Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Read online

  I felt slightly ashamed, almost embarrassed, when I realized I was having these thoughts, that I was thinking them. They were entirely inappropriate, they had taken me pretty much by surprise, and the worst thing is that once an idea gets into your head, it's impossible not to have had it and very hard to drive it out or erase it, whatever it might be: anyone plotting an act of revenge is very likely to attempt to carry it out, and if he can't, out of cowardice or vassalage, or if he has to wait a long time for the right circumstances, then it's probable that he nevertheless already lives with the act and that it sours his light sleep with its nocturnal beating; if one feels a sudden hostility towards someone, it would be odd if that were not translated into machinations and defamations and acts of bad faith, of the sort that seek to cause harm, or lie there watching, in the rear guard, oozing resentment until the long-awaited morning comes; if the temptation to make some amorous conquest arises, the normal thing would be for the conquistador to get straight down to work, with infinite patience and intrigue if necessary, but if he lacks the courage, he will be unable fully to abandon the project until the far-off day when he finally grows bored with so much uncertainty, with such theoretical, future-oriented, and therefore imaginary activities, and only then does the condensation that hangs over his misty wakenings dissipate; if what lies ahead is the possibility of killing someone—or, as is more frequent, of having someone killed—it will be easy enough at least to ascertain the current rates charged by hit men and tell yourself they'll always be there or, if not, their sons will, so that you can approach them once you've overcome your vacillations and your anticipated remorse; and if it's a case of sudden sexual desire, as unexpected as the desire that erupts in our dreams, and as involuntary perhaps, it will be difficult then not to feel it at every moment, for as long as that desire remains unsatisfied and the person inflaming it is still there before us, even though we're not prepared to take a single step towards satisfying it and cannot imagine doing so at any point in what remains of our existence. What remains of the past no longer counts, as regards yearnings or fantasies, or even avarice. Or regret. Although it does as regards speculations.

  When I recalled this in Tupra's house, in his comfortable living room that invited a sense of confidence bordering on easeful calm, I wondered if I had spied on Pérez Nuix's run and thighs with the same apprehensive, unguarded look Sophia Loren had turned on the white breasts of Jayne Mansfield floating above the tablecloth in a restaurant, although my gaze would have been filled with admiration and desire rather than envy and suspicion. If I had, she would have noticed and very quickly too (the person being observed can sense such looks). I filled my glass and Pérez Nuix moved hers a little closer, and I couldn't not fill it without appearing paternalistic or stingy when it came to wine, both of which are extremely unattractive qualities; and so she immediately started on her third glass, taking only a small sip, and at least she ate a couple of olives and a potato chip. My thoughts were, I felt, vain and idiotic, but I was nonetheless convinced that they were right, sometimes idiotic things are. 'It could be,' I thought,' that she's allowing that run to grow so as to show me the way to unexpected lust, to guide me, but be careful: she is about to ask me a favor, she hasn't done so yet in any detail, we're still at the stage when she can't afford to annoy me and when offering me something, or who knows, even giving it to me, must seem to her advisable even though I've made no demands or dropped any hints, a stage that will last at least until I answer "Yes" or "No," or "I'll see what I can do, I'll do my best," or "But I'll want this in exchange." And it would be only natural if this stage were to last still longer, for several days, until I had done what I said I would do, with irreversible words or deeds, beyond the promise or announcement or the half-open possibility of a "Let me think about it" or a "We'll see" or a "It all depends." However, she hasn't yet formulated her petition to me, not entirely, and therefore the moment hasn't yet come for me to speak, to concede or deny, to put off, to play hard to get or to be ambivalent.'

  'Anyway,' she went on, holding another of my Karelias cigarettes from the Peloponnese, 'once a field has been opened up, it's very hard to set bounds on it again, especially if there's no real will to do so. What do you want me to say?'—Yes, Pérez Nuix spoke both languages very well (the expression 'to set bounds on something' is not that common), but now and then she came out with some strange anglicisms—for example '¿Cómo me quieres que diga?'—when she spoke my language, or, rather, ours. 'You open a crack, and if there's a storm blowing outside, there's no way you'll close it. Something growing isn't programmed to shrink but to expand, and almost no one is willing to give up a ready income, still less if he's already started earning it and has grown used to it. The field agents were pioneers in accepting external commissions during the period when there was a gap in activities, let's call it that anyway, although it's not quite accurate, and don't go thinking that even now, when they're working at full capacity again, they earn high salaries, most earn no more than you and I, and that's not much, or so they feel, given the risks they sometimes have to run and the time involved in finding out some trivial piece of information. Many of them have families, many get into debt, they spend long periods traveling and not always at someone else's expense. They're asked to justify their expenses and sometimes that's not possible: you're hardly likely to get a signed receipt from the person you're bribing or paying for a tip-off, or from traitors, informers or moles, or from someone who does the occasional job for you or covers for you or hides you, not to mention the thugs you sometimes have to hire to get out of a tight corner or remove obstacles, or the person you have to pay to spare your life, because the only way to do that is to give him more money than he was given to kill you, a form of auction really. How are people like that going to give you receipts? The financial bureaucracy is irrational, counterproductive, absurd, and deeply unhelpful, a burden really, and discontent is always rife among the agents, they have a sense that they do more than they're given credit for, that they're soiling their hands and having a lousy time in order to protect a society that not only knows nothing about their sacrifices and their acts of bravery and occasional acts of barbarism, but one that also, by definition and on principle, doesn't even know their names. They don't know them even when they die in service, it's forbidden to reveal them, you see, however many decades they've been pushing up daisies. They get depressed and ask themselves every day why they're doing what they're doing. They're not selfless individuals or simple patriots, satisfied to think that they're doing their best for their country without anyone ever knowing, not their friends or their neighbors or, for the most part, their families. That attitude belongs to another era or to the kind of innocent era that soon gets left behind. Some might have been like that to begin with, when they joined, but, I can assure you, any feeling of personal satisfaction doesn't last, there comes a point when everyone wants to do well and get some thanks, a pat on the back, a little flattery, to see their name mentioned and their good works, even if it's only in an internal memo from the firm they work for. And since they're not going to get that, they at least want money, ease, a little luxury, to enjoy themselves when they're not working, to give their children the best, to buy their wives or husbands nice presents, to be able to afford lovers and keep them, and since agents are often absent or unavailable, they have to recompense said children or spouses or lovers, and that costs money, having fun is expensive, pleasing people is expensive, showing off is expensive, making others love you is expensive. They want what everyone else wants in a world in which there's no longer any discipline, and so they don't look too closely at the people who come to them with extra work. And since their bosses don't want to upset the agents on whom they depend, they ignore these other missions when they hear about them and, later, some even go on to travel the same path. Why do you think you and I earn so much, relatively speaking, that is? It's not much for a field agent, who might be away from home for long periods, endure certain hardships or even r
isk his own life, and who probably, in the most extreme cases, will have to decide whether or not to take another man's life. Nevertheless, it's a lot of money for what we do and for where and how we do it, with fairly relaxed working hours and no danger involved, in considerable comfort, with a glass screen between us and them and without exactly working our asses off.'—Again I thought how rich her vocabulary was compared with the norm in Spain, she was clearly a person well-read in superior literature, not like the low-grade stuff you get now, any ignoramus can publish a novel and be praised to the skies for it: most of my compatriots would barely know how to use words like 'cundir'—to be rife—'holgura'—ease—'transitar'—to travel—'deslomarse'—to work one's ass off. I had never heard Pérez Nuix talk so much or for so long, it was as if I were meeting her for the first time, and this second impression was as unusual as the first. She stopped for a moment, took another meager sip of wine and concluded: 'How do you think Bertie manages to live so well and to have so much? Of course we all work for private private individuals now and then, knowingly or not, possibly more often than we think, as I've said, it's not our responsibility, we just take orders. And besides, why shouldn't we do that work, why not make use of our abilities? So what if we do, Jaime? It's been going on at all levels for years now and it really doesn't matter very much. You can be quite sure that nothing very essential changes because of it, it doesn't make the lives of citizens more dangerous. On the contrary. Well, perhaps, but the more avenues we explore, the more fingers we'll have in more pies, and the better equipped we'll be to protect them.'

  I remained silent for a moment, I couldn't help shooting another surreptitious, Lorenesque glance at the run, which was still following its course. It wouldn't be long before her tights split apart, and then she'd have to take them off, and what would happen then?

  'Wasn't James Bond supposed to be a field agent?' I asked unexpectedly, unexpectedly to her at least, because she gave a startled laugh and answered, still laughing:

  'Yes, of course. But what's that got to do with anything?

  'I don't know, but he spends money like water, and it's never seemed to me that he has any problems with budget restraints.'

  Young Pérez Nuix laughed again, and perhaps not only out of politeness, but because my facile joke had genuinely amused her. It may have been the wine or her growing sense of ease and confidence, but her laughter, I noticed, bubbled up unaffectedly and unimpeded, just like Luisa's laughter when she was in a good mood or caught off guard. This wasn't to me an entirely new facet of her personality. I had seen it in the building with no name and on the occasional night out withTupra and the others, but, at work, people's qualities and characteristics seem muffled: feelings of annoyance are contained and amusement postponed, there's not enough room or time. Her laughter also contributed to the further destruction of her already injured tights.

  'Bear in mind,' she replied, 'that real-life agents have never enjoyed Fleming's fortune nor the financial backing of the Broc-colis. And without them, everything is harder, meaner and more prosaic'

  She said this as if I should know who the last rather comically-named people were, if, that is, it was a real name (broccoli' in Italian is the plural of 'broccolo' which has the unfortunate secondary meaning of'idiot'). And I had no idea who they were.

  'I don't know who they are,' I confessed, not bothering to pretend I knew more than I did. They were obviously well-known in England, despite their evident Italian origins, but I'd never heard of them.

  'For decades Albert Broccoli was the producer of the Bond films, along with a guy named Saltzman. In the more recent movies, his name has been replaced by those of a Barbara Broccoli and a Tom Pevsner. I suppose she must be the daughter and that her father is now dead, in fact, I seem to recall reading an obituary a few years ago. The family must have made a fortune, because the films, can you believe it, have been going since 1962, and they're still making them I think—anyway, I always go and see a Bond movie when I can.'

  'I must ask Peter about it,' I thought, 'before he dies,' and it seemed odd to me that such a fear and such an idea should occur to me: despite his advanced age I never imagined the world without him or him without the world. He wasn't one of those old people who wear their imminent disappearance on their face or in the way they speak or walk. On the contrary. Both the adult and the young man he had been were still so present in him that it seemed impossible that they would cease to exist merely because of something as absurd as accumulated time, it doesn't make any sense at all that it should be time that determines and dictates, that it should prevail over free will. Or perhaps, as his brother, Toby Rylands, had said many, many years before, 'When one is ill, just as when one is old or troubled, things are done half with one's own will and half with someone else's in exactly equal measure. What isn't always clear is who the part of the will that isn't ours belongs to. To the illness, to the doctors, to the medicine, to the sense of unease, to the passing years, to times long dead? To the person we no longer are and who carried off our will when he left?' 'To the face we wore yesterday' I could have added, 'we'll always have that as long as we're remembered or some curious person pauses to look at old photographs of us, and, on the other hand, there will come a day when all faces will be skulls or ashes, and then it won't matter, we'll all be the same, us and our enemies, the people we loved most and the people we loathed.' Yes, I would have to ask Wheeler about those dedications from the fortunate and ill-fated Ian Fleming, who had known great success but few years in which to enjoy it, how they had met and how well they had known each other, 'who may know better. Salud!'—that is what Fleming had written in Wheeler's copy in 1957. Since starting work with Tupra I'd had less time to go and visit Peter in Oxford, or perhaps it was rather that I had too much time and my spirits were heavier, but then again my visits to him always helped fill up the former and somewhat lift the latter. However, we never let more than two weeks go by without talking for a while on the phone. He would ask how I was getting on with my new boss and with my colleagues and in my new and imprecise trade, but without demanding any details or enquiring into the present-day activities of the group, that is into our translations of people or interpretations of lives. Perhaps he knew better than anyone how fundamentally reserved I was, or perhaps he didn't need to ask, perhaps he had a direct line to Tupra and knew all about my main activities, my advances and retreats. Sometimes I thought I sensed in him, however, a desire not to meddle, not to draw me out and even not to hear me if I began telling some story related to my work, as if he didn't want to know, or as if being on the outside made him jealous—that was possible, when someone like me was on the inside, and I was, after all, a foreigner, an upstart—or as if he felt slightly hurt to have lost, in part, my company and to have brought about that loss himself in his role as intermediary, through his intrigues and his influence. I never noticed in him a hint of spite, nor of self-reproach, nor resentment at my absence, but something resembling the mixture of grief and pride, or unspoken regret and suppressed satisfaction, that sometimes assails patrons when their proteges break free, or teachers when they see themselves outstripped by their students in audacity, talent or fame, even though both parties pretend that this hasn't happened and won't happen in their lifetimes.

  The person he was most interested in was Pérez Nuix, despite his growing distance from that group to which he had belonged in another age, so remote and so different. I wasn't sure whether this was because he had heard so much from Tupra about her qualities ('That very competent half-Spanish girl of his,' he had said of her when I had still not met her, 'I can never remember her name, but he says that, with time, she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough.' And he had added as if remembering another such case: 'That's one of the difficulties, most of them get fed up and leave') or because he occasionally thought I might get together with her and thus leave behind me my sentimental daze and my occasional sexual toings and froings, far less frequent than he imagine
d, the old tend to deem anyone whom they believe to be still virile, and therefore still young, as promiscuous—I mean truly and successfully so. Wheeler could see that the months were passing and that the situation with Luisa had still not been sorted out, as he would have preferred—there wasn't so much as a flicker, not even a tremor, even of the kind that leaves the doors more firmly shut than before; because even if they only open a crack, there is still a slight fluster of agitation—and so from his distance, fumblingly, not to say blindly, with a touch of ingenuousness and respectful paternalism, he would act as a very tentative matchmaker whenever a female name cropped up in our conversations, and that of Patricia Pérez Nuix was, inevitably, the most persistent and enduring.