Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

which I was, nevertheless, thinking of continuing. But instead of taking advantage of my return to the subject, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten about the couple and to be interested in what I was saying, even though he thus ran the risk that I might once more go off the subject. It was probably just curiosity, because he couldn't resist asking:

'Was that what happened with you and Luisa? Except that it didn't drag on and you didn't stay together.' He observed me for a second with that look of compassion which he immediately corrected or toned down. He didn't dismiss or reject or withdraw it, far from it, he merely adjusted it after its first appearance, which was entirely sincere and spontaneous.

But it could never persist in him, that state of innocence or elementality, as he might have put it, were he describing it.

'No, I or we didn't let it get that far. It was something else, something simpler perhaps and certainly faster. Less cloying. Cleaner perhaps.'

'Some day you'll have to tell me a little more about it. If you want to, of course, and if you can, sometimes it's impossible to explain the really important things, those that have affected us most deeply, and keeping silent is all that saves us in difficult times, because explanations almost always sound so lame with respect to the pain we have inflicted or that others have inflicted on us. They tend not to match up to the evil suffered or caused and so they break down. I don't understand what's happened between you two, although I can understand why I don't. I was very fond of you both. Well, it's absurd to talk about you in the past: I am very fond of you both. I suppose it's because as a couple you seem to belong to the past, for the moment. Because you never know with such bonds, do you, regardless of their actual nature. Bonds.' He stopped for a moment, as if weighing the word or remembering some particular bond of his own. 'I meant that I liked you together, and usually one tends to prefer people separately, on their own, without conjugal or family accretions. Although, now that I think of it, I don't know if I've ever seen Luisa without you, if I've ever seen her alone, can you remember? I have an idea that I have, but I'm not entirely sure.'

'I don't think so, Peter, I don't think you've seen her without me being there. Though obviously you've spoken on the phone.' I must have sounded reluctant to take up this final and, for me, unexpected tangent. But it did not escape me that if Wheeler and Luisa had not seen each other without me (I wasn't quite sure about this either, some vague, ungraspable memory was nagging at me), what he had just said was that he liked me more with Luisa than on my own, as I was when he had first met me. I was not offended by the inference: I was in no doubt that she had improved me, had made me happier and lighter, less given to brooding, less dangerous and much less opaque.

'My dear, my dear,' I thought, and I thought it in English because that was the language I was speaking and because some things are less embarrassing in a language not your own, even if you only think them. 'If I could only forget,' I thought now in Spanish. 'If you would only grant me your forgetting.'

But before getting back to the Tupras – or, rather, to Tupra and Beryl – Peter added something of his own to this detour, or as he would doubtless have called it, this excursus.

'I don't know if you realise,' he said, as he rekindled his cigar with another match, so that, as he spoke, he was enveloped in a cloud of smoke worthy of a steam engine, 'but everything you have described as happening in the conjugal or private world happens in every other sphere as well, at work, in public life, in politics. The denial of everything, of who you are and who you've been, of what you do and what you've done, of what you're trying or have tried to do, of your motives and intentions, of your professions of faith, your ideas, your greatest loyalties, your causes… Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenceless, lost. That's how it is with persecutions, purges, with the worst of intrigues and plots, you have no idea how frightening it is when someone with power and influence decides to deny you, or when many people band together in agreement, although agreement isn't always necessary, all that's needed is a malicious deed or word that takes and spreads like fire, and convinces others, it's like an epidemic. You don't know how dangerous persuasive people can be, never pit yourself against such people unless you are prepared to become even more despicable than they are and unless you're sure that your imagination, no, your capacity for invention is even greater than theirs, and that your outbreak of cholera will spread faster and in the right direction. You have to bear in mind that most people are stupid. Stupid and frivolous and credulous, you have no idea just how stupid, frivolous and credulous they are, they're a permanently blank sheet without a mark on it, without the least resistance, and though you may think you know this, you can never really know it, after all, you haven't lived through war, and I hope you never will. The person doing the persuading relies on that stupidity, he may rely on it too much and yet he's never wrong, he relies on it to the utmost, to the point of exaggeration, and that reliance confers on him an almost limitless boldness. If he's good, he never makes a mistake.' He stopped talking for a moment and allowed the smoke, which seemed now to be emerging from his white, pastry-like hair, to subside, then he looked at me very hard, with a mixture of curiosity and confirmation, as if he were both seeing me for the first time and recognising me (perhaps as the subject of the last sentence he had uttered), or were comparing me with someone else or with himself, or as if he were perhaps blessing me. 'You have that quality, you're very persuasive. It would be most unwise of anyone to pit themselves against you.' The cigar was drawing well again, he observed its glowing red end with satisfaction and even blew on it for sheer pleasure, to see it blush redder still. 'Nowadays, people don't often use the expression 'to fall from grace', do they? To fall from grace. It's interesting and rather odd that it should be so little used, when what it denotes, better than any other expression, is happening all the time, unstoppably and everywhere and possibly more than ever, although more quietly and more surreptitiously than in the past, and it often entails the destruction of the person who falls, who is literally one of the fallen, who is, how can I put it, a casualty, a non-person, a felled tree. I've seen it often, more than that, I've even been a party to it myself, by which I mean that I've contributed to the fall from grace of a number of individuals, a horrible fall which no one ever recovers from. I've even brought it about myself. Or, rather, I've helped to bring about a fall from grace decreed by others. I've helped carry it out.'

'Here, at the university?'

'No. Well, yes, but not only here. On fronts where that fall was far more serious and brought with it far worse consequences than not being invited to high tables' – the dinners of which I had endured a good few in my time at Oxford – 'or becoming the object of gossip and criticism or finding oneself in a social or academic vacuum or being discredited professionally. But we'll talk about that tomorrow too, perhaps, a little, just enough. Or perhaps we won't, I don't know, we'll see. Tomorrow we'll see.'

I don't know quite how I looked at him, but I know that he did not like that look. Not so much because of what it revealed – surprise perhaps, curiosity, slight incredulity, a touch of suspicion, but not, I think, disapproval or censure, it was intuitively impossible for me to harbour such feelings towards him – but because of the mere fact that my look existed. It was as if it made him doubt his previous statement or comparison or recognition, when it was too late or was inappropriate.

'Have you spread any outbreaks of cholera?' That was the question that accompanied my look.

He rested the end of his walking-stick on the ground, grabbed hold of the banister and, with cigar and handle in the same hand, tried to get up, but couldn't. He remained like that, two arms raised, as if he were hanging from both supports or was caught in a gesture reminiscent of the one people make to proclaim their innocence or to announce that they are carrying no weapons: 'Frisk me, if you like.' Or: 'It wasn't me.'

'You're far too intelligent, Jacobo, for it even to occur to me to think that you could have understood that turn of phrase as anything but metaphorical. Of course I've spread them.' And that convoluted Jamesian gibe and the subsequent defiant affirmation were swiftly followed by the dilution of the latter, or its diminishment or an attempt at a nebulous, partial explanation, as if Wheeler did not want my vision of him to be muddied or spoiled by a misunderstanding or by an unpleasant metaphor. I don't know how he could possibly think that I would take him for a callous swine. 'That was a long time ago,' he said. 'Don't forget, I was born in 1913. Before, can you imagine it, the Great War. It doesn't seem possible, does it, that I should still be alive. Some evenings it doesn't seem possible to me either. In a life like mine there is time for too many things. Well, there's simultaneously not time for anything and, yes, time for too much. My memory is so full that sometimes I can't bear it. I'd like to lose more of it, I'd like to empty it a little. No, that's not true, I would rather it didn't fail me just yet. I just wish it wasn't quite so full. When you're young, as you know, you're in a hurry and always afraid that you're not living enough, that your experiences are not varied enough or rich enough, you feel impatient and try to accelerate events, if you can, and so you load yourself up with them, you stockpile them, the urgency of the young to accumulate scan and to forge a past, it's so