I said nothing for a moment, neither of us did. I was aware that young Nuix had still not asked me the favour, not strictly speaking, not entirely, not completely. And she had not, therefore, contradicted or disagreed with me at any point, she had merely set out her point of view, based on her experience, which appeared much greater than seemed possible given her youth, at what age did she start, at what age would she have left behind that youth which she preserved only when she remained silent or when she laughed, not, of course, when she argued or held forth, nor when, in the building with no name, she interpreted people with such discernment, she would long since have plumbed my depths, she would already have turned me inside out? Unless there were still times when she saw me as an enigma, as did the person who had written my report, the one about me. Unless she considered me 'a lost cause' upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought, as, according to that text, I myself did. ('He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will,' the writer of the report had said of me. 'And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so.')
I wondered to what extent Tupra was speaking through her; some of her arguments sounded like him to me, or rather (I hadn't actually heard him use them) they sounded like his way of being in the world, as if he might have silently inculcated her with them during their many years of proximity or, perhaps, intimacy. 'So I don't see the difference, Jaime,' she had said, for example, doubtless in order not to upset me, instead of 'I don't agree with you, Jaime', or 'You're wrong, Jaime', or 'You really haven't thought it through, try again', or 'You have no idea'. I had several questions troubling me, but if I gave voice to them all, we would never end. 'What do you know about criminals?', 'Who are these "wet gamblers"?' and 'Who do I have to lie or keep silent about in order to please you?' and 'You still haven't asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly', and 'How long have you been working here, how old were you when you started, who were you or what were you like before?' and 'Which private private individuals do you mean, and how is it that this time you know so much about this particular commission, its origin and provenance?' In fact, I could have asked all these questions, one after the other, I was in charge of the conversation, that was my privilege. There was no way now that it would take only the 'moment' that she had promised, everything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carries within itself its own prolongation and every phrase leaves a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too. It often astonishes me that there should always be an answer for everything or that an answer can always be attempted, not just for questions and mysteries, but for assertions and things known, for the irrefutable and the certain, as well as for doubts and looks and even for gestures. Everything persists and continues on its own, even if you yourself decide to withdraw. This was definitely not going to take a 'moment', nothing is brief unless cut short. But it clearly depended on me now as to whether it became a whole night plus its ensuing dawn, or the drunken loquacity of a shared insomnia.
'You still haven't properly asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly. And which private individuals do you mean, which private private individuals?' — And as I repeated the young woman's words, I could not help remembering Wheeler and his recitation about kings and private individuals: 'What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?' Those lines had sprung effortlessly from his memory, while I, on the other hand, still did not know their provenance. I ended up asking her only two questions, postponing the others. But when you postpone something you never know if you are, in fact, renouncing it, because at any time — that is, always - there may not be a tomorrow or an afterwards or a later, yes, that is possible at any time. But no, that's not true: there is always more to come, there is always a little more, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and dreams - spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams - and then, of course, there is interminable time that does not even pause or slow its pace after our final end, but continues to make additions and to speak, to murmur, to ask questions and to tell tales, even though we can no longer hear and have fallen silent. To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves. No one, not even after death. It is as if nothing had stopped resonating since the very beginning, not even when we can no longer recognise or trace the living, who are perhaps still alive, we live alert to and troubled by innumerable voices whose origin we do not know, they are so distant and muffled, or have they just been dug down too deep? Perhaps they are the feeble echoes of unrecorded lives, whose cries have been seething in their impatient minds since yesterday or for centuries now: 'We were born at such a place,' they exclaim out of their infinite waiting, 'and we died at such a place.' And far worse things too.
Sometimes four or five of us would go out together, and occasionally six or seven, when Tupra invited Jane Treves or Branshaw or both, for I did eventually meet them, or even, depending on the situation or the place, some other sporadic outside informant or guide. These were times, I think, when Tupra felt festive and convivial and in need of accompaniment, not so much company as accompaniment, in need of an escort, a retinue or perhaps a herd, as if he wanted to experience a feeling of belonging, to have a tangible, noisy sense of forming part, with us, of a team or a group or a body, and being able to say that word 'us' often. On several such nights and days my sense was, rather, of being part of a gang, or of a matador's cuadrilla. I guessed that this gregarious inclination corresponded with times when he was fleeing from Beryl or she from him, if it was Beryl. Not that it mattered who exactly: it corresponded with times when no particular woman was allowing herself to be sufficiently monopolised by him or, consequently, when there was no woman to distract him during his freer or more sociable or diplomatic or preparatory moments from his realms and his manoeuvres, or else when he was avoiding the threat of some woman becoming all too particular.
These were only guesses on my part. Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to past experiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behaviour and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel; a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge. His pale eyes did not merely take in something as tiny as the scene at a buffet supper, they penetrated and analysed and drained it in an instant (me included) - it was child's play to him.
These, however, were my intuitions, suppositions and imaginings; for his part, he exposed fragments and revealed isolated flashes of his past life in the form of maxims and adages or, sometimes, unintended aphorisms, almost proverbs of his own making. And thus one gradually tied up loose ends, which, however, always came undone again, however firmly one had tied them and with however perfect a knot, as if, in his case, the areas of shadow grew still larger whenever one managed to glimpse the glowing ember of some isolated period or insignificant episode of his existence, or as if each tiny revelation served only to make one appreciate the vastness of what remained dark or opaque or murky or even distorted, just as his long eyelashes, the envy of many women, always rendered murky or opaque the ultimate intention of his meditations, which were so prolonged they seemed almost insubstantial, and the true meaning of his looks, which were, it is true, clear and flattering and warm, but very hard to decipher. It was not surp
rising, then, that we men should be suspicious of eyes that were both so welcoming and so elaborately adorned.
We might, for example, be at a performance by a nightclub singer, sitting round a table near the dance floor or the stage in one of those splendid but antiquated clubs to which he sometimes liked to take us in order to soothe our dazed minds and offer us a leisurely transition period before finally sending us home, those, that is, who could take it, the night-owls, or those he kept closest by his side. And pointing his dense eyelashes in the direction of the artiste, Tupra would suddenly murmur: 'Women who sing in public are very exposed and are always the victims of those who guide them; she would collapse on the spot, like an old sack, if the man who steers her steps each night and leads her up onto the stage were to turn his back on her and walk away, never mind if he were to spurn her. All it would take would be one malign breath from him and she would fall to the floor and wish never to rise again.' For a few seconds, I wasn't sure if he was speaking from I personal knowledge, if perhaps he knew about the suicidal dependence of that woman on someone whose face or name were also known to him (a bag of flour, a bag of meat, that's what they use to practise sticking in bayonets or spears, in one there is pain and sleep and in the other nothing). And if I dared to test him out ('Do you know them, Mr Tupra, that woman and that man?' Or perhaps, by that time, I was calling him Bertram), then he would make it quite clear that this was not the case or not necessarily so, and that he was merely applying to the present what the past had taught him: 'I don't need to know them personally,' he would reply, keeping his eyelashes trained on the singer, that is, with his face still in profile, without turning round, and in a tone of slight or purely theoretical regret, 'I know exactly what this particular man and woman are like, I've seen dozens of them everywhere, from Bethnal Green to Cairo.'
That would give me an idea, or several ideas, the most obvious being that he knew Bethnal Green, that depressed east London neighbourhood, quite well and that he had been in Egypt, probably not as a tourist. I couldn't help wondering either if he hadn't, at some point, acted as agent for a female artiste and was referring to himself and to his submissive former protégée. However, I rejected this hypothesis at once, he didn't strike me as the protective, vigilant or even dominant type, that is, with the permanent responsibilities which all those qualities imply. 'He was probably witness to that drama or outline of a drama,' I thought, 'even if only on two occasions: in Bethnal Green and in Cairo.' I sensed or knew (I sensed it first and knew it later on) that if I asked him a direct question or tried to make him focus on a particular event, he would ignore me and avoid the subject, not so much in order to appear mysterious as because reminiscing bored him, he would doubtless not have understood those people who love to speak about their experiences, experiences that they know inside out, including how they ended, and still less those narcissistic writers of diaries who can never quite free themselves from their past, and repeat it with embellishments. For that reason I did not try to worm out of him or to draw from him any a posteriori explanations for his rulings, there was no point, if they came, they came of their own accord and possibly several nights later, and, at most, I would allow myself a little joke at his expense: 'And what about women who dance in public, Bertram? Are they equally exposed?' Tupra had a sense of humour or, at least, tolerated mine. He would shoot me a rapid sideways glance, bite the inside of one cheek so as not to allow so much as a half-smile to escape him, and then would pick up my comment, or so it seemed to me, because nothing in him was transparent or sure or to be taken for granted: 'No, Jack, dancers are far less exposed; bear in mind that keeping on the move always provides protection, it's much more dangerous to stay still, it makes you more vulnerable. Those who run away or hide often forget this, they allow fear to take advantage of them, instead of themselves taking advantage of fear.' He had a way of linking sentences so that the second diverged from the first, the third from the second and so on until he wearied of them all and preferred to remain silent for a while. With him, therefore, it was difficult to go into any subject in depth, unless he was the one asking the questions, the one wanting to reach the bottom of something. 'In what way can one take advantage of fear?' I asked once, seduced by one of his divergent sentences: 'I assume you mean one's own fear.' To which he replied: ‘Fear is the greatest force that exists, as long as you can adapt to it and feel at home and live on good terms with it, and not waste energy battling to ward it off. Because you can never entirely win that battle; even in moments of apparent victory, you're already anticipating its return, you live under constant threat, and then you become paralysed, and fear immediately takes advantage of that. If, on the other hand, you accept fear (that is, if you adjust to it, if you get used to it being there), that gives you incomparable strength and you can then take advantage of that strength and use it. Its possibilities are infinite, far greater than those inherent in hatred, ambition, unconditionality, love, the desire for revenge; they're all unknown quantities. Take someone in whom fear has taken deep roots, in whom fear remains active, an everyday kind of fear that has been incorporated into normal life, that person will be capable of truly superhuman exploits. Mothers with small children know this, or most do. As does anyone who's been in a war. But you haven't, have you, Jack? You've been lucky. But that also means that your education will be forever incomplete. They should send mothers into battle with their children nearby, within sight, to hand, because mothers carry their fear with them, it's a permanent fixture; there could be no fiercer combatants.' If I asked him what wars he had known or taken part in, he certainly wouldn't tell me and wouldn't name them; and if I asked him to expand on his thoughts about the perfect education for a man or about the ferocity of mothers with young children, he would almost certainly bring the conversation to a close. There always came a point when his divergences would fail to find another path, would run into scrub or sand or swamp. He might even put his finger to his lips and then point that same finger at the singer with a look of implicit reproach at my chatter, as if demanding for her art the respect which he himself had denied it only moments before, when he had first spoken, albeit in a murmur and without once taking his eyes off her.
At the start of every sociable period (these usually lasted two or three weeks), he would invite us out, on some work pretext, to suppers or to evenings of itinerant partying. 'I'd like you all to come with me to an important meeting,' he would say or, rather, command, in his semi-authoritarian way. 'I want to give the impression to some people I'm doing a deal with that we form a compact, almost intimidating group.' 'I want you to be particularly attentive to our guests tonight, make them feel comfortable, make sure they have a good time, but keep a close eye on them, because I'll ask you about them later, the more views we have the better.' He didn't usually explain further, or say why he wanted to create that impression or what the deal was or who exactly they were, these individuals with whom we were mingling, mostly British with the occasional foreigner, although, when I think about it and if I include Americans, foreigners weren't so very infrequent. Sometimes, however, it was absolutely clear what or who they were, either from the way the conversation developed, or because they were famous, as famous, almost, as Dick Dearlove. Tupra had an incredibly varied acquaintanceship for one man, if, that is, he was just one man, because I heard him called by different names or, rather, surnames, depending on the place and the company and the circumstances. The first time the maitre d' of some expensive restaurant addressed him in my presence as 'Mr Dundas', he saw that my surprise might give him away and so, after that, he always warned us or me whenever he was not going to be wholly himself. 'I'm Mr Dundas here,' he would tell us. 'Here, I'm Mr Reresby, remember that.' 'They think of me in this place as Mr Ure.' I had to ask him to spell this last name, just hearing it pronounced wasn't enough for me to catch it, that is, to imagine it written down, on his lips it sounded like 'Iuah', I couldn't even guess at its spelling. They were all unusual surnames, slightly antiquated, odd
(perhaps vaguely aristocratic or, to my ear, approximately Scottish), as if Tupra, having given up his own name, was not prepared also to do without the originality of name that had accompanied him since birth, without that Finnish, Russian, Czech, Turkish or Armenian Tupra, always assuming he had, as Wheeler believed, borne that name for a long time. He would have found it extremely galling to be called, even if only for a while, something dull or something that might be confused with something else, as most people, in principle, would, when choosing a false name: I don't know, Gray, Green, Grant or Graham, excluding, of course, such threadbare possibilities as Brown, Smith and Jones.