saying goodbye. 'No, that's impossible,' I thought, not as yet seriously worried; 'Tupra said that all she wanted were compliments and gallant remarks, and that, however eager she might seem to follow a particular path to its end, she would not take that one first poisoned step forwards, and Tupra is rarely wrong. Tonight, however, the lady, it is true, has had a number of drinks, and it would be best not even to begin to calculate De la Garza's liquid intake. And who has not taken such a step at some point in their existence, in the company of an idiot or a criminal or a monster, no one is safe. But Rafita. With his hairnet. With his enormous pale jacket. With his earring like something a female Cuban singer or a Puerto Rican dancer would wear. As if he were Rita Moreno in
Reresby and Manoia immediately noticed my unease. The latter shot a rapid glance at the empty space left by the vanished couple, he remained impassive and did not even touch his glasses, but I felt him grow suddenly dark, he raised his hands as was his custom, holding them in that uncomfortable suspended position reminiscent of certain pious poses, one hand on top of the other in the air, elbows or forearms resting on nothing; I found those hands threatening, bony, rigid – his fingers like yellowing piano keys – as if they were gathering strength or perhaps calm; as if they were preparing themselves or holding back or mutually keeping each other down. Tupra, however, never showed such visible signs of religiosity or piety in any unconscious gesture or posture, not a trace, not even in the cruel form that religiosity often adopts. There was nothing about him of the poseur or even the dissembler, he wasn't like that: if he often seemed opaque and indecipherable it was not because of any non-existent posturings, but simply because it was impossible to know all his codes. (I hoped that he had much the same experience with me, more or less: it would be better for me if he did.) Tupra could tolerate silence all too well, his own, that is, any silence that depended solely on him, any voluntary silence, and anyone who is happy to remain silent wreaks havoc on the impatient and the loquacious, and on his adversaries. That is why I hoped he would speak soon and dissemble a little when he did so (a little and badly, and only for a moment). He hooked one thumb in the chest pocket of his waistcoat in order to appear relaxed: although this was not an unfamiliar gesture in him and resembled one of Wheeler's gestures too, perhaps he had copied the latter, in fact, the more usual pose in both was to hook one thumb under one armpit as if they were carrying a riding crop and resting the whole weight of their chest on it, that, at least, was the impression. And then, half turning towards me, he said in a rapid murmur (and it was clear to me that the reason he spoke to me in this way, swiftly and under his breath, was to prevent his guest from hearing his words): 'First of all, Jack, if you wouldn't mind, take a look in the toilets, both the Ladies and the Gents. Oh, and in the toilet for cripples as well, which tends to be free. Be so kind as to find her
and bring her back here.' He used the polite formulae I had learned to dread in him, they were usually a bad omen, a prelude to a rebuke or a reprimand if you didn't shape up and do as he asked. They constituted one of his few interpretable signs, at least as far as I was concerned. 'Don't linger or delay. Bring her back here.' At least, I think that's what he said in English, or perhaps he said something else, perhaps he said 'loiter' or 'dally', but I don't think so. Of one thing I am sure, the expression 'Hurry up' never left his lips. He was as conscious as I was of what is easy and difficult in languages, and those two words, 'Hurry up', were all too recognisable. He knew that Manoia would have understood them at once, even if mumbled and in the midst of all that clamour, or with his mouth obscured by darkness.
8
No, you are never what you are – not entirely, not exactly – when you're alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your first language. However prolonged the absence and however unforeseeable its conclusion, because no time limit was set at the beginning or because that limit has become vague or unlikely to be met, and when there is no reason to think that its conclusion and your subsequent return home will one day arrive or hove into view (a return to a before that will not, meanwhile, have waited for you), and thus the word 'absence' loses meaning, depth and force with each hour that passes and that you pass far away from home – and then the expression 'far away' also loses meaning, depth and force – the time of our absence accumulates gradually like a strange parenthesis that does not really count and which shelters us only as it might commutable, insubstantial ghosts, and for which, therefore, we need render an account to no one, not even to ourselves (not, at any rate, a detailed or complete account). To some degree you feel no responsibility for what you do or see, as if it all belonged to a provisional existence, parallel, alien, or borrowed, fictitious or almost dreamed – or, perhaps, merely theoretical, like my whole life, according to the unsigned report about me which I found in an old filing cabinet; as if everything could be relegated to the sphere of the purely imaginary and, of course, to the sphere of the involuntary; everything thrown into the bag of illusions and suspicions and hypotheses, and, even, of mere foolish dreams, about which, unusually, there has been almost permanent and universal consensus throughout the centuries of which any memory remains, be it conjectural or historical, invented or true: dreams do not depend on the intentions of the dreamer, and the dreamer can never be blamed for the contents of his dreams.
'What can I do, I don't choose them and I can't avoid them,' we say after each murky dream which, once we are awake, seems to us improper or illicit or which, we feel, it would have been better not to have dreamed at all and certainly not remembered. 'I didn't want to feel that anomalous desire or that baseless resentment,' we think, 'that temptation or that sense of panic, that unknown threat or that surprising curse, that aversion or that longing which now sit heavy on my soul each night, the feeling of disgust or embarrassment which I myself provoke, those dead faces, forever fixed, that made a pact with me that there would be no more tomorrows (yes, that is the pact we make with all those who fall silent) and which now come and whisper dreadful, unexpected words to me, words that are perhaps inappropriate, or perhaps not, while I am asleep and have dropped my guard: I have laid down my shield and my spear on the grass.' Any idea that emerges from the dream-world is often dismissed or invalidated for that very reason, because of its dark, uncertain provenance, because such ideas seem to emerge out of a dream smokescreen, but do not always disappear once consciousness returns, indeed consciousness takes them up and sometimes even feeds them, and thus consciousness coexists with things it did not itself engender; it welcomes them into its bosom and nurtures them and gives them a face and even a name, and incorporates them into its safe, diurnal world even if that means relegating them to a lower category, labelling them as merely venial and gazing upon them paternally, as if every dream that survives the night must inevitably provoke the kind of ironic comment Sir Peter Wheeler made when he finally went to bed, up the stairs and to the left, on the night of that Saturday buffet supper: 'What nonsense,' he said and added, scornfully repeating my words: 'An excellent idea, indeed.' But despite this condescending attitude towards such dream nonsense, I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have learned to fear, therefore, not only what is thought – the idea – but also what precedes it or comes before.
We perceive and experience the parenthetical time of our absence and all that it involves in much the same way as we do simulacra and fantasies: our deeds or crimes, our own actions and those of others; not only those we commit or endure, but also those we witness or provoke, either unwittingly or deliberately; and during that time nothing is ever truly serious, or so we believe. How right he was, the great playwright and counterfeiter, the poet- spy and blasphemer Marlowe about whose obscure death so little is known, except that it was violent and has become the stuff of legends and has been reconstructed numerous times with impossible exactitude, which is to say that it has been entirely imagined, with the gaze of the imaginer turned towards the dark back of time: he was stabbed to death in a tavern before he reached thirty, at the hands, as has lately been discovered, of one Ingram Frizer, who proved quicker or more vicious or more skilful with a dagger on that 30 May more than four hundred years ago, in Deptford, near the River Thames, which is how the Isis is known in every other place and time apart from when it passes through Oxford, that foreign city which, ages ago now, seemed to be or was my city too and where they call it the River Isis, which is why that is what my memory calls it, the River Isis. How right he was the great poet-traitor, so quick to quarrel, and who never ran away from a fight and who had travelled abroad and who
