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  None of these wounding words were spoken, indeed no words of any sort were uttered when I finally dared to make that tentative approach and lightly rested my member against her buttocks and was immediately aware that I was touching not T-shirt but firm, warm flesh, she was probably one of those women who are really sensitive to the cold, but who give off the heat they themselves don’t feel, they’re like a warm oven to the person who touches them, even though they themselves may be shivering, like someone with a fever. Nothing was said, there was no reaction, no movement either towards me or away, no discouragement and no encouragement, it really was as if she were deep asleep, I wondered if she really could be sleeping so profoundly that she wouldn’t notice the touch of skin on skin with nothing in between, I thought not and that she must be pretending, but when it comes to other people, and possibly even when it comes to yourself, you can never be absolutely sure about anything, or almost anything. I got a little closer, pressed a little harder, but so very little that I wasn’t even sure of having done so, sometimes you think you’ve moved or shifted, or pushed or caressed, but your approach is so timid and terrified that you can sometimes deceive yourself, and your advance or even your touch may prove imperceptible to the other person. And that was where I was, caught between a yes and a no, between irresistible desire and fearful or perhaps civilized restraint, applying such minute pressure that it might not have been pressure at all, when a thought suddenly, ridiculously, occurred to me: ‘A condom,’ I thought. ‘I can’t do anything without a condom on, and for that I need a minimum of consent, permission, agreement. If I get up now and fetch one and then come back to bed with it, I’ll have lost my position, lost this closeness, I’d have to start all over again, she might move away or perhaps prove less accessible. And with a condom on I would no longer have an alibi, I would no longer be able to say to her, if she told me off or pulled me up short: “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to, I was fast asleep and didn’t realize I was touching you. It wasn’t intentional, I’m sorry, I’ll keep to my side of the bed,” because the ridiculous sheath would be irrefutable proof that it was intentional and premeditated as well.’

  This thought immediately made me draw back a little, enough to lose contact, and that reaffirmed me in my uncertain belief that there had been contact and that the ghostly pressure had been neither avoided nor rejected; and after a few seconds, I abandoned my position (‘Goddamn condoms,’ I thought, ‘in my youth, we despised them, it never even occurred to me to buy them, now, though, we always have to use them’) and no longer lay behind her, in that privileged place, but on my back, wondering what to do or how to do it or whether I should give up despite my growing hopes and try to go to sleep and do nothing. I put my arm under the pillow the better to rest my head, an involuntary gesture of deliberation, and in doing so I uncovered my chest, almost as far as my waist, and uncovered her shoulders. And that was enough—or a pretext—for young Pérez Nuix to wake up or pretend she did. And for the first and only time in the whole of that night we spent together I was not invisible to her, despite our being in darkness: she turned over and placed the open palms of her hands on my cheeks as if to show her fondness for me, they were very soft palms; she looked into my eyes for a few seconds (one, two, three, four; and five; or six, seven, eight; and nine; or ten, eleven, twelve; and thirteen) and smiled at me or laughed as she delicately cupped or held my face, as Luisa sometimes used to do when her bed was still mine and we weren’t yet sleepy or not sleepy enough to say goodnight and turn our backs on each other until the next day, or when I came to her late like a ghost she’d arranged to meet and for whom she was waiting, and welcomed me. Only then was I not invisible to Pérez Nuix, when there was no light. My eyes were accustomed to seeing in the half-dark of my room without blinds or shutters, like almost all bedrooms on that large island whose inhabitants sleep with one eye open; but not her eyes, which were unfamiliar with the space. Nevertheless, she looked at me and smiled and laughed, it was very brief. Then she turned over again and offered me her back, adopting the same position as before, as if that gazing at each other in the dark hadn’t taken place and she were ready to continue sleeping. But it had taken place, and that for me was the necessary sign of consent, permission, agreement I needed, it made me get out of bed for a moment and rapidly search out a condom, put it on and return with much more confidence and aplomb to my previous position, and to the rubbing and touching and gentle pushing, not against her buttocks now but slightly lower down, towards the dampness and the passage, the passageway, more ferarum, in the manner of the beasts, that’s the Latin tag for it. She didn’t move, at least not as I began to slide in, easily now (‘I’m screwing her,’ I thought as I entered her, I couldn’t help it), she just let me, she didn’t participate if one can say that or if that’s possible, at any rate, we didn’t speak, there was no indication on either side that what was happening was happening, how can I put it, we pretended to pretend to be asleep, to be unaware, to recognize nothing of what was going on as if it were taking place in our absence or without our knowledge, although occasionally she did utter a few sounds and perhaps I did too when I came, I conscientiously repressed them though, telling myself I had merely breathed more deeply, at most sighed, but who knows, one hears oneself so little, and anyway sounds and even groans are permissible during sleep, some people even deliver whole speeches while asleep, but they’re never accused of being awake. Almost nothing was heard or seen, I could see only the back of her neck in the darkness and from far too close, and that’s doubtless why I kept picturing things, the same things I had just spent a long time contemplating in the living room (‘It’ll only take a moment,’ she had announced from the street, I wondered if she knew just how wrong she would be), the zippers on her boots going up and down, the run in her stockings advancing in all directions along her thigh, but especially upwards, as if pointing the way, and another older vision, that of her naked breast, a tight skirt, and in her hand a towel and a raised arm that added an additional nakedness to the image by unembarrassedly revealing her clean, smooth, newly washed and, needless to say, shaven armpit, early one morning in the building with no name, that time when she did not blush, making me think that young Perez Nuix did not rule me out, or did not entirely exclude me, although she didn’t necessarily feel attracted to me either, having been seen by me and having decided not to cover herself up, or perhaps no decision was involved. It was all very silent and timid, ghostly really, and it remained so, except that, after a while, I noticed that she was pushing too, it wasn’t just me now and neither of us was pretending not to push or else pushing only gently, it was as if we were locked in a tight embrace, but without making use of our arms, she was pressed against me and I against her, but with just one part of our body, the same part, as if we were only those parts or as if we consisted solely of that, it was as if we had been forbidden to entwine in any other way, with our arms or our legs or round the waist or by way of kisses. I don’t think we even held hands.

  Yes, we almost certainly shared that in common, Tupra and I, or Ure or Reresby or Dundas, or who knows how many other names he would have used in other countries and which he perhaps now never used in this more sedentary stage of his life, safe and settled in London, where it was possible that he felt slightly bored, although he did go off now and then on short trips, or perhaps not, maybe he had already grown weary of all that gadding about, and of spreading outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague and of igniting fires in far-off countries. His house was not that of a man who felt either temporary or in a hurry, that of someone who goes out and comes in, takes a quick look around, then leaves and returns and smokes a cigarette and never lingers anywhere. Perhaps the thing we shared in common was, nonetheless, very limited: I had slept with Pérez Nuix in a manner that was utterly tacit and clandestine, not only as regards other people, but as regards ourselves as well. On the other hand (and this was only a suspicion, but a strong one), he would have known her intimately over perhaps a long or
at least a not insignificant period of time, perhaps when she was still a novelty and the person who most stimulated and amused him and was an important element in creating for him that sense of a small, or large, daily celebration. They would, at any rate, have seen each other’s faces when they slept together, they would have talked afterwards, they would have told each other something of their lives and their opinions (although Tupra would have done so only in his usual fragmentary way, that is, very little), and when they were together in a room, they would have known for certain that what was happening was really happening, unlike me, for I felt certain of nothing—even less certain, given that what happened immediately became the past—when I withdrew from that passage, the end of which one never reaches, and emerged from it as carefully and tentatively as I had approached and entered; when I moved away and turned over onto my side and for the first time presented my back to that young woman just as she had presented hers to me for almost the whole time—except when she looked at me and cupped my face in her hands—and I slipped one arm under the pillow, not this time in order to think or to curse, but in order to summon sleep.

  Perhaps the only thing Tupra and I would have in common was a pale, vague relationship of which most men know nothing and which languages fail to include, although they recognize the sentiment and, on occasion, the feelings of jealousy or even of camaraderie; apart, that is, from the Anglo-Saxon language as I read once in a book, not by an Englishman, but by a compatriot of mine, and not in an essay or a book on linguistics, but in a fiction, a novel, whose narrator recalled the existence of a word in that ancient language which described the relationship or kinship acquired by two or more men who had lain or slept with the same woman, even if this had happened at different times and with the different faces worn by that woman in her lifetime, her face of yesterday or today or tomorrow. That curious notion remained fixed in my mind, although the narrator wasn’t sure if it was a verb, whose nonexistent modern equivalent would be ‘co-fornicate’ (or ‘co-fuck’ in coarse, contemporary parlance), or a noun, which would denote the ‘co-fornicators’ (or ‘cofuckers’) or the action itself (let’s call it ‘co-fornication’). One of the possible forms of the words, I don’t know which, was , I had remembered it without trying to and without effort, and sometimes it was there on the tip of my tongue, or the tip of my thoughts: ‘Good God, that’s what I am, I’ve become this man’s , how degrading, how horrible, how cheap, how dreadful,’ whenever I saw or heard that an old lover or girlfriend of mine was pairing up or spending too much time with some despicable, odious man, with an imbecile or an untermensch; it happens all too often or so it seems, and besides we’re constantly exposed to it and can do nothing about it. (I had decided that the word was pronounced ‘gebrithgoomer,’ although, naturally, I had no idea.)

  When I first met Tupra, I had thought or feared that I might acquire that relationship with him through Luisa, in some bizarre, unreal way—or, rather, I had been glad that she was in Madrid and that they would never meet and that this would never happen—when I saw that almost no woman could resist him and that I wouldn’t stand a chance against him if I ever had to compete with him in that field, regardless of whether I got there first, or second, or at the same time. And now it seemed that I had probably acquired such a relationship through another unexpected and more frivolous activity, one that made me the person who came afterwards not the person who was or had been there before: the former is in a slightly more advantageous position, because he can hear and find out things from the latter, but he is also the one most at risk of contagion if there’s any disease involved, and that—a disease if there is one—is the only tangible manifestation of that strange, weak link to which no one gives a thought any more, even though it exists without being named and hovers unnoticed above the relations between men and between women, and between men and women. No one speaks that medieval language any more and hardly anyone knows it. And when you think about it, there is, in some cases, something else that is transmitted by the person in the middle, from the one who was with her before to the one who was with her afterwards, but which is neither tangible nor visible: influence. Throughout my conversation that night with young Pérez Nuix, I had now and then had the feeling that Tupra was speaking through her, but this could also have been because they had worked and been in continual contact for several years, not necessarily because they were ex-lovers. The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own. From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it’s incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry—like a faint booming in our heads—the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial—falling in love—and the insignificant—falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.

  ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t have either, if I’d had the choice,’ I said to Tupra when we’d finished our shared, disinterested laughter, with me laughing despite myself, about the ‘bulwarks’ onto which he had thrown me. ‘But you made me do it, just as you’ve made me do everything else tonight, including still being here at this unearthly hour,’ I said in my sometimes rather bookish English, literally ‘a una horn no terrenal’ in Spanish. ‘I don’t know if you realize, but you’ve done nothing all day but give me orders, most of them after hours. It’s time I left. I need to sleep, I’m tired.’ And so I shifted again from brief treacherous laughter to a more enduring seriousness, if not annoyance. And I made a movement as if to suggest that I was thinking about getting up, but no more than that, because he wouldn’t let me leave just yet: he wanted to talk to me about Constantinople and Tangiers in centuries past, there are always more exhausting voices and stories that we have not yet heard. However, he didn’t start again and probably wasn’t going to, there are some things that are mentioned but never returned to, that are sown and then abandoned, like verbal decoys; and he was supposed to be showing me his private tapes, or perhaps DVDs. That didn’t happen either. ‘If you don’t tell me about Tangiers and Constantinople right now, Bertram, I’m leaving. I’ve had enough. I’m dog tired and I’m in no mood to go on chatting.’

  Tupra emitted a kind of dull roar, halfway between a brief guffaw and a stifled snort of scorn. He stood up and said:

  ‘Don’t be impatient, Jack, this is no time to be in a hurry. I’m going to show you the videos I told you about, you’ll learn a lot from them and it will be useful for you to see them. Not immediately useful, they’re not at all pleasant and they may well drive away any current desire for sleep that you feel, at least for the next few hours, but I’ve already given you permission not to come to work tomorrow, or rather today, so let’s waste no more time.’ He gla
nced rapidly at his watch; so did I: it was an unearthly hour for London, but not for Madrid. The children would be asleep, but I had no idea what Luisa would be up to, she might still be awake, with someone else or with no one. ‘But it’ll be useful to you later on to have seen them. In a matter of days really, and they’ll always come in handy. It may be that you are already someone who gives no importance to the unimportant, because that’s the first thing everyone should be taught and yet everyone behaves as if exactly the opposite were true: people are brought up nowadays to think that any idiot can make a great drama out of any kind of nonsense. People are brought up to suffer for no reason, and you get nowhere suffering over everything or tormenting yourself. It paralyzes, overwhelms, stops growth and movement. As you see, though, people nowadays beat their breast over harming a plant, and if it’s an animal, what a crime, what a scandal! They live in an unreal, delicate, soft, twee world.’—‘ Cursi,’ I thought, ‘English doesn’t have that useful, wide-ranging word’—‘Their minds are permanently wrapped in cotton wool.’ And he briefly made that strange roaring noise again; it sounded this time like a short sarcastic cough. ‘In our countries, that is. And when something happens here that’s perfectly normal in other places, common currency, we find ourselves vulnerable, at a loss what to do, helpless, easy prey, and it takes us a while to react, and we do so disproportionately and blindly, missing the target. And with too much retrospective fear as well, as happened with the attacks here and in your own city of Madrid, not to mention the attacks on New York and Washington.’