something that sat heavy on my awakened soul – all of this emanated from Tupra, it was as if he had crossed a frontier or quickly drawn a line and immediately jumped over it, not so much in his mind as in his spirit, and had already settled on a punishment, regardless of what might happen from then on. Perhaps he was the sort who does not issue any warning, at least not always, the sort who takes remote decisions for barely identifiable reasons, or without waiting for a link of cause and effect to establish itself between actions and motives, still less for any proof that such actions have been committed. He did not need proof, on those occasions, whether arbitrary or well founded – who could say – when without the slightest warning or indication, he would lash out with his sabre; indeed, on such occasions, he did not even require the actions or events or deeds to have occurred. Perhaps for him it was enough that he knew precisely what would happen in the world if no pressure or brake were imposed on what he perceived to be people's certain capabilities, and knew, too, that if those capabilities were never fully deployed it was only because someone -himself, for example – had prevented or impeded them, rather than because those people lacked the desire or the guts, he took all that for granted. Perhaps for him to adopt the punitive measures which he deemed necessary, he simply had to convince himself of what would happen in each case if he or another sentinel – the authorities or the law, instinct, the moon, fear, the invisible watchers – did not put a stop to it. 'It's the way of the world,' he would say, and he would say this about many of the complex situations described or related or experienced or foreseen during the sessions when we were called upon to give our interpretations and reports (he alone made the decisions and these came later); he applied these words to betrayals and acts of loyalty, to anxieties and quickened pulses, to unexpected reversals, to anxieties and doubts and torments, to the scratch and the pain and the fever and the festering wound, to griefs and the infinite steps which we all take in the belief that we are being guided by our will, or that our will does at least play a part in them. To him, all this seemed perfectly normal and even, sometimes, routine, he knew all too well that the earth is full of passions and affections and of ill will and malice, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because they are the fuse and the fuel of their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they do not require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, gratitude or insult, or at least not always, or as Wheeler said: 'They carry their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment.' And for Tupra this very radical attitude – or perhaps it was simply a very practical one, a consequence of his clear, confident, unshakeable opinions – was doubtless just another facet of that way of the world in which words like 'distrust', 'friendship', 'enmity' and 'trust' were mere pretence and ornament and, possibly, a quite unnecessary torment, at least as far as he was concerned; that unreflecting, resolute stance (or one based perhaps on a single thought, the first), also formed part of a style that remained unchanged throughout time and regardless of space, and there was, therefore, no reason to question it, just as there is no need to question wakefulness and sleep, or hearing and sight, or breathing and speech, or any of the other things about which one knows: 'that is how it is and will always be'.
This was not, however, a preventative attitude, not exactly and exclusively, but, rather, and depending on the case and the person, punitive or compensatory, for Tupra saw and judged when dry, with no need to get himself wet – to use Don Quixote's words when he announces to Sancho Panza the mad feats he will perform for Dulcinea's sake even before being provoked into them by grief of jealousy. Or perhaps Tupra understood them – the various cases – even though they were pages as yet unwritten, and perhaps, for that very reason, forever blank. 'Life is not recountable,' Wheeler had also said, 'and it seems extraordinary that men have spent all the centuries we know anything about devoted to doing just that… It is a doomed enterprise,' he had added, 'and one that perhaps does us more harm than good. Sometimes I think it would be best to abandon the custom altogether and simply allow things to happen. And then just leave them be.' But the blank page is the best of all, the most eternally believable and the most revealing, precisely because it is never finished, on it there is eternally room for everything, even for denials; and, therefore, what the page might or might not say (because in a world of infinite talk – simultaneous, superimposed, contradictory, constant, exhausting and inexhaustible – even when a page says nothing, it is saying something) could be believed at any time, not just during its one time to be believed, which, sometimes, lasts no time at all, a day or only a few fatal hours, and at others for a very long time indeed, a century, even several, and then it is not fatal at all because there is no one to check if the belief is true or false, and, besides, no one cares when everything is balanced out. So even if we abandon the custom altogether, as Wheeler said, even if we give up telling stories altogether, and never tell any ever, we can still not entirely free ourselves from telling. Not even by leaving the page blank. And even if there are things of which no one speaks, even if they do not even happen, they never stay still. 'It's awful,' I thought. 'There's no escape. Even if no one speaks of them. And even if they never actually happen.’
Arid so I got up and moved my chair slightly to one side and, without making my excuses to Manoia, without a word or a gesture, I set off briskly to the toilets, that was the first thing to do, as Tupra had indicated. The toilets were not that close and I had to walk quite a way to find them, I kept looking to right and left and straight ahead, just in case, en route, my eyes should catch sight of the escaped couple and I could thus complete my task without further delay, except that I was in too much of a hurry and too preoccupied – it quickly became very difficult to walk at all – to spot any one individual among the crowds I was trying to negotiate and who blocked my path, at that hour the disco was jam-packed, with the chic and the not so chic, the night becomes more heterogeneous as it advances, and our area – which included the Spaniards and the semi-fast dance floor – was far less congested, semi-slow music obviously didn't attract so many people (and so wouldn't be played for very much longer), and, on the other hand, the second stage or floor, or whatever they call these things nowadays, was absolutely frenetic, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the crushed and sweating masses a few metres or yards away, I skirted round them rather than plunging in, that would have taken me time and effort, and the urgent thing now was to get to the toilets. Tupra knew that the greatest risks for the two escapees lay there, that is how it is from adolescence onwards, when you smoke on the sly at school.
There was a bit of a queue outside the Ladies, which is not unusual, I don't know why that is, perhaps women take more time because they have to sit down and because each one, each time, gives the cubicle she is about to use a thorough clean; there were two or three women waiting at the door, whereas outside the Gents there was no one, and so I went in there first to have a look, or, rather, to inspect every nook and cranny, I didn't want to let Mr Reresby down, 'Bring her back. Don't linger or delay.' Those clear orders were still ringing in my ears. I saw three men standing up, two of them gravely or sullenly urinating, one beside the other, although they didn't appear to be friends and were not, of course, talking, it was odd that they should be standing so close when there were another six places free, one tends to keep a distance when engaged in such activities; the third man was standing at the mirror, combing his hair and humming to himself. Of the six cubicles, two were occupied, but beneath the truncated doors (given the shortened perspective, I had to lean right down) both revealed their respective pairs of trouser legs duly converted into bellows; I don't know why these doors, in public conveniences I mean, almost never reach the ground or even the ceiling, as if they were saloon doors in the Wild West, well, at least they're not swing doors and not quite so short (they're more raincoats than waistcoats). The urinators eyed me suspiciously, they turned their heads in one synchronised movement and their faces grew still more sullen, I pushed open the other doors to check that the cubicles really were empty, because if someone stands on the toilet bowl, you can't see their feet under the door and the cubicle appears to be empty, although if two people were standing on the bowl they would be in grave danger of falling in, especially if one of them was wearing fierce falsies made of oak or implants made of liquid lead or whatever. The comber, however, did not turn round, he was very carefully parting his hair with a wet comb and continuing his blithe, oblivious humming ('Nanna naranniaro nannara nanniaro', was what it sounded like), it was 'The Bard of Armagh', an Irish song, or 'The Streets of Laredo' if you prefer, which is from the American West (it's the same melody with different words and accompaniment), I recognised it at once, I've heard it hundreds of times in movies and on certain records, and the disco was at least not so unreasonable as to have loudspeakers in the toilets, so the music from the dance floors could be heard only as a distant echo through the double doors of those English toilets, and I immediately picked up that very audible ballad or perhaps lullaby, I knew most of the words of the cowboy version, which is far better known than the Irish original,
