Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

284 Pages·2013·2.05 MB·English

by  Javier Marias

For Carmen López M,
who will, I hope, want
to go on listening to me
And for Sir Peter Russell,
to whom this book is indebted
for his long shadow,
and the author,
for his far-reaching friendship
1
Fever
One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or
make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or
traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain,
one-eyed oblivion. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story
contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is
the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond
that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so tangled that a
razor or knife is needed to cut it. How many of my confidences remain intact, of
all those I have offered up, I, who have always laid such store by my own
instinct and yet have still sometimes failed to listen to it, I, who have been
ingenuous for far too long? (Less so now, less, but these things are very slow to
fade.) The confidences I shared with two friends remain preserved and intact,
unlike those granted to another ten who lost or destroyed them; the meagre
confidences shared with my father, and the chaste ones vouchsafed to my
mother, which were very similar, if not the same, although those granted to her
did not last very long, and she can no longer break them or, at least, only
posthumously, if, one day, I were to make some unfortunate discovery, and
something that was hidden ceased to be hidden; gone are the confidences given
to sister, girlfriend, lover or wife, past, present or imaginary (the sister is usually
the first wife, the child wife), for in such relationships it seems almost obligatory
that one should, in the end, use what one knows or has seen against the beloved
or the spouse — or the person who turns out to have been only momentary
warmth and flesh — against whoever it was who proffered revelations and
allowed a witness to their weaknesses and sorrows and was ready to confide, or
against the person who absent-mindedly reminisced out loud on the pillow not
even aware of the dangers, of the arbitrary eye always watching or the selective,
biased ear always listening (often it’s nothing very serious, for domestic use
only, when cornered or on the defensive, to prove a point if caught in a tight
dialectical spot during a prolonged discussion, then it has a purely argumentative
application).
The violation of a confidence is also this: not just being indiscreet and thereby
causing harm or ruin, not just resorting to that illicit weapon when the wind
changes and the tide turns on the person who did the telling and the revealing —
and who now regrets having done so and denies it and grows confused and
sombre, wishing he could wipe the slate clean, and who now says nothing — it
is also profiting from the knowledge obtained through another’s weakness or
carelessness or generosity, and not respecting or remembering the route by
which we came to know the information that we are now manipulating or
twisting — sometimes it’s enough just to say something out loud for the air to
grasp and distort it: be it the confession of a night of love or of one desperate
day, or of a guilty evening or a desolate awakening, or the drunken loquacity of
an insomniac: a night or a day when the person talking talked as if there were no
future beyond that night or that day and as if their loose tongue would die with
them, not knowing that there is always more to come, that there is always a little
more, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and
dreams — spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams — and then, of course,
there is interminable time that does not even pause or slow its pace after our
final end, but continues to make additions and to speak, to murmur, to ask
questions and to tell tales, even though we can no longer hear and have fallen
silent. To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves not
even after death, and I least of all, for I have often told tales and even written
reports, more than that, I look and I listen, although now I almost never ask
questions. No, I should not tell or hear anything, because I will never be able to
prevent it from being repeated or used against me, to ruin me or — worse still —
from being repeated and used against those I love, to condemn them.

And then there is distrust, of which there has been no shortage in my life either.
It’s interesting how the law takes this into account and, even odder, takes the
trouble to warn us: when someone is arrested, at least in films, he is allowed to
remain silent, because, as he is immediately informed, ‘anything you say can be
used against you’. There is in this warning a strange — or indecisive and
contradictory — desire not to play entirely dirty. That is, the prisoner is told that
the rules will, from now on, be dirty, he is informed and reminded that,
somehow or other, they are going to catch him out and will make the most of
any blunders, lapses and mistakes he might make — he is no longer a suspect,
but an accused man whose guilt they are going to try to prove, whose alibis they
will try to destroy, he has no right to impartiality, not between now and the day
he appears in court — all their efforts will be channelled into gathering the
evidence that will condemn him, all their vigilance and monitoring and
investigation and research into collecting the clues that will incriminate him and
support their decision to arrest him. And yet they offer him the opportunity to
remain silent, indeed, almost urge it upon him; they tell him about this right
which he may have known nothing about, and therefore, sometimes, actually put
the idea in his head: not to open his mouth, not even to deny what he is being
accused of, not to run the risk of having to defend himself alone; remaining
silent appears or is presented as being clearly the most sensible option, one that
could save us even if we know ourselves to be and are guilty, as the only way in
which this self-declared dirty game can be rendered ineffectual or barely
practicable, or at least not with the involuntary and ingenuous collaboration of
the prisoner: ‘You have the right to remain silent’; in America, they call it the
Miranda law and I’m not even sure if its equivalent exists in our countries, they
used it on me once, a long time ago, well, not that long ago, but the policeman
got it wrong, left out a bit, he forgot to say ‘in court’ when he rattled off the
famous phrase, ‘anything you say can be used against you’, there were witnesses
to this omission and the arrest was invalidated. The same strange spirit imbues
that other right of the accused, not to testify against himself, not to prejudice
himself verbally with his story or his answers, with his contradictions or
stumblings. Not to harm himself by his own narrative (which can, indeed, cause
great harm), in other words, to lie.
The game is, in fact, so dirty and so biased that, on such a basis, no justice
system can possibly presume to be just, and perhaps, therefore, there is no
possible justice, ever, anywhere, perhaps justice is a phantasmagoria, a false
concept. Because what the accused is told boils down to this: ‘If you say
something that suits us and is favourable to our aims, we will believe you and
accept it and use it against you. If, on the other hand, you allege something to
your advantage or in your defence, something that proves exculpatory for you
and inconvenient for us, we won’t believe you at all, they will be like words in
the wind, given that you have the right to lie and that we simply assume that
everyone — that is, all criminals — will avail themselves of that right. If you let
slip an incriminating statement or fall into a flagrant contradiction or openly
confess, those words will carry weight and will be used against you: we will
have heard them, recorded them, noted them down, taken them as said, there will
be written evidence of them, we will add them to the report, and they will be
used against you. Any phrase, however, that might help to exonerate you will be
considered frivolous and will be rejected, we will turn a deaf ear, ignore it,
discount it, it will be so much air, smoke, vapour, and will not work in your
favour at all. If you declare yourself guilty, we will judge it to be true and take
your declaration very seriously indeed; if innocent, we will take it as a joke, and,
as such, undeserving of serious consideration.’ It is thus taken for granted that
both the innocent and the guilty will proclaim themselves to be the former, and
so, if they speak, there will be no difference between them, they will be made
equal, on a level. And it is then that these words are spoken: ‘You have the right
to remain silent’, although this won’t help to distinguish between the innocent
and the guilty either. (To remain silent, yes, silent, the great ambition that no one
achieves not even after death, and yet, at critical moments, we are advised and
urged to do just that: ‘Keep quiet and don’t say a word, not even to save
yourself. Put your voice away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend
the cat’s got your tongue. Keep quiet, and save yourself.’)

In our dealings with others, in ordinary, unsurprising life, no such warnings are
given and we should perhaps never forget that absence or lack of warning, or,
which comes to the same thing, never forget the always implicit and threatened
repetition, be it accurate or distorted, of whatever we say and speak. People
cannot help but go and tell what they hear, and they tell everything sooner or
later, 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, the sorrows and the joys and the resentments, the grievances and the
flattery and the plans for revenge, 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. People are ceaselessly relating and narrating without even
realising that they are, and quite unaware of the uncontrollable mechanisms of
treachery, misunderstanding and chaos they are setting in motion and which
could prove disastrous, they talk unceasingly about others and about themselves,
about others when they talk about themselves and about themselves when they
talk about others. This constant telling and retelling is perceived sometimes as a
transaction, although it always successfully disguises itself as a gift (because it
does have something of the gift about it) and is more often than not a bribe, or
the repayment of some debt, or a curse that one hurls at a particular person or
perhaps at chance itself, for chance to turn it, willy-nilly, into fortune or
misfortune, or else it is the coin that buys social relations and favours and trust
and even friendships and, of course, sex. And love too, when what the other
person says becomes indispensable to us, becomes our air. Some of us have been
paid to do just that, to tell and to hear, to put in order and to recount. To retain
and observe and select. To wheedle, to embellish, to remember. To interpret and
translate and incite. To draw out and persuade and distort. (I have been paid for
talking about what did not exist and had not yet happened, the future and the
probable or the merely possible — the hypothetical — that is, to intuit and
imagine and invent; and to convince.)
Besides, most people forget how or from whom they learned what they know,
and there are even people who believe that they were the first to discover
whatever it might be, a story, an idea, an opinion, a piece of gossip, an anecdote,
a lie, a joke, a pun, a maxim, a title, a story, an aphorism, a slogan, a speech, a
quotation or an entire text, which they proudly appropriate, convinced that they
are its progenitors, or perhaps they do, in fact, know they are stealing, but push
the idea far from their thoughts and thus manage to conceal it. It happens more
and more nowadays, as if the times we live in were impatient for everything to
pass into the public domain and for an end to all notions of authorship, or, put
less prosaically, were impatient to convert everything into rumour and proverb
and legend that can be passed from mouth to mouth and from pen to pen and
from screen to screen, all unconstrained by fixity, origin, permanence or
ownership, all headlong, unchecked and unbridled.
I, on the other hand, always do my best to remember my sources, perhaps
because of the work I’ve done in the past which remains always present because
it never leaves me (I had to train my memory to distinguish what was true from
what was imagined, what really happened from what was assumed to have
happened, what was said from what was understood); and depending on who
those sources are, I try not to make use of that information or that knowledge,
indeed I even prohibit myself from doing so, now that I only work in that area
very occasionally, when it can’t be helped or avoided or when asked to by
friends who don’t pay me, at least not with money, only with their gratitude and
a vague sense of indebtedness. A most inadequate recompense, by the way, for
sometimes, indeed, not so very rarely, they try to transfer that feeling to me so
that I am the one who suffers, and if I don’t agree to that swapping of roles and
don’t make that feeling mine and don’t behave as if I owed them my life, they
end up considering me an ungrateful pig and shy away from me: there are many
people who regret having asked for favours and having explained what those
favours were and having, therefore, explained too much about themselves.
A while ago, a woman friend of mine didn’t ask me a favour exactly, but she
did oblige me to listen and informed me — not so much dramatically as fearfully
— of her recently inaugurated adultery, even though I was more her husband’s
friend than hers or, at least, had known him longer. She did me a very poor
service indeed, for I spent months tormented by that knowledge — which she
theatrically and egotistically expanded on and updated, ever more in thrall to
narcissism — knowing that with my friend, her husband, I had to remain silent:
not because I didn’t feel I had the right to tell him something about which he
might — although how was I to know — have preferred to remain in ignorance;
not just because I didn’t want to take responsibility for unleashing with my
words other people’s actions and decisions, but also because I was very
conscious of the manner in which that embarrassing story had reached me. I am
not free to dispose of something I did not find out about by chance or by my own
means, or in response to a commission or a request, I told myself. If I had
spotted my friend’s wife and her lover boarding a plane bound for Buenos Aires,
I could perhaps have considered finding some neutral way of revealing that
involuntary sighting, that interpretable, but not incontrovertible fact (I would,
after all, have had no knowledge of her relationship with the man, and it would
have fallen to my friend and not to me to feel suspicious), although I would
probably still have felt like a traitor and a busybody and very much doubt I
would have dared to say anything in either case. But, I told myself, I would at
least have had the option. Having found out what I knew from her, however,
there was no way I could use this against her or pass it on without her consent,
not even if I believed that doing so would be to my friend’s advantage, and I was
sorely tempted by this belief on certain extremely awkward occasions, for
example, when I was with them both or the four of us were having supper
together (my wife being the fourth guest, not the lover) and she would shoot me
a look that combined complicity and a shudder of pleasurable fear (and I would
hold my breath), or he would blithely mention the well-known case of the well-
known lover of someone or other whose spouse, however, knew nothing at all
about it. (And I would hold my breath.) And so I remained silent for several
months, hearing about and almost witnessing something I found both dull and
highly distasteful, and all for what, I used to ask myself in my darker moments,
probably to be denounced one day — when the unpleasant facts are revealed or
the truth is told or flaunted and exhibited — as a collaborator or an accomplice,
or co-conspirator if you like, by the very person whose secret I am keeping and
whose exclusive authority on the subject I have always acknowledged and
respected and never breathed a word about to anyone else. Her authority and her
authorship, even though at least two other people are involved in her story, one
knowingly and the other entirely unwittingly, or perhaps, despite all, my friend
is still not yet involved and would only become involved were I to tell him.
Maybe I am the one who is already involved because of what I know, and
because I listened and interpreted — I used to think — that is what my long
experience and my long list of responsibilities tell me and confirm to me daily,
with each day that passes, making them grow ever dimmer and more distant, so
that it seems to me sometimes that I must have read them or seen them on the
screen or imagined them, that it is not so easy to disentangle oneself or even to
forget. Or that it isn’t possible at all.
No, I should never tell anyone anything, nor hear anything either.

I did, for some time, listen and notice and interpret and tell, and I was paid to do
so during that time, but it was something I had always done and that I continue
to do, passively and involuntarily, without effort and without reward, I probably
can’t help it now, it’s just my way of being in the world, it will go with me to my
death, and only then will I rest from it. More than once I was told it was a gift,
and Peter Wheeler was the one who pointed this out to me, alerting me to its
existence by explaining and describing it to me, for, as everyone knows or, at
least, senses, things only exist once they have been named. Sometimes, though,
this gift seems more like a curse, even though I now tend to stick to the first
three activities, which are silent and internal and take place solely in my mind,
and therefore need affect no one but me, and I only tell anyone anything when I
have no alternative or if someone insists. For during my professional or, shall we
say, remunerated life in London, I learned that what merely happens to us barely
affects us or, at least, no more than what does not happen, but it is the story (the
story of what does not happen too), which, however imprecise, treacherous,
approximate and downright useless, is nevertheless almost the only thing that
counts, is the decisive factor, it is what troubles our soul and diverts and poisons