Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (23 page)

'Have you heard of a beauty product, some sort of artificial implant or something, an injection apparently, although, frankly, I find it hard to believe, something called Botox?' With that almost last-minute question, I was also trying to distract or quash her incipient irritation, the sudden seriousness that had followed her laughter, her annoyance at my other - too insistent - questions about the absence of knickers and a bloodstain that I might well have imagined, or to which, having erased it entirely, thoroughly, completely, including its sticky, resistant rim, I could at last say what has been said to so many events and objects and to so many dead, always assuming anyone still bothers to do so: 'Since there is no trace of you, you never occurred, you never happened. You neither strode the world nor trod the earth, you did not exist. I cannot see you now, therefore I never saw you. Since you no longer are, you never were.' It was possible that Luisa said this to me in her thoughts, when she was alone or asleep; even though she spoke to me from time to time, and there was, of course, the permanent trace of our two children, and I had not yet died. I was simply 'in another country', expelled from her time, the time that wraps around the children and steals them away and which is already very different from mine, outside her time which advances now without including me, allowing me to be neither participant nor witness, whereas I don't quite know what to do with my own time, which also advances without including me, or perhaps it is just that I have still not worked out how to climb aboard (perhaps now I never will catch up), and in which, nevertheless, this parallel or theoretical life in England is taking place, and which will have little to tell when it ends and closes
like a parenthesis, and to which it will also be possible to say: 'You are no longer moving forwards. You have become a frozen painting or a frozen memory or a dream now over, and I cannot even see you now from this adverse distance. You no longer are, therefore you never were.'

Luisa did not answer me at once, she remained silent, as if she perceived this second request for information as something it only very minimally was (that is, a diversionary tactic, a way of avoiding responding seriously to her question), or as if it seemed to her as unlikely a question for me to ask as the first one and thus only contributed further to her perplexity or to her sense of intrigue.

'Botox? Yes,' she repeated the word after a pause of a few seconds. 'But what
are
you up to, Jaime? Knickers, menstruation, and now this. You're not about to have a sex-change, I hope. I'm not sure how the children would take it, but I imagine it would frighten them. It certainly frightens me.'

'Oh, very funny,' I said, and I did find it quite funny, or perhaps I was just glad that her sense of humour had returned, if Luisa was making jokes it meant that she was feeling friendly and, besides, her jokes were never aggressive, at most slightly acerbic like this one, and she always made them in a kindly or clearly affectionate way, cheerfully and without seeking to wound. She had amused herself by her own silly comment, because I heard her laugh again, and she could not resist carrying the joke a little further.

'What would we call you, do you think? It would all be a bit confusing. Please, Jaime, consider carefully before taking the final step, an irreversible one, I presume. Think of the problems, and the embarrassing situations. Remember the college bursar Wheeler told us about. There he was, a terribly proper gentleman, and suddenly his colleagues didn't know whether to address him as "sir" or "madam"; his more intimate friends spent months addressing a be-skirted, matronly lady as "Arthur", after all, she still had Arthur's face, apart from the painted lips in place of the usual moustache, and the short,
untidy bob of hair, which she had no idea what to do with, well, she wasn't used to it, they said.' Hearing her recall this anecdote, I found that the image of Rosa Klebb crossed my mind again, the slovenly, lazy, 'dreadful woman of SMERSH', a disciple of the implacable Beria who had infiltrated her into the POUM as the lover and right-hand woman of Nin, whose murderer she may also have been, at least according to Fleming; or was it, rather, Lotte Lenya in her interpretation of the role: trying to kick Connery with those poisoned blades, possibly tipped with the same toxin? No, it would have to have been something faster-acting if she wanted to kill him by kicking him with her lethal shoes. 'It won't be an easy job softening your features, however stuffed with hormones you might be, and whatever you've had removed. I don't know, you'll have to see, but you've quite an athletic build and pretty heavy stubble, you'd make a very imposing, not to say alarming, woman. You certainly wouldn't get any women pushing in front of you at the market.' And this time she laughed out loud.

I had to bite my lip in order not to join in, even though I found my description as a woman somewhat troubling; but some telltale sound nevertheless escaped my lips.

'Yes, I remember Vesey the bursar,' I managed to say, once I could contain myself. 'In fact, I knew him by sight during my time in Oxford. When he was still Arthur, of course, not Guinevere. I must ask Peter what's become of him or her. He'll be getting on a bit now, and men age differently from women. After a certain age, you get the upper hand again.' And when Luisa's laughter had subsided, I returned to my question: 'So you
do
know about Botox. Is it true what I was told, about the injections?' This was all very familiar to me: it was what normally happened, she would stray off the point when she was talking to me and intersperse her own jokes. But unlike me or Wheeler, and Tupra too, she did not usually, of her own accord, return to the point.

'Yes, I've heard a few women talking about it. When it first appeared and it wasn't yet on offer here at beauty salons or
beauty clinics or whatever you call them, there even used to be parties apparently, where you could have it injected.'

'Parties?' Now I was the one to repeat a word, the one that had most disconcerted me.

'Yes, I heard Maria Olmo talking about it once. It's something that ladies with a bit of money went in for; they would get together for tea or whatever, and a
practicante,
a visiting nurse, paid for by all the participants, would come in and inject each woman as required. I mean, those who wanted to have it done, of course, and who had contributed, I suppose, to buying the stuff, which would be the expensive part. No, it was probably the hostess who paid the nurse.' And I thought to myself: 'She's not that much younger than me, which is why she, too, uses the word
"practicante". ‘
But it would have to be someone who specialised in Botox injections,' or so I imagined; I didn't want to interrupt her to ask. 'It was the in thing at the time, people said the results were spectacular, although I don't know if they thought it was quite such a big deal afterwards. I believe lots of salons do it now, but to start with, about a year or so ago, they had to import it specially from somewhere or other, from abroad. Now I assume everyone has it done individually.'

'From America,' I murmured, thinking of Heydrich and Colonel Spooner of the SOE, who organised the attempt on the former's life. 'They'd import it from America.'

'No, actually, I think it was from England, or else Germany.' There was no reason why she should know what I was thinking, she hadn't been there when Wheeler had spoken to me about Lidice and about spatial hatred, the hatred of place suffered by Madrid and by London during those years of bombardment and blockade; and Madrid still suffers from it now, since all its governors, without fail, hate it or have hated it. Now she was never in the same place I was. Before, she often had been; that's why we both knew the story about the transsexual bursar.

'Why is that? Wasn't it illegal, like melatonin? It was
melatonin, wasn't it, that was banned in Europe? Didn't they ban it or something?'
'Not as far as I know. It must just have taken a while to arrive. As soon as people find out about something new, they get all impatient and then, when they do finally get hold of the stuff, they pretend they're way ahead of the crowd. You know the type, the idiots who get in a state if they don't fly to New York at least once a year and then insist on telling you all about it, I mean there are more and more of these pretentious hicks; frankly, I'm up to here with stories about New York. And, of course, if they find out that over there or in London, people are shooting up some new, rejuvenating product as if it was heroin, they immediately rush out and buy some needles, just in case.'

'But do they really have injections in their forehead and cheekbones and chin and temples?' I found this in itself shocking, the needle being stuck into the face and the liquid slowly penetrating, all the more so - and this was what really horrified me - if Botox was what I feared it to be. So my tone of voice must have been one of scandalised amazement because I noticed that Luisa's response deliberately brought it all back into perspective, although not with the intention of lecturing me, that wasn't her style.

'Yes, they do, and in worse places too, I understand. In their eyelids, in the bags under their eyes, in their neck, and doubtless in their lips too and, of course, above their lips, in those little vertical lines that are the bugbear of quite a few of my women friends, that and their neck. It seems pretty horrific to me as well, but I'm probably more used to all these implants and inoculations than you are, as well as various other forms of butchery. I know more and more women who go for periodic sessions of nip and tuck, just as if they were going to the hairdresser's. And, you know, quite a lot of men go in for it too, and not just vain bachelors and depressed divorcés, I know of more than one husband as well. If, that is, I can believe what I'm told, which, of course, one never should.' She said this so casually that it made me think: 'That's good, it doesn't even
occur to her to include me among the depressed divorcés, I don't inspire her pity, at least not yet, and, besides, I don't like to play the poor sap as so many boyfriends and husbands do. Also, we're still not divorced. But that will come, I suppose, when she wants it.' I felt that such an initiative was unlikely to come from me. But you never know. I did not, however, share these thoughts with her. 'I mean look at that clown Berlusconi, he must be entirely made of latex by now, have you seen him, he looks like a papier-mâché doll. Now there's someone who should perhaps consider changing sex, to see if it improved him, or rehumanised him and turned him into a grandmother.' And she laughed again, as I knew she would when she used the word
caricato
or 'clown': we knew each other far too well for us ever to stop. The danger now was that we might set off along that tangent and start imagining other politicians transformed into portly matrons; and so I led her back to the subject:
'And what exactly is Botox? Do you know?'
'Someone told me at the time, but I didn't really pay much attention. It's a toxin, I think, or an antitoxin, I can't remember to be honest.'

'Botulinum toxin? Could that be it? As in botulism. It was used as a poison in the past, you know.' And I told her about my intuited etymology.

This apparently failed to shake her. Through her various female acquaintances, or from the occasional insecure girlfriend, she really must have grown used to the most bloody and venomous remedies against ageing.

'I can't remember. Possibly. It wouldn't surprise me, half of these cosmetic surgeons are completely irresponsible, if not criminal. Maria told me about one man who had helped her lose an enormous amount of weight. They happened to go into a pharmacy together one day and he claimed to have left his prescription pad at home and the only way he could think of convincing the pharmacist he really was a doctor was to run back to his car and bring her the stethoscope he happened to have lying on the back seat. Can you imagine: "Look, I've got
a stethoscope, I'm a doctor," and he waved it around in front of her. Maria deduced from this that, despite the fact that he ran a clinic, he wasn't a member of a professional association or certified or anything. She was horrified. Which is why now I can believe anything.'

'Could you find out for me if it is botulinum toxin?' 'I suppose so. Maria is sure to know, or else Isabel Una will, she's involved in things like that too, I can ask them. But why this interest of yours in Botox? Are you thinking of turning yourself into a Berlusconi or is that careless girlfriend of yours considering Botox? You don't need it, you haven't got a single wrinkle, it's not fair really.' She hadn't forgotten my first question about the drop of blood, she was still thinking that someone might have stained my floor, some chance or not-so-chance visitor. The prospect of Luisa carrying out a bit of research for me cheered my innocent heart. It was the first time in ages that we had shared something in common, something new (not the children or money or practical matters), even if it was a trifle. And it would mean that we would phone each other again soon, that she would phone me or I her, to share the information she had gathered. There were matters pending between us, and that, now, was a novelty.

'Thank you, you're very youthful-looking yourself,' I replied with equal parts of humour and gallantry, and added: 'No, it's just curiosity. Someone mentioned it to me, and I'd like to know if it's the same substance that was used in 1942 to kill a Nazi bigwig Wheeler told me about. Do you know what effect it has? The process I mean.'

'I think it paralyses the muscles in the injected area and so smoothes the skin out and plumps it up, don't ask me why or how. Apparently the people who have the injections look a bit expressionless afterwards, although I haven't noticed that with Maria or with Isabel, who are the two women I know who've tried it. Although, of course, I may just not have seen them when they were under its first effects, I think it lasts for a few months and then after a break they have it done again, but the
breaks get shorter and shorter. Although now that I come to; think of it, they did look a bit stiff and somehow tauter, more compact . . . It's odd this obsession,' and she sounded more thoughtful now, 'it's not just prevalent among rich people, nor, as I said, only among women. We'll all be at it soon. You've no idea the things people do to themselves nowadays, the putting in and taking out that goes on, the injecting and slicing, and all the other tortures they submit themselves to. It would make your hair stand on end if you knew the details. But you wait, we'll all end up the same way, and those of us who won't join in will be told: "How can you bear to go around looking like that," they'll say, "with all that flab and those folds of skin and those bags under your eyes; with those lines and that fat and that sagging flesh, how can you stand to go around looking so neglected?" Some people compare it to going to the dentist. "After all, we go to the dentist when we have a chipped tooth, and because it looks unsightly we have it capped. Well, all these other things are just the same." As if growing old were a defect or a vice we tolerated, the result of negligence on our part. As if you could choose and were guilty of allowing yourself to grow old. Or, of course, as if you were poor, with no means to conceal the fact. That's what looking old will mean eventually, that you're a pariah. It will be another division, another difference, as if there weren't enough already. It will be equivalent to walking around in threadbare clothes. I hope we don't live to see it.'