Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

And I was left in no doubt of this one morning when, in a situation in which she should, by rights, have been assailed by blushes, there was no sign at all of any lurking embarrassment. I had been given the keys to the building with no name, and, believing myself to be the first to arrive that morning on the floor we occupied (a bout of dawn insomnia had driven me out of the house to begin the day in earnest and to finish off a report I was writing), and believing therefore that I was the first to turn the key (the night-time bolts still undrawn), I was puzzled to hear noises and a gentle humming coming from one of the offices, the door of which I opened not violently exactly, but with verve and élan, with the vague idea of disconcerting the potential intruder, the early-rising spy or surreptitious burglar, and thus having the advantage if it came to a confrontation, although this seemed unlikely given the apparently tranquil humming. And then I saw her, young Nuix, standing by the desk, naked from the waist up and with a towel in the hand with which, just at that moment, she was drying one armpit, her arm raised. On her lower half, she was wearing a tight skirt, the skirt she had had on the day before, I always make a note of her clothes. I was so surprised by this vision (and yet, at the same time, not very surprised, perhaps not surprised at all: I knew it was a woman's voice doing the humming) that I did not do what I should have done, mutter a hurried apology and close the door, with me, of course, on the outside. It was only a matter of seconds, but I allowed those seconds to pass (one, two, three, four; and five) all the while looking at her with, I think, an expression that was part questioning, part appreciative and part falsely embarrassed (and therefore decidedly stupid), before saying 'Good morning' in an entirely neutral tone, that is, as if she was as fully dressed as I was, or almost, I still had my raincoat on. In a sense, I suppose, I behaved hypocritically as if nothing was amiss, and as if I had seen nothing; but I was helped in this – I would like to think – by the fact that young Nuix did exactly the same and also behaved as if nothing was wrong. For those few seconds in which I held the door open before withdrawing, she not only did not cover herself up, out of fear or modesty or, at the very least, surprise (she could easily have done so with the towel), she remained quite still, like a freeze-frame in a video, in exactly the same posture as when I had burst into the office, looking at me with a questioning but not remotely stupid expression, neither falsely nor truly embarrassed. All she did, though, was to cease her humming and her movement: she was rubbing herself dry with a towel, and she stopped doing that, the towel arrested at rib-height. And in that position she not only did not conceal her nakedness (which she didn't, not even as a reflex action), she kept her arm raised and thus allowed me to observe her armpit, and when a naked woman allows you to do that, uncovering one or both, it's as if she were offering up to you an additional nakedness. It was, of course, a clean, smooth and, I deduced, newly washed armpit, and, needless to say, shaved, without that awful bush of hair that some women insist on preserving nowadays as some strange protest against the traditional taste of men, or most men. 'Good morning,' she said in the same neutral tone. It was only a matter of seconds (five, six, seven, eight; and nine), but the calm and nonchalance with which we behaved during their passing reminded me of the time when my wife, Luisa, shortly after our son was born, stood stock-still half-way through getting undressed (her upper body bare, her breasts still swollen with milk, she was just about to go to bed) and answered some absurd questions I was asking her about our newborn child ('Do you think this child will always live with us, as long as he is a child or at least while he's still very young?'). She was getting undressed, in one hand she held the tights she had just removed, in the other the nightdress she was about to put on ('Of course he will, don't be so silly, who else would he live with?'; and she had added: As long as nothing happens to us, that is'), while young Nuix held in her hand the towel with which she did not even think of covering herself and, indeed, did not cover herself, and the other hand free and held up high, like a statue in antiquity. They were both half-naked ('What do you mean?' I had asked Luisa then), and the nakedness of one had nothing to do with that of the other (I mean as far as I was concerned, because clearly there was, objectively speaking, a resemblance): that of my wife was familiar to me and even customary, which doesn't mean I was indifferent to it, far from it, in fact, even in that fleeting, domestic moment, I glanced at her swollen breasts; but it was normal for us to go on talking as if it didn't matter, and not to interrupt our conversation because of it ('Nothing bad, I mean,' she had replied); that of my young work colleague was, on the other hand, new, unexpected, unprecedented, entirely unforeseen and even undeserved and, from my point of view, furtive, the product of a misunderstanding or of carelessness, and so I looked at her differently, not shamelessly or lasciviously but with an attention that sought both to discover and to memorise, with the apparently veiled eyes of the time we live in and that were always the norm in England, where we were living and where that mode of looking without looking and that way of not looking yet looking has been developed and honed to perfection, and from which I only ever saw one person almost escape or step free, and that was Tupra; and she allowed me to look without looking, she did nothing to prevent it, but neither was there shamelessness or exhibitionism in her eyes or in her attitude, and when she added something more, an explanation that was neither expected nor necessary, and which, despite being the first phrase she had addressed to me that day, did not appear to have been composed beforehand in her head ('I slept here, well, I didn't exactly sleep much, I spent the night wrestling with a particularly fiendish report'), her voice and her tone did not sound so very different from the tone and voice of the married existence I know so well. And so once the remaining seconds had elapsed (nine, ten, eleven and twelve: 'Oh, don't worry, I came in early to see if I can finish a report of my own,' I said in turn, not so much in order to explain myself, but more by way of a belated and implicit apology), I finally closed the door, with one resolute, almost hasty movement (I hadn't let go of the handle), and withdrew to my office, which was next door and which I shared with Rendel, she shared hers with Mulryan. Young Nuix belonged to a different generation, I told myself; I told myself that she probably spent the summers bare-breasted on the beaches and beside the swimming-pools of Spain, that she would be used to being seen like that and admired, her sense of modesty diminished. I also thought that we were compatriots and that when abroad that was almost the same as being related; it creates unusual complicities and solidarities and gives rise to baseless confidences, as well as to friendships and loves that would be unimaginable, almost aberrant, in the common country of origin (a friendship with De la Garza, Rafita, the great moron). But she was probably more English than Spanish, I mustn't forget that. Besides, I know very well that when a woman surprised in her nakedness makes no immediate attempt to cover herself up, even if only instinctively (unless, of course, she's a striptease artiste or something, and I've known a few in my time), it is because she does not rule out the person who has taken her by surprise and is now looking at her, and that goes for all living generations, or at least for the adults of those generations. It isn't that the woman feels attracted to that person or necessarily desires him, my theory would never entertain such ingenuous suppositions. It is simply that she does not rule him out, or does not exclude him, not entirely, and it is highly likely that it is only then that she finds out or realises, in that moment of being seen by someone and deciding not to cover herself up for him, always assuming, of course, that any decision is involved. Young Nuix's raised arm did not, in the end, remind me of the arm of a statue, at least not in my memory: instead I imagined her as if she were gripping the rail on a bus, or strap-hanging in the carriage of an underground train. There she remained, still holding tight, her arm in the air, when I closed the door and ceased seeing both her arm and the smooth armpit that set off the rest. She must have put it down immediately afterwards. It lasted twelve seconds in all. I did not count them at the time, only afterwards, in memory.