Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (31 page)

'And then?' I asked. 'When did you meet up again?'

'In England, years later. By then I really was Wheeler and he was Rylands. I think that I was already the person I am, if I am who I think I am. I sought him out, we didn't just meet. Not exactly. But that's another story.'

'I'm sure it is,' I replied, perhaps with an unintentional touch of impatience: my lack of sleep caught up with me now and then, and when something, even a chance remark, refers in some way to ourselves, waiting becomes very difficult. 'And I assume that the answer to my original question, which you provoked, is hidden in there somewhere: in what way could I, according to Toby, be like the two of you? You're not going to tell me it was because of my variable first name, as you know, you and others call me Jacobo, but Luisa and many others call me Jaime, and there are even those who know me as Diego or Yago. Not to mention Jack, as I'm often called here in England.'

Wheeler noticed my slight impatience, such things never escaped him. I saw that he was amused, it didn't make him feel embarrassed at all, or pressured.

'I call you Jack,' said Mrs Berry shyly. 'I hope you don't mind . . . Jack.' And this time she hesitated before saying the name.

'Not at all, Mrs Berry.'

'And by which name do you know yourself?' Wheeler was quick to ask.

I didn't have to think about it even for a second.

'Jacques. That's the name I learned and made mine as a child. Even though my mother was almost the only one to call me that. Not even my father does.'

'There you are,' said Wheeler in an absurdly demonstrative tone. 'Ahí lo tienes' is the only way I can think to translate it into Spanish. 'But, no, Toby didn't mean that, neither did I,' he added at once. 'He had told me quite a lot about you, before you and I met. In fact, that's partly why we did meet, he aroused my curiosity. He said that you might perhaps be like us . . . That's what he had given me to understand, and he confirmed it later when we happened to talk about the old group. Of course, by then you were no longer living here, and it was unlikely that you would ever come back here to stay. Don't worry, I don't mean that now you're going to stay here for good, I'm sure you'll go back to Madrid sooner or later, you Spaniards don't survive very long far from your country; even though you're from Madrid, and madrileños tend to suffer least from homesickness. But you have, for the moment, come back to stay indefinitely, if you'll forgive the relative contradiction, and that's enough of a return. And so, posthumously, Toby's opinion suddenly acquires, how can I put it, an added practical interest. Especially as I share his opinion (after all, he no longer wields any influence, nor can he be pressed on the matter), having spent quite a lot of time with you since his death. Intermittently, of course, but it's been some years now. As I said, I didn't set great store by his literary judgements, but I did by his personal judgements, by his judgement of people, his interpretation and foresight, he could see straight through them, or, as you say in colloquial Spanish, las calaba. He could suss them out. He was rarely wrong, little short of infallible. Almost as infallible as me.' He gave a brief, studied laugh, to cancel out or mitigate his immodesty. 'More, possibly, than our friend Tupra, who is very good, or than that very competent girl of his, although you do, I suppose, live in less testing times: she's Spanish too, the girl, or half-Spanish at any rate, he's spoken to me about her several times, but I can never remember her name, he says that, with time, she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough, that's one of the difficulties, most of them get fed up and leave. Toby was almost as infallible as you must be, even given the less testing times you live in. According to him anyway. He believed that you would prove more infallible than him, that you might outdo him assuming that you first became conscious of your abilities and then immediately let go of that consciousness, or at least deferred it, as did those of us who had or have it still. Indefinitely, for the moment, if you'll again forgive that relative contradiction as regards the deferral of consciousnesses. But, to be honest, I don't know if you would ever reach those heights.'

'What group are you talking about, Peter? You've mentioned it several times now.' I tried a different question. But I no longer felt impatient, that had been just a reflex reaction, a moment. And if he had been in a hurry before, that had probably been due to my lateness in waking up and coming downstairs, which he had not counted upon, any failure to keep to his mental timetables and plans upset and bothered him. But now that I was there with him, he was enjoying intriguing me, enjoying my state of expectation: he wasn't going to ruin his performance, which he had planned and possibly dreamed about, by rushing things. As expected, he did not answer my new question, but he did, at last, answer my previous one. With only half-truths, of course, or, at most, three-quarter truths. As I have said, he probably didn't know any whole ones. They probably didn't even exist.

'Toby told me that he always admired, and, at the same time, feared, the special gift you had for capturing the distinctive and even essential characteristics, both external and internal, of friends and acquaintances, characteristics which they themselves had often not noticed or known about. Or even people you had only glimpsed or seen in passing, in a meeting or at high table, or whom you had passed a couple of times in the corridors or on the stairs of the Taylorian without exchanging a single word. I understand that, shortly before you left, you even wrote a few sketches of our colleagues for his amusement, is that right?'

I had a vague memory of this. It was so long ago that any trace of it had been erased. You forget much more of what you write than of what you read, assuming it's addressed to you; much more of what you send than of what you receive, of what you say than of what you hear, your own offences more than those committed against you. And although you may not think so, the process of erasure happens more quickly with those who are dead. A few vignettes, perhaps, yes, a few lines about my colleagues of the time in Oxford, those in the sub-faculty of Spanish, whom Rylands, recently retired Professor of English Literature, knew well, although not as well as Wheeler himself, who was, for years, and up until his retirement, the direct boss of most of them, especially those who were, by then, already veterans. I felt a sudden retrospective shame, I was struggling to remember; perhaps they had been amusing, affectionate sketches, with just a touch of mischief or irony. That is why I felt it best to deny it, at least initially.

'I don't remember that,' I said. 'No, I don't think I've ever written a sketch about anyone. Possibly in conversation, yes. We talked a lot about everything, about everyone.'

'Can you pass me that file, please, Estelle?' Wheeler asked Mrs Berry, and she produced one and handed it to him, like a nurse promptly handing a doctor a medical instrument. She must have had it on her lap all that time, like a treasure. Wheeler put it under his arm, or, rather, under his armpit. He got up and said: 'Let's go out into the garden for a while, for a stroll on the lawn. I need the exercise and Mrs Berry will need to clear the table if we want to have lunch later on. It's not that cold now, but you'd better wrap up, that river is treacherous, it gets into your bones before you know it.' His eyes had resumed their mineral quality, and he added calmly and seriously (or, rather, carefully, as if he were holding on to me with his words, but did not want to frighten me off): 'Listen, Jacobo, according to Toby, you had the rare gift of being able to see in people what not even they were capable of seeing in themselves, at least not normally. Or if they do see or glimpse something, they immediately block it out; the flash leaves them with sight in only one eye and then they look ever afterwards through that blind eye. It's a very rare gift indeed nowadays, and becoming rarer, the gift of being able to see straight through people, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad, without effort, that is, without any fuss or squeamishness. That is the way, in which according to Toby, you might be like us, Jacobo, and now I think he was right. We could both see people like that, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad. Seeing was our gift, and we placed it at the service of others. And I can still see.'

One night in London, I thought I had merely frightened myself with the idea that someone was following me, possibly with threatening intent. It could have been the rain, I reasoned, when that first idea seemed convincing, for the rain always makes footsteps on pavements sound as if they were giving off sparks or polishing something, like the rapid brushing of old-fashioned shoe-shines; or it could have been my raincoat rubbing against my trousers as I walked briskly along (the sound of flapping, dancing coat-tails, my raincoat unbuttoned, buffeted in turn by the gusty wind); or the shadow of my own open umbrella, which I could feel all the time at my back like a lingering sense of unease, I was holding it at an angle, resting on one shoulder the way soldiers carry a rifle or a spear when they're on parade; or perhaps the slight creak of its tense ribs as they were shaken by the wind. I had the constant feeling that someone was following close behind, sometimes I could hear what sounded like the short, rapid steps of a dog, for dogs always look as if they are walking over hot coals and being drawn airwards, so lightly do they place their eighteen invisible toes on the ground, as if they were always just about to leap up or levitate. Tis, tis, tis, that was the sound accompanying me, that was what I kept hearing and what made me turn round every few steps, a rapid turn of the head without stopping or slackening my pace, because of the wind the umbrella was only half-doing its job, I was walking at a steady rate, in a hurry to get home, I was returning after far too long a day at the building with no name, and it was late for London, although not at all late for Madrid (but I wasn't in Madrid now); I had only eaten a sandwich or two for lunch, many hours and even more faces ago, some of which I had observed from the stationary train compartment or wood-panelled hiding-place, although most had been on video, and their voices heard or, rather, listened to, their various tones, sincere or presumptuous, timid or false, crafty or boastful, uncertain or shameless. The effort required of me in this picking up and tuning in never diminished, and I had the distinct impression that it would steadily increase: the more one satisfies people's expectations, the more inflated these become and the more subtlety and precision they demand. And although I had, from the start (perhaps from Corporal Bonanza onwards) merely invented out of my own intuitions, the degree of irresponsibility and fiction being required or induced in me now by Tupra, Mulryan, Rendel and Pérez Nuix created a tension in me, almost an anxiety sometimes, usually before or after, but not during my inventive duties, which were termed interpretations or reports. I was aware that, with each day that passed, I was losing more and more scruples or, as Sir Peter Wheeler had put it, deferring my consciousness, letting it grow dim, deferring it indefinitely; and that I was venturing without its company ever farther away and with ever fewer qualms.

It was not, I thought, strange that I should frighten myself on a rainy night with the streets almost empty of other pedestrians and not a taxi in sight, although I had already abandoned that as an idea; or that my nerves should be on edge so that the slightest thing startled me, my loud, wet shoes, the anarchic flapping of my coat-tails, the battered dome of my umbrella whose floating image, in the more brightly lit areas, was reflected back up at me from the asphalt, as I passed by the monuments, gloomy in the evening dark, that pepper the many squares, the metallic creak of crickets produced by my every movement and by the gusty night wind, perhaps the real and weightless footsteps of some stray dog I could not yet see, but who, given the lack of other candidates — for I passed whole blocks without seeing a soul — was clearly following me, perhaps surreptitiously, until someone spotted it out all alone and took it away. Tis tis tis. I was aware of my own smells, but it was as if they had all been passed through water: damp silk and damp leather and damp wool, and I might have been sweating too, with not a trace left of the cologne I had put on that morning. Tis tis tis, I looked round, but there was nothing and nobody, just the sense of unease at the back of my neck and the feeling of menace — or was it merely vigilance — accompanying every rhythmic, constant step — one, two, three and four — as if I were on some interminable march with my umbrella-rifle or my umbrella-spear, even though their real function was that of a frail, oversized helmet or a rickety shield borne on an arm that trembles and dances. 'I am myself my own fever and pain,' I was thinking when I believed I was merely frightening myself. 'I must be.'

No, it wasn't strange. Anyone who spends his days passing judgement, prognosticating and even diagnosing (not to say predicting), giving what are often groundless opinions, insisting that he has seen something when he has, in fact, seen little or nothing — always assuming he isn't pretending — ears pricked for any unusual emphases or vacillations, for any stumblings or quaverings, alert to the choice of words when those being observed have sufficient vocabulary to choose between several (which is not very often, some cannot even find the one possible word and have to be guided towards it, to have the word suggested to them, which makes them easy to manipulate), eyes tuned to detect any wilfully opaque glances, any excessive blinking, the drawing back of a lip as someone prepares to lie or the twitching jaw of the wildly ambitious, scrutinising faces to the point where you no longer see them as living, moving faces, observing them instead as if they were paintings, or as you might observe someone asleep or dead, or as you might observe the past; anyone whose main task is to trust no one ends up viewing everything in that suspicious, wary, interpretative light, dissatisfied with appearances and with the obvious and the straightforward; or, rather, dissatisfied with what is there. And then one easily forgets that what is there on the surface or in the first instance might sometimes be all there is, with no duplicity and no deceit or secrecy either, in the case of someone who is not hiding anything because they don't know how, because they know nothing of the theory and practice of concealment.