Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (21 page)

Tupra remained impassive, or so I imagined. I still had my back to him, preferring not to see his expression and for him not to see mine. His voice sounded calm:

'Of course it wasn't a coincidence. It was precisely because it involved a colleague that they brought it to us, offered it to us.

They thought it might be of interest, either by revealing where her weaknesses might lie, or to help us carry out reprisals against the aggressors. You know, in our group, we don't talk much about our personal problems—Pat says almost nothing. If it hadn't been for this tape, I would hardly have known a thing. All she told me was that her father had had an accident and was in the hospital. We don't tend to mix socially, as you know'

'And didn't you take reprisals? Not even in a case like this? Then why keep the tape?'

'As I told you, nothing here gets thrown away or given away or destroyed, and this beating is perfectly safe here, it's not going to be shown to anyone. Although, who knows, it might be necessary to show it to Pat one day, to convince her of something, perhaps to stay, not to leave us, you never can tell. For the moment, though, there's no point in taking reprisals, those four men are rank nobodies, they do things like that—a hundred similar things for a hundred different masters—and they're sure to get caught now and then with no need for us to go after them, they're used to prison. As for the men behind it, as I've explained, it's best to wait, as we so often do, to make some better future use of it.'

'Is that what you wanted me to see?' I knew it wasn't, if it had been, he wouldn't have been fast-forwarding over it, risking me not saying anything and depriving him of the opportunity to enlighten me. He had still more poison with which to inoculate me, or more torment to put me through.

'No, that's not it. Let's get on.'

And more scenes, albeit fewer, sped silently by, I could still see most of them, I saw a man screaming at another man who was sitting in a car in an underground parking lot, I mean a private not a public one, he was leaning against the car and screaming at him, resting one elbow on the open window so that the other man couldn't wind it up, their two faces so close that he must have been spraying him with spit, I saw how with a rapid movement he took a pistol from his jacket pocket and placed the barrel beneath the ear lobe of his adversary or victim, I saw how he took not even three seconds to squeeze the trigger and shoot him right there, beneath the ear lobe, at point-blank range. I put my hand to my eyes, so that I could see only through the chinks between my fingers, ridiculous I know, I saw blood spurt out and tiny bits of bone, but that way you somehow feel that you're seeing less or could at least stop seeing it at any moment, although that moment never arrives because you never draw your fingers together. The blood spattered the murderer too, not that this appeared to bother him, there must be a shower nearby or else he has a fresh shirt in his car, another suit, or perhaps this was the underground parking lot for his own apartment building, he turned and disappeared, returning the pistol to his pocket, it was a very brief sequence, but judging by the cut of his trousers—rather short and narrow and made of shiny grey fabric—I would have said he was American, and the fact that Tupra kept the video must mean that the man belonged to the CIA or something similar, the Army perhaps, I refrained from asking questions, perhaps he was now one of its highest-ranking officers, who knows, well, Reresby would.

Immediately after this, I saw someone being beaten to death with a hammer, at least I assume he was killed, a woman of about thirty was wielding the weapon, she was wearing a skirt and high heels and a pearl necklace over her tight V-necked sweater—the clothing and shoes in the same matching green, she looked like someone out of the 1950s or the early sixties, a secretary or an executive or a bank clerk, certainly an office worker—she felled a man considerably taller than herself with a savage hammer blow to the forehead, he was my age or Tupra s, but heavier and broader than either of us, this was probably taking place in a hotel room, the burly man fell backwards and she sat astride him hitting him with the hammer, smashing his skull, which is why I assume that he died, she must have feared or hated him intensely, her necklace jiggled up and down, her skirt was all rucked up; strangely enough, despite her autumnal outfit, she wasn't wearing stockings, perhaps she'd taken them off before and perhaps her panties too, in order to have sex fully clothed, or perhaps she didn't have to take off her panties, or he took them off so as to rape her and would have liked to have her like that, on top of him, or underneath with her legs spread, what would that have made her then, what was she now and who was the victim, I still said nothing, the recording ended abruptly, the woman poised with her hammer in the air, like Tupra with his sword, she had not yet finished delivering her blows, I couldn't help remembering that rather odd actress Constance Towers in that old movie,
The Naked Kiss,
in Spain it was called
Una luz en el hampa—A Light in the Underworld
—a slightly ridiculous title—in which she did something similar in the first scene, not with a hammer but with the sharp heel of her shoe, or was it a telephone, and while she was committing this crime her hair fell off, it turned out she was wearing a blonde wig and was revealed to the viewers as completely bald, and maybe that's what was most shocking, like those false stories about Jayne Mansfield; and the image of Luisa also crossed my mind, the dread image I had fantasized about in my darkest or maddest moments, attacked by the man who would replace me, a devious sort who wouldn't give her so much as a moment's breathing space and would isolate her totally, and who, one rainy night, when they were stuck at home, would close his large hands around her throat while the children—my children—watched from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, that awful sight, and the choked-back tears that longed to burst forth, but could not, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother made as she died, I just hoped she had a hammer at hand so that she wouldn't be the one to die, but the devious man, the despotic possessive man who wasn't like that in the early stages, on their first dates, but deferential, respectful, even cautious, who, like me, didn't stay the night, even if begged to do so, but put all his clothes back on despite the lateness of the hour, the exhaustion and the cold, and when he went out into the street once again put his gloves on, that man so similar to Tupra.

It's also possible that I was too tired to say a word, as scene succeeded scene, I felt more and more shrivelled, diminished, atrophied ('Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death'), as if that one facet of the world I was being shown were driving out all the other more usual ones, not just the happy smiling ones, but also the anodyne and the neutral, the indifferent, the routine, which—especially the latter—are our salvation and essence. That is what poison does, it infiltrates and contaminates everything. The tiredness, however, must have been cumulative because, at the same time, I realized that, despite all I had seen, nothing being paraded before me made such a painful impact on me as the incident I had witnessed with my own eyes, unmediated by a screen, in the handicapped toilet. Violence that happens right next to you and that breathes and stains is not the same as violence projected onto a screen, even if you know it's real and not fictitious, television doesn't spatter us, it only frightens us. And now and then, Tupra's question would resurface in my mind, the question he had asked me in the car before setting off and that had made him decide to drive us both to his house, 'Why can't one go around beating up people and killing them? That's what you said.' What nonsense, everyone knows why, anyone could have given him the answer. But in the light of what he was showing me ('Let these visions sit heavy on thy soul; and lay down thy edgeless sword and let thy shield roll away; take off thy helmet and let fall thy lance'), I could still find only idiotic puerile answers, inherited but never thought through, the usual trite and vacuous ones that everyone has learned by rote and is ready to trot out without ever having given them a thought, however paltry or vague, without ever having questioned them: why is it wrong, because it's immoral, because it's against the law, because you can get sent to prison or to the gallows in some countries, because you shouldn't do unto others what you wouldn't want done unto you, because it's a crime, because there is such a thing as pity, because it's a sin, because it's bad, because life is sacred, because once it's done it's done and cannot be undone. Tupra was clearly asking me something that went beyond all that.

I saw more flurries of activity, perhaps I shouldn't describe them, I saw worse things, more confused, almost run together. Reresby had increased the speed, he needed to sleep too, yes, maybe he was growing sleepy, although he sounded wide awake, perhaps he was at last in sympathy with my desire to get it over with as quickly as possible, I wanted an end to the fever, my pain, the word, the dance, the image, the poison, the dream, at least for that day and for that very long night, the things that compromise or accuse are not very varied—weird sex, violent sex, adulterous or merely laughable sex, beatings, drug consumption, a bit of torture, cruelty and sadism, corruption, bribes, con tricks and betrayals and debts, failed conspiracies and treacheries exposed, improvised homicides and planned murders, and not much else really, almost everything can be reduced to that, but then there are the massacres, I saw another machine-gunning, on a larger scale this time, of civilians in some African country, twenty or so women and men and children and old people, they fell in quick succession, like dominoes, and thus it seemed less grave or even less true, executed by black soldiers or marksmen under orders from a white officer in uniform, whether regulation or half-invented I don't know, perhaps he was a mercenary who later rejoined his army, there are Englishmen and South Africans and Belgians who have made that return journey, and Frenchmen too, I believe. If that were the case,Tupra had that European soldier exactly where he wanted him, he would have allowed him to rise, make a career for himself, he certainly wouldn't have warned him of the existence of that film nor would he have denounced him, he would be waiting until he reached some lofty position, in his own country, in NATO, so that he could then ask him an enormous favor, or, rather, in the light of that video, force him to grant the favor.

And finally he stopped, I mean that he resumed normal speed for one particular sequence and with it restored the sound, he had to rewind a little to catch the beginning.

'Here it is,' he said. 'This is what I want you to see before you go home. Take a good look, and when you're lying in bed think about me and think about this.'

It was, like all the others, a short scene, he hadn't lied about that, even though I seemed to have been there forever, almost all the episodes had been edited together onto that one DVD with barely any preamble, what mattered was the brutality, the crime or the farce, not what came before or afterwards, but what could be used to blackmail the subject of the film. Three men were in a kind of hut, in the background I could make out the tail of an animal whisking back and forth, probably a cow or an ox, there was straw scattered about the floor, I could imagine how it must have smelled in there. Two of the men were standing and they had tied up the third man, who was sitting on a wicker chair, his hands behind his back and each foot tied to a chair leg, to the front legs, of course. There was a cassette or a radio playing, I could hear a tune that I half-recognized, with my reliable memory for music: Comendador had taken a liking to the local songs during his prison stay in Palermo after being arrested by customs because of a drop of blood that trickled from his nose at an inopportune or perhaps opportune moment and aroused the suspicions of a border guard with a very sharp or deductive eye, and who literally set the drug-sniffing dogs on him. He had sent me a couple of CDs as a present, one by Modugno and the other by someone called Zappulla, and I was almost sure that it was the latter's voice I could hear at full volume in the cowshed, singing a song that appeared on my CD, I could remember some of the titles:
'
I
puvireddi,' 'Suspirannu,' 'Luntanu,' 'Bidduzza,'
or
'Moro pe ttia,
pretty, pleasant songs, slightly tacky in their melancholy, and I had enjoyed listening to them, over and over, during a melancholy and rather tacky period of my own life, that cowshed must then be in Sicily, an idea confirmed by the presence of the weapon one of the men standing guard wore slung over his shoulder on a chain, a
lupara,
the sawn-off shotgun once used there for hunting and for settling scores, and perhaps still used for both, the other man had a large pistol in a holster under his arm, his jacket draped elegantly over his shoulders, the sleeves hanging empty, and his shirtsleeves rolled up, a large square watch on his wrist, his hand resting on the back of the chair in which sat the prisoner, stouter and older than the two younger and thinner men, and all three were mouthing the words of the song, they all knew it by heart and were singing along with Zappulla, and although each was doing this of his own accord, so to speak, absorbed and isolated, as if to himself and not in unison, there was nonetheless something very odd about them all momentarily sharing that melody, as if they weren't two guards and their captive or two executioners and their victim, and as if nothing bad awaited the latter, and the tails of the animals in the background seemed to move to the same rhythm, all the living beings in that out-of-the-way place were strangely and incongruously in tune, the man carrying the
lupara
was even swaying slightly, not lifting his feet, but just moving his legs and his torso and the twin-barreled shotgun, dancing to the lilting melody of
'I puvireddi'
or
'Moro pe ttia,'
which mean, in dialect, 'The poor devils' or 'I'm dying for you.'