Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

Tupra, who was smiling broadly now, improved on this by saying: 'Remember Dickie Dearlove, darlin', and 'ow they did 'im in,' adopting a cockney accent (or possibly a half-educated South London accent, I can't really tell the difference) and putting on a mother's voice. 'Good grief, I'm sure he could never in his life imagine a more sordid epitaph for himself. Not even in his most humiliating nightmares. What else, though, go on.'

'I don't know if such a phobia has ever been recorded, or if it has a rather less pedantic name than the one I gave it. Dearlove himself, of course, would never use such terms. He wouldn't even understand what I was talking about, I might as well be speaking Greek. And yet that is what it is: narrative horror or disgust; a dread of having his story ruined by the ending, wrecked forever, destroyed, of its complete ruination by a finale too spectacular for the world's taste and hateful to himself; of the irreparable damage done to his story, of a stain so powerful and voracious that it would spread and spread until it had, retrospectively, wiped out everything else. Dearlove would be capable of killing in order to avoid such a fate. Or such an aesthetic, dramaturgical or narrative doom, as you prefer. I'm sure he would be capable of killing for that reason. At least so I believe.' When I finished, I would sometimes retreat a little, shrink back, not that it made any difference, I had spoken, I had said my piece.

'You'll all end up like Dick Dearlove, every one of you,' said Tupra, pursuing his imitation for a while longer, laughing briefly and wagging an admonitory finger. Then he added: 'The only thing is, Jack, that someone like him would never drive through Clapham or Brixton, either to enter the city or leave it.'

'All right, but he could get lost, take the wrong motorway exit and end up there high and dry, couldn't he? It does happen. I saw something similar in a film called Grand Canyon, have you seen it?'

'I don't go to the cinema much, unless obliged to by my work. I used to, when I was young. But I'm afraid you haven't quite grasped the economic level of these people, Jack. For short trips Dearlove probably travels around in a helicopter. And for longer trips he uses his private jet, with an entourage that would make the queen's look positively puny.' He fell silent for a moment, as if recalling a journey made in just such a private plane. Tupra was always very scornful of Dearlove and similar figures, but the fact is that he mixed on occasions with quite a few of them, from the worlds of television, fashion, pop music and cinema, and whenever I had seen him with them, he had always appeared to treat them with easy sympathy and trust. Sometimes I wondered if these contacts, difficult to achieve for most people, were provided from on high, as part of his job and to make his work easier. Naturally, I never knew exactly what his job was. On the other hand, he never seemed uncomfortable in the company of even the most frivolous of celebrities. It could just be part of his training, of his trade, it didn't necessarily mean he enjoyed it. The truth is that he never seemed uncomfortable in any social situation, with the brainy or the serious, with the pretentious or the idiotic, with the marginalised or with the simple, he was clearly a man who adapted to whatever was required of him. Then he returned to the subject: 'Tell me, do you think he would be capable of killing in any other circumstance, apart from one in which he saw that his life might not only be in danger, but also, according to you… called into question? You may be right, he might well be horrified to think that his end could prove ugly, inappropriate, onerous, humiliating, sarcastic, turbulent, dirty…'

'I don't know,' I replied, slightly put out by his realistic rigour, and I immediately regretted having spoken those words, the words most guaranteed to disappoint in that building, or the most despised. I quickly covered them up. 'That seems to me the principal motive, but I suppose it wouldn't be necessary for his life to be in danger, if, as I believe, he is, in a sense, more concerned with his history, with the story of his life than with that life itself. Although he is probably unaware of this. That priority has, I believe, less to do with any future or present biographers than with his need to retell the story to himself every day, to live with it. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear.'

'No, not entirely, Jack. Be more precise, please. Try a bit harder. Don't get yourself in such a tangle.'

Such comments spurred me on, a slight infantilism on my part, from which I've never managed to free myself and probably never will.

'He likes his image, he likes his story as a whole, even the odontological phase; he never loses sight of it, never forgets it.' I was trying to be more precise. 'He always has in his mind his entire trajectory: his past as well as his future. He sees himself as a story, whose ending he must take care of, but whose development he must not neglect either. It isn't that he will allow no upsets or weaknesses or stains in his story, he's not that naive. However, these must be of a kind that do not stand out too stridently, that do not inevitably leap out at him (a horrible protuberance, a lump) when, each morning, he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks about "Dick Dearlove" as a whole, as an idea, or as if he were the title of a novel or a film, which has, moreover, already achieved the status of a classic. It has nothing to do with morality or with shame, that's not it, indeed most people find it easy enough to look themselves in the face, they always find excuses for their own excesses, or deny that they are excesses; bad consciences and selfless regret have no place in our times, I'm speaking of something else. He sees himself from outside, almost exclusively from outside, he has no difficulty admiring himself. And perhaps the first thing he says when he wakes up is something like: "Goodness, it wasn't a dream: I am Dick Dearlove, no less, and I have the privdege of talking and living with that legend on a daily basis." This isn't really so very rare, whether you leave the word "legend" in or take it out. It has been known for writers who have won the Nobel prize to spend what remains of their life thinking all the time: "I'm a Nobel prizewinner, I won the Nobel Prize, and, my, how I shone in Stockholm," sometimes even saying this out loud, they've been overheard doing so by their anxious loved ones. But I know quite a lot of other people of no objective significance or fame, who, nevertheless, perceive themselves in just such a way, or similarly, and who watch their life as if they were at the theatre. A permanent theatre, of course, repetitive and monotonous ad nauseam, which does not scant on detail or on even two seconds of tedium. But those people are the most benevolent and easily pleased of spectators, not for nothing are they also the author, actor and protagonist of their respective dramatic works (dramatic is just a manner of speaking). This form of living and seeing oneself has become fact on the Internet. I understand that some people even earn money showing every soporific, wretched moment of their existences, endlessly filmed by a fixed camera. The astonishing, intellectually sick, seriously unhealthy thing is that there are people willing to watch this, and who even pay to do so; I mean spectators who are not also the authors, actors and protagonists, whose behaviour is not entirely anomalous or even incomprehensible.'

'Come on, Iago, please: get to the point. I get lost in your digressions. When do you think Dearlove would be most likely to bump someone off?'

Tupra was, of course, perfectly capable of following my digressions, he never got lost, even if he wasn't much interested in what he was hearing, although I don't think he did get bored with me, you can tell when you've got the attention of the people listening to you, not for nothing was I a teacher, although those classes are now moving further and further away in time. He would sometimes call me Iago, the classical form of my name, when he wanted to annoy me or force me to concentrate. He knew that Wheeler referred to me as Jacobo and probably didn't dare attempt the pronunciation, and so he placed my name somewhere half-way along the road, in familiar Shakespearean mode, possibly with some mocking undertone, I couldn't rule that out. Of course Tupra could follow me, but he would sometimes pretend that the traditional aversion to the speculative and theoretical, inherent in the education and mind of the English, prevented him from accompanying me very far on my digressions. He was not only following everything, he was recording it, filing it away, retaining it. And he was quite capable of appropriating it for himself.