Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (72 page)

I haven't forgotten what Custardoy told me, not a single word; any information that the mind registers stays in it until oblivion catches up with it, and oblivion is always one-eyed; I haven't forgotten his insinuations or more than insinuations ('Everyone has their own sexuality,' he said with
madrileño
bravado, each rasping word dragged out like the music from a music box, 'with some people it's straightforward and with others it isn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either'), and on occasions I've been tempted to try hurting Luisa, just a little, as if unintentionally, distractedly, accidentally, to see how she would react, to see if she would accept it without protest, holding her breath, just to know how she would respond. But I've always stopped myself and always will, I'm sure, because that would be like accepting that Custardoy had been right and exposing myself to a new poison, and I'd had quite enough poison on that night with Tupra or, rather, Reresby. Also, it implied a danger, albeit remote: that of putting myself in the place of the man I had so feared, the devious fellow of my imagination, who might turn up one rainy night, when they're stuck at home, close his large hands around Luisa's throat—his fingers like piano keys—while the children— my children—watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. ('While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies,' Reresby had said that night. '. . . even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.') No, one mustn't slip or skate too close, one mustn't toy with the time, temptations and circumstances that might lead to the fulfilment of some probability carried in the veins, our veins, and my probability was that I could kill, I know that now, well, I knew it before, but I know it even better now. Best to shy away from it all and keep oneself at a distance, better to avoid it and not to touch it even in dreams ('Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death'), so that not even in dreams could someone say: 'Your wife, that wretched Luisa your wife, Jacques or Jacobo or Jack, Iago or Jaime, that never slept a quiet hour with you because the names don't change who you are . . . Let me be lead within thy bosom and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die.' No, that won't happen, it doesn't happen. Best to keep away.

One day, I went over to his part of town, Custardoy's; normally I try to avoid it as much as I can, which isn't easy, given that it's so central. I don't avoid it for any real reason, it's just that places become marked by what you did in them, far more than by what they did to you, and then something happens which bears a very faint resemblance—a mere shadow, a poor imitation, nonsense, no comparison—to the grudge against place, the spatial hatred, that the Nazis felt for the village of Lidice which they reduced to rubble, razed to the ground and wiped from the map, and for so many other towns in Europe, and the spatial hatred that Valerie Harwood felt perhaps for Milton Bryant and Woburn, and Peter Wheeler for Plantation Road, that pretty leafy street in Oxford, and I myself for the building with no name near Vauxhall Cross and the indiscreet headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service by the Thames with its look of a lighthouse or a ziggurat, where I never venture if I go to London now, whether with Luisa or without her; I have a little money in bank accounts there—well, you never know when you might have to leave Spain in a hurry. But I did feel a kind of spatial hatred for Calle de Bailen and Calle Mayor, quite unconscious, because I like the area, despite the fact that various oafish mayors have done their best to ruin it. I was passing by the Palacio Real, where I sometimes go to see an exhibition, and, which is another building that can no longer be seen from any other angle but from the front—one of the many views that those same idiotic mayors and their town planners and venal architects have inconsiderately and idiotically stolen from both the inhabitants of Madrid and the people who visit it. I was returning from some errands on the other side of Plaza de España when I came across two policewomen on horseback—they regularly patrol there now that all the traffic has been sent underground in this, the capital of tunnels—one white horse and one black, and I passed so close to the white one that I almost touched him and felt his breath—you only realize how tall they are when you're next to them. I hadn't gone five steps beyond the crossroads when I noticed at my back the horse's agitation or anxiety: the dog belonging to a woman who happened to be passing had started barking at the horses and harassing them, and the white horse took fright, reared up and was about to bolt, and did indeed try to make a run for it, although it only got a few yards, while the dog—tis tis tis, aerial footsteps, it was a pointer like Pérez Nuix's, except that this one had a spotted coat and a brown head—got even more excited by all that reined-in skittering and the almost galloping clatter of hooves and barked more loudly. The policewoman regained control of the horse at once, although not without some alarm and some effort: she had to turn it in circles in order to to rein it in and calm it down, and the owner of the dog finally dragged her pet off and put an end to its incursions—the tis tis tis sounded much sadder now—and stopped its barking. The other horse, the black one, wasn't in the least perturbed, either by the pointer's threats or by its companion's attempted escape, he was clearly less delicate. The sound of clattering hooves soon slowed, and when the momentary commotion had subsided, the policewoman and her horse stood quietly for a while, silhouetted against the royal facade, while she soothingly stroked his neck, under the gaze of two guards in nineteenth-century costume, inscrutable and motionless in their sentry boxes by the Palace gates. We weren't far from the monument to Captain Melgar, with its disproportionately small legionnaire, a kind of dwarf Beau Geste trying to scramble up to the Captain's beard or mustaches.

Then, from among the people who had stopped to watch this minor incident (of whom I was one) I noticed a man step forward, the kind of spectator who is prone to jump into the ring at bullfights, who always seems to be around eager to take center stage, whenever there's an altercation, a bit of trouble, and whose whole posture seems to be saying: I'll have this fixed in no time' or 'I'll knock some sense into these madmen and restore peace and amaze the onlookers.' His intervention was entirely unnecessary because the policewoman had by now managed to pacify her mount, yet the man strode over to them and, as if he were a wrangler or something, was patting the horse's neck and stroking its muzzle and whispering mysterious or trivial words. The first thing that alerted me was the glove, the black leather glove that stood out against the horse's white coat; it was a spring day, overcast but not cold, and covering your hands seemed odd, and even odder to have just one hand covered, because when he reached out his other hand and placed it on the horse's back, I saw that it, the right one, was bare, and that made me think: 'What a lot of one-handed people . . . Perhaps his left hand never healed properly and that's why he wears the glove, to hide a deformity or scars, who knows, perhaps he never shows it to anyone.' Then he turned to face me just as I was thinking this, it was simultaneous—he didn't turn to look at anyone else, but at me, as if he had seen me before the incident with the horse and knew where I was, or perhaps he'd been following me—and he gazed straight at me with those unmistakable eyes, crude and rough and cold, two enormous, very dark eyes, rather wide-set and lashless, and both those factors, the lack of lashes and the wide-apartness, that make his obscene gaze unbearable or possibly irresistible when turned on the women he seduces or buys and possibly also when turned on the men with whom he competes, and we were not just rivals, he hated me with the same fierce intensity as when we had seen each other for the last time on the sole occasion that I visited his apartment, with an old Llama pistol and a poker in my hand and wearing gloves like the ones Reresby had worn in the handicapped toilet and like the single glove he was wearing now. But it wasn't the same hatred, not identical: there, in front of the Palacio Real, it wasn't old or impotent, frustrated and without consequences, it wasn't tinged with fear and shock; nor was it like the hatred of a child imprisoned in a childish body, nor like a furious adolescent who watches whirling past him the world he is still not allowed to climb aboard; nor like the prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or abstaining from anything because he is not there; and his gaze was no longer murky, but unequivocal and clear.

It had taken me a few seconds to recognize him because Custardoy wasn't wearing a hat now or a ponytail or even a mustache, or only the merest shadow of one, as if he were starting to let it grow again after a period of shaving it off. He was stroking the horse with his gloved left hand and murmuring short sentences, but I didn't know now whether he was addressing these to the animal or to the policewoman—who happily let him carry on, perhaps she was already won over, with her high leather boots like those of a distant English gypsy girl in Oxford—or to me, knowing that I wouldn't be able to hear what he was saying. And when I saw the way he was looking at me, with utter loathing, I saw that there was insolence in that gaze too, and a threat, not one that was in any hurry to be carried out, but one that was prepared to linger and delay for as long as he chose or needed to; my expression must have changed and I thought: 'Damn. I didn't remove him from the picture, not entirely, I didn't make absolutely sure. This man might come after me one day or after us both, after me and Luisa, or all four of us, perhaps the children too. I humiliated him, I hurt him, and I took from him the person he loved. I should have removed or erased him from the picture for good, as if he were a drop of blood.' And suddenly an image flashed into my mind—like lightning in its brevity but not its brilliance, for it was terrifying, nauseating and sordid; or like thunderless lightning that strikes in silence—an image I had seen in one of Tupra's videos, a tethered horse, a defenseless woman, and I couldn't help but associate Custardoy with those well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, sporting thick mustaches and Texan hats most of them, although Custardoy no longer had a hat or much of a mustache, but I had seen them and the marks left by his abuse. That's the trouble once you've been inoculated with any kind of poison, whether through the eyes or the ears, there's no way of getting rid of it, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done and it comes back to penetrate and contaminate any thing or person, saying each time, repeating, insisting: 'Let this sit heavy on your soul.'

I stood there for a few seconds, before turning and continuing on my way. I don't know if I looked at him with equal hatred, but I might have, it's very likely, more than anything because what I saw him do next troubled me greatly, I didn't like it at all: with his right hand, his bare uninjured hand, his painting hand, he took from his trouser pocket a watch and chain and checked the time with strange intensity. At first, I thought this was just some new eccentricity; having given up his ponytail, he had to find some other way to underline the fact that he was an arty type, as my sister had described him before I had even seen him; and from his stupidly archaic bohemian point of view, carrying such a watch in the twenty-first century was doubtless in keeping with that. Then I thought of another possibility: 'Perhaps he doesn't wear a wristwatch for the same reason that he wears a glove,' I thought, 'because he would have to lift up his hand whenever he wanted to know the time. Perhaps his hand really is irrecoverable, ruined, although there's no sign of the gash I made on his cheek. Whatever the truth of the matter, I don't like the image of him holding that old-fashioned watch in his hand and studying it; he may be measuring out my time.' I didn't want to look at him any longer, and when I was already a few paces away, I thought again, perhaps to exorcise him from my mind or perhaps to raise my spirits: 'But now I know that in my angry mood, I, too, am capable of measuring out his time; I counted it once and stopped the count, and he knows that; he was lucky, but I very nearly counted him out. That will dissuade him from coming near. And if he ever does, we'll see then who will be the first to leave his own first name behind.'

You can live with a threat hanging over you because there is always the possibility that it will never be carried out, and that's what you have to think. Sometimes we see what is approaching and nevertheless we pay no attention, and perhaps not only for the reason Wheeler gave: because we hate certainty, because no one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there; and because no one wants to know, and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror; because we all prefer to be utter
necios
in the strict Latin sense of the word that still appears in our dictionaries: 'Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known,' that is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning.
'Un satisfecho insipiente,
a nincompoop,' as Wheeler had said with a pedantry I now often miss. No, perhaps it's also because we fear wasting our life on our precautions and suspicions and our visions and alarms, and because it is clear to us that everything will have its end, and then, when we say goodbye, when we are already the past or our end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, it will all seem to us vain and naive: why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, our poison, the shadow, and all those doubts, all that torment?