Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (30 page)

The Professor did not move, did not get up, he was clearly capable of controlling his body, it was enough for him occasionally to unleash his tongue, however briefly. He merely deposited his cigarette end in a handy pencil-holder and touched the bridge of his glasses, first with his index finger and then with his middle finger, twice, as if he wanted to make sure they hadn't flown off his nose when he erupted. De la Garza stood paralyzed, knees momentarily bent, not the most graceful of poses, as if he were about to crouch down. Then he straightened up. And since he'd had nothing to drink, he might well have felt alarmed.

'Oh, forgive me, Professor, I'm so sorry, I don't understand, I'd read somewhere that you were interested in hip-hop, that you saw a connection with certain archaic forms of poetry, with doggerel, you know, chapbooks, songbooks, ballads, and all that ...'

'You're confusing me with Villena,' Rico cut in, referring to a very well-known Spanish poet with a sharp eye (a sharp eye for all the latest trends). He didn't say this in an offended tone, but in a purely professorial and explanatory one.

'. . . that you'd said you found it very medieval . . .'

And then it happened. He stopped speaking because that was when it happened. As he was shaking his head to express his incomprehension and his contrition, shocked by Rico's blunt or rough reaction (which he'd brought on himself), he saw me and immediately recognized me, as if he had been fearing just such an encounter for some time or had often dreamed of me or as if, in his nightmares, I was a crushing weight on his chest. When he glanced to the right, he saw me there, straight ahead of him, standing on the other side of the corridor like a specter at the feast, and instantly recognized me. And I saw the effect of that surprise and that recognition. De la Garza shrank back, every bit of him, the way an insect sensing danger contracts, curls up, rolls into a ball, tries to disappear and erase itself so that death will not touch it, so as not to be picked out or seen, to cease to exist and thus deny its own existence ('No, really, I'm not what you see, I'm not here'), because the only sure way of avoiding death is no longer to be, or perhaps even better, never to have been at all. He clamped his arms to his sides, not like a boxer about to defend or cover himself, but as if he'd suddenly been seized with cold and were shivering. He drew in his head too, much as he had done in the handicapped toilet, when he turned his head and for the first time spotted the blurred gleam of metal overhead and saw, at the very periphery of his vision, the double-edged sword about to swoop down on him: he instinctively hunched up his shoulders as if in a spasm of pain, the deliberate or unwitting gesture made by all the victims of the guillotine over two hundred years or of the axe over hundreds of centuries, even chickens and turkeys must have made that gesture from the moment it occurred to the first bored or hungry man to decapitate one. As happened then, too, his top lip lifted, almost folded back on itself in a rictus, revealing dry gums on which the inner part of his lip got stuck for lack of saliva. And in his eyes I saw an irrational, overwhelming, all-excluding fear, as if my mere presence had plucked him from reality and as if, in a matter of seconds, he had forgotten where he was, in the Spanish Embassy in the Court of St. James or San Jacobo or San Jaime, where he worked or spent time every day surrounded by guards and colleagues who would protect him, they were only a step away; he had forgotten that before him sat the prestigious and very irritated Professor Rico and that, given the situation, I could do nothing to him. What I found most disquieting, what left me troubled and transfixed, was that I didn't want to do anything to him, quite the contrary, I wanted to ask if he'd recovered, inquire after his health, make sure that nothing irreparable had happened, and, if the opportunity arose, and even though I couldn't stand the man, to say how sorry I was. How sorry I was that I hadn't done more, that I hadn't stopped it, that I hadn't helped him to flee, that I hadn't defended him or made Tupra see reason (although with Tupra everything was always calculated and he never rushed into anything or lost his reason). And I would even have liked to convince the dickhead that, all in all, he'd been lucky and got off lightly, and that my colleague Reresby, despite his brutality and incredible though it might seem, had done him an enormous favor by stepping in and thus preventing the bloodthirsty Manoia (whom I had seen and not seen in action on that video, now
he
really was Sir Cruelty, I'd closed my eyes, I hadn't wanted to cover them, but that scene really cried out for a blindfold) from taking charge of the punishment himself. But I neither could nor should tell him any of that, still less in front of Rico, who, on seeing Rafita's transformation, glanced with disdainful curiosity in my direction (he must have despised everything about De la Garza and considered him a peabrain and a madman).

It was a very disagreeable feeling, more than that, it was incomprehensible, to discover that I could provoke such fear in someone. It was doubtless by association, by assimilation, after all, I hadn't even touched him, perhaps De la Garza assumed that we always went around together and was afraid that Tupra might suddenly hove into view behind me. I was, however, alone and had gone there without the knowledge of my boss, who would not have been in the least amused by my visit. 'Tell him not to phone you to demand an explanation, but to leave you alone, to forget he ever knew you,' Tupra had told me to tell him, to translate those words to the fallen man, before he abandoned De la Garza, brushing his face with the tail of his armed coat as he left. 'Tell him to accept that there's no reason to demand an explanation, that there are no grounds for complaints or protest. Tell him not to talk to anyone, to keep quiet, not even to recount it later as some kind of adventure. But tell him always to remember.' And Rafita had followed those instructions to the letter, he had invented some tall story to explain his battered state to friends and colleagues. And, of course, he would have remembered, indeed, he would have done little else since then, a bundle of nerves day and night, awake and asleep, night and day, even though he later had the cheek to sing a rap song to Rico and commit other unimaginable acts of nincompoopery. When he saw me there, so close, in the corridor, perhaps, from his point of view, stalking him, he might have been panicked into thinking that I was the one who would never leave him in peace or forget him. 'He could have been left with no head, he came very close,' Reresby had added. 'But since he didn't lose it, tell him there's still time, another day, any day, we know where to find him. Tell him never to forget that, tell him the sword will always be there.' I had omitted those last few words, I hadn't translated them, I had refused to endorse them, but I had translated the rest. Everything would have remained engraved on De la Garza's memory, despite his diminished consciousness after the shock of the sharp steel and being hurled against the blunt cylindrical bars: 'We know where to find you.' Nothing could be truer, and now I had found him and I was his terror, his threat.

'He's absolutely terrified of me,' I thought fleetingly. 'But how can that be, I can't recall having terrified anyone very much before, and yet here's this man, frozen to the spot and consumed with the horror he feels on seeing me, even though he's here in his inviolable office, in the Embassy, along with a member of the Spanish Academy, objectively speaking safe and sound, why, all he'd have to do is shout and fellow diplomats and the odd vigilante or guard would be here in a trice. However, his feeling is that they would arrive too late if I had a gun or a sword or a knife and used them on him right away, with no thought for my own fate and without saying a word, that is what he knows intuitively, or perhaps the memory is still all too vivid of that moment when he first glimpsed the double-edged sword and knew there was nothing he could do to save himself: death comes in a second, one moment you're alive and the next, without realizing it, you're dead, that's how it is sometimes and, of course, all the time during wars and bombardments from on high, that widespread practice, which, however customary and accepted it may have become, is always illegitimate and always dishonorable, far more so than the crossbow in the days of Richard Yea and Nay, that changeable
Coeur de Lion
who was slain by an arrow from a dishonorable crossbow at the end of the twelfth century: you hear the bang and see and hear nothing more, and it won't be you, but possibly someone else who's still alive, who will hear the whistle of the bullet that embeds itself in your forehead. Yes, right now, this man would do anything I ordered him to do, his dread of me—or rather of Tupra, whose representative or henchman or symbol I am—is something he not only experienced in reality for a few minutes that would have seemed to him, as they had to me, an eternity, he would also often have anticipated it, asleep and awake: perhaps he saw us striding towards him like two hired assassins come to slice him up, perhaps we had appeared in his nightmares of being chased and caught, then chased and caught again, and perhaps we have sat heavy on his soul since then.' Because 'even dreams know that your pursuer usually catches up with you, and they've known it since the
Iliad,'
as Tupra had said to me that night, somewhat later, the two of us sitting in his car outside the door to my apartment, where he believed someone was waiting for me, but where there was no one, only the lights still on and possibly the dancer opposite.

Then I strode quickly into the room and spoke. I walked into the office and said confidently, almost jovially:

'So, how are you doing, Rafita? I can see you've made an excellent recovery.' And I added at once, so that he would see I was keen to keep up appearances and that my intentions were not violent or aggressive. 'Forgive me bursting in like this. Won't you introduce me?' And I went straight over to Professor Rico, who made not the slightest effort to get up, but merely held out one hand to me, the way grand ladies used to do, reaching out as far as he could without actually moving, he had a most distinguished hand and a most elegant shirt-cuff, by Cupri or Sensatini at the very least, excellent brands, I shook it warmly (his hand that is). And since De la Garza still did not respond or utter a word (he just stared at me, terrified, so afraid that he didn't even stop me approaching Rico, in fact, he wouldn't have stopped me doing anything, I could, I realized, do what I liked), I introduced myself: 'Jacques Deza, Jacobo Deza. You're Don Francisco Rico, aren't you? The celebrated scholar.'

It pleased him to be recognized and he deigned to answer, doubtless for that reason alone, for his general attitude revealed no actual interest (whoever I might be, I was, after all, already stigmatized as someone he associated with that rapper-attaché).

'Deza, Deza . . . Aren't you a friend or acquaintance or student ... or, er, whatever ... of Sir Peter Wheeler? Your name rings a bell.' Both men were great scholarly figures, and I was aware that they knew and admired each other.

'Yes, I'm a very good friend of his, Professor.'

'I knew the name rang a bell. I recognized it. He must have mentioned you to me once, although I've no idea why. But it definitely rang a bell,' he said, pleased with his own retentive memory.

De la Garza wasn't listening to this superficial exchange. He had moved away from me and was now standing behind his desk as if his desk would protect him and so that he could run away if necessary.

'What the fuck do you want?' he asked suddenly, but despite the expletive, his tone was neither hostile nor ill-tempered, but imploring, as if all he wanted was for me to magically disappear (for the terrible vision, the bad dream to go away) and wishing with all his might that I would reply: 'I'm off now. I don't want anything. I was never here.'

'Nothing, Rafita, I just wanted to reassure myself that you'd recovered from your accident, that there weren't any aftereffects. I happened to be passing and it occurred to me to pop in and ask you, I've been worried. It's a purely friendly visit, I won't stay long, so don't get uptight about it. So, are you all right? Completely better? I'm really sorry about what happened, I mean it.'

'What happened? What accident?' asked Rico skeptically

'Having seen what I've seen and heard what I've heard, no accident could possibly be serious enough,' he added under his breath, but perfectly audibly.

Rafita, however, paid no attention to this harsh comment, he had relegated the Professor and his annoyance to the background, he was too preoccupied with me, alert and tense, as if he feared that at any moment, I would leap at his throat like a tiger. This was an odd sensation for me, almost amusing at first, because I knew myself to be incapable of harming him and had no wish to do so. J knew that, but he did not and contrary to what teachers believe, knowledge is not transmissible; one can only persuade. I found the gulf between his perception and my knowledge almost funny, and yet, at the same time, it was distressing to have someone see me that way, as a danger, as someone threatening and violent. De la Garza was almost beside himself, on tenterhooks.

'Believe me, I just wanted to find out how you are,' I said, trying to calm him, convince him. 'I know you made a real nuisance of yourself and really put your foot in it, but I certainly didn't expect my boss to react like that, and I'm sorry. It took me completely by surprise and was totally disproportionate. I had no idea what he was planning and could do nothing to avoid it.'

'What boss? Sir Peter, you mean? I'm completely lost, what
are
you talking about,
élgar.
If he did turn nasty, I'm not surprised, Sir Peter's far too old for such imbecilities.' Rico returned to the charge, not so much because the matter interested him, but because he was bored. He appeared to be the sort of man who cannot bear his brain to be inactive for a moment, because if you don't understand something immediately, you soon will if you wait, but such waiting is unbearable for people who are constantly thinking. That
'élgar'
denoted a need to know.