'It's got nothing to do with bulimia,' the dunderhead replied. 'No, it's nothing to do with bulimia or anorexia.' He had rested one hand on one of the strange cylindrical bars in the spotless, spacious toilet; on the only bar that was, fortunately for him, fixed: it doubtless helped to keep him from collapsing while he waited for his promised line of cocaine.
'Not bulimia, man, botulin. You know, as in botulism.' He continued to stare at me blankly. 'Botulism, an illness you get from eating food that's gone off, or from canned food that hasn't been properly prepared, haven't you ever heard of it?' This was one etymology I did know and so I let him have it, possibly to repay him for the lecturing tone he had used on me. 'It affects meat or fish, possibly fruit; but it was especially common in sausages, that's where the name comes from: botulus means "sausage" in Latin.'
'I've no idea what you're talking about, not a clue, so don't ask me what it is or where they get it from. But as far as I remember it certainly didn't involve sausages or chorizos or anything. They inject people with this substance and it paralyses the nerves, I think, so that they can hardly move their face, all their wrinkles disappear while the effect lasts and they don't get any new ones either, at least, not in the places where they've had the injections. Anyway, that's what it is, I know several women who've had it, I mean, say some woman's forehead is like piece of old parchment, a little injection in one corner and her forehead's as smooth as a marble statue's. Cheeks like an accordion? Give her a few doses of paralysis and they'll be as fresh and firm as you like. The only downside is that when the nerves are paralysed, the whole area becomes completely desensitised, that's why the Italian woman didn't notice this at all' - he touched the hairnet as if it were a mane - 'and they get a funny, slightly crazed expression too. They can't really move their face at all, so although their skin appears very youthful and firm, there's something stiff and doll-like about their face, they look a bit stupid or a bit touched. Haven't you seen that actress, she's the ex-wife of that guy who's hitched up now with one of our Spanish actresses, oh, fuck, I've forgotten her name, the one with the face of someone very tall, well, I reckon that fixed look in her eyes is from the Botox, her eyes have gone all kind of pointy-looking, haven't they? It makes her look slightly unhinged, don't you think? They must inject it into her cheekbones and into her crow's feet by the litre, I'd be surprised if she can even close her eyes, she probably sleeps with them wide open. Just like this Flavia woman. I mean, depending on the angle, she looks like some kind of sprite.'
He stood there giving me this absurd speech, apparently recovering without too much difficulty from his slight dizziness, and dressed in what he had obviously intended to be an original, modern get-up, but which was, in fact, merely laughable, he was nothing but a clown, a character out of a farce; having announced his intention of removing his snood, he hadn't even attempted to do so, and then there was his vast, stiff jacket and his untied shoelaces. I couldn't help smiling, and I felt a pang of pity. De la Garza was, from every point of view, unbearable, a complete waste of space, an embarrassing one at that, but he wasn't unpleasant, like others of his ilk, I've known so many of them from childhood on, they appear to be jolly and even affectionate, but they're basically inconsiderate and obscene, and even when they're being obsequious or servile they're only out for themselves; deep down, though, they can't stand not to get on with anyone, even with people they detest, they aspire to be loved even by those they hurt, and, in general, they manage it, they have no idea how annoying they are, no sense of when they're in the way, they're too vain even to conceive of the possibility, they live in a permanent state of smugness, they would never pick up a subtle hint or even a rude, unsubtle one, which means it's very difficult to shake them off. And then again what he had said about the accordion and the pointy eyes of the cinema diva and the sprite-like features of Mrs Manoia (it was true that, however pleasant, there was something sharp and stylised about them), I had found all that rather funny, which made me think that there might be some cracks in his stupidity; in practice it's hard to find a person who never has anything interesting to say - or who does not have some quality peculiar to them alone -people are always coming out with images or expressions or comparisons which are comical in the best and most enjoyable sense and which make us smile or laugh, even if only because they're wrong or crude or inappropriate, there are few things as funny as blunders and gaffes, even if you're the butt of them. Perhaps that's why everyone talks so much and why it's so hard to remain silent, because in almost any speech there's nearly always some amusing remark, it isn't only keeping silent that saves, sometimes it's the opposite and that, indeed, is the general belief, a legacy from The Thousand and One Nights, the inherited idea among men that they must never let anyone else have the floor or finish a story, but ramble on endlessly and never stop, not even in order to tell anecdotes or to persuade with reason or discord, which often proves unnecessary anyway, it can be enough just to keep someone else's ear busy as if you were pouring music into it or lulling it to sleep, and thus prevent them from leaving us. And that might be all you need to do to save yourself.
Suddenly I wanted to hear more from him, from De la Garza, more chatter and more nonsense and more comical similes (perhaps I was missing my own language more than I realised), despite the fact that his chauvinistic side kept reappearing like a stigma, without his necessarily intending it to: 'one of our Spanish actresses' he had said - that terrible sense of belonging. I wondered if how I was feeling about him was similar to how Tupra felt about me (although obviously there was no real comparison): I amused Tupra, he enjoyed our sessions of conjecture and examination, our conversations, or even just listening to me ('What else?' he would demand. 'What else occurs to you? Tell me what you're thinking and what else you noticed'), perhaps he liked the sound of the Canadian accent he had attributed to me on the night we first met, or, to be more precise, the accent he thought came from British Columbia, the man had been everywhere. It's all a question of suddenly seeing the funny side of someone, even someone who really gets on your nerves, that, too, is possible, but dangerous, seeing in the person you most detest a smidgeon of previously unsuspected wit (most people's solution — or, rather, precaution — is not to admit the tiniest spark, and to pretend to be blind). Tupra doubtless saw my funny side, almost immediately; it was unexpected and much stranger that I should find a funny side to Rafita after just two infuriating encounters, but it might, of course, be only a short-lived illusion.
As for the Botox, I decided it must in fact be what I had deduced, because botulinum toxin did, indeed, produce muscular paralysis, it attacked the nervous system, you ended up unable to speak or to swallow (ah, an illness that could suppress speech) and, later, unable to breathe, and the idea of a death like that, from asphyxia, brought back familiar warnings from my childhood, when you still feared the tiniest dent in a tin, or any gases that might escape when you opened it, or a can that gave off even a minimally questionable smell when still sealed, canned goods were in no way a novelty then, but neither were they particularly widespread, and all grandmothers distrusted them, mothers no longer did or, under the influence of their mothers, only a little; I had never, in my entire life, heard of a single person in Spain (or perhaps only in some very backward rural area) who had been struck down by botulism; however, a phrase expressive of the prevailing anxiety had remained with me, for what impresses you as a child never really fades, it was something my maternal grandmother used to say, I think, and what impresses the child is always remembered by the adult who replaces him, right up until the final day, and it was one of those threats which, at the time, you take absolutely literally, terrified by the instantaneous effect attributed to the poison, dazzled by the glamour of anything so devastating and so extreme, which allowed one unlimited scope for fantasy and from both sides of the trenches too, as victim and as murderer: 'Under no circumstances must you ever eat the contents of a can or tin which looks even slightly dubious, which is to say most of the
m,' the four of us had heard her warn the maids, 'because if the contents have gone off, the toxin is so strong that sometimes it can take fatal effect even if you only touch it with the tip of your tongue.'
We imagined something as normal and trivial as a spoon whose edge or tip is carried to the tongue of the woman stirring the stew, to see if it needs more salt or if it's warmed up and hot enough to eat, and she does this so calmly, as she softly sings or hums to herself or even whistles (although only men used to whistle then, or girls who were so young that they were still almost children), perhaps without even looking at the casserole or pot, but, instead, peering through the window and down at the courtyard where other women or other maids are leaning out over windowsills, shaking rugs or pegging out the damp clothes (with always at least one peg held between the teeth), or indoors lazily flicking a feather duster around or standing on a stool unscrewing a burnt-out light bulb. When you heard the warning, which was also directed at us in the future ('Don't even touch the suspect contents, just in case. Not until they've been thoroughly boiled'), you imagined the contaminated spoon touching tongue or lips and the woman being instantly felled as if by a lightning bolt or a bullet, and lying lifeless on the kitchen floor while her stew continued to simmer, and then you feared for your own mother if she was the one who did the cooking, because when you heard the word 'fatal' it never occurred to you to think of something deferred and slow, something not immediately perceptible and whose effects would appear later, but a kind of spectacular, murderous electrical charge, a flash, children can only conceive of the immediate and the very swift, if something is fatal it is fatal now, never in the long or medium term, like a blow from a tiger's paw or a musketeer's sword-thrust to the head or a Moor's arrow piercing the heart, we played at these fictions, and if a danger wasn't imminent, then it wasn't truly a danger, 'I'll believe it when I see it', that is the motto of the child when something does not arrive immediately or fails to happen today or even tomorrow - that mere prolongation of today - of course there is no irony in the child, nor does he say it in those words, but in a more childish version: 'That won't be for ages yet', more often than not in the form of a repeated question when faced by any wait or delay: 'Will it be much longer?' 'Will it be much longer until summer?' 'Christmas?' 'My birthday?' 'The start of the film?' 'Tomorrow?' followed, five minutes later, with the impatience that denies or eats up time, with: 'Is it tomorrow yet?' 'No, dear, it isn't tomorrow yet, it's still today, which takes a long time to pass.' 'And will it be much longer until I go back home to Madrid and the children, until I go back to Luisa?' Or the question that becomes more common in adulthood and keeps nagging at us, although without ever formulating itself quite so clearly: 'And will it be much longer until my death?' That is why I asked her, when I phoned her two days after that night with the Manoias and Reresby and De la Garza, before she could angrily hang up on me, I asked her about Botox, in case she knew about it, Luisa had loads of female friends and acquaintances and some, to use the attaché's expression, were rich chicks, although it seemed to me both incredible and ironic that a solution or dose of that once-feared toxin with which they smeared the most fatal of bullets, those destined for the very few Nazi tyrants whom they tried to lay low, should now be used to the advantage of the wealthy, to pander to their every caprice and luxury, to postpone their wrinkles or eliminate them for a few months, using the same elements of muscular paralysis or anaesthetised or damaged nerves - whichever was required, or both, or one as a consequence of the other - the same elements which in days gone by brought on dizziness and growing immobility and a lack of coordination and double vision and serious intestinal problems, followed by aphasia and then asphyxia and total paralysis and which, in the end, killed. Yes, everything is painfully ridiculous and subjective and partial, because everything contains its opposite and depends entirely on the moment and the place and the virulence and the dosage, delivering either sickness or vaccination, either death or beautification, just as all love carries within itself its own staleness and every desire its own satiety and every longing its own ennui, so the same people in the same position and place love each other and cannot stand each other at different moments in time, today, tomorrow; what was once a long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissible - it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it - and the merest contact, a touch once taken for granted, becomes an affront or an insult, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for would now poison the air or provoke nausea and must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition, whether it knows it or not, whether or not it realises this). And even to phone home you have to come up with a reason to present or put forward.
'Have you heard of a beauty product, some sort of artificial implant or something, an injection apparently, although, frankly, I find it hard to believe, something called Botox?' With that almost last-minute question, I was also trying to distract or quash her incipient irritation, the sudden seriousness that had followed her laughter, her annoyance at my other - too insistent - questions about the absence of knickers and a bloodstain that I might well have imagined, or to which, having erased it entirely, thoroughly, completely, including its sticky, resistant rim, I could at last say what has been said to so many events and objects and to so many dead, always assuming anyone still bothers to do so: 'Since there is no trace of you, you never occurred, you never happened. You neither strode the world nor trod the earth, you did not exist. I cannot see you now, therefore I never saw you. Since you no longer are, you never were.' It was possible that Luisa said this to me in her thoughts, when she was alone or asleep; even though she spoke to me from time to time, and there was, of course, the permanent trace of our two children, and I had not yet died. I was simply 'in another country', expelled from her time, the time that wraps around the children and steals them away and which is already very different from mine, outside her time which advances now without including me, allowing me to be neither participant nor witness, whereas I don't quite know what to do with my own time, which also advances without including me, or perhaps it is just that I have still not worked out how to climb aboard (perhaps now I never will catch up), and in which, nevertheless, this parallel or theoretical life in England is taking place, and which will have little to tell when it ends and closes like a parenthesis, and to which it will also be possible to say: 'You are no longer moving forwards. You have become a frozen painting or a frozen memory or a dream now over, and I cannot even see you now from this adverse distance. You no longer are, therefore you never were.'
Luisa did not answer me at once, she remained silent, as if she perceived this second request for information as something it only very minimally was (that is, a diversionary tactic, a way of avoiding responding seriously to her question), or as if it seemed to her as unlikely a question for me to ask as the first one and thus only contributed further to her perplexity or to her sense of intrigue.
'Botox? Yes,' she repeated the word after a pause of a few seconds. 'But what are you up to, Jaime? Knickers, menstruation, and now this. You're not about to have a sex-change, I hope. I'm not sure how the children would take it, but I imagine it would frighten them. It certainly frightens me.'
'Oh, very funny,' I said, and I did find it quite funny, or perhaps I was just glad that her sense of humour had returned, if Luisa was making jokes it meant that she was feeling friendly and, besides, her jokes were never aggressive, at most slightly acerbic like this one, and she always made them in a kindly or clearly affectionate way, cheerfully and without seeking to wound. She had amused herself by her own silly comment, because I heard her laugh again, and she could not resist carrying the joke a little further.
'What would we call you, do you think? It would all be a bit confusing. Please, Jaime, consider carefully before taking the final step,
an irreversible one, I presume. Think of the problems, and the embarrassing situations. Remember the college bursar Wheeler told us about. There he was, a terribly proper gentleman, and suddenly his colleagues didn't know whether to address him as "sir" or "madam"; his more intimate friends spent months addressing a be-skirted, matronly lady as "Arthur", after all, she still had Arthur's face, apart from the painted lips in place of the usual moustache, and the short, untidy bob of hair, which she had no idea what to do with, well, she wasn't used to it, they said.' Hearing her recall this anecdote, I found that the image of Rosa Klebb crossed my mind again, the slovenly, lazy, 'dreadful woman of SMERSH', a disciple of the implacable Beria who had infiltrated her into the POUM as the lover and right-hand woman of Nin, whose murderer she may also have been, at least according to Fleming; or was it, rather, Lotte Lenya in her interpretation of the role: trying to kick Connery with those poisoned blades, possibly tipped with the same toxin? No, it would have to have been something faster-acting if she wanted to kill him by kicking him with her lethal shoes. 'It won't be an easy job softening your features, however stuffed with hormones you might be, and whatever you've had removed. I don't know, you'll have to see, but you've quite an athletic build and pretty heavy stubble, you'd make a very imposing, not to say alarming, woman. You certainly wouldn't get any women pushing in front of you at the market.' And this time she laughed out loud.
Dance and Dream Page 18