Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

criminals?', 'Who are these 'wet gamblers'?' and 'Who do I have to lie or keep silent about in order to please you?' and 'You still haven't asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly', and 'How long have you been working here, how old were you when you started, who were you or what were you like before?' and 'Which private private individuals do you mean, and how is it that this time you know so much about this particular commission, its origin and provenance?' In fact, I could have asked all these questions, one after the other, I was in charge of the conversation, that was my privilege. There was no way now that it would take only the 'moment' that she had promised, everything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carries within itself its own prolongation and every phrase leaves a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too. It often astonishes me that there should always be an answer for everything or that an answer can always be attempted, not just for questions and mysteries, but for assertions and things known, for the irrefutable and the certain, as well as for doubts and looks and even for gestures. Everything persists and continues on its own, even if you yourself decide to withdraw. This was definitely not going to take a 'moment', nothing is brief unless cut short. But it clearly depended on me now as to whether it became a whole night plus its ensuing dawn, or the drunken loquacity of a shared insomnia.

'You still haven't properly asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly. And which private individuals do you mean, which private private individuals?' – And as I repeated the young woman's words, I could not help remembering Wheeler and his recitation about kings and private individuals: 'What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?' Those lines had sprung effortlessly from his memory, while I, on the other hand, still did not know their provenance. I ended up asking her only two questions, postponing the others. But when you postpone something you never know if you are, in fact, renouncing it, because at any time – that is, always – there may not be a tomorrow or an afterwards or a later, yes, that is possible at any time. But no, that's not true: there is always more to come, there is always a little more, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and dreams – spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams – and then, of course, there is interminable time that does not even pause or slow its pace after our final end, but continues to make additions and to speak, to murmur, to ask questions and to tell tales, even though we can no longer hear and have fallen silent. To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no. one achieves. No one, not even after death. It is as if nothing had stopped resonating since the very beginning, not even when we can no longer recognise or trace the living, who are perhaps still alive, we live alert to and troubled by innumerable voices whose origin we do not know, they are so distant and muffled, or have they just been dug down too deep? Perhaps they are the feeble echoes of unrecorded lives, whose cries have been seething in their impatient minds since yesterday or for centuries now: 'We were born at such a place,' they exclaim out of their infinite waiting, 'and we died at such a place.' And far worse things too.

5

Sometimes four or five of us would go out together, and occasionally six or seven, when Tupra invited Jane Treves or Branshaw or both, for I did eventually meet them, or even, depending on the situation or the place, some other sporadic outside informant or guide. These were times, I think, when Tupra felt festive and convivial and in need of accompaniment, not so much company as accompaniment, in need of an escort, a retinue or perhaps a herd, as if he wanted to experience a feeling of belonging, to have a tangible, noisy sense of forming part, with us, of a team or a group or a body, and being able to say that word 'us' often. On several such nights and days my sense was, rather, of being part of a gang, or of a matador's cuadrilla. I guessed that this gregarious inclination corresponded with times when he was fleeing from Beryl or she from him, if it was Beryl. Not that it mattered who exactly: it corresponded with times when no particular woman was allowing herself to be sufficiently monopolised by him or, consequently, when there was no woman to distract him during his freer or more sociable or diplomatic or preparatory moments from his realms and his manoeuvres, or else when he was avoiding the threat of some woman becoming all too particular.

These were only guesses on my part. Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to past experiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behaviour and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel; a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge. His pale eyes did not merely take in something as tiny as the scene at a buffet supper, they penetrated and analysed and drained it in an instant (me included) – it was child's play to him.

These, however, were my intuitions, suppositions and imaginings; for his part, he exposed fragments and revealed isolated flashes of his past life in the form of maxims and adages or, sometimes, unintended aphorisms, almost proverbs of his own making. And thus one gradually tied up loose ends, which, however, always came undone again, however firmly one had tied them and with however perfect a knot, as if, in his case, the areas of shadow grew still larger whenever one managed to glimpse the glowing ember of some isolated period or insignificant episode of his existence, or as if each tiny revelation served only to make one appreciate the vastness of what remained dark or opaque or murky or even distorted, just as his long eyelashes, the envy of many women, always rendered murky or opaque the ultimate intention of his , meditations, which were so prolonged they seemed almost insubstantial, and the true meaning of his looks, which were, it is true, clear and flattering and warm, but very hard to decipher. It was not surprising, then, that we men should be suspicious of eyes that were both so welcoming and so elaborately adorned.

We might, for example, be at a performance by a nightclub singer, sitting round a table near the dance floor or the stage in one of those splendid but antiquated clubs to which he sometimes liked to take us in order to soothe our dazed minds and offer us a leisurely transition period before finally sending us home, those, that is, who could take it, the night-owls, or those he kept closest by his side. And pointing his dense eyelashes in the direction of the artiste, Tupra would suddenly murmur: 'Women who sing in public are very exposed and are always the victims of those who guide them; she would collapse on the spot, like an old sack, if the man who steers her steps each night and leads her up onto the stage were to turn his back on her and walk away, never mind if he were to spurn her. All it would take would be one malign breath from him and she would fall to the floor and wish never to rise again.' For a few seconds, I wasn't sure if he was speaking from I personal knowledge, if perhaps he knew about the suicidal dependence of that woman on someone whose face or name were also known to him (a bag of flour, a bag of meat, that's what they use to practise sticking in bayonets or spears, in one there is pain and sleep and in the other nothing). And if I dared to test him out ('Do you know them, Mr Tupra, that woman and that man?' Or perhaps, by that time, I was calling him Bertram), then he would make it quite clear that this was not the case or not necessarily so, and that he was merely applying to the present what the past had taught him: 'I don't need to know them personally,' he would reply, keeping his eyelashes trained on the singer, that is, with his face still in profile, without turning round, and in a tone of slight or purely theoretical regret, 'I know exactly what this particular man and woman are like, I've seen dozens of them everywhere, from Bethnal Green to Cairo.’

That would give me an idea, or several ideas, the most obvious being that he knew Bethnal Green, that depressed east London neighbourhood, quite well and that he had been in Egypt, probably not as a tourist. I couldn't help wondering either if he hadn't, at some point, acted as agent for a female artiste and was referring to himself and to his submissive former protegee. However, I rejected this hypothesis at once, he didn't strike me as the protective, vigilant or even dominant type, that is, with the permanent responsibilities which all those qualities imply. 'He was probably witness to that drama or outline of a drama,' I thought, 'even if only on two occasions: in Bethnal Green and in Cairo.' I sensed or knew (I sensed it first and knew it later on) that if I asked him a direct question or tried to make him focus on a particular event, he would ignore me and avoid the subject, not so much in order to appear mysterious as because reminiscing bored him, he would doubtless not have understood those people who love to speak about their experiences, experiences that they know inside out, including how they ended,