Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Spain as Tu rostro mañana (2 Baile y Seuño) by Alfaguara, Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S. A. 2004
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 2006
First published in Penguin Classics 2018
Copyright © Javier Marías, 2004
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2009
The publisher is grateful to Macmillan for permission to quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Picador, 1980. Extracts from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 © The Estate of T. S. Eliot and reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover photograph © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos
ISBN: 978-0-241-28892-4
III: DANCE
IV: DREAM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
For Carmen López M,
who will, I hope, want
to go on listening to me
And for Sir Peter Russell,
to whom this book is indebted
for his long shadow,
and the author,
for his far-reaching friendship
The translator would like to thank Javier Marías, Annella McDermott, Palmira Sullivan, Antonio Martín and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.
Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, or even enquires, no advice or favour or loan, not even the loan of our attention, let us hope that others do not ask us to listen to them, to their wretched problems and their painful predicaments so like our own, to their incomprehensible doubts and their paltry stories which are so often interchangeable and have all been written before (the range of stories that can be told is not that wide), or to what used to be called their travails, who doesn’t have them or, if he doesn’t, brings them upon himself, ‘unhappiness is an invention’, I often repeat to myself, and these words hold true for misfortunes that come from inside not outside and always assuming they are not misfortunes which are, objectively speaking, unavoidable, a catastrophe, an accident, a death, a defeat, a dismissal, a plague, a famine, or the vicious persecution of some blameless person, History is full of them, as is our own, by which I mean these unfinished times of ours (there are even dismissals and defeats and deaths that are self-inflicted or deserved or, indeed, invented). Let us hope that no one comes to us and says ‘Please’, or ‘Listen’ – the words that always precede all or almost all requests: ‘Listen, do you know?’, ‘Listen, could you tell me?’, ‘Listen, have you got?’, ‘Listen, I wanted to ask you: for a recommendation, a piece of information, an opinion, a hand, some money, a favourable word, a consolation, a kindness, to keep this secret for me or to change for my sake and be someone else, or to betray and to lie or to keep silent for me and save me.’ People ask and ask for all kinds of things, for everything, the reasonable and the crazy, the fair, the outrageous and the imaginary – the moon, as people always used to say, and which was promised by so many people everywhere precisely because it continues to be an imaginary place; people close to us ask, as do strangers, people who are in difficulties and those who caused those difficulties, the needy and the well-to-do, who, in this one respect, are indistinguishable: no one ever seems to have enough of anything, no one is ever contented, no one ever stops, as if they have all been told: ‘Ask, just open your mouth and keep asking.’ When, in fact, no one is ever told that.
And then, of course, more often than not you listen, feeling fearful sometimes and sometimes gratified too; nothing, in principle, is as flattering as being in a position to concede or refuse something, nothing – as also soon becomes clear – is as sticky and unpleasant: knowing, thinking that one can say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘We’ll see’; and ‘Perhaps’, ‘I’ll think about it’, ‘I’ll give you an answer tomorrow’ or ‘I’ll want this in exchange’, depending on your mood and entirely at your discretion, depending on whether you’re at a loose end, feeling generous or bored, or, on the contrary, in an enormous hurry and lacking patience and time, depending on how you’re feeling or on whether you want to have someone in your debt or to keep them dangling or on whether you want to commit yourself, because when you concede or refuse something – in both cases, even if you have merely lent an ear – you become involved with the supplicant, and you’re caught, enmeshed perhaps.
If, one day, you give some money to a local beggar, the following morning it will be harder not to give, because he will expect it (nothing has changed, he is just as poor, I am not as yet any less rich, and why give nothing today when I gave something yesterday) and in a sense you have contracted an obligation with him: by helping him to reach this new day, you have a responsibility not to let this day turn sour on him, not to let it be the day of his final suffering or condemnation or death, and to create a bridge for him to traverse it safely, and so it goes on, one day after another, perhaps indefinitely, there is nothing so very strange or arbitrary about the law found among certain primitive – or perhaps simply more logical – peoples where anyone who saves another person’s life becomes that person’s guardian and is deemed for ever responsible (unless, one day, the person they saved saves their life and then they can be at peace with each other and go their separate ways), as if the saved person had been empowered to say to his saviour: ‘I’m alive today because you wanted me to be; it’s as if you had caused me to be born again, therefore you must protect and care for me and keep me safe, because if it wasn’t for you, I would be beyond all evil and beyond all harm, or safe more or less in one-eyed, uncertain oblivion.’
And if, on the contrary, you deny alms to your local beggar on that first day, on the second day you will be left with a feeling of indebtedness, an impression that might increase on the third and fourth and fifth days, for if the beggar has negotiated and survived those dates without my help, how can I but commend him and thank him for the money I’ve saved up until now? And with each morning that passes – each night that he lives through – this idea will put down still deeper roots in us, the idea that we should contribute, that it is our turn. (This, of course, only affects people who notice the ragged; most simply pass them by, adopt an opaque gaze and see them as mere bundles of clothes.)
You have only to listen to the beggar who approaches you in the street and you are already involved; you listen to the foreigner or to someone who is lost asking you for directions and sometimes, if you’re taking that route yourself, you end up showing them the way, and then the two of you fall into step and you become each other’s insistent parallel being which, nevertheless, no one sees as a bad omen or as a nuisance or an obstacle, because you have chosen to walk along together, even though you don’t know each other and may not even speak during that time, as the two of you progress (it is the stranger or the person who is lost who can always be led to another place, into a trap, an ambush, to a piece of waste ground, into a snare); and you listen to the stranger who appears at the door persuading or selling or evangelising, trying always to persuade us and always talking very quickly, and just by opening the door to him you are caught; and you listen to the friend on the phone speaking in an urgent, hysterical or mellifluous voice – no, it’s definitely hysterical – imploring or demanding or suddenly threatening, and you’re already enmeshed; and you listen to your wife and your children who know of almost no other way of talking to you, at least this – asking I mean – is the only way they know of talking to you now, given the growing distance and diffuseness, and then you have to take out a knife or a blade to cut the bond that will eventually tighten around you: you caused them to be born, these children who are not yet beyond all evil or beyond all harm and who never will be, and you caused them to be born to their mother as well, who is like them still because she is now unimaginable without children – they form a nucleus from which none is ever excluded – and they are inconceivable without that figure who is still so necessary to them, so much so that you have no option but to protect her and care for her and keep her safe – you still see this as your task – even though Luisa is not fully aware of it, or not consciously, and even though she is far away in space and moving away from me in time too, date by date and with each day that passes. Even though each night that I negotiate and traverse and survive casts an ever denser cloud over me, and still I cannot see her, do not see her.
Luisa did not get caught or entangled, but she did, once, become involved because of a request and a gift of alms and she involved me a little in both of those things too, this was before we separated and before I left for England, when we had not yet foreseen the deepening rift or our backs so firmly turned on each other, at least I had not, for it is only later on that you realise you have lost the trust you had in someone or that others have lost the trust they had in you – if, that is, you ever do realise, which I don’t really think you do; I mean, that only afterwards, when the present is already the past and is thus so changeable and uncertain that it can easily be told (and can be retold a thousand times more, with no two versions agreeing), do we realise that we also knew it when the present was still present and had not yet been rejected or become muddied or shadowy, how else would we be able to put a date to it, because the fact is we can, oh yes, we can date it afterwards with alarming precision: ‘It was that day when …’ we say or remember, as people do in novels (which are always heading towards a specific moment: the plot points to it, dictates it; except that not all novels know how they’re going to end), sometimes when we are alone or in company, two people summing things up out loud: ‘It was those words you came out with so casually on your birthday that first put me on my guard or began to distance me.’ ‘Your reaction disappointed me, it made me wonder if perhaps I was wrong about you, but that meant I’d been wrong about you for years, so perhaps you had simply changed.’ ‘I just couldn’t stand the way you kept criticising me, it was so unfair that I thought maybe it was simply a ploy of yours, a way to freeze me out, and frozen out was how I felt.’ Yes, we usually know when something breaks or breaks down or begins to grow weary. But we always hope that it will sort itself out or mend or recover – by itself sometimes, as if by magic – and that what we know will not be confirmed; or if we see that it is something far simpler, that there is something about us that annoys or displeases or repels, we make valiant efforts to change ourselves. These attempts, however, are made in a theoretical, sceptical spirit. In reality, we know that we won’t succeed, or that things no longer depend on what we do or don’t do. It is the same feeling that the ancients had when an expression came to their lips or their minds, an expression which our time has forgotten or, rather, rejected, but which they recognised: ‘The die is cast.’ And although the phrase has been more or less abolished, the feeling still persists and we still know it. ‘There’s nothing to be done about it’ is what I sometimes say to myself.
A young woman – very young – had posted herself at the door of the hypermarket or supermarket or pseudomarket where Luisa used to do the shopping, she was not only very young, she was also foreign and a mother and was both these things twice over: for she had two children, one only a few months old sitting in a battered pushchair and another, who was older, but still very small, two or three perhaps (or so Luisa thought, she had noticed that he was still wearing nappies under his short trousers), and who guarded the pushchair like a soldier, a tiny unarmed member of the Praetorian guard; and the young woman was not only Rumanian or Bosnian, or possibly Hungarian – although that is less likely, there are far fewer of them in Spain – she also appeared to be a gypsy. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, and on the days when she begged there (it wasn’t every day, or perhaps Luisa simply didn’t happen to see her), she was always with her two children, not so much because she wanted to inspire pity – this was Luisa’s interpretation – as because she clearly had nowhere else to leave them or no one else to leave them with. They were part of her, as much a part of her as her arms. They were her prolongation, they were with her just as the dog was without a leg, according to Alan Marriott’s vision when he decided, in his imagination, to link his dog with that other young gypsy woman, so that together they formed for him a horrific couple.
The Rumanian woman would spend hours standing at the door of the supermarket, sometimes she would sit on the steps at the entrance and move the pushchair back and forth on the pavement, with her older son on guard. The reason Luisa noticed her was not because of this tableau vivant, this picture, which is both effective and fairly commonplace, even though it’s now forbidden to use children when begging – and Luisa isn’t the kind of person who takes pity on just anyone, nor am I, or perhaps we are, but not to the point of her putting her hand in her purse, or, in my case, of me putting my hand in my pocket, every time we come across an indigent, we couldn’t afford it in Madrid, we don’t earn enough for such extravagance, and our crude and callous officials are constantly transferring to the big city, and releasing onto its streets, wave upon wave of illegal immigrants who know nothing of the language, the country or the customs – people who have just slipped in via Andalusia or the Canaries, or via Catalonia and the Balearics if they’re coming from the East, the officials wouldn’t even know which country to send them back to – and they are left to get by somehow without papers and without money, with the number of poor people always on the increase, poor people who are disoriented, lost, peripatetic, unintelligible, nameless. Luisa, then, did not notice this little group, one of many, because they struck her as being unusually deserving of pity; she singled them out as individuals, she noted the young Bosnian woman and her child sentinel, I mean that she saw them as them, they did not seem to her indistinguishable or interchangeable as objects of compassion, she saw beyond their condition and their function and their needs, so widespread and so widely shared. She did not see a poor mother with her two children, she saw that particular mother and those particular children, especially the older child.
‘He’s got such a bright, lively little face,’ she told me. ‘And what touches me most is his readiness to help, to look after his little brother, to be of some use. That child doesn’t want to be a burden, although he can’t help but be one because he can’t yet do anything on his own. But small though he is, he wants to take part, to contribute, and he’s so affectionate with the baby and so alert to what might happen and to what is happening. He spends hours and hours there, with no means of entertaining himself, he goes up and down the steps, he swings on the handrail, he tries to move the pushchair back and forth, but he’s not really strong enough yet for that. Those are his main distractions. But he never strays far from his mother, not because he’s not adventurous (as I say, you can see that he’s really bright), but as if he were aware that this would just be another worry for her, and you can tell that he’s trying to make things as easy as possible for her, well, insofar as he’s able to, which isn’t very much. And sometimes he strokes the young woman’s cheek or his little brother’s cheek. He keeps looking around and about him, he’s very alert, I’m sure those quick eyes of his don’t miss a single passer-by, and some he must remember from one visit to the next, he probably remembers me already. I find it so touching, that terribly responsible, industrious, participatory attitude, that enormous desire to be useful. He’s too young for that.’ She paused and then added: ‘It’s so absurd. A moment ago, he didn’t even exist and now he’s full of anxieties he doesn’t even understand. Perhaps that’s why they don’t weigh on him, he seems quite happy, and his mother adores him. But it’s not just absurd, it’s unfair too.’ She thought for a few seconds, stroking her knees with her two hands, she had sat down on the edge of the sofa to my right, she had just come in and had still not taken off her raincoat, the shopping bags were on the floor, she hadn’t gone straight to the kitchen. I’ve always liked her knees, with or without tights, and fortunately, since she usually wore a skirt, they were nearly always visible to me. Then she said: ‘He reminds me a bit of Guillermo when he was small. I used to find it touching in him too, it’s not just because they’re poor. Seeing him so impatient to participate in the world or in responsibilities and tasks, so eager to find out about everything and to help, so aware of my struggles and my difficulties. And, even more intuitively – or more deductively – aware of yours too, if you remember, even though he saw you much less.’
She wasn’t asking me, she was merely reminding me or confirming my memory. And I did still remember, even when I was in London, when I didn’t see the boy and was beginning to fear for him; he was very patient and protective towards his sister and often shared or gave in too much, like someone who knows that the noble, upright thing is for the strong always to give in to the non-tyrannical, non-abusive weak, a rather old-fashioned principle nowadays, since now the strong tend to be heartless and the weak despotic; he was even protective of his mother and, who knows, possibly of me, now that he felt that I was exiled and alone and far away, an orphan in his eyes and understanding; those who act as a shield suffer greatly in life, as do the vigilant, their ears and eyes always alert. And those who want at all costs to play fair, even when they are fighting and what is at risk is their survival or that of their most indispensable loved ones, without whom it is impossible to live, or almost.
‘And Guillermo hasn’t changed,’ I said to Luisa. ‘I hope he doesn’t, but then again, sometimes I hope he does. He’s bound to lose, given the way the world is going. I thought he’d learn to take better care of himself when he went to school and experienced the dangers for himself, but the years have gone by, and that doesn’t seem to have happened. Sometimes I wonder if I’m being a bad father by not training him, not teaching him what he needs to know: tricks, cunning arguments, intimidation, caution, complaints; and more egotism. One should, I think, prepare one’s children. But it’s not easy to instil in them what they need to know, if you don’t yourself like it. And he’s a better person than I am, for now at any rate.’
‘Then again it might have been a waste of time in his case,’ answered Luisa. And she got up as if she were in a hurry. ‘I’m going out again before they leave,’ she said. That was why she hadn’t yet taken off her raincoat or unpacked the bags: she knew she hadn’t quite come home. ‘I usually give her a bit of money when I go in, she’s got a box you can throw coins into, and I gave her some today. But on my way out, she asked me for something, it’s the first time she’s ever asked me for anything, in words I mean, in a very strange, limited Spanish, I couldn’t make out the accent, and she used the occasional Italian expression as well. She asked me to buy her some of those baby wipes that are so useful for keeping children clean, you know, the sort you can just pull out of a box. I said no, that she should buy them herself and that I’d already given her some money. And she said: “No, money no, money no.” I’ve been going over and over it in my head and I think I’ve just understood what she meant. She must be collecting money for her husband or for her brothers or her father, I don’t know, for the men in her life. She wouldn’t dare touch any of that money without their permission, she wouldn’t be able to decide, off her own bat, to spend it on something, she must have to hand it over and then they buy whatever they think should be bought, perhaps attending to their own needs first. They would think baby wipes were superfluous, a luxury, they wouldn’t give her money for something like that, and she’d just have to put up with it. But I know they’re not a luxury, those children spend hours on end there, and they must get really sore and chafed if she can’t clean them up now and then. So I’m going to buy them for her. I hadn’t cottoned on until now, she can’t do what she likes with what she earns, not a single penny of it, that’s why she asked me for the thing itself and why the money was of no use to her. I’ll be right back.’
When she returned shortly afterwards, she took off her raincoat. I had unpacked the bags meanwhile, and everything was in its place.
‘Did you get there in time?’ I asked. She had aroused my curiosity.
‘Yes, they obviously stay there until the shop closes. I went in, bought the wipes and gave them to her. You should have seen the look of joy and gratitude on her face. I mean she’s always very grateful anyway and always gives me a big smile whenever I give her any money. But this time it was different, it was something for her, for her use and for the children, it wasn’t part of the common pot, money, then, is all the same and once it’s mixed up you can’t tell whose is whose. And the little boy was happy too, just to see her happy. He had such a celebratory look on his face, even though he didn’t really know what it was he was celebrating. He’s so quick, so bright, he notices everything. If things don’t go too badly for him in life, he’ll be a great optimist. Let’s hope he’s lucky.’
I knew that Luisa was already involved by that request for help, which she had answered belatedly and, therefore, after some thought. She wasn’t caught or entangled, but she was involved. Whenever she went back to the supermarket and saw the young Hungarian woman and her little optimist, she would wonder if the wipes had run out, for the children’s need for them would not, of course – nor would it for a long time. And if the woman wasn’t there, she would wonder about her, about them, not in a worried or, far less, an interfering way (Luisa is not one to draw attention to herself, nor does she go poking about in other people’s lives), but I knew she was involved because, from then on, without my ever having seen them, I myself would sometimes ask about them and wait for my wife to bring me news, if there was any.
A few weeks later, when people were avidly buying things for the fast-approaching Christmas season, she told me that the Rumanian mother had again specifically asked her for something. ‘Hello, carina,’ the young woman had said, which made us think that before arriving in Spain she must have spent some time in Italy, from where perhaps she had been unceremoniously expelled by the brutal, xenophobic, pseudo-Lombardic authorities, who are even coarser and more oafish than our own contemptuous, pseudo-madrileño ones. ‘If you don’t want you tell me no, but I ask you one thing,’ had been her polite preamble, for courtesy partly consists in stating the obvious, which is never out of place when employed in its service. ‘The boy wants a cake. I cannot buy. Can you buy for him? Only if you want. It is there, detralángolo,’ and she pointed around the corner, and Luisa immediately knew which shop she meant, a very good, expensive pâtisserie which she also frequented. ‘If you don’t want, then no,’ the woman had insisted, as if she knew perfectly well that the request was a mere fancy. Yet because it was her son’s fancy it was worth asking.
‘This time, the boy understood everything,’ Luisa said. ‘She was giving expression to something he wanted, and he knew it. Well, the look of suspense on his face left no room for doubt, the poor little thing was waiting with bated breath for my Yes or No, his eyes like saucers.’ (‘Just like a defendant awaiting the verdict,’ I thought, though without interrupting her, ‘an optimistic defendant.’) ‘Anyway, I didn’t know what exactly she meant by “a cake”, and, besides, they seemed to know precisely which one and it was that and no other that they wanted, and so the four of us had to go over to the pâtisserie so that they could show me. I went in first so that the people in the shop could see that they were with me, and even then a lot of customers instinctively moved away in disgust, they made way for us as if to avoid contagion, I don’t think she noticed, or perhaps she’s used to it and it doesn’t affect her any more, but it did me. It was the little boy who, very excitedly, pointed out the cake to me in a display case, a birthday cake, not very big, and the young woman nodded. I told her that they should go back to the steps outside the supermarket – the pâtisserie was packed and even more so with us and the pushchair and everything – while I stood in the queue, bought the cake and had them wrap it up, then I’d bring it over to her. What with one thing and another, it took me a quarter of an hour or thereabouts, and I had to laugh when I came round the corner, carrying the package, and saw the little boy, his eyes fixed on that spot and with a look of such expectation on his face, I’m sure he hadn’t taken his eyes off that corner for a second since returning to his place, waiting for me to appear, bearing the treasure: as if he’d been mentally running all that time, out of pure impatience, pure longing. For once, he left his mother’s side and ran to meet me, even though she called to him: “No, Emil! Emil, come here!” He ran round and round me like a puppy.’ Luisa sat thinking, a smile on her lips, amused by this recent memory. Then she added: ‘And that was that.’
‘And now that you’ve done what she asked, won’t she always be asking you for things?’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think she’s the sort to take advantage. I’ve seen her several times since I bought her the baby wipes, and this was the first time that she’s expressly asked me for something else. One day, I saw her menfolk hanging around there, I suppose one of them was her husband, although none of them behaved any differently towards her or the children. They may well have been her brothers or cousins or uncles, some relation or other, there were four or five of them standing near her, talking, but without including her in their discussions, and then they left.’
‘They probably act as a kind of mafia and carry out checks to make sure other beggars don’t take her place. A lot of beggars pay a form of rent for a particularly good pitch, there’s a lot of competition even in the world of begging. And it’s no bad thing, I mean, she probably wouldn’t be able to hold on to it if she didn’t have some kind of protection. What were the men like?’
‘A rough lot. I’m afraid that, in their case, I too would have moved out of their way as if to avoid contagion. Nasty-looking men. Tetchy. Bossy. Cheating. Dirty. Oh, and they all had mobile phones and lots of rings. And some of them wore waistcoats.’
‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘the reaction of the other customers in the pâtisserie; it really did affect her, she won’t forget it, she’ll be very conscious of it the next time she goes in there alone or with our own well-to-do, non-mendicant children: she obviously felt it very deeply. She’s involved. But it’s nothing serious and won’t become so. Doubtless I’m involved too.’
I found out to what extent I was involved during my time in London. Because even there, far from Luisa and from our children, I would sometimes remember the young Bosnian woman and her two children, the small, responsible, stateless optimist and his brother in the old pushchair, none of whom I had seen and whom I had only heard about from Luisa. And when they came into my mind, what I wondered most was not how they would be getting on or if they had had any luck, but – perhaps strangely, perhaps not – whether they were still in the world, as if, only then, would it be worth devoting a brief, vague, insubstantial thought to them. And yet that wasn’t the case: even if they had left the world because of some misfortune or some dreadful mistake, because of some injustice or accident or murderous act, they had already joined the stories I had heard and incorporated, they were yet one more accumulated image, and our capacity for absorbing these is infinite (they are constantly being added to and never subtracted from), the real and the imagined as well as the false and the factual, and as we progress, we are constantly being exposed to new stories and to a million further episodes, and to the memory of beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who did, but who are now safe more or less in their own blessed insignificance or in blissful unmemorability. Emil had reminded Luisa of our son Guillermo in the past, when he was two or three years old, and now this growing son of ours, in turn, reminded me or us – for our children are always in our thoughts – of the small insignificant Hungarian boy, when he might well already have moved on and, in his enforced nomadic state, left for another country or might not even exist in time, expelled from it early on by some unfortunate incident or encounter, as often happens to those who are in a hurry to participate in the world and its tasks and benefits and sorrows.
Sometimes, I would wake in the middle of the night, or so I thought, bathed in sweat sometimes and always agitated, and, while still inside my dream or clumsily and belatedly only just emerging from it, I would ask myself: ‘Are they still in the world? Are my children still in the world? What is happening to them on this distant night, at this very moment in this remote space of mine, what is happening to them right now? I have no way of knowing, I can’t go into their rooms to see if they’re still breathing or if they’re whimpering in their sleep, did the phone ring to warn me of some evil or was it just ringing in my murky dream? To warn me that they no longer exist, but have been expelled from time, what can have happened and how can I be sure that, at this very moment, Luisa isn’t dialling my number to tell me about the tragedy of which I have just had a premonition? Or else she wouldn’t be able to speak for sobbing and I would say to her: “Calm down, calm down, and tell me what happened, it’ll be all right.” But she would never calm down or be able to explain because there are some things that cannot be explained and will never be all right, and sorrows that can never be calmed.’ And when my disquiet gradually ebbed away – the back of my neck still damp with sweat – and I realised that it was all to do with distance and anxiety and sleep and the curse of not being able to see – the back of the neck never sees, nor do exiled eyes – then, by association, the other question would formulate itself, pointless and bearable: ‘Are those two Rumanian children on the supermarket steps still in the world, and is their young gypsy mother? I have no way of knowing and it doesn’t really concern me. I have no way of knowing tonight, of course, and tomorrow I will forget to ask Luisa if she happens to phone me or I her (it isn’t our usual time) because, by day, I won’t care so much if she does or doesn’t know what has become of them, not here in faraway London, that’s where I am, yes, now I remember, now I understand, this window and its sky, the curving whistle of the wind, the bustling murmur of trees which is never indifferent or languid like the murmur of the river, I’m the one who moved to another country, not the little boy (he may still be wandering my streets), in a few hours I will go to work in this city and Tupra will be waiting for me, Tupra, who always wants more, Bertram Tupra, who is always waiting and insatiable, who sees no limits in anyone and asks more and more of us, of me, Mulryan, Pérez Nuix and Rendel, and of any of the other faces that might join him tomorrow, including ours when they are no longer recognisable, because they have grown so treacherous or so worn.’
Asking, asking, almost no one holds back and almost everyone tries; who doesn’t? They might say no – that is the reasoning that goes on inside every head, even those that do not reason – but if I don’t ask, I won’t get, that’s for sure; and what do I lose by asking, if I can manage to do so without hoping for too much. ‘I’m here, too, because of a request, originally and in part,’ I was thinking as I lay, half asleep, half awake, in London, ‘it was Luisa who asked me to go, to leave the field clear and to move out of the house and to make things easier for her, and to leave the way open to whoever might come, and then we would both be able to see more clearly, without cramping each other’s style. I did as she asked, I obeyed, I listened: I left and set off, I moved away and kept walking, until I arrived here, and I have still not gone back. I don’t even know yet if I’ve stopped walking. Perhaps I won’t go back, perhaps I will never go back unless another request is made, which might be this: “I was so wrong about you before, come here. Sit down here beside me again, somehow I just couldn’t see you clearly before. Come here. Come to me. Come back. And stay for ever.” But another night has passed, and I have still not heard that request.’
Young Pérez Nuix was about to make a request too, after thinking long and hard before doing so. She wanted something, possibly something she did not deserve given that she had followed me for far too long, unable to make up her mind to approach me, in that heavy night rain and, what’s more, dragging or being dragged along by a poor, drenched dog. I didn’t have to think about it, I knew as soon as I recognised her voice over the entryphone and when I buzzed the door downstairs so that she could come up and talk to me, as she had already announced: ‘I know it’s a bit late, but I must talk to you. It’ll only take a moment’ (she had said this in my language and had called me ‘Jaime’, as Luisa would have done had she come to my door). And I knew it as I heard her walking unhurriedly up the stairs, one step at a time, along with her dog, a very wet pointer, and when I heard the latter shaking himself dry, under cover at last and at last with some obvious direction (without the incomprehensible, insistent sky continuing to hurl down more rain upon him): she paused on the false landings or turns in the stairs, which had no angles only curves and were adorned, as almost all English staircases are, with a carpet to absorb the water that falls from us when we shake ourselves dry – so many days and even more nights of rain; and I heard Pérez Nuix strike the air with her closed umbrella, it would no longer conceal her face, and perhaps she took advantage of each brief pause and each time the dog shook himself to glance for a second in a hand mirror – eyes, chin, skin or lips – and tidy her hair a little, because hair always gets damp even if you protect it from the rain (I had still not seen whether it was covered with a hat or a scarf or a cap or a kitschy little beret worn at an angle, I had never perhaps even seen her head outside the office and outside our building with no name). And I had known it, even when I did not know it was her or who she was, when she was just a woman, strange or mercenary or lost or eccentric, helpless or blind, in the empty streets, with her raincoat and boots and with that agreeable thigh of which I had caught a momentary glimpse (or was that my imagination, the incorrigible desideratum of a lifetime, deeply entrenched ever since adolescence and which never fades and, as I am discovering, never goes away) when she crouched down to stroke the dog and speak softly to him. ‘Let her come to me,’ I had thought when I stopped abruptly and turned to look at her, ‘if she wants something from me or if she’s following me. That’s her problem. She must have a reason, assuming she was following me or still is, it can’t be in order not to talk to me.’ And there had, in fact, been a reason, she wanted to talk to me and to ask me for something.
I looked at the clock, I looked around me to make sure that the apartment wasn’t too untidy, not that any apartment I’ve ever lived in has been (but that is why we tidy people always check for untidiness whenever anyone comes to see us). It was rather late for England, but not for Spain – there, lots of people would just be going out to supper or wondering where to eat, in Madrid the night was just beginning, and Nuix was half-Spanish or perhaps less – Luisa might be going out right now for a long night with her putative, partying suitor who would want nothing to do with my children and would never step over the threshold (nor – bless him – would he ever occupy my place). That’s her problem, I had thought beneath the endless spears of water, and I repeated these words to myself while I held the door open waiting for her arrival, she was panting a little as she came up the stairs, she had walked quite a long way, I could hear them both panting, her and not just the dog, the same thing had happened to me shortly before, when I came up the stairs and even after I had arrived – two minutes to catch my breath – I had walked a long way across squares and down empty streets and past monuments. That’s her problem, one thinks mistakenly or incompletely, or that’s his problem, when someone is preparing to ask us something. It’s my problem too, we should always add or should I say include. It would doubtless be my problem once the request had left her lips or her throat and once I had heard it. Once we had both heard it, for that is how the person making the request knows his or her message has traversed the air and cannot be ignored, because once it’s in the air, it has reached its destination.