Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

17

'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common', that was the exact quotation, as I discovered later on in Madrid, and which I had murmured to myself when I was with Wheeler in his garden by the river, just after he had said: 'Speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods… The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.' I have never really understood that first quotation, and Wheeler, with his broader knowledge, might perhaps have been able to explain it, but he didn't hear me say it or chose not to, or assumed it was merely some idea of my own and so ignored it, but those words belonged to someone far more deserving of respect than me, the words of a dead man spoken when he was alive, he wrote them in, 1967 and died in 1993, but now he was as dead as the poet Marlowe, although the latter had a four-hundred-year lead over him in death, for he was stabbed in 1593, that son of a cobbler born in Canterbury (the city of the bandit-Dean Hewlett Johnson, who was the absurd and indirect reason why my father could so easily have been shot long before I was born), and who had studied, in fact, at Benett's College in Cambridge, which was later called Corpus Christi. Perhaps not talking any more has an equalising effect, perhaps that immediate levelling out and becoming alike is a consequence of being definitively silenced, which binds one with a strong and previously unknown bond to the already silent from every age, to the first and to the last, who will immediately become the second to last, and the whole of time becomes compressed and does not make divisions or distinctions or create distances because time ceases to have any meaning once it is over – once each person's life is over – even though those left behind continue counting, their own time and the empty time of those who have departed, as if one day the latter might be able to undo their leaving and be absent no longer. 'It's twenty-six years since my mother died,' we say, or 'It's nearly a year since your son died.’

When the person who wrote these lines wrote them that was more or less what he was talking about, he was a compatriot of mine, a madrileno like me, from that same hated city of Madrid, and, indeed, had lived through the blockade. Once, on a visit to Lisbon, he went to the leafy cemetery of Os Prazeres, with its avenues flanked by tiny mausoleums, a small fairyland of strange, low, grey, miniature houses, with ornamental pitched roofs, silent, immaculate and arcane – at once inhabited and uninhabited – and he began noticing the bare little living rooms which you can just make out through the glass-paned door which is set into so many of these tombs, each room furnished with 'a few chairs or two small upholstered armchairs next to a table covered by a lace shawl on which lies open some pious book, a silver-framed photograph of the deceased, a vase containing everlasting flowers and, on occasion, an ashtray'. In one of those small living rooms 'which are intended to look cosy', the traveller saw a pair of shoes, some socks and some dirty laundry peeping out from beneath one of the coffins; in another, some wine glasses; and in another, he thought, a deck of cards. 'It seemed to me,' my fellow countryman wrote, 'that the purpose of this decor was to give a familiar, ordinary, comfortable feel to any visits made to the dead, so that it would not be so very different from visiting the living.' He could see no relationship with the customs of the ancient Egyptians, who tried to ensure that the dead person, in his eternal isolation, signed and sealed, did not go without any of the things he had enjoyed and loved in life – although this, of course, applied only to those who were considered important – he related it, rather, 'to a desire not so much to make the dead person's stay in that place pleasant and homely, but to the need of the living to feel they will receive a warm welcome there'. And he added, clearly aware of the grave irony: 'One imagines that in this case it is the living who seek the company of the dead, who, as Comte would suggest, are not only in the majority, they are also a more influential and more animated majority.’

But what most shocked this traveller was the 'perfect composition' which he observed, 'with a degree of indiscretion', in one of these sepulchral rooms: as well as the small rug, the two armchairs and the table bearing the family photograph, the crucifix and a few artificial flowers, he saw 'an alarm clock, of the kind we used to see in our parents' kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet'. He and his companions all, naturally, pressed their ear to the door to hear 'a loud tick-tock which was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice'. And it was seeing this scene and hearing that loud ticking which sparked the reflection that culminated in the quotation I have never quite understood, which is why I remember it and why it makes me think. 'Was it,' he wondered, 'that, like the people buried alive in Poe, the clock was trying to remind the living of the macabre act of forgetfulness that had left it there? Or did it need that extra volume in order to keep the deaf people around it aware of time being measured out?' Then he went to the heart of the matter, to the real question provoked by that antiquated clock, apparently the most pointless and superfluous of alarm clocks: 'What was it actually measuring, I wonder?' wondered the man from my own city; yes, that was the main question, 'was it the amount of time they had been dead, or was it the countdown, as they call it now, the time yet to elapse before the final judgement? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come? No other clock – and such a humble clock too – has ever seemed better placed or provided more food for thought. It occurred to me, with some surprise, that a religion which has always placed such emphasis on that precarious waiting rime has not taken the trouble – not even the person who put the clock there – to give the soul the relief of knowing how long its anguish will last; for if the soul is waiting for the resurrection of the flesh, what better than a clock to give an idea not so much of how long the wait will be, but how much time has already been spent in waiting?' And it was here that the enigmatic words appeared or were inserted: 'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension…' as given in full above. The passage continues, but does not help to elucidate these words, not that it really matters, it is often impossible to understand Shakespeare, to understand him exactly that is, and yet whenever he produces some obscure metaphor or dazzling ambiguity, he opens up ten paths or turnings down which one can plunge further (that is, he opens up these paths if you continue looking and thinking beyond what is merely necessary, as my father used to urge us to do, and you drive yourself on and say 'What else' at the point where you would normally say that there can be nothing more); 'in that sense,' added the traveller, 'within the confines of that comfortable, musty little living room, that troubling alarm clock is the only deus ex machina which allows the celebration of the mysterious dialogue which exists between the living and the dead'. There was no further comment, or, rather, there was: as is compulsory after these incursions into ghost time or dead time, before bidding farewell to his text, the traveller returned for a moment to the living and recalled how, 'as they were leaving', he had asked these two questions of one of his companions (someone, by the way, who bore the name of a character straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, Valdemar, no less): 'What happens, do you think, if it rings at night? Do the people sleeping here stir?' One might ask those same questions now of him, my fellow countryman, who died twenty-six years after that visit or that piece of writing, although he was not buried in the small, leafy world of Os Prazeres, but, as he had wanted, in the tidy cemetery of La Almudena in the city of our birth, where my mother has been for twenty-six different years, her years. And one might well ask the same question of all of them: what if, instead of remaining silent, they talk among themselves while they wait, and the strong, unknown bond that places them on the same level and makes them alike and joins them together is not a definitive descent into silence but that indefinite counting throughout the interminable time which the stubborn clock measures and measures with its loud tick-tock, and during which its extravagant bell never rings even once? More than enough time to tell each other what they recall of their private dream – rather than of their consciousness – what they did and what happened to them and what they said, over and over, until they know everyone's story by heart, that is, each individual knows everyone's story and everyone knows each individual's story. Time enough for every man who has trodden the earth since the earth began and every woman who has traversed the world to tell the others their whole story, from beginning to end, the end being what carried them to the tomb or drove them from the living to join this other more numerous and influential company, more animated and perhaps also wittier and jokier, and certainly more indolent and more light-hearted, with fewer worries and responsibilities. Time, even, to contribute information and invent stories about beings that never existed and to recount deeds that never happened, fictions and fantasies and games with which to pass that long waiting time, and without ever once repeating themselves. And thus we would be back to our normal state, to not knowing what is true or, rather, what really happened.

And we might ask then how would the dead who died a violent death speak to the dead who killed them or who had issued the order to finish them off- they might never even have seen each other – once they were all on a level and all alike, although only in one respect, that of having died, which, in reality, is nothing, therefore the deceased, no less than the living, would be able to tell each other apart. And one might ask which version they would give, not to the Judge who has not yet appeared and to whom no one lies, and who is perhaps taking so long to arrive because there is no Judge nor ever was and never will be, mass suggestion will not summon him up nor mere insistence (or it may be that he does not dare to confront such a vast, querulous or possibly offended or, even worse, mocking multitude, and so he himself puts off until tomorrow, always tomorrow, the ghastly experience to which he committed himself out of pride; he places it infinitely on hold out of a sense of invincible fear or idleness), yes, which version would they tell each other and what would the two of them tell everyone else, martyr and executioner or instigator and victim, knowing that the present time, if I can call it that and as I have been calling it for a while now, would be too long, too unbearably long for that which did not happen, but was said to have happened, to be believed.

18

I only had time to say a few things in reply, I had time to smile to myself and to feel a pang of pity, to be amused by his comments on the sharp, stylised features that Botox gave certain faces, the faces of both divas and earthlings, and to think that there might be some unexpected cracks in De la Garza's global stupidity; and even to want to hear a little more from him, more chatter and more nonsense and more comical descriptions, and even to wonder fleetingly if how I was feeling about him was similar to how Tupra felt about me (although obviously there was no real comparison): I amused Tupra, and he enjoyed our sessions of conjecture and examination, our conversations or merely listening to me. ('What else?' he would demand. 'What else occurs to you? Tell me what you're thinking and what else you noticed.’)

This lasted almost no time at all, or perhaps everything happened at once, which meant there was time for everything, or maybe I retrieved and rethought it later on, in the pause provided by my doze in the chair or by the sense of unease that persisted when I did finally go to bed, once that long, erroneous, disagreeable night was over. De la Garza had, in his own way, enlightened me about that product which once was poisonous, but was now possibly innocuous, and he had come out with a few amusingly impertinent remarks about its users or addicts with their wild expressions, the last thing he had said was this: 'It makes her look slightly unhinged, don't you think?' referring to someone he had called 'the ex-wife of that guy who's hitched up now with one of our Spanish actresses', I had understood him perfectly, one of the drawbacks or advantages of compatriotism, a tall woman who also had the face of someone very tall; it was a problem, having that kind of face, regardless of whether one was tall or short. 'They must inject it into her cheekbones and into her crow's feet by the litre, I'd be surprised if she can even close her eyes, she probably sleeps with them wide open. Just like this Flavia woman. I mean, depending on the angle, she looks like some kind of sprite.' There he was in his carnival get-up and with his shoelaces untied, long shoelaces too, they could easily get wet, even in a toilet that wasn't used very much, the floors in public toilets are always wet. It was a miracle he hadn't had an accident, especially during the last dance, when he had danced almost like one possessed, and which we had interrupted in order to save Mrs Manoia from the flailings of his fake hair and, according to what Tupra told me later on at his house, to save De la Garza himself from something far worse.

'Perhaps all sprites sleep with their eyes open.' That was all it occurred to me to say in response, as a preparation for a joke or a quip; I could feel laughter bubbling up inside me, and I didn't want him to take it as a pardon or a homage (he was a very arrogant attache), and so I looked for and improvised another outlet for it: 'Well, you should know, Rafael, seeing as how you know such a hell of a lot about literary fantasy – including the medieval stuff.' And I pretended to laugh at my own comment, when in fact I was laughing at his outrageous remarks. Nevertheless, I immediately introduced another element to dissipate the possibly wounding effects of my sarcasm (so I obviously had time to say four or five things to him): 'By the way, your shoelaces have come undone.' And I pointed at his feet.

Without changing his posture, De la Garza looked down too; he had got over his dizziness or frenzy or vertigo, he must have thought it somehow chic to stand there, half leaning and half hanging onto a strange, cylindrical metal bar, despite the prosaic nature of the place and the complete absence of spectators (he could hardly imagine that I was likely to be impressed). He gazed at his shoes from afar, with an inexplicably commiserative look on his face, as if they were not his, but someone else's – mine – and he did not make the immediate movement one would expect, that of crouching down and tying them up. He had an ability to surprise, as does every major idiot, and, of course, to irritate, all in the space of a single second, and to erase at a stroke my open laughter, my inner smile, my incipient sympathy and that tiny pang of pity.

'Tie them up for me, will you, I'm still a bit too drunk to crouch down like that, anyway, where's that frigging friend of yours frigging got to with his frigging waistcoat and the frigging line of cocaine he promised me. And maybe make it a double knot, just in case. Go on, it won't hurt you.’

Perhaps the worst thing was that final remark, 'Go on, it won't hurt you'. His childishness, his rich-kid manners enraged me. The very idea that I would kneel down on a toilet floor, however clean and luxurious the toilet might be, and tie the shoelaces of a great dickhead like him who made all entirely artificial show of being foulmouthed (four 'friggings' in one sentence is too much, it's bound to seem put on) and had blithely landed me in all kinds of trouble; just because the idea occurred to him or presented itself to him as something perfectly natural and possible, and he saw nothing unseemly or unusual about it; and he said it as if it were a whim of his or almost as if it were an order, and in that chic, idiotic place, I had already been given quite enough orders by others, by those who paid me and were allowed to give me orders, or not, or only up to a point; and he wasn't even disabled or crippled or anything, he just couldn't be bothered to crouch down… There are people who have no sense of boundaries and who always catch you unawares, however forewarned you might be, such people are simply impossible. I don't know what I would have replied or done, or done to him, I don't know because I didn't have time to do anything; although perhaps, after a few seconds of initial stupefaction, who knows, I would simply have laughed even more, at his sheer nerve. I didn't have time, though, because, at that moment, Tupra came in, or Reresby as he was that night. I think that when he came in, I had, at most, the same brief, simple thought that had filled my mind when I saw De la Garza's flailing hairnet in action on the dance floor: 'I'd like to smash his face in,' and that is what I must have been thinking when the door opened.

Seven of the minutes announced by Tupra must have passed or perhaps ten or even possibly twelve, he would have had various things to deal with, sorting out Flavia and cleaning her up, restoring her to her husband, offering him some kind of explanation, apologising for having to absent himself again and, since I was occupied elsewhere, leaving the two of them alone, he would, I thought, take over from me now and stay with the attache – but what would they talk about – and send me back to the table to look after the Manoias. I saw at once, however -his whole figure appeared, as if we could see both the front and the back of him – that he was carrying his overcoat, he did not have it on, but wore it draped over his shoulders like an Italian or a particularly vain Spaniard or perhaps a wealthy Slav, and that he had another slung over his arm, there were two overcoats, his light one and a dark one, it occurred to me that the latter was mine, and so I thought that perhaps we were leaving and that he had picked them up before keeping our absurd ad hoc appointment in the Disabled toilet, so that we would not waste time in the cloakroom on our way out ('Don't linger or delay', perhaps that was Reresby's motto).

'Are we leaving?' I asked.

He did not reply at once, but did not take long to do so. I saw him remove something from his pocket and jam the door shut with it, a much-folded sheet of paper, a wooden wedge, a small piece of cardboard, I couldn't see what it was at first, he did it in a matter of seconds, as if he had been jamming doors shut since he was a boy. No one would be able to open it until he removed the wedge, I saw him testing it by pushing and pulling hard at the door, two rapid movements one after the other, I noticed a particular firmness and confidence and even economy in each and every movement he made. 'No, no one's leaving just yet,' he said. He seemed distracted, or, rather, still preoccupied, he was very businesslike in his attitude. He slung the darker coat over one of the metal bars, a low one at about hip-height, while he hooked his own coat carefully over the end of another higher one, he took his coat off as if it were a cape, not that it was particularly full, it did, however, seem to me somewhat heavy and stiff, like the filthy coats worn by beggars or as if it had been starched. But no one uses starch any more, certainly not on overcoats. His was clearly very new and expensive, of the kind that underlines its owner's respectability, possibly too emphatically, to the extent that one begins to doubt it.

'At last,' De la Garza said in a whining voice. And he added in his hideous English accent, addressing Tupra directly (it was provoking and positively incendiary that he should have passed comment on the latter's waistcoat given how extreme or, rather, offensive he himself was to the eye): 'It's about time too, you know.' Set phrases were always the only recognisable words in his mouth, precisely because they were so fixed and set, and he was one of those people who add 'you know' to everything, which is always a sign of someone who knows nothing at all; and as I knew all too well, the oaf was incapable of holding a conversation in English, he would get lost at the first subordinate clause, if not before, and he was only comprehensible to a fellow Spaniard, which it was my misfortune, and not my only one, to be. It was as if he had forgotten the real reason he was there, as if he had forgotten that we had separated him from Flavia to prevent him from turning her face into a holy shroud, that he was indebted to us and had, in a sense, insulted us as her companions and guardians; I, after all, had been the one to introduce her to him. That is the good fortune of the arrogant, they never feel responsible or have a bad conscience because they have no conscience and are totally irresponsible, they are bewildered and taken aback by any punishment or slight, even one they have determinedly brought on themselves, they are never at fault, and often convince others, as if by contagion, of that spontaneous conviction of theirs and end up getting off scot-free. I wasn't sure that this time he would. Tupra would not, I thought, like that carping tone; De la Garza had been offered a line of cocaine, not even directly, but through a third party (his compatriot and, very nearly, his interpreter), and in his happy, fatuous mind that meant he could justifiably demand to have it seven minutes later, or ten or twelve, it was tantamount to registering a complaint about a favour done or a gift given.

The feeling of heaviness that had overwhelmed me when I first got up from the table and headed for the toilets increased at that moment; I hadn't lost it, but now it grew stronger, became almost oppressive; various combinations triggered it: alarm and haste, the sense of tedium experienced at the prospect of having to carry out some cold-blooded act of reprisal, or the invincible meekness one feels in a threatening situation. That third blend would not apply to Rafita at the moment, he was unaware of any threat. I, on the other hand, was aware more of the second than the first, there was no alarm or haste now as there had been when I stood up and pushed back my chair in order to go in search of him and of Flavia, but a presentiment (I wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'prescience') of some near-inevitable act of reprisal hovering over us, as if the arrow had been placed in the bow and the latter, however lethargically, was now drawn tight, even if the arm drawing it tight was yawning. All this was emanating from Tupra, even though I was the one feeling it: the malaise, the pinprick and the sense of menace and of some impending misfortune. Yes, Reresby was clearly the kind to give no warning or only when it was of no use at all, how can I put it, when the caveat was just part of the punitive action already being taken.

'Don't worry, I'll reward you for the wait,' he said affably, he was still sending out no message, not verbally at least. I don't know if the attache understood, but it didn't matter because, at the same time, Tupra slipped two fingers into the breast pocket of his reprehensible waistcoat and drew out a neatly folded sachet. With those same two fingers, index and middle, he held it out to De la Garza; or, rather, he did not take a step forward or extend his arm, he merely showed the little packet to him, dangling it in mid-air, pincered between his fingers, the way an adult displays the prize a child has won, so that the undiplomatic diplomat was obliged to come and take it; and Reresby invited him to do so: 'Help yourself,' he added, and that can be understood by any fool who has ever set foot in England. 'But don't take too much. It's got to last all night.' He still sounded distracted, like someone going through the motions or else gearing up to something. And although there is no indication of this in English, I sensed that he was addressing De la Garza as 'hi'.

'So it was true, he does have some,' I thought, without feeling it was in any way strange: indeed, there was nothing unusual about a man like him having one or two grammes or more, possibly even obtained from the police, confiscated goods; and it wouldn't even necessarily be for his personal consumption, it might serve for just such a situation as this, using the substance as a lure or as a symbolic reward, in order to get something in exchange. 'Comendador, in his day, used it as a bait for getting some pussy,' I suddenly recalled, 'they'd get into his car or go back to his apartment with him and in one of those two places he would frequently, but not always, end up having it away with them, even though they might not have foreseen that when they first got into his car. This was the kind of language – "getting some pussy" and "having it away" – that Comendador normally used, and although very different, it coincided in part with the slang of this imbecile here, and it had been my language too in other, younger, more subjective times and still can be on odd occasions – one never forgets a way of speaking, I can recall all the ones I've known and used – when a woman decides to be just pussy and nothing else and to let you screw her without more ado and without any sudden, subsequent show of affection, or if she screws you, it comes to the same thing, most women have known a night in their life when they felt like playing the role of pure, mindless flesh, of being either plunderer or spoils, it makes no difference, even Luisa had known such nights in her youth, although I don't know the details, and she might know such nights again now, just as I occasionally have here, perhaps, indeed, Luisa is experiencing such a night tonight; and Perez Nuix must have known such nights too, she isn't old enough to have called a halt to them for good, that is, a temporary or apparent halt, because nothing is ever definitively over. With his cocaine Tupra has managed to have me lure this cunt into a Disabled toilet, and it's quite something to have got him to stay in here for ten or twelve minutes without complaint. So for the moment, he has managed to achieve his most urgent aim, to neutralise him, to prevent his making the situation with Mrs Manoia still worse and thus reassuring her Arturo or, still more important, assuaging his anger, that is doubtless the main thing.' But now that he was offering him the little packet, I wondered what else he wanted in exchange for handing it over, perhaps it was a bribe (he would say afterwards: 'No, it's OK, you keep it') to make him disappear for good, so that he would go straight from that toilet out into the street with no stopovers en route, but that would be impossible, he would have to go and collect or warn his partying companions, unless they had left without him when they saw his wild behaviour on the dance floor. Reresby had also said: 'This moron has got to be neutralised, stopped,' which meant, sensu strictu, rendering him null and void, something not dissimilar to annihilating him.

De la Garza took it from his hand, the neatly folded packet, possibly as yet untouched, it looked quite plump. He did not even say 'Thank you', he merely used the edge of his bejewelled fist to check that the door was closed, securely jammed shut, and then set about preparing the cocaine beside the various taps, on the flat black marble that surrounded the concave porcelain. But he changed his mind as soon as he took out his wallet (perhaps he didn't quite trust Tupra's wedge after all, it didn't strike him as providing a strong enough padlock), and he went into one of the cubicles, still holding the packet in one hand; obviously he didn't close the door, we would have found that insulting, or as indicating a possible intention to take more than he should. I had not had a proper look during my first rapid visit -just a quick glance round in search of the fugitives – and had failed to notice that as well as bars at shoulder-height, there were also three or four bars at hip-height as well; on one of these lay my overcoat, if it was mine; nor had I noticed how large the cubicles were, there were only two of them, but they were almost like small rooms, everything about the toilet was spacious, doubtless to facilitate the movements of disabled people and to allow wheelchairs to make all kinds of turns (even sudden ones); equally generous was the excellent lighting, intended, I assumed, to avoid the possibility of any stumbles, everything was new and spotless, gleaming and even welcoming, without any of the sordid elements so frequent in public toilets. It was admirable that people should show such respect for the disabled of Britain, that they did not cheerfully invade it and soil and besmirch it, as is the norm among men and optional among women. Anyway, there the three of us were, still all able-bodied, not just making improper and semi-criminal use of the toilet, but also preventing any legitimately handicapped person who might need it from entering, although that would have been an unlikely coincidence; but two of we three intruders were Spanish, and you know what we're Like, or most of us: you only have to forbid us from doing something for us all to rush in and disobey whatever orders or instructions or requests have been issued. The original idea, however, had come from the English member of the trio, the idea of meeting there or of profaning that place; regardless of whether his surname was Finnish or Czech, Turkish or Russian, he was a real and possibly patriotic Englishman and, besides, that night, he answered to Reresby. The truth is that I found it hard to remember when he was using one of his other names: I always thought of him as Tupra and that was what came to my tongue, not even Bertram or Bertie after he had repeatedly urged me to treat him in that more familiar way.

De la Garza lowered the lid of the toilet seat and placed the packet and the wallet on the cistern behind, but immediately stopped when he realised that the cistern was white, and transferred them instead to the lid, which was made of moulded plastic or something similar, dark blue, polished and smooth, and he knelt down before it, almost resting his buttocks on his heels ('Ah, so now the little prat doesn't mind kneeling down,' I thought bitterly, 'a moment ago, he didn't even want to bend down to tie his own shoelaces and wanted me to tie his knots for him, but he's happy enough to do it now in order to prepare his line of cocaine and sniff it up, well, I hope he steps on his laces afterwards and falls over; right now, I'd willingly tie a knot in his neck'). He pushed the hairnet out of the way with a toss of his head so that it wouldn't bother him, as if the hairnet were a full head of hair; it hung limply to one side; he took a credit card out of his wallet, it was, I noticed, Platinum, he must have a fair amount of money in his account, or else was in charge of administering embassy funds under various headings, they don't give Platinum Visa cards to just anyone. He opened the packet carefully and rather ineptly, he must be only an occasional consumer; with the aid of one corner of the credit card he scattered a small amount of cocaine directly onto the lid of the toilet seat, having nothing else to hand that he could use as a paten or tray, the white powder could be seen quite clearly, which would not have been the case had he used the white porcelain cistern. With the stiff plastic card he formed the powder into a line, and he didn't take too much, he even returned a little of the powder to the sachet, which he pushed to one side, folded but not completely closed, as if suddenly aware that it was someone else's property. He did not manipulate the Visa card with great dexterity, he kept regrouping and shaping the line; I watched, perplexed, from the cubicle doorway and Tupra remained outside, behind me or so I assumed, I wasn't looking at him, only at Rafita on bended knee (he may not have been very experienced, but it was a brief operation, or should have been). The line did not seem to me either very long or very broad, at least compared with those I had seen Comendador and his friends prepare in earlier days, as well as other less nocturnal people at various parties and in the occasional toilet (the latter especially in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, but not only then), including a minister, a tycoon, the president of a football club, a judge with a very stem reputation and even their respective wives in all their finery and from different backgrounds and of assorted ideas and ages, both in England and in Spain, as well as a couple of actresses and a couple of bishops (on separate occasions: one Catholic and one Anglican, but both incognito), a multimillionairess from Opus Dei or from Christ's Legionnaires, I can't quite remember now, and, more recently, Dick Dearlove at the end of his celebrity supper along with some of his supper celebrities; and one time in America, a Pentagon chief, although I can say no more than that, I mean, who or where or what the circumstances were; but it was pure chance that I was there, and, besides, that happened later, and at the time I'm referring to, I hadn't yet seen all this (I think it was the reason I escaped arrest, or else it immediately invalidated the arrest, more surely even than the faulty recital of the Miranda law on the part of the detective who had ordered me, the Pentagon chief, two women and another two men to be handcuffed, 'You have the right to remain silent…': the fact is that if I hadn't remained silent, I could have landed that high-up chief with all those troops at his command in a very tight spot indeed).

De la Garza patted his trousers and his giant jacket (the tails of which were brushing the floor) and he looked at me without really focusing or entirely turning his head; I was afraid he was going to ask me, or even Tupra, for a banknote, he was quite capable of doing so. 'If you're going to stick a note up your nose, use one of your own, you drone,' I thought, unwittingly falling into rhyme. But, in the end, he stuck his hand in one of his pockets and brought out a five-pound note which he rapidly rolled up – he was more dexterous at that – to make the tube through which to inhale the powder that looked rather like talc. 'Yes,' I thought, 'it does smell a bit like talcum powder in here. They're so clean, the disabled,' although I was becoming increasingly convinced that it had been a very long time since any disabled person had visited that disco, perhaps the toilet had just been installed, a recent improvement. 'Or perhaps it isn't coke, but talc that Tupra's given him': that thought also occurred to me. I saw De la Garza bend his head and crane his neck forward, he was about to snort the line, or half of it, up his left nostril, he had closed his right nostril with his index finger. 'He looks like a condemned man in olden times,' I thought, 'offering his vanquished head, his bare neck to the axe or the guillotine, with the toilet-seat lid as stump or block, and if the seat was up, the toilet bowl would serve as a basket for his head as it fell – the way vomit does – into the blue water, that way, it wouldn't roll.’

19

Then I heard Tupra's commanding voice:

'Stand clear, Jack.' And at the same time, he grabbed my shoulder, firmly but not roughly, and drew me aside, removed me, I mean, from the doorway of that cubicle which was more like a small room, perhaps the same size as those minuscule mausoleums in the cemetery of Os Prazeres, summarily decorated and intended to be welcoming, at once inhabited and uninhabited. 'Stand clear, Jack' were his words, or perhaps 'Clear off' or 'Step aside' or 'Out of my way, Jack', it's hard to remember exactly something which, subsequently, disappears into nothing because of everything else that comes after, at any rate, I understood what he meant, whatever the phrase he used, that was the sense and it was, moreover, accompanied by that gesture, his firm hand on my shoulder, which allowed itself to be pushed out of the way; viewed positively, the phrase could have been understood as 'Step aside', more negatively as 'Out of my way, Jack, clear off, don't get involved and don't even think about trying to stop me', but his tone of voice sounded more like the former, a very gentle voice given that it was issuing an order that brooked no disobedience or delay, no hesitation in its performance, no resistance or questioning or protest or even any show of horror, because it is impossible to object to or to oppose someone who has a sword in his hand and who has already raised it up in order to bring it down hard, to deal a blow, to slice through something, when that is the first time you have seen the sword and have no idea where it came from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out of keeping with the times we live in, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just visceral fear, but atavistic fear too, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that caused most deaths throughout most centuries – it has killed at close quarters and when face to face with the person killed, without the murderer or the avenger or the avenged detaching or separating himself from the sword while he wreaks his havoc and plunges it in and cuts and slices, all with the same blade which he never discards, but holds onto and grips even harder while he pierces, mutilates, skewers and even dismembers, never a bag of flour, but always a bag of meat that gives and opens beneath this skin of ours that resists nothing, which offers no protection and is so easily wounded that even a fingernail can scratch it, and a knife can cut it and a spear rip it open, and a sword can tear it even as it slices through the air – that it is the most dangerous and tenacious and terrible of weapons, because unlike something that can be thrown or hurled, the sword can strike again and stab repeatedly, over and over, again and again, each strike worse and more vicious than the last, it isn't an arrow or a spear which may wound, but which will not necessarily be followed by others that will hit and penetrate the same body, one may be enough, it may cause only a single gash or a wound that will subsequently heal, unless the weapon has been dipped in some deadly poison, whereas the sword slices insistently in and out and in and out, it is capable of slaying the healthy and finishing off the wounded and dismembering the indefinitely dead, only stopping when the person wielding it drops from exhaustion, but who will otherwise never let go or lose it, unless he, in turn, is killed or has his arm torn off; which is why the gesture of unsheathing was enough of a threat and never a vain one, it was best to leave it half unsheathed as a warning or a doubt or a signal that one was alert, a visual message that one was on guard, because once the whole blade was out in the air, once the tip was free and looking around, that was a sign that bloodshed would inevitably follow.

I hadn't seen Tupra unsheathe the sword, always assuming he had a sheath, yet, suddenly, as if by magic, there he was holding the bare blade, not a very long blade, certainly much less than a metre in length, but cruel and very sharp, the grip was not a medieval one, although, at a first glance, all swords look medieval apart from those that have a guard or a cup hilt, it was perhaps more Renaissance in style, it reminded me of a Landsknecht sword, at the time and later on too, when I returned home and remembered it in my state of half-sleep or sleeplessness, not that I'm an expert in these matters, but during my time teaching in Oxford I had to translate, among many a pretentious, ancient text with absolutely no practical application, one by Sir Richard Francis Burton – known as 'Captain Burton' to second-hand booksellers – about the different types of sword, an illustrated passage what's more, and the name and its corresponding image stuck in my head, as did a few others ('Papenheim', for instance), the Landsknecht sword also had a German nickname, Katzbalger or some such thing, a word that meant 'cat-gutter', a modest undertaking involving little risk, or else frankly profitable and base, after all, the Landsknechts were German mercenaries in the infantry, of whom my country nevertheless made full use in its imperial regiments, or perhaps that absurd translation had been from Spanish into English and not vice versa, The Siege of Vienna by Charles V, why else would that tide by the infinite Lope de Vega ring a bell, why else would I know by heart these lines (although it was just possible that I had heard them spoken by my father, who loved reciting, as much as or more than Wheeler, they were almost contemporaries): 'I go, victorious Spaniard of lightning and fire, I leave you. I leave you too, sweet lands, I leave Spain and tremble as I go; for these men, full of rage, are like thunderless lightning that kills silently.' A highly patriotic, arrogant, eloquent passage, spoken by an invader put to flight, although this wasn't the case in that siege laid in order to destroy and put an end to another, the Ottomans' siege of Vienna under the command of Suleiman the Magnificent, there the 'cat-gutters' must have fairly burned in the hands of those mercenaries, more callous than angry, they appear in engravings by Duerer and Altdorfer, which show their weapons too, that not particularly long sword, seventy centimetres, worn diagonally across the belly, or sometimes they carry pikes, rather like the ones in Velazquez's painting of the surrender at Breda, had Tupra been wielding one of those as well he would have filled us with even more dread, me, of course, but especially his victim, De la Garza, against whom he had raised his sword, Reresby was holding it in one hand when he pushed me aside to get past, but he was gripping it now with both hands to raise it, ready to unleash the blow. I noticed that his waistcoat rode up when he had both arms raised, he was creating as much momentum for himself as possible, underneath, above his belt, I could see his shirt with its very fine, pale, elegant stripes.

'He's going to kill him,' I thought, 'he's going to cut off his head, slice through his neck, no, he can't, he won't, yes, he is, he's going to decapitate him right here, separate his head from his trunk and I can do nothing about it because the blade is going to come down and it's a two-edged sword, he can't just deal him a blow, even a hard blow, with the blunt edge, just to frighten him, to teach him a lesson, because there is no such edge, but two equally sharp edges which would cut through him anyway, De la Garza will die immediately and then we will have to wait an infinite amount of time before we see him whole again, all in one piece, until the day when, out of respect, the two parts into which he is about to be transformed will be joined together, so that he can come to Judgement as he should, not like some freak-show monster, but with his head on his shoulders and not under his arm as if it were a ball or a globe of the world, and there cry: "I died in England, in a public toilet, in a Disabled toilet in the old city of London. This man killed me with a sword and cut me in two, and this other man was there, he saw it all and didn't lift a finger. It was in another country, the country of the man who killed me, but for me he was a foreigner, which is what he would have been in my country; on the other hand, the man who watched and did nothing spoke my language and we were both from the same land, further south, not so very far away, albeit separated by the sea. I still don't know why I was murdered, I hadn't done anything very bad, nor did I constitute a danger to them. I had half a life or more before me, I would probably have become a minister or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington. I didn't see it coming, I was left without life, without anything. They came like thunderless lightning: one did the destroying, while the other kept silent." But perhaps De la Garza would be incapable of speaking like that even on the last day, for on that day each man and each woman will continue to be exactly as they always were, the brutish will not become delicate nor the laconic eloquent, the bad will not become good nor the savage civilised, the cruel will not become compassionate nor the treacherous loyal. And so the likelihood was that Rafita would make his complaint in his usual coarse, affected way, and bawl at the Judge: "You know, the way I snuffed it was really nasty, I mean, along comes this guy and slices my head off on the lid of a toilet seat in a public lav for cripples, can you believe it? The great British bastard, the son-of-a-bitch. I was fucking innocent, I was, I hadn't a clue what was coming, I was pretty much out of my head and pretty much danced out too, and feeling distinctly under the weather, I was just minding my own business and hadn't a clue what was going down, but I hadn't done him any harm, I swear it, he just turned up there in psychopath mode, in inexplicable enigma mode, anyway, the brute produced this sword out of nowhere and chopped off my head with one blow, I don't know, the nutter must have come over all Conan the Barbarian, or El Cid, or Gladiator, a guy in a waistcoat for Christ's sake, a waistcoat, and suddenly he goes and whips out this sword, and his little private fantasy cost me my neck, and my life ended right there and then, I mean, what a bummer. And the other guy just stood there like a statue, his face frozen in horror, a guy from Madrid, would you believe, a fellow Spaniard, one of us, and he didn't even try to grab the other guy's arm, well, his two arms, because the swine was holding this cutlass thing with both hands so as to bring it down on me with all his might, so much for world medieval literature, although it was probably better like that, you know, a clean cut, imagine if he'd only sliced halfway through and left me hanging, still alive and watching it all and knowing that I was being killed for no reason. I died in London, I died when I was out one night partying, I didn't even get to enjoy the whole evening, didn't even have time to drain it to the dregs, those two set a trap for me. And do you know the last thing I did, I knelt down, dammit. And then it was all over." No, there's nothing to be done,' I thought, 'he's going to kill him. The voice is the quickest thing there is, all I can do now is shout.’

Tupra!' I shouted his name, I didn't have time to do anything else, not even to add 'What are you doing?' or 'Are you mad?' or 'Stop!', as they do in old-fashioned novels and in comic strips, nor to come out with any kind of exclamation which would prove utterly futile in the face of something that is not just imminent but has actually begun, and is already happening and is an arrow flying. De la Garza turned his head for a fraction of a second – it would roll like a globe -just as he had done shortly before, when he had been on the point of asking me for a banknote so that he could roll it into a tube and stick it up his nose, that is, he didn't really turn his gaze on me, didn't focus, and would only have seen the blurred gleam of what hung or hovered over him, but he must have caught a glimpse or a glance of the steel, recognised the blade and the edge, but without recognising that recognition, not believing and at the same time believing, because you are always instantly aware of any real danger of death, even if, in the end, it turns out to be something that merely frightens you half to death. As when, in a dream, a life-threatening situation goes on for far too long, or there is a prolonged sequence of being chased and caught, then chased and caught again, and the sleeping consciousness succumbs to panic and to fatalism and, at the same time, knows that something is not quite right and that your fate is not necessarily sealed, because the dream is still going on without stop or respite or resolution, and the blow that began its descent some time ago has not yet fallen: it delays and lingers and dallies and loiters, the blow, the sword-strike, the dream, it pauses and waits and everything sits heavy on the soul, it freezes and plays for time while the conscious mind struggles to wake up and save us, to dissipate the terrible vision or to shatter it, and to drive away or staunch the pent-up tears that long to burst forth, but cannot.

I saw the look on his face, the look of someone who thinks or knows he is dead; but since he was still alive, the image was one of infinite fear and struggle, mental struggle, perhaps of desire; of childish, undisguised terror, his mouth must have dried instantly, as instantly as his face turned deathly pale, just as if someone had given his face a quick lick of grey or off-white or queasy-coloured paint, or had thrown flour over him or perhaps talcum powder, it was rather like when swift clouds cast a shadow over the fields and a shudder runs through the flocks below, or like the hand that spreads the plague or closes the eyes of the deceased. His top lip lifted, almost folded back on itself in a rictus, revealing his dry gums on which the inner part of his lip got stuck for lack of saliva, he would never be able to lower that lip, it would be fixed like that until the end of time on a tormented face separated from its body, he did lower his head as soon as he caught sight of the blurred gleam of metal overhead, above him and above me, up there, a double-edged sword, two hands, a grip, he pressed his head against the lid of the toilet seat as if hoping it would give way and disappear, and he instinctively drew in his neck, hunched up his shoulders as if in a spasm of pain, the deliberate or unwitting gesture made by all the victims of the guillotine over two hundred years or of the axe over hundreds of centuries, even those satisfied with their guilt and those resigned to their innocence, even chickens and turkeys must have made that gesture.

The sword fell with great speed and force, that one blow would be enough to make a clean cut and even splinter or split the lid, but Tupra stopped the blade dead, about one centimetre or two from the back of the neck, the flesh, the cartilage and the blood, he was in control of what he was doing, he knew how to gauge it, he meant to stop it. 'He hasn't done it, he hasn't decapitated him,' I thought with some relief and not in so many words, but this thought lasted barely a moment, because he immediately raised the sword again, in keeping with the terrible nature of weapons that are not loosed or thrown and can therefore be used repeatedly, and can strike over and over, can threaten first and then cut afterwards or pierce right through, a mistake or a sudden change of mind are not the same as the breathing space, the momentary reprieve or ephemeral truce one would get with a thrown spear that misses the target or an arrow that goes astray or gets lost en route to the sky or simply falls to earth, because it takes a few seconds for the archer to remove another from the quiver and place it in the bow and steady himself again to aim better and carefully pull the bow taut without straining a muscle, and that minimal pause allows you time to take cover or run zigzagging away, in the hope that the nervous archer who has flushed you out has only javelins left to throw, three, two, one, none. Every movement Tupra made continued to be or was resolute, not improvised, he must have planned and calculated each one before he even entered the toilet, when, on the dance floor, he ordered me to bring the attache here and for us both to await his return with the promised cocaine, he had kept his word, he had brought it, always assuming it wasn't just talc, the powder that now lay scattered, swept aside by De la Garza's fleeing head, wishful thinking, for he had nowhere to flee to, nowhere to hide. But while Reresby might know what he was going to do, I did not, still less De la Garza, and so I didn't know how to interpret the half-smile – or not even that, only a quarter-smile, at most, or perhaps it was just his usual mocking expression – which I thought I saw on his fleshy lips, lips that were rather African or perhaps Hindu or Slav, when he stopped the sword and raised it again and thus once more appeared to be about to kill him, this seemed to me even more likely than the first time, because when one opportunity has been used up, that leaves one less chance that you will be saved, and the odds have narrowed. That is how it is, never the other way around.

'Tupra, don't!' Now I did have time to add a syllable, it would have been four in my own language, 'No lo hagas!', although I could have just said, '¡Tupra, no!', I thought him both capable and incapable of doing it, both things, which meant, as I thought much later on in bed, that on this occasion he wasn't going to do it, but that he was certainly cold-blooded enough – or was it that he was cruel enough, or was it merely a question of mettle or nerve or character, or indifference, or was it something closely bound up with 'his line of work' – and that he might have done it before, in his youth and in the distant past, or in adulthood and only a short time before, perhaps only months or weeks or days before, and I knew nothing about it, could not even imagine such a thing; possibly in other countries and in the service of ‘his line of work', even though everything he did was, more than anything, to his own advantage; in remote places where a blow with a sword is sometimes necessary to put out or stir up major conflagrations and to cover up or create large holes, to sort out messy pre-bellum situations and to calm down or urge on insurrectionists, invariably by deceiving them. And what was a blow with a sword compared to spreading outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague, as Wheeler had done years ago, or so he said, or compared to a single act of treachery that takes hold and is passed on, that becomes an unstoppable, all-consuming fire, or an epidemic that eliminates all those in its path or merely close by and even on the very fringes, all those who cannot leave or seek refuge, so often there is nowhere to run and no shelter to be found, and not even a wing under which to hide your head.

De la Garza had resorted to both his wings, his two arms folded over his neck, as useless as an umbrella in a storm at sea, and he had closed his eyes tight shut, they were trembling or pulsating – perhaps his pupils were racing about madly beneath the lids – he must have understood the situation even without looking, the sword had fallen very fast, but stopped before it touched his neck and now had resumed its previous position, perhaps to correct its path by a millimetre and to check the trajectory, to make sure the blade kept to the perpendicular or else to hone its aim, the threat was not only still there, it was even greater (although if the first threat had been fulfilled there would have been no more, no more of anything). De la Garza preferred not to look again in any direction, not even with his gaze unfocused, or out of the corner of his eye, he did not want to see another blurred gleam or anything else, his final image was of a toilet with the seat lid down, and they are all alike, with his wallet on top and the Visa card he had used as a blade, he knew he was a dead man and considered himself still deader, he had been given a few seconds of awareness or life to feel the fear even more intensely and to understand that what was happening really was happening to him, that – unexpectedly, ridiculously, without, as far as he knew, having done anything to provoke such an extreme response – this is what he had come to, to this stopping-place, to this end. I thought that given a few moments more he could have dropped asleep, with his head pressed against the plastic, however flat and uninviting it may have been as a pillow, sometimes it is the only way to escape from pain and to rest from despair, a form of narcolepsy, that's what they call it, but who has not experienced that sudden, unseasonable, inappropriate sleep, who has not fallen asleep or wanted to fall asleep in the midst of fear or in the middle of weeping, it's the same when you sit down in the dentist's chair or as you're being wheeled to the operating room, you try to anticipate the careful work of the anaesthetist – irresistible sleep as the ultimate denial and flight – in the hope that dreaming what happens will transform it into fiction.

Tupra wielded the sword with such vigour that it sounded like a whiplash in the air, and this second time, he again displayed remarkable control, he stopped short so that the blade did not touch anything, animate or inanimate, fabric or skin or flesh or object, everything remained intact, the head, the lid of the toilet seat, the porcelain, the neck, he did not cut or split anything open, he did not dismember or sever, he did not slice. Then he held the blade for a moment very close to De la Garza's hunched neck and shoulders, as if he wanted him to feel its presence – the breath of steel – and even familiarise himself with it before the final blow, just as, after a while, we notice behind us agitated breathing or intense eyes that wish us ill or well, it doesn't matter which if they are as voracious as saws or axes or as penetrating as knives. As if he wanted him to realise that he was alive and was about to die in the next instant, in any one of those instants – one, two, three and four; but not yet; then five – and the attache must have thought, if he was still thinking and not deep asleep and dreaming: 'Don't let him do it, please, he can hesitate and keep hesitating all he wants as long as he decides, at last, not to do it, make him raise that absurd weapon one more time and not lower it again, I mean, who does he think he is, a Saracen, a Viking, a Mau Mau, a buccaneer, let him take the sword away, let him put it back in its sheath and put it away, what is the point of this, and make Deza do something, for God's sake make him do something, make him take the sword off him, throw him to the floor or persuade him, he can't just let this happen, it won't happen, it won't happen to me, not to me, I'm still thinking so it can't have happened yet, time has ceased moving, but I'm still thinking, which means that my time has not entirely stopped.’

Something very similar must have gone through my head, perhaps equally supplicant and numbed – numbed by sheer incredulity perhaps, or simply dulled, even though I was only a witness or an involuntary accomplice – but to what: as yet nothing – and my neck was not on the block. Only a fool would consider trying to grab a sword from the person wielding it, he might well turn it on me, that double-edged blade, the Landsknecht or 'cat-gutter', and then my head would be the one at risk and might yet end up rolling around on the floor of that toilet, although there wasn't the slightest sign in Tupra of derangement or insanity, he was as he always was, concentrating on the job in hand, serene, alert, methodical, slightly mocking, even rather pleasant given that he was possibly about to kill someone, which is the worst and most unspeakably unpleasant thing anyone can do. It was unlikely that he would attack me, I was with him, I worked with him, we had gone there together and would leave together, he was a decent man, there was my overcoat, he had gone to fetch it for me and had brought it to me, why didn't he just abandon these shock tactics and let us get out of this vile place, I didn't want to see blood or to see De la Garza beheaded, headless like a chicken, what would we do with the body and what would the embassy say, they would launch an investigation in Spain, after all, despite his ludicrous appearance, he was still a diplomat, and New Scotland Yard would start their own, we had been seen with him on the dance floor, especially me, as had Mrs Manoia. I knew with absolute certainty then: Tupra would not kill him, because he wouldn't want to get her involved in a mess like that. Unless there was no corpse, because we would take it away with us. But how?

'Are you mad or what? Don't do it!' Now when I spoke, I had time to say more, although still not very much, the kind of superfluous, ineffectual, pathetic phrases that rush to our tongue when confronted by unexpected brutality, a mere verbal counterpoint to something that has dispensed with words entirely and is nothing but violent action, a stabbing, a beating, a homicide, a murder or a suicide, they are superstitious phrases, like interjections, I came out with them despite seeing no signs at all of any madness in Tupra, he knew perfectly well what he was doing and not doing, I saw no rage in him, or even anger, at most annoyance, impatience, irritation, and, doubtless, delayed censure: I would bear my fair share of that, I was sure, since, that night, I had been the link with De la Garza; Wheeler had dumped him on me, but that had been on another day entirely and only today counts. It was more like teaching someone a lesson or calling in a debt, a punishment that he was dishing out or was going to dish out in cool blood with that unlikely sword, I still didn't know where it had come from or why he should resort to such an unusual and impractical weapon – it took up a lot of space, it was a nuisance really -disconcerting nowadays. I found out the answer to the first thing at once; the second only much later, when we had left the club.

He raised the Landsknecht sword, removed it from the neck it had so nearly touched, and this was both a good moment and a bad moment, it could be the prelude to a final, fatal descent, it could be a new gathering of breath before the threatened strike and decapitation, or else signify the renunciation, withdrawal and cancellation of fear, the decision not to use the sword and to allow the head to remain united with its trunk. He rested the flat of the sword on his right shoulder, as if it were the rifle of a sentinel or of a soldier on parade. It was a thoughtful, meditative gesture. He looked directly down at the kneeling De la Garza, who was not moving apart from a few disagreeable, involuntary, spasmodic tremors, he must be holding his breath while his heart raced, he would not want to do anything to tip the balance, not speak or look or exist, like insects which, when faced with danger, remain utterly still, thinking that they can disappear from view and even from smell by changing colour abruptly and blending in with the stone or leaf on which their enemies found them perched. Then Tupra lowered his left hand, took hold of De la Garza's hairnet and pulled it hard, the attache really should never have worn it. De la Garza felt the tug and squeezed his eyes still more tightly shut as if he were trying to burst them and hunched his neck still more, but, having no protective shell into which to withdraw, he could not conceal it.

'Don't do what, Jack?' Reresby said this without looking at me, he was still studying the figure at his feet, at his mercy, kneeling before the toilet. 'Who told you what I'm going to do or not going to do? I certainly didn't tell you, Jack. Tell me, what exactly is it that you don't want me to do?' He raised his eyes. He looked at me straight on, as he did at everything, focusing clearly and at the appropriate height, which is that of a man. And then he brought the sword down.

20

He sliced off the hairnet with one blow; a kitchen knife, scissors, a Swiss army knife would have been sufficient, a fir shorter blade than that used by a bullfighter to cut off his pigtail when he retires from the ring, although that would have been slower and made less of an impression on the person being threatened as well as on the witness, nor would it have sounded the same, it wasn't like before, like a whiplash or a riding crop swishing through the air, but like a light slap or a soft, clear handclap or even the sound of a gob of spit hitting a tiled floor, it was, at any rate, audible enough for De la Garza automatically to raise his hands to his ears in another gesture of imaginary protection, it obviously didn't occur to him that if he could make that gesture, he must still be alive, it doubtless took him a while longer to tell himself that he had, in fact, survived the third lunge or pass or swipe of the terrible blade, that it had not severed or opened up any part of his body, or perhaps he could not believe it – and if that were the case, he was quite right -and was still waiting for the next blow, and the next, and another, from the weapon that remains in the hand and is not thrown away; of course, I, too, waited for a few seconds, although fewer than he, because I could see what he could not: during the minimal amount of time it took Tupra to walk a few steps, free up his hands and then retrace those steps, De la Garza remained still as a stone, like a strange imploring statue, anguished or, rather, vanquished, terrified, resigned to the sacrifice, with his eyes closed and his ears covered, and in that position he reminded me of Peter Wheeler – although only in that respect – when he had covered his ears in just the same way against the noise of the helicopter which he thought was a Sikorsky H-5 and against the winds that the helicopter kicked up, on that Sunday morning in his garden by the river, the day when he told me more about Tupra and the nameless group to which he too had belonged and to which I belonged now, and it was because of that tacit belonging that I was there, in that spotless, gleaming toilet, sharing in a man's terror.

The man who was Reresby that night moved away, holding his sword in one hand and the hairnet in the other, earned like a miserable little trophy, much less impressive than a scalp, a mere sweaty rag; he left the cubicle and winked at me – but it was not a reassuring wink, I took it to mean: 'That was just for starters' – and he went over to the overcoat he had left hanging up, and which now hung less stiffly, and then I realised that in the lining, at the back, there must be a very long inside pocket and inside it a sheath, because that is where he stowed his Landsknecht sword, and as it slid in, it made a metallic noise, and if there had been no sheath, the point would have torn the bottom of that long, narrow pocket, at least seventy centimetres in length if it was to hold the blade of the Katzbalger and with, perhaps, the grip protruding so as to make it easier to take it out, I couldn't quite see the actual pocket, but there was no other possible explanation. I gave a deep sigh – or perhaps more than a sigh – when I saw that deadly piece of metal disappear, at least for the time being. The fact that he had put it back in its sheath did not necessarily mean that he would not have recourse to it; again – it was still to hand – and it might simply be a precaution typical of Tupra, not leaving the weapon within reach of the enemy, which was entirely the wrong word, for the poor nonentity of an attache was certainly not putting up a fight, he was not even resisting; but if Reresby had placed the sword on the cistern or deposited it on the floor, there was no guarantee that, in a moment of desperation and panic, De la Garza would not have flung himself upon it and grabbed it, and then what, the tables would have been turned, the two-edged blade was fairly light and easy to handle, and danger lurks in the weakest and most insignificant of beings, in the most cowardly and most defeated, and you must never underestimate anyone or give him the chance to recover or pull himself together, to screw up his courage or muster a little suicidal valour, that was one of Tupra's teachings and that is why he immediately understood -he appreciated it, even made a mental note of it – a Spanish expression that so perfectly defines us and which I mentioned to him one day and translated for him: 'Quedarse uno tuerto par dejar al otro ciego' – "To put out your own eye while trying to make another man blind' – he dreaded such a response like the plague. I was grateful that it did not occur to him to ask me to hold it, the 'cat-gutter', I would not have relished the idea, that is, of holding it, although I would, of course, have picked it up and brandished it while I had the chance. Or perhaps he didn't trust me with it either, he couldn't be sure that events wouldn't take a different turn, and that I might not end up using it against the wrong person, I never knew if I had his full trust or not, in fact, one never knows that about anyone. Nor should anyone ever entirely win our trust either.

And so he walked back to the cubicle, wearing a pair of gloves that he had taken from one of the ordinary pockets in his overcoat – good black leather gloves, perfectly normal – and he passed me again carrying the hairnet or spoils in one hand and with his right hand free; he maintained his resolute, pragmatic, dispassionate air, as if everything he was doing at each moment were programmed and, what's more, belonged to a programme that was tried and tested. He winked at me again, and again it was not in the least reassuring, these winks did not imply a smile, they were merely announcements or warnings that bordered on being instructions or orders, this time I understood it as 'Right, let's get down to business, it won't take long and then we'll be done', and that is why I found myself saying: 'Tupra, that's enough, leave him be, what are you going to do now, he's already half dead with fright.' But there was much less alarm in my voice than when I had only shouted out his name and little else, because I was feeling much less alarmed, now that the sword was out of the way; indeed, such was my relief, and so quickly had my feelings of anxiety and horror and heaviness abated, that almost anything that happened now seemed to me light, welcome, unimportant. I don't know, a few slaps, a few punches, perhaps the odd kick (even in the mouth): in comparison with my certainties of only a moment ago they seemed almost like manna from heaven, and to be honest, I didn't feel particularly disposed to stopping them; or only with my voice, I suppose. Yes, that was it: I felt grateful that he was going to hit him, as I imagined he would, with his gloved hands. Just hit him, that was all. Not cut him in two or into pieces or dismember him, what luck, what joy.

'It'll only take a minute. And remember who I am, that's three times now.’

I didn't grasp the meaning of those last words and didn't have time to think about it either or to reflect on my worrying feeling of gratitude and that anomalous sensation of a weight having been lifted from me, a near-criminal sensation of lightness, because Tupra went straight to work: he picked up the packet from the toilet-seat lid, resealed the top and put it back in his waistcoat pocket – of his varied collection I will never forget that particular waistcoat, intense watermelon green – then with the same two fingers he picked up the Visa card, placed it in De la Garza's wallet from which it had come and put that in his other jacket pocket along with the rolled-up banknote. With one hand he swept away what remained of the line of cocaine, or talc, and the dust scattered and fell onto the ', floor, Rafita had not even got a snort, had never had the benefit of it, after all his preparations. Then Tupra looped the hairnet around De la Garza's neck and tugged, and immediately my sense of relief went on hold – 'He's going to strangle him, he's • going to choke him,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' - before I realised that this was not his intention – he didn't wrap it around De la Garza's neck, he didn't pull it tight or twist it- he was merely forcing him to lift his head, the attache was still pressed so close to the lid that he was almost embracing the toilet bowl, and he would have embraced it, I think, if he had not chosen to keep his hands over his ears, he preferred not to see or hear anything in the vain hope that he would then not know much about what was being done to him, even though his sense of touch would be sure to inform him, and the pain and the hurt would tell him.

Once Tupra had lifted De la Garza's head high enough, he pushed up both lid and seat and plunged the latter's head into the bowl with such violence that De la Garza's feet lifted off the ground, I saw his loose shoelaces waving in the air, neither he nor I had got around to tying them. I did not, at first, fear that the water in the bowl would drown him, because it was too narrow at the bottom for his broad, full-moon face, which nevertheless got battered against the porcelain – and slightly stuck – every time Tupra pushed it back in again after puffing it up for a while, and he also flushed the toilet three or four times one after the other, the rush of blue water was so strong and so prolonged that I was once more briefly filled by terrible alarm -'He's going to drown him, he'll fill his lungs,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' – and it occurred to me that, anyway, all it takes is two inches of water, a puddle in which to submerge mouth and nose and thus stop someone ever breathing again; and that the momentary rise in the water level, with each flush, would bring Rafita a sure sensation of drowning, or, at the very least, of choking; and in the toilet for the disabled too: with luck there would be no remnants of fetid smells, and with even more luck, it would never have been used.

'I don't want to see Tupra as Sir Death,' I thought, 'with the cold arms of a disciplined sergeant, always brisk and busy; but that is how I'm beginning to see him, given his many abilities and the variety of his threats, decapitation, strangulation, drowning, to name but three, how many more are there, which one is he going to choose, if he does choose, which one will he select to finish his expert work or task, which one will become accomplished fact and not just a feint or an attempt.' He did not hold De la Garza under the water for very long, therefore that would not, it seemed, be the definitive form, although he might at any moment change his mind and all it would take would be for him to allow the seconds to pass, a few more, just a few, the seconds that normally pass so quickly that we don't even notice them, time's crumbs, he would only have to let those seconds pass while my compatriot's face was in the water – nose and mouth, that was all it would take – and life and death often depend on those scorned, wasted seconds or on a few centimetres that are often given away, or conceded to our rival for nothing – the centimetres that the sword declined to travel. 'yqu had two henchmen plunge me head first into a butt of your disgusting wine and drown me, poor me, poor Clarence, held by the legs, which remained outside the butt and flailed ridiculously about until my lungs' final intoxication, betrayed and humiliated and killed by the black, opaque cunning of your hideous, indefatigable tongue.' But this was not stagnant wine in a butt, it was blue water falling in torrents, and he was not George, Duke of Clarence, but the idiotic De la Garza, and we were not two henchmen, still less those of a murderous king. Or perhaps I was Tupra's or Reresby's henchman, I received small-scale orders from the former every day, and those issued by the latter that night were on a larger scale and of an unforeseen nature, utterly different from the kind of work I was paid to do, they had either released me from my normal commitments or had violated my contract, not that anything had ever been set down in writing or clearly stipulated. Or perhaps we were both henchmen, even though I didn't know it, of the State, of the Crown, of MI6, of the army, of the Foreign Office, of the Home Office, of the navy, I could be at the service of a foreign country and not even be aware of it in my foreign dream, and in a way, perhaps, that I would never have agreed to had it been my own country. Or we might be the henchmen of Arturo Manoia (according to Perez Nuix, our employers, at the time, varied) and there we were beating Rafita to a pulp on his orders, wreaking revenge on his behalf, I had no idea how Manoia had reacted to his wife's return to the table with, on her cheek, a sfregio or scar, she had gone off to have fun and to dance and come back with a mark on her face, Manoia would not have liked that at all. And make-up could only do so much.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of squeaky, tinny music, like the tone of a mobile phone, it took me a while to recognise it – it wasn't easy – the hackneyed notes of a famous and terribly Spanish paso doble, it was probably that tired old tune 'Suspires de Espana' which is so often used in my country by novelists and film-makers in order to create a certain tacky, ersatz emotion (people with left-winger stamped on their foreheads love it as much as cryptofascists do), a ghastly thing, he must have chosen it for his mobile phone out of pure racial pedantry, De la Garza I mean, poor De la Garza, and to think only a while ago I had thought 'I'd like to smash his face in', I had thought it on the dance floor and afterwards too, with that business of the shoelaces, and perhaps before as well; but it was just a manner of speaking, a figurative use of words, in fact, it's very rare that anyone actually means, literally, what he or she is saving or even thinking (if the thought has been sufficiently clearly formulated), almost all our phrases are in fact metaphorical, language is only an approximation, an attempt, a detour, even the language used by the most ignorant and illiterate, or perhaps they are the most metaphorical of all, maybe only the technician and the scientist are safe from it, and even then not always (geologists, for example, are very colourful in their use of language). Now I was watching as he was being beaten – not slapped, Tupra had not once attacked him directly with his hands, not even now that he had his gloves on, they were getting wet, they would have to be thrown away -and I was very frightened and shaken, not only because I didn't know just how much harm Tupra was going to inflict on him – if he would be transformed before my eyes into Sir Death or if he would remain plain Sir Blow, which was quite enough, or Sir Wound or Sir Thrashing (he was, in any case, already Sir Punishment), it was unpleasant to discover any of these characters in someone who was a close acquaintance, and even more so to have to observe his actions – but also because the long habit of seeing violence on screen, and of hearing every punch and kick as if it were a thunderbolt without the lightning or a dynamite blast or a collapsing building, has led us to believe in a rather venial form of violence, when there is nothing venial about it at all, and seeing it for real, perceiving its emanations from close to, feeling it physically throbbing beside you, smelling the immediate sweat of the person getting angry and hitting out and of the person who shrinks back and is afraid, hearing the creak of a bone as it dislocates and the crunch of a broken cheekbone and the tearing of flesh, seeing fragments and slivers and getting spattered with blood, isn't just horrifying, it simply makes any normal person feel ill, physically sick, apart, that is, from sadists and those who are used to it, those who live with it every day or every so often, and, of course, those who make a profession of it. I had to assume that Tupra belonged to this latter category, having seen how determined and expert he was, his movements almost routine.

My father had spoken to me about it once, during one of our conversations about the past or rather about his past and not mine, about the Civil War and the way people were trampled upon during the initial Franco era, which lasted so very long and, indeed, seemed eternal because we weren't really sure when it had finished and because, now and then, it came back.

'Your generation and the generations after you,' he had said to me, using, as he often did, the second-person plural, always, aware that he had four children, and when he spoke to one of us, it was, more often than not, as if he were addressing us all, or as if he were sure that his current interlocutor would later pass on his words to the others, 'have been fortunate enough to; experience very little real violence, it's been absent from your day-to-day existence, and if you have encountered any, it's been the exception and never anything very grave, someone I getting beaten up at a demonstration or during a brawl in a bar, the kind of thing that always comes to a natural halt and is never given free rein and doesn't tend to spread; a mugging perhaps, or a robbery. Fortunately, and I very much hope this continues, you haven't been in situations where violence was unavoidable, I mean, where it was certain, where you knew it was bound to surface at some point during the day or the night, and if there happened to be one day when there was no violence or you didn't yourself come face to face with it and only heard about it – no one was free from that, from stories and rumours – you could be sure that this was a gift that would not be repeated the following day, because the law of probabilities did not allow for such excellent good fortune. The threat was always there, as was the state of alert. For example, one afternoon, my room was shelled, a direct hit, a huge hole in the wall and the interior completely destroyed. I wasn't in, although I had been shortly before and was about to return. But it could have fallen on me somewhere else, walking down the street or travelling in a tram, in a cafe, at the office, while I was waiting for your mother outside her house, at the radio station or in the cinema. During the first months of the War, you saw arrests everywhere, people being pushed around or hit with rifle butts, or else there were raids on houses, they would take away whole families along with anyone who happened to be visiting, on any corner you could come across a chase or a shooting, and, at night, on the outskirts, you'd hear the so-called paseos, the random executions, or a few isolated shots from the pacos (the sharpshooters I mean) on the rooftops in the evening or very early in the morning, especially during the first few days, and any shots you heard at dawn would be shots fired point-blank into the head or the back of the neck of a victim who, sometimes, but not always, would be kneeling in the gutter, if you were very unlucky, you might actually witness this and see someone kneel down and have their brains blown out, and I don't mean that metaphorically, you'd actually see their brain matter spill out. It was best just to keep walking and not to look, to get away from there as quickly as possible, there was nothing you could do, and if you did only see it out of the corner of your eye, you could count yourself lucky. Other executioners started work at nightfall, they couldn't be bothered to go very far if they didn't have a car available or were short of fuel, and so they would slip down an alleyway where there wasn't much traffic and finish people off there, they were impatient and couldn't wait until the city had half fallen asleep, because it never did entirely fall asleep, not during those three long years of siege, hunger and cold, nor afterwards either, because from 1939 onwards, Franco's police would burst into people's houses in the middle of the night, just as their first cousins, the Gestapo, were doing in the rest of Europe. Others were more organised and carried out their shootings in cemeteries when they were closed or when they themselves had closed them for that purpose; and so for a long time afterwards, when peace had supposedly been declared, there were some areas where you would go on, hearing shots late into the night. There wasn't a great deal of peace or only for those on the other side, they could sleep peacefully enough. I'll never be able to understand how they could do that, with so much killing going on. There were a few decent people among them, but most were just really proud and smug.’

I remember that my father paused at that point or, rather, only afterwards did I realise it was a pause. He had fallen silent, I wondered if he had forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about or tell me, although I doubted that he had, he, too, always used to pick up the thread, or it was enough for me to give the thread a short tug for him to return to the subject. He sat staring straight ahead of him at nothing, his clear, blue eyes gazed back at that time, a time he could doubtless see with absolute clarity, as if he were able to observe it through a pair of supernatural binoculars, it was very like the gaze I had noticed on occasions in Peter Wheeler, or, to be precise, on the occasion when I went up the first flight of his stairs to point out to him and to Mrs Berry where I had found the nocturnal bloodstain that I'd taken so much trouble to expunge and for which neither he nor she had any explanation. It is a gaze one often sees in the old even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off, back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It isn't an absent or a crazed look, but intense and concentrated, focused on something a very long way off. I had noticed it, too, in the bi-coloured eyes of the brother who kept his surname, Toby Rylands. I mean that each of his eyes was of a different colour, his right eye the colour of olive oil and his left that of pale ashes. One keen and almost cruel, the eye of an eagle or a cat, the other the eye of a dog or a horse, meditative and honest. But when they adopted that gaze, his eyes became the same, as if they were, somehow, above mere colour.

'It fell to me to see what went on here in Madrid,' my father continued, 'and I heard more than I saw, much more. I don't know which is worse, hearing an account or actually witnessing what happened. Perhaps, at the time, the latter is less bearable and more horrifying, but it's also easier to erase it or blur it and then deceive yourself about it, convince yourself that you didn't see what you saw, to think that you anticipated with your eyes what you feared might happen and which, in the end, did not. A story, on the other hand, is closed and fixed, and if it has been written down, you can go back and check; and if it's spoken, it can be told to you again, but even if it isn't, words are always less equivocal than actions, at least as regards the words you hear compared with the actions you see. Sometimes actions are only glimpsed, like a flash that lasts no time at all, that dazzles the eyes, and which, afterwards, can be manipulated or cleaned up in your memory, which, however, does not allow such distortion with things heard or told. Of course, it's a bit of an exaggeration to describe as an account what, for example, I happened to overhear one morning on a tram, a few words spoken quite casually, in the weeks after war broke out, weeks of murderous intensity and utter chaos, many people simply gave in to it and were just seething with rage, and if they had any weapons, they did whatever they liked with them and took advantage of the political situation to settle personal scores and wreak the most terrible revenge. Well, you know what it was like, the same in both sectors: in ours, later on, they did at least try to put a stop to all that, but not hard enough; in the other sector, they made almost no attempt at all for the three years the War lasted, nor afterwards either, when the enemy had been defeated. But I was so shocked by the violence described to me – well, not to me, but to anyone within earshot, that's the awful thing- that I can remember precisely where the tram was at that particular moment, the moment when those words reached my ears. We were coming down Alcala and turning into Calle de Velazquez, and a woman sitting in the seat in front of me pointed at a house, at an apartment on one of the top floors, and she said to the woman she was travelling with: "See that house. Some rich people used to live there. We took them out one day and finished off the lot of them. And the little baby they had, I took it out of its cot, grabbed it by its legs, swung it around a few times and smashed its head against the wall. Killed it straight off. We didn't leave a single one of them alive, wiped out the whole damn crew." She was a rather brutish-looking woman, but no more so than many others I'd seen hundreds of times in the market, at church, or in someone's living room, poor and wealthy, shabby and smart, dirty and clean, you get brutes like that everywhere and in every class, I've seen equally brutish women taking communion at midday mass in San Fermin de los Navarros, wearing fur coats and expensive jewellery. The woman talked about the atrocity she'd committed in the same tone as she might have said: "See that house. I worked there for a while, but after a few months I couldn't stand it any longer, so I left, just like that. I walked out on them. That showed them." Perfectly naturally. Without giving it any importance. With the complete sense of impunity that people felt in those days; she didn't care a bit who heard her. She was even rather proud of it, and certainly boastful. And she had nothing but scorn for her victims, of course. And obviously it would have been naive to have expected any remorse from her, even a hint.

I went cold with disgust and got off as soon as I could, one or two stops earlier than I needed to, so as not to have to look at her any more or risk hearing her recount more such exploits. I didn't say anything, you simply couldn't in those days if you wanted to survive, you could be arrested for the slightest thing and bumped off, even if you were a Republican; or like your uncle, Alfonso, who was nothing, just a boy, and the girl who was with him when they picked him up, who was even less than nothing. I glanced at the woman's face as I got off, an ordinary woman, with coarse but not ugly features, quite young, although not young enough to put it all down to the frequent callousness of youth, she might have had children of her own or had them later on. If she survived the War and suffered no reprisals (and she certainly wouldn't have been punished for the thing I heard her describe; although she might have been had she gone on to play a significant part in activities that could be more easily traced and reconstructed at the end of the War or if someone high up took against her and denounced her just like that, or on some intuitive whim; because all those early atrocities were just left in limbo), she probably led a normal existence and never gave much thought to what she had done. She'll be like a lot of women, possibly even cheerful and friendly and nice, with grandchildren she's devoted to, she might even have been a fervent Francoist throughout the dictatorship, and yet none of that will have caused her a flicker of doubt. Many people who were responsible for barbarous acts and crimes against humanity have lived like that quite happily for years; here, and in Germany, in Italy, in France, all of a sudden no one had been a Nazi or a Fascist or a collaborator, everyone had convinced themselves that they hadn't been and would even explain themselves by saying: "No, it wasn't like that for me," that's usually the key phrase. Or else: "Times were different then, you would have to have been there to understand." It is rarely difficult to save yourself from your own conscience if that is what you really want or need to do, still less if that conscience is a shared one, if it's part of a large, collective or even mass conscience, which makes it easier to say: "I wasn't the only one, I wasn't a monster, I was just like everyone else, I wasn't unusual; it was a matter of survival and almost everyone did the same thing, or would have if they'd been born." And people who are religious have it even easier, especially Catholics who have priests to wash clean their sublime regions, their innermost selves, and believe me, the priests here were readier than ever to absolve, to rationalise and to justify whatever vile or cruel deeds their protectors or comrades had committed, bear in mind that they were equally belligerent and egged them on. All that may help, of course, but it isn't even really necessary. People have an incredible capacity willingly to forget the pain they inflicted, to erase their bloody past not just in the eyes of others – their capacity then is infinite, unlimited – but in their own eyes too. To persuade themselves that things were different from the way they actually were, that they did not do what they clearly did do, or that what took place did not take place, and all with their indispensable co-operation. Most of us are past masters at the art of dressing up our own biographies, * or of toning them down, and it's astonishing how easy it is to exile thoughts and bury memories, and to see our sordid or criminal past as a mere dream from whose intense reality we escape as the day progresses, that is, as our life progresses. And yet, on the other hand, after all these years, every time I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I can't help glancing up at the fourth floor of the building which that woman on the tram, pointed out one morning in 1936, and thinking about that; small, dead child, even though for me the child has no face and no name and even though all I know about him or her are a couple of sinister sentences that chance brought to my ear.’

21

My father fell silent again, and this time I had something to say during the pause. The blue of his eyes seemed to have intensified. I said, in fact, what I had been thinking just before: 'From now on, I might also look at those buildings when I pass that corner, even though I don't know precisely which building it is. Now that I've heard you tell that story, I mean.' He made a gesture with his hand in the air, or, rather, with three fingers, index, middle finger and thumb – the latter accompanying the other two with a slight delay and purely imitatively – as if I had touched on some very ancient matter, long since debated and resolved. Almost as if he were pushing it away or rejecting it as beyond further comment.

'Yes, I know. Perhaps one should never tell anyone anything,' he said. 'I mean, nothing bad. When you children started to arrive, your mother and I asked ourselves the question: how were we going to tell you about what had happened right here, in the country where you lived, only fifteen or twenty years before you came into the world, or even more than that in the case of your sister? It seemed to us that it wasn't something we could tell our children, still less explain, it wasn't explicable even to ourselves who had witnessed it from start to finish. There hadn't been enough time for us to begin to forget, and besides, it was still all too fresh in our minds, the regime made sure of that. There was never any process of psychological healing, no attempt at assuagement, the regime showed a consistent and thoroughly totalitarian lack of generosity, which was evident in every order and in every sphere of life, even the most intangible. I left the decision to her, to your mother, who spent more time with you than I did; you were always more her children than mine, which is why it seems so dreadfully sad that she ended up knowing you far less than I have, for fewer years and only when you were young and, how can I put it, less finished than you are now, although you're all still fairly unfinished, especially you, but don't take that the wrong way. And then there are your children, your siblings' children and yours, whom she never even knew. Anyway, I always felt her decision was the right one. She believed that you should never feel threatened, personally anxious, fearful for yourselves, afraid that something terrible might happen to you, insecure about your daily lives and your actions. That you should all feel protected and safe. But she didn't think it prudent or right that you should know nothing about how the world works, about the kind of thing that can happen or has happened. She thought that if you found out gradually, without going into gruesome, ugly, unnecessary detail, you would be forewarned and better prepared and have more resources with which to deal with life. It also depended, of course, on the questions you asked. She always hated lies. I mean she really did, she couldn't bring herself to tell you that something that was true wasn't. She could tone down or disguise the truth a little, but not deny it. The tendency today is to enclose children in a bubble of foolish happiness and false security, by not bringing them into contact even with the mildly disquieting, and by keeping them ignorant -of fear or even of its existence, indeed, I understand that nowadays you can buy – and that some people actually give or read these to their children – censored, doctored or saccharine' versions of classics like Grimm or Perrault or Andersen, stripped of all the darkness and cruelly, of anything that's threatening and sinister, and probably with all the upsets and deceptions removed. Rank stupidity in my view. Namby-pamby parenting and irresponsible teaching. I consider that a crime of neglect, really, and a dereliction of duty. Because being exposed to other people's fears provides children with a lot of protection; they can imagine it serenely from the background of their own security and can experience it vicariously, through others, especially through fictional characters, like a short-lived contagion which, while only borrowed, is nevertheless not pure fakery. By imagining something you are starting to resist it, and that applies to things that have already happened as well: you can withstand misfortunes more easily if, afterwards, after experiencing them, you can manage to imagine them. And, of course, the way most people do this is by talking about them. Not that I think everything could or should be told, far from it, but neither is it admissible to over-falsify the world and send idiots and dimwits out into it who have never known the slightest disappointment or anxiety. Throughout my life, before telling something, I have always tried to gauge what could be told. To whom, how and when. You have to stop and consider what stage or moment in their life the person listening to you has reached, and to bear in mind that what you tell that person will stay with them for ever. It will become incorporated into their knowledge, just as the murder I heard about on a tram became incorporated into mine, even though it was just one of many. And, as you see, I haven't managed to dislodge that story from my knowledge, nor another story from the War which, for example, it never occurred to me to tell your mother at the time, even though she was accustomed to horrors and even though I was in quite a state when I returned home after hearing it. But what is the point, I thought, what is the point of upsetting her with yet another story, now that the War has ended, I'll get over it, I'll forget about it in time without having to share or pass the burden on to her. And I did slowly get over it, because one does get over almost everything. But I've never forgotten it, that would be too much to hope for, how could I? This particular gift was given to me by a notorious Falangist writer who later ceased to be a Falangist, as most of them did, and, can you believe it, during Franco's latter years, never mind after his death, the man had the gall to pretend he was a veteran of the Left, and people swallowed it too. They weren't ignorant people either, but journalists and politicians. And so, with Spain 's characteristic ethical superficiality, he was always celebrated, under two different flags.’

He stopped for a moment, but this time he was not remembering with particular intensity or sharpness, he was thinking, or hesitating, or perhaps biting his tongue. He had reined himself in.

'I can't really say whether I believe it or not,' I put in, 'if I don't know who you're talking about and you haven't told me the story. What was the story? Who was this man?' 'You reproached me just now with having told you the story I heard on that tram,' he replied, and I thought he seemed just a touch offended. 'I don't know if I should go on.' And he sounded to me as if he were asking my permission. He sounded strange.

'I certainly didn't intend it as a reproach, that would be absurd. That would be like reproaching historians for writing down what they have found out or what they know at first hand. We spend our lives adding to the catalogue of horrors that have occurred, there are always more being uncovered, always more surfacing. My listening to you telling the story can't possibly have the same effect on me as it did on you hearing it from that woman. She was the one who had done the deed, and she was proud of it too. Plus it had only just taken place. It was still taking place, here and everywhere, that's very different. Don't worry, you can tell me anything, it can't be any worse than all the other things I've read about or that we see on television every day. I don't want you turning into one of those namby-pamby parents, not at this stage in my life. Really! Besides, I would have to denounce you then and accuse you of neglect and, what did you call it, dereliction of duty.’

He gave a short laugh, it amused him that I should dismantle his improvised objections with the very arguments and terminology he had just used. But before replying, he once more addressed me using the plural 'you': including all four: siblings was another way of softening a reprimand intended for only one of us.

'You're a silly lot sometimes,' he said. And then he went back to addressing me as 'you' singular. 'All right. I won't tell you who he was, his name. I can't be sure that if you knew it you would keep quiet about it, as I have always done. From your point of view, you would have no reason to. You wouldn't feel obliged to, not even if I asked you to say nothing, and I would rather not take the risk, Jacobo. It's not out of consideration for him, because ever since I heard him tell the story, I've felt nothing but contempt and resentment for him. No, something stronger than that, more like disgust and loathing. Not, I think, a desire for revenge, mainly because of the way unfulfilled desires eat away at you, besides, there was I a victim of reprisals and there was he on the winning side and wielding considerable influence. But, you know, for fifty years he kept publishing books and receiving prizes and being praised to the skies and appearing in the press and on television, and for about half or more of those fifty years I don't think I read a single line of his, and I would quickly turn the page of any newspaper that carried an interview with him or a review of one of his books, I simply couldn't bear to see his face or his name in print. Later on, though, I felt curious to see just what he was capable of, how far he would go in the biographical fiction he had shamelessly started to weave about himself in public. But above all, purely by chance, through my work, I met his wife and got to know her. She was a really nice, cheerful person, who clearly knew nothing of her husband's more repulsive side, or the more repulsive facts about his behaviour during the War. She was quite a bit younger than him, ten or twelve years, they must have got married in about 1950, when he was thirty-five or more, fairly old for the time. And not only was she an extremely nice, cheerful, capable woman, on one occasion she was very helpful to us, and to your mother in particular. That's all by the bye now, but I've always had a sense of enormous gratitude towards her, and any consideration I've felt has always been for her, not for him.’

'Is she still alive? Are they still alive?' I asked.

'No, he died a few years ago, and she died not long afterwards.’

'So?' What I meant to say was 'So why maintain the consideration and the silence?' and my father understood.

'There are two daughters, two very sweet, pretty girls, I saw them a couple of times. And they were and are her daughters as well, not just the daughters of the important man. Well, he was important while he was alive and could fight his corner, and he used all available means to do so, but even though only a few years have passed, he barely merits a mention now, and his memory will continue to fade, he was a very overrated figure. But I wouldn't want to upset her daughters, whom she adored almost as much as she did her loathsome husband, she was I devoted to them all and especially to him, one of those steadfast I loves that remains undiminished and unquestioned, untouched by time or even infidelities (very minor infidelities, because, ial his superficial, egotistical way, he loved her very much and couldn't have coped without her; he was even lucky in respect too, in dying before her), the kind of love that is above such things. No, I would never bring such shame down upon her daughters, and even if they hadn't existed, I wouldn't br down posthumous shame on someone so affectionate compassionate. It seems to me that your generation, and the younger generations too, don't care much about the good bad name of the dead, but for us it still matters. Besides, give that he was a man in the public eye, one day someone probably reveal all anyway and, who knows, no one will much as bat an eye or see it as shameful, or even as a stain, his apologists will just ignore it as if it were purely anecdot this country is not only superficial, it's also arbitrary partisan, and once someone has been issued with an indulges it's rarely taken away. But I Won't be the one to tell the: nor will it come out because I was foolish enough to tell yc no, it won't come out through me or because of some slip of mine. Most of the other men who were present must be dead by now, there were five of us round the table when I heard him tell the story, and I'm sure it wasn't the only time he had told it so brazenly, quite a few people must know it (although there can't be many of us left alive). But I wouldn't be in the least surprised if that was the last time, if after that little gathering he tried to keep quiet about it and even began the meticulous cover-up job of later years. It's quite likely.’

'What little gathering? What was it he told you?' I asked, although without emphasising the interrogative tone. I realised that I did want to know, despite the fact that, generally speaking, I did not try to worm information out of my father even if I was really curious, I left him and his memories alone unless he summoned them up on his own account and of his own accord – and despite having lied to him a little and having, in passing, lied to myself a little too, albeit only momentarily: it wasn't true that he could tell me anything, with no consequences, I mean, for my state of mind or my sorrow, nor that the unpleasant events related by him were more bearable or less awful to know about than the worst atrocities read about in history books or the contemporary atrocities seen on television. What he told me was not only as real and true as the siege of Vienna in 1529 or the terrible fall of Constantinople to the Turkish infidels in 1453; as the slaughter in Gallipoli of Wheeler's compatriots and the three battles or bloodbaths at Ypres during the First World War; as the devastation of the village of Lidice and the bombing of Hamburg and Coventry and Cologne and London during the Second World War; it had, moreover, happened here, in the same bright, peaceful and, nowadays, prosperous cities and streets, the 'sweet lands', where I had spent the larger part of my life and almost the whole of my childhood; and it had not only happened here – as had the executions of 3 May 1808, during what the English call the Peninsular War, as had the siege of Numancia between 154 and 133 bc, and so many other incidents of unspeakable cruelty – they were things that had happened to him and which his blue eyes (dull now and with the iris dilated) had seen and which they now saw again, or which his defenceless ears had heard and now heard again (with stomach churning, with a weight on his chest as in murky, agitated dreams, all of it lying like lead upon his soul). What made his bad experiences more painful to me than almost any past misfortune or act of cruelty, or even present-day ones that take place somewhere far away, was that they had affected him personally and had cast a shadow over his biography, that of someone so close to me and who was there before me, still alive, still present – who knows for how much longer – with his mind still perfectly clear. No, you don't take in or receive first-hand testimony from a stranger – a journalist, a witness, a newsreader, an historian – in the same way as you do from someone you have known since birth. You see the same eyes that saw and, to their grief, found in a riling cabinet the photo of a young man who had been killed by a bullet in his head or ear; and you hear the same voice that had to tell the dead man's sister, or had to remain silent with horror or sorrow or suppressed rage when those same ears heard involuntarily, in a tram or a cafe, what they would prefer never to have heard It('Keep quiet and don't say a word. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it burns you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself').

'One morning, I went to the publishing house of Gomez-Antiguedad,' that voice told me, 'to see if they had any translation work for me to do, even though I wouldn't be able to sign it with my own name, or if there were any other anonymous, occasional jobs, reports on foreign books and so forth. The son, Pepito, was pretty much in charge of thlcompany at the time, and I knew him slightly from university and from the famous Mediterranean cruise we'd been on as students, and he was one of the few people on the winning side who, as you know, behaved with great decency and generosity he helped quite a number of people who were being singled out for reprisals, those whom he considered to be the most able, and he did that during the early years, when it was almost impossible for us to find any kind of work at all, things were really difficult up until 1945 and not a great deal easier between then and 1953. Your mother and I had only been able to get married thanks to the French classes she gave, a small loan from her godmother, who had money and had managed somehow to hang on to it, and to occasional commissions from the Revista de Occidente; but in order to keep going, I had to be constantly looking for more work, because three-quarters – or more – of the things I went after didn't come to anything. Antiguedad, the son, agreed to see me, and I explained my problem.' ('Whenever we ask for something, we are exposed, defenceless,' I thought, 'at the almost absolute mercy of the person giving or refusing’) 'Despite our political differences, he felt that I was being treated unfairly and gave me a couple of books to translate, I can still remember what they were, one from German, by Schnitzler, and the other by the French writer Hazard. At the time, this felt to me like winning the lottery, being able to get paid work, even if I wasn't getting paid very much. You just grabbed whatever there was, and as I've always told you, there's no such thing as a bad job if there's no better job in view. He was a very friendly man and, in order to celebrate our collaboration, he suggested having a drink at what used to be the Cafe Roma, in Calle de Serrano, close to his office in Calle de Ayala.’

'Oh, I remember the Cafe Roma,' I said, 'it was still there during my first year at university.’

'Possibly,' he replied, not wanting to pause. I felt that it was best not to interrupt him again, he had embarked on a story that was very hard for him to tell, and it was best not to give him time to have second thoughts or doubts, as he had with my mother, when he returned home after hearing the story and decided to keep it to himself. 'As soon as we went in, some friends or acquaintances of his called him over to their table and asked us to join them. I don't know if they knew who I was, I mean, if my name meant anything to them when I was introduced, but I certainly knew who two of them were, although not the other two. One was the writer I've told you about, and who, at the time, was still a shiny new Falangist, and the other I was a monarchist, of the kind with infinite patience and in no particular hurry, that is, a Francoist through and through. Both were already safely ensconced in their respective cushy jobs. The writer was really only beginning to be talked about as such: he had published a volume, or possibly two volumes, of rather old-fashioned verse, much praised for obvious reasons; later on, he abandoned poetry and devoted himself to the novel, which is where he made his name; he also wrote a few dull plays and the odd dull essay as well. These two men appeared not to have seen the others for a very long time, and people then were still in the habit of recounting to each other what had happened to them during the War, what they'd suffered or made other people suffer. And this was the case with them. They were swapping experiences, stories, the occasional exploit, the occasional hardship, the occasional atrocity. Gomez-Antiguedad contributed a little, I not at all. And in the middle of all this, the writer mentioned a name which I knew and admired, that of a former university friend. We hadn't been close friends, he was a year below me, but I'd enjoyed talking to him from time to time, and he was just a very nice man: Emilio Mares, an Andalusian, very friendly and bright, he was rather vain, but in a funny, self-consciously frivolous way, he made out he was an anarchist, but there was nothing solemn about him at all; even when he got on his high horse about something, he did so with a degree of self-mockery, and he always looked immaculate, impeccably dressed, certainly not the kind of anarchist you read about in novels; a really lovely man, always in a good mood. He was in Andalusia when the War broke out; by 18 July a lot of students who weren't from Madrid had gone back home to spend the summer with their families, and he was from a village near Malaga or Granada, I'm not quite sure where, but his father was, I think, the socialist mayor, in Grazalema or Casares off Manilva, somewhere round there. We had heard, when the War was already in full swing, that he'd been killed in Malaga by the Nationalists, and we assumed that he'd been killed there in February 1937 when the Italian blackshirts moved in, more than ten thousand of them. We imagined that he would have been summarily shot. The repression or, rather, revenge was particularly ferocious there, because the city had resisted for seven months and the people of Malaga had committed a lot of barbarous acts themselves, random shootings, indiscriminate looting, the burning of churches, the settling of personal accounts, just as happened at the beginning of the War here. It was said that when the Nationalists took the city, under the Duque de Sevilla, they corrected the imbalance and went still further, and that in the first week alone about four thousand people were shot. It may have been fewer than that, but it doesn't matter, they certainly served up plenty of coffee, because that, as you know, was the euphemism used by Franco and his cohorts for ordering executions, "Dadles cafe" – "Give them some coffee" – they would say, and the prisoners would be put up against the wall and shot. In Malaga, a lot of them were taken to the beach to be shot. The Italians protested at such brutality, they felt splattered by all that spilled blood, so much so that the ambassador, Cantalupo, spoke to Franco about it and went there himself to stem the violence. I read somewhere that he was stunned at the furious cruelty that had been unleashed, and how even wealthy matrons, all of them good Catholics, were busily desecrating Republican graves.' My father stopped and drew one hand across his forehead or, rather, almost squeezed it with his four fingers, as if he were trying to remove something, images perhaps, perhaps stories. He was then in his eighties. But it was a very brief pause and he immediately resumed his account: 'I can't remember exactly how the episode came up in the conversation, in the old Cafe Roma, but what was said about Mares is engraved on my memory. I think one of them remarked in offended tones that many Republicans, when they surrendered or were detained, 'got very hoity-toity", he said, or something along those lines. And it was more or less then, spurred on by the mention of such arrogance, that the writer decided to describe the lesson they had taught just one such Republican. He told how once, in Ronda (Ronda had fallen long before Malaga, in September or October of 1936), they took three prisoners out at dawn to shoot them, and how, as was the custom, they ordered them to dig their own grave (it was the custom on both sides, and I fear it may still be so in any war). One of them, "a dandified little fellow called Emilio Mares", those were his words, "the son of a Commie mayor from some village around there" refused and said to his executioners: "You can and will kill me, I know that, but I'm not a bull to be baited." He wasn't prepared to do their work for them, let's say. The comment was just what I would have expected from the man I had known, who had, on that I particular day, unsurprisingly lost his usual good humour: a final impudent remark, he obviously didn't want to spend his last moments digging and sweating and getting himself dirty. "The fellow got really uppity," the writer went on, "as if he was in a position to impose conditions. However much of a red he claimed to be, you could see, straight off, that he was just a little rich kid, done up to the nines, quite the young master. And he even urged his two companions to refuse as well. Luckily for them, though, they were too frightened, and kept on digging. He must have assumed we would just shoot all three of them afterwards beside the open grave. One man in our group, a local chap who clearly had it in for him from the start, struck him in the face with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground, and told; him again to start digging. But the fellow still refused, and repeated that we could kill him if we wanted to, beat him to; death if we liked, but that he wasn't going to be our plaything,; a bull to be baited 'as sure as my name is Emilio Mares', he said. That's how he put it, with his name and everything -jumped up little man. Well, all I can say is that it was a most unfortunate turn of phrase to choose because, do you know what we did?” And the writer waited a moment, as if for dramatic effect, to arouse our expectations, as if he really needed us to say "No, what did you do?", although he didn't, in fact, wait that long, because it was a purely rhetorical question, pure theatre Then he brought his index finger down through the air, stopping just short of the table, as if he were pointing something out or underlining it, as if he were proud of the answer, and at the same time as he made this gesture, he gave the answer, gave us the answer: "We baited him," he said smugly, pleased with the lesson they had taught the man. I remember that this was followed by a shocked, uncomprehending silence. I don't think any of us could grasp what he meant, because up until then it had been clear that the man had been speaking figuratively, and, of course, the whole thing was utterly inconceivable. Surprised and slightly apprehensive, Antiguedad was the one to ask him: "What do you mean?" "Precisely what I said, we took him at his word and we baited him like a bull. We played matador to his bull," replied the writer. "It was the chap from Malaga 's idea, the one who'd had it in for him from the start. 'Oh, so you're not a bull to be baited, eh?' he said to him. 'I don't think you've quite got the measure of us.' And he climbed into the van and drove into town and in less than half an hour, he was back with all the stuff. We stuck banderillas in him, stood on the roof of the van and drove very slowly past him, jabbing at him like picadors, and then the malagueno delivered the coup de grace with the sword. He was a nasty piece of work, a real bastard, but he obviously knew what he was doing, and he went in for the kill with genuine style, straight in, through the heart. I only stuck a couple of short banderillas in him, round the neck and shoulders. Oh, Emilio Mares got the measure of us all right. The other two men were our audience and we forced them to cheer and clap. We didn't shoot them until the show was over, as a reward for having dug their own graves. That way they could see what they had escaped. The malagueno insisted on cutting off one ear as a prize. That was perhaps going a bit too fir, but we weren't going to stop him." And that was the story that the famous, celebrated writer told over drinks,' added my rather, and as soon as he stopped speaking, his voice sounded suddenly weary, 'although he never told it again later on, when he was really famous. A solemn funeral mass was held when he died. I think one very democratic minister even helped carry his coffin.’

22

He fell silent for longer this time, his gaze again that of an old man remembering, as if he really had returned to the long-since disappeared Cafe Roma on Calle Serrano or to Ronda where he had not been, at least not in September 1936, when they baited his friend like a bull in the ring and delivered the coup de grace with a sword. It was on the 16th of that month I found out later, when that 'heroic and fantastical' city, with its huge precipice or gorge, fell into the white-gloved hands of General Varela – or perhaps he was only a colonel then: it was said that he slept with his medals on – a far crueller man than the head of the Italian blackshirts, Colonel Roatta, who advanced on Malaga and was nicknamed 'Mancini' – like my musical protector – following the norm set by many others who passed through that war, when names were routinely renounced or lost; but no less cruel, at any rate, than the person who took over and controlled Malaga once it had fallen, the Duque de Sevilla was his somewhat inappropriate tide: ah, these rapacious Spaniards, some silent, some verbose; ah, 'these men full of rage', as so many of them so often are.

The poet Rilke had stayed in Ronda for a couple of months twenty-four years before, at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, when not even Wheeler had yet arrived in the world – in the Antipodes and as Peter Rylands. And there is a statue of him, of the poet, a very black, life-size one, in the garden of a hotel from whose long balcony you can see the broad, sweet lands of Spain, perhaps one of those fields was the scene of that brief one-man corrida: it's unlikely, but not impossible, because at dawn, there would be no one standing there contemplating the fields, or else the area would be occupied by victorious troops who would have had no objection to such sport should some guard have spotted it: perhaps among them would be some of the requetés, the Carlist militiamen trained up by Varela as he travelled around the villages of Navarra, disguised as a priest and going by the colourful sobriquet of Tio Pepe'; as well as legionnaires and Moroccans, a grotesque 'crusade' – Varela's favourite word – of fanatical Catholic volunteers and Muslim mercenaries engaged together in destroying and laying waste this secular land. That hotel is, I believe, the 'Reina Victoria', which, as Rilke put it, 'the devil persuaded the English to build here'; you can even visit the room in which he stayed, a kind of mini-museum or minuscule mausoleum, adorned with a portrait and a few bits of furniture, some old books, some jottings by him in German, possibly a bust (it's been years since I visited it, so I can't be sure). It may have been there that he began to conceive these lines, or, rather, fragments, which I often recall: 'Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to leam; not to be what one was and having to leave even one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that once clung together floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…" Perhaps, who knows, this is what Emilio Mares thought, although not in these words.

'But what happened, what did you do, how did you react?' I asked my father, not just to draw him out of his silence and away from his long journey. I was intrigued to know what, if anything, he could have done or said. At that time, he could have been arrested on the slightest pretext and returned to prison, and probably with far worse luck, for he had had exceptional luck before, and in 1939 too, a year when anyone on the losing side had hardly any luck at all.

With some effort, he returned from far away. A sigh. One hand on his forehead, with the wedding ring he had never taken off. A clearing of the throat. Then he focused his gaze. He looked at me and answered me. Slowly at first, as if with sudden caution, perhaps the same caution he had had to use then, in the Cafe Roma.

'Well,' he said, 'the moment I heard Mares' name I feared the worst, and I was even more on my guard. I didn't at all like the turn the conversation was taking. But I did nothing while he was telling the story. It didn't even occur to me to interrupt him. I felt sick and angry as I listened, the two things at once, rather than alternating between them. I would have preferred not to be there, not to know what he and others had done to a former university friend whom I had liked and admired. I knew that Mares had been killed for no reason, and that was enough, that was bad enough, but he had not been such a close friend that I would not occasionally forget this fact. On the other hand, I realised that, once the horror story had begun, there was no stopping halfway. I must have turned very pale or very red, I don't know, I felt cold and hot, again both at the same time. Whatever colour I turned, however, no one else would have noticed, it wouldn't have aroused suspicions or given me away, because every other face round the table looked equally distraught, deathly pale, even though all four men present were Francoists and had doubtless witnessed similar acts of brutality or even committed them themselves.' My father stopped for a second and looked around him – we were in his living room, at the end of the twentieth century or possibly the beginning of the twenty-first, in the late morning: he was bringing himself back to the present – then he continued, more easily this time: 'I think the writer had miscalculated. He started telling the tale almost proudly, boastfully, but as he continued, and even though it didn't take him long to tell it, he must have realised that his story was going down very badly indeed, that it went too far, that it had shocked us all. Amid the sound and fury of the Civil War it might have amused someone (if I can put it like that), but not now. It was entirely inappropriate to describe such an episode seated around a cafe table, on a sunny Madrid morning, over a few beers and some olives. The silence which had fallen when he said "We baited him" and brought his index finger down like a banderilla or a lance or a sword, continued until the end of the story, and remained unaltered at its conclusion. And when it became embarrassing, and since the writer was probably the most influential person there, one of the other men whom I didn't at the time even know by name, the most deferential among them, broke the silence with a joke in the worst possible taste, one he was incapable of keeping to himself, or perhaps, being a rather stupid man, it was the only thing that occurred to him to fill the void and applaud the anecdote: "How come, while he was at it, he didn't award himself both ears and the tail?" he asked, referring to the malagueno and the ear he had cut off. And the writer again miscalculated, or perhaps the icy atmosphere left behind by his story made him feel, I don't know, uncomfortable, awkward, and in situations like that, any attempt to put things right almost only ever succeeds in making matters worse, it's best just to keep very still and quiet. He smiled as if he saw his chance. Perhaps he was still clinging to the idea that his story had had the effect he was hoping for, a slightly delayed effect given the shocking nature of the lesson dealt out, or perhaps he considered it an exploit to be proud of. He wasn't an intelligent man, only clever. And vain to his boot-tips, too, as tends to be the case with people who know their talents are overvalued, for spurious reasons or by dint of their own pushiness and sheer insistence. They can't bear to look bad or to feel they've been caught out, and everything about them is so fragile and so false that the slightest lack of enthusiasm, the smallest reservation upsets them. And so he replied, half coy, half derisive: "No, well, I didn't want to shock anyone. And I'm not saying he didn't cut the lot off. He was a dangerous man, our comrade. You should have seen him, doffing his red beret like a hunter and displaying his three trophies." I don't know if that was true or not, or if, goaded by the other man's comment, he simply made it up in order to show off; he probably felt he hadn't gone quite far enough and that this was the reason for his audience's cool response. I didn't care either way; or, rather, it was almost worse that he should have invented it on the spur of the moment, to flatter us, according to his criteria, or to make us shudder. I couldn't take any more. I couldn't before either, but I was suddenly assailed by a vague image of a mutilated Mares after he had been tortured and killed, of the amusing man I had known before, so delightfully full of himself, converted into mere mangled remains, more animal than human. I got up and, addressing only Gomez-Antiguedad, murmured: "I have to go, I'm late already. I'll pay for this round." And I went over to the bar to ask for the bill. I made my exit in two stages because I felt it would attract less attention and seem less abrupt than if I headed straight for the door. I couldn't really afford to pay for anything, as you can imagine, and it was, as far as I was concerned, a very expensive bar, I wasn't even sure I had enough money on me; and I can't tell you how it disgusted me having to buy a round of drinks for those four men. But I considered it would be money well spent if I could get away from them there and then, and not have to listen to their affected, mocking laughter or to the voice of that murderous thug; and to get out of there, of course, without any mishap. With my record, the last thing I wanted was to be arrested. I was standing not too far from them, with my back turned, while I waited for a barman or waiter to appear, and I heard the writer say to Antiguedad: "What's got into him? His name's Deza, isn't it? Where's he from anyway? Did I say something he didn't like?" It's always a bad thing when someone takes your name and notices it and remembers it, whether it's the authorities or a bunch of criminals, let alone when the authorities are the criminals. I thought I wasn't going to be able to escape, that the writer would not simply let me leave in peace, that he would want to find out what was wrong with me, and I was sure, then, that I would no longer be able to contain myself. If he demanded an explanation from me, I was likely to hurl myself at him without another word. He certainly wouldn't have come out of that very well, but I would have come out of it even worse. I would have got a sound beating in a prison cell that night, and they might well have decided to haul me into court again, on whatever charges they fancied. Fortunately, Antiguedad's response was immediate, and that's another reason I remained grateful to him for the rest of his life: "The same thing has got into him as into me, for fuck's sake, what a sickening story," he said. He was not a man who normally resorted to bad language, but, depending on who one is talking to, it's useful to know how to use it if necessary. Sometimes, it's just a question of authority. And he used that authority to rebuke the writer, to tear him off a strip: "Do you honestly believe it's all right to speak so lightly about an atrocity like that? Do you really believe it's a joking matter? Think about it, man, think about it. It's high time we put all that bad blood behind us." The writer may have been better placed within the regime, but Antiguedad was from a very influential, staunchly right-wing family, he had ended the war with the rank of captain and was entirely above suspicion; besides, he would one day be the owner of a publishing house and already pretty much called the shots there, and that is something any new writer must always bear in mind, because he never knows when he might need a publisher. So he swallowed his pride and accepted this dressing-down. "There's no need to get so het up about it, Pepito, it's not that big a deal, is it? We could all of us tell some pretty ugly stories, I'm sure. But I agree, it probably isn't a suitable tale for peacetime." And Antiguedad immediately softened. He gave the writer a fatherly pat on the back and said: "Oh, that's all right, let's get together for a chat when we've got more time. See you, gentlemen." He said goodbye to the others as a group, without shaking them by the hand, and joined me at the bar, just as the waiter who had served us came over. "Give me that, Deza, after all, I was the one who invited you for a drink," and he grabbed the bill before the waiter could hand it to me. I was already anxiously counting my money out into the palm of my hand, worried that I wasn't going to have enough. We left together, he turned at the door and raised one arm in the direction of the other four men, as a gesture of goodbye. Then, once out in the street, he apologised to me, even though none of it had been his fault. "I'm so very sorry, Deza, I had no idea," he said. "You were friendly with Mares, weren't you? I only knew him by sight myself." He was one of the few on the winning side who tried to mitigate the situation, one of the few who did not blindly follow Franco's instructions to mete out constant humiliation and continual punishment to the defeated. And you've no idea how glad I was to be able to reciprocate later on in a not inconsiderable way: in the 1980’s, I managed to keep him out of prison over some matter to do with company accounts, with the illegal transfer of funds, well, it doesn't really matter now what it was. Obviously, I would have preferred him not to have got into trouble in the first place, but for me it was a real blessing to be in a position to throw him a line and pull hard on it until I'd got him out. When someone helps you when times are really bad, for no real reason (you children have never known what really bad times are), well, you never forget it. If you're a decent person, that is, and don't take that help as a kind of personal humiliation or as a public insult.’

It occurred to me that when he made that last comment, he was thinking of Del Real, the treacherous friend whose future face, that of 1939, he had failed to foresee throughout the 1930’s.

'And did you ever meet the writer later on, in person?' I asked.

'Only very belatedly, thirty or forty years afterwards, at a couple of public events to which we were both invited. The first time, he was with his wife, and, of course, I shook his hand then so as not to wound or worry her in any way, and the three of us spoke briefly, about nothing really, just a polite exchange. The second time he was on his own, or, rather, with his usual entourage of admirers, he never went anywhere alone. He saw me and avoided me, avoided my eye. Not that I, heaven forbid, was trying to catch his. But just in case. You can always tell these things. He knew exactly who I was. I mean, not only what I did, or the fact that his wife and I had a very civilised friendship based on great mutual respect, I mean that he remembered my name from that morning in the cafe, and had, ever since then, been conscious that I'd heard his story. He must have regretted time and again letting his mouth or his smugness run away with him in that cafe. That's why I think it was perhaps the last time he revealed it to anyone, his disgusting contribution to that "bullfight". Antiguedad's reaction must have provided a warning. That and the ensuing silence. So you won't be surprised to learn that I never told your mother, however much I wanted to share the state of despondency in which I arrived home that day, even though I'd just received commissions for two translations. She had known Mares at university too and really liked him, well, almost everyone did, he was one of those people who light up any gathering and make it seem more promising and more worthwhile. Why bring her more grief, why afflict her with some new horror that could not be changed and for which there could be no solace and, of course, no compensation. Especially since she really liked bullfighting, much more than you might realise, a liking she inherited from her father, but one that she preferred not to pass on to you children. On more than one occasion, when we told you we were going to the theatre or the cinema, we actually went to the bulking.' And my father chuckled briefly to remember and to confess that small, innocuous deception. 'I didn't want to ruin bullfighting for her, because it doubtless would have. I myself didn't particularly enjoy bullfights, they left me pretty cold really, but it took a long time and a lot of effort on my part to prevent the story of Mares' death spoiling them for me entirely: at first, every fight we went to reminded me of him, and that cast a pall over the whole event, I felt his shadow slip in between me and each stage of the corrida. It's just the same, I suppose, as when I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I always think of the little child whom the militia-woman claimed to have killed by slamming against the wall.’

My father had grown tired, as I saw when he paused again; he closed his eyes as if they ached from having gazed for too long into the far distance. But it was not yet time for lunch; I glanced at my watch, it would be another twenty minutes before the woman who did the cooking came in to call us to the table or before my sister arrived, she'd said she would drop in and have lunch with us if she managed to finish what she had to do early. And he had not yet taken up the thread again; then, after a while, he decided to continue talking, although without immediately opening his eyes. 'I saw many things, we saw possibly worse things,' he said, using an ambiguous plural after that unequivocally singular T. 'Many simultaneous deaths, people I knew and didn't know, suddenly, during a bombardment, and then you don't have time to think about any of them, not even for a second, what tends to prevail is a sense that it's all over, a desire simply to give up, a feeling of being on the brink of extermination, that is what you feel then, and you're full of contrary impulses, wanting to survive at all costs, to simply step over the surrounding corpses, to seek shelter and save yourself, but also to stay with them, I mean to join them, to lie down by their side and form part of the inert pile of bodies and stay there; it's a feeling almost akin to envy. It's odd, but even in the din and the collapsing buildings and the chaos, as you're racing to help someone who's wounded or to protect yourself, you know at once when someone's a hopeless case. Not a threat to anyone, but at peace, at rest, gone in a flash. It's likely, in fact, that if you followed the second impulse, you would unintentionally achieve the same effect as the first, because the next bomb would never fall in the same place as the previous ones: the besiegers didn't squander their bombs, the safest place might well be alongside the already dead. But, as you see, I've told you about two things that I didn't see, that we didn't see, but which were recounted to me or, rather, which I happened to hear, in neither case were the words addressed to me personally, or at least not exclusively; and yet they've stayed in my memory as clearly as if I had seen it myself, possibly more clearly, it's easier to suppress an unbearable image than it is to suppress someone's account of an event, however loathsome those events might be, precisely because narrative always seems more bearable. And in a sense it is: what you see is happening; what you hear has happened already; whatever it is, you know that it is over, otherwise no one would be able to tell you about it. I believe that the reason I have such a vivid memory of those two stories, those two crimes, is because I heard them from the mouths of the people who had committed them. Not from a witness, not from a victim who had survived, whose tone would have been one of justifiable reproach and complaint, but also, therefore, of a more dubious veracity, there is always a tendency to exaggerate any description of suffering, because the person who endured it tends to present it as a virtue or as something to be admired, a noble sacrifice, when sometimes that isn't the case at all and it was just bad luck. Both of the people who told the stories did so unhesitatingly and boastfully. Yes, they were showing off. To me, though, it was as if they were accusing themselves and without even having been asked to do so, the Falangist writer and the woman on the tram. That, at least, is how my ears reacted, they were not amused, they did not admire the cruel acts they described, but were horrified and disgusted; and my judgement condemned them, passively of course.' ('With my tongue silenced," I thought.) 'It gives you an idea of how other people experience violence; of how simpler, more superficial people – although they're not necessarily more primitive or less educated – grow accustomed to it and then see no need to place limits on it and consequently don't; and it gives you an idea of just how much violence there was. So much, and so taken for granted, that the people who perpetrated the most brutal and gratuitous acts of violence, committed out of a senseless, baseless hatred, could talk about it in public with perfect aplomb, could boast about it. I mean what possible need was there to bash a baby's brains out; what need was there to stick banderillas and lances into a condemned man and then mutilate his body. But there were others among us who never got used to it, you never do if you keep your sense of perspective and don't fell into the lazy way of thinking that says "What does it matter, after all…" which lay behind the comment that other man made to the writer when he asked if the malagueno had claimed the other ear and the tail too "while he was at it", if you refuse to allow the concrete to become abstract, which is what happens today with so many people, starting with terrorists and followed soon after by governments: they don't see the concreteness of what they set in motion, nor, of course, do they want to. I don't know, it seems to me that most people in these societies of ours have seen too much violence, fictitious or real, on the screen. And that confuses them, they accept it as a lesser evil, as not being of great importance. But neither fictitious nor real violence is real on screen, as a flat image, however terrible the events we're shown. Not even on the news. "Oh, how terrible, that really happened," we think, "but not here, not in my room." If it were happening in our living room, what a difference that would make: feeling it, breathing it, smelling it, because there is always a smell, it always smells. The terror, the panic. People would find it unbearable, they would really feel the fear, their own and other people's, the effect and the shock of both are similar, and nothing is as contagious as fear. People would run away to take shelter. Look, all it takes is for someone to give someone else a shove, in a bar, say, or in the street or in the metro, or for two uncouth motorists to come to blows or to grapple with each other, for those nearby to tremble with shock and uncertainty, for them to grow tense and filled with often uncontrollable alarm, both physical and mental, it happens to most people. Worse still if there's a crowd. And if you punch someone really hard, you'll probably do them quite a lot of damage, but your own hand will be a mess too and will be inflamed for several days afterwards. After just one blow with the fist. It's no joke.' ('That's true,' I thought, but didn't say anything so as not to worry him, 'it happened to me once, and I could hardly move my hand afterwards.') 'Anyone who, at some stage in his life, has lived with violence on a daily basis will never take any risks with it, never take it lightly. He'll administer it not just with care and with extreme caution, but in as stingy and miserly a way as he can. He won't allow himself to be violent, not as long as he can avoid it, and it almost always is avoidable, although he'll be able to withstand it better should violence ever return.' Then my father opened his pale eyes again, and they were once more serene; they had been troubled by all those memories. 'Apart from in fiction, that's different, although people should be more aware of that than they are. Exaggerated violence is even funny, watching film violence is like watching acrobatics or fireworks, it makes me laugh, all those bodies sent flying, all that blood spattered about, you can see a mile off that they're wearing springs and bags of liquid that they puncture and burst. People who are shot in real life don't leap into the air, they just drop and cease moving. That kind of violence is perfectly innocuous or, at least, it would be if there hadn't been such a decline in people's general levels of perceptiveness. For someone as ancient as me, it's astonishing to see how stupid the world has become. Inexplicable. What an age of decline, you have no idea. Not just intellectual decline, but a decline in discernment too. Oh well. That kind of violence is not much different from the beatings described in Don Quixote or the ones shown in those Tom and Jerry cartoons you enjoyed so much as children, when you know deep down that no one has been badly hurt, that they'll get up afterwards unscathed and go out to supper together like good friends. There's no need to get all puritanical about it, or prudish for that matter, like those people who reduce the classics to pure saccharine. With real violence, on the other hand, you must take no chances. But look how things have changed, and attitudes too: when war was declared on Hitler, and it may be that there has never been an occasion when a war was more necessary or more justifiable, Churchill himself wrote that the mere fact of having come to that pass, to that state of failure, made those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before History. He was referring to the governments of his own country and of France, you understand, and, by extension, to himself, although he would have preferred that state of blameworthiness and failure to have been reached at a much earlier stage, when the situation was less disadvantageous to them and when it would not have been so difficult or so bloody to fight that war. "… this sad tale of wrong judgements formed by well-meaning and capable people…": that is how he described it. And now, as you see, the same people who are scandalised by the rough and tumble of Tom and Jerry et al. unleash unnecessary, selfish wars, devoid of any honourable motives, and which sidestep all the other options, if they don't actually torpedo them. And unlike Churchill, they are not even ashamed of them. They're not even sorry. Nor, of course, do they apologise, people just don't do that nowadays… In Spain, the Francoists established that particular school of thought long ago. They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war. The worst of all possible wars. And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents… It was absurd, all of it.' I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.' And in the thought that followed he used a word which I heard Wheeler use later on, when talking about wars, although he had said it in English, and the word was, if I'm not mistaken, 'waste'. 'And what a terrible waste… I don't know, I remember it and I can't believe it. Sometimes, it seems unbelievable to me that I lived through all of that. I just can't see the reason for it, that's the worst of it, and with the passing of the years, it's even harder to see a reason. Nothing serious ever appears quite so serious with the passing of time. Certainly not serious enough to start a war over, wars always seem so out of proportion when viewed in retrospect… And certainly never serious enough for anyone to kill another person.' (And then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous. 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, the dance, and all those doubts, all that torment?)

23

That squeaky, tinny music immediately distracted me from the apocryphal lines from 'The Streets of Laredo' that were going round and round in my head, for despite my fear and alarm, the tune had barely left my mind for a single moment, and now, seeing De la Garza gulping down that blue water, a third version had, I feel, become intertwined with it: people put whatever words they want to ballads and I had heard the Laredo or Armagh ballad converted into 'Doc Holliday' on the whim of some forgotten singer, who had the good doctor recount his story to that same tune, the man who had been with Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, at the famous duel or, rather, pitched battle between gangs, the tubercular, alcoholic gambler and medical doctor (or was he an odontologist like Dick Dearlove?) and connoisseur of Shakespeare, or so at least he was presented to us in the best film about them certainly I have ever seen, about Earp and Holliday in the town of Tombstone, and not in Laredo nor, of course, in that unknown place, Armagh in Ireland: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today', and that might well have been what Rafael de la Garza would have been saying in his own inevitably racier and coarser language, although he was not dying from a lung disease, with his handkerchief pressed to his mouth and coughing up bloody sputum, but from inundation or flooding…

The squeaky paso doble bothered Reresby, even annoyed him, and this didn't surprise me in the least, because it irritated the hell out of me as well.

'What's that shit?' he said, while I, at the same time, was thinking: 'Oh no, not that again.’

The insistent sound made him interrupt his beatings and immersions of De la Garza in the toilet bowl. He rudely and rapidly frisked De la Garza in search of the impertinent mobile, and when he found it in one pocket of that rapper-style jacket, he took it out, stared at it in perplexity and rage and slammed it with all his might against the wall, the phone broke into pieces and the cliched Spanish music ceased at once. 'At least he's not going to drown him now,' I thought, 'for the moment,' and I realised that I was beginning to think that nothing was as dangerous or as deadly as the sword, perhaps this was only because strangulation or drowning take time, however brief, and that brief amount of time allows time for someone else to intervene and that someone else would have to be me, but how, there was no one else there and no one was trying to get in, they would have found the door wedged shut and assumed the toilet was out of use; whereas a decapitation or an amputation requires no lapse of time, and if Tupra hadn't checked the fall of the blade, the attache's head would have been lopped off and be lying on the floor, De la Garza would be in two parts now or, rather, he would not be at all. And so while I kept an apprehensive eye on what Reresby was doing, I also cast occasional glances over at where his coat was hanging, I knew now that it was there that he kept the fearsome weapon of the Landsknecht soldiers and that, should his temper flare up or boil over, he could easily go back for it and unsheathe it and brandish it again.

Tupra grabbed Rafita by the lapels or, rather, by the shirt-front and did with him more or less what he had done with the mobile phone, that is, he slammed him against the wall, and one of the strange cylindrical bars attached to the wall, I noticed, thudded into his back. Fortunately, the bars did not have sharp edges, but even so it must have hurt him badly, Tupra's violence had not abated. After this, De la Garza collapsed, with a defeated, breathless howl. His shirt had come out of his trousers, and I discovered to my amazement – to my embarrassment and almost sorrow too – that the diplomat had a jewel encrusted in his navel, like a small diamond or perhaps a pearl, doubtless cheap imitations, fakes. 'Good grief," I thought, 'he's obviously really desperate to keep up with trends, and the gypsy earring and the hairnet just weren't enough, I wonder if he always wears it, even in the embassy, or only when he gets dressed up to go out on the town?' Tupra dragged him to his feet again, still gripping his shirt-front, pulled him close and then again flung him against the metal bar placed there for the disabled, the fixed bar, I had the sense this time that it caught him in the shoulder blades. De la Garza was a puppet, a sack, he was drenched and stained with blue, with gashes on his chin and forehead and a cut on his cheekbone, uno sfregio, his clothes all dishevelled and torn, and his cries very feeble now, only an irrepressible groan each time his back hit the bar, because Reresby continued in the same vein, repeatedly and rapidly: he would pull him to his feet, draw him a little away from the wall and then hurl him against that battering ram, he must have been breaking several of his ribs, if not causing more dangerous internal lesions, the attache's whole ribcage resounded and his insides crunched, and with every impact it was if his breath dried up in him. Reresby did this a total of five times, as if he were counting them, in a patient, disciplined way, like someone who has it all planned out. De la Garza did not defend himself at any point (he could not even shrink in on himself or cover his ears now), I suppose you know when there's nothing you can do, when the other person's strength and determination – or the sheer numbers if there are several of them, or the weapons if you yourself are unarmed – are so much greater that all you can hope is that they will grow tired or decide to finish you off; during these attacks, during the beating, Rafita would also be thinking of the sword with a mixture of fear and something like hope, as perhaps Emilio Mares would have done in the fields of Ronda once he saw them coming for him first with the banderillas and then with the lance: 'They're going to do it. They're really going to do it, the bastards, the brutes,' he must have thought then. 'They're going to bait me like a bull, it would be better if they just killed me now and did a good job of it, rather than give me the coup de grace with whatever they have to hand, because they're capable of doing it with a nail.’

When Tupra had finished, he turned to me and said: 'Jack, translate this, will you, I want him to understand and to be quite clear about what I'm saying.' And before he began, he added: 'Have you got a comb?’

De la Garza was slumped on the floor, he seemed incapable of movement and would not, in my presence, be hauled to his feet by Sir Blow or Sir Punishment or Sir Thrashing, well, at least he wasn't Sir Death. Reresby looked in the mirror while he was talking, he tucked in his shirt, tugged at his jacket, smoothed his waistcoat, otherwise he looked exactly as he always looked, even his hair had remained relatively unruffled. He straightened his tie, adjusted the knot, and did this without his sodden gloves, which he had deposited, with a grimace of disgust, next to the toilet. When he'd had the gloves on, he had not once used his fist or even the flat of his hand – or his foot either – every blow dealt had been made by another interposing object, the toilet bowl, the cylindrical bar and even the hairnet and the flushing water, he must have known all about what my father had told me years before, that a punch can shatter the hand of the person doing the punching. In Spain we have always known about these tricks of the trade as regards violence: in 1808 (to give but one example), during the Peninsular War or the War of Independence, Filangieri, the governor of La Coruna and, more suspiciously still, Italian by birth (and not 'a Spaniard of lightning and fire'), was judged by his troops to be a traitor because he delayed slightly before rallying to the cause of Independence (he lingered, he claimed, only out of strategic prudence, but, by then, it was too late); and so they stuck their bayonets in the ground, points uppermost (this happened apparently in Villafranca del Bierzo, although I've no idea what they were doing there), and threw their Captain-General onto the spikes a few times, until some vital organ was finally pierced and there was no point in continuing, thus saving the mutineers the energy and effort involved in sticking their bayonets into him themselves and leaving the not-yet-dead Filanghieri to do all the work for them. This was not apparently the first example of such idleness, and was started perhaps by the Carthaginians who deployed spears in a similar way against the Roman general Atilius Regulus in the third century bc; and an English traveller in Spain remarked that murdering the unjust, despotic, incompetent and generally appalling generals and leaders who have, on the whole, ruled over our Peninsula throughout history (good vassals, but bad lords) was 'an inveterate Iberian trait'. He also remarked: 'Help from Spain comes either late or never' – the person who would succeed Filanghieri did eventually come to his aid, but only long after the latter had been tested to destruction as a fakir and been found wanting, as I remembered when I bent down over De la Garza to enquire vaguely and ineffectually about his battered state, there was little I could do then, the fatuous fellow lay there crushed and half conscious, he might perhaps be crippled for some time to come, not for ever I hoped, otherwise he would have to grow used to frequenting toilets like this one. And I wondered, too, if the surname Tupra did not perhaps have its remote origins among certain ancient, idle compatriots of mine.

'A comb?' I replied, somewhat annoyed. It reminded me of Wheeler's comment about Latins, in his garden by the river, after the helicopter had had its little joke. A reputation for being vain. 'What makes you think I'd have a comb on me?’

'You Latins usually have one, don't you? See if he's got one.' And he jerked his head in the direction of the fallen man.

It made me squirm inside, it seemed outrageous to me that Reresby should use the comb that De la Garza was bound to have on him, assuming he had not lost it in that one-sided scrimmage or during the furious dancing beforehand. I felt ashamed at the very idea of frisking the beaten man, that all too easily defeated man. And so I took mine out, even though this meant admitting that Tupra had been right.

'Very clever,' I said to Tupra and handed it to him. It was clearly a widespread idea on that large island, about us Latins and our combs.

Not that I cared particularly if I did corroborate his theory: I suddenly felt extraordinarily relieved, because it was over and De la Garza was still alive and I had already imagined him dead. Very dead indeed, sliced in two, transformed into head and trunk. The greatest danger was over, or so it seemed, however recently it had occurred, it was nonetheless over, it is amazing and also irritating how cessation brings with it a kind of false, momentary cancellation of what has happened. 'Now that he's not walloping the hell out of him any more, it's almost as if he hadn't done it at all,' we think in our excessive adoration of the present moment, which is madly and permanently on the increase. 'Now that it isn't burning any more, it's almost as if it had never burned. Now that they're not bombing us any more, it's almost as if they had never bombed us. Yes, there are the dead^ and the mutilated, and the charred houses reduced to rubble, but that's how it is now, it's happened, it's already past and there is no one who can change or undo it, and now, at least, they're not killing or mutilating or destroying, not while I'm here and breathing and with things still to do.' These thoughts pass through our heads whenever one of the present-day, more or less televised wars is going on – the Gulf War, the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the Iraq War based on dishonest motives and spurious interests and which was totally unnecessary except as a way of feeding the limitless arrogance of those who were the driving forces behind it – wars which are held in such scorn by older people, like my father or Wheeler, who had been involved in the non-frivolous variety. As long as there are battles and as long as there are bombs foiling on soldiers and civilians, we are gripped by a terrible anxiety, we watch the news every day with our hearts in our mouths; this phase doesn't usually last very long nowadays, sometimes only a matter of weeks or, at most, months, and so we don't have time to get used to it nor, therefore, to become sufficiently desensitised, to accept that this is the nature of any war, be it treacherous or righteous, and that it is something that can be lived with on a daily basis, without giving it too much importance or worrying about other people all the time, especially about distant people unknown to us; not even about ourselves and those close by, once the slaughter has begun, if your time is up, it's up. If a bullet has your name on it, as Diderot said – long before anyone else did, if I'm not mistaken. Nowadays, we don't have time to become accustomed to living in a state of war, a state which, as Wheeler remarked, makes peace inconceivable and vice versa ('People don't realise to what extent the one negates the other,' he had said, 'how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts'), and thus the sense of emergency remains intense for the brief duration of the horror seen on screen, and when that phase ends, we are filled by a strange conviction that it is all over and has, to some extent, disappeared. 'At least it's not happening now,' we think, sometimes even with a sigh; and that 'at least' implies a real injustice: what happened loses in gravity and impact simply because it is not happening now, and -then we almost lose interest in the wounded and the dead who so distressed and affected us while it was going on. They are the past now, someone is taking care of things, reconstructing, healing, burying, adopting, preferably the same people who caused the war, so that they can then be seen as righters of wrongs, the very height of absurdity and an out-and-out lie. It's yet another symptom of the infantilisation of the world, mothers used to soothe their children by saying: 'It's over now, it's all right, it's over,' after a nightmare or a fright or some unpleasant incident, trapped fingers or some such thing, almost as if they were saying: 'What no longer is never was,' even if the pain persisted and an itchy scab formed afterwards or the fingers became bruised and swollen and even if, sometimes, a scar was left behind so that, later, the adult could stroke it and continue to remember that injury and that day.

To experience a sense of relief after having watched as some cowed, unwitting, half-drunk person was roundly beaten and having myself lacked both the courage or the ability to stop it, after having believed that my colleague was about to slice someone's head off, was going to strangle him with a hairnet and drown him in the toilet bowl, was not at all reasonable nor, of course, noble. And yet that was how it was, Tupra had stopped, and I was pleased, he had removed a much greater weight than he had placed on me, and that was no small thing. De la Garza was no longer in danger, that was my main, grotesque thought, because danger had already taken a brutal toll on him. It had not, it's true, killed him, but it seemed ridiculous to be satisfied with that, with seeing him still alive, and even feeling glad, when the last thing I had imagined as I led him to the Disabled toilet was that he would leave it so badly injured, doubtless with, at the very least, several broken bones. If, that is, he did leave it, because while Reresby was readjusting his dress and trying to tame his dark hair, thicker and curlier than one normally finds in Britain (with the exception of Wales), and which was probably dyed, particularly at the temples where the curls were almost ringlets (he combed it through a few times and tidied it, although it didn't look much different afterwards), he again ordered me to translate the following: 'Translate this for him, Jack,' he said once more, 'I don't want there to be any misunderstandings, because he, not us, will suffer the consequences, make it quite clear, tell him, tell him what I've just told you.' And I did, I told De la Garza in my own language about those possible misunderstandings; his eyes were half closed and puffy, but he was doubtless able to hear me. 'Tell him that you and I are going to leave here quietly and that he is going to lie there, where he is, without moving, for another half an hour, no, make that forty minutes, that gives me a bit more leeway, I've still got some things to deal with out there. Tell him not even to think of leaving or of getting up. Tell him not to shout or call for help. Tell him he's to stay here during that time, the cold floor will do him good and it won't do him any harm to spend a bit of time lying still, until he gets his breath back. Tell him that.' And I did, including the part about the restoring coolness of the floor. 'There's his overcoat,' Reresby went on, pointing to the second coat he had brought with him, the dark one, which he had left hanging on one of the lower bars, and then I realised how carefully my transitory boss had planned it all: it wasn't my coat, but Rafita's, which he had gone to the trouble of fetching from the cloakroom before coming to the toilet, he presumably had some influence in that chic, idiotic place or else a talent for deception, they would have fetched it and handed it to him without asking any questions and even with a bow. 'With that on, no one will notice the state he or his clothes are in, he won't attract attention. If he finds walking difficult, people will just assume he's sloshed. He can always pretend, unless, of course, he really is still a bit pissed. When he leaves, he's to go straight out into the street without stopping in the club for any reason, he's to go straight home. And he must never come back here, ever. Go on, translate that for him.' – And I did so again, translating Tupra's English word 'sloshed' as 'mamado'. – Tell him not even to think of going to the police or kicking up a stink at his embassy, or making a complaint through them, of any kind: he knows what could happen to him. Tell him not to phone you to demand an explanation, but to leave you alone, to forget he ever knew you. Tell him to accept that there's no reason to demand an explanation, that there are no grounds for complaints or protest. Tell him not to talk to anyone, to keep quiet, not even to recount it later as some kind of adventure. But tell him always to remember.' – As I gave these instructions to De la Garza, I thought again: 'Keep quiet and don't say a word, not even to save yourself. Keep quiet, and save yourself.' – But Tupra added a few more, in quick succession, as if he were reciting a list or as if they were the known consequences of a plan successfully carried out, the known effects of a treatment. – 'Tell him he's probably got a couple of broken ribs, three or possibly four. They'll be very painful, but they'll heal, they'll mend eventually. And if he finds something worse wrong, then he should just think himself very lucky. He could have been left with no head, he came very close. But since he didn't lose it, tell him there's still time, another day, any day, we know where to find him. Tell him never to forget that, tell him the sword will always be there. If he has to go to hospital, then he should give them the same line drunks and debtors do – that the garage door fell on him. Tell him to wet his hair before he leaves, to clean himself up a bit, although I shouldn't think anybody would find that particular shade of blue out of place here. Actually, he looks less odd and less ridiculous than he did wearing that string bag he had on. Go on, tell him all that, then we can leave. Make sure he's understood everything. Oh, and here's your comb, thank you.’

He handed it back to me. Unlike Wheeler, he hadn't taken the precaution of holding it up to the light to see if it was clean when I gave it to him. I, however, did do so when it was returned to my hand, but there were no hairs caught on it. I translated that last list of orders to the attache, but I left out the bit about the sword; that is, I mentioned his head and its possible, perhaps only postponed, loss, but not the sword. You cannot ask someone to translate everything, even insane, obscene or nasty remarks, even curses and calumnies, without their questioning or judging or rejecting some of it. Even if you are not the person doing the speaking or the saying, even though you are the mere transmitter or reproducer of someone else's words and sentences, the truth is that these do in large part become yours when you make them comprehensible and repeat them to another person, to a far greater degree than might at first seem likely. You hear them, understand them and sometimes have opinions about them; you find an immediate equivalent for them, give them a new form and let them go. It's as if you endorsed them. I had approved of nothing that had happened in that toilet, nor of anything that Tupra had done. Nor of my own passivity, or bewilderment, or was it cowardice or perhaps prudence, perhaps I had prevented worse calamities. I was even more displeased with Reresby's improper use of the plural, 'we know where to find him', it troubled and upset me that he should include me in that, without my consent and when he knew me so little. What he could not ask me to do was to play an active role and to threaten De la Garza with the weapon that arouses most fear, an atavistic fear, the weapon that has caused most deaths throughout most centuries, at close quarters and face to face with the person killed. And the one that I had feared so much while it was unsheathed and ready for use.

I finished, and added in Spanish on my own account: 'De la Garza, you'd better do everything he says, is that clear? I mean it. I honestly didn't think you were going to get out of here alive. I don't know him that well myself. I hope you recover. Good luck.’

De la Garza nodded, just a slight lift of the chin, his eyes dull, his gaze averted, he did not even want to look at us. He was not only in pain, he was, I think, still terrified, and the terror would not pass until we were out of his sight, and even then a remnant would always remain. He would be sure to obey, he would not dare to make enquiries or seek me out or phone me. He might not even phone Wheeler, his theoretical mentor in England, to have a moan about it. Nor his father in Spain, Peter's old friend. His name was Pablo, and he was, I recalled, a much better man than his son.

Tupra picked up his own pale coat, so stiff and respectable, and put it over his shoulders, there was no difference now between the man who was leaving the toilet and the man who had entered it. He picked up the sodden gloves and put them in one of his overcoat pockets, having first wrung them out and wrapped them each in several pieces of toilet paper. He removed the wedge from beneath the door and held the door open for me.

'Let's go, Jack,' he said.

He did not so much as glance at the fallen man. De la Garza was just that, one of the fallen, no longer of any concern to him, he had done his job. That was my impression, that he viewed him probably without hostility or pity. That must be how he saw everything: you did what you had to do, you took care of things, sorted them out, defused them, set fire to them or restored them to balance ('Don't linger or delay'); then they were forgotten, relegated to the past, and there was always something else waiting, as he had said, he still had some things to deal with out there and needed thirty or forty minutes; with all these interruptions, he wouldn't have had time to close the deals or agree the bribes or the blackmailing scams or the pacts with Mr Manoia. Or he would not have convinced or persuaded him, or he would not have had sufficient opportunity to allow Manoia to persuade or convince him about whatever it was. Nor did he give a farewell kick or flourish as he passed by De la Garza's fallen form. Tupra was certainly Sir Punishment, but he was not perhaps Sir Cruelty. Or maybe he simply never ever hit anyone directly with any part of his body. As he left, only the tail of his overcoat, which swirled like a matador's cape, brushed the face of the fallen man.

Before going through the second door, the one that gave onto the disco itself, another line from 'The Streets of Laredo' came into my mind, with its insistent, repetitive melody. I found the line unfortunate, because I couldn't be sure that I did not, at that moment, endorse it slightly, as one does when one translates or repeats an oath, or that Tupra could not adopt the line as his own that night, after what had, in his eyes, been my entirely unsatisfactory behaviour from start to finish: 'We all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong,' it said, 'Todos queriamos a nuestro camarada aunque hubiera hecho mal.' Although, of course, it could also be translated as 'aunque hubiera hecho daño - 'although he'd caused harm' – and perhaps that version was the more accurate one.

24

Reresby knew his timings, we spent thirty-five minutes at the table before the four of us left the disco, Mr and Mrs Manoia, him and me. We had left the couple alone for fax less time than that, the business in the Disabled toilet, that is, Tupra's violent intervention, had lasted barely ten minutes, and before that he had first solicitously accompanied Flavia to the Ladies' toilet and then back to the table: he had neglected neither her nor, indeed, him, so there could be no great complaints about our absence. Manoia did not, therefore, seem particularly impatient or ill-humoured, or perhaps to sfregio on his wife's face had so incensed him that this could only be followed by an abatement of the fever, a relative calming down, while we (I included myself in that plural now) were busy punishing the dickhead, possibly in Manoia's name and possibly on his orders.

Tupra, at any rate, did not return his overcoat to the cloakroom, he sat down with it over his shoulders, allowing it to hang straight, like a cloak, as he was obliged to do given the rigidity of the concealed weapon, he seemed used to doing so (the hem must have got dirty, since it was dragging on the floor). I wondered if Manoia had any idea as to what my boss had hidden about his person, he might not have liked it at all. It was not impossible either that the sword had not been there from the start, that Tupra had not always had it with him, that it had been handed to him in the cloakroom when he went to ask for his coat; that, at a signal from him, they had slipped it into the long pocket-cum-sheath, that it was held there for him, so to speak, and given to him whenever he needed it. He was probably a regular customer, a favoured client, and must have been so in all the places we went to, at least that is how he was treated, as a familiar figure, someone to be flattered, respected and even slightly feared, he was known as Reresby in some, Ure in others and Dundas in the rest. But not all of those places would keep a store of weapons to be handed over as and when. Long, sharp weapons.

During those thirty-five minutes he immersed himself in conversation with Manoia, having first made a gesture which I took to mean 'It's done' or 'You can consider yourself avenged' or 'Problem solved, I'm sorry it ever happened'. I heard them mention some of the same names that had cropped up earlier: Pollari, Letta, Saltamerenda, Vails, the Sismi, although I still had no idea what the latter was. Manoia did not so much as glance in my direction, he must have formed a very bad opinion of me and decided to avoid all contact, even visual. It again fell to me to keep Flavia amused, as if nothing had happened; but she seemed dejected, almost depressed, with little desire to talk, she kept glancing vaguely about her, as if she were bored and killing time, she tapped her foot to the music, languidly and discreetly, she had carefully applied more make-up to her cheek, but it still looked raw, there was still a visible mark, her hair had become dishevelled during the dance and, in her case, a comb, her own or someone else's, would not have been enough to restore order to a complex arrangement of what were doubtless various forms of false switches and plaits. She had aged a few years, she might even have wept a few artificial, childish tears, which is something that immediately accentuates the age of someone intent on delaying or concealing it (but only fake tears do this, not real ones). Then, after some moments had passed and while her husband was busily engaged in whispering into Tupra's ear, she asked me in Italian: 'And your friend?' She had suddenly reverted to the formal mode of address, a further indication of her low spirits.

I cast a sideways glance at those penetrating nipples, those brutali capezzoli, fancy arming yourself with such ice picks. They had been indirectly to blame for almost everything, notably my negligence.

'He's left,' I said. 'He got bored. Besides, it was getting late, he's a very early riser.' My second comment was spiteful, because I myself was feeling miserable and found her presence unbearable.

Then I looked round for the group of noisy Spaniards who had come with De la Garza; I couldn't hear them, so it was logical to think that I wouldn't be able to see them either, their table was empty. They had left or scattered, without waiting for him or going in search of him, they would have assumed that he was either in full or partial copulatory mode somewhere; there was, therefore, no need to worry about them, to worry that they might rescue their friend and prevent his complying with Reresby's implacable orders and deadlines.

I had more than enough time – contemplative or dead time – to become retrospectively angry. How could it have happened? I asked myself, and with every second it seemed more like a stupid, disturbing dream, of the sort that will not go away, but which lingers and waits. Why hadn't Tupra contented himself with merely giving De la Garza the slip, with all four of us leaving and making sure that he wasn't following us? Why was it so important to continue the conversation there, in that noisy, pretentious place, rather than somewhere else, where there would be no hold-ups or interruptions? The city was full of such places, there were several in Knightsbridge itself, and Tupra would have been perfectly at home in any of them; I couldn't understand the need for the thrashing either, still less the sword. And why hadn't I grabbed his arm? (When I thought he was about to bring the sword down on living flesh.) The answer to this last question came to me at once, and it was very simple: because he might have cut my head off instead, or sliced through one of my shoulders and punctured a lung. With a single two-handed blow. ('And in short, I was afraid.') And given that answer and what I had seen, I interrogated myself about Tupra as if Tupra were interrogating me in one of our sessions spent interpreting lives in the building with no name, and he might well have asked me questions such as these – almost impossible to answer at first, until you plunged in – the day after any meeting or outing, after any encounter or observation, about anyone with whom we had spoken, or even been with, or whom we had merely observed and heard: 'Do you think that man could kill, or that he's just a braggart, the sort who looks as if he's going to do something, but never dares? Why do you think he stopped short of decapitating him with the sword?’

And I could have replied: 'Perhaps we should start by asking why he took the sword out in the first place. It was melodramatic and unnecessary and, in the end, he didn't even use it, except to cut off the hairnet and frighten his victim half to death, and the witness too, of course. One has to ask oneself whether he brandished that sword purely so that I would see it and feel alarmed and shocked, as indeed I did, or, I don't know, so that I would believe he was capable of actually killing, without giving it a second thought, in the most brutal manner and for no reason. Or perhaps he stopped short so that I would believe quite the opposite, that he wasn't capable of doing it despite having every opportunity to do so or, how can I put it, despite being already halfway there. Or perhaps he wanted to test me, to see my reaction, to find out whether or not I would back him up or if I would confront him over such a violent act. Well, he knows the answer to that last point. He knows that I wouldn't, not when unarmed. Not that this tells him very much: he would have got a clearer idea if I had been wielding a weapon as well.’

'So what do you actually believe? You haven't given me an answer, Jack, and the reason I ask you a question is because I'm interested in your answer; whether you're right or wrong doesn't really matter, because most of the time we'll never find out one way or another. Do you think this man Reresby could kill or would ever really kill? Don't just consider this one situation, think of the man as a whole.’

'Yes, I think he could,' I would have said. 'Everyone could, but some are more likely to do so and the majority far less so, and as regards the latter, infinitely less.' And I would have added to myself: 'Comendador could, I've always known that, Wheeler could and I could, although I've only known that very recently; Luisa couldn't, but I don't know about Perez Nuix, I can't tell, and Manoia and Rendel could, although not Mulryan or De la Garza or Flavia, or perhaps De la Garza could accidentally, treacherously, in a moment of panic; Beryl couldn't nor could Lord Rymer the Flask – he doesn't get aggressive when he's drunk, although, of course, he might when he's sober, but no one can ever remember seeing him sober – and, on the other hand, Mrs Berry could, as could Dick Dearlove, but for very different horrific reasons, I don't know quite what, but not out of narrative or biographical horror, which only affects celebrities. My father and my sister and my brothers couldn't, and my mother couldn't have, nor Cromer-Blake or Toby Rylands, well, Toby could have killed in battle and probably did. Alan Marriott with his three-legged dog couldn't, but Clare Bayes, my former, clinging lover from Oxford, could. My son wouldn't be capable of killing, but my daughter might be, as far as one can tell, which is, as yet, very little. Incompara certainly could, even though I have stated the contrary.' And I might have continued that train of thought: 'When I think about it, I know this about nearly all the people I have ever known, or pretty much, and I believe I also know who would come and kill me, take me out and finish me, as they did with Emilio Mares and so many others: if they had the chance, if another civil war broke out in Spain, if there were enough confusion and enough excuses and a way of covering up their crime. I'm better off in England.' And then I would have continued interpreting for Reresby: 'He has probably killed before. Sometimes with his own hands, but far more often by using intrigue, subterfuge, defamation, poison, by dint of innuendo, laconic orders and condemnatory silences. He has doubtless spread outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague too, and then pretended to be either surprised or in the know already, depending on the circumstances and what seemed appropriate, depending on whether he wanted to leave his mask on or take it off. Take it off to instil fear, leave it on to instil confidence. Both things bring great benefits, they never fail.’

'So you have to be very careful with him, then,' Tupra would have said of Reresby. 'He's dangerous and, of course, to be feared.’

This was almost the conclusion reached by the somewhat vague report about me which I had discovered among some old files in the building with no name, an anonymous report, but which had referred to particular people, although I had no idea who they were (or perhaps they were merely archetypes) and was clearly addressed to someone: 'He may not care very much what happens to anyone…' it said in that English text someone had devoted to me. 'Things happen and he makes a mental note, not for any particular reason, usually without even feeling greatly concerned most of the time, still less implicated. Perhaps that is why he notices so many things. So few escape him that it's almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows. About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do.' And further on: 'He makes no use of his knowledge, it's very odd. But he has it. And if he did one day make use of it, he would be someone to be feared. He'd be pretty unforgiving, I think.' And it concluded, as if to emphasise this point: 'He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will. And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so. I don't think he's dangerous. But he is to be feared.’

The first statement might be true, that I rarely gave much importance to what was going on around me (perhaps that is why I had not grabbed Reresby's arm, when he was wielding the Landsknecht sword). The second was, I felt, an exaggeration: however much I might think I knew, I didn't know that much, there is always an enormous difference between those two things which are constantly being confused – thinking you know something and really knowing something. And who was T, who was 'you’, who was 'she' in that report? Was ‘I’ Tupra? Was 'you' Perez Nuix, or was she 'she'? It suddenly occurred to me that ‘I’, the person writing and pondering, the person who had observed me, must have known me for longer and in greater depth than my colleagues (although this was to forget for a moment what they did, what we did, with great arbitrariness and audacity). Was it Wheeler, was it Mrs Berry or was it even Toby Rylands himself who had written or dictated and prepared it years ago, just in case, at a time when I was still living in Oxford and wasn't even married and when it was unlikely that I would return to England once my university contract ran out? Did they really file away such useless stuff? Would he really have thought so far ahead? That would mean that the 'you' was his brother, Wheeler, whom I hardly knew during my stay there. And who could 'she' be but Clare Bayes, who was my only 'she' at the time. 'He knows more about us than we ourselves do.' Perhaps that was a way of referring to the Congregation, which is what the assembly of dons at the university call themselves, following the strong clerical tradition of the place, and of which both brothers were members. Peter had told me that Toby was the first person to talk to him about me and my supposed gift, which in fact was why we met: 'he aroused my curiosity. He said that you might perhaps be like us…" That was a different 'us', not an Oxonian one this time, he was referring to what both of them were or had been, interpreters of people or translators of lives. 'That's what he had given me to understand, and he confirmed it later when we happened to talk about the old group.' These had been his words while I was having breakfast, and later he had been even more explicit: 'Toby told me that he always admired the special gift you had for capturing the distinctive and even essential characteristics of friends and acquaintances, characteristics which they themselves had often not noticed or known about…" All these things were possible, it might even have been Rylands's voice from beyond the grave reporting on me to Wheeler or to Tupra himself, who was, after all, a former student of his, I mustn't forget that. (We never know to what extent and in what way we are observed by those who surround us, by those closest to us, our most loyal supporters, who appear to have long ago renounced objectivity and to take us for granted, or to consider us permanent or inviolable or non-negotiable, or to have bestowed on us their eternal clemency; we don't know what silent and constantly changing judgements they are making, our wives and our husbands, our parents and our children, our best friends: we consider them utterly and definitively safe, as if they were going to remain like that for ever, when it is clear that their faces change as ours do for them, that we might love them and end up hating them, that they might be unconditionally on our side until the day they turn against us and devote themselves to seeking ways to ruin us, wreck us, drown us and bring us pain. And even to expel us from the earth and from time itself, that is, to destroy us.)

As for the third statement, that I was not dangerous, but that I was to be feared, and that I was unforgiving (although this was offered only as an opinion), that seemed even more of an exaggeration. I'm not sure that anyone knows whether they are to be feared or not, unless they set out to be feared, unless they work at it, dominating minds and laying down rules or calling the shots, as part of a plan or strategy, or, when I think about it, as a fairly common way of going about the world. Otherwise, how can I put it, you never see yourself as someone to be feared because you never fear yourself. And of those who struggle hard to be dreaded and feared, only a few actually manage it. Tupra and Wheeler, each in his own way, were good examples of this, and if there were links between them and if there were, in turn, links between each of them and the teacher or the friend or the dead brother, if among those three there were similarities and bonds of character, or, rather, of capability, the shared gift which, according to their wise view, I also had, then it was not impossible that I too, however unintentionally, must also be feared, and the report was therefore right. I had already been less than honest with Tupra on one occasion, in my interpretation of Incompara: I had agreed to Perez Nuix's request, and so had kept silent or said too little or lied. And perhaps that alone made me someone to be feared or, which comes to the same thing, someone not to be trusted or, which is very similar, a traitor. (Asking favours is, after telling tales, the most common curse; let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, but only gives us orders.)

'Oh, yes,' I would have said to Tupra about Reresby. 'Even though he doesn't appear intimidating, not initially, or make you feel you should be on your guard, rather, he invites you to lower your sword and remove your helmet in order to be more easily taken captive by him, by his warm, enveloping attention, by those eyes of his which plumb the past and end up making the person they're looking at feel really important: even though, to begin with, despite being a native of the British Isles, he seems a cordial, smiling, openly friendly man, whose bland, ingenuous form of vanity proves not only inoffensive, but causes you to view him slightly ironically and with an almost instinctive fondness, he is, nevertheless, infinitely dangerous and, I believe, to be infinitely feared. He is certainly a man who takes it very badly if someone fails to do what he himself considers to be just, right, appropriate or good, especially when it's perfectly do-able.’

And Tupra would then have asked me the most difficult question of all: 'Do you think he could have killed you, Jack, there in the Disabled toilet, if you had grabbed his arm, if you had tried to prevent him decapitating that loudmouth? You believed he was going to kill De la Garza and that seemed to you wrong, very wrong. Even though you loathed the individual, it horrified you. Why didn't you stop him? Was it because you thought that if he was capable of killing one man, he was capable of killing two, and then you would all end up losing still more? Two deaths instead of one, and one of them yours? I mean, do you believe him capable of killing you, not a friend exactly, but someone in his charge, an employee, a hired man, a workmate, a colleague, an associate on the same side as him? Tell me what you think, tell me now, just say whatever comes into your head. Have the courage to see. Be irresponsible enough to see. This is the kind of thing that one believes one knows.’

And I would have succumbed to the habitual temptation of those first sessions when he used to question me about famous or unknown people scrutinised on video or in the flesh from the stationary train compartment or face to face, and often he would ask me very specific things about aspects of people that are usually impenetrable at first sight and even at last sight, even with those people to whom you are closest, for you can spend a lifetime by someone's side and watch them die in your arms, and, at the hour of their death, still not know what they were or were not capable of, and not even be sure of their true desires, if they were reasonably content in the knowledge that they had achieved such desires or if they continued to yearn for them throughout their entire existence, and that is what most frequently happens unless the person has no desires at all, which rarely occurs, some modest desire always slips in. (Yes, you can be convinced of something, but not know for certain.)

So I would have preferred to answer 'I don't know', the words no one ever wanted to hear and which were deemed almost unacceptable in the building with no name, in that new group, which, as I was becoming increasingly aware, was the impoverished heir of the old group, the words that never found favour, but met with scorn and blank rejection. And it wasn't just Tupra to whom they were unacceptable: they were unacceptable to Perez Nuix, Mulryan and Rendel as well, and probably to Branshaw and Jane Treves too, who although they were only occasional collaborators would doubtless not allow such words to be spoken by their lower-ranking narks and informers. 'Perhaps' was allowed – it had to be – but it made a bad impression, it wasn't much appreciated and, in the end, was ignored as if you had made no real contribution or suggestion at all, it had the same effect as a blank vote or an abstention, how can I put it, the attitude with which it was received almost never had a verbal correlative, but was equivalent to someone muttering: 'Well, that's a fat lot of use. Let's move on to the next subject'; and sometimes they would frown or pull an exasperated face. At that stage of my induced boldness and my carefully elaborated or developed powers of penetration, it would have been extraordinary for me to give such a reply to that final question about Reresby, shrouded, as he was, in his unending night: 'Perhaps. It's unlikely. It's not impossible. Who knows? I certainly don't.' And so I would have had to take a risk and, after considering for a moment, would at last have given my most sincerely felt verdict or wager, that is, the one I most believed to be true or, as people like to say, as I believed in my heart of hearts: 'I don't think it would have been easy for him, it would have been hard for him to do it, he would have tried to avoid it, that is, he would have given me at least one or two opportunities before unleashing the blow, the opportunity to desist. Perhaps a wound, a cut, a warning or two. But yes, I think he would have been capable of killing me if he had seen that I was determined and serious, or if it meant that I was stopping him doing what he had decided to do. He would have been capable of killing me because I was in his way and would not give up. Except that, as we have seen, he had not yet decided on an execution.’

'Do you mean you would have so enraged him that he would have lost control and lashed out murderously in a burst of impatience, pride or anger?' Tupra might have asked, perhaps offended by such a possibility.

'No, no,' I would have said. 'It would have been for the reason I gave before, because he takes it very badly if someone fails to do what, according to him, they should and could do. Something on which he has already reached a reasoned decision, based on his own or other people's reasons, which sometimes emerges after long reflection or machination and at others very quickly, in a flash, as if his all-seeing eyes saw at once what there was to see and knew at a glance what would happen, with just one clearly focused glance, with no going back. I don't know how to explain it: he could have killed me for reasons of discipline, which is something the world has relinquished; or out of determination or haste, or as part of a plan; because he was used to overcoming obstacles and I had suddenly, gratuitously, superfluously, become an unplanned and, from his point of view, unreasonable obstacle.' But then I would have had to give voice to a last-minute doubt, because it was a real doubt, and added: 'Or perhaps not, perhaps he wouldn't have been capable of killing me, despite everything, for one reason only: perhaps he likes me too much and has not yet tired of that feeling.’

When we got up and went to fetch the overcoats, the Manoias' and mine, Tupra went back to the Disabled toilet. He didn't tell me he was going to, but I saw him do so. He indicated to me that I should accompany Flavia to the cloakroom, he gave me the tickets for the coats, and I saw him and Manoia head off in that direction, go through the first door and, I assumed, through the second door too, but I have no idea what happened next. I didn't have the energy to become alarmed and angry all over again: what had happened was bad enough, and the fact that De la Garza had not died – I realised – only made things marginally better. I had seen the expression on his face, the look of a dead man, of someone who knows he is going to die and knows he is dead. There were three or four or five times when his heart could have burst. 'Reresby is probably going to kill him now,' I thought without believing it, 'he's still got his sword with him. Or perhaps he's merely going to check that De la Garza has obeyed his orders. Or perhaps he wants to show his work to Manoia, to give Manoia or himself that satisfaction. Or maybe it is Manoia who has demanded to see the results of his labours and to give or withhold his approval, a "Basta cos?' or a "Non mi basta". Or, more likely, this Sicilian, Neapolitan or Calabrian isn't going there to check anything, but is going to finish him off in person.' They did not take long, they were in and out in a trice, and when they rejoined us, our coats, Mrs Manoia's and mine, were still lying across the cloakroom counter. The fourth or the third possibilities were the most likely, either a case of accounts rendered or of pure vanity; I doubted it was the second possibility, Tupra knew as well as I did that De la Garza would not have moved an inch from his place on the floor. In that idiotic place, no one seemed to pay for anything, at least I didn't and I saw no one else pay either. Reresby must have an account there or else everything was always on the house or perhaps he was a member with a share. in the profits. Or, who knows, perhaps De la Garza had paid already behind our backs, before his last, interrupted dance, in order to seduce Flavia by that generous gesture. But that would have been most unlike him, nor would that dickhead have thought she was worth such a gesture.

The four of us got into the Aston Martin used on nights when the aim was to make a good impression or to toady up to someone, that night it had been the former; it was quite a tight fit, but we couldn't send the couple off in a taxi, we were the hosts, and, besides, it was only a short ride. We took them to their hotel, the opulent Ritz no less, near Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly, which I had visited so often following in the footsteps of past notables, Byron and Wellington, Wilde and Thackeray, Shaw and Chesterton; and not far from Heywood Hill, which I frequented more when I lived in Oxford, and not far either from the shops of Davidoff and Fox in St James's Street where Tupra probably bought his Rameses II and where I obtained my rather less magnificent Karelias cigarettes, from the Peloponnese.

When I said goodbye to Flavia, I had a presentiment – or was it prescience – that if she were still disappointed or disconcerted by the incident and the removal of the young man, after a while, in the darkness, when she and her husband were lying silently in their respective beds or together in their double bed, what she would remember most were the compliments paid to her during the evening and she would fall asleep feeling calmer and more contented than when she had woken up that morning; and this meant that she could still wake up the next day thinking: 'Last night, I was fine, but will I be all right today?' So at least, in that one respect, I had done my job and had, indirectly and extravagantly – the best way – given her a further extension. (How she would love to have known that she had been the cause of violence.) One more extension before the day on which her first thought would be: 'Last night, I wasn't fine, so what will happen today?' She kissed both Tupra and myself and went inside, not noticing the commissionaire who held the door open for her and not waiting for her husband to finish saying his goodbyes. He wouldn't tell her off for that, and she must have been eager to study her sfregio in a magnifying mirror and in a better light, and to start summoning up the more pleasant moments of that long night, when she had still been in such excellent spirits that she could urge me in mock-reproachful tones: 'Su, va, signer Deza, non sia cost antipatico. Mi dica qualcosa di carino, qualcosa di tenero. Una parolina e sara contenta… Anzi, me fara felice.’

As for Manoia, he shook Reresby's hand in what passed for effusiveness in such a mild, anodyne, Vaticanish man – the mildness, of course, was phoney – and I assumed that they had, in the end, reached some mutually convenient agreement, or had got from each other what each of them had asked for or proposed or had imposed by dint of some unspoken threat.

'It has been a great great great pleasure, Mr Reresby,' he said in his heavy Italian accent: he probably didn't know how else to translate 'grandissimo'. 'An evening full of incident but no less of a pleasure for that. Be so kind as to keep me informed.' In contrast, he was extremely cold with me, indeed, he left the hand I held out to him hanging in mid-air and merely inclined his head slightly, like an old-fashioned diplomat (and 'inclined' is something of an exaggeration). He did not even look at me, or, rather, I could not see his dull, zigzagging eyes behind his large, reflecting glasses. He pushed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb one last time, although they had not in fact slipped down, and said: 'Buona notte.’

Then he scuttled off after his wife, he probably found separation from her painful. He looked then more like a diligent civil servant than a rapist, not so much Mafia or Camorra or 'ndrangheta as Opus Dei or Christ's Legionnaires, or perhaps Sismi, whatever that was. But Flavia was nowhere to be seen in the lobby, not at least from the street. She must be in the lift, on her way up to their room, where she would lock herself in the bathroom for a while alone and thus postpone her husband's private reproaches. She would have warned him not to speak to her through the bathroom door, and in such matters he would doubtless have obeyed her.

He had not even added: 'Egrazie.' Nor was there any reason why he should, he was unaware of my growing anger or my unease. He may even have believed that I had been responsible for handing out the beating whose result must have pleased him when he visited the toilet to check. He may have taken me for a mere henchman, an underling, a flunkey, a thug. And the truth is that, at that moment, I did feel like a henchman and an underling, and even like a flunkey too: I had placed Tupra's victim precisely where he had wanted him to be. But not a heavy or a hitman or a goon, not a thug, because I hadn't laid a finger on anyone and had no intention of doing so. Just as I hoped no one would lay a finger on me, with or without the benefit of a sword, even with or without a comb.

25

Anything I sensed or knew about him and anything he knew or sensed about me – since you cannot, at will or with impunity, crouched or invisible like someone watching from a house or like a ghost, decipher another person who is, in turn, studying and deciphering you – came from observing someone who was also continually observing me, someone equipped with identical faculties and with the same or similar or possibly superior weapons; or perhaps all that can emerge from such a situation is a kind of sterile, reciprocal neutralisation, an impenetrability, a blockade, a cancelling out and a blindness – a sort of Cold War peace and detente – the mutual defusing of curses or gifts, paralysed and rendered useless when confronted by another mind that also suffers or enjoys them, if he and Wheeler were right and were not lying and I really did live up to their predictions. I was still so unconvinced of this that I did not quite believe it, despite Wheeler having persuaded me -invoking the authority of Rylands which there was now no way of refuting – that I did possess such a gift, and despite having grown bolder with each day spent on our one-eyed task in the building with no name, goaded by the faith of the others or by their demands: 'Tell me what else, don't stop, what else do you see, just say whatever comes into your head, don't delay or linger, the next to last thing we want is for you to keep quiet, to hesitate, to watch your back, we don't pay for your prudence, that isn't why we employ you, and the very last thing we want is for you to know nothing and to say nothing. Everything has its time to be believed, remember, so never keep silent, not even to save yourself, there's no room for that here and there's no cat either to get anyone's tongue, any of our five tongues, and you can't swallow it, not even if you wanted to choke yourself…' Or else: 'Why, you haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking. The really interesting and difficult thing is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking when you have the feeling that there is no more to think and no more to see, that to continue would be a waste of time. In that wasted time lies the truly important, at the point where you might say to yourself there can't be anything else. So tell me, what else, what else occurs to you, what else can you offer, what else have you got? Go on thinking, quickly now, don't stop, go on.' That was what my father used to say to us during any discussion, even from when we were very young.

And that possible situation of stalemate or of a draw and of resignation, of an absence of any duel, of holding back among one's peers, could happen not only with Tupra and, of course, with Wheeler, but with the other three, with young Perez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel, and who knows, even with Branshaw and Jane Treves, if it came to that. And possibly with Mrs Berry too.

When Manoia had disappeared (at a trot), Tupra looked at me very seriously, almost ominously, outside on the pavement by the lights of the Ritz Hotel, Ritz Restaurant, Ritz Club. Then he smiled broadly and said: 'Shall I give you a lift? It's Dorset Square, isn't it, or a square near there? In that area, anyway.’

I knew, for example, that he knew the precise details of my address and that all these approximations were a pretence, he would have memorised the floor and the number and the letter of my apartment, as he did with all his collaborators. I also knew that he wanted to give me a lift, for some reason that went beyond mere thoughtfulness. He wanted to talk, to comment on the events of the night. Or to warn me about something. Or to give me advice and perhaps instructions for other such occasions, after my baptism of fire, as a witness and in the presence of a sword. I didn't think he intended giving me an explanation or apologising, smoothing away any rough edges. But he wanted something. I assumed, therefore, that he would end up giving me a lift in his Aston Martin, velis nolis. And that if I declined his offer, he would insist. And that if I refused, he would insist further.

'There's no need, I'll take a taxi,' I replied, and he must have realised that my indignation had not abated.

The two of us were standing on the pavement outside the Ritz; he had left the car door open while we were saying our rapid farewells to the Catholic couple, the nearside door, the co-pilot's door, from which I had emerged. The commissionaire kept shifting from one foot to another, as if his feet were cold. He was keeping an urgent eye on us, we weren't supposed to park there, of course, or even to stop.

'Oh, come on, it's no bother, besides, this whole business has woken me up. It'll only take ten minutes; it's the least I can do, you deserve it. Come on, get in, we're in the way here.’

I would have taken a taxi and that would have been an end to it, but no taxis were passing at that moment, and the hotel taxi rank must have been elsewhere, I couldn't see it, or perhaps that was it, right there, and it was deserted. However, I knew now, very clearly, that he wanted to or, rather, intended to give me a lift.

The prospect didn't please me. I would have preferred to see no more of him that night and not to run the risk of confronting him and reproaching him and demanding an explanation, and it seemed to me impossible not to do this if we were to go in the car alone. The following morning – we would start late, that was the norm when we had had a late night because of work, and our timetable was, anyway, fairly flexible – I would feel calmer, I thought, and might have come to terms with it more. And although he knew exactly where I lived, I didn't much like the idea of his encroaching on my territory, not with my knowledge and in my company. When someone drops you off or follows, you or tails you or spies on you, and sees you open your front door as night fells or evening falls, they have seen much more than they appear to have seen or should have seen: they have seen you – how can I put it – in retreat, probably tired and even on the point of succumbing to passivity after the long day of pretence and effort and of false alert; they have, moreover, seen something that we repeat every day, perhaps the most everyday event of our external lives. People allow themselves to be accompanied or given lifts without a qualm, they even expect it and are grateful, as is often the case with women, but from then on it is as if someone knew where to find us – as if they knew it with their own eyes and had stored away the image; which is different from merely knowing something -and at approximately what time too. (Indeed, this is the first thing that burglars and kidnappers, rapists and murderers, spies and policemen find out and observe, what time you come home, when you are at home or when the house is empty, depending on their intentions and whether or not they would prefer you to be there or safely out of the way.) Yes, it makes a lot of difference being seen in our own territory or environs, even more so being seen going up the four or five steps that separate the street from our front door in London, opening the latter with our key, going in and closing it behind us with the involuntary slowness of the weary. After a couple of minutes, they will be able to identify our lights and our balconies, from the pavement below, or from behind the trees and the statue -except the window on that side has no balcony; and then they are better able to imagine or to guess at our domestic interiors, to know what kind of lighting we like, and even make out our silhouette if we go over to the window or observe us in our personal frame if we lean out to smoke a cigarette or to admire the twilight or to take the air or water the plants, or to see who it is ringing our doorbell oh a rainy night, who it is who has been following us for ages now, she and I both with umbrellas and she with a white dog, tis tis tis the dog went, its footsteps almost flying. And someone in the square, from a distance, or, more precisely, someone from one of the houses opposite, the house of the proud dancer, for example, could have watched the two of us while we were talking, while young Perez Nuix was asking me a bothersome and awkward favour, and was explaining why it is that our clients are no longer always the State, the army, the navy, a ministry or an embassy, New Scotland Yard or the judiciary, Parliament, the Bank of England, the Secret Service, MI6, MI5 or even Buckingham Palace, the Crown; and also while she was answering my numerous questions, sometimes without my even having to ask them and sometimes once I had asked them, 'What do you know about criminals?', 'Who are these "wet gamblers"?' and 'Who do I have to lie or keep silent about in order to please you?' and 'You still haven't asked me the favour, I still don't know what it is exactly' and 'How long have you been working here, how old were you when you started, who were you or what were you like before?' and 'Which private private individuals do you mean, and how is it that this time you know so much about this particular commission, its origin and provenance?' It could no longer be, nor was it, 'a moment', as she had announced after saying 'It's me' from down in the street. (Everything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carried within it its own prolongation and every phrase left a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too. Everything persists and continues on its own, even if you yourself decide to withdraw.)

And whenever I've brought a woman home, before, when I was single, or during that time in London (I mean brought someone back to spend the night or at least spend some time in my bed), I have always feared that she might later revisit the place uninvited and unsolicited: precisely because she had once set foot there and had seen me inside my apartment, seen how I lived and then stored away the image. And sometimes I have been quite right to fear this. And if someone has returned to this territory because I wanted them to and with my permission, or even because I summoned them and desired their presence, then, if we don't want them to move in, if we're not prepared for that, there is one room we must never allow them to enter, not even to keep us company while we fix a drink or prepare a snack, and that room is not the bedroom, where it doesn't even matter if they spend the night, nor the bathroom, a single man's bathroom is hardly a place to fire the imagination, but the kitchen, because if a woman enters the kitchen to continue the conversation while we're busy or to help us without our asking or suggesting that she does; if she follows us there on her own initiative, or almost instinctively, the way ducks do, she will probably want to stay by our side sine die – for a moment, she experiences or even smells what it would be like to live together – even though she may not know it and it is only her first visit, and even though she would genuinely deny it if someone were to predict it. This was perhaps one of the more trivial things learned from my gift or my curse, assuming I possessed either.

Tupra wasn't a woman and wasn't going to stay, he wasn't even coming upstairs to my apartment, he was merely going to drive into the square in his speedy Aston Martin and leave me at my door. Nevertheless, I didn't like the idea, because I could so easily imagine him afterwards, or on another night, another evening, another day or at dawn, spying on me from behind the trees or the statue, watching my window, or lying in wait in the hotel opposite, eyes trained on my lights or my window and on the possible woman who might have come to see me, although not necessarily to spend time in my bed. Waiting for her to leave. No wonder he had, from the first, struck me as a man who spent more time padding streets than carpets, more time out of the office than slaving away inside.

I opened the passenger door properly and got back into the car, without saying a word. He walked round to his side. I simply gave him my exact address, rather sarcastically I imagine, as if he were a taxi driver, and that was all. I knew I wouldn't be able to contain myself during the next few minutes that we would spend alone, but I wasn't sure how to begin, perhaps it would be best if I didn't rush things, despite my anger, by saying the first and possibly trivial words of recrimination that sprang to my lips, a mere detail in comparison with the real gravity of what had happened. I had not yet decided to leave this job for good, I needed to think about it more coolly and get myself used to the idea of going back to the BBC, with its ill-paid tedium. I waited for a few long seconds, with the car already moving off" and accelerating, to see if he would say something and thus give me an opening. 'He won't do that,' I thought, 'he's very good at withstanding silences, especially those he initiates.' He was the one who had wanted to give me a lift, but perhaps it was not in order to lecture me or to tell me off (it was my fault that we had got stuck with De la Garza), nor to clarify anything to me, but to hear me venting my rage in the heat of the moment, and thus gauge my capacity for anger. After a while, the silence became that of two people who do not wish to speak to each other.

'It's not exactly a cheap area where you live,' he said eventually; the silence, therefore, was not, I judged, one he had decided upon and chosen, and he was not so good at withstanding those: his permanent state of vehemence and tension demanded that he fill every moment with some palpable, audible, recognisable or computable content. The whole car, free now from the interference of Flavia's rival fragrance, smelled of his aftershave, it was as if the lotion impregnated his skin or as if he were constantly, secretly, applying more. I hadn't seen him do so in front of the cripples' mirror. I wound down my window slightly.

'No, it's not cheap, in fact, it's rather expensive,' I replied almost reluctantly. 'But I prefer to spend my money on that, I avoid squalor like the plague.' Suddenly I realised that Tupra wasn't wearing his overcoat and hadn't been for a while, not even draped over his shoulders or over his arm, I hadn't noticed when he had taken it off or where he had put it, it must have been when we left the disco, or perhaps, unbeknown to me, he had switched coats in the cloakroom. I turned my head to see if the coat was lying on the shelf behind the back seats, but I couldn't see it, so where was the wretched sword? 'What about that sword?' I said.

Tupra – he was no longer Reresby, even though the night was not yet over – took out a cigarette and lit it with the lighter in the car, illuminating for a moment his smooth cheeks the colour of beer, he looked as if he had just shaved. This time he did not offer me one of his precious Egyptian cigarettes. To underline this, I got out one of my own Peloponnese brand, but did not immediately light it.

'It's in the boot.’

'No, I mean what was it for? Why do you carry it with you? That was a monstrous, brutish thing to do, I thought you were really going to cut the guy's head off, I nearly died, you must be mad, I mean what is all this about, where do you think we are, you're nothing but an animal, and why did you need to…" It all came out in a rush, in a torrent, despite the fact that his answer ('It's in the boot') had been spoken in the same concluding or conclusive tone with which he had once answered me in his office ('Yes, I have') when I asked him if he had heard about the coup d'etat against Chavez in Venezuela (and had added: 'Anything else, Jack?'). My tone was not yet furious, but if I had continued my disjointed litany, that tone would inevitably have come to the fore, we tend to generate our own heat, everything happens inside our head, especially if there is a pause, a condensation, an enforced wait between the events and the explosion. Tupra seemed unaffected, as yet, by my bitter outburst – he did not appear to feel uncomfortable or even moderately upset – and he dammed the current, only barely begun, with a calm, tangential sentence which I only partly understood. Not understanding is what most effectively brings us up short, and the need to understand is more urgent and more potent than any other.

'I learned it from the Krays,' he said, using that plural which is redundant in Spanish when used with surnames or the names of families (the plural is indicated by the article, for example, 'los Manoia') and which more and more of our idiotic compatriots are transferring into our language out of pure copy-cat ignorance: they'll end up saying 'los Lopeces' or 'los Santistebanes' or 'los Mercaderes' – but I didn't understand the word at the time, nor did I imagine it as having a capital letter or even know that it was a surname, still less how it was written ('erase', 'craze', 'kreys', 'crays', 'crease', 'creys', or even 'krais'? Most Spaniards have difficulty distinguishing the different kinds of Y in English). That is why I abruptly stopped the deluge, at the same time as he stopped at a traffic light.

'From what?’

'From whom, you mean,' he replied. 'The Kray brothers, k-r-a-y.' And he spelled it out, as people so often do with English words and names. 'There's no reason why you should have heard of them, they were twins, Ronnie and Reggie, two pioneering gangsters from the 1950’s and 1960’s, they started out in the East End, they were from Bethnal Green or thereabouts; they took over the respective turfs of the Italians and the Maltese; they prospered and expanded and eventually ended up in prison at the end of the 1960’s, one died behind bars and I think the other one is still in there, he must be pretty old by now and he'll probably never be let out. They were the most violent and the most feared and the most vicious of the lot, sadists really, and they did little to curb their cruelty, and to start with, they used swords. Obviously, in their first attempts at punishment beatings and intimidation, they did so out of necessity, because they didn't have the money for more expensive weapons. They provoked terror with those swords, they would slice their victim's face from ear to ear with a single cut, or slit them down the spine or lower still. They'd sometimes make a second cut too, and it's said that they sliced one woman in four. There are a number of books about them, and there was a film as well, I thought you were a cinema-goer. Although it probably wasn't shown in Spain, too parochial to be of interest in other countries, a minor London story. I've seen it, though, and in one or two scenes they showed them sowing panic with their swords. I remember one scene took place in a pool hall. It wasn't a bad film, well documented, and the actors were twins too. Biographical cinema, they call it.' I had never heard that term. I'd heard of ‘biopic', but never 'biographical cinema', yet that was what he said.

He had defused me, at least for the moment. That was the way he usually talked, he went from one sentence to another and each one took him further away from whatever had given rise to the first, further away from the origin of the conversation or from his disquisition, if that was what it was. The origin in this case had been my anger, my resentment at the way he had involved me in his atrocities and made me witness them, in films and in novels anyone can get killed for no reason at all and no one so much as blinks, not the author or the characters or the viewers or the readers, it always seems so easy and so ordinary and so commonplace. But it isn't like that in real life, it isn't easy or ordinary or commonplace, not in the lives led by the vast – and I mean vast – majority of people, and in real life it causes enormous unease and alarm and sorrow, unimaginable to someone who has never been embroiled in such things. (As I believe I said before, it leaves you trembling and for a long time afterwards too. And then you feel depressed, and that lasts even longer.) Fortunately, we had not, as far as I knew, killed anyone, contrary to what had seemed likely when that sword first appeared (I might be the one to phone De la Garza later, behind Tupra's back – that would be best – to find out if the dickhead was still alive, and hadn't subsequently snuffed it because of some internal injury). After all, it had only been a few blows and shakings and a brief attempted drowning, pretty minor stuff really, very small beer in a film or in one of those slow-witted novel-clones about body-busting psychopaths or analytical, almost arithmetical, serial killers, there are dozens of them, in imitative Spain as well. And yet that trifling incident – at least compared with fictional versions – had left me feeling feverish and nauseous and suffering from intermittent cold sweats, they did not last long, but nor did they entirely go away either, and every time the car stopped at a red light and no air was coming in, the sweats would return and I would be drenched again in a matter of seconds. This was during the car journey, which was indeed brief, especially at night, for we had nearly reached my square already.

Feeling troubled, but, even more than that, feeling both irritable and curious, I had said nothing after his explanations about the Kray twins, and had to backtrack mentally to recover if not the origin of that comment, at least the near vicinity: the sword.

'What do you mean when you say you learned from them? Do you mean the business with the sword? And where did you learn it from, from books, from the film, or did you actually know the Krays?’

Tupra would have been born around 1950, slightly before or slightly after. He might have known them in the role of apprentice, beginner or acolyte, before their imprisonment, in some spheres of activity people do start very young, almost as children. He had mentioned Bethnal Green on other occasions, it had been the poorest part of London during the Victorian era, and its poverty had lasted much longer than that very long reign. For decades, it was home to an insane asylum, the Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum, and the district around Old Nichol Street known as 'Jago' – the name by which Tupra sometimes ironically called me – was notorious for its high levels of deprivation and of crime. If he did come from an area like that – but had also studied at Oxford, thanks perhaps to his gifts – it might explain why he was equally at home among low-lifes and in high society: the latter can be learned and is within the grasp of anyone; on the other hand, the only valid training for the former is total immersion. It was possible, given his age. Tupra, however, did not answer me directly, but then he rarely did.

'The film must be available on DVD or video. But it's pretty gloomy stuff, and fairly squalid. If, as you say, you tend to avoid squalor like the plague, you'd better not see it,' he said, as if he hadn't heard my questions or merely found them superfluous; and I noted, too, a slight hint of mockery, taking my aversion to squalor so literally. 'An actor I know well, an old friend of mine, had a bit part in it and, one night, when they were fuming, I helped him rehearse his scene. I think that's why I went to see it later on, he had picked up a lot of my style. In the scene, he was sharing an army cell with the twins, during their national service, when they were still very young; he was watching them and giving them a brief lesson on what they would have to do when they left the army and returned to civilian life. It's a very condensed lesson in how to get what you want, whenever, whatever. "I know your name. Kray," he said to them.' And this time Tupra pronounced the name in a cockney or perhaps it was merely an uneducated accent, that is, as if the word were 'cry', which, depending on the context, can mean 'a shout' or 'weeping'. As if, at that moment, he were himself playing the part: his bland, ingenuous vanity resurfacing. We had just driven into my secluded square, which was silent and tranquil now that night had fallen; he had parked opposite the trees and had immediately turned off the engine, but he wasn't going to let me get out at once, he still had things to say to me. And he had not yet revealed why he had wanted to give me a lift. – ' "And I think to myself, George, I think,"' – he continued his monologue, it was as if he had learned it by heart on that night, years ago, when he had rehearsed it with his friend the actor -' "these boys are special. These boys are a new kind. You've got it… And I can see it."' – That or something similar was also our motto at work, 'I can see it, I can see your face tomorrow' -' "And you've got to learn how to use it. Now these people, they don't like getting hurt. Not them or their property. Now these people out there who don't like to be hurt, pay other people not to hurt them. You know what I'm saying. 'Course you do. When you get out, you keep your eyes open. Watch out for the people who don't want to be hurt. Because you scare the shit out of me, boys. Wonderful.'" – That is what Tupra said in a fake accent which was perhaps his real accent, inside his fast car, in the lunar light of the street-lamps, sitting on my right, with his hands still resting on the motionless steering wheel, squeezing it or strangling it, he wasn't wearing gloves now, they were hidden away, dirty and sodden and wrapped in toilet paper, in his overcoat, along with the sword. – 'That's the thing, Jack. Fear,' he added, and those words still sounded as if they belonged to the role he had been imitating, or which he had usurped, or which perhaps he had stolen, or which he felt he had actually played through the intermediary of his friend. But it didn't really sound like his style, not the usual style of the Bertram Tupra I knew, more like the performance of a Shakespearian actor, although he did sound sombre, not squalid perhaps, but definitely sinister, ominous, so it was not surprising that along with the cold sweats that came and went and my general sense of fever, a shudder also ran through me.

26

My unease, however, had begun to subside since he had stopped the car. I could see the lights on in my apartment, I often left some or all of them on, to anyone watching from the building opposite or from the street, it would look as if I were always home, apart from when I was sleeping or on other occasions when I deliberately turned them off, to listen to music, for example.

'Are those lights yours?' asked Tupra, following my gaze, and he had to invade my space for a moment in order to lean across and peer through the open window on my side of the car, he liked to see things for himself, to scrutinise everything he saw with his insatiable eyes, blue or grey depending on the light.

'Yes, I don't like finding the apartment in darkness when I come home late.’

'It isn't because there's someone waiting for you upstairs, is it? And here I am monopolising your time down here.’

'No, no one's waiting for me, Bertram. You know I live alone.’

'You could have a visitor, a regular one, someone with a key. Perhaps an English girlfriend. Or would she have to be Spanish?’

'No one has my keys, Bertram, and tonight would hardly have been the best one to choose for a late-night tryst. When we go out with you, we never know what time we'll be back. We're not that late tonight, but if De la Garza had put up a fight or run away, or if we'd had to go to the police station for causing a public affray or for being in possession of some very original weapons, we would have been out until the small hours, or even until the morning.’

I had recovered my slightly reproachful tone and that may have reminded him that he, in turn, had something with which to reproach me, either in order to crush or quash my reproaches or because he had been keeping it back, and which was his original reason for wanting to give me a lift home. Yes, that was probably it, he did not usually allow faults to go unnoticed, or his own discontents.

'He couldn't have run away, nor could he have put up a fight, you know that,' he pointed out. 'But seeing as how you're calling me Bertram now, there's something I want to say.' – And his face hardened, I really must have done something to annoy him. 'Three times tonight, three times if not four, you called me Tupra when we were with that imbecile friend of yours. How could you, Jack? Where's your head?' And he even struck me on my forehead with the soft, lower portion of his palm, as if he were a gym teacher. 'I'm Reresby tonight, Jack, tonight that's the only name I have – I'd made that perfectly clear – under any circumstances. You know that full well, no matter what the situation, that's an immutable rule, unless, of course, I tell you otherwise. How could you have been so careless? That cretin heard my name. Other people could have heard it. He doesn't matter, he's not important, it makes no difference to him what my name is, besides, the last thing he'll want to do is remember me, my face or my name. He'll want to forget the whole dreadful nightmare, he won't be looking for revenge. But imagine if you'd let my name slip in front of Manoia, for whom I've always been Reresby, ever since he's known me. And we go back years, Jack. You can't just chuck all those years down the drain, simply because you throw a wobbly and get all hysterical and act as if you know what I might or might not be about to do, you can't possibly know that until you actually see me do it, and sometimes not even then, do you understand? I wouldn't have done it anyway.

Not that it's any business of yours. You'll be doing some travelling with me soon, Jack, abroad, and there'll probably be other trips too, if, that is, you stay with us and we continue working together. Regardless of what you see me doing, don't ever try to interfere again. It doesn't bear thinking about: with Manoia it's taken years to build the rather precarious, uncertain trust we've got and to see all that tossed overboard in a moment… How do you think someone would react to hearing a negotiator or a colleague suddenly being addressed by a different name from the one by which he or she has always known him?’

He was right in a way, indeed he was largely right: it had been a failure on my part. But it had happened when it had happened, each time that I believed he was about to kill the cretin, it wasn't exactly a normal situation. However, instead of immediately defending myself (to call him by the wrong name three times was quite a lot), I decided to ask a question of my own: 'So you've known each other for years, then, and yet he still thinks you're Reresby,' I said. 'I didn't know that, not that you ever explained. And may I ask what the Sismi is?’

Tupra laughed, on his own this time, a short, almost sarcastic laugh it seemed to me; or worse than that, condescending.

'You may,' he replied, 'although you may not need to. You'd probably find it in a dictionary, an Italian-English one, or Italian-Spanish in your case. It's the Italian Intelligence Service. The Military Security and Information Service, or something like that, it's an acronym, which in Italian gives you SISMI, s-i-s-m-i, there's no great mystery about it. You were paying more attention than I thought.’

'I see. Should I deduce, then, that Manoia works for them, that he's one of Berlusconi's vassals? Those poor Italian civil servants and soldiers, slaves to a man who has no taste in clothes at all. You can sense the sequins and the red satin jacket even when he's not wearing them. I wasn't paying much attention actually, it just happened to be a word I didn't know in any language.’

He didn't respond to my joke, but that wouldn't have been out of respect for that particular Prime Minister, I knew he shared my views, that Berlusconi was a man with no taste in clothes who was always implicitly wearing a sequinned satin jacket…

'That would be a deduction too far, Jack. So don't even ask. Mentioning the CIA or MI6 or MIS doesn't necessarily mean that you work for them, does it? In fact, those who do rarely talk about them at all, just as many mafiosi have banned the word "Mafia", they can't bear to hear it being bandied about by other people, by civilians shall we say. Besides, you're not paid to make deductions or to ask questions, so you can save yourself some work, which you're doing for free anyway. So, if ever you're tempted, just keep any deductions and questions to yourself. But don't piss me off, all right, don't bother me with them.’

He suddenly turned rude and unpleasant and said those last words with great disdain. It was easy enough for me to recover my own anger, I wouldn't get over those deep feelings of rage for a long time and I would never forget the whole awful experience, the feeling of wretchedness and outrage he had instilled in me, of impotence and menace and even of analogical fascism. If it was analogical: it had reminded me of that gang of Carlist militiamen or Falangists who had baited a man in a field outside Ronda, in the remote October or September of 1936. Tupra had pissed me off, and so I responded in kind.

'You were about to explain,' I said, 'about that wretched sword. About the Krays and all that. What was it you learned from them that was so important, how to be Zorro perhaps? Or d'Artagnan, Gladiator, Conan the Barbarian, Spartacus? Or Prince Valiant, the Seven Samurai, Aragorn, Scaramouche? Or even Darth Vader? Which was your chosen model?’

He rested his hands again on the immobile steering wheel. He turned towards me, to his left, and in the faint light – the lunar light – his eyes seemed black and opaque, as I had never seen them before; or was it the dominant effect of his eyelashes, long and dense enough to be the envy of any woman and to be considered highly suspect by any man? Although I'm a man too, and my lashes are neither short nor sparse. He laughed briefly, although more wholeheartedly this time, my remark had amused him. Once again I had amused him, and that is the best safe-conduct pass you can have in order to step free from any situation (not where grudges or revenge are involved, but certainly from angry reprisals and threats, which is no small thing).

'Oh, you can laugh now, Iago,' he said mockingly, he always called me that when he wanted to annoy me. And then he continued in a more serious vein. 'You can laugh now, but an hour ago, when I had that sword in my hand, you were as petrified as Garza was' – he pronounced this in the English fashion, 'gaatsa' – 'and if I were to get out of the car now, go to the boot and take out that sword, you would be terrified all over again; and if I threatened you with it, you would race off to your front door, cursing the existence of keys, which have to be taken out of your pocket and fitted into that tiny slot, not so easy to do when your life depends on it and when you're desperate and can't catch your breath. You would never get the key in the lock in time. I would have caught up with you before you managed to open it. Or if you had managed to unlock it, leaving me outside with my sword, I would have jammed the blade in the crack so you couldn't slam the door shut. Even dreams know that your pursuer usually catches up with you, and they've known it since the Iliad.' – He paused for a moment and glanced across at my front door, he pointed at it as if we could both see, in split-screen image, the hypothetical scene he was describing, a man running frantically to the door, taking the steps in one bound and fumbling with the key in the lock, completely panic-stricken; and behind him the other man holding a double-edged 'cat-gutter', wielding a Landsknecht sword. If I shuddered, I tried to conceal the fact. I was disconcerted by his mention of the Iliad. – 'It's fear, Jack. Fear. I told you once that fear is the greatest force that exists, as long as you can adapt to it, and feel at home and live on good terms with it. Then you can benefit from it and use it to your own advantage, and carry out exploits never dreamed of even in the most fatuous of dreams, you can fight with great courage or resist and even overcome someone stronger than yourself. As I said, mothers on the front line with their children nearby would make the best combatants in any battle. That is why you have to be so careful with the fear you provoke, because it could turn back on you. The fear you provoke has to be so terrible that there is no chance of the other person absorbing it or incorporating it, adapting to it or finding it bearable, there must be no point at which the fear stabilises, no pause so that the person can get used to it, not even for a second, or can assimilate and make room for it and thus, for a moment, cease the exhausting effort involved in fending it off. That is what paralyses and erodes and absorbs all their energy – incomprehension, incredulity, denial, struggle. And if the struggle (which is pointless anyway) stops, then the person's strength returns in spades. No one thinks they are going to die, not even in the most adverse of situations, not even in the bleakest of circumstances, not even when confronted by death's irrefutable imminence. Therefore, the fear you provoke or instil cannot be a known or even an imaginable fear. If it's a conventional, predictable or, how can I put it, common-or-garden fear, the person feeling the fear will be capable of understanding it, of gaining time and, eventually, getting used to it, and perhaps, afterwards, even being able to tackle it. He won't stop feeling the fear, he won't lose it, that's not the point: that fear will remain active, plaguing and tormenting him, but he will be able, partly, to come to terms with it, he will be able to reposition himself and to reflect; and when you're in the grip of fear you think very quickly, the imagination grows keener and solutions appear, whether realisable or not, whether doomed to failure or not, but you at least catch glimpses of solutions, the mind becomes alert and with it everything else. You leap a wall that would have seemed insurmountable at any other time, or you run for hours as you make your escape when, before, you would have said you didn't have enough puff to run for the bus. Or you begin to speak, to ask questions, to discuss and to argue, to divert the person threatening you and to see if you can dissuade them, when all your life you have been at a loss for words and have never even been able to catch the eye of a waiter at a bar to place your order. People become transformed by fear if you allow time for the quick inventiveness of survival to prevail in them, rather than mere instinct.’

And Tupra fell silent, he was definitely not Reresby any more, his lecture was over, he must have studied fear first hand, must have experienced and lived it as well, presumably because he had made great use of it during his life, here and there, who knows, on his missions to various countries or on field trips, there are insurrectionists everywhere especially if one is working for an old empire that is in ruins and in retreat, which leaves behind it only a few sturdy outposts to take stock and to transfer powers and to organise not entirely dishonourable departures, future business deals and belated withdrawals. The dark thought crossed my mind that he might have been a torturer himself and witnessed as much panic as Orlov and Bielov and Contreras, who, in their day, had tortured Andres Nin (the first man's real name was Nikolski and the third was really Vidali and later, in America, Sormenti: Tupra had his aliases too) in a cellar or a barracks or a house or a prison or a hotel in the Russian colony in Alcala de Henares, the town where Cervantes had been born; one sombre and unspecified informant suggested that these three comrades had flayed him alive; but this version or idea filled me with such fear that I flatly rejected it for no other reason than my own incredulity or my struggle against that fear, just as I immediately rejected this dark thought about my comrade, Tupra; after all, I saw Tupra nearly every day, on workdays anyway, during that London time of mine.

He suddenly fell silent, as if he had run out of verbal rather than respiratory puff, his hands still on the wheel, as if he were a child playing in a pretend car or in his father's stationary, immobilised car. He was staring absently into space, at nothing in particular, he was certainly not seeing what his eyes were seeing, my front door, my square, the trees, the offices, the hotel, the street-lamps, the statue, or the scene that he had just invented, in which he was pursuing me in order to kill me – it was odd to see those eyes at rest, so to speak, eyes that were normally so aware and never idle – or the lights in my dancer-neighbour's windows, Tupra knew nothing of his existence, nor that he was my entertainment when I was alone at home, tired or depressed or nostalgic, and sometimes also a solace, the happy, carefree dancer with his two women, and an extra one now and then. The square was empty during almost all of this time, only the occasional car or passer-by, several minutes apart; and because it was a secluded place, a semi-oasis, the footsteps of the latter rang out loudly on the pavement. Some noticed this and tried to silence them, to muffle them, as if they suddenly missed having a carpet beneath their indiscreet feet. Not the cars though, cars are always inconsiderate everywhere. They didn't even slow down. Nor had we, in the Aston Martin, when we drove into the square.

'Anyway,' I said, because, like Wheeler and like Tupra too, I did not let go of my prey if I was interested in what I was being told. 'You were talking about your apprenticeship, about the sword.' I had dropped the wounding tone, or perhaps it had merely been one of friendly mockery.

He immediately emerged from his absent state, lit another Rameses II and this time he did offer me the open, predominantly red, Pharaonic packet; he did so mechanically, without, I think, realising that he had not done so before. We had carefully extinguished our previous cigarettes in the ashtray; in London people don't throw matches or cigarette ends out of the car window. He began talking again with the same vigour and conviction. He had clearly studied and weighed his methods, he had pondered them or else experts had pondered them for him and he had adopted them after listening to their explanations and fully conscious of the implications; almost nothing happened by chance, nothing was mere outlandish caprice, judging by what he said next (and for once he did not change the subject from sentence to sentence): 'Exactly. If I draw a gun or a knife on someone, they're bound to be scared, but only in a conventional, or, as I said, common-or-garden way, yes, perhaps that's the word. Because it's the norm these days and has been for a couple of centuries, quite ancient really. If someone mugs us or kidnaps us, if they threaten us in order to make us talk or want to force us to do something or to teach us a lesson, in almost every case they will do so at gunpoint or knifepoint: those are the easiest weapons to get hold of and, besides, they're simple to use and practical, they fit in the pocket and can be pulled out quickly with one hand, and they're what we expect the other person to be carrying when we sense that something bad is going to happen. When, for example, we come across a gang of football hooligans or skinheads and we just have time to wonder whether or not to cross over to the other side of the road, almost always too late, if they've already seen us, it's not usually worth it and may even make matters worse. Or if someone is following us with suspicious intent, for example, the woman who suspects she's going to be raped both fears and assumes that the point of a knife will be pressed to her chest or her throat; the man who is home when his house is broken into expects the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple or the back of his neck, it's normal and predictable and, in a way, you get used to the idea. Getting used to the idea may not help much, but it does to some extent, because, almost unwittingly, you're already thinking about ways of escaping or of limiting the damage, even though, given the circumstances, such thoughts are pure fantasy; but at least you're one step ahead, and, more importantly, you're not quite so terrified or so surprised, or, rather, you're surprised to find yourself in this predicament because you never thought such a thing could possibly happen to you, that you weren't even in the running, our optimism is infinite when, confronted by someone else's misfortune, even that of someone close, you can still say to yourself after all the words of condolence and lamentation: "It's not me, it didn't happen to me." Nowadays, there are gangs, you'll have read about them in the press, most of them from Eastern Europe, Albanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovans, Poles, who, without warning, burst into people's houses carrying machine guns, they kick the door down and make everyone lie on the floor and start beating them with their machine-gun butts, all very brutal, and sometimes they go too far and kill someone. The old KGB techniques, or those of the even older NKVD, and not so very different from the Gestapo's techniques.' – 'Because they knew nothing of the machinations of Orlov and his boys at the NKVD': this quote surfaced in my memory, I had read it in Wheeler's house, during my long night of research into the mysterious disappearance of Nin. – 'That already creates more fear because it's so unexpected, and the violence is seen at once as being totally out of proportion to that required to subdue and rob an ordinary, peace-loving family, who are not going to put up any resistance; and so they start to fear that something even more disproportionate might happen. I believe that in Spain, as well as these ungrateful Slavs, there are Colombians and Peruvians who do the same, the fact that they speak the same language helps enormously, well, it's what tempts them over there in the first place, and since language isn't a problem for them in your country, they're unlikely to move elsewhere. So at least here we're pretty safe from them for the moment. We get Arabs, Chinese, Rastas and Pakistanis, but that's another matter. But the fear provoked by a machine gun is still not that terrible, not what I would call terrible, the kind of fear that cancels out and overwhelms everything, leaving no room to think about anything but that, about the fear filling your whole being. Because a machine gun is difficult to use, and they won't use it if they can avoid it. It's noisy and flamboyant, there's a lot of vibration and the recoil is so powerful that it shakes you and tires you, and the gun's very hard to conceal if you have to run away. Its function, then, is more to intimidate than anything else, and the victim knows or senses this from the very first moment and he takes comfort in that, and consoles himself thinking that his assailants will only fire if things start to go badly wrong for them.' Tupra paused again, only very briefly this time, as if to start a new paragraph, but not a new chapter. – 'A sword, on the other hand,' he went on. 'Oh, you can laugh now and say it's theatrical or anachronistic or even rusty, but you didn't see the look on your face when you saw that sword in my hands. You saw the look on the monkey's face, though, and that should give you an idea.' – He used the word 'monkey' to describe De la Garza, and I translated this to myself as macaco, although the English equivalent macaque would sound ludicrous as an insult. – 'It's probably the weapon that instils the most fear in people, precisely because it seems so out of place in a day and age when hand-to-hand fighting barely exists, or only as some curious sport. They hurl bombs and projectiles from unimaginable distances, it's as if the explosives simply fell from the skies, often you don't see the planes or even hear them, perhaps they don't have a pilot at all, or so it seems to the populations below. They suffer the appalling consequences, but rarely see who caused them, that's been the tendency ever since the invention of the crossbow, which Richard the Lionheart and others considered dishonourable, because it gave too much of an advantage to the crossbowman and exposed him to so little risk, much less than with the ordinary longbow, because that, at least, required a greater degree of skill and effort and didn't use any kind of mechanism, and it reached – if I can put it like this – it reached only as far as a man's arm, never much further or much quicker or with much more precision. For centuries now, everything has been tending towards the concealment and anonymity of the person doing the killing, and towards dishonour; and that is why the sword seems to be more in earnest than any other weapon. It seems impossible to wield it in vain; it seems impossible to do anything else but use it, and to use it immediately.’

And it was true that I had wondered about it when I saw it in his hand – or perhaps that was later on, when I finally got home (not then, not during that car journey or while sitting in the car) and it took me so long to get to sleep (therefore, he may have formulated it for me, may have put it into words for me in the car and my thought might have been a mere echo of those words) – and I had done so in these terms: 'Where did that come from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out-of-keeping with these times, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just intense fear, but an atavistic fear, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that has caused the most deaths throughout most centuries; that it has killed at close quarters and face to face." Earlier, Tupra had alluded to Homer and now he was talking about the second Plantagenet king and the first of the Richards, born in Oxford of all places, although it is highly unlikely that he knew any English, even broken English, and during the ten years of his reign, he spent, altogether, no more than six months in the country of that language, the rest of the time being taken up with the Third Crusade or with familial wars in France, where he was killed as he was besieging Chalus in 1199 by – to add insult to injury – an arrow from a crossbow, as I was able to confirm later on in a couple of history books: another British foreigner, yet another bogus Englishman and another one who had his aliases: not just the famous 'Lionheart', but also 'Yea and Nay', which, understandably enough, tends to be forgotten; well, Richard Yea and Nay sounds rather comical, even if he was called that because of his sudden and continual changes of mind and plan, even in the midst of battle (he must have been infuriating, that cruel king). I inevitably found these cultural references coming from Tupra rather surprising, in normal conversation he didn't usually make such references, either historical or literary, although perhaps it was because there was no need for them at work: we were always talking about other people, most of whom were present and none of whom was fictitious, although the majority of them were strangers to me. Perhaps, for professional motives, he knew the entire history of weapons. Or, more likely, it was because he had studied at Oxford and been a disciple of Toby Rylands, eminent emeritus professor of English Language and Literature, and was more educated than he seemed. But sometimes I wondered whether Rylands's tutorship had taken place more within the group with no name, which provided a more practical training, rather than at the renowned university to which we had all belonged. Even I had belonged to it during those two now distant years of which barely a trace remained, as I had confidently predicted when I still lived there, conscious that I was just passing through and would leave no mark. Now, in this other London time, I thought the same sometimes, only more so, despite never being very clear as to where I would go if I left or whether I would return: 'When I leave here, when I return to Spain, my life during these real days – and some pass very slowly – will become a "Yea and Nay" or like a banal dream, and none of it will be of any importance, not even the gravest events, not even that temptation or that sense of panic, not even the feelings of disgust or embarrassment that I myself provoke, not even the sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. A day will have arrived when I will have said a farewell to these days perhaps similar to that written by Cervantes and of which I tried to remind Wheeler, although without entirely daring to, in his garden by the river. Doubtless a less cheerful farewell, but definitely more relieved. For example: "Farewell, laughter and farewell, insults. I will not see you again, nor will you see me. And farewell, passion; farewell, memories."'

27

'What did you study at Oxford, Bertram?' I suddenly asked him, although it was probably not the best moment, especially when there had been (and would be) so many other moments, during our sessions and dialogues and pauses to ponder or consider, and idle moments too, in order to find this out. The fact is that I didn't know because I had never got as far as asking him, and in England that is always one of the first things one asks in order to break the ice between strangers and even between colleagues. That was how it was whenever I met some Oxford don outside of our teaching or administrative activities, having a coffee in the Senior Common Room at the Taylorian, between classes, or in between lectures or seminars; or at one of the hellish high tables held by one of the thirty-nine colleges (elevated and eternal tables), in which one might find oneself seated and immobile for several hours beside a young economist whose sole topic of conversation was a peculiar cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767 and on which he had written his thesis (this is a true example from my previous Oxford experience, the name of this glorious individual was Halliwell), as I found out by politely asking the simultaneously fetal and inaugural phrase: 'What's your field?', literally, in Spanish, '¿Cual es su campo?', but meaning 'What's your specialty?' or 'What do you do?', although in Oxford it could also mean 'What do you teach?' However, none of these variants was an appropriate way of interrupting Tupra in the middle of a discussion about swords.

If I still remember even Halliwell, obese and with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, how could I not remember all the other people from then, the old, time-travelling porter Will with his clear, limpid eyes, and Alec Dewar – the Butcher, the Ripper, the Inquisitor or the Hammer – a selfless Dickensian teacher beneath his proud facade and his unjustified nicknames; or the inebriated Lord Rymer – the Flask – who had since reappeared with his all too justified nickname, and Rook, the gossipy expert in Slavonic languages, a man with a large head and a slender body – an egghead, in short – who claimed to have been friends with Nabokov and who had, for about a thousand years, been translating Anna Karenina as it should be translated, although with no visible result; the Alabasters, who used to spy on me with bated breath via the closed-circuit television in their second-hand bookshop when I went down to their basement to snoop around in the dust; and the head of my department, Aidan Kavanagh, whom I saw once wearing a waistcoat, as my boss Tupra always did, except that Kavanagh wasn't wearing a shirt underneath his or only some strange sleeveless variety; the fat girl called Muriel – who wasn't really fat – with whom I spent one night, and one night only, and who told me that she lived between the rivers Windrush and Evenlode, in an area which was once a forest, Wychwood Forest; the gypsy florist, Jane, with her high boots, and Alan Marriott with his docile, three-legged dog, who had visited me with his master one morning, just as, many years afterwards, late one night, the white pointer had visited me with his mistress, Perez Nuix; my best friend Cromer-Blake, my guide in the city and who had sometimes been both father- and mother-figure to me, alternating between health and sickness during my time there and dead four months after my departure (I still have his diaries); and the great authority Toby Rylands so like Wheeler but, as far as I knew then, unrelated, and who might well have got me into all this by means of a report written then and filed away just in case; the young woman with the rhythmic, well-shod feet and perfectly turned ankles, to whom I had not dared to speak with sufficient emotion, the emotion I felt in her presence, on a late-night train journey from Didcot station, and Clare Bayes, my lover. All those people existed in my life before Luisa, whom I met only on my return. While I might not have left any mark on Oxford, my time there had certainly left a mark on me. As this other period of London solitude would too, even if, one day, it appeared to me like a daydream never lived and shorn of consequences, and I could misquote those lines from Milton each morning: 'I wak'd, time fled, and day brought back my day.’

No, it wasn't at all certain that what was happening now did not count, while I was working in a foreign country and in a building with no name and for whom I did not know, or only sometimes, as young Perez Nuix had explained to me in my apartment. And at the same time as I asked Tupra that question in the car, about what he had studied at Oxford, I glanced up at my illuminated window behind which I was already yearning to be: it would have looked just like that while she was standing in the street wondering whether or not to ring the bell, and afterwards too, while she was inside on that night of heavy, steady, sustained rain, talking and even lecturing, and asking me for that awkward favour which I finally granted a few days later, and which now made me feel in silent debt to Tupra – or perhaps it was a secret, guilty debt – and which somewhat checked my anger or near rage, for I could still not come to terms with what Reresby had or hadn't done – what I had thought he would do – in that gleaming toilet for cripples, to use his term, in which he might, who knows, have left another cripple, and in which he had been about to leave a corpse, before my very eyes, a man decapitated in my presence.

'I read medieval history, in the Modern History department,' he replied. 'But I've never done anything with it, professionally, that is. Why do you ask?’

I had time to think, although not in as clearly articulated a form as follows here: 'What a shame I didn't know before. Instead of beating De la Garza up, he could have made friends with him, even joined forces, De la Garza being such a connoisseur of chic medieval literary fantasy. He might at least have shown him more mercy.’

What I actually said was this: 'Oh, so it's a kind of nostalgic throwback, the sword, I mean. Perhaps a youthful fantasy.’

He did not initially appreciate my irony, he pulled a face and I heard an impatient tut-tutting: after my triple blunder with his name, he must consider that I was in no position to criticise him or to make derisive comments.

'Possibly. I always liked medieval history, and the military history that I studied later on,' he replied calmly, he was, after all, a man capable of seeing the funny side of things where there was one. 'But never dismiss ideas born of the imagination, Jack, you only get to them after much thought, much reflection and study, and considerable boldness. They're not within the grasp of just anyone, only those of us who see and who keep looking.' – 'It's a very rare gift indeed nowadays, and becoming rarer,' Wheeler had explained to me over breakfast, 'the gift of being able to see straight through people, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad, without effort.' – 'Like you and me, like Patricia and Peter.' – And Peter had added: 'That is the way, in which according to Toby, you might be like us, Jacobo, and now I think he was right. We could both see through people like that. Seeing was our gift, and we placed it at the service of others. And I can still see.' – Patricia, that is how Tupra referred to young Perez Nuix, by her first name, or else by the diminutive form Pat, just as Wheeler would say Val sometimes, when he recalled his wife Valerie, whose early death he had preferred not to tell me about, as yet ('Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right,' he had said almost in a whisper, as if he were asking me a favour, that of allowing him to remain silent). This was not the same as when Tupra or Mrs Berry called me Jack, that was because it was easier for them and a phonetic approximation of my real name Jacques, more than Jacobo and Jaime, although no one ever used it now. And then Tupra went on and concluded his explanation: 'That atavistic fear is so powerful, Jack, that if ever one of our contemporaries finds a sword hovering above his head or pointing at his chest, the moment the sword disappears from view and returns to its scabbard, he'll feel so grateful that anything that happens to him afterwards will seem good and he will accept it without resistance, not just without defending himself, but with immense relief, almost with gratitude, because he will have surrendered even before the first blow was struck, having given himself up for dead. And he will do whatever you want him to do: he will betray, denounce, confess the truth or invent a lie, he will undo what has been done and retract what has been said, he will disown his children, beg forgiveness, pay whatever is asked, allow himself to be mistreated and accept his punishment without a murmur. Without opposition and without haggling. Because, as I said, people today can only conceive of the sword as a weapon to be used, not merely brandished as a threat or as a way of keeping someone quiet. That's what guns are for or even knives, no one would bother taking up such an awkward object, such an encumbrance, if he were not going to make use of it, at least that is what anyone who sees a sword raised against them will believe. That is why the Krays provoked such fear, right from the very start, even when they lacked power or influence and were mere beginners, upstarts: because they would turn up with their sabres and they would use them too. They would cut and slash, you bet they did, and in London too. And that panic continued and remained for ever, it became legendary the panic they spread with that archaic brand of violence from a more barbarous age. Admit it, Jack, even you breathed more easily when I put the sword away. And everything after that seems almost welcome, isn't that right, Jack? Admit it.’

I had to admit he was right, but I did not do so out loud. The fact that he should boast about it struck me as intolerable.

'And what was the point this time, Bertram?' I asked instead. 'You didn't use it, damn it; fortunately, you only pretended you were going to use it, but I don't know what good it did you, taking the sword out and terrifying us both with it or with everything that came afterwards. I didn't notice you taking advantage of De la Garza's fear to interrogate him or to get something out of him, or to demand an apology, or to force him to undo something he had done or to get money out of him. What exactly were you after, may I ask? To frighten me? If so, what you did was gratuitous and entirely unnecessary. It was absolutely outrageous. There was no need for you to produce a double-edged Landsknecht sword. Nor to half drown him in the toilet. Nor to hurl him against that bar. Unless all you wanted was to punish him because he had got in your way. I agree the man is an arsehole, but he's completely harmless. You can't just go around beating people up, killing them. Especially not if you're going to involve me.’

For a moment Tupra again invaded my side of the car with his curly hair, to look up at the window as I had done, perhaps he wanted to make sure that no figure had since appeared there, silhouetted against the light.

'That isn't what I do,' he said. 'And I see you know about swords. You're quite right, it is a Landsknecht Or Katzbalger, a genuine one,' he added pedantically and with a touch of pride. 'But why, according to you, can't one do that?’

His question caught me off guard, so much so that I did not, for a moment, know what he was talking about, even though I had just said what it was that could not be done.

'Why can't one do what?’

'Why can't one go around beating up people and killing them? That's what you said.’

'What do you mean, "why"?’

My confusion was growing; sometimes we don't have an answer to the most obvious of questions. They seem so obvious that we take them for granted, and stop thinking about them, still less questioning them, and so literally decades pass without our giving them a thought, however paltry or vague. Why, in my opinion, can't one go around killing people, that was the idiotic question Tupra was asking me. And I had no answer to this idiotic question, or only equally idiotic, puerile answers inherited but never thought through: because it's not right, because it's immoral, because it's against the law, because you can get sent to prison, or in some countries to the gallows, because you should not do unto others what you would not have done unto you, because it's a crime, because it's a sin, because it's bad. He was clearly asking me something that went beyond all that. He did not reply at once. He saw that I did not know what to say, or at least not immediately. He took out another Rameses II, and did not offer me one this time, two in a row would have seemed to him an extravagance; he put it to his lips, but did not light it yet, instead, he turned the ignition key and started the engine. I did not for a second think that he was going to ask me to get out, to dismiss me and drive off. He did not let go of his prey either, whether dialectical or otherwise.

'I hope there really isn't anyone waiting for you up there, I hope so for her sake,' he said, and pointed up at the car roof, then glanced at his watch; in an almost reflective, mimetic response, I looked at mine too: no, it wasn't very late, despite everything, not even for London, and in Madrid the night, any night, would just be getting into its stride, the partying would be at its height – 'because it's not yet time for you to go up and see her. Anyway, it's not that late, and you can have tomorrow off if you want. But we need to talk a bit more about all this, I can see that you've taken it all very much to heart, too much so really. I'll explain to you why it was necessary. We're going to go to my place for a while, it won't take more than an hour or an hour and a half. I want to show you some videos that I keep there rather than at the office, they're not for just anyone's eyes. And I'll tell you a couple of stories, one from medieval times in fact. I'll tell you about Constantinople, for example. Perhaps a bit about Tangiers as well, not quite so remote, although still a few centuries ago. And while we're driving, think a bit more about what you said, so that you can explain to me why one can't beat people up or kill them.’

I had said nothing since my failure to find an answer to his idiotic question. Or perhaps it wasn't so very idiotic and there was no easy answer. I didn't feel I could say no. And, besides, it made no sense, after all we had already been through that night.

'I know what happened in Constantinople in 1453,' I said, for lack of anything else to say. Many years ago, before I went to live in Oxford, I had read a marvellous book, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 by Sir Steven Runciman, who was not from Oxford, but from Cambridge. Nor was it true that I knew what had happened, I couldn't remember, you read and learn and immediately forget, if you don't continue reading, if you don't continue thinking.

'I see,' replied Tupra. 'But I'll tell you a bit about what happened shortly before as well.’

He drove around the square in order to leave and head north. I didn't know where he lived. 'Perhaps in Hampstead,' I thought. I looked back once more at the lights in my windows, and at those of the trusting dancer. Tupra caught these two glances out of the corner of his eye. Everything was still lit, the large dancing windows, my silent window. Mine would have to remain silent, and would stay like that until I returned, with Tupra you could never tell what time you would be back. And however much he insisted, there was, fortunately, no one waiting for me in my apartment, no one to turn off any lights in my absence, while I was not there. No one had my keys and no one was ever waiting for me.