Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

He fled and did not flee, because it was precisely then that he realised that he had no way of going back to the apartment or of getting in if he wanted to, nor of helping the young woman if she was still alive, and that was when he raced madly to a phone booth and tried to get the dealer on his mobile, to warn him about what had happened and to tell him what he knew. The dealer's voice-mail answered, so Comendador left a brief, confused message, then it occurred to him that the man must be at his shop, or that he would at least find the shop assistants, whom he knew, and who could then take action, the dealer owned a shop selling expensive designer-label Italian clothes, a franchise or whatever they're called, and was putting more and more of his energies into that, everyone tends towards respectability as soon as they see a chance and are allowed to or able to, both those who break the law and those who aspire to subvert order, both criminals and revolutionaries, the latter often only behind closed doors, they conceal the tendency when they have to live off their appearance. Comendador and I have known a few like that. Comendador didn't know the phone number of the shop, but it wasn't far away, so he started running, and he ran and ran and ran through the streets as he had not done since childhood, or since university perhaps, during the demonstrations that marked the end of the Franco era, fleeing the always much slower guards bundled up in their greatcoats. And as he ran, he went over in his mind what was still so very recently the past that he found it hard to believe it wasn't still the present and that he could do nothing to change it, and thinking: 'I didn't do anything, I didn't even try, I didn't even find out or make sure, I didn't take her pulse or try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or heart massage, I've never done it and don't know how to, apart from having seen it done in ten thousand films, not that that's any use, but I could at least have tried, who knows, I might have saved her and now it's too late, every minute that passes is a minute later, a minute that condemns us, me and the girl, but especially her, perhaps she isn't dead yet, instead she'll die while I'm running or when I finally get to the boutique and talk to the assistants and tell them what's happened, or while they look for Cuesta, or for Navascués, his partner, who will probably have a key to the apartment and could then let them in, or let us in if I decide to go back there with them, although I'd better not, I've still got the stuff on me, but meanwhile that silly girl could well die because of all the time I'm wasting or, rather, have wasted, time I should have used taking whatever desperate measures I could take or else calling an ambulance, I could have moistened her temples, the back of her neck, her face, I could have given her a whiff of cognac or alcohol or cologne, I could at least have cleaned up the blood, I'm as selfish, mean and cowardly as I always thought I was, but knowing that is not the same as being brought face to face with it, and seeing that it has its consequences.' He entered the shop like a horse at full gallop and there they all were, the dealer Cuesta, Navascues his partner, and the shop assistants, Cuesta had turned off his mobile, he was serving some customers, who looked quite taken aback, hadn't he got the message, Comendador asked, and gave a garbled account of what had happened, Cuesta took him into his office at the back of the shop, calmed him down, picked up the phone, quickly dialled his own number, but without any great panic, and a few seconds later, Comendador heard him speaking to his girlfriend in the apartment that he had just left like a shot, without so much as a backwards glance. 'What happened,' he heard him ask her, 'Comendador tells me that you hit your head and fainted. Ah, I see. It's just that when you didn't come round, he didn't know what to think. But don't you always have them with you? You should watch that, you know, you can't afford to skip one. Are you sure you're all right, you don't want me to come over? Sure? Fine. Dab some alcohol on that cut and put a plaster on it, there's nothing you can do about the bump, but you'd better disinfect it, don't just leave it, will you? OK. Fine. Yes, yes, you obviously frightened the life out of him, he came charging over here, he's in my office now all out of breath. Yes, he said you gave it to him before you passed out, yeah, well, you probably wouldn't remember. All right, I'll tell him. See you later, then. 'Bye, take care.' Cuesta explained briefly that the girl suffered from diabetes, and these episodes happened sometimes when she drank too much and then, to make matters worse, forgot to take her medication, the two things usually went together and happened, to be honest, far too often, she was silly about it, a child really. She had recovered now and was feeling better, she had taken her medication, and about time too, and the cut was nothing, a nasty bump and bit of blood. She was really sorry to have frightened Comendador like that, she sent him her love and hoped he would forgive her for having put him through it, and thanked him for having taken so much trouble over her, he was an angel, Comendador was an angel.

I remembered this episode as I was going to the bathroom on the ground floor, where I picked up a packet of cotton wool and a bottle of alcohol and then returned to the top of the first flight of stairs to clean up that inexplicable stain that was not my responsibility, it was lucky it was on the wooden floor and not on the carpet. When he gave his rapid, flustered account in the shop, Comendador had not mentioned to Cuesta anything about the bloodstains that had clearly come from his girlfriend, about those on the floor and those on the sheets and the spots on her T-shirt, and she herself had not apparently mentioned them over the phone, after all, what was the point – it might, indeed, have seemed indiscreet, tactless. The girl might have felt embarrassed and preferred to pretend that they had never existed and that no one could, therefore, have seen them: perhaps – without actually saying so – she was asking his forgiveness for that. And so Comendador never knew for certain where they came from or what had caused them, but decided to content himself with the explanation of an unexpected period or one which, out of perfectly understandable carelessness, had not been intercepted in time, and, after a few days had passed, he even began to doubt he had seen them at all, those bloodstains, that's what happens sometimes with those things that we deny or keep silent about, that we hide away and bury, they inevitably start to fade and blur, and we come to believe that they never actually existed or happened, we tend to be incredibly distrustful of our own perceptions once they have passed and find no outside confirmation or ratification, we sometimes renounce our memory and end up telling ourselves inexact versions of what we witnessed, we do not trust ourselves as witnesses, indeed, we do not trust ourselves at all, we submit everything to a process of translation, we translate our own crystal-clear actions and those translations are not always faithful, thus our actions begin to grow unclear, and ultimately we surrender and give ourselves over to a process of perpetual interpretation, applied even to those things we know to be absolute fact, so that everything drifts, unstable, imprecise, and nothing is ever fixed or definite and everything oscillates before us until the end of time, perhaps it's because we cannot really stand certainty, not even certainties that suit us and comfort us, and certainly not those that displease or unsettle or hurt us, no one wants to be transformed into that, into their own fever and spear and pain. 'Perhaps I was frightened by the cut on the girl's forehead, I mean, she hit her head with such a thud, and, who knows, seeing a little blood appear possibly made me think that a dark stain on the wooden floorboards was also blood, it was pretty hard to see in that corridor,' Comendador had said to me when he told me about the incident some days later. 'And what about the stains on the sheets, the drops of blood?' I said. 'Oh, I don't know, they could have been something else, wine perhaps, or even brandy, she had probably been swigging it straight from the bottle in the corridor and in bed and then, when she felt ill, had spilled it and not even noticed, I mean, she was completely out of it, either that or feeling in a really bad way by the time she did finally manage to drag herself out of bed and come and open the door to me.' 'Are you telling me that while you're absolutely sure that you saw drops of blood in several places, at the same time you also think it's perfectly possible that you didn't see them or that they might not even have been there, that it was just a product of your imagination or your fear?' 'Yes, I suppose I am, I suppose that's possible,' replied Comendador, perplexed.