past, when he was two or three years old, and now this growing son of ours, in turn, reminded me or us – for our children are always in our thoughts – of the small insignificant Hungarian boy, when he might well already have moved on and, in his enforced nomadic state, left for another country or might not even exist in time, expelled from it early on by some unfortunate incident or encounter, as often happens to those who are in a hurry to participate in the world and its tasks and benefits and sorrows.
Sometimes, I would wake in the middle of the night, or so I thought, bathed in sweat sometimes and always agitated, and, while still inside my dream or clumsily and belatedly only just emerging from it, I would ask myself: 'Are they still in the world? Are my children still in the world? What is happening to them on this distant night, at this very moment in this remote space of mine, what is happening to them right now? I have no way of knowing, I can't go into their rooms to see if they're still breathing or if they're whimpering in their sleep, did the phone ring to warn me of some evil or was it just ringing in my murky dream? To warn me that they no longer exist, but have been expelled from time, what can have happened and how can I be sure that, at this very moment, Luisa isn't dialling my number to tell me about the tragedy of which I have just had a premonition? Or else she wouldn't be able to speak for sobbing and I would say to her: 'Calm down, calm down, and tell me what happened, it'll be all right.' But she would never calm down or be able to explain because there are some things that cannot be explained and will never be all right, and sorrows that can never be calmed.' And when my disquiet gradually ebbed away – the back of my neck still damp with sweat – and I realised that it was all to do with distance and anxiety and sleep and the curse of not being able to see – the back of the neck never sees, nor do exiled eyes – then, by association, the other question would formulate itself, pointless and bearable: 'Are those two Rumanian children on the supermarket steps still in the world, and is their young gypsy mother? I have no way of knowing and it doesn't really concern me. I have no way of knowing tonight, of course, and tomorrow I will forget to ask Luisa if she happens to phone me or I her (it isn't our usual time) because, by day, I won't care so much if she does or doesn't know what has become of them, not here in faraway London, that's where I am, yes, now I remember, now I understand, this window and its sky, the curving whistle of the wind, the bustling murmur of trees which is never indifferent or languid like the murmur of the river, I'm the one who moved to another country, not the little boy (he may still be wandering my streets), in a few hours I will go to work in this city and Tupra will be waiting for me, Tupra, who always wants more, Bertram Tupra, who is always waiting and insatiable, who sees no limits in anyone and asks more and more of us, of me, Mulryan, Perez Nuix and Rendel, and of any of the other faces that might join him tomorrow, including ours when they are no longer recognisable, because they have grown so treacherous or so worn.’
Asking, asking, almost no one holds back and almost everyone tries; who doesn't? They might say no – that is the reasoning that goes on inside every head, even those that do not reason – but if I don't ask, I won't get, that's for sure; and what do I lose by asking, if I can manage to do so without hoping for too much. 'I'm here, too, because of a request, originally and in part,' I was thinking as I lay, half asleep, half awake, in London, 'it was Luisa who asked me to go, to leave the field clear and to move out of the house and to make things easier for her, and to leave the way open to whoever might come, and then we would both be able to see more clearly, without cramping each other's style. I did as she asked, I obeyed, I listened: I left and set off, I moved away and kept walking, until I arrived here, and I have still not gone back. I don't even know yet if I've stopped walking. Perhaps I won't go back, perhaps I will never go back unless another request is made, which might be this: 'I was so wrong about you before, come here. Sit down here beside me again, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come here. Come to me. Come back. And stay for ever.' But another night has passed, and I have still not heard that request.’
3
Young Perez Nuix was about to make a request too, after thinking long and hard before doing so. She wanted something, possibly something she did not deserve given that she had followed me for far too long, unable to make up her mind to approach me, in that heavy night rain and, what's more, dragging or being dragged along by a poor, drenched dog. I didn't have to think about it, I knew as soon as I recognised her voice over the entryphone and when I buzzed the door downstairs so that she could come up and talk to me, as she had already announced: 'I know it's a bit late, but I must talk to you. It'll only take a moment' (she had said this in my language and had called me 'Jaime', as Luisa would have done had she come to my door). And I knew it as I heard her walking unhurriedly up the stairs, one step at a time, along with her dog, a very wet pointer, and when I heard the latter shaking himself dry, under cover at last and at last with some obvious direction (without the incomprehensible, insistent sky continuing to hurl down more rain upon him): she paused on the false landings or turns in the stairs, which had no angles only curves and were adorned, as almost all English staircases are, with a carpet to absorb the water that falls from us when we shake ourselves dry – so many days and even more nights of rain; and I heard Perez Nuix strike the air with her closed umbrella, it would no longer conceal her face, and perhaps she took advantage of each brief pause and each time the dog shook himself to glance for a second in a hand mirror – eyes, chin, skin or lips – and tidy her hair a little, because hair always gets damp even if you protect it from the rain (I had still not seen whether it was covered with a hat or a scarf or a cap or a kitschy little beret worn at an angle, I had never perhaps even seen her head outside the office and outside our building with no name). And I had known it, even when I did not know it was her or who she was, when she was just a woman, strange or mercenary or lost or eccentric, helpless or blind, in the empty streets, with her raincoat and boots and with that agreeable thigh of which I had caught a momentary glimpse (or was that my imagination, the incorrigible desideratum of a lifetime, deeply entrenched ever since adolescence and which never fades and, as I am discovering, never goes away) when she crouched down to stroke the dog and speak softly to him. 'Let her come to me,' I had thought when I stopped abruptly and turned to look at her, 'if she wants something from me or if she's following me. That's her problem. She must have a reason, assuming she was following me or still is, it can't be in order
I looked at the clock, I looked around me to make sure that the apartment wasn't too untidy, not that any apartment I've ever lived in has been (but that is why we tidy people always check for untidiness whenever anyone comes to see us). It was rather late for England, but not for Spain – there, lots of people would just be going out to supper or wondering where to eat, in Madrid the night was just beginning, and Nuix was half-Spanish or perhaps less – Luisa might be going out right now for a long night with her putative, partying suitor who would want nothing to do with my children and would never step over the threshold (nor – bless him – would he ever occupy my place). That's her problem, I had thought beneath the endless spears of water, and I repeated these words to myself while I held the door open waiting for her arrival, she was panting a little as she came up the stairs, she had walked quite a long way, I could hear them both panting, her and not just the dog, the same thing had happened to me shortly before, when I came up the stairs and even after I had arrived – two minutes to catch my breath – I had walked a long way across squares and down empty streets and past monuments. That's her problem one thinks mistakenly or incompletely, or that's his problem, when someone is preparing to ask us something. It's my problem too we should always add or should I say include. It would doubtless be my problem once the request had left her lips or her throat and once I had heard it. Once we had both heard it for that is how the person making the request knows his or her message has traversed the air and cannot be ignored, because once it's in the air, it has reached its destination.
4
Initially, she talked non-stop and filled the air, young Perez Nuix – a way of postponing what one has come to say, the important part – while she was taking off her raincoat and proffering me her umbrella as if she were surrendering her sword, and while she was asking me what she should do with the dog, who was still spraying drops of water everywhere whenever he shook himself.
'Shall I put him in the kitchen?' she asked, still in Spanish. 'He'll make everything wet if I don't.’
