Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (2 page)

I fixed my weary eyes on the fire that Reresby had lit and which contributed in no small part to transforming
his sitting room into a story-book setting, a place of enchantment, and there came into my mind the image of a more welcoming and, in fact, unusual, but, how I can put it, not entirely non-existent London, the London of Wendy's parents in the Disney version of
Peter Pan,
with its square windowpanes framed by strips of white lacquered wood and its equally white bookshelves, its clusters of chimneys and its peaceful attic rooms, at least that's how I recalled the home I had seen in the dark in my childhood, cartoons so comforting that one wanted to live in them. Yes, Tupra's house was cosy and comfortable, the kind of house that helps you to forget about things and relax, it also had something about it of the house inhabited by Professor Higgins, as played by Rex Harrison in My
Fair Lady,
although his was in Marylebone and Wendy's in Bloomsbury, I think, and Tupra's was there in Hampstead, further to the north. Perhaps he needed these benign, tranquil surroundings in order to cancel out and isolate himself from his many intersecting, murky and even violent activities, perhaps his background as a low-born foreigner or his origins in Bethnal Green or in some other depressing area had made him aspire to a mode of decor so opposed to the sordid that it's almost only ever found in fiction, intended for children if they're by Barrie or for adults if they're by Dickens, he was bound to have seen that film based on the work of the former, the dramatist, when it came out, as did every child in our day in any country in this world of ours, I'd seen it dozens of times in my own childhood world.

He took out one of his Egyptian cigarettes and offered it to me, he was my host now and was mechanically aware of that, he'd also offered me a drink which, for the moment, I'd declined, he'd poured himself a port not from an ordinary bottle, but from one with a little medal about its neck, like those passed swiftly round in a clockwise direction by the guests (there were always several bottles, they never stopped coming) during the dessert course at the high tables to which I was occasionally invited by colleagues in my distant Oxford days, perhaps
his
Oxford colleagues still sent him some of that extraordinary port wine from the college cellars and which one can find nowhere else. I hadn't kept up with how much Tupra had drunk during that long, interminable evening which had still not yet ended, although he had, I imagined, drunk no less than I had, and I didn't want and couldn't hold another drop, he, however, seemed unaffected by the alcohol or else its ravages were not apparent. The quantity of alcohol consumed, however, had had nothing to do with his terrorizing and punishing or beating or thrashing of De la Garza, for he had behaved throughout with precision and calculation. Who knows, though, perhaps it
had
influenced his decision to demonstrate to De la Garza his variant—varying— modes of death and to leave both De la Garza and me alive so that we would always remember them, it's rare for the resolve to do something and the actual execution of that act to coincide, even though the two things may follow on and appear to be simultaneous, perhaps he'd taken that decision when his head was still fuzzy, still hot, and his head had cleared and cooled during the few minutes I'd spent waiting for him in the handicapped toilet
along with our trusting victim, for I'd tricked De la Garza into going there with the false promise of a line of cocaine, although I didn't know at the time why I was putting him, the victim, where I'd been asked to put him or that the promise was a mere pretext. I should have imagined it, I should have foreseen it. I should have refused to have anything to do with it. I'd prepared him for Tupra, served him up on a plate, I had, in the end, been a part of it all. I was about to ask him, out of curiosity: 'Was it real cocaine you gave the poor devil?' But, as often happens after long silences, we both spoke at once and he got in just a fraction of a second before me, in order to reply to the last thing I'd said:

Yes, of course,' murmured Reresby almost lazily. 'You'll always get the kind of person who watches himself acting, who sees himself as if in some continuous performance. Who believes there'll be witnesses to report his generous or contemptible death and that this is what matters most. Or who, if there
are
no witnesses, invents them—the eye of God, the world stage, or whatever. Who believes that the world only exists to the extent that it's reported and events only to the extent that they're recounted, even though it's highly unlikely that anyone will bother to recount them, or to recount those particular facts, I mean, the facts relating to each individual. The vast majority of things simply happen and there neither is nor ever was any record of them, those we hear about are an infinitesimal fraction of what goes on. Most lives and, needless to say, most deaths, are forgotten as soon as they've occurred and leave not the slightest trace, or become unknown soon afterwards, after a few years, a few decades, a century, which, as you know, is, in reality, a very short time. Take battles, for example, think how important they were for those who took part in them and, sometimes, for their compatriots, think how many of those battles now mean nothing to us, not even their names, we don't even know which war they belonged to, more than that, we don't care. What do the names Ulundi and Beersheba, or Gravelotte and Rezonville, or Namur, or Maiwand, Paardeberg and Mafeking, or Mohacs, or Najera, mean to anyone nowadays?'—He mispronounced that last name, Najera.—'But there are many others who resist, incapable of accepting their own insignificance or invisibility, I mean once they're dead and converted into past matter, once they're no longer present to defend their existence and to declare: "Hey, I'm here. I can intervene, I have influence, I can do good or cause harm, save or destroy, and even change the course of the world, because I haven't yet disappeared."—'I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before,' I thought or remembered having thought as I was cleaning up the red stain I found on Wheeler's stairs and the rim of which I had to work hard to erase (if, that is, there ever had been such a stain, I doubted it more and more), and the effort made by things and people to keep us from saying: 'No, this never happened, it never was, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it never existed and never occurred.'—'Those individuals you mention,' continued Reresby, whose voice had gradually and unexpectedly taken on a more elevated tone, 'they're not so very different from Dick Dearlove, according to your interpretation of him. They suffer from narrative horror—isn't that what you called it—or narrative disgust. They fear that the manner in which they end their life will blot and taint everything, that some belated or final episode will cast its shadow over what came before, covering and canceling it: don't let it be said that I didn't help, that I didn't risk my life for the sake of others, that I didn't sacrifice myself for my loved ones, they think at the most absurd moments, when there's no one there to see them or when those who can see them, principally themselves, are about to die. Don't let anyone say I was a coward, a callous swine, a vulture, a murderer, they think, feeling the glare of the spotlight, when no one is shining a light on them at all or ever going to talk about them because they're too insignificant. They'll be as anonymous when dead as they were alive. It will be as if they had never existed.' He fell silent for a moment, took a sip of his port and added: 'You and I will be like them, the kind who leave no mark, so it won't matter what we've done, no one will bother to recount or even to investigate it. I don't know about you, but I don't belong to that type, the ones you mean, the people who are like Dick Dearlove even though they're not celebrities, quite the contrary. The ones who, in our jargon, suffer from some form of K-M complex.' He stopped, gave a sideways glance at the fire and added: 'I know that I'm invisible and will be more so when I'm dead, when I'm nothing but past matter. Dumb matter.'

'K-M?' I asked, ignoring his final prophetic, oracular words. 'What's that? Killing-Murdering?'

'No, it doesn't mean that, although it could, it had never occurred to me,' replied Tupra, smiling slightly through the smoke. It means Kennedy-Mansfield. Mulryan insisted on the second name because he's always been fascinated by the actress Jayne Mansfield, a favorite of his since childhood, and he bet us that she would linger in everyone's memory and not just because of the singular way in which she died; he was quite wrong of course. The truth is that she was the dream of every boy or adolescent. And of every truck driver. Do you remember her? No, probably not,' he went on, without giving me time to reply, 'which is yet further proof of how inappropriate and gratuitous and exaggerated that "M" was when it came to giving a name to the complex. Anyway, we've called it that for quite some time now, it's become the custom, and it's used almost exclusively in-house. Although, believe it or not,' he said, correcting himself, 'I've known some high officials use it too, having picked it up from us presumably, and the term has even appeared in the odd book.'

'I believe I do remember Jayne Mansfield,' I said, taking advantage of that minimal pause.

'Really?' Tupra seemed surprised. 'Well, you're certainly old enough, but I wasn't sure if such frivolous films would have made it into your country. During the dictatorship, I mean.'

'The only thing we weren't cut off from was the movies. Franco loved films and had his own projection room in the palace of El Pardo. We saw almost everything, apart from a few things that the censor strictly forbade (they weren't forbidden to Franco, of course: he enjoyed being shocked, the way priests do, at the vile deeds committed in the outside world from which he was protecting us). Others were cut or had the dialogue changed in the dubbing process, but most movies got shown. Yes, I think I do remember Jayne Mansfield. I can't quite recollect her face, but I can recall her general appearance. She was a voluptuous platinum blonde, wasn't she, very curvaceous. She made comedies in the fifties and possibly the sixties. And she had fairly big boobs.'

'Fairly big? Good grief, you clearly don't remember her at all, Jack. Wait, I'm going to show you a funny photo, I have it here.' Tupra had little difficulty in finding it. He got up, went over to one of the shelves, wiggled his fingers about as if he were trying the combination of a safe and then took from the shelf what seemed to be a hefty volume but which turned out to be a wooden rather than a metal box, disguised as a book. He took it down, opened it there and then, and rummaged for a couple of minutes among the letters kept inside, heaven knows who they were from, given that he knew exactly where to locate them and kept them so easily to hand. While he was doing this, he tapped the holder of his Rameses II cigarette and nonchalantly tipped ash onto the carpet, as if it didn't matter. He must have had servants. Permanent staff. Finally, he carefully removed a postcard from an envelope, using his index and middle finger as tweezers, then held it out to me. 'Here it is. Take a look. You'll remember her clearly now, as clear as clear. In a sense, she's unforgettable, especially if you discovered her as a boy. You can understand Mulryan's fascination. Our friend must be more lecherous than he seems. Doubtless in private. Or in his day perhaps,' he added.

I took the black-and-white photo from Tupra—like him with index and middle finger—and it immediately made me smile, even while he was commenting on it in words very similar to those going through my own head. Seated at a table, elbow to elbow, in the middle of supper or before or possibly afterwards (there are a few disorienting bowls), are two actresses famous at the time, to the left of the image Sophia Loren and to the right Jayne Mansfield, whose face ceased to be vague the moment I saw it again. The Italian, who was herself far from flat-chested— she had been another dream for many men, a long-lasting one too—is wearing a dress with a very modest neckline and she's giving Mansfield a sideways look, but making no attempt to conceal the fact, her eyes drawn irresistibly, with a mixture of envy, perplexity and fright, or perhaps incredulous alarm, to the far more abundant and far barer breasts of her American colleague, which really are very eye-catching and prominent (they make Loren's bust seem positively paltry in comparison), and even more so in an age when augmentative surgery was unlikely or certainly infrequent. Mansfield's breasts, as far as one can judge, are natural, not stiff and hard, but endowed with a pleasant, mobile softness—or so one would imagine ('If only I'd encountered breasts like that tonight and not Flavia's rock-hard pair,' I thought fleetingly), and must have caused a tremendous stir in that restaurant—whether in Rome or America who knows—the waiter who can be seen in the background, between the two women, maintains a praiseworthy impassivity, although we can only see his body, his face is in shadow, and one does wonder if

he isn't perhaps using his white napkin as a shield or screen. To the left of Mansfield is a male guest of whom one can see only a hand holding a spoon, but his eyes must be turned as sharply to the right as Loren's are to the left, although probably somewhat more avidly. Unlike Loren, the platinum blonde is looking straight at the camera with a cordial but slightly frozen smile, and although not totally unconcerned—she's perfectly aware of what she has on show—she's quite at ease: she is the novelty in Rome (if they are in Rome) and she has put the local beauty in the shade, made her look almost prim. A childhood memory of that pretty woman, Jayne Mansfield, came to me then and with it a title,
The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw
(or
La rubia y el sheriff—The Blonde and the Sherriff-
—as it was known in Spain): a large mouth and large eyes, she was all large, vulgar beauty. To a boy at any rate, and to many grown men too, like me.

This was what Tupra was saying and what I was thinking, while he continued to enlighten me. He gave occasional short laughs, he found both the photo and the situation amusing, and they were.

'May I look to see what caption they gave it? May I turn it over?' I asked, for I wasn't going to read, without permission, what had been written on the back by the person who had originally sent it.