Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

'I'm not even sure the comparison works,' I replied, and now I joined her in her effort, 'because our reports aren't, as I understand it, public but more or less secret; at any rate, they're not available to be read by anyone nor are they sold in shops; besides, they're about people, real people whom no one has invented and who cannot, therefore, be made to disappear or be dropped in the next chapter, and for whom I have no idea whether what we say has much or little importance, if it causes them great harm or brings them great benefit, if what it withholds from or grants them is crucial to them, if it makes their plans possible or completely scuppers them, plans which, as far as they're concerned, are important, possibly vital. If it resolves or ruins their future, or, at the very least, their immediate future (but then the distant future depends on the immediate future, and so everything else ends up depending on it too). Anyway, I don't believe reporting to the Crown or the State is the same as reporting to a private individual.’

'Ah, you don't believe,' she said. Not with irony (she could not as yet allow herself that), but perhaps with surprise. 'And what do you see as the fundamental difference?' Ah, yes, what did I see? Her question made me feel suddenly ingenuous, absurdly much younger or less experienced (I was, as she said, new), and it suddenly became a very hard question to answer without appearing a complete idiot, a novice. I had no option but to try, though; after all, I had come out with the remark, and I couldn't simply allow it to fall at the first fence, I couldn't just give in like that and say: 'Yes, you're right. There is, as far as I can see, no difference at all.’

'At least in theory,' I said protecting myself as best I could, 'the State safeguards the common interest, the interests of its citizens, that should be its sole concern. At least in theory,' I said again: I didn't really believe what I was saying, even as I was saying it, and that is why it emerged only slowly; she would be bound to notice this, 'it's just an intermediary, an interpreter. And its components, which are always circumstantial, are not subject to personal, individual or private passions, either base or elevated. How can I put it, they are representatives, a part of the whole, and nothing more, and they are replaceable, interchangeable. They have been chosen, in places where that's usual, as is the case, up to a point, in both our countries. One assumes they're working for the general good. According to their own lights, of course. True, they can make mistakes, and even pretend to make mistakes in order to disguise as error any personal, selfish gain. That inevitably happens in practice, possibly frequently. Possibly all the time and everywhere, from the sewers up to the palace. But we have to assume their theoretical good faith, otherwise we would never be able to live in peace. There can be no peace without the assumption that our governments are legitimate, even honest, because our states are too. (Or you can dispense with that illusion, if you like.) And so you work for them based on that theoretical good faith, which also touches or enfolds or protects you in your mission, your job, or even in your mere acquiescence. On the other hand, you wouldn't work for any private individual without first finding out exactly who he is, what he does, what he proposes, if he's a criminal or an honest man. And to what aims our efforts will contribute.’

'You said it. In theory,' agreed young Perez Nuix, and she uncrossed her legs and lit a cigarette, one of mine, she took it without asking, as if, in this respect, she were a pure-bred Spaniard. They weren't Rameses II, just Karelias from the Peloponnese, far from cheap, but not that rare either, I never skimp on cigarettes. With that movement, the ladder in her tights advanced a little further, but she still didn't see or feel it. (Or perhaps she didn't care.) (Or perhaps she was offering it to me: a minimal, insignificant, progressive nakedness; no, that I didn't believe.) 'Look, in all the years I've been here, I've never seen anyone who wasn't a private individual.' – That 'here' I took to mean 'working here'; as far as I knew, she had spent most of her life in her mother's country. – 'Not even in the army, which is mostly about obeying orders and very little about taking decisions, a machine they call it. But it isn't, nothing is. It doesn't matter what posts people occupy, or whom they represent, whether they have high responsibilities or are mere errand-boys, whether they've been elected or chosen arbitrarily, it doesn't matter where their authority, however large or small, comes from, or whether their sense of the State is great or non-existent, their loyalty is beside the point, as are their venality and their proclivity for changing sides. It doesn't matter if the money that passes through their hands belongs to the Treasury and that not a penny piece of it is theirs. It doesn't matter, they will handle huge amounts of money, never mind insignificant sums, as if they were their own. I'm not saying that they keep the money, not all of them, or not necessarily; but they distribute it according to their whim or convenience and only afterwards find reasons for that distribution, never before. There are, as you know, always reasons a posteriori for any action, even for the most gratuitous and most unspeakable actions, reasons can always be found, ridiculous, improbable and ill-founded sometimes and which deceive no one or only the person who invents them. But you can always find a reason. And sometimes those reasons are good and convincing, impeccable; in fact, it's easier to find a reason for some thing that has happened than for plans and intentions, for proposals or decisions. What has already happened provides a very strong, solid starting point: it's irreversible, and that provides a standard, a guide. It's something to hold on to. Or more than that, something to adhere to, because it binds and obliges, and so half your work is done for you. It's far easier to give reasons to explain something that is past (or, which comes to the same thing, to find them or even, why not, provide them) than to justify beforehand what you want to happen, what you're trying to achieve. Anyone in politics knows that, as does anyone in diplomacy. As do wet gamblers, or criminals when they decide to eliminate someone and do eliminate them, knowing that they will deal later on with any previous considerations and with examining the pros and cons when they meet them as consequences; but the eliminee has been eliminated, you see, and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and there's nearly always gain, not pain. And everyone who occupies some post of responsibility knows this, even if they're the last policeman in the last village in the remotest of shires.' -'She didn't use our Spanish word condado,' I thought, 'but then it isn't much used nowadays.' After all, it was her language too. And she had used the English term 'wet gamblers' too, an expression I had never heard and didn't understand, perhaps it had no real equivalent in Spanish, given that she had not even attempted to find one: it meant literally jugadores humedos, or tahures mojados, I had a sudden anachronistic image of waistcoats on Mississippi riverboats. – 'And they're all private individuals, I can assure you, under the uniforms and outside of their offices, and inside too, when they're alone.' – I remembered Rosa Klebb, SMERSH's ruthless murderess in From Russia with Love, who, according to that novel, might have killed Andres Nin; I remembered the description of her that I had read in Wheeler's house, on that night of improvised, feverish study by the river of calm continuity: 'She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant… to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform…' And there was still time for this thought to cross my mind: 'Few people are exactly appealing when they get out of or into their warm bed, when they relax or let themselves go or lower their guard; but I know that Luisa is, and this young woman seems as if she would be; or perhaps neither of them ever does lower her guard, despite that ever-growing ladder in her tights.' – 'To a greater or lesser degree everyone allows themselves to be led by their impulses, they are oriented, guided by their sympathies and antipathies, by their fears, their ambitions, their conjectures and their obsessions; by their preferences and their grudges, biographical or social. So I don't see the difference, Jaime. But then it's better for me that you do see the difference, because that means you won't mind so much doing me the favour I'm asking. Because this commission comes from private individuals and not from the State, that much I know. I mean that it comes from private private individuals.’

I said nothing for a moment, neither of us did. I was aware that young Nuix had still not asked me the favour, not strictly speaking, not entirely, not completely. And she had not, therefore, contradicted or disagreed with me at any point, she had merely set out her point of view, based on her experience, which appeared much greater than seemed possible given her youth, at what age did she start, at what age would she have left behind that youth which she preserved only when she remained silent or when she laughed, not, of course, when she argued or held forth, nor when, in the building with no name, she interpreted people with such discernment, she would long since have plumbed my depths, she would already have turned me inside out? Unless there were still times when she saw me as an enigma, as did the person who had written my report, the one about me. Unless she considered me 'a lost cause' upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought, as, according to that text, I myself did. ('He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will,' the writer of the report had said of me. 'And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so.’)

I wondered to what extent Tupra was speaking through her; some of her arguments sounded like him to me, or rather (I hadn't actually heard him use them) they sounded like his way of being in the world, as if he might have silently inculcated her with them during their many years of proximity or, perhaps, intimacy. 'So I don't see the difference, Jaime,' she had said, for example, doubtless in order not to upset me, instead of 'I don't agree with you, Jaime', or 'You're wrong, Jaime', or 'You really haven't thought it through, try again', or 'You have no idea'. I had several questions troubling me, but if I gave voice to them all, we would never end. 'What do you know about