Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa Read Free Book Online Page A

have been enough for him. He would have gone up to your friend and, if your friend was lucky, torn off his arm, if not his head. You criticize me for some trifling, unimportant thing that I did, but you live in a tiny world that barely exists, sheltered from the violence that has always been the norm and still is in most parts of the world, it's like mistaking the interlude for the whole performance, you haven't a clue, you people who never step outside of your own time or travel beyond countries like ours in which, up until the day before yesterday, violence also ruled. What I did was nothing. The lesser of two evils. And it was your fault.'
    The lesser of two evils. So Tupra belonged to that all-too-familiar group of men who have always existed and of whom I've known a few myself, there are always so many of them. The sort who justify themselves by saying: 'I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I believed; others would have done the same, only they would have behaved more cruelly and caused more harm. I killed one so that ten would not be killed, and ten so that a hundred would not die, I don't deserve to be punished, I deserve a prize.' Or those who answer: 'I had to do it, I was defending my God, my King, my country, my culture, my race; my flag, my legend, my language, my class, my space; my honour, my family, my strongbox, my purse and my socks. And in short, I was afraid.' Fear, which exonerates as much as love, and of which it's so easy to say and to believe 'It's stronger than I am, it's not in my power to stop it' or that allows one to resort to the words 'But I love you so much,' as an explanation for one's actions, as an alibi or an excuse or as a mitigating factor. Perhaps he even belonged to those who would claim: 'It was the times we lived in, and unless you were there, you couldn't possibly understand. It was the place, it was unhealthy, oppressive; unless you were there, you couldn't possibly imagine our feelings of alienation, the spell we were under.' On the other hand, at least he would not be one of those who dodged the issue altogether, he would never pronounce those other words: 'I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, as if befuddled by the tortuous smokescreen of dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, the life that doesn't really count, it only half-happened and without my full consent.' No, Tupra would never stoop to the sort of pathetic excuses even I have used to justify to myself certain episodes in my own life. Just then, however, I prefered not to go into that aspect of things, and so I replied to the last thing he'd said to me:
    'I work for you, Bertram, I do my job. Don't ask me to do any more than that. I'm here to interpret and to write reports, not to deal with drunken boors. Nor even to entertain ladies in their declining years, clasping them to me, sternum to breast.'
    Tupra couldn't help being amused despite himself. Up until then we hadn't had the chance to talk about my torment, still less to laugh about it, or for him to laugh at me, at my bad luck and my imperfect stoicism.
    'Rocky peaks, eh?' And he let out a genuine guffaw. 'There's no way I would have accepted her invitation to dance, not with those bulwarks of hers.' He used the word 'bulwarks,' which might best be rendered in Spanish as 'baluartes.'
    He'd done it again. I myself sometimes laugh at things despite myself. I couldn't suppress my own laughter, my anger vanished for a moment, or was postponed because it was no longer relevant. For a few seconds, we both laughed together, simultaneously, with neither of us hanging back or preempting the other, the laughter that creates a kind of disinterested bond between men and that suspends or dissolves their differences. This meant that, for all my irritation and my growing feelings of apprehension—or was it perhaps unease, aversion, repugnance— I hadn't entirely withdrawn my laughter from him. I might