Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (56 page)

In other circumstances I wouldn't have enjoyed hearing that conversation at all, hearing Luisa pleading with that other man, very nearly begging him, before reacting with wounded dignity to his evasiveness or indifference. But I had prepared that scene, almost set it up and dictated it, as if I were Wheeler, who doubtless devoted no small part of his time to the preparation or composition of prized moments, or, so to speak, to guiding his numerous empty or dead moments towards a few pre-planned and carefully considered dialogues in which he had, of course, memorized his own part. Except that I hadn't intervened in that conversation, or, rather, Custardoy had spoken for me, for he was, after all, not using his own words, but those which I, like an Iago, had led him to say or obliged him to pronounce. Knowing that I was there, close by, must have increased his fear as well as his hatred of me. My presence had been a complete coincidence, but he would not have experienced it like that, he would have thought I was watching over the whole process, keeping an eye on things. So much the better for me.

Luisa came over to where I was standing, the cell phone still in her hand, and the look on her face was a mixture of puzzlement, resignation and annoyance. 'You've still got a long way to go,' I thought, 'you'll know worse despair yet. And then you'll seek me out, because I'm the person you know best and the one who will always be here.'

'Right, I'd better be going,' I said, picking up my raincoat and gloves. She had initially asked the caller to phone back in five minutes, ready, at a moment's notice, to sacrifice our conversation, the one we had unexpectedly been about to have. Missing that conversation, having it or not, was only of secondary importance to her. And at that point, it was to me as well. My chance would not come on that trip, I would have to wait quite a while longer.

'I'm sorry,' she murmured. 'Problems at work. People behave in the strangest way. They say they'll do one thing, then forget all about it and disappear.' She didn't need to give me any false explanations. The conversation had clearly been of a personal nature, and nothing to do with work. I knew what was going on, and she as yet did not. I didn't mind being so far ahead of her, I didn't mind deceiving her. 'This isn't the Jaime I know,' Cristina would say to me later on, and I had already thought the same thing: 'No, I'm not. I am more myself.'

Luisa accompanied me to the door. We kissed each other on the cheek, but this time she embraced me too. I sensed that she did so more out of a feeling of vulnerability, or a sudden sense of abandonment and loss, than out of genuine affection. Nevertheless, I returned her embrace warmly and enthusiastically. I certainly didn't mind embracing her, I never had.

'Come, come back to me, I'll be patient, I'll wait; but don't delay very much longer,' I thought when I was on the plane, remembering that farewell. And then I quoted to myself a line from a recent poem in English that I'd read during one of my trips with Tupra, on a train: 'Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.'

That was the last thing that happened before everything changed. I asked the stewardess for an English newspaper; I needed to get used to that other country again. I hadn't even looked at a Spanish newspaper that morning, I was still too involved in my own thoughts to bother with the outside world, although a copy of
El País
lay unopened on my lap. The stewardess offered me
The Guardian, The Independent
and
The Times,
and I chose the first two because I can't stand the dreadful decadence into which the third one has fallen under its present Antipodean regime. I glanced at the front page of
The Guardian,
and my gaze fixed instantly—familiar names always call to us, immediately attract our attention—on a report that must have made my eyes start from their sockets and which sent me straight to the front page of
The Independent
for reassurance and confirmation that this wasn't some absurd sick joke or a figment of someone's imagination. Both papers carried the story, so it must be true, and although it wasn't a headline or a long item, the report was given due prominence in both: 'Dick Dearlove Arrested Following Boy's Violent Death.' Obviously neither headline said 'Dick Dearlove'; Dearlove is just the name I have taken to calling him by.

I turned immediately to the relevant pages and read them fearfully, eagerly, then with a sense of horror and growing repugnance towards Tupra and myself—in fact, a feeling of self-disgust swept over me at once. The information was incomplete and the facts confused and did little to clarify the succinct, not to say hermetic statements made by Dearlove's spokesman and his lawyers, who were the people who had reported the incident to New Scotland Yard on the morning after the night of the murder, which made one think that they must have had a few hours to weigh up the situation and prepare and agree the best line of defense, about which, on the other hand, they gave little or no detail. In England, as I understand it, unlike in Spain, where there's an irresponsible clamor of voices right from the start, or even a verbal lynching, they take the confidentiality of legal proceedings very seriously indeed and never release any evidence or testimony that will form part of a trial, and no one who might be called on to testify is allowed to give his or her version of events to the press prior to that trial. Lawyers and journalists were thus limited to making veiled hints and prudent, rather discreet speculations as to what actually happened. They suggested a possible kidnapping attempt, a possible burglary, or even a settling of accounts between lovers. The victim was seventeen and apparently either Bulgarian or Russian (no one knew for sure, nor if he had a British passport, although this seemed unlikely) and he was referred to only by his initials, which, curiously enough, were the same as those of his killer, let's say R.D. Whatever the truth of the matter—and I saw at once what must have happened—one thing was sure: two nights ago the singer had stuck a spear, one of several he had hanging in a room next to the dining room, into the chest and throat of that very young young man. This doubtless meant that televisions around the world, especially those in Britain, but in my own country too, not to mention the millions of anonymous or pseudonymous voices on the Internet, would already have had a whole day to dissect the affair. But I had seen neither television nor Internet.

I briefly regretted that the plane had no low, sensationalist rag like
The Sun
on board,
The Sun
belonging, of course, to the same Antipodean empire as
The Times
and being therefore more given to scandal, moralizing and rumor: such newspapers would be rubbing their hands with glee and prepared to risk breaking any law if it meant selling more copies. I had a glance at
El País,
just in case, but its treatment of the matter was sober and concise and revealed nothing more than its London colleagues claimed to know. My regret was short-lived or was, I should say, merely a moment of naiveté, because I didn't need to know the details or the circumstances or the background or the motives, or even the psychological explanations being pondered by journalists or whoever. It was clear to me that Tupra had projected onto that idol the maximum biographical horror, had plunged him into narrative disgust as if into a butt of disgusting wine, had lit a torch for him and inscribed him in letters of fire on the list of those afflicted by the K-M or Killing-Murdering or Kennedy-Mansfield curse, as it was known in our little group with no name and who knows, by a process of mimesis, in some other loftier place; that Reresby or Ure or Dundas had condemned Dearlove not just to a few years in prison, which, for someone as famous as Dearlove, with such a sordid crime behind him, would be a slow incessant hell—I mean slower and more incessant than for other people—unless, and this was the best-case scenario, those years were interrupted by a swift death at the hands of other prisoners; he had condemned him also to seeing his entire life story and achievements lost beneath a quick lick of grey or off-white or off-color paint, its whole trajectory and construction plunged into immediate oblivion, condemned him to knowing that whenever anyone mentioned or read or heard his name, he or she would always instantly associate it with that final crime. Mothers would even use his name to warn their unwary offspring and, even worse, the message they gave would become distorted and exaggerated over time: 'Be careful who you mix with and who you go around with, you can't trust anyone. Remember what Dickie Dearlove did to that young Russian lad—he took him to his house and slit him open.' And I was as sure of this as I was that Tupra would already have in his possession a recording, a film of these events about which the press were now hypothesizing and which were known to almost no one else; it would doubtless show the whole sequence, from the point where the young Bulgarian, R.D, arrived at Dearlove's house up to the furious, fearsome moment when the latter stuck a spear in him, causing his instant death, although it must have taken two blows—one in the throat and the other in the chest, or possibly the other way round—to silence him completely and put an end to him; and then, perhaps, still blinded by rage and gripped by a childish sense of triumph (a very shortlived emotion and one that he would deplore for the rest of his days), searching the young man's body for the cell phone or tiny camera with which he would have taken his compromising photos and which Dearlove had failed to find when he playfully frisked him on arrival, perhaps because Tupra had told the boy he wouldn't need to carry a phone or camera because a camera would have been hidden somewhere in the house prior to that amorous or commercial assignation, like the gun that was famously waiting for Al Pacino in a restaurant restroom in the first episode of that great masterpiece in three parts, each part better than the last.

Tupra wouldn't need to make use of that tape or DVD (he hadn't, on that occasion, recorded and kept it for future use) in order to persuade Dearlove later on to do or not do something; the important thing had been to make Dearlove aware of just one of the deceptions of which he was the victim and of the irreparable act he had committed in response, so irreparable and unconcealable that his punishment would not be long in coming. Tupra would keep that video simply in order to have it and to watch it when he was alone or to revel in the perfect execution of his plan, the prize item in his collection. It wouldn't be of any further use to him, given that the main deed had been revealed as soon as it was done: Dearlove had done the deed, and the whole world knew about it. He had killed a young man with a spear.

In the final analysis, though, the person who had instigated that killing was me. Or perhaps not exactly: I had invented, conceived, described or dictated it, imagined the mise-en-scene. I had given Tupra the idea—no one is ever fully aware of how dangerous it is to give other people ideas, and it happens all the time, at all hours and in all places—and I couldn't help wondering how many more of my interpretations or translations might have had consequences of which I knew nothing, how many and which ones. I had spent a long time passing judgment on a daily basis and with ever greater ease and unconcern, listening to voices and looking at faces, in the flesh or hidden in the station-studio or on video, saying who could be trusted and who could not, who would kill and who would allow himself to be killed and why, who would betray and who would remain loyal, who would lie and who would meet with failure or with only average success in life, who irritated me and who aroused my pity, who was a poseur and who I warmed to, and what probabilities each individual carried in his veins, just like a novelist who knows that whatever his characters say or tell, whatever is attributed to them or whatever they are made to do, will go no further than his novel and will harm no one, because, however real they may seem, they will continue to be a fiction and will never interfere with anyone real (with anyone in his right mind, that is). But that was not my case: I wasn't using pen and paper to write about those who have never existed or trod the earth or traversed the world, I was describing and deciphering flesh-and-blood people and pontificating and making predictions about them, and I saw now that regardless of whether I was right or wrong, what I said could have disastrous consequences and determine their fate if placed in the hands of someone like Tupra, who, on this occasion, had not restricted himself to being only Sir Punishment or Sir Thrashing, but Sir Death and Sir Cruelty and, possibly, Sir Vengeance. And I had not been his instrument, but something less common and perhaps worse, his inspiration, an innocent whisper in his ear, an imprudent and unwitting Iago. I didn't care nor was I particularly interested in what grudge he bore Dearlove or if he had laid that trap for him—my trap—on his own initiative or as part of some outlandish State mission or on the well-paid orders of some private private individual. That was the least of it. What troubled me most was the thought that he had put into practice my plan, which wasn't a plan at all, and that in order to ensure its success, he had shown no qualms about sacrificing the life of a young man: 'Strange to leave even one's own first name behind,' indeed, and the victim didn't even have a name, only the initials R.D Worryingly or improbably, I hadn't until then noticed the most serious implication of all and—as I realized at once, with the three newspapers unfolded on my lap in that plane—the one that would torment me for the rest of my life. And however tenuous I tried to make and succeeded in making that link later on, and however tenuous it did in fact become—for that is what would happen, it would seem to me remote and accidental, on my part at least, and my feelings of responsibility would diminish, and it would all seem like a dream, and with luck I would deceive myself entirely and make it disappear, especially when the last stubborn rim was finally erased and I was able to say to myself one day: 'But that was in another country'—that young Russian man who did not even know of my existence, just as I had known nothing of his while it lasted, had died because of my prediction or hypothesis or fantasy, because of what I had said and reported, and now, in my head, I would always have the words: 'For I am myself my own fever and pain.'