Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

I heard them whispering for a few moments, I got up from the sofa, but didn't dare to join them; then I heard the door close, the Polish babysitter had gone. After that came the sound of Luisa's footsteps in the corridor-she was wearing high heels, I recognized the click-clack on the wooden floor-she always wore them to go out-heading towards the bathroom and her bedroom, she didn't even look in at me, she must be desperate for a pee, I assumed, as one so often is on arriving home; that seemed quite normal really, if she'd been with other people and not wanted to get up, for example, during a meal, either at someone's table or in a restaurant. Or perhaps she wanted to tidy up before showing herself to me, assuming she had spent the evening with my ephemeral replacement and was returning as women sometimes do return from such prolonged encounters, with her skirt all wrinkled and slightly askew, her hair disheveled, her lipstick erased by kisses, a run in her stockings and the signs of all that impetuosity still in her eyes. Or perhaps she was so angry with me that she had decided to go to bed without even saying hello and to leave me in the living room until I got fed up or until I understood that when she had said she wasn't going to see me that night, she had meant it. She'd probably decided to shut herself in the bedroom and not come out, to get undressed, turn off the light and climb into bed, pretending that I wasn't there, that I was still in London and did not exist in Madrid, or that I was a mere ghost. She was perfectly capable of that and more-I knew what she was like-whenever anyone tried to impose something on her that she didn't want. But she would have to leave the bedroom before she closed her eyes, at least once, and if the worst came to the worst, I could intercept her then, for it would be quite beyond her powers not to go in and see the children and make sure they were safe and sleeping peacefully.

I continued to wait, I didn't want to rush anything, still less go and pound on her door, beg her to let me see her, bombard her with awkward questions through that barrier, and demand explanations I had no right to demand. That would have been a bad start, after such a long separation, it would be best to avoid anything that smacked of confrontation or reproach, unnecessary and absurd and not at all what I wanted. From now on, the initiative lay with her, I had already made things awkward for her by refusing to leave, once the excuse of enjoying spending time with my children had lapsed. On hearing the key in the door, I had muted the TV, but could still see the antics of that porcine emulator of De Niro and John Wayne-he was an extremely polite little pig-and his co-stars: a few dogs, some sheep, a horse, a bad-tempered duck, all of them superb actors.

After a few minutes, I heard the door of her bedroom open and a few footsteps, she was still wearing her high heels, so she obviously hadn't changed her clothes, but she walked more quietly, trying not to make noise: she peered into Marina's room and then into Guillermo's, she didn't go right in or only a little way, just far enough to see that everything was in order. I still didn't want to get up and go and find her, I preferred for her to come into the living room, if she did, and when at last she did-her footsteps firmer, normal, now that she had breathed in the sound of the children's deep sleep, which had been enough to reassure her that she ran no risk of waking them-I thought I understood, despite any efforts at concealment she may have made in the bathroom that had once been mine, why she had wanted to avoid me, and that it hadn't been because she didn't want to see me, but because she didn't want me to see her.

At first sight, she looked very good, well-dressed, well-shod, although rather less well-coiffed, and yet wearing her long locks caught back in a ponytail suited her, gave her a youthful, naive air, almost that of a young girl caught in flagrante on returning home late, but who was I to say anything, or even to feel surprised. Before I noticed anything was wrong, she had time to say a few words, with an expression on her face of mingled pleasure to see me and annoyance at finding me there, but also of fear that I had caught her out or perhaps it was embarrassment doing battle with defiance, as if I had surprised her doing something I wouldn't like or that would seem to me reprehensible, and, realizing that, she didn't know whether to strike her flag or to run it up the flagpole and stand and fight, it's odd how former couples, long after they have ceased being a couple, still feel mutually responsible, as if they owed each other a certain loyalty, even if that amounts only to knowing how they're coping on their own and what's going on in their life, especially if something strange or bad is happening. Things were happening to me about which I, being far away, had said nothing: I had clearly lost my footing or lost both grip and judgment, employed as I was in a job about whose consequences I knew nothing, not even if it had any consequences, and being paid a suspiciously large salary too; I had, by then, been injected with strange poisons and was leading an existence that grew ghostlier by the day, immersed in the dream-like state of one who lives in another country and is starting not always to think in his own language, I was very alone there in London, even though I was surrounded by people all day, they were just work colleagues and never really developed into pure friendships, even Perez Nuix had turned out to be no different-not even my lover, which she wasn't, since there had been no repetition and no laughter-after that one night I had shared with her carnally, a fact we had kept concealed and excessively silent, from others and from ourselves, and when one pretends that something hasn't happened and it's never spoken of, it ends up not having happened, even though we know the opposite to be case; what Jorge Manrique wrote in his 'Lines on the Death of His Father' some five hundred and thirty years ago, and only two years before his own early death when he was not yet forty, wounded during an attack on a castle by a shot from a harquebus (even worse and more dishonorable than that of Richard Yea and Nay, felled by an arrow from a crossbow), 'If we judge wisely, we will count what has not happened as the past' is as true as the contrary position which allows us to count the past, along with everything else we have experienced, our entire life, as also not having happened. Then what does it matter what we do in our lives, or why it does it matter so very much to us?

You just had to stay, didn't you, Jaime?' Luisa said before I could say anything. 'You just had to wait up to see me.'

Now, though, after that initial glance, I spotted what was wrong at once, it was impossible not to, at least for me. She had tried to cover it with make-up, to conceal it, hide it, perhaps in the same way that Flavia would have tried unsuccessfully, with the unlikely help of Tupra in the ladies' restroom, to make the wound on her face invisible, the mark of the rope, the weal left by the whip, the welt caused by De la Garza's clumsy lashings during his wild gyrations on the fast dance floor. That wasn't what Luisa had on her face, it wasn't uno sfregio, not a gash or a cut or a scratch, but what has always been known in my language as 'un ojo morado'-literally 'a purple eye'-and in English as 'a black eye,' although since the impact or cause was not recent, the skin was already growing yellow, the colors that appear after such a blow are always mixed, there's never a single color, but several, which combine at every phase and keep changing, perhaps the disagreement between the two languages stems from that (although mine does lean more to English when it refers to such an eye as 'un ojo a la funerala'-more or less 'an eye in mourning'), they always take a long time to fade, it was just our bad luck that not enough time had yet passed. When I saw it, I no longer had to respond to her words, nor to apologize. Unfortunately, I couldn't greet her either or give her a kiss or embrace her, I had waited so long for this meeting and now I couldn't even manage a smile or an 'Hola, nina-'Hello, love'-as I used to when we were still together and on good terms. I immediately went over to her and the first thing I said was: 'What's that? Let me see? What happened? Who did it?'

I took her face in my hands, taking care not to touch the affected area, she had clearly just been in the bathroom applying various creams, to no avail. Her eyelid was no longer puffy or only a little, but it obviously had been. I calculated that the injury must have occurred about a week or perhaps ten days ago, and it was the result of a blow, I was sure of that, dealt by a fist or a blunt instrument like a bat or a blackjack, I had seen such bruised eyes and cheekbones and chins years before, under the Franco regime, when students who had been arrested and beaten up would emerge from the police station, from the headquarters of the security forces in Puerta del Sol or from Carabanchel prison, my fellow university students who'd had much worse luck than I did during the small semi-spontaneous street demonstrations that we called 'saltos' and at illegal rallies that were broken up with the aid of very long, flexible truncheons, which really hurt because the truncheon flexed on impact, they were used by the police or 'grises' who charged on horseback, sometimes it seems incredible to me that it was only in the mid-seventies that we used to flee their hooves every few days or weeks, as we left our classes. Although, of course, everything can come back.

She moved away, avoided me, retreating two steps in order to re-establish the distance between us, smiling as if my questions amused her, but I could see that they didn't.

'What do you mean? No one did anything to me. I collided with the garage door about a week ago. It was my wretched cell phone's fault. Someone called me, I got distracted and misjudged the distance when the door was closing. It hit me full on, it's really heavy, it must be made of solid iron. It's nearly better now, it looked worse than it was. It doesn't hurt.'