Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (73 page)

I had arranged to see Luisa that afternoon: we see each other two or three times a week in this long truce we are enjoying. Indeed, she has the keys to my apartment and, on occasion, arrives before I do and then she waits for me, exactly as Tupra believed someone was waiting for me in London on that night of poison and dance, when no one was ever waiting for me, when there was no one to turn off any lights in my absence, the lights I left on all the time so as not to be entirely in the dark. No one had my keys and no one was ever waiting for me there. The doorman said: 'Your wife, I mean, your girlfriend has gone up already. I gave her a package that arrived for you earlier.' The man senses something marital about us, but is uncertain quite what our relationship is, and so hovers between wife and girlfriend. I've told him that Luisa is my wife, but he still doesn't quite believe it, or perhaps he doesn't understand why, in that case, she comes and goes.

Before opening the door, I could hear her humming to herself inside, she often does that now and she laughs a lot too, with me and without me, I suppose; she no longer rations out her laughter, and I trust this will remain so, if possible forever, or so I think. Her return is nothing like Beryl's return to Tupra, according to my distant interpretations and always assuming they did, in fact, get back together, which was something I never found out: there's no self-interest, not a spurious self-interest, and there's nothing clandestine about it either. It's clear that Luisa benefits from and enjoys us seeing each other like this, just now and then, and not living together, although she might grow tired of that one day; she has already started leaving clothes here. And it suits me too. After all, in London, I got used to being very alone, as Wheeler paternally said to me early on, and sometimes I need to continue to be alone because I don't think I could bear someone's company all the time and never be able to look out at the world from my window on my own, the living world that knows where it's going and to which I imagine I still belong. I opened the door and saw on the coffee table in the living room the package that the porter had given to Luisa, who was in the kitchen, still humming and not aware that I had come in. I saw that it came from Berlin, shoes by VonTruschinsky, from whom, since they have all my measurements, I still occasionally order a pair, even though they are very expensive. I always think of Tupra when I receive them, but then he's always vaguely in my thoughts, as if he were a friend on whom I continue to count—which is odd—and to whom I could turn for help. I haven't done so yet.

That afternoon, he was even more in my thoughts after my silent encounter with Custardoy, with two or three animals as indifferent witnesses. On the way home, something else had occurred to me, I had thought: 'I didn't want to frighten De la Garza when I went to see him at the Embassy, and I was horrified to see the panic my mere presence instilled in him, but, on the other hand, I would have liked to see that same fear on Custardoy's face and in the way he behaved. He's completely recovered from his fright now or if a little remains—as it must— he doesn't show it. Nothing ever works out as we want or as we think, or perhaps I'm still too hesitant; such a thing would never have happened to Tupra, he would have removed him from the picture when he had him in the frame, and now I'll have to watch every corner, just in case he slips back in again, this time with sword or spear, although that might take some time, because once you've experienced fear, you never entirely lose it.' These thoughts continued to preoccupy me. Luisa noticed that I was quiet and was perhaps even a little worried because I wasn't responding much to her jokes, for she's gone back to poking gentle fun at me.

'What's wrong?' she asked. 'Has something happened?'

'What do you mean?' I replied, half-suspicious, half-distracted. 'What sort of thing?'

'I mean, something bad.'

Yes, something bad had happened to me, and no, nothing bad had happened to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Someone hurts you and you become an enemy. Or you hurt someone and create an enemy It's as easy as breathing, both things happen much more frequently than we imagine, often by chance and without our realizing, it pays to stay alert and watch people's faces, but even then we don't always notice. I
had
noticed that afternoon, which is an advantage. But I couldn't say anything to Luisa, I couldn't talk to her about it, I couldn't tell her about that meeting. We have barely asked each other anything about our time of absolute separation, best not to. She has never spoken to me about Custardoy, nor have I to her, and I will never know how much she loved or feared him. That is perhaps the only thing about which I will never be able to say anything to her, not even when I am already the past or my end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, because I think I know her face and I stake everything on that, even the way she will remember me. Perhaps because of that, and also because I am usually perfectly content, I sometimes sing or hum to myself at times, as she does, and I have a tendency to sing or whistle that song of many titles, from Ireland or the Wild West ('Nanna naranniario nannara nanniaro,' that's how the melody goes), 'The Bard of Armagh' who forecast: And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me'; or 'Doc Holliday' who first justified himself by saying: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today'; or 'The Streets of Laredo,' which is the version whose words I know best and which is therefore the one I sometimes sing out loud or to myself, perhaps, who knows, as a reminder, especially the last verse that ends by asking: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'

'No,' I said, 'nothing bad.'

May 2007

Acknowledgments

Throughout the writing of the three volumes of
Your Face Tomorrow,
various people have helped me at some point or other: with a fact, an image, a foreign word, some piece of historical or geographical information, a medical query, a bullfighting term, a few lines of poetry, some advice that contributed to clarifying the narrative, or by looking after my only two copies of the original (I still use a typewriter) until it was completed. They are as follows: Julia Altares, John Ashbery, Antony Beevor, Ines Blanca, Nick Clapton, Margaret Jull Costa, Agustin Diaz Yanes, Paul Ingendaay, Antonio Iriarte, Mercedes Lopez-Ballesteros, Carme Lopez Mercader, Ian Michael, Cesar Pérez Gracia, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Daniella Pittarello, Alvaro Pombo, Eric Southworth, Bruce Taylor and Dr. Jose Manuel Vidal. To all of them, my heartfelt thanks.

Separate mention must be made of my father, Julian Marias, and Sir Peter Russell, who was born Peter Wheeler, without whose borrowed lives this book would not have existed. May they both rest now, in the fiction of these pages as well.

JAVIER MARIAS

Table of Contents

Title page

5 Poison

6 Shadow

7 Farewell

Acknowledgments