Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Read Free

and offered it to me, he was my host now and was mechanically aware of that, he'd also offered me a drink which, for the moment, I'd declined, he'd poured himself a port not from an ordinary bottle, but from one with a little medal about its neck, like those passed swiftly round in a clockwise direction by the guests (there were always several bottles, they never stopped coming) during the dessert course at the high tables to which I was occasionally invited by colleagues in my distant Oxford days, perhaps his Oxford colleagues still sent him some of that extraordinary port wine from the college cellars and which one can find nowhere else. I hadn't kept up with how much Tupra had drunk during that long, interminable evening which had still not yet ended, although he had, I imagined, drunk no less than I had, and I didn't want and couldn't hold another drop, he, however, seemed unaffected by the alcohol or else its ravages were not apparent. The quantity of alcohol consumed, however, had had nothing to do with his terrorizing and punishing or beating or thrashing of De la Garza, for he had behaved throughout with precision and calculation. Who knows, though, perhaps it had influenced his decision to demonstrate to De la Garza his variant—varying— modes of death and to leave both De la Garza and me alive so that we would always remember them, it's rare for the resolve to do something and the actual execution of that act to coincide, even though the two things may follow on and appear to be simultaneous, perhaps he'd taken that decision when his head was still fuzzy, still hot, and his head had cleared and cooled during the few minutes I'd spent waiting for him in the handicapped toiletalong with our trusting victim, for I'd tricked De la Garza into going there with the false promise of a line of cocaine, although I didn't know at the time why I was putting him, the victim, where I'd been asked to put him or that the promise was a mere pretext. I should have imagined it, I should have foreseen it. I should have refused to have anything to do with it. I'd prepared him for Tupra, served him up on a plate, I had, in the end, been a part of it all. I was about to ask him, out of curiosity: 'Was it real cocaine you gave the poor devil?' But, as often happens after long silences, we both spoke at once and he got in just a fraction of a second before me, in order to reply to the last thing I'd said:
    Yes, of course,' murmured Reresby almost lazily. 'You'll always get the kind of person who watches himself acting, who sees himself as if in some continuous performance. Who believes there'll be witnesses to report his generous or contemptible death and that this is what matters most. Or who, if there are no witnesses, invents them—the eye of God, the world stage, or whatever. Who believes that the world only exists to the extent that it's reported and events only to the extent that they're recounted, even though it's highly unlikely that anyone will bother to recount them, or to recount those particular facts, I mean, the facts relating to each individual. The vast majority of things simply happen and there neither is nor ever was any record of them, those we hear about are an infinitesimal fraction of what goes on. Most lives and, needless to say, most deaths, are forgotten as soon as they've occurred and leave not the slightest trace, or become unknown soon afterwards, after a few years, a few decades, a century, which, as you know, is, in reality, a very short time. Take battles, for example, think how important they were for those who took part in them and, sometimes, for their compatriots, think how many of those battles now mean nothing to us, not even their names, we don't even know which war they belonged to, more than that, we don't care. What do the names Ulundi and Beersheba, or Gravelotte and Rezonville, or Namur, or Maiwand, Paardeberg and Mafeking, or Mohacs, or Najera, mean to anyone nowadays?'—He mispronounced that