Your Face Tomorrow

by Javier Marías

  Now it was my turn to sit thinking for a moment, but not because I wasn’t sure. No, I didn’t have anything remotely like a girlfriend; I’d merely had a few fleeting encounters, especially in the first few months of settling in and reconnoitering and weighing things up, but they had all lacked either continuity or enthusiasm: of the three women who had slept at my apartment during that period, only one had returned with my consent (another had tried but without success), and that relationship had soon foundered, after our third or fourth date. Subsequently, another woman had passed through, but without any consequences. Then there was young Pérez Nuix who, I could not deny it, had meandered through my imagination, and after the one night we spent together, she still did occasionally, but that strange encounter had become tinged with vague ideas of favors and payments, and such things quickly douse the imagination; and although ideas of secrecy and silence ignite it, they are perhaps not enough to counteract the former, which have more weight and force.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Just the odd fling, but at my age such things are no longer stimulating or particularly diverting. Or only to those who are easily flattered. Which is not my case.’

  My father smiled, he was sometimes amused by the things I said.

  ‘No, maybe not now. It was in the past though, when you were younger, so don’t be so superior. It’s not the case with Luisa either, of that I’m sure. I have no idea whether she’s seeing anyone else. Needless to say, she doesn’t talk to me about such things, although she will one day, if I live that long. She trusts me, and I think she would tell me about any serious relationship. What I do see is that she doesn’t discount the possibility and might even be in a hurry for such a relationship to appear. She’s in a hurry to get back on her feet or to remake her life, or however people put it nowadays, you’ll know, I’m sure. I mean that I don’t think she yet has doubts about her attractiveness, that’s not the problem, although neither of you is as young as you were. It’s more that she’s afraid of starting “the definitive relationship” too late. For many years, she clearly thought you were that—“definitive” I mean—but realizing that you weren’t hasn’t made her think that such a thing doesn’t exist, rather that you both made a mistake and that she has wasted a great deal of precious time. So much so that she must now make haste to find that definitive relationship, which she hasn’t given up on, she hasn’t yet had time to adapt her expectations, or her illusions, she must still feel quite bewildered.’—Now the look of pity on his face grew more marked, similar to the look one sees on the face of many a mother as she watches her small children and sees how ignorant they still are and how slow they are to learn (and therefore how vulnerable). Naïveté does, more often than not, provoke pity. My father seemed to see that quality in Luisa, of whom he was speaking, but he may have seen it in me too, for asking him about her when he couldn’t help me. All he could do was distract me and listen to me, that, after all, is what it means to take on another person’s anxieties.—‘It’s rather childish, I suppose. As if she’d always had a particular model of life in her head and as if the enormous upset with you hasn’t made her abandon that, not yet at least, and as if she were thinking: “If he wasn’t the person I thought he was, there must be another one. But where is he, I must find him, I must see him.” That’s all I can tell you. She’s not in need of flattery, nor, of course, of ephemeral conquests in order to bolster her confidence. Whenever she goes out with someone, if she does, she’ll be looking at him as if he might be the definitive one, as a future husband, and she’ll make every effort to make things turn out right, she’ll treat him with infinite good will and patience, wanting to love him, determinedly desiring him.’—He paused and looked up at the ceiling, the better perhaps to imagine her at the side of some permanent imbecile, practicing her patience upon him. Then he added sadly: ‘It doesn’t look good for her. I’d say that such an attitude tends to frighten men off or else attract the pusillanimous. It would certainly scare you off, Jacobo. You’re not the marrying kind, even though you were married for several years and miss being married now. What you really miss is Luisa, not matrimony. I was always surprised that it suited you so well. I was surprised, too, that it lasted so long, I never thought it would.’

  I didn’t want to go down that road, I certainly didn’t feel any curiosity about myself or, as that anonymous report in the files at the office had put it, I just took myself for granted, or assumed I knew myself, or considered myself a lost cause upon whom it would be pointless to squander thought. And so I insisted on talking about someone I knew much better or, who knows, perhaps not that well:

  ‘Do you think that in her haste she might end up with the wrong kind of man, with someone dangerous?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said. ‘Luisa’s an intelligent woman, and when faced with disappointment, she’ll accept it, however reluctantly, however much she resists and however hard it is to do so … She might end up with someone merely average or with whom she feels only partially satisfied, or even someone who has qualities she dislikes, that’s possible. What I do think is that whatever he’s like, she’ll give innumerable opportunities to that potential husband, to that project, to the person upon whom she’s fixed her gaze, she’ll do more than her share, she’ll try to be as understanding as she can, as she no doubt tried to be with you until, I suppose, you overstepped the mark, although I’ve never asked you what exactly happened … She won’t hand this man any blank checks, but rather than get rid of him, she’ll use up almost the whole checkbook, little by little. Nevertheless, as far as I know, no such person exists as yet, or he’s still not important enough for her to talk to me about him or to consult me. Bear in mind that I am now the closest thing Luisa has to a father, and that she still preserves a childlike attitude that makes her such a delightful person and leads her to ask the advice of her elders. Well, in some respects, but not, of course, in others. When did you say you were going back to Oxford?’

  I could see that he was tired. He had made an effort, yes, an effort of translation or interpretation, as if he were me and I were Tupra in our office, and Tupra was putting pressure on him to talk about Luisa, I just hoped they never put her under scrutiny, there was no reason why they should, but the mere thought made me shudder. My poor father had done as I asked, he had tried to help me, as a favor to his son, he had told me what he thought, how he saw Luisa, what, it seemed to him, could be expected from her immediate future. Perhaps he was right in his estimations, and if Luisa was going out with someone who, at one fateful moment, on one fateful day, had gone too far, it might be that she was trying to excuse him or change him or understand him instead of distancing herself or running away, which is what you have to do while there’s still time, that is, when you’re not tied to someone, but only involved. It might be that she wanted to ignore or erase that moment, that she was seeking to relegate the fact to the sphere of bad dreams or to toss it into the bag of imaginings, as most of us do when we don’t want that other face to fail us so soon, not today, without them even being considerate enough to wait until tomorrow to disappoint us. Many women have almost infinite powers of endurance, especially when they feel themselves to be saviours or healers or redeemers, when they believe that they will be able to rescue the man they love, or whom they have decided to love at all costs, from apathy or disease or vice. They think he’ll be different with them, that he’ll mend his ways or improve or change and that they will, therefore, become indispensable to him, sometimes it seems to me that for such women redeeming someone is a form—foolish and naïve—of ensuring the unconditional love of that person: ‘He can’t live without me,’ they think without entirely thinking that or without quite formulating the thought. ‘He knows that without me he would revert to his former self, disastrous, incompetent, sick, depressed, an addict, a drunk, a failure, a mere shadow, a condemned man, a loser. He’ll never leave me, nor will he endanger our relationship, he won’t play dirty tricks on me, he won’t run the risk that I
might leave him. Not only will he be forever grateful to me, he’ll realize that with me he can stay afloat and even swim on ahead, whereas without me he would sink and drown.’Yes, that is what many women seem to think when some difficult or calamitous or hopeless or violent man crosses their path, they see a challenge, a problem, a task, someone they can put right or rescue from a little hell. And it’s quite incomprehensible that after centuries of hearing about other women’s experiences and of reading stories, they still don’t know that as soon as such men feel sober and optimistic and healthy again—as soon as they feel real rather than mere specters—they will believe that they got back on their feet all by themselves and will very likely see the women as mere obstacles who keep them from running freely or from continuing their upward climb. It seems equally incomprehensible that the women don’t realize that it is they who will be the most entangled or the most tightly bound and who will never be prepared to abandon those dependent, disoriented, irascible, defective men, because they will have made them neither more nor less than their mission, and if you have or believe you have a mission, you never give up on it, if you have finally found a mission and believe it to be an endless lifelong commitment and the daily justification for your gratuitous existence or for the countless steps taken upon the earth and for your slow, slow journey through the shrunken world …

  I got up and placed my hand on his shoulder, it was a gesture that, in recent years, had always calmed my father, whenever he felt frightened or weak or confused, when he opened his eyes very wide as if seeing the world for the first time, with a gaze as inscrutable as that of a child born only weeks or days before, and who, I imagine, observes this new place into which he has been hurled and tries perhaps to decipher our customs and to discover which of those customs will be his. My father's sight must have been as limited as the sight of such newborn babies is sometimes said to be, he may have been able to make out only shadows, blotches, the familiar light and the blur of colors, it was impossible to know, he always claimed to see much more than we thought he could, possibly out of a kind of pride that prevented him from recognizing how physically diminished he had become. He knew who I was, and his hearing was as acute as ever, and so perhaps, more than anything, he saw with his memory. And that is why, in part, he accordingly located me in Oxford, where I had in fact lived, albeit many years before and from where I had, moreover, returned. As regards London, on the other hand, he didn’t yet know for sure that I would return from there (I had returned now, but not for good). During my two-week stay I would, at some point during my visits to him, place my hand on his shoulder: I would leave it there for a while, exerting enough pressure for him to be able to feel it and know that I was near and in touch, to make him feel safe and to soothe him. I could feel his slightly prominent bones, his collarbone too, he had grown thinner since I left, and when I touched them they gave an impression of fragility, not as if they might break, but as if they might easily become dislocated, by a clumsy gesture or excessive effort; when his caregiver helped him up, she did so with great delicacy. On one occasion, however, he turned to look curiously at my hand on his shoulder, although in no way rejecting my touch. It occurred to me that he perhaps found it odd to be the object of a gesture that he had possibly often made when I was a child, when he was tall and I was growing only very slowly, the father bending down and placing his hand on his son’s shoulder in order to tell him off or to instill him with confidence or to offer him some symbolic protection, or to pacify him. He looked at my hand as if at an innocuous fly that had alighted there, or perhaps something larger, a lizard momentarily pausing in its scurryings, as if hearing approaching footsteps. ‘Why do you put your hand on my shoulder like that?’ he asked, half-smiling, as if amused. ‘Don’t you like me to?’ I asked in turn, and he replied: ‘Well, if you want to, it certainly doesn’t bother me.’ However, on that first visit, he didn’t really notice, as was usually the case, but was merely silently aware of that gentle, guiding, soothing pressure. I said:

  ‘I don’t live in Oxford any more, Papa. I only go there occasionally to visit Wheeler, I’ve mentioned him to you before, do you remember? Sir Peter Wheeler, the Hispanist. He’s about your age, well, a year older. I live in London now. I’ll be going back in a couple of weeks.’

  Perhaps his wise interpretation of Luisa had taken its toll, he had made a great effort for me and now he was paying the price. It was as if he had grown suddenly tired of his own perspicacity and had again become confused about time, as he had the previous day on the phone. Perhaps he could no longer stand being himself for very long, I mean being his old self, his alert intellectually demanding self, the one who urged his children always to go on, to go on thinking, the one who used to say ‘And what else?’ just when we felt that an exposition or argument was over, the one who made us keep on looking at things and at people, beyond what seemed necessary, at the point when we had the feeling that there was no more to see and that continuing would be a waste of time. ‘At the point,’ in his words,‘where you might say to yourself there can’t be anything else.’ Yes, as I get older, I know how that wearies and wears one out, and sometimes I wonder why I should and why, to a greater or lesser degree, we do pay so much attention to our fellow men and women or to the world, and why we don’t just ignore them, I’m not even sure that it isn’t yet one more source of conflict, even if what we see meets with our approval. He was ninety years old. It was hardly to be wondered at that he should want to take a rest from himself. And from everything else too.

  ‘Oh, honestly,’ he said somewhat irritably, as if I had deceived him on purpose and for my own pleasure. ‘You’ve always told me you were in Oxford. That you’d been offered a job there, teaching. And there was a man called Kavanagh, who writes horror novels and is a medievalist, isn’t that right? And of course I know who your friend Wheeler is, I’ve even read a couple of his books. But didn’t he used to be called Rylands? You always used to call him Rylands.’ I didn’t tell him they were brothers, that would have led to still more confusion. ‘So which university are you teaching at in London?’

  That is how the memory of the old works. He remembered Aidan Kavanagh or his name, and even the successful novels he used to publish under a pseudonym, a pleasant and deliberately frivolous man, the head of the Spanish department during my time in Oxford, but long since retired; he remembered Rylands too, although he confused him with Wheeler; and yet he didn’t remember that I had gone to work for the BBC during my second English sojourn, so recent that it was still going on. There was no reason why he should remember what had happened subsequently: as with Luisa, I had told him very little—only a few vague, possibly evasive remarks—about my new job. It’s strange how one instinctively hides, or, which is somewhat different, keeps quiet about anything that immediately strikes one as murky: just as I would say nothing to Luisa about meeting a woman with whom I had barely exchanged a word at a meeting or a party and with whom nothing could or indeed would happen, but to whom I had felt instantly attracted. I had possibly never even mentioned Tupra to my father or to Luisa, or only in passing, and yet he was, without a doubt, the dominant figure in my life in London (and after a few days I realized just how dominant a figure he was). It didn’t seem to me, at that moment, worth disillusioning my father and telling him that I no longer did any teaching anywhere.

  ‘I’ve got to go now, Papa,’ I said. ‘I’ll pop in now and then, when I’ve got time. Do you want me to warn you? Shall I call before I drop by?’