Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (9 page)

So when I recognised him, and saw that he was not wearing any horrifying headgear (at least that was something), I felt only disbelief in my martyred bosom, that is, I managed to think the following thoughts in the midst of my frenzied dancing: 'My God, it's not possible. The attaché De la Garza hangs out in London discotheques dressed like a dandified black rapper, or perhaps like the black proxy of a black boxer. At this hour, he himself may well believe he's black.' And I added to myself: 'What a dickhead, and white to boot.' He was clearly a man who had no time for good taste, or in whom bad taste was so pervasive that it crossed all frontiers, the clear and the blurred; more than that, he was someone capable of taking a lascivious interest in almost any female being — a rather smutty interest, verging on the merely evacuative - at Sir Peter Wheeler's party, he had been capable of taking a fancy, and quite a large fancy at that, to the not-quite-venerable reverend widow or Deaness Wadman, with her soft, straining decolletage and her precious stone necklace of orange segments. (I mean, of course, an interest any female
human
being, I would not like to insinuate things I know nothing about and of which I have no proof.) Flavia Manoia, who was of a similar age, but with considerably more style and dash (a dash of her former beauty, I mean), could easily turn his head after the couple of drinks he already had inside him or was planning to drink in the next few minutes. Instantaneous associative memory made me glance around, quite illogically, for the not-quite-ancient Lord Rymer, the famous and maleficent Flask of Oxford with whom De la Garza had shared so many toasts at the buffet supper and who infallibly incited anyone who placed themselves within reach of his bottle (or flask, it comes to the same thing) to drink like the proverbial fish. But his fame and his clumsy manoeuvrings were now confined to strictly Oxonian territory since his retirement from the House and the consequent abandonment of his legendary intrigues in the cities of Strasbourg, Brussels, Geneva and, of course, London (perhaps he wasn't a life peer, but it was rumoured that the increasingly intoxicated wisdom of his interventions in the Lords - a never-satisfied wisdom - made it advisable, in the end, for him to give up his seat prematurely); and with his convex silhouette and his unpredictable feet he would never have ventured into the brutal world of discos, not even if chaired there by De la Garza and one other person.

I trusted that Rafita de la Garza would be accompanied by that other person or by several, by someone at any rate, or so I thought with a modicum of relief (again, at least it was something) when I saw that he was also waving or, rather, making gestures calling for patience and forbearance from a group of four or five people sitting at a table not far from that occupied by Tupra and Manoia, all, or most, of them self-evidently Spanish, given their shrill voices and their loud, attention-seeking laughter (besides, one of them - a complete idiot - was apparently so moved by the idiotic music that he was wearing the incongruous expression of someone listening to the purest and most painful of flamenco songs, of the kind that would never be played there in a million years, not even in an adulterated, jazzed-up version): it was a very exclusive place of din and deafening clamour, the most idiotically chic place of the season for those who, while not so very young, were nevertheless extremely wealthy, a place chosen by Tupra perhaps to please Flavia Manoia, or so that the only ear that could hear what he said would be that to which his lips were pressed.

'Bloody hell, Deza, where did you get your hands on this piece of pussy?' Those were the great dickhead Rafita's first, repellent and even depressing words to me in Spanish when he could contain himself no longer and swayed onto the dance floor in a terrible pastiche - for that was what it was - of a cocky black man, the semi-slow number was still unfinished, as, therefore, was our semi-fast dance. 'Come on, introduce me, come on, you pig, don't be so selfish. Is she with you or did you pick her up here?' He obviously assumed that Mrs Manoia was English and so, once more, felt invulnerable in his own language, he probably spent his whole stupid life in London feeling exactly that, one day he would put his foot right in it and someone would make mincemeat of him or beat him to a pulp. I was still busily executing turns and he was spinning in my wake (behind me, I mean), addressing the back of my neck with perfect aplomb, entirely unabashed and unembarrassed: I recalled that he specialised in repeatedly interrupting other people's conversations until they imploded, so there was nothing surprising about the fact that he should sidle his way into other people's dances and pulverise those as well. 'I'll bet you a first edition of Lorca that you've pinched her off some idiot here. When we're out on the pull, watch out, eh?'
These small comments of his so enraged me - the puerile rather than, as he probably thought, crude nature of the last; the pedantic wager of this would-be bibliophile; the groundless conceit of his patriotic vulgarity ('we' had to mean 'we Spaniards') — that despite my determination to respond to him in obscure English - for a reason I give below - and to stick with all the resolve of a prisoner of war to my identity as Ure or Dundas, I could not control myself and managed to hurl a few shouted words at him, with my head slightly turned, although not my captive torso:
'You haven't got a first edition of Lorca, Garza Ladra, not even a stolen one.' He probably failed to catch the insulting operatic allusion, but I didn't care, just having made it was reward enough for me. He certainly didn't pick up on it until later, and in a very slow-witted way; initially, though, he opted for a rather snooty, argumentative tone:
'That's where you're wrong, bright boy,' he said, and wagged one absurd, be-ringed finger: he obviously donned his disco gear complete with all the accessories whenever he went out to do some serious partying, or perhaps to play the would-be black; but what could not be explained in such a context (and this is the reason I mention above, the one that should have made me decide to play dumb, and in which aim I immediately failed) was the black Goyaesque hairnet that De la Garza actually and impossibly was wearing to keep his hair in place or for some other cretinous motive, and so my confused vision of that second moment turned out to be right. Now, on the other hand, I couldn't believe it, despite my vision being blindingly clear now. The net did not even have a bob or a ponytail to fill it, its content was pure nothingness; given that he had had the nerve to wear such an anachronistic item, the choice of a sick mind, he could at least have hired a hairpiece, in order, within the awful twisted logic of the idea, to give it meaning and weight and some justification ('meaning' is a manner of speaking, as is 'justification', as is 'mind'). It occurred to me that he might have been sold or given a first-edition Lorca by the former director of the National Library of Spain, who was, I understand, a friend of his and who had, it would seem, taken full advantage of his post — now he was making the most of a still higher post - to squeeze ridiculous prices out of the finest antiquarian booksellers, claiming that he was acquiring the rare, expensive volume in question for that public institution, which was often, moreover, closed to Spanish citizens (appealing, in short, to the patriotic or, in this case, the most easily duped side of each seller), when, in fact, those books flew direct, with no official stopover, to his own private collection, which was still in a phase of rapid expansion.

I chose not to enquire just then why I was a bright boy and why I was wrong. I noticed that Mrs Manoia was beginning to get annoyed. It was completely unacceptable that, in the middle of a dance, her dance, some ridiculous and possibly already rather inebriated man should clumsily join us on the dance floor, position himself behind her partner and begin loudly berating the back of the latter's neck; it had been even more discourteous on my part, I realised, to reply to this erratic individual, even if only with a single, angry phrase, instead of stopping him literally in his tracks and sending him packing back to the bar, or even further off if I was really trying. Nevertheless, I wasn't sure if her annoyance was due to my momentary neglect, to De la Garza's pure, simple and unprecedented intrusion, or to the fact that I had not suggested an immediate halt to the dancing in order to introduce them formally. It seemed to me she felt some curiosity about Rafita the nightbird in his unintelligible get-up, but it was hard to tell, it might just have been complete bewilderment: as she danced, she must have been seeing two faces juxtaposed, which would have put her off pressing still more closely to my breast or concentrating on and enjoying her steps; I saw, too, how, irresistibly, she kept glancing up at the person behind me, she was understandably distracted by the sight of that accessory more suited to a matador or to an eighteenth-century
majo,
she could probably not quite make out what it was or its improbable significance, its hermetic symbolism. Or perhaps she had sensed from the very first that, regardless of the string bag with which he had chosen to adorn his hair, regardless of the fortune-teller's earring with which he had encumbered his ear, this second Spaniard would be for her a certain, possibly inexhaustible, source of flattery. The idea came to me anyway, and in a fit of irresponsibility and egotism, it occurred to me that it would be no bad thing to let the attaché join us for a while, he would keep her supplied with a variety of glowing words and compliments (albeit indecipherable), and put on a brave front (the phrase was never more apt) and withstand the stakes or logs if she insisted on more dances. (I was, I feared, being more meagre with my words of praise than I was expected to be, not because I was being excessively prudent or because I found it hard to flatter such a spirited and receptive woman, who was, basically, very easily contented, except that no amount of contentment lasted her for very long and she required constant nourishment, but because I get so bored with expressions such as
carine
or
tenere,
and their monotonous nature soon cloys, even if I happen to read them in a novel or hear them in a film, even if I say them in real life or someone addresses them to me.) Whatever the truth of the matter, it took only four words from Flavia Manoia for me to convince myself that the current situation was unsustainable and that I should, without further delay, proceed to the introductions. And I felt quite certain of this when I saw out of the corner of my eye that Manoia, into whose ear Tupra was insinuating long, whispered arguments or propositions, had shot a couple of interrogative, not to say inquisitorial, glances at the dance floor since De la Garza had been pestering us, a total stranger, -in his eyes, who showed every sign of being a troublemaker and who might even be taken for a debauchee.

'Mah,'
was Flavia's first word, and it is a word of great ambiguity in the Italian language, it can indicate consent, vexation, slight interest, slight irritation, confusion, doubt, or it may merely announce a full stop and the start of a new topic. And then she added:
'Che sarebbe, lui?
' This was enough for me to interrupt the dance and disimpale myself very gently and carefully from the palisade, but she asked me one other thing before I pronounced the names:
'E cosa vuol dire
pussy?' She must have understood almost nothing of what had been spoken
by that disgrace to the Peninsula (although nowadays there are so many similar disgraces that they almost constitute the norm, and so can hardly be termed a disgrace), but perhaps she had sensed that this memorable term was intended for her, that it had been applied to her, and in pretty brazen tones.

'Rafael de la Garza, from the Spanish embassy in London. Mrs Flavia Manoia, a delightful Italian friend of mine.' I used Italian to introduce them, and took the opportunity to insert an adulatory word; then I added in Spanish, that is, purely for Rafita's benefit and in order to warn him off or to contain him (possibly a naive endeavour): 'That's her husband over there, he has a lot of influence in the Vatican.' I was hoping to impress him. 'On the same table as Mr Reresby, you remember Mr Reresby, don't you? At Sir Peter's party?' Of one thing I was sure, he would not remember that in Wheeler's house Tupra's surname had been Tupra.

'Oh, but he's so young, your ambassador,' she replied still in Italian, while they shook hands. 'And he's so modern too, so daring in the way he dresses, don't you think? Your country is clearly so very up to date in every respect. Oh, yes, in every respect.' Then she asked me again about 'pussy', she was determined to know. 'Tell me what "pussy" means, go on, tell me.'

De la Garza was talking to me at the same time (each of them bellowing in one of my ears and each in his or her own language), keeping the lady's hand clasped in his for far too long, that is, holding it prisoner while he unleashed a long string of insults and obscenities which the sight and recollection of Reresby caused to spill from his mouth as soon as he spotted him, and which I wasn't entirely able to follow, but from which I picked out the following words, fractured phrases and concepts: 'bastard', 'ringlets', 'big tall bint', 'a right tart', 'showing me her knickers', 'they cleared off', 'great lump of lard', 'flabbing up against her', 'frigging sofa', 'did you get them off her', 'pretence', 'bloody gypsy', 'bitch'; 'oh, purr-lease', and a final question: 'Did you have a dash in the bloomers yourself?' After this torrent of words, he brought himself back for a moment to the present:
'What did you say before about
ladra?
You mean this corker of a -woman? Bloody hell, look at those bazoomas.' His vocabulary was often at its most schoolboyish or antiquated when he was trying his best to be crude. He had, however, seen that any approach might be problematic. He had not, on the other hand, even considered the matter of their obvious artificiality (the work of man), he was not a person for fine distinctions or for getting lost in petty details. Then, for an instant, he adopted an unctuous tone to address and flatter Flavia: 'It is an enormous pleasure to meet you, madam, and may I assure you of my equally enormous admiration.' This she did understand, it would have been crystal clear to any Italian.