Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

absolute separation, best not to. She has never spoken to me about Custardoy, nor have I to her, and I will never know how much she loved or feared him. That is perhaps the only thing about which I will never be able to say anything to her, not even when I am already the past or my end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, because I think I know her face and I stake everything on that, even the way she will remember me. Perhaps because of that, and also because I am usually perfectly content, I sometimes sing or hum to myself at times, as she does, and I have a tendency to sing or whistle that song of many titles, from Ireland or the Wild West ('Nanna naranniario nannara nanniaro,' that's how the melody goes), 'The Bard of Armagh' who forecast: And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me'; or 'Doc Holliday' who first justified himself by saying: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today'; or 'The Streets of Laredo,' which is the version whose words I know best and which is therefore the one I sometimes sing out loud or to myself, perhaps, who knows, as a reminder, especially the last verse that ends by asking: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'

'No,' I said, 'nothing bad.'

May 2007

Acknowledgments

Throughout the writing of the three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow, various people have helped me at some point or other: with a fact, an image, a foreign word, some piece of historical or geographical information, a medical query, a bullfighting term, a few lines of poetry, some advice that contributed to clarifying the narrative, or by looking after my only two copies of the original (I still use a typewriter) until it was completed. They are as follows: Julia Altares, John Ashbery, Antony Beevor, Ines Blanca, Nick Clapton, Margaret Jull Costa, Agustin Diaz Yanes, Paul Ingendaay, Antonio Iriarte, Mercedes Lopez-Ballesteros, Carme Lopez Mercader, Ian Michael, Cesar Perez Gracia, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Daniella Pittarello, Alvaro Pombo, Eric Southworth, Bruce Taylor and Dr. Jose Manuel Vidal. To all of them, my heartfelt thanks.

Separate mention must be made of my father, Julian Marias, and Sir Peter Russell, who was born Peter Wheeler, without whose borrowed lives this book would not have existed. May they both rest now, in the fiction of these pages as well.

JAVIER MARIAS

Javier Marias

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