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

give our work, on the understanding that he'll make the best use of it, well, that at least is what I assume,I suppose. Or perhaps, I don't know, perhaps I just think that it's not my concern. Is it the concern of a car worker what happens to the screws he puts in or the engine he builds along with his workmates, for example, if it's going to be an ambulance or a tank, or, if it is a tank, whose hands the tank will end up in?''I really don't think the two things are comparable,' I said and said no more. I wanted her to go on arguing, I was the one in charge just as Peter Wheeler was in charge when he and I were talking, or Tupra when he urged me on or questioned me or forced me to see more and then wormed things out of me.
    "Well, what do you want me to say?" - Bueno, como me quieres que diga, she had said. Yes, there was definitely something strange or half-English sometimes about her turns of phrase in Spanish, yet they were almost never merely incorrect. - 'Going further than that would be like a novelist worrying not about the publisher to whom he hands over his novel so that the former can find as wide a public for it as possible, but about the potential buyers of what the publisher produces under his imprint. There would be no way of selecting or controlling or meeting those buyers,, and, besides, that wouldn't be the novelist's concern. He puts stories, plots and ideas into his book. Bad ideas, temptations if you like. But surely what arises out of them, what they unleash, is neither his business nor his responsibility.' She paused for a moment. 'Or do you think it would be?'She seemed sincere — or genuine -I mean that she seemed to be thinking what she was saying while she was formulating it, somewhat uncertainly, hesitantly, with a sense of spontaneity and of effort too (the effort of really thinking, nothing more, but which is something that is becoming less and less common in the world, as if the whole world nearly always resorts to a few set pieces available to everyone, even to the most unlettered, a kind of infection of the air).
    'I'm not even sure the comparison works,' I replied, and now I joined her in her effort, 'because our reports aren't, as I understand it, public but more or less secret; at any rate, they're not available to be read by anyone nor are they sold in shops; besides, they're about people, real people whom no one has invented and who cannot, therefore, be made to disappear or be dropped in the next chapter, and for whom I have no idea whether what we say has much or little importance, if it causes them great harm or brings them great benefit, if what it withholds from or grants them is crucial to them, if it makes their plans possible or completely scuppers them, plans which, as far as they're concerned, are important, possibly vital. If it resolves or ruins their future, or, at the very least, their immediate future (but then the distant future depends on the immediate future, and so everything else ends up depending on it too). Anyway, I don't believe reporting to the Crown or the State is the same as reporting to a private individual.'
    'Ah, you don't believe,' she said. Not with irony (she could not as yet allow herself that), but perhaps with surprise. 'And what do you see as the fundamental difference?'Ah, yes, what did I see? Her question made me feel suddenly ingenuous, absurdly much younger or less experienced (I was, as she said, new), and it suddenly became a very hard question to answer without appearing a complete idiot, a novice. I had no option but to try, though; after all, I had come out with the remark, and I couldn't simply allow it to fall at the first fence, I couldn't just give in like that and say: 'Yes, you're right. There is, as far as I can see, no difference at all.'
    'At least in theory,' I said protecting myself as best I could, 'the State safeguards the common interest, the interests of its citizens, that should be its sole concern. At least in theory,' I said