Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

We never know when we have entirely won someone's trust, still less when we have lost it. I mean the trust of someone who would never speak of such things or make protestations of friendship or offer reproaches, or ever use those words – distrust, friendship, enmity, trust – or only as a mocking element in their normal representations and dialogues, as echoes or quotations of speeches and scenes from times past which always seem so ingenuous to us, just as today will seem tomorrow for whoever comes after, and only those who know this can save themselves the quickening pulse and the sharp intake of breath, and thus not submit their veins to any unpleasant shocks. Yet it is hard to accept or to see this, and so hearts continue their somersaults, mouths their drynesses and inhalations, and legs their tremblings, how was I or how could I have been – men say to themselves – so stupid, so clever, so smug, so credulous, so dim, so sceptical, the trusting person is not necessarily more ingenuous than the wary, the cynic no less ingenuous than the person who surrenders unconditionally and places himself in our hands and offers us his neck for the last or the first blow, or his chest so that we can pierce it with our sharpest spear. Even the most suspicious and astute and the most cunning turn out to be slightly ingenuous when expelled from time, once they have passed and their story is known (it's on everyone's lips, which is how, ultimately, it takes shape). Perhaps that's all it is, the ending and knowing the ending, knowing what happened and how things turned out, who was in for a surprise and who was behind the deception, who came off well or badly or who came out quits and who did not bet at all and so ran no risk, who – even so – came out the loser because he was dragged along by the current of the broad, rushing river, which is always crowded with gamblers, so many that eventually they manage to get all the passengers involved, even the most passive, even the indifferent, the scornful and the disapproving, the hostile and the reluctant; as well as those who live along the banks of the river itself. It doesn't seem possible to remain apart, on the margins, to shut oneself up in one's house, knowing nothing and wanting nothing – not even wanting to want anything, that's not much use – never opening the letter-box, never answering the phone, never drawing back the bolt however loudly they knock, even if they seem about to break the door down, it doesn't seem possible to pretend that no one lives there or that the person who did has died and doesn't hear you, to be invisible at will and when one chooses, it isn't possible to be silent and to eternally hold your breath while still alive, it's not even entirely possible when you believe that you inhabit this earth no longer and have abandoned your name. It simply isn't that easy, it isn't that easy to erase everything and to erase yourself and for not a trace to remain, not even the last rim or the last remnant of a rim, it's not easy simply to be like the bloodstain that can be washed and scrubbed and suppressed and then… then one can begin to doubt that it ever existed. And each vestige always drags behind it the shadow of a story, perhaps not complete, doubtless incomplete, full of lacunae, ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary, like bits of gravestone or like ruined pediments with fractured inscriptions, and sometimes it's not even possible to know how a story really ended, as in the case of Andreu Nin and of my uncle Alfonso and his young friend with a bullet in her neck and no name at all, as in the case of so many others about whom I know nothing and about whom no one speaks. But the form is one thing and quite another the actual ending, which is always known: just as time is one thing and its content another, never repeated, infinitely variable, while time itself is homogeneous, unalterable. And it is that known ending which allows us to dub everyone ingenuous and futile, the clever and the stupid, the totally committed as well as the slippery and the evasive, the unwary, the cautious and those who hatched plots and set traps, the victims and the executioners and the fugitives, the innocuous and the malicious, from the position of false superiority – time will see it off, it will be time, time that will cure it – of those who have not yet reached their end and are still groping their way uncertainly forwards or walking lightly with shield and spear, or slowly and wearily with shield all battered and spear blunt and dull, without even realising that we will soon be with them, with those who have been expelled and those who have passed and then… then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous, why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my fever, my word, your pain, and all those doubts, all that torment?

That's how it is and will always be, Tupra more or less said as much to me on one occasion, and Wheeler said so quite clearly the following morning and over lunch. And if Tupra said it less clearly it was doubtless because he would never talk about such things or use words like 'distrust', 'friendship', 'enmity' or 'trust', at least not seriously, not in relation to himself, as if none of those words could apply to him or touch him or have any place in his experiences. 'It's the way of the world,' he would say sometimes, as if that really was all one could say on the subject, and as if everything else were mere ornament and possibly unnecessary torment. I don't think he expected anything, either loyalty or treachery, and if he came across one or the other, he didn't seem particularly surprised, nor did he take any precautions other than sensible practical ones. He didn't expect admiration or affection, but neither did he expect ill will or malice, even though he knew full well that the earth is infested with both the former and the latter, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because these are the fuse and the fuel for their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they do not require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, neither gratitude nor insult, or at least not always, according to Wheeler, who was more explicit: 'they carry their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment'.

So I never knew if I ever did win Tupra's trust, nor if I lost it or when, perhaps there was no one moment for either of those two phases or changes of mind, or perhaps one could not have given it a name, or not those names, of winning or losing. He didn't talk about such things, in fact, there was almost nothing about which he did speak clearly and directly, and had it not been for Wheeler's preliminary explanations on that Sunday in Oxford, it is quite possible that I would have known nothing either precise or imprecise about my duties, and that I would not even have guessed at their sense or their object. Not, of course, that I ever knew or understood this entirely: what was done with my rulings or reports or impressions, for whom they were ultimately intended or what purpose they served exactly, what consequences they would bring or, indeed, if they had any consequences, or belonged, on the contrary, to that category of task and activity which certain organisations and institutions carry out simply because they always have, and because no one can remember why these things were done in the first place or cares to question why they should continue. Sometimes I thought perhaps they simply filed them away, just in case. A strange expression, but one which justifies everything: just in case. Even the most absurd things. I don't think it happens any more, but any traveller visiting the United States used to be asked whether he or she had any intention of making an attempt on the life of the American President. As you can imagine, no one ever replied in the affirmative – it was a declaration made under oath – unless they wanted to make a joke, which could prove very costly on that stern, uncompromising border – least of all the hypothetical assassin or jackal who had disembarked with precisely that aim or mission in mind. The thinking behind this absurd question was, it seems, that should a foreigner take it into his or her head to assassinate Eisenhower or Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Nixon, then perjury could be added to the main charge; in other words, they asked the question in order to catch people out – just in case. I never understood, however, the relevance or advantage of that extra aggravating factor when used against someone accused of bumping off or trying to bump off the highest-ranking person in the land, a crime which would, one imagines, be of a gravity difficult to surpass. But that is the way with things that are done just in case. They anticipate the most unlikely and improbable events and are drawn up on that basis, and almost always in vain, since those events almost never happen. They perform fruitless or superfluous tasks that probably never serve any purpose or are never even used, they are based on eventualities and imaginings and hypotheses, on nothing, on the non-existent, on what never happens and has never happened. Just in case.