Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

He had stopped and was looking at me again, hard and expectantly, as if I were not one of his own familiar children, but a much younger friend, a new friend who had come to see him that morning in his bright, welcoming apartment in Madrid. And as if he could expect from me a novel reaction to what he had said.

'You're a better man than I am,' was my response. 'Or if it isn't a question of better or worse, you're certainly freer and more astute. I can't be sure, but I think I would have sought to avenge myself. After Franco died, or whenever it would have been feasible to do so.'

My father laughed, and this he did paternally, more or less as he had when we, as children, came out with some wildly ingenuous or tactless remark in the presence of visitors.

'Possibly,' he said, 'you do have a tendency to hang on to things, Jacobo, and it's sometimes hard for you to let go, you're not always good at leaving things behind. But that's mainly a sign that you still feel very young. You still think you have unlimited time, time enough to squander. It may be hard for you to understand this, but trying to avenge myself would simply have meant wasting more of my time because of him, and those months in prison were quite enough for me. Besides, it would have given him a sort of a posteriori justification, a false validation, an anachronistic motive for his action. Bear in mind that when you look at your life as a whole the chronological aspect gradually diminishes in importance, you make less of a distinction between what happened before and what happened afterwards, between actions and their consequences, between decisions and what they unleash. He might have thought that I had, in fact, done him some harm, it didn't matter when, and then he would have gone to his grave feeling more at peace with himself. And that wasn't and hasn't been the case. I never wronged him in any way, I didn't harm him and I never had, either before or afterwards or, needless to say, at the time. And that perhaps was what he could not bear, what hurt him. Some people can't forgive you for behaving decently towards them, for being loyal to them, for defending them and giving them your support, let alone doing them a favour or getting them out of some difficulty, that can, on occasions, sound the death knell for the benefactor, I'm quite sure you can come up with your own examples. It's as if they felt humiliated by being the object of someone's affection and good intentions, or thought that this implied a degree of contempt towards them, it's as if they could not stand to feel indebted, however imaginary the debt, or to be obliged to feel grateful. Not that they would want to be treated otherwise, of course, heavens, no, they're always terribly insecure. They would be even more unforgiving if you behaved badly or disloyally towards them, if you denied them favours and left them firmly stuck in their own mire. Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, and not to let them near you for good or ill, or count on you for anything, quite simply, to cease to exist for them, not even in order to fight them. That, of course, is the ideal. Unfortunately, you can't make yourself invisible by sheer willpower or by choice. For example, when I was in prison, our friend Margarita came to visit me (there was a metal grille between us), and she became so passionately indignant about the things she had heard my betrayer saying about me that this attracted the attention of the prison guards. They asked her who she was talking about, fearing, no doubt, that it was Franco himself. She, being of a highly excitable nature, told them, and they made her go with them to Del Real's house to find out if what she had said was true. There they found his mother, who, of course, Margarita knew (we all knew her, we had been good friends for many years), and whom she attempted to persuade to get her son to see reason and to withdraw his unfair and incomprehensible accusations. His mother, who was very fond of Margarita, listened with a mixture of astonishment and discomfort. In the end, though, maternal faith outweighed everything else, but all she could say in her son's defence was: "La patria es la patria" – "One's country is one's country." To which Margarita replied: "Yes, and lies are lies.'"

My father fell silent again, but this time he didn't look at me, but at the arm of his chair. He seemed suddenly tired, or perhaps distracted by something that had nothing to do with our conversation. I couldn't tell if he had become slightly lost amongst his memories and did not intend to add anything more, or if he was still going to connect the last story to the one before and offer me a conclusion. It seemed unlikely that I would find out because my sister had arrived (perhaps my father had heard the lift) and had just come into the living-room, but only, I imagine, in time to hear Margarita's quoted words, because she immediately asked us in a jovial, chiding tone:

'All right, what are you two arguing about?'

And I said:

'We're not, we were talking about the past.' 'What past? Was I there?'

My sister always had a particularly cheering effect on my father, even though she resembled my mother rather less than I did. Well, not exactly: she resembled her more in that she was also a woman, but less so in her actual features, which I reproduced in my male face with disquieting fidelity. He replied with an ironic, happy smile, his usual harmonious blend:

'No, you weren't, not even as the embryo of a plan of a hypothesis of a possibility.' Then he went on to conclude, addressing himself solely to me: 'Lies are lies, you see. There's not really any more to say or time to waste on such things.'

'No, not once you've emerged from them, more or less unscathed that is,' I said.

'Yes, of course, once you've emerged from them, scathed or unscathed. That's obvious, I mean if I hadn't emerged, we wouldn't be talking now, you and me, still less this young woman here.'

'Is this some deep dark secret you two are talking about?'

That is what my sister said then, I remember it well, and those were the memories that came to me as I finally climbed into the familiar bed prepared by Mrs Berry many hours before, but first I returned to its place in the next room the copy of From Russia with Love with its dedication. I had, I thought, left almost everything in order, and had even cleaned up a strange bloodstain that I had neither spilled nor provoked and which now, in the midst of my drunkenness and tiredness, and just as I had foreseen before erasing it for good and expunging its rim or last remnant, was already starting to seem unreal to me, a product of my imagination. Or perhaps of my readings. Without realising it, I had read a great deal about the days of blood in my own country. The blood of Nin, the blood of the uncle who never was my uncle, the blood of so many people without names or who had to abandon their name and who inhabit the earth no longer. And the blood of my father which they sought but did not manage to spill (blood of my blood which did not spurt forth or spatter me). 'La patria es la patria', the traitor's poor, trapped mother. An inextricable phrase, meaningless like all tautologies, empty words, a rudimentary concept – that of fatherland, homeland, mother country – and fanatical in its application. Never trust anyone who used it or uses it, but how would you know someone was using it if they were speaking in English and said 'country', which usually translates as 'país', as in 'What country do you come from?', or 'campo' as in 'countryside', which are both entirely inoffensive in Spanish. From the top floor I could hear the murmur of the river even more clearly now, quiet and patient or indifferent and languid; sound rises, or was it just the part of the house I was in, lying in bed at last. I could already see a little light in the sky or so I thought, it was barely noticeable, my eyes might have been deceiving me. But there you can't help but notice, even at dead of night and at the hour we Latins used to call the conticinio – a word now forgotten by my own language – because of that strange English penchant for sleeping without blinds on the windows, something I never did grow accustomed to, there are no blinds, they don't have them, indeed, they don't always have curtains or shutters, often only transparent net curtains which neither shelter nor conceal nor calm, as if they always had to keep one eye open when they fall asleep, the inhabitants of that large island on which I have spent more time than is advisable and more than was foreseeable, if I add up the before and the after, the now and the then. 'Lies are lies', another meaningless tautology, although this time the word is not empty, nor the concept rudimentary, nor its application fanatical, but, rather, universal, effortless, routine, constant, almost mechanical and casual at times, and the more mechanical and casual, the more difficult it is to identify, to distinguish, and the truer the lie, for lies have their truth, the more defenceless we are. 'Lies are lies, but all lies have their moment to be believed.' Just as I might believe the river as I lay listening to its murmurings, and, thinking I understood, repeated what it said, as I drifted off to sleep, keeping one eye open, as is the custom in this country, which is also, for some, their patria, softly and languidly, with the open eye of my contagion and the non-existent lightness in the sky: 'I am the river, I am the river and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.'