That squeaky, tinny music immediately distracted me from the apocryphal lines from 'The Streets of Laredo' that were going round and round in my head, for despite my fear and alarm, the tune had barely left my mind for a single moment, and now, seeing De la Garza gulping down that blue water, a third version had, I feel, become intertwined with it: people put whatever words they want to ballads and I had heard the Laredo or Armagh ballad converted into 'Doc Holliday' on the whim of some forgotten singer, who had the good doctor recount his story to that same tune, the man who had been with Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, at the famous duel or, rather, pitched battle between gangs, the tubercular, alcoholic gambler and medical doctor (or was he an odontologist like Dick Dearlove?) and connoisseur of Shakespeare, or so at least he was presented to us in the best film about them certainly I have ever seen, about Earp and Holliday in the town of Tombstone, and not in Laredo nor, of course, in that unknown place, Armagh in Ireland: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today', and that might well have been what Rafael de la Garza would have been saying in his own inevitably racier and coarser language, although he was not dying from a lung disease, with his handkerchief pressed to his mouth and coughing up bloody sputum, but from inundation or flooding..
The squeaky paso doble bothered Reresby, even annoyed him, and this didn't surprise me in the least, because it irritated the hell out of me as well.
'What's that shit?' he said, while I, at the same time, was thinking: 'Oh no, not that again.'
The insistent sound made him interrupt his beatings and immersions of De la Garza in the toilet bowl. He rudely and rapidly frisked De la Garza in search of the impertinent mobile, and when he found it in one pocket of that rapper-style jacket, he took it out, stared at it in perplexity and rage and slammed it with all his might against the wall, the phone broke into pieces and the cliched Spanish music ceased at once. 'At least he's not going to drown him now,' I thought, 'for the moment,' and I realised that I was beginning to think that nothing was as dangerous or as deadly as the sword, perhaps this was only because strangulation or drowning take time, however brief, and that brief amount of time allows time for someone else to intervene and that someone else would have to be me, but how, there was no one else there and no one was trying to get in, they would have found the door wedged shut and assumed the toilet was out of use; whereas a decapitation or an amputation requires no lapse of time, and if Tupra hadn't checked the fall of the blade, the attaché's head would have been lopped off and be lying on the floor, De la Garza would be in two parts now or, rather, he would not be at all. And so while I kept an apprehensive eye on what Reresby was doing, I also cast occasional glances over at where his coat was hanging, I knew now that it was there that he kept the fearsome weapon of the Landsknecht soldiers and that, should his temper flare up or boil over, he could easily go back for it and unsheathe it and brandish it again.
Tupra grabbed Rafita by the lapels or, rather, by the shirt-front and did with him more or less what he had done with the mobile phone, that is, he slammed him against the wall, and one of the strange cylindrical bars attached to the wall, I noticed, thudded into his back. Fortunately, the bars did not have sharp edges, but even so it must have hurt him badly, Tupra's violence had not abated. After this, De la Garza collapsed, with a defeated, breathless howl. His shirt had come out of his trousers, and I discovered to my amazement - to my embarrassment and almost sorrow too - that the diplomat had a jewel encrusted in his navel, like a small diamond or perhaps a pearl, doubtless cheap imitations, fakes. 'Good grief,' I thought, 'he's obviously really desperate to keep up with trends, and the gypsy earring and the hairnet just weren't enough, I wonder if he always wears it, even in the embassy, or only when he gets dressed up to go out on the town?' Tupra dragged him to his feet again, still gripping his shirt-front, pulled him close and then again flung him against the metal bar placed there for the disabled, the fixed bar, I had the sense this time that it caught him in the shoulder blades. De la Garza was a puppet, a sack, he was drenched and stained with blue, with gashes on his chin and forehead and a cut on his cheekbone, uno sfregio, his clothes all dishevelled and torn, and his cries very feeble now, only an irrepressible groan each time his back hit the bar, because Reresby continued in the same vein, repeatedly and rapidly: he would pull him to his feet, draw him a little away from the wall and then hurl him against that battering ram, he must have been breaking several of his ribs, if not causing more dangerous internal lesions, the attaché's whole ribcage resounded and his insides crunched, and with every impact it was if his breath dried up in him. Reresby did this a total of five times, as if he were counting them, in a patient, disciplined way, like someone who has it all planned out. De la Garza did not defend himself at any point (he could not even shrink in on himself or cover his ears now), I suppose you know when there's nothing you can do, when the other person's strength and determination — or the sheer numbers if there are several of them, or the weapons if you yourself are unarmed - are so much greater that all you can hope is that they will grow tired or decide to finish you off; during these attacks, during the beating, Rafita would also be thinking of the sword with a mixture of fear and something like hope, as perhaps Emilio Mares would have done in the fields of Ronda once he saw them coming for him first with the banderillas and then with the lance: 'They're going to do it. They're really going to do it, the bastards, the brutes,' he must have thought then. 'They're going to bait me like a bull, it would be better if they just killed me now and did a good job of it, rather than give me the coup de grâce with whatever they have to hand, because they're capable of doing it with a nail.'
When Tupra had finished, he turned to me and said: 'Jack, translate this, will you, I want him to understand and to be quite clear about what I'm saying.' And before he began, he added: 'Have you got a comb?'
De la Garza was slumped on the floor, he seemed incapable of movement and would not, in my presence, be hauled to his feet by Sir Blow or Sir Punishment or Sir Thrashing, well, at least he wasn't Sir Death. Reresby looked in the mirror while he was talking, he tucked in his shirt, tugged at his jacket, smoothed his waistcoat, otherwise he looked exactly as he always looked, even his hair had remained relatively unruffled. He straightened his tie, adjusted the knot, and did this without his sodden gloves, which he had deposited, with a grimace of disgust, next to the toilet. When he'd had the gloves on, he had not once used his fist or even the flat of his hand — or his foot either - every blow dealt had been made by another interposing object, the toilet bowl, the cylindrical bar and even the hairnet and the flushing water, he must have known all about what my father had told me years before, that a punch can shatter the hand of the person doing the punching. In Spain we have always known about these tricks of the trade as regards violence: in 1808 (to give but one example), during the Peninsular War or the War of Independence, Filangieri, the governor of La Coruna and, more suspiciously still, Italian by birth (and not 'a Spaniard of lightning and fire'), was judged by his troops to be a traitor because he delayed slightly before rallying to the cause of Independence (he lingered, he claimed, only out of strategic prudence, but, by then, it was too late); and so they stuck their bayonets in the ground, points uppermost (this happened apparently in Villafranca del Bierzo, although I've no idea what they were doing there), and threw their Captain-General onto the spikes a few times, until some vital organ was finally pierced and there was no point in continuing, thus saving the mutineers the energy and effort involved in sticking their bayonets into him themselves and leaving the not-yet-dead Filanghieri to do all the work for them. This was not apparently the first example of such idleness, and was started perhaps by the Carthaginians who deployed spears in a similar way against the Roman general Atilius Regulus in the third century BC; and an English traveller in Spain remarked that murdering the unjust, despotic, incompetent and generally appalling generals and leaders who have, on the whole, ruled over our Peninsula throughout h
istory (good vassals, but bad lords) was 'an inveterate Iberian trait'. He also remarked: 'Help from Spain comes either late or never' - the person who would succeed Filanghieri did eventually come to his aid, but only long after the latter had been tested to destruction as a fakir and been found wanting, as I remembered when I bent down over De la Garza to enquire vaguely and ineffectually about his battered state, there was little I could do then, the fatuous fellow lay there crushed and half conscious, he might perhaps be crippled for some time to come, not for ever I hoped, otherwise he would have to grow used to frequenting toilets like this one. And I wondered, too, if the surname Tupra did not perhaps have its remote origins among certain ancient, idle compatriots of mine.
'A comb?' I replied, somewhat annoyed. It reminded me of Wheeler's comment about Latins, in his garden by the river, after the helicopter had had its little joke. A reputation for being vain. 'What makes you think I'd have a comb on me?'
'You Latins usually have one, don't you? See if he's got one.' And he jerked his head in the direction of the fallen man.
It made me squirm inside, it seemed outrageous to me that Reresby should use the comb that De la Garza was bound to have on him, assuming he had not lost it in that one-sided scrimmage or during the furious dancing beforehand. I felt ashamed at the very idea of frisking the beaten man, that all too easily defeated man. And so I took mine out, even though this meant admitting that Tupra had been right.
'Very clever,' I said to Tupra and handed it to him. It was clearly a widespread idea on that large island, about us Latins and our combs.
Not that I cared particularly if I did corroborate his theory: I suddenly felt extraordinarily relieved, because it was over and De la Garza was still alive and I had already imagined him dead. Very dead indeed, sliced in two, transformed into head and trunk. The greatest danger was over, or so it seemed, however recently it had occurred, it was nonetheless over, it is amazing and also irritating how cessation brings with it a kind of false, momentary cancellation of what has happened. 'Now that he's not walloping the hell out of him any more, it's almost as if he hadn't done it at all,' we think in our excessive adoration of the present moment, which is madly and permanently on the increase. 'Now that it isn't burning any more, it's almost as if it had never burned. Now that they're not bombing us any more, it's almost as if they had never bombed us. Yes, there are the dead and the mutilated, and the charred houses reduced to rubble, but that's how it is now, it's happened, it's already past and there is no one who can change or undo it, and now, at least, they're not killing or mutilating or destroying, not while I'm here and breathing and with things still to do.' These thoughts pass through our heads whenever one of the present-day, more or less televised wars is going on - the Gulf War, the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the Iraq War based on dishonest motives and spurious interests and which was totally unnecessary except as a way of feeding the limitless arrogance of those who were the driving forces behind it - wars which are held in such scorn by older people, like my father or Wheeler, who had been involved in the non-frivolous variety. As long as there are battles and as long as there are bombs falling on soldiers and civilians, we are gripped by a terrible anxiety, we watch the news every day with our hearts in our mouths; this phase doesn't usually last very long nowadays, sometimes only a matter of weeks or, at most, months, and so we don't have time to get used to it nor, therefore, to become sufficiently desensitised, to accept that this is the nature of any war, be it treacherous or righteous, and that it is something that can be lived with on a daily basis, without giving it too much importance or worrying about other people all the time, especially about distant people unknown to us; not even about ourselves and those close by, once the slaughter has begun, if your time is up, it's up. If a bullet has your name on it, as Diderot said - long before anyone else did, if I'm not mistaken. Nowadays, we don't have time to become accustomed to living in a state of war, a state which, as Wheeler remarked, makes peace inconceivable and vice versa ('People don't realise to what extent the one negates the other,' he had said, 'how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts'), and thus the sense of emergency remains intense for the brief duration of the horror seen on screen, and when that phase ends, we are filled by a strange conviction that it is all over and has, to some extent, disappeared. 'At least it's not happening now,' we think, sometimes even with a sigh; and that 'at least' implies a real injustice: what happened loses in gravity and impact simply because it is not happening now, and then we almost lose interest in the wounded and the dead who so distressed and affected us while it was going on. They are the past now, someone is taking care of things, reconstructing, healing, burying, adopting, preferably the same people who caused the war, so that they can then be seen as righters of wrongs, the very height of absurdity and an out-and-out lie. It's yet another symptom of the infantilisation of the world, mothers used to soothe their children by saying: 'It's over now, it's all right, it's over,' after a nightmare or a fright or some unpleasant incident, trapped fingers or some such thing, almost as if they were saying: 'What no longer is never was,' even if the pain persisted and an itchy scab formed afterwards or the fingers became bruised and swollen and even if, sometimes, a scar was left behind so that, later, the adult could stroke it and continue to remember that injury and that day.
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