Your Face Tomorrow 2 Read online

  And so in the disco, when Mrs Manoia had drunk moderately during supper and moderately while she watched, longingly and with foot tapping, the crowded, heaving dance floor - two moderations can, after all, make an excess - and she was already calling me, in Italian, Jacopo or Giacomo, with the stress on the first syllable, and was, of course, addressing me as 'tu' and urging me to address her likewise, she took advantage of a truce or a change of register in the music on one of the two dance floors to insist on dancing a few slow, or perhaps only semi-slow, dances, first with her husband, who took off his glasses, breathed on them, polished them with a cloth and gave her a myopic look declining her offer, then with Tupra, who raised one open hand to indicate his unfinished duties of hospitality and business towards her unwilling spouse (it was too noisy for anyone to be able to talk except by shouting directly into someone's ear, or else by signs alone), and lastly with me, who had no option but to say yes. I was struck by the fact that, despite the foreseeable results of her initial attempts and despite my having been the one who had been looking after her throughout the evening and although she was, by then, professing for me as much warmth as I was beginning to feel affection for her - transitory emotions which, by the next morning, we would be unable even to recall, without, however, any feelings of guilt on either side - she had respected the hierarchy even when asking for a partner, which indicated a strong, deep-rooted sense of respect.

  And perhaps that was why, having offered each of us three men, in the correct order, the opportunity to dance with her, she then felt she had been given permission to wrap herself around her enforced partenaire in the most tempestuous and even somewhat immodest manner, by which I mean that she pressed herself furiously, indeed almost painfully, against me. Not that she intended to hurt me, it was, I think, simply that she was not entirely in control of her true volume (just as backpackers are unaware of the amount of space they take up, because, however hard they try, they cannot feel the beloved burden or limpet on their back as part of their own body), nor could she have realised the impact on my breast of her two breasts, which were as hard as logs and as pointed as stakes - her bust must have been made out of the densest wood or, possibly, granite. The woman had gone too far, she had lost all sense of proportion in her zeal to fortify and shore them up, probably in so many stages that her memory deceived her as regards the date of the last time and the number of stages in total. They were delightful to look at, and her canoe or gondola neckline doubtless flattered them, but, when one thought about it, there was absolutely nothing nautical about that particular promontory. What could the jolly Mrs Manoia have had stuck, embedded, placed, propelled, injected or built inside herself - marble, a citadel, iron, two pantheons, anthracite, steel, it was like being impaled on two stout stalactites, or two pointed irons minus the flat part, as sharp-prowed as an iron but entirely round. It seemed to me a degenerate form of a contemporary madness, and an abuse too; I could understand why her husband might avoid being assailed by such twin bulwarks, and Tupra, I imagined, who had a quicker, better eye than mine, would have calculated at a glance the risks of any full-frontal collision (I refer to the collision of the male with those horizontal pyramids or, perhaps, giant rubies, for the blouse or top with the boat neckline was a slightly watered-down shade of wine red, and in the neurotic disco lights it flashed and even glowed iridescent).

  It was, however, very hard to get angry with Flavia Manoia, or to slight her, knowing that one so easily could: she was too affectionate, cheerful and vulnerable, all three things at once, and only one of those things would have been enough to stop me brusquely rejecting her or even moving discreetly away. And so I withstood the pressure of those two horn-like cones, trusting that she would be the one to put air and distance between us, although the word 'trusting' is far too weak, for the truth is, I was desperate for her to do so. Reresby would have been right, as he almost always was, to commend her legs, if he had ever got round to doing so; and one had to acknowledge that the lady knew exactly the right length of skirt for her build and stature, three inches above the knee; if you saw her from a distance, with her lithe, swaying sensuality, her firm, robust bust, her shapely, rather hard calves and thighs, as well as that eminently screwable arse, as a man with no time for good taste might have put it, she could give precisely the impression she intended every night and thus oblige her husband - as I saw immediately with a slight sense of unease - to put on his now clean glasses and keep watch out of the corner of one eye on her every step and every embrace. The devil does not always demand exaggeration or at least not from everyone, and he doubtless makes pacts of infinite gradations as regards appearances, and is perhaps very exact about distances: sometimes he is kind to a body or a face far off in the shadows, but will condemn and destroy it in the light and from close up (he does not normally allow the opposite to happen). This was not exactly the case here - Mrs Manoia's features had, in Vong's restaurant, seemed extremely pleasant, although not tempting, definitely not that - but in exuberant motion and with a man in her arms she looked far more attractive than when in repose and gulping down or, rather, sucking at bits of crab: sufficiently attractive anyway for someone leaning at a bar, some metres or yards away, to stand up and scan and sniff the dance floor and, more than that, to begin to wave both hands histrionically when he recognised the individual she was clutching to her with practised fanaticism, otherwise known as her dance partner. I, on the other hand, did not, at first, recognise him. Mrs Manoia made me perform so many turns - she wasn't so much doing a semi-slow dance as a semi-fast one, and I was dancing to her tune and to her commands - that I could not fix my eyes on any one point for more than a few tenths of a second, it was worse than being on a carousel. So much so that I took him for a black man, due to the poor visibility and my own precipitate movements and because he was wearing a very pale jacket, several sizes too large and with massive shoulder pads, and the only people I have known who dared wear such an item of clothing, loose but structured, cut very straight, were certain members of that race, especially well-built, nouveau-riche types belonging, loosely, to the world of show business: athletes, boxers, TV celebrities, dandified rappers. For a few seconds, I thought he must be one of them, because in his left ear gleamed an earring, a hoop rather than a stud it seemed to me, which was too large and loose for the taste of the modern, ultra-late scene of the time, although I don't know about now (I don't go out so much), as if a gypsy had lent it to him or as if he had stolen it from a pirate of the sort that hasn't existed for two hundred years, not at least in the West. Luckily, he wasn't wearing a hat with a brim broad or narrow, or a scarf tied in a knot at the back of his head buccaneer-style, bandanas they call them now (he might have decided to go for that had he wanted a coordinated look), he wore his hair greased or smoothed or, rather, pulled back, so much so that for a second, confused moment I feared that he might have secured it with something worse still, namely, a black hairnet like those worn by Goya's majos or, perhaps, as unashamedly sported by the period bullfighters I've seen depicted in engravings and paintings, again by Goya. If I say luckily, this is not just because those who wear hats nowadays, never mind people who wear them indoors, strike me as pathetic individuals, not to say enormous phoneys (they have pretensions not so much to originality in style of dress as to some kind of biographical-artistic originality, men and women alike, although in the latter this seems not only more affected, but completely unforgivable, and women who wear berets, either straight or at a rakish angle, deserve to be shot), but because when I finally realised the identity of the dude or groover or guy, black or otherwise, standing at the bar (this was in a brief moment of stillness allowed me by my Vatican spinning top: she stopped turning for about ten seconds and I got a clear, ungiddy view of the figure waving his hands in the air), it occurred to me that had he been wearing a gypsy violinist's hat or a pirate headscarf I would not have been able to bear it, the mere sight of him, I mean, and still less his company in the presence of people who knew
me, I would have found it unbearable to have anyone associate me with that man, even if only as a fellow Spaniard: I would have denied myself in order to keep him at a safe distance, I would have invented another name (Ure or Dundas would do, since those names were free that night), I would have pretended to be a complete stranger and, of course, British or Canadian through and through, I would have said to him in a heavy fake accent: 'Mi no comprender. No Spanish.' And confronted by his probable, barbarous attempts at English, I would have closed ranks entirely: 'No Spanglish either, hombre.'

  So when I recognised him, and saw that he was not wearing any horrifying headgear (at least that was something), I felt only disbelief in my martyred bosom, that is, I managed to think the following thoughts in the midst of my frenzied dancing: 'My God, it's not possible. The attaché De la Garza hangs out in London discotheques dressed like a dandified black rapper, or perhaps like the black proxy of a black boxer. At this hour, he himself may well believe he's black.' And I added to myself: 'What a dickhead, and white to boot.' He was clearly a man who had no time for good taste, or in whom bad taste was so pervasive that it crossed all frontiers, the clear and the blurred; more than that, he was someone capable of taking a lascivious interest in almost any female being — a rather smutty interest, verging on the merely evacuative - at Sir Peter Wheeler's party, he had been capable of taking a fancy, and quite a large fancy at that, to the not-quite-venerable reverend widow or Deaness Wadman, with her soft, straining decolletage and her precious stone necklace of orange segments. (I mean, of course, an interest any female human being, I would not like to insinuate things I know nothing about and of which I have no proof.) Flavia Manoia, who was of a similar age, but with considerably more style and dash (a dash of her former beauty, I mean), could easily turn his head after the couple of drinks he already had inside him or was planning to drink in the next few minutes. Instantaneous associative memory made me glance around, quite illogically, for the not-quite-ancient Lord Rymer, the famous and maleficent Flask of Oxford with whom De la Garza had shared so many toasts at the buffet supper and who infallibly incited anyone who placed themselves within reach of his bottle (or flask, it comes to the same thing) to drink like the proverbial fish. But his fame and his clumsy manoeuvrings were now confined to strictly Oxonian territory since his retirement from the House and the consequent abandonment of his legendary intrigues in the cities of Strasbourg, Brussels, Geneva and, of course, London (perhaps he wasn't a life peer, but it was rumoured that the increasingly intoxicated wisdom of his interventions in the Lords - a never-satisfied wisdom - made it advisable, in the end, for him to give up his seat prematurely); and with his convex silhouette and his unpredictable feet he would never have ventured into the brutal world of discos, not even if chaired there by De la Garza and one other person.

  I trusted that Rafita de la Garza would be accompanied by that other person or by several, by someone at any rate, or so I thought with a modicum of relief (again, at least it was something) when I saw that he was also waving or, rather, making gestures calling for patience and forbearance from a group of four or five people sitting at a table not far from that occupied by Tupra and Manoia, all, or most, of them self-evidently Spanish, given their shrill voices and their loud, attention-seeking laughter (besides, one of them - a complete idiot - was apparently so moved by the idiotic music that he was wearing the incongruous expression of someone listening to the purest and most painful of flamenco songs, of the kind that would never be played there in a million years, not even in an adulterated, jazzed-up version): it was a very exclusive place of din and deafening clamour, the most idiotically chic place of the season for those who, while not so very young, were nevertheless extremely wealthy, a place chosen by Tupra perhaps to please Flavia Manoia, or so that the only ear that could hear what he said would be that to which his lips were pressed.

  'Bloody hell, Deza, where did you get your hands on this piece of pussy?' Those were the great dickhead Rafita's first, repellent and even depressing words to me in Spanish when he could contain himself no longer and swayed onto the dance floor in a terrible pastiche - for that was what it was - of a cocky black man, the semi-slow number was still unfinished, as, therefore, was our semi-fast dance. 'Come on, introduce me, come on, you pig, don't be so selfish. Is she with you or did you pick her up here?' He obviously assumed that Mrs Manoia was English and so, once more, felt invulnerable in his own language, he probably spent his whole stupid life in London feeling exactly that, one day he would put his foot right in it and someone would make mincemeat of him or beat him to a pulp. I was still busily executing turns and he was spinning in my wake (behind me, I mean), addressing the back of my neck with perfect aplomb, entirely unabashed and unembarrassed: I recalled that he specialised in repeatedly interrupting other people's conversations until they imploded, so there was nothing surprising about the fact that he should sidle his way into other people's dances and pulverise those as well. 'I'll bet you a first edition of Lorca that you've pinched her off some idiot here. When we're out on the pull, watch out, eh?' These small comments of his so enraged me - the puerile rather than, as he probably thought, crude nature of the last; the pedantic wager of this would-be bibliophile; the groundless conceit of his patriotic vulgarity ('we' had to mean 'we Spaniards') — that despite my determination to respond to him in obscure English - for a reason I give below - and to stick with all the resolve of a prisoner of war to my identity as Ure or Dundas, I could not control myself and managed to hurl a few shouted words at him, with my head slightly turned, although not my captive torso: 'You haven't got a first edition of Lorca, Garza Ladra, not even a stolen one.' He probably failed to catch the insulting operatic allusion, but I didn't care, just having made it was reward enough for me. He certainly didn't pick up on it until later, and in a very slow-witted way; initially, though, he opted for a rather snooty, argumentative tone: 'That's where you're wrong, bright boy,' he said, and wagged one absurd, be-ringed finger: he obviously donned his disco gear complete with all the accessories whenever he went out to do some serious partying, or perhaps to play the would-be black; but what could not be explained in such a context (and this is the reason I mention above, the one that should have made me decide to play dumb, and in which aim I immediately failed) was the black Goyaesque hairnet that De la Garza actually and impossibly was wearing to keep his hair in place or for some other cretinous motive, and so my confused vision of that second moment turned out to be right. Now, on the other hand, I couldn't believe it, despite my vision being blindingly clear now. The net did not even have a bob or a ponytail to fill it, its content was pure nothingness; given that he had had the nerve to wear such an anachronistic item, the choice of a sick mind, he could at least have hired a hairpiece, in order, within the awful twisted logic of the idea, to give it meaning and weight and some justification ('meaning' is a manner of speaking, as is 'justification', as is 'mind'). It occurred to me that he might have been sold or given a first-edition Lorca by the former director of the National Library of Spain, who was, I understand, a friend of his and who had, it would seem, taken full advantage of his post — now he was making the most of a still higher post - to squeeze ridiculous prices out of the finest antiquarian booksellers, claiming that he was acquiring the rare, expensive volume in question for that public institution, which was often, moreover, closed to Spanish citizens (appealing, in short, to the patriotic or, in this case, the most easily duped side of each seller), when, in fact, those books flew direct, with no official stopover, to his own private collection, which was still in a phase of rapid expansion.

  I chose not to enquire just then why I was a bright boy and why I was wrong. I noticed that Mrs Manoia was beginning to get annoyed. It was completely unacceptable that, in the middle of a dance, her dance, some ridiculous and possibly already rather inebriated man should clumsily join us on the dance floor, position himself behind her partner and begin loudly berating the back of the latter's neck; it had been even more d
iscourteous on my part, I realised, to reply to this erratic individual, even if only with a single, angry phrase, instead of stopping him literally in his tracks and sending him packing back to the bar, or even further off if I was really trying. Nevertheless, I wasn't sure if her annoyance was due to my momentary neglect, to De la Garza's pure, simple and unprecedented intrusion, or to the fact that I had not suggested an immediate halt to the dancing in order to introduce them formally. It seemed to me she felt some curiosity about Rafita the nightbird in his unintelligible get-up, but it was hard to tell, it might just have been complete bewilderment: as she danced, she must have been seeing two faces juxtaposed, which would have put her off pressing still more closely to my breast or concentrating on and enjoying her steps; I saw, too, how, irresistibly, she kept glancing up at the person behind me, she was understandably distracted by the sight of that accessory more suited to a matador or to an eighteenth-century majo, she could probably not quite make out what it was or its improbable significance, its hermetic symbolism. Or perhaps she had sensed from the very first that, regardless of the string bag with which he had chosen to adorn his hair, regardless of the fortune-teller's earring with which he had encumbered his ear, this second Spaniard would be for her a certain, possibly inexhaustible, source of flattery. The idea came to me anyway, and in a fit of irresponsibility and egotism, it occurred to me that it would be no bad thing to let the attaché join us for a while, he would keep her supplied with a variety of glowing words and compliments (albeit indecipherable), and put on a brave front (the phrase was never more apt) and withstand the stakes or logs if she insisted on more dances. (I was, I feared, being more meagre with my words of praise than I was expected to be, not because I was being excessively prudent or because I found it hard to flatter such a spirited and receptive woman, who was, basically, very easily contented, except that no amount of contentment lasted her for very long and she required constant nourishment, but because I get so bored with expressions such as carine or tenere, and their monotonous nature soon cloys, even if I happen to read them in a novel or hear them in a film, even if I say them in real life or someone addresses them to me.) Whatever the truth of the matter, it took only four words from Flavia Manoia for me to convince myself that the current situation was unsustainable and that I should, without further delay, proceed to the introductions. And I felt quite certain of this when I saw out of the corner of my eye that Manoia, into whose ear Tupra was insinuating long, whispered arguments or propositions, had shot a couple of interrogative, not to say inquisitorial, glances at the dance floor since De la Garza had been pestering us, a total stranger, -in his eyes, who showed every sign of being a troublemaker and who might even be taken for a debauchee.