shaving it off. He was stroking the horse with his gloved left hand and murmuring short sentences, but I didn't know now whether he was addressing these to the animal or to the policewoman-who happily let him carry on, perhaps she was already won over, with her high leather boots like those of a distant English gypsy girl in Oxford-or to me, knowing that I wouldn't be able to hear what he was saying. And when I saw the way he was looking at me, with utter loathing, I saw that there was insolence in that gaze too, and a threat, not one that was in any hurry to be carried out, but one that was prepared to linger and delay for as long as he chose or needed to; my expression must have changed and I thought: 'Damn. I didn't remove him from the picture, not entirely, I didn't make absolutely sure. This man might come after me one day or after us both, after me and Luisa, or all four of us, perhaps the children too. I humiliated him, I hurt him, and I took from him the person he loved. I should have removed or erased him from the picture for good, as if he were a drop of blood.' And suddenly an image flashed into my mind-like lightning in its brevity but not its brilliance, for it was terrifying, nauseating and sordid; or like thunderless lightning that strikes in silence-an image I had seen in one of Tupra's videos, a tethered horse, a defenseless woman, and I couldn't help but associate Custardoy with those well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, sporting thick mustaches and Texan hats most of them, although Custardoy no longer had a hat or much of a mustache, but I had seen them and the marks left by his abuse. That's the trouble once you've been inoculated with any kind of poison, whether through the eyes or the ears, there's no way of getting rid of it, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done and it comes back to penetrate and contaminate any thing or person, saying each time, repeating, insisting: 'Let this sit heavy on your soul.'
I stood there for a few seconds, before turning and continuing on my way. I don't know if I looked at him with equal hatred, but I might have, it's very likely, more than anything because what I saw him do next troubled me greatly, I didn't like it at all: with his right hand, his bare uninjured hand, his painting hand, he took from his trouser pocket a watch and chain and checked the time with strange intensity. At first, I thought this was just some new eccentricity; having given up his ponytail, he had to find some other way to underline the fact that he was an arty type, as my sister had described him before I had even seen him; and from his stupidly archaic bohemian point of view, carrying such a watch in the twenty-first century was doubtless in keeping with that. Then I thought of another possibility: 'Perhaps he doesn't wear a wristwatch for the same reason that he wears a glove,' I thought, 'because he would have to lift up his hand whenever he wanted to know the time. Perhaps his hand really is irrecoverable, ruined, although there's no sign of the gash I made on his cheek. Whatever the truth of the matter, I don't like the image of him holding that old-fashioned watch in his hand and studying it; he may be measuring out my time.' I didn't want to look at him any longer, and when I was already a few paces away, I thought again, perhaps to exorcise him from my mind or perhaps to raise my spirits: 'But now I know that in my angry mood, I, too, am capable of measuring out his time; I counted it once and stopped the count, and he knows that; he was lucky, but I very nearly counted him out. That will dissuade him from coming near. And if he ever does, we'll see then who will be the first to leave his own first name behind.'
You can live with a threat hanging over you because there is always the possibility that it will never be carried out, and that's what you have to think. Sometimes we see what is approaching and nevertheless we pay no attention, and perhaps not only for the reason Wheeler gave: because we hate certainty, because no one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there; and because no one wants to know, and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror; because we all prefer to be utter
I had arranged to see Luisa that afternoon: we see each other two or three times a week in this long truce we are enjoying. Indeed, she has the keys to my apartment and, on occasion, arrives before I do and then she waits for me, exactly as Tupra believed someone was waiting for me in London on that night of poison and dance, when no one was ever waiting for me, when there was no one to turn off any lights in my absence, the lights I left on all the time so as not to be entirely in the dark. No one had my keys and no one was ever waiting for me there. The doorman said: 'Your wife, I mean, your girlfriend has gone up already. I gave her a package that arrived for you earlier.' The man senses something marital about us, but is uncertain quite what our relationship is, and so hovers between wife and girlfriend. I've told him that Luisa is my wife, but he still doesn't quite believe it, or perhaps he doesn't understand why, in that case, she comes and goes.
Before opening the door, I could hear her humming to herself inside, she often does that now and she laughs a lot too, with me and without me, I suppose; she no longer rations out her laughter, and I trust this will remain so, if possible forever, or so I think. Her return is nothing like Beryl's return to Tupra, according to my distant interpretations and always assuming they did, in fact, get back together, which was something I never found out: there's no self-interest, not a spurious self-interest, and there's nothing clandestine about it either. It's clear that Luisa benefits from and enjoys us seeing each other like this, just now and then, and not living together, although she might grow tired of that one day; she has already started leaving clothes here. And it suits me too. After all, in London, I got used to being very alone, as Wheeler paternally said to me early on, and sometimes I need to continue to be alone because I don't think I could bear someone's company all the time and never be able to look out at the world from my window on my own, the living world that knows where it's going and to which I imagine I still belong. I opened the door and saw on the coffee table in the living room the package that the porter had given to Luisa, who was in the kitchen, still humming and not aware that I had come in. I saw that it came from Berlin, shoes by VonTruschinsky, from whom, since they have all my measurements, I still occasionally order a pair, even though they are very expensive. I always think of Tupra when I receive them, but then he's always vaguely in my thoughts, as if he were a friend on whom I continue to count-which is odd-and to whom I could turn for help. I haven't done so yet.
That afternoon, he was even more in my thoughts after my silent encounter with Custardoy, with two or three animals as indifferent witnesses. On the way home, something else had occurred to me, I had thought: 'I didn't want to frighten De la Garza when I went to see him at the Embassy, and I was horrified to see the panic my mere presence instilled in him, but, on the other hand, I would have liked to see that same fear on Custardoy's face and in the way he behaved. He's completely recovered from his fright now or if a little remains-as it must- he doesn't show it. Nothing ever works out as we want or as we think, or perhaps I'm still too hesitant; such a thing would never have happened to Tupra, he would have removed him from the picture when he had him in the frame, and now I'll have to watch every corner, just in case he slips back in again, this time with sword or spear, although that might take some time, because once you've experienced fear, you never entirely lose it.' These thoughts continued to preoccupy me. Luisa noticed that I was quiet and was perhaps even a little worried because I wasn't responding much to her jokes, for she's gone back to poking gentle fun at me.
'What's wrong?' she asked. 'Has something happened?'
'What do you mean?' I replied, half-suspicious, half-distracted. 'What sort of thing?'
'I mean, something bad.'
Yes, something bad had happened to me, and no, nothing bad had happened to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Someone hurts you and you become an enemy. Or you hurt someone and create an enemy It's as easy as breathing, both things happen much more frequently than we imagine, often by chance and without our realizing, it pays to stay alert and watch people's faces, but even then we don't always notice. I
