The waiter, Paco, or Pablo, a young man with hot eyes and aristocratic pretensions, made a mistake and brought us the wrong drinks, and Randolph seized the opportunity to savage him. The poor boy stood there, his shoulders bowed under the lashes of invective, and was what he had always been, a peasant's son. When he had stumbled away, Randolph looked at Daphne and grinned, showing a side row of long, fulvous teeth, and I thought of a hound sitting back proud as punch after delivering a dead rat at its mistress's feet. Goddamned spics, he said carelessly, and made a spitting noise out of the side of his mouth. I jumped up and seized the edge of the table and overturned it, pitching the drinks into his lap, and shouted at him to get up and reach for it, you sonofabitch! No, no, of course I didn't. Much as I might have liked to dump a table full of broken glass into his ludicrously overstuffed crotch, that was not the way I did things, not in those days. Besides, I had enjoyed as much as anyone seeing Pablo or Paco get his comeuppance, the twerp, with his soulful glances and his delicate hands and that horrible, pubic moustache.
Randolph liked to give the impression that he was a very dangerous character. He spoke of dark deeds perpetrated in a far-off country which he called Stateside. I encouraged these tales of derring-do, secretly delighting in the aw-shucks, 'tweren't-nuthin' way he told them. There was something wonderfully ridiculous about it all, the braggart's sly glance and slyly modest inflexion, his air of euphoric self-regard, the way he opened like a flower under the warmth of my silently nodding, awed response. I have always derived satisfaction from the little wickednesses of human beings. To treat a fool and a liar as if I esteemed him the soul of probity, to string him along in his poses and his fibs, that is a peculiar pleasure. He claimed he was a painter, until I put a few innocent questions to him on the subject, then he suddenly became a writer instead. In fact, as he confided to me one night in his cups, he made his money by dealing in dope among the island's transient rich. I was shocked, of course, but I recognised a valuable piece of information, and later, when -But I am tired of this, let me get it out of the way. I asked him to lend me some money. He refused. I reminded him of that drunken night, and said I was sure the guardia would be interested to hear what he had told me. He was shocked. He thought about it. He didn't have the kind of dough I was asking for, he said, he would have to get it for me somewhere, maybe from some people that he knew. And he chewed his lip. I said that would be all right, I didn't mind where it came from. I was amused, and rather pleased with myself, playing at being a blackmailer. I had not really expected him to take me seriously, but it seemed I had underestimated his cravenness. He produced the cash, and for a few weeks Daphne and I had a high old time, and everything was grand except for Randolph dogging my steps wherever I went. He was distressingly literal-minded in his interpretation of words such as lend and repay. Hadn't I kept his grubby little secret, I said, was that not a fair return? These people, he said, with an awful, twitching attempt at a grin, these people didn't fool around. I said I was glad to hear it, one wouldn't want to think one had been dealing, even at second-hand, with the merely frivolous. Then he threatened to give them my name. I laughed in his face and walked away. I still could not take any of it seriously. A few days later a small package wrapped in brown paper arrived, addressed to me in a semi-literate hand. Daphne made the mistake of opening it. Inside was a tobacco tin – Balkan Sobranie, lending an oddly cosmopolitan touch – lined with cotton wool, in which nestled a curiously whorled, pale, gristly piece of meat crusted with dried blood. It took me a moment to identify it as a human ear. Whoever had cut it off had done a messy job, with something like a breadknife, to judge by the ragged serration. Painful. I suppose that was the intention. I remember thinking: How appropriate, an ear, in this land of the toreador! Quite droll, really.
I went in search of Randolph. He wore a large lint pad pressed to the left side of his head, held in place by a rakishly angled and none-too-clean bandage. He no longer made me think of the Wild West. Now, as if fate had decided to support his claim of being an artist, he bore a striking resemblance to poor, mad Vincent in that self-portrait made after he had disfigured himself for love. When he saw me I thought he was going to weep, he looked so sorry for himself, and so indignant. You deal with them yourself now, he said, you owe them, not me, I've paid, and he touched a hand grimly to his bandaged head. Then he called me a vile name and skulked off down an alleyway. Despite the noonday sun a shiver passed across my back, like a grey wind swarming over water. I tarried there for a moment, on that white corner, musing. An old man on a burro saluted me. Nearby a tinny churchbell was clanging rapidly. Why, I asked myself, why am I living like this?
That is a question which no doubt the court also would like answered. With my background, my education, my – yes – my culture, how could I live such a life, associate with such people, get myself into such scrapes? The answer is – I don't know the answer. Or I do, and it is too large, too tangled, for me to attempt here. I used to believe, like everyone else, that I was determining the course of my own life, according to my own decisions, but gradually, as I accumulated more and more past to look back on, I realised that I had done the things I did because I could do no other. Please, do not imagine, my lord, I hasten to say it, do not imagine that you detect here the insinuation of an apologia, or even of a defence. I wish to claim full responsibility for my actions – after all, they are the only things I can call my own – and I declare in advance that I shall accept without demur the verdict of the court. I am merely asking, with all respect, whether it is feasible to hold on to the principle of moral culpability once the notion of free will has been abandoned. It is, I grant you, a tricky one, the sort of thing we love to discuss in here of an evening, over our cocoa and our fags, when time hangs heavy.
As I've said, I did not always think of my life as a prison in which all actions are determined according to a random pattern thrown down by an unknown and insensate authority. Indeed, when I was young I saw myself as a masterbuilder who would one day assemble a marvellous edifice around myself, a kind of grand pavilion, airy and light, which would contain me utterly and yet wherein I would be free. Look, they would say, distinguishing this eminence from afar, look how sound it is, how solid: it's him all right, yes, no doubt about it, the man himself. Meantime, however, unhoused, I felt at once exposed and invisible. How shall I describe it, this sense of myself as something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom? Other people seemed to have a density, a thereness, which I lacked. Among them, these big, carefree creatures, I was like a child among adults. I watched them, wide-eyed, wondering at their calm assurance in the face of a baffling and preposterous world. Don't mistake me, I was no wilting lily, I laughed and whooped and boasted with the best of them – only inside, in that grim, shadowed gallery I call my heart, I stood uneasily, with a hand to my mouth, silent, envious, uncertain. They understood matters, or accepted them, at least. They knew what they thought about things, they had opinions. They took the broad view, as if they did not realise that everything is infinitely divisible. They talked of cause and effect, as if they believed it possible to isolate an event and hold it up to scrutiny in a pure, timeless space, outside the mad swirl of things. They would speak of whole peoples as if they were speaking of a single individual, while to speak even of an individual with any show of certainty seemed to me foolhardy. Oh, they knew no bounds.
And as if people in the outside world were not enough, I had inside me too an exemplar of my own, a kind of invigilator, from whom I must hide my lack of conviction. For instance, if I was reading something, an argument in some book or other, and agreeing with it enthusiastically, and then I discovered at the end that I had misunderstood entirely what the writer was saying, had in fact got the whole thing arse-ways, I would be compelled at once to execute a somersault, quick as a flash, and tell myself, I mean my other self, that stern interior sergeant, that what was being said was true, that I had never really thought otherwise, and, even if I had, that it showed an open mind that I should be able to switch back and forth between opinions without even noticing it. Then I would mop my brow, clear my throat, straighten my shoulders and pass on delicately, in stifled dismay. But why the past tense? Has anything changed? Only that the watcher from inside has stepped forth and taken over, while the puzzled outsider cowers within.