'I don't know,' I replied, slightly put out by his realistic rigour, and I immediately regretted having spoken those words, the words most guaranteed to disappoint in that building, or the most despised. I quickly covered them up. 'That seems to me the principal motive, but I suppose it wouldn't be necessary for his life to be in danger, if, as I believe, he is, in a sense, more concerned with his history, with the story of his life than with that life itself. Although he is probably unaware of this. That priority has, I believe, less to do with any future or present biographers than with his need to retell the story to himself every day, to live with it. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear.'
'No, not entirely, Jack. Be more precise, please. Try a bit harder. Don't get yourself in such a tangle.'
Such comments spurred me on, a slight infantilism on my part, from which I've never managed to free myself and probably never will.
'He likes his image, he likes his story as a whole, even the odontological phase; he never loses sight of it, never forgets it.' I was trying to be more precise. 'He always has in his mind his entire trajectory: his past as well as his future. He sees himself as a story, whose ending he must take care of, but whose development he must not neglect either. It isn't that he will allow no upsets or weaknesses or stains in his story, he's not that naive. However, these must be of a kind that do not stand out too stridently, that do not inevitably leap out at him (a horrible protuberance, a lump) when, each morning, he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks about 'Dick Dearlove' as a whole, as an idea, or as if he were the title of a novel or a film, which has, moreover, already achieved the status of a classic. It has nothing to do with morality or with shame, that's not it, indeed most people find it easy enough to look themselves in the face, they always find excuses for their own excesses, or deny that they are excesses; bad consciences and selfless regret have no place in our times, I'm speaking of something else. He sees himself from outside, almost exclusively from outside, he has no difficulty admiring himself. And perhaps the first thing he says when he wakes up is something like: 'Goodness, it wasn't a dream: I am Dick Dearlove, no less, and I have the privdege of talking and living with that legend on a daily basis.' This isn't really so very rare, whether you leave the word 'legend' in or take it out. It has been known for writers who have won the Nobel prize to spend what remains of their life thinking all the time: 'I'm a Nobel prizewinner, I won the Nobel Prize, and, my, how I shone in Stockholm,' sometimes even saying this out loud, they've been overheard doing so by their anxious loved ones. But I know quite a lot of other people of no objective significance or fame, who, nevertheless, perceive themselves in just such a way, or similarly, and who watch their life as if they were at the theatre. A permanent theatre, of course, repetitive and monotonous
'Come on, Iago, please: get to the point. I get lost in your digressions. When do you think Dearlove would be most likely to bump someone off?'
Tupra was, of course, perfectly capable of following my digressions, he never got lost, even if he wasn't much interested in what he was hearing, although I don't think he did get bored with me, you can tell when you've got the attention of the people listening to you, not for nothing was I a teacher, although those classes are now moving further and further away in time. He would sometimes call me Iago, the classical form of my name, when he wanted to annoy me or force me to concentrate. He knew that Wheeler referred to me as Jacobo and probably didn't dare attempt the pronunciation, and so he placed my name somewhere half-way along the road, in familiar Shakespearean mode, possibly with some mocking undertone, I couldn't rule that out. Of course Tupra could follow me, but he would sometimes pretend that the traditional aversion to the speculative and theoretical, inherent in the education and mind of the English, prevented him from accompanying me very far on my digressions. He was not only following everything, he was recording it, filing it away, retaining it. And he was quite capable of appropriating it for himself.
'Sorry, Mr Tupra, I didn't mean to get diverted,' I said; I was still well behaved then. 'Well, they say that Dearlove is bisexual, or pentasexual, or pansexual, I don't know, but very highly sexed anyway, sex-mad, they hint at it all the time in the press. And last night he did seem rather overexcited when he slipped on his green gown and insisted on sorting out Mrs Thompson's tooth decay. Although he would doubtless have preferred to be rooting around in her young son's mouth. It was a shame for Dr Dearlove, I suppose, that the boy refused to oblige, however sweetly he insisted. They also say that he's very fond of… of the newly pubescent, shall we say.'
'They do say that,' replied Tupra gravely, but barely bothering to conceal the fact that he found all this highly amusing. 'And?'
'Well, supposing a minor, male or female, it doesn't matter, laid a trap for him. If my information is correct, he happily allows these rumours to spread, as long as they are only that, rumours. I imagine it's not a bad way of airing them: by ignoring them, by not even admitting their existence with denials and lawsuits and complaints. As I understand it, he has never said a word about his sexual predilections. Besides, everyone knows he's been married, twice, admittedly both marriages were childless, but that, nevertheless, is what he holds on to, officially at least.'
'More or less. I don't know much about that aspect of his life.'
'Anyway, suppose a minor, male or female, slipped a sleeping-pill into his drink. While they were at it, both of them stark naked. Suppose the minor takes some photos of him while he's off in Limbo, the boy or the girl also gets in on the shot, of course, puts the camera on automatic and takes charge of the stage direction, with our ex-dentist a limp rag-doll in his or her hands. Let's say, however, that the pill doesn't prove strong enough for the titanic Dr Dearlove: that an inner sense of alarm helps him pull himself together. So that he either doesn't fall very deeply asleep or else wakes up early. With one eye half-open he sees what's happening. With a quarter of his conscious mind he takes in the situation, or with even only a tenth part of it. It's not that he's puritanical in his attitudes or public declarations, that would lose him fans; he's quite daring, really, although he's careful never to go too far, he defends the legalisation of drugs, responsible euthanasia, the kind of cause that won't lose him any fans. But the appearance of such photos in the press belongs to an entirely different sphere, as would his knifing by thugs from Brixton, Clapham or Streatham. Exactly the same, I think you'll agree. Even though in one situation he would be the vile, despicable offender and in the other the poor, pitiful, much-mourned victim. As regards the effect on his narrative, they're not so very different, both are protuberances. In this case it wouldn't be an ending, the kiss of sleep and the photos I mean, but it would be an episode that would always have a place in his history, that could never be avoided in the story or in the idea of Dick Dearlove. And given the way the public feels about child abuse, it could lead to prison and an embarrassing trial. And even if he was absolved afterwards, the accusation alone and its reverberations, the images seen and repeated thousands of times, the scandal and the grave suspicions that will have lasted for months, could also end up as a warning used by mothers to their adolescent offspring: 'Mind who you mix with, dear, you might end up with a Dick Dearlove.' That's the trouble with being so famous: lose concentration for a moment and you could become the subject of a ballad.'
'You're very well informed about the buffoon. Even about his opinions; very impressive,' said Tupra wryly.
'As I say, he's almost as much of a superstar in Spain as he is here. He's given loads of concerts there. It would be hard not to know about him.'
'I always had the impression that the Basques were a very austere people, in the present context I mean,' he added, genuinely surprised. He never missed anything or forgot anything.
Austere? Well, that depends. There's no shortage of buffoons either. The leader sets the tone, you know. Like in Lombardy. Or anywhere else in Italy for that matter. Not to mention Venezuela; remember our friend Bonanza.'
'Well, we're not far behind,' he said, and that shocked me a little, for no reason really: I didn't know exactly who Tupra worked for (that is, who we worked for), I only had Wheeler's hints to go on and my own unreflective deductions. 'The kiss of sleep you called it.'
'Yes, that's how the trick is known in Spain, it's used mainly as a ruse to strip the sleeping person's house of all its valuables. That's what the media call it.'
'H'm, the kiss of sleep, not bad.' He liked the name. 'So what would happen with Dearlove. He wakes with a
