'What the fuck's up with you?' said Custardoy. 'You're Jaime, aren't you?' The use of a swearword denoted aplomb and a certain lack of respect, unless, of course, he always talked like that (after all, he had no reason to respect me and more than enough reason to be angry with me); regardless of whether such aplomb was feigned or real, it was clear, I thought, that I had not yet frightened him enough, and how was I to do that? I sat sideways on the arm of a chair, which meant that not only was I facing him, I was higher up as well.
'Who said you could talk? I didn't. I only said you could smoke. So smoke your cigarette and shut the fuck up.' I flung the swearword back at him so as to place us on an equal footing and I waved the pistol about a bit. I hoped he wasn't used to handling firearms or wouldn't notice that I wasn't. It's not easy to frighten someone if you're not in the habit of doing so. I knew I could do it (I had done so before on occasion), just as I knew or imagined that I would be capable, or at least not incapable, of killing; but to do both those things, I would—perhaps—need to be completely crazy, agitated or furious or gripped by a long-lasting thirst for revenge, and at that moment, I wasn't, not sufficiently; perhaps I had relaxed once the first phase of my unplanned plan had passed without mishap, intercepting Custardoy, going to his apartment and shutting myself up with him there. I had too little hatred. I had too little knowledge. I was too lukewarm. I lacked the necessary heat. And, unlike Tupra, I wasn't cold enough either.
'OK, talk. I haven't got all fucking day to waste over this kind of crazy nonsense. Why are you pointing that gun at me? Just what are you up to, pal?' And he attempted another of those smiles that revealed long shiny teeth and which made him look almost pleasant and his profile less aggressive. He still reminded me of someone, but I didn't have time just then to think who it might be.
Custardoy was either brave or overconfident. Or perhaps he didn't want to appear daunted despite the weapon pointed at his chest by this madman, or maybe he was convinced I wouldn't use it. He had spoken scornfully, as if he wanted to diminish us, me and my gun. He had gone so far as to address me as 'pal' (and I hate people who use such terms), trying to belittle me and make me feel like some ridiculous child with my antiquated pistol in my hand. If he was over-confident, I wondered what more I would have to do to puncture his arrogance: I had already hit him and hurt him, and he must have registered that if I was capable of that, I was capable of worse things. If he continued in that vein, he ran the risk of getting me seriously riled or, as Custardoy might have put it, of getting on my tits. So it suited me that he should continue in that vein. Or perhaps not, he might just make me see myself in that situation as grotesque and puerile.
'Listen,' I said. 'From today on, you're going to stop seeing Luisa Juarez. It's over. No more beatings or cuts or black eyes. You never touch her again, right?'
I thought he would immediately deny ever laying a finger on her and declare: 'I don't know what you're talking about' or some such thing. But he didn't, that wasn't what upset him:
'Oh, really? What? On your say-so? He's got some nerve.' The way he said this irritated me, as if he were not addressing me, but some invisible third party, some imaginary witness with whom he felt at liberty to mock me. 'That's up to her and me, don't you think?'
Yes, that was precisely what I thought. I had no right to involve myself in her affairs, she was free, she was an adult, she might even be very happy with him, she hadn't asked me for my opinion or my protection, she hadn't even deigned to tell me about her day-to-day life, that life no longer concerned me; of course I agreed. None of that, though, was relevant now—I had decided to involve myself and to use force and fear, and at that point you have to leave aside all arguments and principles, all respect and moral reservations and scruples because you have decided to do what you want to do and to impose that decision on others, to achieve your ends without further delay, and then, as with any war once it has begun, being right or wrong should neither intervene nor count. Once that line has been crossed, right or wrong no longer matter, it's simply a matter of getting your own way, of winning and subjugating and prevailing. He had hit her and must be made to stop, that was all. 'Just make sure he's out of the picture,' I repeated to myself. I had to leave that apartment with Custardoy suppressed and erased like a bloodstain, that was all. And my determination grew.
'Yes,' I agreed, 'it should be up to the two of you to make decision, but that isn't how it's going to be. You're going to decide on your own. You're going to give her up today. Which would you rather give up—her or the world. Be quite clear about one thing though: either way you're going to give her up.'
For the first time, I saw him hesitate, perhaps I even caught a glimmer of fear. I thought: 'He's realized that it's not at all difficult to shoot someone, it's just a question of not being yourself for two seconds or perhaps of being yourself-—one moment you're not a murderer and then suddenly you are and will be for all eternity—that anyone with a weapon in his hand might suddenly up and shoot you, all it takes is for him to forget for an instant the magnitude of the gesture, of a single simple gesture, or rather two, cocking the gun and squeezing the trigger, which might be almost simultaneous as it is in Westerns, cocking the hammer and pulling the trigger, put this finger here and that finger there, first one and then the other, up and back and there you are, it can happen to anyone, a slip of the hand or the finger, the hand that, in just one movement, puts the bullet into the barrel or the chamber and then the forefinger drawing back— this is a heavy pistol, quite hard to hold, but hand and finger act on their own as if no one were moving them, no consciousness or will, they caress and stroke and glide almost, you don't even have to make the effort that a sword inevitably requires, with a sword you have to raise it up and then bring it down and both movements require the whole strength of one arm or even both, which is why neither children nor many women nor feeble old men can wield one, but on the other hand, the pistol can be used by the weakest, most fearful, most stupid and most worthless of people—the pistol democratizes killing far more than the dishonorable crossbow—and anyone can cause irreparable damage with one, you just have to let things happen. And if I were to cock the pistol now, Custardoy would be terrified.'
And as soon as I thought this, and despite Miquelin's warning, I cocked the pistol. It was only a test and only for an instant, just to see a spark of panic in those strange dark eyes, it was only a spark, but I saw it. And then I immediately put my thumb on the hammer and lowered it and removed the projectile that had passed into the barrel or chamber or whatever it's called and put it away in my pocket; I uncocked the Llama. But he had seen how quick the pistol was to cock and how, once cocked, the bullets could fly out—a single gesture, then another and another—towards his head or his chest, towards an arm or a leg, towards his codpiece which would be reduced to a few fine hairs like the vanished codpiece of Death in the painting, or towards whatever part I chose to point it at. 'What a very odd feeling,' I thought, 'having a man at your mercy. Deciding if he should live or die, although it's not even really a matter of deciding.'
Custardoy, however, put on a brave face, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to be right, or, given that he had no weapon with which to defend himself, that he was trying to dissuade or terrify or destroy me, or to dig my grave still deeper with his ugly words and with his voice. His voice did not emerge cleanly, it was slightly hoarse, as if there were tiny pins in his throat similar to those on the revolving metallic disc or cylinder in a music box, which strike the tuned teeth of the comb and determine or mark the one repetitive melody. What he said emerged slowly, as if the spikes slowed down his speech. At any rate, he kept his hands on the table. He had finished his cigarette, but hadn't forgotten my earlier order, which was a good sign.
'Look, Jaime.' And it bothered me unutterably that he should call me by my first name, the name that Luisa used and which he had doubtless heard her say (how embarrassing) when she spoke to him about me. 'This is all total bullshit, and in a while
, when you've left here, you'll be the first to see that. What is it that bothers you so much? Is it the fact that I screw her now and then? It's a bit late for you to be complaining about that. You probably do the same in London with whoever takes your fancy, and you're going to have to get used to it, if you aren't already, for Chrissake, there was whatever there was between you two and now there isn't. It happens all the time. But this I really can't believe.' He stopped and gave a short laugh, the laughter that made him almost pleasant and more attractive, he was still not fully aware of the danger, of the danger I represented. 'I mean, it's funny really, this is the last thing I would have expected. It's like a scene straight out of an opera, dammit!' Again he said this as if he were talking to a third party, to a ghost present in the room and not to me, and that drove me wild. He was probably looking forward to telling the story later on to a friend ('You won't believe what happened to me today? Christ, it was weird') or perhaps to Luisa herself ('I bet you can't guess who came to see me today, and toting a gun as well. Fucking hell! You married a really nasty piece of work there, he's nothing like you said, he's a complete headcase'). But he wouldn't be seeing Luisa again, he didn't know that, but I did. I doubted that he would talk quite like that to her, although he did when she wasn't there, of course; foul language came naturally to him, much more than it does to me: I have no problem using swearwords when the situation calls for it, but I lacked his fluency in that particular register, with which I was as familiar as almost everyone else, but which I didn't often use.
'You know exactly what bothers me. You know precisely what I find unacceptable, you bastard. Like I said, from today on, you'll never touch her again.'
He was still unbowed. He was playing a dangerous game. As he must have noticed, he risked heating up my lukewarm blood and provoking hand and finger into action. Perhaps this was a useful stratagem: perhaps he was trying not only to show that he was right, but also to show me that I was not, to open my eyes, to rid himself of this stupid unexpected problem and get on with his life by making me give in.
'What? Oh. The bruises,' he said, and each rasping word was dragged out like the music from a music box, each one emerged slowly as if it kept snagging on something, there was also perhaps a little madrileño bravado in his way of speaking. Then he added a trite remark, which, nonetheless, wounded me when I realized what he was saying; it took me a few seconds because I found it hard to grasp or preferred not to grasp what he meant, or maybe it took me that amount of time to absorb the meaning. 'Look, pal,' again that hateful belittling term, 'everyone has their own sexuality, and with some partners it comes out naturally and with others it doesn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either. It just happened and you have to give people what they want. Or don't you think so? Look, I didn't do anything to her she didn't want me to. Is that clear? So don't damn well go blaming me for something I'm not guilty of, all right?'
Yes, it took me a few seconds. 'What is this guy saying?' I thought. 'He's telling me that Luisa enjoys being knocked around, he's telling me that? That's impossible. It's a lie,' I thought, 'I've known her intimately for years, although less so lately, and I've never seen the slightest suggestion of that, I'd have noticed it, however slight, a hint, a question mark, a glimpse, this guy's trying to slither out of it, trying to justify himself, to escape, he knows why I'm here and that my reason is a grave one and he's been thinking up this false explanation for a while now, he knows for certain that I'm not going to ask Luisa about it and he's taking advantage of that to tell me he only hurts women who want to be hurt, or something of the sort, but Cristina told me how frightened the women were who had slept with him, some at any rate, and their subsequent silence about or concealment of what went on, why wouldn't they speak, if he was a violent brute, they'd report him, they'd alert other women, they'd forewarn them, for example those prostitutes he goes with, sometimes two at a time. No, it can't be true, it's not,' I thought, shrugging off the idea. It's dreadful to be told anything, anything at all, it's dreadful to have ideas put in your head, however unlikely or ridiculous and however unsustainable and improbable (but everything has its time to be believed), any scrap of information registered by the brain stays there until it achieves oblivion, that eternally one-eyed oblivion, any story or fact and even the remotest possibility is recorded, and however much you clean and scrub and erase, that rim is the kind that will never come out; it's understandable really that people should hate knowledge and deny what is there before their eyes and prefer to know nothing and to repudiate the facts, that they should avoid the inoculation and the poison and push it away as soon as they see or feel it near, it's best not to take risks; it's understandable, too, that we almost all ignore what we see and divine and anticipate and smell, and that we toss into the bag of imaginings anything that we see clearly—for however short a time—before it can take root in our mind and leave it forever troubled, and so it's hardly strange that we should be reluctant to know anyone's face, today, tomorrow or yesterday 'What face am I wearing now?' I wondered. 'And what about Luisa's face, one I thought I had plumbed and deciphered and knew, to all intents and purposes, from top to bottom, from past to future and from tomorrow to yesterday, and then along comes this son-of-a-bitch talking about her sexuality and telling me she likes him to get rough with her in bed, it's a joke, I mustn't believe him or think about it, but people do change and, above all, make discoveries, the kind of wretched discovery that takes those people from us and carries them far away, as with young Pérez Nuix when I discovered the pleasure of pretending that I wasn't doing what I was doing or of making believe that what was happening wasn't happening, which is not, I think, quite the same thing, that had been political, a tacit game, but that's what this bastard would say, damn him, that it's all a game, an erotic game, anything is possible, but it can't be true. Luisa's black eye wasn't the result of some game, like hell it was, and yet Custardoy said: "What? Oh. The bruises," why did he use the plural when I've only seen one bruise, perhaps there are more underneath her clothes, on her body, I haven't seen Luisa naked on this visit nor will I, I'll probably never see her naked again, but this bastard will unless I stop him and make sure he's out of the picture now and for good, with no going back and no further delay, don't ever linger or delay, just cock the gun again and squeeze the trigger, it's a simple matter of running my hand over the slide to release it and moving a finger, this and then this, forward and back and a bullet in the head and that will be that, I am, after all, wearing gloves, he'll be out of the picture forever and no more bruises, no more bed, no more wit or charm, it's in my hands to do all of that and I don't even have to listen to him or speak to him again.'
And so I did cock the pistol, and for the first time I moved my index finger from the guard to the trigger, remembering Miquelin's warning and believing that I was following his advice, 'Never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot.' And for a few seconds—one, two, three, four, five; and six—I did know, but not afterwards. I have no idea what saved him that time, it wasn't his silence, perhaps there were several things—thoughts, memories, and a recognition— all crowded together into six or possibly seven seconds, or perhaps other things came to me later and so had more time to be thought or remembered once I was back in my hotel room. 'What face am I wearing now?' I thought again. 'It's the face of all those men and rather fewer women who have held someone else's life in their hands and it could, from one moment to the next, come to resemble the face of those who chose to take that life. Not Reresby's face, who did not, in the end, snatch away De la Garza's life, and who, if he has killed other people, did not do so in my presence, like Wheeler with his outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague. But it would join the face of that vicious malagueño who baited and killed Mares, the face of that Madrid woman who boasted on the tram of having killed a child by smashing its head against a wall, of those militiamen who finished off my young Uncle Alfonso and left h
im dead in the gutter, even the faces of Orlov and Bielov and Carlos Contreras, who tortured Andreu Nin in Alcala and possibly flayed him alive; of Vizconde de La Barthe, who ordered Torrijos and, according to the painting, seventeen of his followers to be shot on the beach as soon as they disembarked, but in reality and in history there may have been many more; the faces of the Czech resistance fighters or students who made an attempt on the life of the Nazi Protector Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and the face of Spooner, the director of the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, who planned it all; the faces of the German occupiers who, in reprisal and with their hatred of place, destroyed the village of Lidice and killed either instantly or slowly one hundred and ninety-nine men and one hundred and eighty-four women on June 10, 1942; the faces of the thugs who machine-gunned those four unfortunates on another hidden beach, in Calabria this time, not far from Crotone, on the Golfo de Taranto, three men and a woman, a killing I myself watched; and the face of the man who screamed at another man in a garage, his mouth so close to the other's face that he sprayed him with saliva, and then shot him at point-blank range beneath the earlobe, as I could do now to Custardoy with no one here to cry out 'Don't!' as I did to Reresby and probably stopped him, I could put the barrel right there and that would be it, blood spurting out and tiny bits of bone; the face of the woman in green, her skirt all rucked up and wearing a sweater and a pearl necklace and high heels but with no stockings, who crushed the skull of a man with a hammer and sat astride him to strike his forehead over and over; the face of the European officer or mercenary who ordered the massacre of twenty Africans who fell in swift succession, like dominoes; the face of Manoia, yes him too, who scooped out the eyes of his prisoner as if they were peach stones and then, according to Tupra, slit his throat; and all those centuries before, the face of Ingram Frizer, who stabbed to death the poet Marlowe in a tavern in Deptford, even though his face is unknown and his name, too, remains uncertain; and, of course, the face of King Richard, who ordered his two little nephews in the Tower to be strangled, and had many others killed too, whether in his angry mood or not, including poor Clarence, drowned by two henchmen in a butt of disgusting wine and held by the legs, which remained outside the barrel and flailed ridiculously about in the air he would never breathe again . . . My face will resemble and be assimilated into that of all those men and rather fewer women who were once masters of time and who held in their hand the hourglass—in the form of a weapon, in the form of an order—and decided suddenly, without lingering or delaying, to stop time, thus obliging others no longer to desire their own desires and to leave even their own first name behind. I don't like being linked to those faces. On the other hand, I must remove Luisa from all danger and suffering and torment, so that her ghost will not one day say to this man what Lady Anne's ghost said to her husband on the eve of battle, nor hurl at him the curse that I am failing to carry out despite being in a position to do so: "Thy wife, that wretched Luisa thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee . . . Let me sit heavy on thy soul, and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die!" Yes, it would be best to kill him while I still have time,' I thought, 'I might not have another opportunity in the future, perhaps there is no other way of removing him from the picture forever and this is the only way to make us safe.' That 'us' surprised me. And it gave me strength and encouragement to discover that I still thought of us as 'us.'