Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (38 page)

A dog and a young woman in high boots. That rainy night was in fact the first time I had seen this conjunction, this image, with my own eyes; but my memory had already recorded or made the sinister association many years before, in this same country which was not mine, when I was still not married and had no children. (This present time of mine was beginning to resemble that other time; I had no wife or children, although I relied on them and sent them money and missed them every day, at some moment of each day.) The flower-seller Jane used to wear her jeans tucked into her boots, almost musketeer-fashion. The woman hidden behind her umbrella was wearing a skirt, I had glimpsed one thigh. It was doubtless because of that invisible precedent, that imagined image transmitted to me once by the lame bibliophile, that I had felt so relieved to find that the nocturnal white pointer had all its four legs, I had counted them one by one even though I had seen them anyway at a glance. But I had wanted to make quite sure (an instance of reflex superstition, I realised) that he and his mistress did not form some horrific couple already dreamed up by someone else.

That was what I was paid to do in the building with no name. I ceaselessly made associations, rather than interpretations or decipherings or analyses, or, rather, those merely came afterwards, as a rather feeble consequence. Wheeler had more or less announced this to me that Sunday in Oxford, in his garden or during lunch: there is no such thing as two identical people, nor has there ever been, we know that; but nor is there anyone who is not related in some way to someone else who has traversed the world, who does not have what Wheeler called affinities with someone else. There is no one who has no ties, there never has been, no links of fate or character, which, anyway, comes to the same thing (I was paraphrasing Wheeler freely), except perhaps for the very first men, if they really did exist before all others rather than many of them springing up in many places simultaneously. You see two very different people and see them, moreover, separated by centuries from your own life, so much so that, by the time the second one appears, the first has been forgotten for all those centuries, just as I had stored away the anaesthetised image of that horrific couple dreamed up by Alan Marriott. They are people who differ in age, sex, education, beliefs, mentality, temperament, affections; they might speak different languages, come from countries far, far away from each other, have entirely contrary biographies and not share a single experience, not a single parallel hour in their long, respective pasts, not a single comparable one. You meet a very young woman, with her ambition so untouched and intact that you cannot yet tell if she has any ambition or not, I remember Wheeler saying. Her shyness makes her hermetic, so much so that you're not sure if her very shyness is not merely a pretence, a timid mask. She is the daughter of a Spanish couple you know and whom you visit, the parents force her to say hello, to join in, at least for a while, to have supper with the guest and with them. The young woman does not want to be known or even seen, she is there against her will, feigning indifference and coolness, waiting for the world — which she feels owes her a debt — to take an interest in her, to court her, seek her out and even offer her reparation, but feeling vastly bored if the friend of her parents (whom she does not consider to be part of the world: she has, by association, excluded him) displays an insistent curiosity in her, watches her with friendly concern, flatters her and draws her out. She is a slightly offended sphinx, or perhaps she is frightened, or vulnerable and uncertain, or deceitful, an impostor. She's impossible to fathom, she wants people to take notice of her and, at the same time, sees this as interference, she can't bear to be noticed by someone who doesn't count, someone who, according to her perceptions and criteria, has no right to notice her. She isn't and cannot be unpleasant, she doesn't go quite that far, besides, no one with a pretty, blushing face ever is, but it is impossible to imagine what lies behind the helmet of her extreme youth, it is as if she wore the visor lowered so that all one could see of her eyes were her eyelashes. The immature and the unfinished are the most unfathomable of things, like the four lines of a drawing, dashed off and left incomplete, which do not even allow you to speculate on the figure they aspired to be or were on the way to becoming. And yet something nearly always does emerge, says Wheeler. Rarely do you meet a person about whom you remain forever in the dark, rarely — by dint of sheer persistence on our part — does a figure fail to emerge, however blurred or tenuous, and however different from what you were expecting, remote, defined, or out of keeping with those few initial lines, even incongruous. You become accustomed to the darkness of each face or person or past or history or life, you begin, after unflagging scrutiny of the shadows, to be able to make something out, the gloom lifts and you grasp something, discern something: the discouragement abates then or else invades and wraps around us, depending on whether we wanted to see something or to see nothing, depending upon which characteristics, which affinities we find in which person, or whether these are merely our own marks, our own memories. Anyone who wants to see nearly always does end up seeing something, imagine, then, what a person committed to seeing could achieve, or someone who makes a career out of it, like you and like me, you think you haven't begun, but you began a long time ago, you just haven't yet been paid to do it, but now you will be, very soon; it's the way you live anyway. There are so few of us who have the courage and the patience to keep looking that we get well paid for it ('Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking and keep looking beyond the purely necessary, even when you have the feeling that there is no more, no more to think, that it's all been thought, that there's no more to see, that it's all been seen'), to examine in depth what appears to be as smooth, opaque and black as a field of heraldic sable, a compact darkness. Yet one suddenly catches a gesture, an intonation, a flicker, a hesitation, a laugh, a tic, an oblique look, it can be anything, even something very trivial. You hear or see something, whatever it might be, in the young daughter of the couple you are friendly with, you see something that you recognise and associate with something else, that you heard or saw in someone, I think, while Wheeler continues his explanation. You see in the girl the same conceited, cruel, neurotic expression, the identical expression, that you saw so often in a much older man, almost elderly, a magazine publisher with whom you worked for far too long, even a single day would have been too much. They are, in principle, unrelated, no one would have made the connection, it's ridiculous. There is no resemblance, nor, of course, any family relationship. The man had grey, almost bouffant hair, the young woman's is a glossy, dark brown mane; his flesh sags, his face grows visibly more haggard every day, her flesh is so firm and exultant that, beside her, her parents seem one-dimensional (as do you, probably, but you cannot see yourself), as if she were the only person in the room who had any volume, or as if only she had been carved in relief; his eyes were small and treacherous, greedy and malicious despite the smiles that frequented his wide-set teeth — which looked as if they had never been polished or buffed (or as if the enamel had worn away, so that they resembled the tiny, grubby teeth of a saw) — in the hope of making the whole more cordial (and he deceived many, even me for a while, or perhaps I merely averted my gaze from what I saw, that is what the world does constantly, and you cannot always separate yourself from the world), whereas her eyes are large and elusive and grave and seem to covet nothing, her lips do not bestow smiles on those who do not, from her miserly point of view, deserve it, and she doesn't mind appearing sullen (she's not as yet interested in seducing anyone with flattery), and the rare glimpse you get of her teeth is a radiant benediction. No, they are entirely unrelated, that devious owner and publisher of magazines, that boastful and unpleasant older man, so insecure about his acquisitions and so conscious of his monetary and intellectual thefts that he would do his best to crush, if he could, those from whom he pilfered; no, nothing connects them, he and this girl on whom one would say the curtain has not yet gone up, who is still all potentiality and enigma, a ready-prepared canvas on which only a few tentative brushstrokes have fallen, a few experiments with colour. And yet. In the end, at the last, it is only when your persistence finally runs out that you see, with a clear, disinterested bitterness, that flash, the expression or even the look of that man whom she does not resemble and whom she does not know (thus ruling out any idea of mimesis). It isn't just a matter of superimposing their two faces, so different, so opposed — that would be a visual aberration, an ocular absurdity. No, it's an association, a recognition, an affinity grasped. (A horrific couple.) It's the same flicker of irritation or the same demanding look, doubtless provoked by different causes or following such divergent trajectories that his is already declining and hers is barely starting. Or perhaps there is no cause in either case and the trajectories count for little, the flicker or the look do not have their origins in a setback or in a piece of good luck, nor in what events might bring. In the businessman, such expressions were already deeply rooted, permanently resident in his ruddy drinker's complexion threaded with broken veins, whilst in the young girl they are only a momentary temptation, a mist perhaps, something that could yet be reversible and which, at this precise moment, is of no importance. And yet, once you've noticed that link, you know. You know what she is like in one aspect, and that there can be no emendation in that crucial aspect: it will go hard for anyone who thwarts her and equally hard for those who try to please her ('Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, to cease to exist for them'). That look and that expression indicate something which you discerned and noted from the very first moment, but without making the link with that old, immensely arrogant petty thief, without noticing that the young woman shares that characteristic with him, or reproduces it (she doesn't even know him, yet she has produced an exact copy). Both feel, or perhaps judge, that the world is in their debt; that anything good which comes their way is merely their due — what else; they therefore know nothing of contentment or gratitude; they appreciate none of the favours done to them or the clemency with which they are treated; they see such things as evidence of respect, and respect they see as evidence of the weakness and fear of the person who had the cane in his hand, but chose not to beat them. They are quite simply insufferable, people who never learn, certainly not from their mistakes. They always feel that they are the creditors of the world, even though they spend their whole lives affronting and despoiling it, via any of the world's innumerable offspring who happen to stray into their line of fire. And if, given her age, the girl had not yet been able to shoot down many of these, I was quite sure that, swiftly and with great precocity, she would soon make up for the intolerably long waiting time that indolent physical growth imposes on the very determined. When you recognise that conceited, cruel, complex-ridden expression — which always presages anger — when you make that unhappy link, that is, when you cease to be curious about the young woman, or to look on her with sympathy, or to flatter her with the captivating questions of an adult. And she, who previously found those attentions so hard to bear and who spurned them because of the person they came from — a friend of her parents, so boring, so old — now finds it still harder to bear the withdrawal of that deferential behaviour. Which is why she bolts her dessert, gets up from the table and leaves the room without saying goodbye. She has suffered, she has collected and stored away yet another insult.

At other times, fortunately, it's quite the opposite: what you see or identify or associate is something so longed for and beloved that you immediately grow calm, Wheeler tells me. You hear the timbre and the familiar diction of the woman you're speaking to, to whom you have just been introduced. You hear her easy laugh with nostalgic pleasure, or, more than that, with distant emotion. You remember, you listen, you remember: why, of course, yes, I recognise that liking for parties, that infectious good humour, that rapid dissipation of all mists, that invitation to enjoy yourself, that spirit which quickly grows bored with its own sadness and does whatever it can to lighten or truncate the doses that life metes out to her as it does to everyone else, to her too, she doesn't get off scot-free. But neither does she surrender or yield, defenceless, and as soon as she sees that she can survive the burden, she straightens up a little and tries to shake it off, as far away as possible from her frail shoulders. Not in order to suppress sorrow, as if it had never existed, she doesn't wash her hands of it or wriggle out of it, she doesn't irresponsibly forget; but she knows that she can only watch over that sadness if she keeps it in perspective, at a distance, that she might then be able to understand it. And in that middle-aged woman you see an unmistakable affinity with a young woman who is gone forever, with your own wife — Valerie, Val, almost all that remains is the memory of her name, but now, vital, living traces of her appear again, in that other voice and face — the wife who died young and could never even have dreamed of reaching this great age, nor, of course, of giving birth to a child or possibly even fantasising about one, she died too young to imagine herself a mother, almost too soon to imagine herself married to Peter Wheeler, or Peter Rylands, too young either to imagine herself married, let alone actually being married. She had dreamy, diaphanous eyes and very happy, affectionately ironic lips. She joked a lot, she never lost her youthful ways, she never had the chance. Once, with those same lips, she told me why she loved me: 'Because I like to see you reading the newspaper while I'm having my breakfast, that's all. I can read in your face the mood in which the world has got out of bed this morning and the mood in which you have got out of bed too, since you are the world's main representative in my life. And by far its most visible representative too.' Those words return unexpectedly, when you hear that identical timbre and diction, and see that oh so comparable smile. And you know at once that this mature woman to whom you have just been introduced can be trusted absolutely. You know that she will do you no harm, or not at least without warning you first.