Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (29 page)

'And what about lunch?' he asked before we even set off. He had to make sure he got his reward, at least the minimum and immediate one. He would try to get something better out of me later, that was his way of charging interest. But I didn't care a fig about that or indeed about our lunch date, which I probably wouldn't keep. He'd be momentarily angry, but it would only increase his respect for me and his curiosity when he saw how little care I took over my social commitments. 'I'd love to go to that restaurant you mentioned.'

'What about Saturday? I have to fly over to Madrid for a few days after that. I'll phone you tomorrow and we'll arrange a time. I'll reserve a table.'

'Oro!'

I couldn't bear him saying that. Well, I couldn't bear anything about him. I decided there and then that I would not damn well reserve a table nor would I damn well phone him, I'd invent some convincing excuse later on.

He led me down carpeted and slightly labyrinthine corridors, we changed direction at least six times. Finally, he stopped at a prudent distance from a door that stood ajar or almost open, we could hear declamatory voices, or rather one voice, barely audible, which sounded as if it were reciting poetry in a strange, insistent rhythm, or perhaps it was a litany.

'Is he alone?' I whispered.

'I'm not sure. He might be, although, of course, he is speaking. No, wait, now I remember: Professor Rico is here today. He's giving a lecture this evening at the Cervantes Institute. They're probably rehearsing.' And then he felt it necessary to enlighten me: 'Yes, Professor Francisco Rico, no less. You may not know it, but he's a great expert, really top-notch, and very stern. Apparently he treats anyone he deems stupid or importunate like dirt. He's much feared, very disrespectful and has a caustic wit. There's absolutely no way we can interrupt them, Deza. He's a member of the Spanish Academy.'

'It would be best if the Professor didn't see you, then. I'll wait here until they've finished. You'd better go, you don't want to get a dressing down. Thanks for everything and, don't worry, I'll be all right.'

Garralde hesitated for a moment. He didn't trust me. Quite right too. However, he must have thought that whatever happened next and whatever I did, it would be best if he wasn't there. He set off back down those corridors, turning round every now and then and repeating noiselessly to me until he had disappeared from view (it was easy enough to read his lips):

'Don't go in. Don't even think of interrupting them. He's a member of the Academy'

I had learned from Tupra and Rendel how to move almost silently, and to silently open closed doors, if there were no complications, and how to jam them shut, as with the door of the handicapped toilet. And so I made my way over to De la Garza's office, keeping close to the farther side of the corridor. From there I could see practically the whole room, I could certainly see both men, the numbskull and Rico, whose face I was familiar with from television and the newspapers and which was, besides, pretty much unmistakable, he was a bald man who, curiously and audaciously, did not behave like a bald man, he had a disdainful or sometimes even weary look in his eye, he must get very tired of the ignorance surrounding him, he must constantly curse having been born into an illiterate age for which he would feel nothing but scorn; in his statements to the press and in his writings (I had read the occasional article) he gave the impression that he was addressing himself not to a few cultivated people in the future, in whose existence he doubtless did not trust, but to readers from the past, all good and dead, as if he believed that in books—on both sides of the divide: for books speak in the middle of the night just as the river speaks, quietly and reluctantly, and their murmur, too, is tranquil or patient or languid—being alive or dead was merely a secondary matter, a matter of chance. He perhaps thought, like his compatriot and mine, that 'time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common and that binds them together,' and that all time is therefore inevitably indifferent and shared (we all existed and will exist in time), and the fact that we coincide in it physically is purely incidental, like arriving late or early for an appointment. I saw his characteristically large mouth, well-formed and rather soft, slightly reminiscent of Tupra's mouth, but less moist, less cruel. His mouth was closed, his lips almost pressed together, so the primitive rhythms I could hear were emanating not from there, but from Rafita, who, it seems, not only considered himself to be a black rapper by night, in chic and idiotic clubs, but a white hip-hopper in the broad light of day and in his office at the Embassy, although he was dressed perfectly conventionally now and wasn't wearing a stiff, over-large jacket, or a gipsy earring in one ear, or some faux matador's hairnet or a hat or a bandana or a Phrygian cap, or anything else on his empty head. His recitation droned to a halt, and he said with satisfaction to Francisco Rico, that man of great learning: 'So what did you think, Professor?'

The Professor was wearing a pair of large spectacles with thick frames and lenses possibly made of anti-glare glass, but even so I could see his icy gaze, his look of sad stupefaction, as if he were not so much angry as unable to believe De la Garza's pretentiousness or presumptuousness.

'It doesn't thrill me.
Ps. Tah.
Not in the least.'—That's what he said,
'Ps!
Not even the more traditional
'Pse'
which means 'So-so' or 'No great shakes' (or
'Ni fu ni fa,'
which Spaniards use all the time, even though no one really knows what it means). 'Ps,' especially when followed by '
Tah
,' was far more discouraging, in fact it was deeply disheartening.

'Let me lay another one on you, Professor. This one's more elaborate, has more ass to it, it's more, like, kickin.'

There he was again with his semi-crude, semi-youth slang; no one could dishearten or discourage Rafita. I felt relieved to see that he was little changed since the last time I had seen him, beaten and lying on the floor, literally with the fear of death in his shaking, silently supplicant body, his eyes dull and his gaze averted, not even daring to look at us, at his punisher and at me, his punisher's companion by association. I saw that he had recovered, his injuries couldn't have been so very grave if he were still prepared to importune anyone anywhere with his nonsense. He must be the kind of man who never learned, a hopeless case. It was, of course, unlikely that Professor Rico would draw a sword or a dagger on him, or grab him by the neck and bang his head on the table several times. At most, he would give a loud, dismissive snort, or bluntly tell him what he thought of him, because, as the vile Garralde had said, he did have a reputation for being caustic and wounding and for not keeping to himself his harsh opinions or his insults when he considered them to be justified. He was seated indolently in an armchair, his head thrown back like a disinterested, skeptical judge, his legs elegantly crossed, his right forearm resting on the back of the chair and in his hand a cigarette whose ash he was allowing to fall onto the floor, helped by an occasional light tap on the filter with his thumbnail. It was clear that unless someone placed an ashtray immediately underneath his cigarette, he was not going to bother looking for one. He sometimes blew the smoke out through his nose, a somewhat old-fashioned thing to do nowadays, and for that reason still stylish. He probably couldn't care less about the ban on smoking in offices. He was well dressed and well shod, his shirt and suit looked to me as if they were by Zegna or Corneliani or someone similar, but his shoes were definitely not by Hlustik, that much was sure, they, too, must have come from the South. Rafita was standing in front of him, clearly rather worked up, as if he genuinely wanted to know Rico's opinion, to which, however, he paid no attention because that opinion was not, for the moment, benevolent. There are more and more such people in the world, who only hear what pleases and flatters them, as if anything else simply passes them by. It started off as a phenomenon among politicians and mediocre artists hungry for success, but now it has infected whole populations. I was watching the two of them as if from the fifth row in a theater, and if I centered myself opposite the half-open door, both appeared in my field of vision uncut.

'Look here, young De la Garza,' Rico said in an offensively paternalistic tone, 'it's as plain as day that God has not called you to follow the path of foolish nonsensical verse. You're light years away from
Struwwelpeter,
and Edward Lear could run rings around you.' The Professor was being deliberately pedantic, that is, he was having fun at Rafita's expense, because he probably knew that Rafita wouldn't have heard of either name, I knew of Edward Lear purely by chance, from my pedantic years in Oxford, the other name meant nothing to me, although I've found out more since. 'And I feel you should not oppose His wishes,
derr,
and that way you won't waste any more time. He obviously hasn't called you to the higher path either, why, you wouldn't even be capable of writing something like
'Una alta ricca rocca,'
even though you have six long centuries of progress on your side.' He spoke this line in an immaculate Italian accent, and so I assumed it was not Spanish but Italian, despite the similarity of vocabulary; perhaps it was from Petrarch, on whom he was an expert, as he was on so many other world authors and doubtless on
Struwwelpeter,
too, his knowledge was immeasurable. 'There are some things,
ets,
that simply cannot be. So give up now,
pf!
I was struck by the fact that, despite his role as member of the Spanish Academy, he used so much onomatopoeia that was strange to our language and initially indecipherable, although, at the same time, I found it all perfectly comprehensible and clear, perhaps he had a special gift for it and was a master of onomatopoeia, an inventor, a creator even.
'Derr
obviously indicated some sort of prohibition.
'Ets
sounded to me like a very serious warning.
'Pf
seemed to me to indicate a lost cause.

But Rafita was very much a man of his age and preferred not to hear or perhaps did not hear, and maybe the plethora of other people like him nowadays are just the same. And so he continued unabashed:

'No, you'll really like this one, Professor, it'll blow your mind. Here goes.' Then I saw him doing ridiculous things with his hands and arms just like a rapper (I'm applying the word 'ridiculous' not to him, although he was ridiculous, but to all those who devote themselves to gesticulating and mumbling that witless, worthless drivel, as if the religious doggerel we had to chorus when we were kids, God help us, was making a comeback after all these years), he flailed about, making undulating movements in an attempt to emulate the angry gestures of some low-life black man, although every now and then his Spanish roots would reveal themselves and he'd end up striking poses more like those of a flamenco dancer in full flow. It was truly pathetic, as were his awful so-called verses, a ghastly dirge accompanied by a constant bending of the knees in time to the supposed rhythm of some thin, imaginary tune: 'I'm gonna turn you baby into my ukelele,' was how it began, with that so-called rhyme, 'I'm food for the snakes, like a fine beefsteak, I'll fill you up with venom just for wearin' denim, don't go stepping on my toes if you want to keep your nose, hoo-yoo, yoo-hoo.'—And then, without even pausing to take a breath, he attacked another strophe or section or whatever it was: 'My bullets want some fun, no point in trying to run, and they're looking for your brain and are out to cause you pain, to burn up your grey matter, send it pouring down the gutter, flushing down the can, you'll be shit down the pan, hoo-yoo, yoo-hoo.'

'Enough!'—The very eminent Professor Rico had looked him straight in the eye
('de hito en hito',
another phrase that everyone understands without knowing quite what it means); and I suppose he had listened to him
'de hito en hito'
as well, if that's possible, which I doubt, although I really don't know He had, at any rate, turned pale on hearing those defiling dactyls, as must I, I imagine, although there were no mirrors to confirm this. Immediately afterwards, however, I felt a wave of heat to my face and I must have blushed, out of a mixture of fury and embarrassment (not for myself but for De la Garza): how did that great nincompoop dare to waste the admirable Francisco Rico's time and bother him with such out-and-out bunkum and baloney? How could he possibly think that his crude ditty had any poetic value whatsoever, not even as a kind of pseudo-limerick, and how could he expect to receive the approval of one of Spain's leading literary authorities, a great expert, on a visit to London, perhaps still tired from his journey, perhaps needing time to put the finishing touches to his magisterial lecture that evening? I felt as indignant as when I saw De la Garza on the fast dance floor at the disco, flailing the imprudent Flavia's face with his ludicrous hairnet. My one brief, simple thought then had been: 'I'd like to smash his face in,' and at the time I knew nothing of the imminent traumatic consequences of that incident. I had remembered that thought much later, with sadness, with a kind of vicarious regret (on my own behalf, but also, vaguely, on behalf of Tupra, who seemed to regret nothing, as was only natural in someone so single-minded and conscientious; he had no regrets, at least about work-related matters), both during and after the thrashing—and, of course, before—each time that Reresby's Landsknecht sword rose and fell. How could De la Garza not have learned his lesson, how could he not have grown more discreet? How could he have composed anything, however incoherent and grotesque, that contained elements of violence, when he himself, courtesy of us, had such painful first-hand experience of it? How could he even mention the words 'pan' and 'can,' when he had nearly been drowned in the blue water of a toilet? 'Perhaps that's why' I thought to myself as I stood in the corridor, still unnoticed, invisible, a voyeur and an eavesdropper. 'Perhaps he's obsessed with what happened to him, and this is his one (idiotic) way of coming to terms with it or overcoming it, by believing (in his clumsy, puerile way) that he could be Reresby and fill someone with bullets or at least with fear, or poison them, or blow their brains out, or do all those things to Tupra himself, of whom he must be scared witless and whom he doubtless prayed each day never to meet again—in this city that they shared. Fantasizing is free, we know this from childhood on; we continue to know it as we grow older, but we learn to fantasize very little, and less and less as the years pass, when we realize that there's no point.' I immediately felt rather sorry for him and that feeling tempered my indignation, although this was not the case with the illustrious Professor, of course, who shared neither my thoughts nor my outstanding debts: 'Enough!' he cried, without actually raising his voice, but the way he projected his voice it sounded like a shout, rather in the way that waiters in Madrid bars can bawl out orders to the people in the kitchen or at the bar, above or below the hubbub from the customers. 'Are you out of your tiny mind, De la Garza? Just what
has
got into you? Do you really think I could possibly be interested in hearing that string of inanities,' he paused, 'that tom-tom-like tosh you were spouting? What filth!
Regit.
What dross!'—Many of the expressions he used were old-fashioned or perhaps it was simply that the lexicon used by Spaniards nowadays has become so reduced that almost all expressions seem old-fashioned, things like
'¿qué ventolera te ha dado?
—'what
has
got into you?' or
'sarta de necedades'
—'string of inanities' or
'taharra
—'dross,' as well as
'no estar en sus cabales'
—'to be out of your mind,' and I was pleased to see that I was not the only one to use them; for a second, I identified with Rico, a self-identification I found flattering, unexpectedly or perhaps not (he
is
a very eminent man). His latest onomatopoeia,
'Regh,'
seemed to me as transparent and eloquent as the previous ones, conveying disgust, both moral and aesthetic.