Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online

presence, still friendly but more formal, it would be equivalent in my language to a respectful use of the familiar 'tu'. He had not yet given me permission to go that far, that would come later, and at his urging not mine.
    'What do you mean "whoever has requested the report"?' That was my second preliminary question. 'What do you mean by "client"? I thought there was only one and that it was always the same one, albeit with different faces, I don't know, the navy, the army, such-and-such a ministry or one of the embassies, or Scotland Yard or the judiciary or Parliament, or, I don't know, the Bank of England or even Buckingham Palace. I mean the Government.' I had been about to say 'the Secret Service, MI6, MIS', but that would have sounded too ridiculous on my lips, and so I avoided it and replaced it as I went with: 'Or the Crown. The State.'
    It seemed to me that young Pérez Nuix did not want to spend time on this subject either, she had launched into the first part of her speech and had not reckoned on the possible side effects of my curiosity. Perhaps she was formulating her request in calculated stages, perhaps she was getting me accustomed to it first, getting me used to the idea in several phases (the main drift of the request was already clear); or its nature - but she would not want to lose her way among unexpected matters of procedure, in preambles and long explanations.
    'Well, yes, generally speaking, that's so, at least as I understand it, but there are exceptions. We don't often know who exactly we're reporting to, or who our interpretations, our judgements, are intended for. We certainly don't, but Tupra, I imagine, must always know or deduce who it is. Or perhaps not, some commissions probably reach him through the intermediaries of other intermediaries, and he doesn't ask questions unless he can do so without arousing suspicions or causing upset. And he has a very precise idea of when it's safe to do so; he spends his whole life calculating such things. But he'll have some idea, I suppose, of where each commission comes from. He can see through walls. He can sniff out where things come from. He's very bright.'
    'Does that mean that we sometimes work for . . . private individuals, if I can put it like that?'Young Pérez Nuix pursed her lips in a gesture that was half mild annoyance and half self-imposed patience, as if she were unresistingly accepting the irritating fact of having, after all, to discuss the matter, velis nolis or doubtless nolis, much against her will. I had the advantage of directing the conversation, of abbreviating it or delaying it or diverting it or interrupting it as long as her request remained incomplete, or at one remove, as long as it had been neither accepted nor rejected. Yes, until the eternal or eternalised 'We'll see', until the 'Yes' or 'No' had been pronounced, she would be pretty much prohibited from contradicting me in any way. This is one of the ephemeral powers of the person doing the granting or refusing, the most immediate compensation for finding oneself involved, but one pays the price for this too, later on. And this is why, often, in order to make that power last, the reply or decision are delayed, and sometimes never even arrive at all. She uncrossed her legs and crossed them again the other way, I saw the ladder in her tights begin on one thigh, she would not discover it for quite some time, I thought (she was not looking where I was looking), and by then the size of the ladder might make her blush. But I wasn't going to tell her about it now, that would have been an impertinence or so it seemed to me just then. What little of her thigh that was revealed, however, was of a very pleasing colour.
    'Does it really matter?' she asked, not defensively, but as if she had never thought about it and was therefore asking herself the question too. 'We're always working for Tupra, aren't we? I mean, he hires us, he pays us. He's the one we answer to and the one to whom we