Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

No, I should never tell anyone anything, nor hear anything either.

I did, for some time, listen and notice and interpret and tell, and I was paid to do so during that time, but it was something I had always done and that I continue to do, passively and involuntarily, without effort and without reward, I probably can't help it now, it's just my way of being in the world, it will go with me to my death, and only then will I rest from it. More than once I was told it was a gift, and Peter Wheeler was the one who pointed this out to me, alerting me to its existence by explaining and describing it to me, for, as everyone knows or, at least, senses, things only exist once they have been named. Sometimes, though, this gift seems more like a curse, even though I now tend to stick to the first three activities, which are silent and internal and take place solely in my mind, and therefore need affect no one but me, and I only tell anyone anything when I have no alternative or if someone insists. For during my professional or, shall we say, remunerated life in London, I learned that what merely happens to us barely affects us or, at least, no more than what does not happen, but it is the story (the story of what does not happen too), which, however imprecise, treacherous, approximate and downright useless, is nevertheless almost the only thing that counts, is the decisive factor, it is what troubles our soul and diverts and poisons our footsteps, it is doubtless also what keeps the weak, lazy wheel of the world turning.

It is not mere chance or fancy that in espionage, conspiracies, or criminal activities, what is known by the various participants in a mission or a plot or a coup – clandestinely, secretly – is always diffuse, partial, fragmentary, oblique, with each person knowing only about his or her particular task, but not about the whole, not the final aim. We've all seen this in films, the way the partisan, realising that he won't survive the next ambush or the next inevitable attempt on his life, tells his girlfriend when they say their farewells: 'It's best if you know nothing; then, if they interrogate you, you'll be telling the truth when you say you know nothing, the truth is easy, it has more force, it's more believable, the truth persuades.' (For lying does require certain imaginative and improvisational abilities, it requires inventiveness, a cast-iron memory, complex architectures, everyone does it, but few with any skill.) Or the way the mastermind behind the big robbery, the one who plans and directs it, informs his flunky or henchman: 'If you know only about your part of the job, even if they catch you or you fail, the plan can still go ahead.' (And it's true that you can always allow for one link to break or for some mistake to be made, total failure is not something that is achieved quickly or simply, every enterprise, every action resists and struggles for some time before it stops altogether and collapses.) Or the way the head of Secret Services whispers to the agent about whom he has his suspicions and whom he no longer trusts: 'Your ignorance will be your protection, so don't ask any more questions, don't ask, it will be your salvation and your guarantee of safety.' (And the best way to avoid betrayals is to provide no fuel for them, or only rumours, valueless and weightless, mere husks, a disappointment to those who pay for them.) Or the way someone who commissions a crime or threatens to commit one, or someone who confesses to vile deeds thus exposing himself to blackmail, or someone who buys something secretly – keep your collar turned up, your face always in the shadows, never light a cigarette – warns the hired assassin or the person under threat or the potential blackmailer or the commutable woman once desired and already forgotten, but still a source of shame to us: 'You know the score, you've never seen me, from now on you don't know me, I've never spoken to you or said anything, as far as you're concerned I have no face, no voice, no breath, no name, no back. This conversation and this meeting never took place, what's happening now before your eyes didn't happen, isn't happening, you haven't even heard these words because I didn't say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I'm not saying them.'

(Keeping silent, erasing, suppressing, cancelling and having, in the past, remained silent too: that is the world's great, unachievable ambition, which is why anything else, any substitute, falls short, and why it is pure childishness to withdraw what has been said and why retraction is so futile; and that is also why – because, unlikely though it may seem, it is sometimes the only thing that can effectively inject a little doubt – out-and-out denial is so irritating, denying that one said what was said and heard and denying that one did what was done and endured, it's exasperating that the action announced by those earlier words can be carried out unwaveringly and to the letter, words that could be spoken by so many and by such very different people, the mouth of the instigator and the threatener, of the person living in fear of blackmail and the one who furtively pays for his pleasures or profits, as well as in the mouth of a lover or a friend, and that those words can then, equally exasperatingly, be denied.)

All the words we have seen uttered in the cinema I myself have said or have had said to me or have heard others say throughout my whole existence, that is, in real life, which bears a closer relation to films and literature than is normally recognised and believed. It isn't, as people say, that the former imitates the latter or the latter the former, but that our infinite imaginings belong to life too and help make it broader and more complex, make it murkier and, at the same time, more acceptable, although not more explicable (or only very rarely). A very thin line separates facts from imaginings, even desires from their fulfilment, and the fictitious from what actually happened, because imaginings are already facts, and desires are their own fulfilment, and the fictitious does happen, although not in the eyes of common sense and of the law, which, for example, makes a vast distinction between the intention and the crime, or between the commission of a crime and its attempt. But consciousness knows nothing of the law, and common sense neither interests nor concerns it, each consciousness has its own sense, and that very thin line is, in my experience, often blurred and, once it has disappeared, separates nothing, which is why I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have-therefore learned to fear not only what is thought, the idea, but also what precedes it and comes before. For I am myself my own fever and pain.

This gift or curse of mine is nothing very extraordinary, by which I mean it is nothing supernatural, preternatural, unnatural or contra natura, nor does it involve any unusual abilities, not divination, say, although something rather similar to that was what came to be expected of me by my temporary boss, the man who contracted me to work for him during a period that seemed to go on for a long time, more or less the same period of time as my separation from my wife, Luisa, when I came back to England so as not to be near her while she was slowly distancing herself from me. People behave idiotically with remarkable frequency, given their tendency to believe in the repetition of what pleases them: if something good happens once, then it should happen again, or at least tend in that direction. And it was all because I chanced to make a correct interpretation of a relationship that was of (momentary) importance to Señor Tupra, that Mr Tupra – as I always called him until he urged me to replace this with Bertram and later, much to my distaste, with Bertie – wanted to hire my services, initially on an ad hoc basis and subsequently full-time, with theoretical duties as vague as they were varied, including acting as liaison or occasional interpreter on his Spanish or Spanish-American incursions. But in reality or, rather, in practice, I was of interest to him and was taken on as an interpreter of lives, to use his own grandiose expression and exaggerated expectations. It would be best just to say translator or interpreter of people: of their behaviour and reactions, of their inclinations and characters and powers of endurance; of their malleability and their submissiveness, of their faint or firm wills, their inconstancies, their limits, their innocence, their lack of scruples and their resistance; their possible degrees of loyalty or baseness and their calculable prices and their poisons and their temptations; and also their deducible histories, not past but future, those that had not yet happened and could therefore be prevented. Or, indeed, created.