Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  I started, perhaps gasped or panted unexpectedly, I turned to Tupra and said in alarm:

  'What's this?'

  As he fell, the prisoner must have struck or perhaps brushed against the invisible lamp, because for a few seconds the light swayed gently back and forth.

  'Don't turn away, keep looking, it isn't finished yet,' Tupra said imperiously. And he tapped my elbow with his stiff fingers, as if I were a disobedient child.

  When I again fixed my eyes on the screen, I saw the feet of the hanged man still flailing around for support, while his panting gave way to a kind of guttural groan, a choking sound that never became more than that-it couldn't. The feet, however, suddenly found some support: one of the men in camouflage trousers grabbed the man's two legs and lifted them up as high as he could while the other man retrieved the stool and placed it once again beneath the hanged man's feet. Once he was firmly installed, they removed the rope and lowered him to ground level. Then they gave him a shove and he sat down again on the stool, and the two soldiers recommenced their prowling round the prisoner, who was now coughing, his lungs must have been bursting. The short boots made more noise this time, as if their owners were marching in unison and deliberately bringing their feet down hard in order to make that threatening noise, evocative of a roll on the drums at the circus announcing some still more dangerous feat or in public squares just before a much-anticipated execution. And after about thirty seconds-or perhaps ninety-they repeated the whole operation, that is, they made the hooded man stand on the stool and again pretended to hang him, or, to be more exact, they started to hang him-the stool kicked away as before-and then, soon afterwards, stopped. On that occasion, the prisoner lost a shoe during his desperate kicking, perhaps this time the hanging went on slightly longer than before. He was wearing very ordinary shoes, old lace-ups without the laces. He wasn't wearing socks. 'This is just like Tupra in the handicapped toilet,' I managed to think confusedly, 'when he raised and lowered the sword and then raised and lowered it again. Each time I thought he was going to cut the moron's head off, and now, although what he's showing me is over and done with and although he can freeze the action on the video, or even leave it for another day as if it really didn't matter (the scene will still be there unchanged), right now, I've no idea if those guys will end up hanging the poor devil on one of these dummy runs or not, and I want to know, even though the man's a stranger and I can't even see his face. He wouldn't have known how it would end either, when it was still not yet the past. He can't be a young man, not with those old battered brown shoes.' Before sitting the man down again, they put his shoe back on, as if driven by some mysterious impulse to maintain tidiness and good order. One of the soldiers started waving his hand about in front of his nose, as if some terrible smell were suddenly emanating from the man. They still said nothing, no one spoke, not even the obscure spectators, and that's bound to fill anyone unable to see or move with even more fear, more than surly voices or insults, unless they're asked something in an unfamiliar language, and that's the most frightening thing, I think, not understanding what is being said to you in a life-or-death situation.

  They went on to repeat the whole operation a third time, exactly the same, with the prisoner's head at first out of the frame only to reappear later along with the already taut rope, the body dropping straight down, albeit only a short way, so that nothing irreparable happened during the fall, the light swaying briefly either because he had brushed against it or perhaps from the sudden jolting, the second or third time they may have left him hanging there for fewer seconds, although, in my distress, it seemed much longer. The victim would be getting weaker with each cruel attempt, he had probably dislocated something and his heart would be racing. Obviously his neck hadn't been broken, that would have been the end, the men in the camouflage trousers didn't leave him long enough for that to happen, they were well trained, they must have known at what point it would be too late, not, I imagined, that it would matter very much if they got it wrong and the man snuffed it, perhaps no one in the world knew of his fate, nor even where he was. Everyone seemed relatively relaxed, both executioners and witnesses, diligent or alert but without malice, as if they were carrying out or watching some unpleasant procedure, but which was nothing more than that, a procedure.

  Tupra froze the image when the prisoner had again been taken down and was coughing, his legs very weak and uncooperative, and on that occasion they did not sit him down. He still had on the black hood, with a single opening for mouth and nose (with adhesive tape covering the mouth), but none for the eyes. They seemed about to take him away, perhaps back to a cell, perhaps to the infirmary. His breathing was once more gradually slowing to a pant.

  'Did you see?' Tupra asked. And in his voice I heard a note of almost amused excitement, to me inexplicable, for I was already aware of the poison entering me.

  'What are you doing?' I replied. 'I want to know how it ends, to know if they finish off the poor guy'

  'That's where it ends, there isn't any more, it moves on to something else. But did you see him?' he said, referring clearly now to a man, not to an object or a particular detail or to the episode itself, in that case, he would have said 'it' not 'him.'

  'Whom?' I asked, falling perhaps into hypercorrection, another example of that mysterious impulse to impose excessive good order and tidiness in the midst of the shock I was feeling.

  Tupra tut-tutted in spontaneous scorn.

  'You're being very slow on the uptake, Jack. Come on,what are your eyes for? The eye is quick and catches everything. You've done better than this in the past, you're losing your powers, or perhaps you're just tired.' Then he rewound the images with the remote control, found a particular point in the recording and froze it again, he did this quickly and skilfully, he was obviously very practiced. It was one of the moments in which the prisoner was falling, the rope tightening, the stool kicked away, and the light swaying very briefly and gently, hardly at all and less and less with each movement, and covering a shorter distance. Two, at most three movements back and forth, but in that moment, just for a fraction of a second, the three men in the background were suddenly lit up by the shifting light. I looked at them, I couldn't quite make them out, but there was something familiar about them. 'What do you see now?'

  'Wait,' I said, still uncertain, screwing up my eyes to see more clearly. 'Wait.'

  Tupra did not wait, he activated the zoom and framed their faces in enlarged form, he had a DVD player with far more features than I had on mine in Madrid, I still hadn't bought one for myself in London. And then I clearly saw the familiar square, lined face, known to half of humanity, the half that watches television and reads the newspapers, with his unmistakable glasses and his look of some German doctor or chemist, or rather some Nazi doctor or chemist or scientist, whenever I'd seen him on screen or in a photo, I'd had no difficulty at all in imagining him wearing a white coat over his tie, more than that, his face almost cried out for, no, demanded that white coat, it seemed strange that he didn't wear one. He, like all democratic world leaders and politicians, had repeatedly and publicly denied having anything to do with such things, or having given orders, approved or consented or even known about such practices, even ones that were less brutal and merely humiliating. No one in the outside world knew what I knew now: that, far from not knowing, he had been present, at least once, at the triple half-hanging of a man chained hand and foot, and that he had literally sat idly by, arms folded, impassive, the highest authority there, as he would have been almost anywhere. As Tupra had said, those videos could not be seen by just anyone (a journalist would have been jumping up and down). And the reason they were treasured as if they were gold dust was because each of them contained the fixed image-indefinitely repeatable-of someone famous or powerful or wealthy or someone with prestige and influence. After a while, I had forgotten all about that and focused only on the main action, how could I not? Perhaps for Tupra, on the other hand, the only thing that counted was the d
ark backdrop, or that one illuminated moment. Obviously, he had seen it before, it didn't take him by surprise. His attitude confirmed to me, at any rate, that he gave little importance to someone's possible death, but that neither was he a sadist. At least he took no pleasure in the suffering of another, those dummy hangings were not an object of fascination, they were merely the necessary framework for what really interested him.

  'Yes, I can see him now,' I said. 'But why do you keep this? He's an American, an ally, one of yours.' And I realized at once that I hadn't said 'one of ours,' as would perhaps have seemed logical to Tupra and as would have been logical at that point; it seemed to me that, without even realizing it, I had entered some very murky territory Yes, I was inside and I knew it, I really did belong to one particular side, despite feeling that I belonged to none. And what was even more unexpected and would have seemed unthinkable a year or even six months ago: I had seen something that was forbidden to almost all other eyes in the world, or, rather, had seen only the half of it.

  'So what if he is? You never know' He took a sip of port, I no longer felt much like drinking mine. He took out and lit a Rameses II. He only offered me one afterwards, when his cigarette was already smoking, and that I did accept. 'We don't even know who is "one of ours," or if they'll still be one of ours tomorrow, it's best not to worry too much about that aspect of things. That's something I can't know about you or you about me. Anyway, let's continue.'

  And he resumed the session, the injection of poison, and, at my side and slightly behind me, occasionally spoke to make some brief point or comment, almost as used to happen at slide-shows, with a projector and a screen, given after a journey considered unusual for the times-in my childhood, for example-with the travelers, the ones showing the slides to relatives or friends, placing each one in its context and giving an explanation: 'Here we are on top of the Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper in the world,' when it still was, 'it's enough to give you vertigo, isn't it?' And vertigo, yes, vertigo was exactly what I felt with each new scene. Some were innocuous, people caught performing perfectly normal sexual acts, but which if made public or seen by others become strangely anomalous, especially if performed by famous people or very serious people or people of a certain age or respectable people, there's always something laborious and ridiculous about objectified sex, and it's hard to understand why, today, there are so many people who film themselves for pleasure, to bask later on in the semi-embarrassment of it all. There were also individuals offering and accepting bribes, some in cash, some whose faces I knew, the occasional Spaniard or, rather, one particular Spanish woman, the blonde hypocrite, but Tupra fast-forwarded over all of these and only returned to normal speed when the scene involved violence or something bizarre. Bizarre to me, that is; not to him, of course; who knows, perhaps they would have seemed so to Pérez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel, they might never have seen such images either or perhaps they were fully aware of them and knew every detail; perhaps, who knows, such images would have struck Wheeler as bizarre too, or maybe he would have seen more than enough of such things during his youth, and not on screen. But I had not, I had never seen an execution before, except in films, or more recently on television, where the news they show always seems as unreal as the cinema; three men and a woman standing quite still on the seashore, waiting, their hands untied, they're helpless, so why tie them up, a dawn light, it reminded me at once of that painting in the Prado, by Gisbert, at least that's the name that came to me, the shooting of Torrijos and his liberal companions in Malaga, you can see the sand and the waves, perhaps a little of the countryside behind and, in the center, a large group of condemned men, and when I looked it up on the Internet later that morning, I counted sixteen if you include the wife and child to whom one of them is clinging, but doubtless wife and child were merely saying goodbye to their soon-to-be-dead husband and father and would not meet the same fate, so there were fourteen and four more already fallen, with their eyes blindfolded, and nearby, on the ground, there's a top hat that one of the corpses must have tenaciously kept on his head until the moment he became a corpse, they would have killed them in batches to make things manageable, fifty or so men fell there in 1831 ('Late at night they killed him, along with all his company' I recalled Lorca's great ballad on the subject and quoted it to myself), the six most smartly dressed are grouped on the right, the troops are bunched together on the left and the man in the Phrygian hat looks disdainful and proud (social class matters even in a shared death), more so than the bespectacled fellow who forms part of the gentlemen's group, Torrijos must be the one with fairish hair ('the noble general, with the clear brow'), or perhaps not, he must be the one wearing boots and holding the hands of two of his comrades ('A gentleman among the dukes, a heart of finest silver'), betrayed on his return to the country by the Governor of Malaga ('they drew him there with deceitful words, which he, alas, believed'), he, too, had sought refuge in England for several years, it's always dangerous returning to Spain, where faces change so much between today and tomorrow, even if you were a hero of the Peninsular War or the War of Independence ('The Vizconde de La Barthe, who commanded the militias, should have cut off his own hand rather than commit such villainy'), and there were the friars who are always present at our most somber events (and if not them, priests and if not priests, then nuns), one reading or praying and two applying blindfolds, all three are ominous figures, and behind stand the blurred and waiting shapes of the firing squad ('Great clouds are building above the Mijas mountains'),

  it's possible that the man commanding them let fall the white handkerchief he's holding in his left hand, or attached it perhaps to the point of his saber, at the same time shouting 'Fire!' ('Amongst the sound of the waves the rifle shots rang out, and he lay dead upon the sand, bleeding from three wounds… Death, being death, did not wither his smile'); and I remembered, too, those who were executed without trial or given, at most, a sham version of justice, on those same Malaga beaches by the man who took the city more than a century later with his Francoist and Moorish hordes and with the Blackshirts of Roatta or 'Mancini': the Duque de Sevilla was his untimely title, the man who strewed with corpses the shore and the water and the barracks and the prisons and the hotels and the walls, about four thousand, it was claimed, and so what if it was fewer; and in front of the condemned men and woman stood two men with machine-guns or something similar, I don't know much about these things, two men wearing ties and with their hair neatly combed, I bet they always carried a comb in their pocket as I do, as do most southerners, and when one of them said 'Dai,' they both unleashed interminable bursts of gunfire, they fired and fired, squandering bullets as if they had to get rid of them all, while the bodies were falling and once they had fallen too, the woman and one man face upwards and the other two on their sides, the gunmen moved closer, still firing, holding their weapons almost vertically now, the sand jumped and it seemed as if the flesh and the modest clothes of the already very dead dead, bleeding from twenty wounds, also jumped at every gratuitous shot. 'This is a settling of accounts on some secluded beach on the Golfo de Taranto, probably not far from Crotone in Calabria, a few years ago now,' murmured Reresby, correctly stressing the first syllable of Taranto, and he spoke so very softly now, it was as if his voice were emerging from inside a helmet. 'It's interesting. One of the executioners has since carved out a career for himself, first in the construction industry, then in politics, and he now has an excellent post in the current government. The other man, however is dead, he was bumped off straight away, in reprisal for this. It's useful for us to have this video, don't you think?' And I sensed in that question a kind of collector's pride, and maybe he was right to feel proud.

  Nor had I ever seen, or even conceived of, an arranged bestial rape, with spectators as if they were at a tryout for young fighting bulls, a small arena, or perhaps the central courtyard of a group of houses, well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, a vicious sun, thick mustaches and Texan ha
ts and not a few Havana cigars clenched between teeth, there was the festive sound of a brass band in the background, encouraging shouts in Spanish and in English, and in the arena, a woman, a horse, a few mamporreros-men employed to help stallions mate with mares-and something tearing, I couldn't bear it, I closed my eyes, 'Don't close your eyes!' and so I looked away, 'Don't look away!' But I did, except for the odd moment, this I really couldn't stand because I couldn't believe it, I'd never imagined such a thing were possible in the world, purely as a form of entertainment, and it really was a mortal poison, the images-what I glimpsed of them, for my eyelids and my turned-away face were quick to save me-entered my mind as if they were an ugly reptile or a kind of serpent, or perhaps an eel, or leeches under the skin, how can I put it, internal leeches, the images slipped inside me like a foreign body that caused me immediate pain and a sense of oppression and suffocation and the urgent need for someone to remove it ('Let me sit heavy on thy soul'), but you cannot root out what enters through the eyes, nor what enters through the ears, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done about it, or else you have to wait some time in order to be able to persuade yourself that you did not see or hear what you did see or hear-there's always a doubt or the trace of a doubt-that it was imagination or a misunderstanding or a mirage or a hallucination or a malicious misinterpretation, we are none of us immune from them when our thoughts and our perceptions become twisted and we judge everything in the same slanted sinister light. 'This is Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, in Mexico,' murmured Tupra in his ever more sunken voice and in a tone that wasn't in the least indifferent, but almost sorrowful, grave, and it didn't sound to me as if he were putting it on, 'and there you have one of the thousand women who have disappeared and about whom so much has been written in the press. That, however, is not what matters to us, important though it is, but, rather, that man there, to the right in the second row, the one all in white and wearing a red tie.' This forced me to look for a moment, reluctantly and out of the corner of my eye-how hard it is to resist curiosity when someone points a finger at something-I saw a man in the audience, a fat, smiling, middle-aged man with shiny skin and thick hair, though I couldn't help but see, as well, the terrible irrationality and more tearing and some blood now-like a sword or a spear-and I turned away again, towards where Reresby was sitting, his eyes fixed on the screen, but screwed up now, as if he needed glasses or were preparing to close them at any moment, perhaps that episode, even though he had seen it before and knew how it would end, really set his teeth on edge or provoked anguish or even repugnance ('Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake'), no one can bear everything and, as I said, he was not a sadist. 'At the time, and this is a few years ago now, he was a very rich businessman, not yet a tycoon. Now he is, though, and he's standing for the post of mayor in an important town, in another region, in another state on the border with the United States, Coahuila. And he'll get it too. It will be useful for us to have this film of him enjoying the show.' He mispronounced Coahuila, saying it as if it were an English word-it's less well known than Chihuahua-something like 'koh-hoo-why-lah.' The worst thing was that the event seemed not to be a single episode, I certainly didn't get the impression that everything had been arranged for this one occasion, the band, the awnings, the horse and its experienced handlers, the invitation, doubtless made over the Internet and in code, or through messages left on cell phones, doubtless in a whisper. What I glimpsed had probably happened before, perhaps with minor variations, with a different animal perhaps, but I didn't want to go down that road and I tore out all further imaginings by the roots.