Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

The beggars have withdrawn after devouring their booty – they are a mere interregnum of ash and shadow – and the square is almost empty, someone crosses it now and again, no one is ever the last person anywhere, there is always someone who crosses later on. Lights are on in the smart hotel and in a few of the houses, but in my field of vision no one, at that moment, appears. The unfathomable dancer opposite has stopped and turned out the lights, he started at too late an hour to be able to withstand much prancing about. So here I am, all alone like a boyfriend or a lover, substantial and insignificant, here I am still awake. 'Sí?'

I picked up the phone almost before it had rung, it was so close. I spoke in Spanish, having been thinking in my own language for some time.

'Deza.' Luisa sometimes called me by my surname, when she wanted to be forgiven or to get something out of me, but also when she was in a very bad mood, because of something I had done. 'Hi, you've probably been trying to get through, I'm sorry, my sister has had me on the phone for an hour playing psychiatrist, she's going through a really rough patch with her husband and she considers me to be an expert on the subject now. Honestly. And the children are asleep now, I'm really sorry, I put them to bed at the usual time, the fact is that I'd completely forgotten it was Thursday until this very moment, when I put the phone down, you know what it's like when what's perfectly clear to you isn't at all clear to the other person, so you repeat yourself about ten times and end up getting more and more exasperated, and my sister's the same, I mean, she only really wants to hear what she's telling herself and not what I might think about the matter or advise her to do. Anyway, how are you?'

She sounded very tired and slightly absent, as if talking to me was a final, additional night-time chore she hadn't counted on, and as if she were still in conversation with her sister and not with me, always assuming that the conversation did take place. It's always the same, every day and with anyone, constantly, in any exchange of words, trivial or grave, we can believe or not believe what we're told, there aren't that many options, too few and too simple, and so we believe almost everything we're told, or, if we don't, we usually keep quiet about it, because otherwise everything becomes so tangled and difficult, staggering forwards in fits and starts, and nothing flows. And so everything that's said is taken, in principle, as the truth, the true and the false, unless the latter is obvious, that is, obviously false. This wasn't the case with Luisa now, what she was telling me could be what had really happened or it could be a mask for something else – a different phone call, a supper out under the protection of a talkative babysitter, a prolonged visit from someone and then a prolonged goodbye, it wasn't my business, and what did it matter – I had to accept it, in fact, I shouldn't even be thinking about it. Besides, there is another option, everything is full of half-truths, and we all take our inspiration from the truth in order to formulate or improvise lies, so there is always a pinch of truth in every lie, a basis, the starting-point, the source. I usually know, even if they don't concern me or there is no possible way of checking (and often I couldn't care less, it doesn't really matter). I detect them without any need of proof, but, generally speaking, I say nothing, unless I am being paid to point them out, as was the case when I was working in London.

'Fine,' I said, and even that one word was false. I didn't really feel like talking at all. Not even to ask about the children, there probably wouldn't be anything new to report. Nevertheless, she gave me a rapid summary as if to compensate me for not having heard their voices that night: perhaps that is why she had called me Deza, so that I would forgive the oversight with which I was not reproaching her, after all, those few minutes with my son and daughter on the phone were always very routine and rather silly, the same questions from me and similar responses from them, who never asked me anything apart from when I would be coming to see them and what presents I would bring, then a few affectionate words, the odd joke, all very stilted, the sadness came afterwards in the silence, at least in mine, but it was bearable.

'I'm absolutely shattered,' said Luisa in conclusion. 'I've had enough of phones for one night, I'm going straight to bed.'

'Good night, then. I'll try and phone on Sunday. Sleep well.'

I hung up or we both did, I too felt exhausted and I had a lot of work to do the following morning at the BBC, I was still working there at the time and had no idea then that I would do so for only a short while longer. While I was getting undressed to go to bed, I remembered a foolish question I had asked Luisa while she was getting undressed to go to bed about a thousand years ago, shortly after our son was born, when I had still not quite got used to his existence, to his omnipresence. I had asked Luisa if she thought he would always live with us, while he was a child or very young. And she had responded with surprise and a touch of impatience: 'Of course he will, what nonsense, who else would he live with?' And then she had immediately added: 'As long as nothing happens to us.' 'What do you mean?' I asked, slightly distracted and disconcerted, as I often was at the time. She was almost naked. And her answer was: 'If nothing bad happens, I mean.' Our son was still only a child and he did not live with us, but with her alone, and with our daughter, who should also always have lived like that, with us. Something bad must have happened, or perhaps not to both of us, but only to me. Or to her.

In the first instance and at a party, Tupra turned out to be a cordial man, smiling and openly friendly, despite being a native of the British Isles, a man whose bland, ingenuous form of vanity not only proved inoffensive, but caused one to view him slightly ironically and with an almost instinctive fondness. He was unmistakably English despite his odd name, much more Bertram than Tupra: his gestures, intonation, his alternating high and low notes when he spoke, the way he had of standing, swaying gently back and forth on his heels with his hands behind his back, his initial assumed timidity, which is often used in England as a sign of politeness, or as a preliminary declaration of one's renunciation of all attempts at verbal domination – although his timidity was very much initial, since it lasted no further than the introductions – and yet something of his remote or traceable foreign origins survived in him – perhaps they were only paternal – possibly learned unintentionally and quite naturally at home and not entirely erased by the area where he'd been brought up and gone to school, not even by the University of Oxford where he had studied and which brings with it so many affectations and turns of phrase and so many exclusive and distinctive attitudes – almost like passwords or codes – a large degree of arrogance and even a few facial tics amongst those who have become most thoroughly assimilated into the place – although it is more akin to being assimilated into some ancient legend. That 'something' was related to a certain hardness of character or to a kind of permanent state of tension, or was it a postponed, subterranean, captive vehemence, impatiently waiting for there to be no witnesses – or only those who could be trusted – in order to emerge and show itself. I don't know, but it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that Tupra, when he was alone or had nothing to do, danced like a mad thing around his room, with or without a partner, but probably with a woman to hand, for he was obviously immoderately fond of them (such a predilection always stands out a mile in England, in marked contrast to the prevailing affectation of indifference), not just the woman he was with, but almost any woman, even one of mature years, it was as if he were able to see them in their previous state, when they were young women or, who knows, young girls, to be able to read them retrospectively and, with those eyes of his that probed the past, to make the past once more present during the time that he chose to reclaim and study it, and to cause women, who were in the process of shrinking or fading or withdrawing, to recover, in his presence, lust and vigour (or was it just a flash: the mad, ephemeral spluttering, more ephemeral even than the flame of a match newly struck). The most remarkable thing was that he made this happen not only in his own eyes, but in those of others, as if, when he talked about it, his vision became contagious, or, put another way, as if he persuaded and taught us all to see what he was seeing at that precise moment and which we would never have perceived without his help and his words and without his index finger pointing it out to us.