Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  And so I took two steps back and decided not to ask her any more questions, I would ask elsewhere, I had two weeks, that should be time enough to investigate and to convince her, and perhaps, during my stay, she would receive another blow and then she wouldn’t want to keep quiet and close her mind to my words (‘Keep quiet and don’t say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat’s got your tongue. Keep quiet, and save yourself.’ But perhaps we shouldn’t always do that, however much, in the gravest of situations, we are advised and urged to do precisely that).

  ‘All right, I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I won’t take up any more of your time, you’re right, it’s late, I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after and we can meet whenever it suits you. And don’t worry about the pig, it was your Polish babysitter who started watching him, although, it has to be said, he is a wonderful actor, up there with the greats.’ And at the front door, to which she accompanied me, smiling ever more brightly, as if the imminent absence of my gaze were already a source of relief, I added: ‘But te conosco, mascherina.’—This was an expression I had learned a long time before from my distant Italian girlfriend, who had taught me her language, more or less; and that carnivalesque expression, known to Luisa as well, was tantamount to saying: ‘You don’t fool me.’

  I wasted no time. The following day, I went to see my father, as I’d said I would; I had lunch with him and, while we were eating dessert, my sister arrived, she dropped in on him most days and since she knew nothing of my visit (my father had forgotten to mention it,‘Oh, I thought you all knew’), finding me there was a cause of great surprise and pleasure. And when my father went to lie down for a while, at the request of his caregiver, and left us alone, Cecilia brought me up to date on the medical situation, providing me with more details (the outlook wasn’t good, either in the medium or more likely short term), and once she, in turn, had told me about her and her husband and I’d done my best not to tell her anything about myself beyond the innocuously vague, I finally got up the nerve to ask if she knew anything about Luisa: what kind of life she was leading, if they ever got together socially, if she knew whether or not she was going out with anyone yet. She knew almost nothing, she told me: they talked on the phone now and then, especially about practical matters involving their respective children, and they occasionally met up there, at my father’s apartment, but generally only for a matter of minutes because Luisa was usually in a hurry, they would exchange a few friendly words and then Luisa would leave the children to spend some time with their grandfather or with their cousins, my sister’s children or my brothers,’ one or another of whom would usually be there on a Saturday or a Sunday; then, after a couple of hours, Luisa would return to pick up Guillermo and Marina, but, again, she was always in a rush. My sister understood, though, that Luisa sometimes visited my father on her own, on a weekday, to chat and keep him company, they had always got on well together. So it might be that she talked more with him, or about more personal matters, than with any other member of the family, even if only once in a blue moon. No, she had no idea what kind of life Luisa was leading in her spare time, not that she would have a great deal of that. There was no reason why Luisa would keep her up to date on her comings and goings, least of all the romantic kind. Her husband had bumped into Luisa one evening, about two or three months ago, coming out of an art gallery or an exhibition, she couldn’t quite remember which, accompanied by a man he didn’t know, which was hardly surprising really, it would have been far stranger if he had known him; they had seemed to him like friends or colleagues, by which he meant that they hadn’t been walking along arm in arm or anything. The only thing he did say was that the man looked to him like an arty type. At that point, I interrupted her (my reflexes in my own language were beginning to go).

  ‘You mean he’s an artist? Why? Did Federico say what he looked like?’

  ‘No, by “arty” he meant one of those people who like to look the part of the artist, the eccentric. They may or may not be artists, it doesn’t matter. They dress in a way that gives that impression, it’s a deliberate ploy, to fool people into thinking that they’re very intense and, well, arty, it could be a black polo neck or a fancy walking stick with a ghastly greyhound head on the handle, or an anachronistic hat they never take off, or long wavy musician’s hair, you know the sort I mean.’—And she made a corresponding gesture with her hands around her head, rather as if she were washing her hair without touching her scalp.—‘Or a ridiculous Goyaesque hairnet,’ I had time to think fleetingly. ‘Or tattoos anywhere, especially on their heels’—‘Or’ she went on, ‘women who wear caps, or those baggy stockings that reach just above the knee, or a sailor’s hat or the kind of hat some smug sassy black woman would wear or else some ghastly rasta braids.’

  It amused me to know that she hated that particular kind of stockings. I had no idea, on the other hand, what she meant by ‘the kind of hat some smug sassy black woman would wear’ and I was curious enough to be tempted to ask. However, I couldn’t afford to waste any time, my other curiosity was more urgent. ‘I see. So what was the guy wearing? Or did he have the whole caboodle, polo neck, walking stick and hat?’

  ‘He had a ponytail. Federico noticed this because he wasn’t a particularly young man, your age or thereabouts. Our age.’

  ‘Yes, in certain places, it’s quite a common sight now. You get grown men wearing a ponytail, in the belief that it makes them look like a pirate or a bandit; or else it’s a goatee, and then they think they’re Cardinal Richelieu or a psychiatrist or someone’s cliched idea of a sage—there’s a positive epidemic of them among professors; or they grow a mustache and an imperial and think they’re musketeers. They’re complete frauds, the lot of them.’ With my sister I could allow myself to be as arbitrary and cranky and over-the-top as she herself tended to be, it was a comical family trait, shared by all of us except my father, whom we did not greatly resemble in terms of equanimity or good temper. I, for example, never trust men who wear those rather monk-like sandals, I figure they’re all impostors and traitors; or anyone in bermuda shorts or clamdiggers (men, I mean), which nowadays means that in summer I trust almost no one, especially in Spain, that paradise of shameless ignominious get-ups. It may be that those intuitions-made-rules, those radical prejudices or defining superficialities, which are based solely on limited personal experience (as are all such intuitions), had helped me with Tupra in my now not-so-new job, even if only in the categorical way I sometimes pronounced on the individuals presented to me for interpretation and conjecture, once, that is, I’d acquired both the confidence to issue judgments out loud and the irresponsibility one always needs when handing down any verdict. Nevertheless, those generalizations are based on something, even if that something belongs only to the realm of perceptions: each person carries echoes of other people within them and we cannot ignore them, there are what I call ‘affinities’ between individuals who may be utterly different or even polar opposites, but which, on occasion, lead us to see or intuit the shadows of physical resemblances which seem, at first, quite crazy. ‘Objectively speaking, this beautiful woman and my grandfather have absolutely nothing in common,’ we think, ‘and yet something about her makes me think of him and reminds me of him,’ and then we tend to attribute to her the character and reactions, the irrascibility and opportunism of that despotic ancestor of ours. And the surprising thing is, we’re often right—if enough time passes for us to find that out—as if life were full of inexplicable non-blood relationships, or as if each being that exists and treads the earth and traverses the world left hanging in the air invisible intangible particles of their personality, loose threads from their actions and tenuous resonances from their words, which later alight by chance on others like snow on shoulders, and thus are perpetuated from generation to generation, like a curse or a legend, or like a painful memory belonging to someone else, thus creating the infinite, exhausting and eternal combination of
those same elements. ‘What else did he tell you? What was the guy like, apart from the ponytail? How was he dressed? Didn’t Luisa introduce him? What was his name? What does he do?’

  ‘How should I know? I’ve no idea. Federico didn’t notice and anyway he only saw him for a moment. They just walked past each other and said “Hello,” that’s all, but they didn’t stop. Besides, Federico and Luisa don’t really know each other that well.’

  ‘So the lovely couple were in a hurry, were they?’

  ‘They all were, Jacobo, Federico didn’t stop and neither did they. Now don’t start going around giving funny looks to every guy with a ponytail you happen to meet. Besides, whoever he was, they’ve probably split up since then. And don’t go calling them “the lovely couple” either, because there’s no basis for that, not the slightest indication, I’ve told you what happened, but I obviously can’t tell you anything much at all. You’re just getting yourself all worked up about nothing.’

  I prefered not to tell her about the punch, the unbearable blow, about the shiner, the black eye, it was best if I continued investigating on my own without alarming her, if Cecilia knew no more than she had told me, she wasn’t going to be able to provide me with any further information, I didn’t mind if she attributed my disquiet exclusively to feelings of jealousy, those were enough to justify my insistent curiosity and, after all, they did exist, perhaps as much as my concern that some poseur, some wretch, with ponytail or without, it didn’t matter, was abusing Luisa: someone who was trying to take my place but who would have difficulty keeping it, because it wasn’t his turn. Even so he must be gotten rid of. If he was violent, if he was dangerous, if he raised his hand to her, he must be ejected without delay, before he had a chance to settle in, because life is full of surprises and there’s always the risk that something that seems to have no future at all could go on forever. And if she lacked the will, the strength, the resolve or the courage, I was the only one capable of attempting it, or so, at least, I told myself.

  And so I waited for my father to get up (or for him to be helped out of bed and brought to the living room, to the armchair where he had always done his reading, beneath the pleasant light of the lampstand) and for my sister to leave, and then I could continue my investigations, or my soundings. I didn’t really expect that he would know very much, possibly nothing, but if, of all the people I had to hand, he was, according to what Cecilia had said, the one who perhaps talked most to Luisa about her personal life—even if only now and then and given the natural constraints felt by a daughter-in-law and a father-in-law, or rather by two people with such a great age difference between them—I might be able to find out, if not about the man who aspired to my position—she wouldn’t tell him anything about that; and there might well be several aspirants—at least about what most concerned me: how she saw me, now that I had abandoned the field and gently removed myself from her existence—and even from her practical life—and detached myself, unprotesting, from her time and from that of our children. I asked my father about her and again he said that she didn’t often come to see him, although I was gradually discovering or realizing that he had grown rather bad at gauging the presences or absences of certain people, as if it seemed to him that his most pleasant or enjoyable visitors always visited him far too infrequently, although I knew that some of those people visited almost every day, as was the case with my sister and my older nieces; he had always enjoyed the company of women and now that he was so weak and in need of gentleness, this liking had become even more marked. I guessed that something similar was happening with Luisa, who would certainly not have been able to visit him quite that often, but who, given the familiarity with which he referred to her and the odd telling comment, clearly did so more often than he imagined or felt that she did. I pressed him (‘What does she say, what does she talk about when she comes? Does she talk about me or does she try not to mention me? Do you think she has doubts, might she have regrets, or does my name on her lips sound always as if she had found a place for me from which I don’t and won’t move, a place that is far too calm and stable?’), and suddenly he looked at me with his pale eyes, without answering, resting his forehead on one hand, his elbow on the arm of the chair, his usual pose when he was thinking and preparing to say something, I had the impression sometimes that he mentally constructed his sentences before uttering them, the first few at least (but not the subsequent ones). He sat looking at me with a mixture of interest, slight impatience and slight pity, as if I were not his son exactly, but a troubled young friend, of whom he was very fond and in whom he found two things strange or perhaps disappointing: one, that I should take such pains over a matter involving the extent of someone else’s feelings or, indeed, self-interest, neither of which one can do anything about; and the other, that, despite being a grown man, a father, and despite my years and experience, I had still failed to grasp the insuperable nature of such griefs, or are they perhaps merely disquiets, and their laments.

  ‘You don’t seem at all resigned to the situation, Jacobo,’ he said at last, after studying me for a while,‘and you have to resign yourself. If someone no longer wants to be with you, then you have to accept it. On your own, and without always watching to see how that person is changing or always looking out for signs and hoping for some drastic change. If such a change occurs, it won’t be because you’re watching or asking me questions or sounding out someone else. You can’t keep on at someone all the time, you can’t apply a magnifying glass or a telescope or resort to spies, nor, of course, must you pester them or impose yourself on them. Pretending doesn’t help either, there’s no point in feigning indifference or politeness when you feel neither polite nor indifferent, and I don’t think you feel either of those things—yet. She’ll know that you’re pretending. Remember, transparency is one of the characteristics of being in love and other related states, in all their many guises (love can often be confused with stubbornness in its first stages and its last, when one thinks that the love of the other person has not yet put down deep roots or is slipping away). It’s very difficult to deceive the person you love, or who feels or has felt loved (who has known love), unless, of course, that person prefers to be deceived, which, I must admit, is not uncommon. But you always know when you’re no longer loved, if you’re open to finding that out: when everything has become mere habit or a lack of courage to bring things to a close, or a desire not to make a fuss and not to hurt anyone, or a fear for your life or your purse, or a mere lack of imagination, most people are incapable of imagining a different life from the one they’re living and they won’t change it for that reason alone, they won’t move, won’t even consider it; they patch things up, postpone, seek distractions, take a lover, go gambling, convince themselves that what they have is bearable, allow time to do its work; but it won’t occur to them to try something else. Only self-interest can defeat feelings, and then only sometimes. And in the same way, you always know when you’re still loved, especially when you would like that love to abate or to stop altogether, which is usually the case with a couple in the process of splitting up. The one who made the decision, if he or she isn’t an egotist or a sadist, longs for the other person to leave, to disentangle themselves from the web, to stop loving them and oppressing them with that love. To move on to someone else or, indeed, to no one, but to wash their hands of the whole business once and for all.’—My father paused for a moment and again looked at me hard, the way one sometimes looks before saying goodbye. He seemed to be scrutinizing me, which was unlikely because his sight had deteriorated greatly and he found it hard to read or even to watch television, I think he listened to it rather than watched. And yet that look had exactly the opposite effect, those ever paler blue eyes fixed on my face seemed to see right through me and to know more about me than I did myself.—‘I think you need to let Luisa go, Jacobo. You haven’t done so, even though you’ve respectfully and courteously taken yourself off to another country and so on. But you still haven’t let her
go. And now you have no option, you have to do it whether you like it or not. Let her breathe freely, give her some air, don’t stand in her way. Let her take the initiative. It’s not in your hands to do anything. If, one day, she discovers she’s unhappy without you, if she realizes that she misses you so much that it’s making her miserable, I don’t think she would hesitate to tell you so and to ask you to come back, if I know her as I think I do. She’s capable of admitting she was wrong, she’s not proud. If she doesn’t do so, it’s because she doesn’t want to, and she won’t change whatever you do or say or however you behave, here or at a distance; as far as she’s concerned, you’re transparent, as she will be for you if you’re prepared really to see her and to recognize what you see. If you’re not, then that’s another matter, and I understand that. Just don’t ask me something I don’t know, but you do; she isn’t transparent to me.’ And he added at once: ‘Do you have a girlfriend at all in London?’