Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (40 page)

'Is Don Esteban Custardoy there, please?' I asked.

'Who?' The woman was doubtless elderly.

'Cus-tar-doy' I said slowly and clearly. 'Don Esteban.'

'No, he doesn't live here.'

'I must have the wrong apartment. Would you be so kind as to tell me which apartment he lives in? I have a telegram for him.'

'A telegram for me? Who from? We never get telegrams.'

'No, not for you, madam.' I realized that I would get nowhere with her. 'It's for your neighbor, Señor Custardoy. Would you mind telling me which floor he's on?'

'Which floor? This is the second floor,' she said. 'But there's no Bujaraloz living here. You've got the wrong address.'

The sound on those tinny intercoms is always dreadful, but the lady in question must, like Goya, have been both Aragonese and deaf for her to be able to trot out so blithely and so fluently the name of that rather obscure town in the province of Zaragoza. I apologized and thanked her, then left her in peace.

I decided to press a third bell, but there was no response, so many people have lunch out in Madrid. I tried a fourth bell and immediately heard another female voice, younger and more encouraging.

'Esteban Buscato?' the voice asked. That was the surname of a former basketball player, she must be a fan, I thought. 'No, I don't know the name. I don't think he lives here.' There was some creaking and the sound of the sea in the background, it was like having a seashell pressed to my ear and as if a ship somewhere out there was about to be wrecked.

'The name's Custardoy' I said again. 'Cus-tar-doy. He's a painter. Perhaps you could tell me which floor he lives on or where he has his studio. He's a painter, Custardoy the painter.'

'We're not expecting any painter here.'

'No,
I'm
not a painter, Madam,' I said, fast losing hope. 'I have a telegram for Señor Custardoy. He's the painter. Don't you know of a painter living in this building? A painter, not a house painter, but a painter like Goya, do you know him?'

'Of course I know Goya. He's the one who painted
La Maja!
And she sounded rather offended. 'But as I'm sure you can imagine, he doesn't live here, or anywhere else for that matter. You may not know this, but he's dead.'

I silently cursed the forger's outlandish surname and gave up. I couldn't stay there much longer, ringing every bell, or I could do so on another occasion (ringing two was enough at any one time, I shouldn't overstep the mark), or return at a different hour when the real-life doorman would be in, if there was one. Besides, it occurred to me that Custardoy might have rented or bought his apartment or studio under a false name, as befitted a criminal, or maybe under his own name, Custardoy being a pseudonym. In either case, no one in that building would be able to tell me where to find him.

I was almost certain I had the right place, which was promising, but I had to make sure and find out what floor he lived on and in which apartment; Tupra, I knew, would have had no qualms about stationing himself outside my house from early on—that is, outside Luisa's house—waiting for her to come out and following her as often as proved necessary, knowing that on one such sortie she was sure to head for that area near the Royal Palace and the cathedral-
cum
-eyesore, near Cuesta de la Vega and Atenas Park and the various other local parks and gardens, Sabatini, Campo del Moro, Viaducto and Vistillas or what remained of them (I had read that the Council and the Church were plotting to do away with them and use the land to build diocesan offices or semi-clerical housing or a parking lot or something), where the Madrid of the Habsburgs mingled with that of Carlos III, until she arrived at that or another door. I, however, did have qualms. It wasn't just that it seemed wrong and contemptible of me to shadow her like that, I feared, above all, that she might spot me and then all my plans would be ruined: she'd be on the alert, she'd be sure to get angry and forbid me from interfering in any aspect or area of her life, and then I would be unable to talk to Custardoy or influence him without her attributing to me any resulting change, and blaming me for any rupture with the con man or, indeed, his withdrawal, the thing I so desired, and then, as her sister had predicted, she would never speak to me again; well, perhaps not never, but certainly not for a long time. I had to save Luisa without her suspecting my intervention, or as little as possible. She would always have an inkling that there was some connection, because of my presence in Madrid: her boyfriend vanishing just when I appeared or shortly afterwards would be too much of a coincidence, and she'd be left with the conviction that I'd had something to do with it. However, if I performed my task well and kept out of the way as much as possible, that conviction would have no grounds, no proof, and, as such, would soon fade and end up tossed into the bag of suspicions and imaginings.

During the days that followed, I visited my children and took them out as often as I could, occasionally meeting Luisa when I picked them up or dropped them off, but usually encountering only the Polish babysitter. I avoided hanging around, as I had on the first night; I avoided asking Luisa anything more about her black eye, or, at most, ventured some neutral, indirect comment: 'I see it's getting better—but try to be more careful in future.' Nor did I insist we meet on our own one day, to go out to supper and talk in peace, it was best to see very little of her during that stay and concentrate on trying to extricate her from the unhealthy relationship she had got herself into, even if she didn't see the relationship like that or, worse, was drawn to it. And if she was bemused by my lack of insistence, I could always say chivalrously: 'You've got too much to do. I'm just passing through, almost like a tourist really. And it seems more appropriate to let you take the initiative. Besides, I need to spend time with my father, who's not at all well. He sends his love by the way, and always asks after you.' And so I tried to remove myself and not to coincide with her except where the coincidence was genuine, not to make myself too visible or to be always bumping into her, as would have been tempting, and as I might have tended to do had I not immediately taken on that unexpected, specific, urgent, vital task as soon as I arrived in Madrid. Not that I found it easy to maintain a discreet pose, especially when the first week had passed and Luisa showed no sign of regret at not being able to spend time with me nor—most woundingly of all—did she show any curiosity about my life in London, about the kind of person I was when I was there, about who I hung around with, nor if I had become someone else, even if only superficially, nor about my current job of which I had spoken so little over the phone, almost avoiding her occasional questions, perhaps asked only perfunctorily and out of politeness, but at least they were questions. Now there were no questions of any kind, nor did she seek the opportunity to ask them: during that first week she never made a single proposal to meet or get together, to go out to lunch, to linger a while in the apartment or have supper or a drink with her when I returned with Guillermo and Marina in the evening, having taken them to the movies or the Retire or wherever. It was as if she had no mental space to think of anything apart from her relationship with Custardoy, or at least that was what I assumed must be filling it entirely, for what else could it have been? She seemed to me absorbed, preoccupied. It wasn't the absorption of mere excitement or of plenitude. Nor that of anxiety or torment or unease, but that of someone struggling to understand or to decipher something.

And I did, in fact, spend time with my father and see my siblings and a few friends; I also visited Madrid's secondhand bookshops and generally mooched around. In one of those bookshops I bought a present for Sir Peter, a large book of propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War, some of which, I noticed, bore the same 'careless talk' slogan as had appeared in his own country, with very similar warnings—I'd had a vague recollection of seeing something similar in Spain, although he never had—and he would be intrigued to see these Spanish precursors, as would Mrs. Berry. I would go and see him as soon as I got back, without fail. And one morning, I returned to the area where Custardoy lived and, standing on the sidewalk opposite, looked at the street door leading to his apartment or studio in Calle Mayor. The door was still closed, so it may be that there was no doorman or only one who kept a very brief or idle or erratic timetable. In the end, however, I had decided that if I were ever to find him in, I would not approach the doorman; it was best that no one should see or identify me, still less associate me with Custardoy. If I were to go there in person to enquire after that copyist and forger, I might, depending on what happened later on between him and me, be putting myself in a vulnerable position, for you never know what might occur when two men come face to face and argue, or if one of them tries to get or demand something from the other, to force or convince or dissuade or repel. Standing on the same side of the street as the abominable cathedral, I looked up at the balconies, in the bizarre hope that I might have the great good luck that while I was there, Custardoy would appear on his—I would recognize him by his ponytail and from Cristina's grudging description—and I would know then, with no need for further effort or investigation, just where he worked or lived. There were balconies on all the floors until the fifth, where there were only the windows of what looked like an attic apartment. The balconies of the apartment immediately above the enormous door were made of stone and had little columns, while above that they were all fancy wrought iron, and every one had slatted shutters that stood open, an indication that each apartment was occupied and no one was away or traveling, and that Custardoy was in town. I studied each balcony and each window, trying to take in the fact—rather than imagine, which would have been a disagreeable and superfluous exercise—that behind one of them Luisa and Custardoy met and went to bed together, laughed and talked, discussed their day, that there they had perhaps argued and he had slapped her round the face with his open hand or punched her in the eye with his closed fist. He must be a very irascible fellow or perhaps not, perhaps he was utterly cold and had delivered both blows as a calculated warning, to remind her just what and how much he was capable of. And it might be that one night my wife would emerge from that ornate door opposite me, trembling with fear and excitement, simultaneously horrified and captivated. No, I didn't like that man or anything I knew or could imagine about him.

I also took to going to the Prado each morning, before I did anything else and as soon as I'd had breakfast, it was right across the street from my hotel. This wasn't just for my enjoyment and because I hadn't visited the place for ages. I also had in mind something my sister-in-law Cristina had said to me about Custardoy: '. . . sometimes he's commissioned to copy paintings from the Prado and he spends hours there studying and copying.' And so the first thing I did on the first day I went into the museum, and before looking at any pictures at all, was to search the place from top to bottom and from end to end, scrutinizing the copyists who were working in the various rooms, in case one of them was a fifty-something man with his hair scraped back in a ponytail, a man prepared to spend hours and hours before some painting not of his choice, whether good, bad or indifferent. Needless to say I spotted none of these characteristics, indeed, most of the copyists were youngish women, although not all of them young enough to be art students. Perhaps it's another of those professions, like art restoration, that the female population has appropriated and which they do very well. I saw no one answering that description on the second day either. I carried out that same preliminary patrol, although I was filled this time with less hope or was it mere superstition: copying is such a slow task that it was likely that only those from the day before would be there again, or so it seemed; it would have been an extraordinary coincidence if Custardoy had started work on one of his copies or forgeries on the very day I happened to be there, on the alert. This, however, did not prevent me from repeating what I had done the previous morning and striding round all the galleries, studying the few people who were sitting or, in some cases, standing at their easels, intent on reproducing what was there before their eyes, something that already existed and which had, usually, been painted better several centuries before.

On the fifth day, I got up late, after a relatively wild night with some old friends, and only arrived at the Prado around one o'clock, about two hours later than usual. I wanted to visit some of the rooms containing works by Italian artists that I hadn't seen for years, and since those in charge of the museum have the ridiculous habit of moving everything around every so often—as if they were running a supermarket—and I suspected that it would take me a while to find the current location of those paintings, I dispensed with my preliminary patrol and inspection of the copyists. And it was there and then that I noticed in passing, in one of the long galleries on the ground floor, a man with a short piratical or matadorish pigtail who wasn't copying anything, but taking notes or doing pencil sketches of a painting in a fairly sizeable sketch pad, although not so large that he couldn't hold it in one hand. He was standing quite close to the picture in question and therefore with his back to me or to anyone else who was not right next to him or who had decided to block his view. I was perfectly within my rights to do either or both of those things, it is, after all, quite common nowadays for rude tourists—almost a tautology really—or indeed the rude natives of any city to impatiently, inconsiderately interpose themselves between painting and viewer and even elbow the latter none too subtly out of the way in order to occupy his or her more central position, the way of the world of which Tupra spoke has become ill-mannered, especially in Spain, although it's now a near-universal phenomenon. I kept a safe distance from him and not only so as not to appear rude. Initially, I observed him from behind, but just as there was no space to his right, only a rope barrier and the side wall, to the left of the painting there was a high door and to the left of that another painting (there were only two on that end wall), and so I moved cautiously in that direction to get as clear a view as possible of his profile, at the same time doing my best not to enter, or only minimally, his field of vision. I realized at once that I needn't worry about him seeing me, for he was totally absorbed in the painting and in his sketchbook, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between the two, with no interest in anything else, he wasn't even distracted by the continuous ebb and flow of tourists, mostly Italians (come to admire their ancient compatriots), who, curiously enough, did not insist on crowding round him and bothering him by looking at what he was looking at, rather, on seeing him so absorbed in his work, they walked past without stopping, as if intimidated by that tense motionless figure and as if prepared, for the moment, to allow him exclusive usufruct and enjoyment of it. I noticed that he had a mustache and sideburns, which, although not long, were somewhat longer than is perhaps considered the norm nowadays, or perhaps they were merely striking because, while his hair was straight and rather fair and with no visible grey in it, his sideburns were curly and much darker, almost black, but streaked with white and grey, as if old age had decided to begin its work from the sides, leaving the pale dome for later. He was quite tall and thin, with perhaps some evidence around his belly of having drunk too much beer, but the general impression was of someone gaunt and bony, and what I could see of his cheekbones and his broad forehead confirmed that impression, as did his swift active right hand, which had the long strong fingers of a professional pianist; alarming fingers, like piano keys.