Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

Why haven't you even found them yet? I asked you not to delay,' he said to me just with his pupils, which were sometimes almost as pale as his irises, or did he say it with his eyelashes, so thick and lustrous that they immediately became the predominant feature in any situation where there was more darkness than light?); but there was no time to ponder this at length; we instantly joined eyes so that there were now four eyes doing the looking, and his were the first to spot them, Flavia and De la Garza, he pointed them out to me with one irritated finger, like someone pointing the barrel of a gun.

They were in the thick of the crowd on the fast dance floor, gyrating wildly, each seemingly in urgent need of an exorcist, and both scaring the life out of the people nearby, who doubtless saw them as foreign elements (she because of her age, he because he was dangerous), the music did not allow for any normal dance-hold or even for proximity, and so De la Garza was not subjected to torture by the erect cones or horizontal ice picks that he and I had both experienced already, indeed it was he – and this was what most alarmed Tupra and myself and obliged us to intervene without further delay or ceremony -who was now flailing Mrs Manoia, almost literally, no, literally, and the most surprising thing was that she evinced no pain -that, at least, was my impression, I've no idea what Tupra thought – from the unintended lashes that the prize prick kept dealing her as he danced, I mean, you had to be a complete prick to dance in that crazy way, only a short distance away from his partner, performing Travolta-like turns, presenting Flavia as often with the back of his neck as with his face, completely oblivious to the fact that, with all these fast, abrupt movements, the empty hairnet, with no ponytail, no long hair to fill it and no weight to constrain or hamper it, could easily turn into a whip, a lash, an unruly riding crop; if there had been some metal ornament on the end, it would have been just like the bolas a gaucho uses to catch cattle or the knut deployed by cruel Cossacks, but, fortunately, he had not adorned it with aglets or bobbles or bells or spikes, any of which would have made mincemeat of Flavia; I shuddered nonetheless, because such ornamental ideas could so easily have entered his vacant head, it would have been just like an idiot of his calibre, disguised as he was as a black rapper, as a Napoleonic bullfighter, as the painter-cum-majo, Melendez, in his self-portrait in the Louvre, and as a fortune-telling gypsy with the obligatory hoop earring tinkling and bobbing (all these things at once, a total mishmash). ‘I’dlike to smash his face in,' this, at that instant, was my one brief, simple thought. Every time he spun round, the wretched hairnet would whip across whichever part of Flavia happened to be at the right height and within range, fortunately, most of the time, because De la Garza was taller, the scourge merely skimmed the top of her hair or, perhaps, hair extensions, but we had time to notice that, on a couple of occasions, when the attache crouched down a little in his febrile whirlings, the hairnet cut across Mrs Manoia's face from ear to ear. It made me wince just to see it, which is why it was so incomprehensible that she should appear not to notice, regardless of however many layers of make-up there might be to deaden the impact of the lashes: I had a fleeting recollection of those boxers who can take an enormous amount of punishment, who do not even blink when they receive the first onslaught – a real rain of blows -although it all tends to be a question of whether their opponent is attacking – and, ultimately, opening up – a cheekbone or an eyebrow.

We did not wait for the ferocious piece of music to end. We immediately rushed onto the dance floor and, grabbing them firmly and carefully by the shoulders (Tupra grabbed Flavia and I grabbed the moron, we did not need to discuss who would grab whom), we brought them both to an abrupt halt. We saw the look of bewilderment on their faces and saw too – now that we were closer – that Mrs Manoia had a line across one cheek, a welt left by the rope, a weal left by the whip, it was not bleeding but it was, nevertheless, noticeable, like a scratch, it reminded me of Westerns I had seen, of the mark that remained on the neck of a hanged man (one who had been reprieved, of course; well, it wasn't perhaps that bad, the mark on her face would soon fade). Manoia wouldn't like it one bit when he found out, I saw from the expression on Tupra's face that he was thinking the same thing and heard him click his tongue, she had not even noticed, perhaps she was too caught up in the excitement of the dance, I just couldn't understand it.

‘I’ll take her to the Ladies' room and see if she can do something about that or at least conceal it,' he said to me, pointing at the mark. Then he turned to her: 'You've hurt your face, Flavia.' And he drew his finger across his own cheek. 'Let's go to the Ladies, I'll wait for you outside. Make sure you wash that scratch and see if you can cover it up with some make-up, all right? Arturo will be worried if he sees it. He wants you back over at the table. Does it hurt?' She raised her hand to her cheek and shook her head, she seemed pensive or perhaps she was merely stunned. Tupra then turned to me again and gave me this order, he spoke rapidly but calmly: 'Take him to the Cripples' toilet and wait for me there, I won't be long. Let's hope we can do something about that wound, it doesn't seem to be an actual cut, and then restore her to her husband. Hang on to this cunt meanwhile, I'll be five minutes at most, well, say, seven. Keep him there until I come back. This moron has got to be neutralised, stopped.’

He referred to him first as 'cunt' and then as 'moron', at the time I only knew the first word in the sense of cono, the crude name for the female sexual part when spoken or merely thought, that night I only inferred its other meaning and confirmed it later in a dictionary, a slang dictionary. It wasn't so very different from the way I referred to him mentally, as capullo, 'cunt' probably meant pretty much the same, while mamon was less exact and possibly more aggressive. But what you think and even what you say are not the same as hearing someone else saying it; with an insult that you yourself think and even utter, you know exactly how serious it is, that is, usually not very serious at all, you know that it serves largely as a way of letting off steam, and most of the time you don't worry about it or think it important because you know how little importance it has; you are in control of your own vehemence, which, generally speaking, can be pretty artificial, if not entirely false: a rhetorical exaggeration, a performance for I your own benefit or for that of other people, a form of bragging. On the other hand, an insult proffered by someone else is always troubling, whether it is directed at us or at a third: party, because it's difficult to gauge its true intention – the intention of the person doing the insulting – the degree of anger or resentment, or if there is any real likelihood of violence. And that is why it made me uneasy to hear Tupra use these words, especially, of course, because I had never heard him use them before and because we do not like to discover in others what we carry within ourselves, our worst potentialities, things which, in us, seem acceptable (what can you expect); what we want is to believe that there are men and women who are better than us, people who are beyond reproach and who might, furthermore, be our friends, we would like, at least, to have them near, but never confronting us, never in opposition to us. Obviously, I don't often say the word capullo – to seek no further examples – and yet I had thought it that night over and over, just as I had during supper at Wheeler's and afterwards, when we were alone. But I did not, I think, actually say it, not in his presence, because, again, it is not the same to think something but keep it to yourself, to think it strenuously and yet remain silent, as it is to say it out loud before witnesses or to the person at whom it is directed, even if only because by doing so you are allowing others to attribute certain words to you and for those words ever after to be held as typical of you or as something you might well say ('I heard you, you said it, you've resorted to precisely that kind of language before'). That involves giving far too much away, showing far too many cards.

The order seemed so impossible to carry out that I said to Tupra straight out: 'What do you mean, take him there? On what pretext? And what for, what are you going to do?' 'Tell him you're going to suck him off.' Reresby had lost patience with me, but only for a second: the look of surprise on my face must have been so intense (my anger would have shone through, irrepressible, immediate) that he doubtless read it as potential rebellion or even as a possible threat. And so he immediately added, suppressing his previous crude words (perhaps Reresby was the only foul-mouthed one, not Tupra or Ure or Dundas, and maybe each night he was who he was, to all intents and purposes and regardless of the consequences): 'Ask him if he wants a line of cocaine, top-grade stuff. He'll be bound to wait for me then, with his nose watering. He won't mind at all.’

'How do you know?' I asked. Then it occurred to me that this was a pointless question to ask Tupra, one to which any answer would be redundant. He devoted his life principally to knowing, or so I thought, and to knowing in advance, to recognising future faces; and unlike myself or Mulryan and Rendel, or possibly, occasionally, Jane Treves and Branshaw (although probably not Perez Nuix), he did not need to be guided towards that knowledge or to have the path ahead pointed out to him. He was the one who led us, who decided which aspects of people were of interest or concern to us, the person who questioned us about those particular areas: for example, if the singer Dick Dearlove would be capable of killing and in what circumstances, or if an anonymous man had any intention of returning a loan, all kinds of situations on all kinds of occasions. He had never asked me if I thought De la Garza was into cocaine or glue or opium, in fact, I couldn't recall his ever asking me anything about him. It was only now, therefore, that I stopped to consider. And when I thought about it, it seemed to me probable that De la Garza