Your Face Tomorrow 2 Page 2

  When she returned shortly afterwards, she took off her raincoat. I had unpacked the bags meanwhile, and everything was in its place.

  'Did you get there in time?' I asked. She had aroused my curiosity.

  'Yes, they obviously stay there until the shop closes. I went in, bought the wipes and gave them to her. You should have seen the look of joy and gratitude on her face. I mean she's always very grateful anyway and always gives me a big smile whenever I give her any money. But this time it was different, it was something for her, for her use and for the children, it wasn't part of the common pot, money, then, is all the same and once it's mixed up you can't tell whose is whose. And the little boy was happy too, just to see her happy. He had such a celebratory look on his face, even though he didn't really know what it was he was celebrating. He's so quick, so bright, he notices everything. If things don't go too badly for him in life, he'll be a great optimist. Let's hope he's lucky.'

  I knew that Luisa was already involved by that request for help, which she had answered belatedly and, therefore, after some thought. She wasn't caught or entangled, but she was involved. Whenever she went back to the supermarket and saw the young Hungarian woman and her little optimist, she would wonder if the wipes had run out, for the children's need for them would not, of course — nor would it for a long time. And if the woman wasn't there, she would wonder about her, about them, not in a worried or, far less, an interfering way (Luisa is not one to draw attention to herself, nor does she go poking about in other people's lives), but I knew she was involved because, from then on, without my ever having seen them, I myself would sometimes ask about them and wait for my wife to bring me news, if there was any.

  A few weeks later, when people were avidly buying things for the fast-approaching Christmas season, she told me that the Rumanian mother had again specifically asked her for something. 'Hello, carina,' the young woman had said, which made us think that before arriving in Spain she must have spent some time in Italy, from where perhaps she had been unceremoniously expelled by the brutal, xenophobic, pseudo-Lombardic authorities, who are even coarser and more oafish than our own contemptuous, pseudo-madrileno ones. 'If you don't want you tell me no, but I ask you one thing,' had been her polite preamble, for courtesy partly consists in stating the obvious, which is never out of place when employed in its service. 'The boy wants a cake. I cannot buy. Can you buy for him? Only if you want. It is there, detralangolo,' and she pointed around the comer, and Luisa immediately knew which shop she meant, a very good, expensive patisserie which she also frequented. 'If you don't want, then no,' the woman had insisted, as if she knew perfectly well that the request was a mere fancy. Yet because it was her son's fancy it was worth asking.

  'This time, the boy understood everything,' Luisa said. 'She was giving expression to something he wanted, and he knew it. Well, the look of suspense on his face left no room for doubt, the poor little thing was waiting with bated breath for my Yes or No, his eyes like saucers.' ('Just like a defendant awaiting the verdict,' I thought, though without interrupting her, 'an optimistic defendant.') 'Anyway, I didn't know what exactly she meant by "a cake", and, besides, they seemed to know precisely which one and it was that and no other that they wanted, and so the four of us had to go over to the patisserie so that they could show me. I went in first so that the people in the shop could see that they were with me, and even then a lot of customers instinctively moved away in disgust, they made way for us as if to avoid contagion, I don't think she noticed, or perhaps she's used to it and it doesn't affect her any more, but it did me. It was the little boy who, very excitedly, pointed out the cake to me in a display case, a birthday cake, not very big, and the young woman nodded. I told her that they should go back to the steps outside the supermarket - the patisserie was packed and even more so with us and the pushchair and everything — while I stood in the queue, bought the cake and had them wrap it up, then I'd bring it over to her. What with one thing and another, it took me a quarter of an hour or thereabouts, and I had to laugh when I came round the corner, carrying the package, and saw the little boy, his eyes fixed on that spot and with a look of such expectation on his face, I'm sure he hadn't taken his eyes off that corner for a second since returning to his place, waiting for me to appear, bearing the treasure: as if he'd been mentally running all that time, out of pure impatience, pure longing. For once, he left his mother's side and ran to meet me, even though she called to him: "No, Emil! Emil, come here!" He ran round and round me like a puppy.' Luisa sat thinking, a smile on her lips, amused by this recent memory. Then she added: 'And that was that.'

  'And now that you've done what she asked, won't she always be asking you for things?' I said.

  'No, I don't think she's the sort to take advantage. I've seen her several times since I bought her the baby wipes, and this was the first time that she's expressly asked me for something else. One day, I saw her menfolk hanging around there, I suppose one of them was her husband, although none of them behaved any differently towards her or the children. They may well have been her brothers or cousins or uncles, some relation or other, there were four or five of them standing near her, talking, but without including her in their discussions, and then they left.'

  'They probably act as a kind of mafia and carry out checks to make sure other beggars don't take her place. A lot of beggars pay a form of rent for a particularly good pitch, there's a lot of competition even in the world of begging. And it's no bad thing, I mean, she probably wouldn't be able to hold on to it if she didn't have some kind of protection. What were the men like?' 'A rough lot. I'm afraid that, in their case, I too would have moved out of their way as if to avoid contagion. Nasty-looking men. Tetchy. Bossy. Cheating. Dirty. Oh, and they all had mobile phones and lots of rings. And some of them wore waistcoats.'

  'Ah,' I thought, 'the reaction of the other customers in the patisserie; it really did affect her, she won't forget it, she'll be very conscious of it the next time she goes in there alone or with our own well-to-do, non-mendicant children: she obviously felt it very deeply. She's involved. But it's nothing serious and won't become so. Doubtless I'm involved too.'

  I found out to what extent I was involved during my time in London. Because even there, far from Luisa and from our children, I would sometimes remember the young Bosnian woman and her two children, the small, responsible, stateless optimist and his brother in the old pushchair, none of whom I had seen and whom I had only heard about from Luisa. And when they came into my mind, what I wondered most was not how they would be getting on or if they had had any luck, but - perhaps strangely, perhaps not - whether they were still in the world, as if, only then, would it be worth devoting a brief, vague, insubstantial thought to them. And yet that wasn't the case: even if they had left the world because of some misfortune or some dreadful mistake, because of some injustice or accident or murderous act, they had already joined the stories I had heard and incorporated, they were yet one more accumulated image, and our capacity for absorbing these is infinite (they are constantly being added to and never subtracted from), the real and the imagined as well as the false and the factual, and as we progress, we are constantly being exposed to new stories and to a million further episodes, and to the memory of beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who did, but who are now safe more or less in their own blessed insignificance or in blissful unmemorability. Emil had reminded Luisa of our son Guillermo in the past, when he was two or three years old, and now this growing son of ours, in turn, reminded me or us - for our children are always in our thoughts — of the small insignificant Hungarian boy, when he might well already have moved on and, in his enforced nomadic state, left for another country or might not even exist in time, expelled from it early on by some unfortunate incident or encounter, as often happens to those who are in a hurry to participate in the world and its tasks and benefits and sorrows.

  Sometimes, I would wake in the middle of the night, or so I thought, bat
hed in sweat sometimes and always agitated, and, while still inside my dream or clumsily and belatedly only just emerging from it, I would ask myself: 'Are they still in the world? Are my children still in the world? What is happening to them on this distant night, at this very moment in this remote space of mine, what is happening to them right now? I have no way of knowing, I can't go into their rooms to see if they're still breathing or if they're whimpering in their sleep, did the phone ring to warn me of some evil or was it just ringing in my murky dream? To warn me that they no longer exist, but have been expelled from time, what can have happened and how can I be sure that, at this very moment, Luisa isn't dialling my number to tell me about the tragedy of which I have just had a premonition? Or else she wouldn't be able to speak for sobbing and I would say to her: "Calm down, calm down, and tell me what happened, it'll be all right." But she would never calm down or be able to explain because there are some things that cannot be explained and will never be all right, and sorrows that can never be calmed.' And when my disquiet gradually ebbed away - the back of my neck still damp with sweat - and I realised that it was all to do with distance and anxiety and sleep and the curse of not being able to see - the back of the neck never sees, nor do exiled eyes - then, by association, the other question would formulate itself, pointless and bearable: 'Are those two Rumanian children on the supermarket steps still in the world, and is their young gypsy mother? I have no way of knowing and it doesn't really concern me. I have no way of knowing tonight, of course, and tomorrow I will forget to ask Luisa if she happens to phone me or I her (it isn't our usual time) because, by day, I won't care so much if she does or doesn't know what has become of them, not here in faraway London, that's where I am, yes, now I remember, now I understand, this window and its sky, the curving whistle of the wind, the bustling murmur of trees which is never indifferent or languid like the murmur of the river, I'm the one who moved to another country, not the little boy (he may still be wandering my streets), in a few hours I will go to work in this city and Tupra will be waiting for me, Tupra, who always wants more, Bertram Tupra, who is always waiting and insatiable, who sees no limits in anyone and asks more and more of us, of me, Mulryan, Pérez Nuix and Rendel, and of any of the other faces that might join him tomorrow, including ours when they are no longer recognisable, because they have grown so treacherous or so worn.'

  Asking, asking, almost no one holds back and almost everyone tries; who doesn't? They might say no - that is the reasoning that goes on inside every head, even those that do not reason - but if I don't ask, I won't get, that's for sure; and what do I lose by asking, if I can manage to do so without hoping for too much. 'I'm here, too, because of a request, originally and in part,' I was thinking as I lay, half asleep, half awake, in London, 'it was Luisa who asked me to go, to leave the field clear and to move out of the house and to make things easier for her, and to leave the way open to whoever might come, and then we would both be able to see more clearly, without cramping each other's style. I did as she asked, I obeyed, I listened: I left and set off, I moved away and kept walking, until I arrived here, and I have still not gone back. I don't even know yet if I've stopped walking. Perhaps I won't go back, perhaps I will never go back unless another request is made, which might be this: "I was so wrong about you before, come here. Sit down here beside me again, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come here. Come to me. Come back. And stay for ever." But another night has passed, and I have still not heard that request.'

  Young Pérez Nuix was about to make a request too, after thinking long and hard before doing so. She wanted something, possibly something she did not deserve given that she had followed me for far too long, unable to make up her mind to approach me, in that heavy night rain and, what's more, dragging or being dragged along by a poor, drenched dog. I didn't have to think about it, I knew as soon as I recognised her voice over the entryphone and when I buzzed the door downstairs so that she could come up and talk to me, as she had already announced: 'I know it's a bit late, but I must talk to you. It'll only take a moment' (she had said this in my language and had called me 'Jaime', as Luisa would have done had she come to my door). And I knew it as I heard her walking unhurriedly up the stairs, one step at a time, along with her dog, a very wet pointer, and when I heard the latter shaking himself dry, under cover at last and at last with some obvious direction (without the incomprehensible, insistent sky continuing to hurl down more rain upon him): she paused on the false landings or turns in the stairs, which had no angles only curves and were adorned, as almost all English staircases are, with a carpet to absorb the water that falls from us when we shake ourselves dry - so many days and even more nights of rain; and I heard Pérez Nuix strike the air with her closed umbrella, it would no longer conceal her face, and perhaps she took advantage of each brief pause and each time the dog shook himself to glance for a second in a hand mirror - eyes, chin, skin or lips - and tidy her hair a little, because hair always gets damp even if you protect it from the rain (I had still not seen whether it was covered with a hat or a scarf or a cap or a kitschy little beret worn at an angle, I had never perhaps even seen her head outside the office and outside our building with no name). And I had known it, even when I did not know it was her or who she was, when she was just a woman, strange or mercenary or lost or eccentric, helpless or blind, in the empty streets, with her raincoat and boots and with that agreeable thigh of which I had caught a momentary glimpse (or was that my imagination, the incorrigible desideratum of a lifetime, deeply entrenched ever since adolescence and which never fades and, as I am discovering, never goes away) when she crouched down to stroke the dog and speak softly to him. 'Let her come to me,' I had thought when I stopped abruptly and turned to look at her, 'if she wants something from me or if she's following me. That's her problem. She must have a reason, assuming she was following me or still is, it can't be in order not to talk to me.' And there had, in fact, been a reason, she wanted to talk to me and to ask me for something.

  I looked at the clock, I looked around me to make sure that the apartment wasn't too untidy, not that any apartment I've ever lived in has been (but that is why we tidy people always check for untidiness whenever anyone comes to see us). It was rather late for England, but not for Spain - there, lots of people would just be going out to supper or wondering where to eat, in Madrid the night was just beginning, and Nuix was half-Spanish or perhaps less — Luisa might be going out right now for a long night with her putative, partying suitor who would want nothing to do with my children and would never step over the threshold (nor - bless him - would he ever occupy my place). That's her problem, I had thought beneath the endless spears of water, and I repeated these words to myself while I held the door open waiting for her arrival, she was panting a little as she came up the stairs, she had walked quite a long way, I could hear them both panting, her and not just the dog, the same thing had happened to me shortly before, when I came up the stairs and even after I had arrived — two minutes to catch my breath - I had walked a long way across squares and down empty streets and past monuments. That's her problem one thinks mistakenly or incompletely, or that's his problem, when someone is preparing to ask us something. It's my problem too we should always add or should I say include. It would doubtless be my problem once the request had left her lips or her throat and once I had heard it. Once we had both heard it for that is how the person making the request knows his or her message has traversed the air and cannot be ignored, because once it's in the air, it has reached its destination.

  Initially, she talked non-stop and filled the air, young Pérez Nuix — a way of postponing what one has come to say, the important part - while she was taking off her raincoat and proffering me her umbrella as if she were surrendering her sword, and while she was asking me what she should do with the dog, who was still spraying drops of water everywhere whenever he shook himself.

  'Shall I put him in the kitchen?' she asked, still in Spanish. 'He'll make everything wet if I
don't.'

  I looked at the poor, resigned pointer, he did not look like the kind of dog to raise any objections.

  'No, leave him. He deserves a bit of consideration. He'll be better off with us. The carpet will help him dry off, it's pretty batallada anyway.' I realised at once that this was an odd expression, neither proper Spanish nor an adaptation of some English expression, maybe both my languages were becoming not so much confused as unreliable, because I spoke the latter almost all the time and thought in the former when I was alone. Perhaps I was losing my confidence in both, because, unlike Pérez Nuix, I had not been bilingual since childhood. I added: 'I mean very sufrida.' I wasn't sure, though, that sufrida was the right word either, my mother had used it in a different sense, referring more to the colour of a fabric than to its ability to stand up to wear and tear. My mother spoke excellent Spanish, much better than my contaminated version.