Your Face Tomorrow
2: Dance and Dream
Javier Marias
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY
Margaret Jull Costa
Published by Vintage 2007 24681097531
First published with the title Tu rostra manana (2 Baile y Seuno) by Alfaguera, Spain 2004
Copyright © Javier Marias, 2004 English translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2006
Javier Marias has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
For Carmen Lopez 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
Your Face Tomorrow
III Dance
IV Dream
The translator would like to thank Javier Marias, Annella McDermott, Palmira Sullivan, Antonio Martin and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.
III Dance
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.'
&nbs
p; 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.'