Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine,' Tupra said to me once. My face would become one with that of Santa Olalla and, even worse, that of Del Real, two names that have always been for me the names of treachery; because when they betrayed my father at the end of the Civil War, what they wanted was his execution and his death, that was the usual fate of any detainee, for they were the masters of time, they held the hourglass in their hand and ordered it to stop, except that it didn't stop and didn't obey them and, thanks to that, I am here, and my father did not have to say as he died: 'Strange to see meanings that clung together once floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…' No, I will not be the one to impose that task on this unpleasant man for whom I feel a strange blend of sympathy and loathing, he is part of this landscape and of the universe, he still treads the earth and traverses the world and it is not up to me to change that; at the end of time there are only vestiges or remnants or rims and in each can be traced, at most, the shadow of an incomplete story, full of lacunae, as ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary as pieces of tombstones or the broken inscriptions on ruined tympana, 'past matter, dumb matter,' and then you might doubt that it ever existed at all. Why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, and all those doubts, all that torment.'

I took out the second bullet and put it away, I uncocked the pistol, removed my finger from the trigger and rested it once more on the guard, as Miquelin had advised me to do unless I was sure I was going to fire. I saw on Custardoy's face a look of contained or repressed relief, he didn't dare feel entirely relieved, how could he, when he still had the barrel of a gun pointing at his face and when the man holding the gun was wearing gloves and had just done something very worrying: he had picked up the two ashtrays with the two cigarette butts in them and their corresponding ash, his own and Custardoy's, the ash from the burned-out Karelias cigarettes, and emptied them into his other raincoat pocket to keep them separate from the bullets, just as, in the handicapped toilet, Tupra had put away his sodden gloves, wrung out and wrapped up in toilet paper, although he had done so only once his task was complete, while mine still lay before me. 'Now I do have his coldness, Reresby's coldness that is, now that I've recognized my similarity or affinity with this man, which is why he's going to emerge from this alive,' I thought, 'and now that I've thoroughly frightened him, even though he has barely shown it and put on a brave face, anything else I do to him will seem all right and of no account, he'll think himself lucky and find it perfectly reasonable. I will not be Sergeant Death or Sir Death or Sir Cruelty or even Sir Thrashing, I will be Sir Blow or Sir Wound or Sir Punishment, because something has to be done to keep him out of the picture, just as Tupra did with De la Garza.'

And while I was thinking (and much of this I thought later on), I realized who it was that Custardoy reminded me of; what, to use Wheeler's word, his affinity was; or his relationship, although in this case there was even a resemblance. And it was probably that very frivolous fact that saved him, truly and definitively, a nonsense, a mere nothing, a chance superfluous flash, an opportune association or a fickle memory that might or might not have surfaced; sometimes what we do or don't do depends on that, just as we decide to give alms to one beggar among many, whose appearance, for some reason, moves us: we suddenly see the person, see beyond his condition and function and needs, we individualize him, and he no longer seems to us indistinguishable or interchangeable as an object of compassion, of which there are hundreds; that's what happened to Luisa with the young Romanian or Hungarian or Bosnian woman and her sentinel son at the entrance to the supermarket, and about whom I had occasionally thought while I was far away in London, having first known of their existence through a story told to me. I associated Custardoy with my dancing neighbor opposite, with whom I had never exchanged a word, but who had so often cheered or soothed me with his improvised dances beyond the trees and the statue, on the other side of the square, alone or accompanied by his friends or partenaires or lovers. Yes, they had quite a lot in common: my dancer is a thin fellow with bony features-jaw and nose and forehead-but a strong athletic build, just as Custardoy is all sinew; he has a thick but well-groomed mustache, like that of a boxer from the early days, except that it's cut straight with no nineteenth-century curlicues, and he wears his hair combed back with a middle parting as if he had a ponytail, although I've never seen it, perhaps one day he'll reveal that he has one just like Custardoy, he also sometimes wears a tie as Custardoy always does, even when he's running and leaping about his empty living room, the guy's mad, but so happy, so contented, so oblivious to everything that wears the rest of us down and consumes us, immersed in his dances danced for no one, it's fun and even rather cheering to watch, and mysterious too, I can't imagine who he is or what he does, he eludes-and this doesn't happen very often-my interpretative or deductive faculties, which may or may not be right, but which never hold back, springing immediately into action to compose a brief, improvised portrait, a stereotype, a flash, a plausible supposition, a sketch or snippet of life however imaginary and basic or arbitrary these might be, it's my alert, detective mind, the idiotic mind that Clare Bayes criticized and reproached me for years ago now, before I met Luisa, and which I had to suppress with Luisa so as not to irritate her or fill her with fear, the superstitious fear that always does the most damage and yet serves so little purpose, for there's nothing to be done to protect ourselves from what we already know and dread (perhaps because we are fatalistically drawn to it and seek it out so as to avoid disappointment), and we usually know how things will end, how they will evolve and what awaits us, where things are going and what their conclusion will be; everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest straightforward stories, you only have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history-one grave pregnant moment- and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to decipher their meanings, if you are prepared to do so-but it's very difficult and can prove catastrophic…

I had interpreted or deduced Custardoy and even had proof, and both those things had been enough to condemn him. But what bad or good luck-how I regret it, how I celebrate it- that he should remind me of my contented dancer to whom I was grateful from afar, which was doubtless why I felt for Custardoy that inexplicable sympathy mingled with profound loathing. Perhaps they were alike in other ways too, perhaps there were other affinities apart from the pleasant smile and the superficial physical likeness: when Custardoy was sketching and taking notes as he stood before that painting by Parmigianino he was, perhaps, as focused on that as my neighbor was on his dancing, as happy and contented, and when he painted at home, when he made his copies or forgeries, he may have been even more abstracted and oblivious to all that wears us down and consumes us. And the dancer was often accompanied by two women, just as Custardoy sometimes took two women to bed with him in his need to be many or to live more than one life. And it was that, above all, that made me give up the idea of killing him: a nonsense, a mere nothing, a chance, superfluous flash of thought, a doubt or caprice or some stupid fit of feeling, an untimely association of fickle memories, or was it, rather, one-eyed oblivion.

Without saying anything, I went over to his enviable fireplace and thereafter I acted very swiftly, as if I were distracted or, rather, busy, yes, my attitude was as businesslike as Reresby's had been when he walked into that immaculate handicapped toilet. 'Now I have his coldness,' I thought again, 'now I know how to frighten Custardoy, now I can imagine myself, because it is just a question of imagining yourself and only then can you rid yourself of problems; now I can calculate how hard the blow should be, can bring down my sword without severing anything, lift it up and then bring it down again but still cut nothing and nevertheless give him the fright of his life that will ensure he never comes near us again, near me or, above all, Luisa.' I picked up the poker and without giving Custardoy time to prepare himself or even to foresee what I was about to do, I struck him as hard as I could on the left hand that he had placed, along with his right hand, on the table. I heard the crunch of broken bones, I heard it clearly despite the simultaneous howl he let out, his face, no longer rough or crude or cold, twisted in pain and he instinctively clasped his broken hand with his other hand.

'Fuck! You've broken my hand, you bastard!' It was a perfectly normal reaction, he didn't really know what he was saying, the pain had made him forget for a moment that I still had a gun aimed at him and that my last words to him had been: 'you're not going to tell her anything about what's happened here.'

I raised the poker again and this time, applying less pressure- yes, now I could calculate how hard the blow should be-I slashed his cheek, gave him uno sfregio or a cut much longer and much deeper than the one Flavia Manoia suffered, although it barely touched bone. He raised his good hand to his jaw, his cheek, it was the right one, and stared at me with a look of panic, of fear, which was not so much visceral as atavistic, the fear of someone who does not know whether more blows will follow nor how many because that is