Your Face Tomorrow 2 Page 13

  But what flashed into my mind was that other bloodstain, the one I saw on the stairs in Wheeler's house, the one I had painstakingly cleaned up in the middle of the night that I spent there, well, in the early hours of Sunday morning really, but which was, as far as I was concerned, still Saturday night, given that, for me, the day had been lengthened out by books and given that I had still not gone to bed, I finally went to sleep, soothed or lulled by the murmurings of the river, so late or so early that I could already see a little light in the sky. I still did not know from whom or what it had come, that blood, for the following day over lunch I had finally asked Peter and Mrs Berry, but without success: I found their reply so disappointing that I began to doubt the existence of the large drop whose rim had resisted me the night before, reluctant to disappear and to be erased (and I had, up to a point, already foreseen that future uncertainty: one can always doubt anything that ceases and does not persist, which means that one is always in a state of doubt about everything, because nothing is ever constantly present, apart from the stars and the seasons, that is, but nothing human); and so, in a way, the same thing happened to me as happened to Comendador, who distrusted the reality of the various stains which, in his panic, he had seen in that apartment. But I felt no panic when I discovered mine, at the top of the first flight of Wheeler's stairs, although I had been drinking and was slightly feverish with words and my long hours of wakefulness, with my many tangential night-time readings, all interleaved with memories of my father, more his than mine: 'an assiduous collaborator on the Moscow newspaper, Pravda; contact, willing companion, interpreter and guide in Spain to the bandit Dean of Canterbury; and privy to the whole web of red propaganda throughout the conflict', he had been accused of all those things, accusations dreamed up by his best friend whose face he had failed to recognise, the face of a tomorrow that arrived all too soon, almost when it was still today. But now they were my memories too, for sometimes we have memories that are only heard or inherited. Like the legs of my fairy-tale princess lined up with another six or thirteen or twenty pairs.

  I had to leave that busy and entirely inappropriate toilet, it was, after all, not my toilet, a long queue would be forming outside, I had been in there for a couple of minutes now, during which time no one had entered or left, the women inside being occupied, while those behind me, in the area by the mirrors, were by now, most of them, laughing openly at my exchange of words with the seated Caribbean woman - Cuban, Puerto Rican, Nicaraguan, or from further south, Colombian or Venezuelan or even Brazilian; or Spanish, that, too, was a possibility. But I could not possibly fail to draw the stain to the attention of this young woman with the powerful thighs which I knew then I would think about later, on other nights or days. She had very almond-shaped eyes, that much I did have time to see, although not the colour, and a rather broad nose, or perhaps her nostrils were flared or it was a combination of both things, she struck me as one of those beauties who look as if they had just breathed out, it's a common look in all races now, perhaps it's one of the more sought-after types of nose among women who go in for such operations, almost no one is content with the sum of their features. So I said to her through the now closed door, with my left hand still on the handle so that it wouldn't open again of its own accord (the bolt was on her side, inside, and I had not heard her slide it shut) or so that she would not try to open it again herself, who knows: 'You've got a red stain on your white shoe, madam. I just thought I'd tell you.'

  She could have told me that it didn't matter and that it was none of my business anyway, in the same tone that Wheeler had used (or an even surlier one) when, very late on that Saturday night, just before he turned round and finally went up the first flight of stairs to bed, I pointed out to him that his socks had slipped down. But the woman said only 'Thank you', and again I did not notice any accent. A 'red stain', I said. I did not dare to say 'bloodstain', although I was sure that the drop on her shoe and the one on the floor were drops of blood, newly spilled, newly fallen.

  I left the toilet as resolutely as I had entered it, muttering, 'No luck, no luck,' as if I were explaining or making excuses to myself, I didn't even look at the women inside or, when I strode past them, those waiting outside (there were once again three or four), I had to find Flavia and take her back to her husband's table, not that my mind wasn't on the job or that I had lost sight of my mission, it had simply got mixed up with a few other things: lines of poetry, images and inherited memories as well as a story, none of which managed to fill my mind entirely, because none was particularly pressing, but they were all floating around in there, perhaps waiting to be picked up later by idle thought - that is, by thought at its most active - at the end of the day, when I finally went to bed.

  The song from Laredo and from Armagh was still going round and round in my head despite the blaring music, which once again grew deafening as soon as I walked through the double doors and found myself back in the main room, I hadn't been gone very long and yet the crowd had grown, things were moving towards their apogee. But when a tune we used to know reappears and lodges itself in our brain, there is no way of getting rid of it without the mediation of something from outside, something entirely different (perhaps, as with hiccups, a shock), 'And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me', that was the Irish version from Armagh, in English the idea still survives of death as a masculine being or figure although — with the exception of 'ship', I believe - ordinary nouns lack any grammatical gender; it was not always thus, however, at least not for everyone, the related language of German does have genders and there is no doubt at all that death is masculine and that it is always shown as a man, as in the classic subject of Death and the Maiden, so often seen in paintings and engravings, in which he is depicted as a knight with helmet and armour and spear, or perhaps with a sword, or with both, Sir Death he was called in more than one English medieval play, and he also turned up disguised as a white-coated doctor in certain pictures from the Nazi era, watching and waiting with his lamp on his forehead and with a predilection for half-naked young women like Pérez Nuix on that other day and like the woman with her skirt hitched up that night in the Ladies' toilet, just like his fierce antecedents from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who pursued maidens through woods and over fields; the poor, desperate women, according to the fantasies illustrated in the pictures, tore their clothes in their futile flight. While for us Latins, whose words are more or less obliged to have a gender, death is a feminine being and old too, the decrepit old lady with the scythe of so many paintings and so many illustrations, and perhaps that is why her victims are more often men than women, although she visits and hunts us all or literally cuts us down with her rustic tool, it makes sense for her to be old, she's been working furiously for a long time now and hasn't stopped for a single hour, day or night, since she made her debut with that first remote, unknown dead man who is still waiting for the world to end and for no one else to be left, in order finally to be judged and to tell his story and to set out his case, 'when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, "We died at such a place."' And it makes sense, too, that in the Germanic imagination he should be a knight in his prime, a strong, spirited warrior, capable of relentlessly snatching lives, a skilled professional with the cold arms of a disciplined sergeant, because no other being could cope with such an infinite task in those ancient times: and many centuries later, the Nazi leaders faced the same problem and sought faster, cheaper, less tiring methods of mass extermination, and so resorted to the intelligence of the men in white coats, physicists and chemists and biologists, as well as doctors wearing head-lamps, killing is not so easy, it takes time. And, of course, it's tiring, even exhausting.

  'We died at such a place,' Wheeler had said to me in his own language, quoting from Shakespeare, and one assumes that this Final Judgement foreseen by the steadfast faith of the times, with the whole of the world's history recounted at once and in d
etail by all those people who had made and composed it, from the powerful emperor who left a more enduring mark to the newborn baby who departed this earth with his first cry and never traversed it or set foot on it and did not leave in anyone's memory even the image of his perfectly formed face, one assumes that on that final day, with all time and all space transformed into a madhouse and an uproar, as I had suggested to Wheeler - perhaps that day would already belong to eternity, and thus would have existence but not duration — the condemned and those who'd condemned them, the betrayed and their betrayers, the persecuted and their persecutors, the tortured and their torturers, the mutilated and their mutilators, the murdered and their murderers, the victims and their executioners, along with those who urged them on or issued the order, would also all meet up and gather together and once more see each other's faces as they stood before that Judge to whom no one lies (a judge lenient or wrathful, implacable or kindly, that is something no one knows). And all of them would have great difficulty justifying their respective causes and thereby their innocence or the attenuation of their guilt, that was what the soldiers were saying to Henry V (now I knew which Shakespeare king it was) when he joined them incognito, wrapped in a cloak, on the eve of battle, as Wheeler remembered and described, all of them ready for combat; and one of them even said: 'If the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make.'

  All those dead would exchange reproaches, accusations, charges: 'You killed me and I had done you no harm at all.' 'I died because of you and your flippant comments.' 'You sacrificed me in order to destroy another who was your enemy, you didn't even know of my existence, but that didn't stop you cutting it short, after the bombardment, I was just a number to you, or not even that, a mere unit of that number then hidden away in your secret files.' 'I died by my own hand because I could no longer live with the deaths I had caused; believe me when I say that the harm I did by killing myself cost me great effort and much fear and terrible anticipatory remorse; but I could no longer carry on as if it had never happened and as if those deaths were not mine.' 'You fired a bullet into the back of my neck in the gutter of a street I had never seen before, although it could not have been far away, we took no time at all to get there from the detention centre in Calle Fomento from which you dragged me at night and into which you had thrown me that morning after stopping me in the street, because I was wearing a tie, you said, and was carrying a membership card to some club you didn't like, "A lot of Falangists go there," you said, and to which I had foolishly applied in order to be like my elder brother, who was in hiding at the time, I was seventeen and didn't even know what it meant, and you didn't allow me time to find out or to go back to my comic books which were my great joy and passion, I knew nothing about politics,' my Uncle Alfonso would say when he met up again with the forgetful militiamen who had killed him: they would scarcely remember him, still less the young woman who was with him and who shared the same fate, a bullet in the temple or perhaps the back of the neck, or perhaps in the ear. 'You showed no mercy and I felt such pain as you could never imagine all the days of your life or of your death in infinite waiting for this final day, and you falsely accused me even though you were perfectly aware of the absolute falsity of your accusation, and you demanded that I give you names and confess to betrayals I never committed, knowing that I could not do so,' Nin would say to those two or three men — all of them former comrades: Orlov certainly, possibly Bielov, perhaps Contreras — who exasperatedly interrogated and tortured him in Alcala de Henares and, according to one grim source, flayed him alive. 'You fired poisoned bullets at me, but didn't smear them with enough poison to kill me at once, with the botulin they brought you from America and which gnawed away at me for seven whole days without actually killing me or bringing to an end the suffering and the fury, and if you had been better shots, there would have been no need to wait for it to take effect and I would have been spared that long, wretched period of dying,' the Nazi Heydrich would say to the two Czech resisters or students who machine-gunned his car in Prague and hurled grenades, and who were trained and equipped by the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, whose director, Spooner, planned the attempt. 'Yes, you committed a grave and frivolous crime by not honing your marksmanship and ensuring that the Nazi was blown to bits at once, because every night that he lay dying, they took a hundred of us out to be shot, and he survived for one long, bloody week,' those same resisters and those in charge of the SOE would be told by the seven hundred hostages who continued to be executed until the slow-acting poison finally overcame both Heydrich's powers of endurance and his rage. 'We died on 10 June 1942 in Lidice, you didn't leave a soul alive in the whole village, you killed us all regardless of age or sex, you killed the men right there and took the women to the camp at Ravensbrueck to die more slowly, simply because it was our bad luck to live in the place where the agents who were behind the Reich Protector's slow death parachuted into our occupied lands of Bohemia and Moravia, it wasn't enough for you just to loathe us and to punish a few of us as possible collaborators, why waste time finding out or checking anything, you simply hated our entire line and you destroyed it so that no memory of it would exist or survive, and you murdered us all so that there wouldn't even be anyone to remember what no longer existed,' the Nazi occupiers would be told by the 199 men and the women of that Czech village who were victims of the reprisals for Heydrich's eventual death, down to the last old man and the almost last child, for there were three of the latter, very young and 'of Aryan appearance', who, it was judged, would be capable of being re-educated as Germans and so were saved; they could not, however, save their memory. 'You killed me so that I would write no more poetry after my twenty-ninth year, you've stolen my manhood, I thought as I fell to the wine-spattered floor that later became soaked with my blood; but I was careless, you were quicker than me, and I would have done just the same to you, your life was as valuable as mine then, even though you had written nothing, but it's quite another matter for these other selfish men to come along and hate you simply because you cut short my art and deprived them of further enjoyment; but I, your dead victim, have no complaints, nor anything to blame you for,' the dramatist and poet Marlowe would say in the inn at Deptford to his knifer Ingram Frizer, if, of course, that is his definitive name, a name that has changed or remained unknown over the centuries. 'You 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 about ridiculously until my lungs' final intoxication, betrayed and humiliated and killed by the black, opaque cunning of your hideous, indefatigable tongue,' George, Duke of Clarence would say to the murderous English king who was also one of Shakespeare's kings.

  Oh yes, on that last day, when all times, perhaps suspended and unmoving, are brought together, these words would ring out again and again until they made the dead retch, even those who had murdered (but none of them had ever imagined the final result of the final addition, because when things end they have a number), and even the Judge to whom no one lies, who might perhaps feel tempted to forget his promise and his plans and cancel for ever that eternal, pestilential assembly: 'I died in such a place and on such a date and in such a manner, and you killed me, you placed me in the path of the bullet, the bomb, the grenade or the torch, of the stone, the arrow, the sword or the spear, you ordered me to step out and meet the bayonet, the scimitar, the machete or the axe, the dagger, the club, the musket or the sabre, you killed me or you were the cause of my death. May it all now sit heavy on your soul and may you feel the pinprick in your breast.' And the accused would always answer: 'I had to do it, I was defending my God, my king, my country, my culture, my race; my flag, my legend, my language, my class, my space; my honour, my family, my strongbox, my purse and my socks. And in short, I was afraid.' (That last was a line from a poem too, and I repeated it to myself later out loud, when I was in bed: 'And in short, I was afraid'; several times, because that
night I was applying it to myself or endorsing it: 'And in short, I was afraid.') Or else they would resort to this excuse: 'I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I thought.' Because before that weary, nauseous Judge they would not be able to claim: 'I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, as if befuddled by the tortuous smokescreen of dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, the life that does not really count, it only half happened and without my full consent.' Any judge hearing the case would say: 'Overruled, case dismissed.' No, they would not be able to make such claims before the judge who was now going to hear their case, and yet there would be some who would: they're always unmistakable, I've known them myself in my own lifetime. There is never any shortage of them.

  How comforting it must have been, that distant hope or postponed reward or deferred justice, that prospect, that vision, that idea, for those people of steadfast faith during the many centuries when they believed it to be true and imagined it and nurtured it, as if it were part of a knowledge common to everyone, the illiterate and the learned, the wealthy and the needy, and when it was more like a kind of prescience than a promise or a desideratum. What a consoling idea, especially for all those who were forever subjugated, for those who knew they were destined to suffer in life - throughout their entire meek life, with no escape and no respite - injustices and abuses and humiliations that would go unpunished, with no hope of any possible reparation for their grievances nor of any conceivable chastisement for the offending parties, who were more powerful or more cruel, or simply more determined. 'I won't see it here,' they would think, biting their lower lip or their tongue until it hurt, and then easing their bite, 'not in this stubborn, unequal world, not in its unchanging order which I cannot alter and which causes me such harm, not in the skewed harmony that governs it and that is already digging my grave in order to drive me out early; but in that other world I will, when time comes to an end and we are all gathered together, all invited, without exception, to the great dance of suffering and contentment, and I will be told that I was right and will be rewarded by that Judge to whom one cannot lie because he knows already what went on, the Judge who has been everywhere and seen and heard everything, even the most trivial and insignificant of things in the world as a whole or in a single existence; what happened to me today, the terrible insult which I myself will forget if I live a few more years and it doesn't occur again, or else occurs so often that I will get the different occasions muddled up and, for my own sake, become used to it and cease to see it as a crime, no, that will not be forgotten by the Judge who remembers everything in his all-embracing record or infinite archive of the history of time, from the first hour to the last day.' What an enormous solace to utter solitude it must have been to believe that we were seen and even spied upon at every moment of our few, miserable days, with superhuman perspicacity and attention and with every tiresome detail and vacuous thought supernaturally noted and stored away: that is how it must have been if it truly existed, no human mind could have stood it, knowing and remembering everything about each person from each age, knowing it permanently, without a single fact about anyone ever going to waste, however dispensable it was and even if it neither added nor subtracted anything: a real affliction, a curse, a torment or even heaven's version of hell itself, perhaps the Judge would come to regret his omniscience with all those goings-on, become resentful of that proliferation of boring, puerile, stupid and entirely superfluous events, or else would have turned to drink in order to grow forgetful (just a little snifter now and then), or else become an opium addict (leisurely smoking the occasional pipe, to empty himself of knowledge).