Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (25 page)

I realised that I felt lighter, in part thanks to the music, to 'Peter Gunn' which never fails and works in all situations, and at the same instant I saw that it was also - or even more so -thanks to the dance into which I had unconsciously slipped,
doubtless in instinctive, mechanical, almost unthinking imitation of the three carefree individuals on the other side of the square: sometimes your feet move of their own accord, or as we say in Spanish with more metaphorical exactitude,
cobran vida,
they take on a life of their own, they just won't keep still, and you barely notice. I had started dancing, it was incredible, there I was alone in the house, as if I were no longer me, but my agile, athletic neighbour with the bony features and neat moustache, a clear case of visual and auditory contagion, of mimesis, encouraged, in fact, by my own musings. I found myself (in a manner of speaking) moving around my living room, which was encumbered with furniture and much smaller than the one opposite, taking short, quick steps, although whether or not they were sinuous, I don't know, furiously jiggling feet and hips and with my head keeping time, my arms accompanying these movements only lightly and minimally, slightly bent and held out to the side, and in my hands an open newspaper which, of course, I wasn't reading, I had picked it up, I suppose, to provide an element of balance required by the dance. And then I felt embarrassed, because when I turned to look properly at the original dancers, when I looked again - really looked this time, rather than while absorbed in my own thoughts -I had to assume that they, in turn, had heard my music during a brief pause in theirs - my window was open as were two of theirs -and they would have located me without difficulty, by tracing where the music was coming from; and, of course, they were amused to see me (the watchman watched, the hunter hunted, the spy spied upon, the dancer caught dancing), because now not only were the four of us dancing absurdly and wildly according to their choreography, there had been another contagion too, from me to them: they must have found my idea ingenious or imaginative, and so each of them was now holding an open newspaper, as if they were dancing with the pages, with the newspaper as partner.

I stopped at once, I felt my face grow hot, fortunately, given the distance, they would not be able to see that, they weren't
using binoculars as I occasionally did to spy on their dance studio. They too immediately stopped, they came over to the windows and signalled to me, waving, in fact they made explicit gestures to me to go over there and join them, to go to their apartment and not dance alone any more, but to form part of a jolly quartet. That made me feel even more embarrassed: I slammed the window shut, stepped back, switched off the light and turned the music down. I made myself invisible, inaudible. From now on, it would not — alas — be so easy for me to watch them or, rather, him, since, more often than not, he was alone. But it made me smile too, and I saw that it had one advantage: I thought that if ever a day or night should seem so desolate that even one of those infallible Mancini melodies, or another of those tunes that had the same effect, should prove incapable of raising my spirits, I at least had the possibility of going in search of company and dancing on the other side of the square, in that happy, carefree household whose occupant resisted all my deductions and conjectures, and inhibited or eluded my interpretative faculties, something that happened so infrequently that it bestowed on him a slight air of mystery. The prospect of a hypothetical visit, of his possible or future support, made me feel lighter still. I picked up my racing binoculars and looked across at them from behind the window, safe inside, safe from their eyes, and it seemed to me, judging from the way they were moving, that they had changed the music (they had gone back to their own dance, after my eclipse and flight), and so I altered the track on my machine as well and replaced it with a tune from
Touch of Evil
called 'Background for Murder', not as sombre as its title would suggest. But I made a mistake when trying to programme it in the dark or lit only by the thrifty light of the lunar street-lamps, and in its place another unexpected and entirely different tune began to play, it wasn't jazz this time, but a pianola, 'Tana's Theme' by name, as I later saw on the back of the disc, a tune I barely remembered from the soundtrack and from the film (I had a still fuzzier memory of the film, I should buy myself a DVD player without delay, in London I
hardly ever went to
the cinema), although gradually, through those notes so like a hurdy-gurdy, emerging from the mists, came the figure of a mature Marlene Dietrich with black hair, dressed as a fortune-teller or something of the sort, also playing the role — even more improbably, and yet one believed in her too - of a Mexican woman I suppose, or perhaps a stateless gypsy in the eponymous frontier town of Tana.

It was a melancholy tune, difficult to dance to on your own, a valedictory melody, and bore no relation — indeed it was utterly incongruous — to the long strides and leaps my neighbours were performing over there in the distance, although I could see them close to through my lenses. However, I let the music play, I stood listening to it; hurdy-gurdies always bring back memories of childhood, they were common in the Madrid of the time, you still occasionally see one now, but it's not the same, they're not part of the natural landscape, but an intentional lure for tourists; and hearing the hurdy-gurdy music which I had accidentally programmed on my CD player, which was repeating slowly and calmly over and over (as if it really were a pianola, whose keys move on their own, as if played by ghostly fingers), images of those childhood streets appeared before me, Geneva and Covarrubias and Miguel Angel, the image of four children walking along those streets with an old maidservant or with my young living mother (both of them now ghosts), my siblings and me, three boys and a girl, she by my side, holding my hand, she was the youngest and I was the second youngest, and that had doubtless drawn us together.

'It seems odd that it should be the same life,' I thought. 'It seems odd that I should be one and the same, that boy with his three siblings and this man sitting in the half-darkness, with his own distant children whom he never now sees, a little alone here in London.' 'How can I be the same man?' Wheeler had wondered out loud in the garden of his house beside the river, just before lunch on that Sunday. How could that old man — he said to himself and to me - be the man who was married to a very young girl who had stayed forever young because she had
died when she was still that age? Peter had preferred to leave the story for another day ('How did your wife die, what did she die of?' was my question), doubtless a day that would never arrive, at least not on earth but, with any luck, on Judgement Day, if that ever took place: it was clear that he found it hard to talk about her, or preferred not to. I, on the other hand, could still recognise myself as the man who married Luisa, on my return from my stay in England, and which I now had to call my first stay, the wedding took place not long afterwards. Years had passed, but not so very many, and unlike what had happened to Wheeler with his wife Val or Valerie, Luisa had kept me company through almost all the days of my slow ageing, at least until my expulsion and exile. I realised that my lightness that night was due less to the music or to my unpremeditated dance than to the whole of my conversation with her, especially the latter part, with that optimistic suspicion of mine, possibly without foundation, that no-one had yet entered her life, not fully, and had not therefore yet installed himself in my house to rest his head on my pillow and to occupy all those places that had once been mine.

'Perhaps I should hang on to this job for a while longer, despite everything, despite Pérez Nuix, despite Tupra,' I thought as I began to doze off, sitting in my chair again, still dressed, my binoculars on my lap, in almost total darkness, lulled by the hurdy-gurdy or pianola which was playing out its melody in a series of endless farewells (Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, laughter and farewell, insults), convinced that I would at last enjoy a night without insomnia or unpleasant surprises, without any crushing nightmares, without that sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. 'That was her advice to me, that I should hang on to this job about which she knows nothing, absolutely nothing. It wasn't because of how much I earn, she wasn't serious about that, and I do send her more than I need to, as she said with her usual honesty, she hasn't changed now that she's alone. But it's good that they're living in the lap of luxury, or nearly, that's what she said, it pleases me to be able
to make that possible, although she's probably exaggerating, and it's all thanks to this job of which there is still more to come, there is always something, just a bit more, and so why not continue, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and dreams (but afterwards there is always pain and the sword, and days and weeks and months and possibly years will have passed). What happened the night before last, what I saw and heard, is already beginning to grow blurred on this other night and will doubtless fade with the passing of the days, thanks to our ability to erase all things, we have an enormous capacity for that, as we do for temporary denial and transitory forgetting, and it will end up perhaps like the drop of blood at the top of the stairs, which I can no longer swear that I saw because by cleaning it up so very thoroughly, I opened the way to doubt, however contradictory that may seem: if I know I got rid of it, how can I doubt it; and yet that is how it is, you erase or delete something and what was erased or deleted no longer exists; and if it no longer exists, how can you be sure that it did actually once exist or if it never existed at all; when something disappears without leaving a rim or a trace, or someone vanishes without leaving a corpse, then it is possible to doubt their actual existence, even an existence that happened and had witnesses. It is therefore possible to doubt the existence of my uncle Alfonso, of whom my mother found only a photo of him dead, which I still have, but not his body. It's possible therefore to doubt that of Andres Nin, for no one knows where he is buried or, indeed, if he was buried (perhaps in a little inner garden in the palace of El Pardo, and there, for thirty-six years, his bones would shudder whenever they felt the leisurely steps of his enemy above his anonymous or, rather, unrecorded grave). It's possible to doubt the existence of Valerie Wheeler, who, as far as I am concerned, has neither death nor life if no one tells me about them, she's just a name and might well be an invention and perhaps it would be better if she were (and maybe that's why her eternal widower gave me that warning: "One should never tell anyone anything"). What happened the night
before last, and in which I participated, in this country which for me will one day revert to being "other", will become increasingly hazy, unreal, especially if it doesn't happen again or if I don't tell anyone else and don't keep thinking about it, then it will come to be remembered as, at most, a bad dream, and after every dream in which some appalling or violent act occurs, caused by me or which I did nothing to prevent, I can always say: "I didn't want it, that wasn't my intention, I took no part, it had nothing to do with me, I didn't choose it, what can I do about it..." That is what the dreamer thinks and what we all think, and who, from time to time, hasn't done the same? While the illusion lasts, we are safe, and it isn't a question of truncating the illusion, but, rather, of allowing it to have its full time to be believed.'

Suddenly — no, that isn't true, it took me a while to realise — I saw that the lights opposite, the dancers' lights, had gone out and the windows were now closed. They had, at some point, brought the session to an end, while I was drowsing or dozing to the sound of 'Tana's Theme', the pianola would not stop until I made it do so with my remote control, if not; it would never cease saying goodbye (Farewell, dear, delightful friends, for I am dying; I will not see you again, nor will you see me; and farewell, passion, farewell, memories). I had not been aware of what was going on outside, I had not gone back over to the window to see who came out, which of the two women, if one or both or neither, I could still peer out now and see if a bike was parked there, but if there wasn't, it wouldn't mean anything anyway, its owner might not have brought it tonight, she might have come by bus, Underground or taxi, there's no reason why what happens once should necessarily happen again, although we have the foolish tendency to believe otherwise, especially if what happens pleases us; and if there was a bike there, it wouldn't mean anything either, since it could belong to anyone. It really didn't matter to me at all, I wasn't going to go out and scan the square, all I cared about, at least a little, was who did or did not leave my house, that is, Luisa's and the children's
house in far-off Madrid, or who did or did not enter it, and who stayed; and that was something I could not see, the eyes of the mind were not enough, they have limits. 'It's none of my business, I should get used to the idea once and for all,' I thought. 'Just as it's none of my business how Luisa spends my unnecessary money, the "excessive amount" I send without her asking me to, she knows what asking entails, for both parties involved, and now that we're no longer together, she prefers to wait and to avoid asking: nor is it my business if she succumbs to the same temptation as her female acquaintances and friends, deciding not to run the risk of ending up a pariah or one of the careless, and not wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow to have some treatment or other were she to want to, and submit herself to incisions and implants or to plump herself up like Mrs Manoia with those vile Botox injections if that makes her happy, although I can't see her taking that route, not yet, not the person I left behind, the person I know, she can't have changed that much, not enough to betray her own face; anyway, I probably should hang on to this job, so as to continue earning what I earn now and even a bit more, to defray or cover the costs of any more serious needs or emergencies, although it's no longer my role to try and protect her or try and make her happy, but how do you free yourself of that tendency, that habit; how do you expunge it from your thoughts?'
I pressed the remote-control button and silenced the hurdy-gurdy or pianola, it was high time, I had got carried away, I had opened myself up too much to evocations, although without ever becoming bored hearing the same tune over and over. If I stayed in the armchair and went to sleep there fully dressed, I would wake in the night oppressed by leaden dreams, stiff-limbed and feeling grubby and cold. But I couldn't muster the energy to get up and go to the bedroom and at least lie down. And I thought this without the benefit of music, in total silence, it was late now, not by Madrid standards, but for London and that was where I was, one more inhabitant of that large island which was home or
patria
to some people, like Bertram Tupra,
but not to me, to me it was simply that other country where there are no blinds or shutters and often no curtains, and so, if the sky is clear, the moon slips into all the rooms, or the lunar street-lamps do if it's cloudy, as if you always had to keep one eye open as you fell asleep: 'I must get used to the idea that I have no role now and that I am nothing in that apartment, between those sheets that no longer exist because they've been torn up to make rags or dusters long before they grew old and thin, or, indeed, on that pillow. I am just a shadow, a vestige, or not even that. An aphasic murmur, a dissipated smell and a vanished fever, a scratch without a scab, the scab came off long ago. I am like the earth beneath the grass or even deeper down, like the invisible earth beneath the still more sunken earth, a dead man for whom there was no mourning because he left no corpse, a ghost whose flesh is falling away and who is only a name for those who come afterwards and who will never know for sure if that name was invented. I will be the rim of a stain that vainly resists removal when someone scrubs and rubs at the wood and cleans it all up; or like the trail of blood that is so hard to erase, but which does, in the end, disappear and is lost, so that there never was any trail or any blood spilled. I am snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops falling. Nothing more. Or rather this: "Let it be changed into nothing, and let it be as if what was had never been." That is what I will be, what was and has never been. That is, I will be time, which has never been seen, and which no one ever can see.'