Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

thought long ago. They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war. The worst of all possible wars. And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents… It was absurd, all of it.' I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.' And in the thought that followed he used a word which I heard Wheeler use later on, when talking about wars, although he had said it in English, and the word was, if I'm not mistaken, 'waste'. 'And what a terrible waste… I don't know, I remember it and I can't believe it. Sometimes, it seems unbelievable to me that I lived through all of that. I just can't see the reason for it, that's the worst of it, and with the passing of the years, it's even harder to see a reason. Nothing serious ever appears quite so serious with the passing of time. Certainly not serious enough to start a war over, wars always seem so out of proportion when viewed in retrospect… And certainly never serious enough for anyone to kill another person.' (And then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous. Why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart? And of me they will say: Why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: Why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, the dance, and all those doubts, all that torment?)

23

That squeaky, tinny music immediately distracted me from the apocryphal lines from 'The Streets of Laredo' that were going round and round in my head, for despite my fear and alarm, the tune had barely left my mind for a single moment, and now, seeing De la Garza gulping down that blue water, a third version had, I feel, become intertwined with it: people put whatever words they want to ballads and I had heard the Laredo or Armagh ballad converted into 'Doc Holliday' on the whim of some forgotten singer, who had the good doctor recount his story to that same tune, the man who had been with Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, at the famous duel or, rather, pitched battle between gangs, the tubercular, alcoholic gambler and medical doctor (or was he an odontologist like Dick Dearlove?) and connoisseur of Shakespeare, or so at least he was presented to us in the best film about them certainly I have ever seen, about Earp and Holliday in the town of Tombstone, and not in Laredo nor, of course, in that unknown place, Armagh in Ireland: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today', and that might well have been what Rafael de la Garza would have been saying in his own inevitably racier and coarser language, although he was not dying from a lung disease, with his handkerchief pressed to his mouth and coughing up bloody sputum, but from inundation or flooding…

The squeaky paso doble bothered Reresby, even annoyed him, and this didn't surprise me in the least, because it irritated the hell out of me as well.

'What's that shit?' he said, while I, at the same time, was thinking: 'Oh no, not that again.’

The insistent sound made him interrupt his beatings and immersions of De la Garza in the toilet bowl. He rudely and rapidly frisked De la Garza in search of the impertinent mobile, and when he found it in one pocket of that rapper-style jacket, he took it out, stared at it in perplexity and rage and slammed it with all his might against the wall, the phone broke into pieces and the cliched Spanish music ceased at once. 'At least he's not going to drown him now,' I thought, 'for the moment,' and I realised that I was beginning to think that nothing was as dangerous or as deadly as the sword, perhaps this was only because strangulation or drowning take time, however brief, and that brief amount of time allows time for someone else to intervene and that someone else would have to be me, but how, there was no one else there and no one was trying to get in, they would have found the door wedged shut and assumed the toilet was out of use; whereas a decapitation or an amputation requires no lapse of time, and if Tupra hadn't checked the fall of the blade, the attache's head would have been lopped off and be lying on the floor, De la Garza would be in two parts now or, rather, he would not be at all. And so while I kept an apprehensive eye on what Reresby was doing, I also cast occasional glances over at where his coat was hanging, I knew now that it was there that he kept the fearsome weapon of the Landsknecht soldiers and that, should his temper flare up or boil over, he could easily go back for it and unsheathe it and brandish it again.

Tupra grabbed Rafita by the lapels or, rather, by the shirt-front and did with him more or less what he had done with the mobile phone, that is, he slammed him against the wall, and one of the strange cylindrical bars attached to the wall, I noticed, thudded into his back. Fortunately, the bars did not have sharp edges, but even so it must have hurt him badly, Tupra's violence had not abated. After this, De la Garza collapsed, with a defeated, breathless howl. His shirt had come out of his trousers, and I discovered to my amazement – to my embarrassment and almost sorrow too – that the diplomat had a jewel encrusted in his navel, like a small diamond or perhaps a pearl, doubtless cheap imitations, fakes. 'Good grief,' I thought, 'he's obviously really desperate to keep up with trends, and the gypsy earring and the hairnet just weren't enough, I wonder if he always wears it, even in the embassy, or only when he gets dressed up to go out on the town?' Tupra dragged him to his feet again, still gripping his shirt- front, pulled him close and then again flung him against the metal bar placed there for the disabled, the fixed bar, I had the sense this time that it caught him in the shoulder blades. De la Garza was a puppet, a sack, he was drenched and stained with blue, with gashes on his chin and forehead and a cut on his cheekbone, uno sfregio, his clothes all dishevelled and torn, and his cries very feeble now, only an irrepressible groan each time his back hit the bar, because Reresby continued in the same vein, repeatedly and rapidly: he would pull him to his feet, draw him a little away from the wall and then hurl him against that battering ram, he must have been breaking several of his ribs, if not causing more dangerous internal lesions, the attache's whole ribcage resounded and his insides crunched, and with every impact it was if his breath dried up in him. Reresby did this a total of five times, as if he were counting them, in a patient, disciplined way, like someone who has it all planned out. De la Garza did not defend himself at any point (he could not even shrink in on himself or cover his ears now), I suppose you know when there's nothing you can do, when the other person's strength and determination – or the sheer numbers if there are several of them, or the weapons if you yourself are unarmed – are so much greater that all you can hope is that they will grow tired or decide to finish you off; during these attacks, during the beating, Rafita would also be thinking of the sword with a mixture of fear and something like hope, as perhaps Emilio Mares would have done in the fields of Ronda once he saw them coming for him first with the banderillas and then with the lance: 'They're going to do it. They're really going to do it, the bastards, the brutes,' he must have thought then. 'They're going to bait me like a bull, it would be better if they just killed me now and did a good job of it, rather than give me the coup de grace with whatever they have to hand, because they're capable of doing it with a nail.’

When Tupra had finished, he turned to me and said: 'Jack, translate this, will you, I want him to understand and to be quite clear about what I'm saying.' And before he began, he added: 'Have you got a comb?’

De la Garza was slumped on the floor, he seemed incapable of movement and would not, in my presence, be hauled to his feet by Sir Blow or Sir Punishment or Sir Thrashing, well, at least he wasn't Sir Death. Reresby looked in the mirror while he was talking, he tucked in his shirt, tugged at his jacket, smoothed his waistcoat, otherwise he looked exactly as he always looked, even his hair had remained relatively unruffled. He straightened his tie, adjusted the knot, and did this without his sodden gloves, which he had deposited, with a grimace of disgust, next to the toilet. When he'd had the gloves on, he had not once used his fist or even the flat of his hand – or his foot either – every blow dealt had been made by another interposing object, the toilet bowl, the cylindrical bar and even the hairnet and the flushing water, he must have known all about what my father had told me years before, that a punch can shatter the hand of the person doing the punching. In Spain we have always known about these tricks of the trade as regards violence: in 1808 (to give but one example), during the Peninsular War or the War of Independence, Filangieri, the governor of La Coruna and, more suspiciously still, Italian by birth (and not 'a Spaniard of lightning and fire'), was judged by his troops to be a traitor because he delayed slightly before rallying to the cause of Independence (he lingered, he claimed, only out of strategic prudence, but, by then, it was too late); and