Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Young Perez Nuix burst out laughing, a pleasant, slightly maternal laugh, with no mockery in it or, if so, only the kind of mockery with which one might greet a child's naive response or angry retort, and I took advantage of that momentary lowering of her guard to direct my eyes to the place at which I'd been trying not to look, at least not fixedly-she had not yet re-crossed her legs.

'I'm sorry' she said, 'it just amuses me that even an intelligent man like you should suffer from the same inability. It's astonishing how wrong our perception of ourselves always is, how hopeless we are at gauging and weighing up our strengths and weaknesses. Even people like us-gifted and highly trained in examining and deciphering our fellow man-become one-eyed idiots when we make ourselves the object of our studies. It's probably the lack of perspective and the impossibility of observing yourself without knowing that you're doing so. Whenever we become spectators of ourselves that's when we're most likely to play a role, distort the truth, clean up our act.' She paused and looked at me with a mixture of jovial stupefaction and unwitting pity. She'd described me as 'intelligent' and had done so quite spontaneously; if this was flattery, she had disguised it very well. 'Don't you realize, Jaime, how much Bertie likes you? How stimulating and amusing he finds you? That he's so fond of you that he'll make a genuine effort to accept your view of things, as long, of course, as it's not arrant nonsense, and to believe what you tell him you can see, even if only to confirm to himself that you are his most magnificent acquisition, his most successful hire? Remember, too, that you came to him recommended not only by Wheeler, but by his teacher Rylands, from beyond the grave. Not that this situation will necessarily last; he'll grow tired of it one day, or get used to your presence; he'll even disapprove of you sometimes or scorn you, Bertie is not the most constant of people and he quickly tires of almost everything, or his enthusiasms come and go. Now, though, you're the latest novelty and, besides, you really do seem to have hit it off, in that sober, masculine, unspoken way of yours-or whatever it is-but I know what I'm talking about. At the moment, you have far more influence over him than you think, and yet it seems to me you haven't even noticed. It's a rather temporary state of affairs, and partial too, because Bertie never entirely trusts anyone and he's not a man to be manipulated or led and certainly not deflected. But there are a few areas where he can be made to entertain doubts, and you're in a position to sow a few doubts now. I know because I've been through the same process and can recognize it. I recognize his pleasure and enjoyment, how being with you amuses and stimulates him, just as he used to find my company enlivening too. We really hit it off as well, and that lasted a long time. Not in the same masculine way in which you and he get on. And it's not as if we don't any more, I have no complaints about the high esteem in which he holds me or his professional respect for me. But I no longer represent for him the small daily celebration that I did at first and even later on too, that's what he felt about me for quite a while, and I know I shouldn't say so, but it's true, ask Mulryan or Rendel, or Jane Treves, who, being a woman, naturally suffered more from jealousy, I'm sure you'll meet her one day, she felt positively neglected when she and I were both there with Tupra. You can persuade him, Jaime. Not about just anything, that won't happen either today or indeed ever, but if it's about some area he's unsure of and in which he believes you to be an expert, as with cowardice and bravery; there, as I said, he's convinced of your expertise. I am too, by the way, you're really very good. Anyway, that's what I'm asking you, Jaime. The man will then cancel the debt and my father will be safe. As you see, it's a big favor to ask.'

She had used the word 'favor' several times, it was a way of saying 'please' or 'por favor' without actually saying it or not in so many words-words that denote pleading or begging, especially when repeated, 'Please, please, please'-'Por favor, por favor, por favor,' She crossed her legs, blocking my view, but I could instead direct my gaze anywhere with impunity, I could still see her bare thighs for example. She took a small sip of wine and put another Karelias cigarette to her red lips-again that flashback to childhood cartoons-without lighting it. The dog was fast asleep, as if he had got used to the idea that he might be staying there all night, and lying down like that, he seemed even whiter. I glanced out of the window, then moved away, nothing had changed, the flexible metal bars or endless spears of the ever more dominant rain continued to fall, as if excluding the possibility of clear skies for good. I took a few steps and then sat down where I had been sitting before. I had the feeling that the silence was not a pause this time, but that Perez Nuix had finished her presentation; that she considered her plea to be over and done with: her few timid attempts at flattery, her various lines of argument and her deployment of prudent powers of persuasion. I felt that I now had to give an answer, that she was not going to add anything more. To answer 'Yes' or 'No' or 'Possibly' or 'We'll see.' To give her a little more hope without actually committing myself to anything: 'I'll see what I can do, I'll do my best.' 'It depends' would not, of course, put an end to the conversation or the visit. And I wasn't sure I wanted either to end, and so I didn't give her an answer, but asked her another question:

'How much is the debt exactly?'

She lit the cigarette and I thought I saw her blush for a moment, or perhaps it was just the glow from the match, or a lurking embarrassment, as when in the office with no name, I would sense in her a brief gathering of energy before she came over to talk to me, that is, beyond greeting me or asking me some isolated question, as if she had to gather momentum or take a run-up, and that was what gave me the idea that she didn't rule me out, although probably without knowing that she didn't, nor having even considered the possibility. I thought: 'She's embarrassed to tell me how much. Either because it's so low, and then I'll know that she can't afford to pay even that, or because it's so high, and then I'll find out what an enormous sum it is, or how crazy her father is, and perhaps how crazy she is as well.'

'Nearly two hundred thousand pounds,' she said after a few seconds, and she raised her eyebrows in a gesture that was not, of course, English, as if she were adding: 'You see the fix I'm in.' Though what she did, in fact, say was not so very different. 'What do you think?'

I made a rapid calculation. It was nearly three hundred thousand euros or fifty million pesetas, I had still not quite reaccustomed myself to the pound and will perhaps never get used to the euro when it comes to the kind of large quantities one does not deal with every day.

'I think that, considering his defects, Incompara is very generous,' I replied. 'Or else that report is worth an awful lot to him.' And then I asked another question, perhaps the one I least expected to ask, although I don't know if she was quite as surprised as I was, that depended on how well she knew me, on how much more she knew of me than I did of myself, on how much and in what depth she had translated or interpreted me-to employ the terminology we sometimes used to describe our indefinable work-during those months of working together. It occurred to me as a joke really and I saw no reason to resist. Besides, it would force her to put something on the table, to put a value on my participation, to consider me and the risk I was taking, to consider the possible damage to me and the unlikely benefits. Asking a favor is easy, even comfortable, the difficult, disquieting thing is hearing the request and then having to decide whether to grant or deny it. A transaction involves more work and more care and calculation for both parties. With a favor, only one of the parties has to decide and calculate, the one who is or isn't going to agree to it, because no one is obliged to return a favor or even be grateful. You ask, wait and receive a 'Yes' or a 'No'; then, in either case, you can calmly leave, having offloaded a problem or created a conflict. No, favors granted are not binding, they carry with them no contract, no debt, or only moral ones, and that's nothing, mere air, nothing practical. So, to my surprise, what I said was: And what's in it for me?'

Perez Nuix, however, had not fallen into my trap, into my improvised and semi-unintentional trap. She didn't immediately go on to offer me something, a reward, a sum of money, a percentage, a gift, not even the promise of her eternal gratitude. She doubtless knew that the latter has no tangible or even symbolic meaning. People say it far too much, 'I'll be eternally grateful' is one of the most vacuous statements ever uttered and yet one hears it often, always with that unvarying epithet, always that same irresponsible 'eternally,' another clue to its absolute lack of reality, or truth or meaning, and sometimes the person saying it will add: 'If there's ever anything I can do for you, now or later on, you only have to ask,' when the fact is that almost no one immediately asks a favor in return, that would seem exploitative-a case of do ut des-and if, in the future, one does ask for something, the empty words will have been long forgotten and, besides, no one resorts to that, rarely does anyone remind the other person: 'Some time ago, you said…'; and if they do, they're likely to meet with this response: 'Did I say that? How very odd. Did I really? I don't remember that,' or else 'No, ask anything but that, that's the one thing I can't grant you, the very worst thing, please, don't ask me' or else 'I'm so sorry, I'd love to help, but it's simply not in my power, if only you'd come to me a few years ago, but things have changed.' And so the person who was only seeking the return of an old favor ends up asking a new favor, as if nothing had happened before, and is reduced almost to begging ('Please, please, please'). She was intelligent enough not to promise me chimeras or outlandish rewards in kind, nothing graspable or ungraspable, present or future.