out into the street.