Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (2 page)

Besides, most people forget how or from whom they learned what they know, and there are even people who believe that they were the first to discover whatever it might be, a story, an idea, an opinion, a piece of gossip, an anecdote, a lie, a joke, a pun, a maxim, a title, a story, an aphorism, a slogan, a speech, a quotation or an entire text, which they proudly appropriate, convinced that they are its progenitors, or perhaps they do, in fact, know they are stealing, but push the idea far from their thoughts and thus manage to conceal it. It happens more and more nowadays, as if the times we live in were impatient for everything to pass into the public domain and for an end to all notions of authorship, or, put less prosaically, were impatient to convert everything into rumour and proverb and legend that can be passed from mouth to mouth and from pen to pen and from screen to screen, all unconstrained by fixity, origin, permanence or ownership, all headlong, unchecked and unbridled.

I, on the other hand, always do my best to remember my sources, perhaps because of the work I've done in the past which remains always present because it never leaves me (I had to train my memory to distinguish what was true from what was imagined, what really happened from what was assumed to have happened, what was said from what was understood); and depending on who those sources are, I try not to make use of that information or that knowledge, indeed I even prohibit myself from doing so, now that I only work in that area very occasionally, when it can't be helped or avoided or when asked to by friends who don't pay me, at least not with money, only with their gratitude and a vague sense of indebtedness. A most inadequate recompense, by the way, for sometimes, indeed, not so very rarely, they try to transfer that feeling to me so that I am the one who suffers, and if I don't agree to that swapping of roles and don't make that feeling mine and don't behave as if I owed them my life, they end up considering me an ungrateful pig and shy away from me: there are many people who regret having asked for favours and having explained what those favours were and having, therefore, explained too much about themselves.

A while ago, a woman friend of mine didn't ask me a favour exactly, but she did oblige me to listen and informed me — not so much dramatically as fearfully — of her recently inaugurated adultery, even though I was more her husband's friend than hers or, at least, had known him longer. She did me a very poor service indeed, for I spent months tormented by that knowledge — which she theatrically and egotistically expanded on and updated, ever more in thrall to narcissism — knowing that with my friend, her husband, I had to remain silent: not because I didn't feel I had the right to tell him something about which he might — although how was I to know — have preferred to remain in ignorance; not just because I didn't want to take responsibility for unleashing with my words other people's actions and decisions, but also because I was very conscious of the manner in which that embarrassing story had reached me. I am not free to dispose of something I did not find out about by chance or by my own means, or in response to a commission or a request, I told myself. If I had spotted my friend's wife and her lover boarding a plane bound for Buenos Aires, I could perhaps have considered finding some neutral way of revealing that involuntary sighting, that interpretable, but not incontrovertible fact (I would, after all, have had no knowledge of her relationship with the man, and it would have fallen to my friend and not to me to feel suspicious), although I would probably still have felt like a traitor and a busybody and very much doubt I would have dared to say anything in either case. But, I told myself, I would at least have had the option. Having found out what I knew from her, however, there was no way I could use this against her or pass it on without her consent, not even if I believed that doing so would be to my friend's advantage, and I was sorely tempted by this belief on certain extremely awkward occasions, for example, when I was with them both or the four of us were having supper together (my wife being the fourth guest, not the lover) and she would shoot me a look that combined complicity and a shudder of pleasurable fear (and I would hold my breath), or he would blithely mention the well-known case of the well-known lover of someone or other whose spouse, however, knew nothing at all about it. (And I would hold my breath.) And so I remained silent for several months, hearing about and almost witnessing something I found both dull and highly distasteful, and all for what, I used to ask myself in my darker moments, probably to be denounced one day — when the unpleasant facts are revealed or the truth is told or flaunted and exhibited — as a collaborator or an accomplice, or co-conspirator if you like, by the very person whose secret I am keeping and whose exclusive authority on the subject I have always acknowledged and respected and never breathed a word about to anyone else. Her authority and her authorship, even though at least two other people are involved in her story, one knowingly and the other entirely unwittingly, or perhaps, despite all, my friend is still not yet involved and would only become involved were I to tell him. Maybe I am the one who is already involved because of what I know, and because I listened and interpreted — I used to think — that is what my long experience and my long list of responsibilities tell me and confirm to me daily, with each day that passes, making them grow ever dimmer and more distant, so that it seems to me sometimes that I must have read them or seen them on the screen or imagined them, that it is not so easy to disentangle oneself or even to forget. Or that it isn't possible at all.

No, I should never tell anyone anything, nor hear anything either.

I did, for some time, listen and notice and interpret and tell, and I was paid to do so during that time, but it was something I had always done and that I continue to do, passively and involuntarily, without effort and without reward, I probably can't help it now, it's just my way of being in the world, it will go with me to my death, and only then will I rest from it. More than once I was told it was a gift, and Peter Wheeler was the one who pointed this out to me, alerting me to its existence by explaining and describing it to me, for, as everyone knows or, at least, senses, things only exist once they have been named. Sometimes, though, this gift seems more like a curse, even though I now tend to stick to the first three activities, which are silent and internal and take place solely in my mind, and therefore need affect no one but me, and I only tell anyone anything when I have no alternative or if someone insists. For during my professional or, shall we say, remunerated life in London, I learned that what merely happens to us barely affects us or, at least, no more than what does not happen, but it is the story (the story of what does not happen too), which, however imprecise, treacherous, approximate and downright useless, is nevertheless almost the only thing that counts, is the decisive factor, it is what troubles our soul and diverts and poisons our footsteps, it is doubtless also what keeps the weak, lazy wheel of the world turning.

It is not mere chance or fancy that in espionage, conspiracies, or criminal activities, what is known by the various participants in a mission or a plot or a coup — clandestinely, secretly — is always diffuse, partial, fragmentary, oblique, with each person knowing only about his or her particular task, but not about the whole, not the final aim. We've all seen this in films, the way the partisan, realising that he won't survive the next ambush or the next inevitable attempt on his life, tells his girlfriend when they say their farewells: 'It's best if you know nothing; then, if they interrogate you, you'll be telling the truth when you say you know nothing, the truth is easy, it has more force, it's more believable, the truth persuades.' (For lying does require certain imaginative and improvisational abilities, it requires inventiveness, a cast-iron memory, complex architectures, everyone does it, but few with any skill.) Or the way the mastermind behind the big robbery, the one who plans and directs it, informs his flunky or henchman: 'If you know only about your part of the job, even if they catch you or you fail, the plan can still go ahead.' (And it's true that you can always allow for one link to break or for some mistake to be made, total failure is not something that is achieved quickly or simply, every enterprise, every action resists and struggles for some time before it stops altogether and collapses.) Or the way the head of Secret Services whispers to the agent about whom he has his suspicions and whom he no longer trusts: 'Your ignorance will be your protection, so don't ask any more questions, don't ask, it will be your salvation and your guarantee of safety.' (And the best way to avoid betrayals is to provide no fuel for them, or only rumours, valueless and weightless, mere husks, a disappointment to those who pay for them.) Or the way someone who commissions a crime or threatens to commit one, or someone who confesses to vile deeds thus exposing himself to blackmail, or someone who buys something secretly — keep your collar turned up, your face always in the shadows, never light a cigarette — warns the hired assassin or the person under threat or the potential blackmailer or the commutable woman once desired and already forgotten, but still a source of shame to us: 'You know the score, you've never seen me, from now on you don't know me, I've never spoken to you or said anything, as far as you're concerned I have no face, no voice, no breath, no name, no back. This conversation and this meeting never took place, what's happening now before your eyes didn't happen, isn't happening, you haven't even heard these words because I didn't say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I'm not saying them.'

(Keeping silent, erasing, suppressing, cancelling and having, in the past, remained silent too: that is the world's great, unachievable ambition, which is why anything else, any substitute, falls short, and why it is pure childishness to withdraw what has been said and why retraction is so futile; and that is also why — because, unlikely though it may seem, it is sometimes the only thing that can effectively inject a little doubt — out-and-out denial is so irritating, denying that one said what was said and heard and denying that one did what was done and endured, it's exasperating that the action announced by those earlier words can be carried out unwaveringly and to the letter, words that could be spoken by so many and by such very different people, the mouth of the instigator and the threatener, of the person living in fear of blackmail and the one who furtively pays for his pleasures or profits, as well as in the mouth of a lover or a friend, and that those words can then, equally exasperatingly, be denied.)

All the words we have seen uttered in the cinema I myself have said or have had said to me or have heard others say throughout my whole existence, that is, in real life, which bears a closer relation to films and literature than is normally recognised and believed. It isn't, as people say, that the former imitates the latter or the latter the former, but that our infinite imaginings belong to life too and help make it broader and more complex, make it murkier and, at the same time, more acceptable, although not more explicable (or only very rarely). A very thin line separates facts from imaginings, even desires from their fulfilment, and the fictitious from what actually happened, because imaginings are already facts, and desires are their own fulfilment, and the fictitious does happen, although not in the eyes of common sense and of the law, which, for example, makes a vast distinction between the intention and the crime, or between the commission of a crime and its attempt. But consciousness knows nothing of the law, and common sense neither interests nor concerns it, each consciousness has its own sense, and that very thin line is, in my experience, often blurred and, once it has disappeared, separates nothing, which is why I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have-therefore learned to fear not only what is thought, the idea, but also what precedes it and comes before. For I am myself my own fever and pain.

This gift or curse of mine is nothing very extraordinary, by which I mean it is nothing supernatural, preternatural, unnatural or
contra natura,
nor does it involve any unusual abilities, not divination, say, although something rather similar to that was what came to be expected of me by my temporary boss, the man who contracted me to work for him during a period that seemed to go on for a long time, more or less the same period of time as my separation from my wife, Luisa, when I came back to England so as not to be near her while she was slowly distancing herself from me. People behave idiotically with remarkable frequency, given their tendency to believe in the repetition of what pleases them: if something good happens once, then it should happen again, or at least tend in that direction. And it was all because I chanced to make a correct interpretation of a relationship that was of (momentary) importance to Señor Tupra, that Mr Tupra — as I always called him until he urged me to replace this with Bertram and later, much to my distaste, with Bertie — wanted to hire my services, initially on an ad hoc basis and subsequently full-time, with theoretical duties as vague as they were varied, including acting as liaison or occasional interpreter on his Spanish or Spanish-American incursions. But in reality or, rather, in practice, I was of interest to him and was taken on as an interpreter of lives, to use his own grandiose expression and exaggerated expectations. It would be best just to say translator or interpreter of people: of their behaviour and reactions, of their inclinations and characters and powers of endurance; of their malleability and their submissiveness, of their faint or firm wills, their inconstancies, their limits, their innocence, their lack of scruples and their resistance; their possible degrees of loyalty or baseness and their calculable prices and their poisons and their temptations; and also their deducible histories, not past but future, those that had not yet happened and could therefore be prevented. Or, indeed, created.