Tupra emitted a kind of dull roar, halfway between a brief guffaw and a stifled snort of scorn. He stood up and said:
'Don't be impatient, Jack, this is no time to be in a hurry. I'm going to show you the videos I told you about, you'll learn a lot from them and it will be useful for you to see them. Not immediately useful, they're not at all pleasant and they may well drive away any current desire for sleep that you feel, at least for the next few hours, but I've already given you permission not to come to work tomorrow, or rather today, so let's waste no more time.' He glanced rapidly at his watch; so did I: it was an unearthly hour for London, but not for Madrid. The children would be asleep, but I had no idea what Luisa would be up to, she might still be awake, with someone else or with no one. 'But it'll be useful to you later on to have seen them. In a matter of days really, and they'll always come in handy. It may be that you are already someone who gives no importance to the unimportant, because that's the first thing everyone should be taught and yet everyone behaves as if exactly the opposite were true: people are brought up nowadays to think that any idiot can make a great drama out of any kind of nonsense. People are brought up to suffer for no reason, and you get nowhere suffering over everything or tormenting yourself. It paralyzes, overwhelms, stops growth and movement. As you see, though, people nowadays beat their breast over harming a plant, and if it's an animal, what a crime, what a scandal! They live in an unreal, delicate, soft, twee world.'-'Cursi',' I thought, 'English doesn't have that useful, wide-ranging word'-'Their minds are permanently wrapped in cotton wool.' And he briefly made that strange roaring noise again; it sounded this time like a short sarcastic cough. 'In our countries, that is. And when something happens here that's perfectly normal in other places, common currency, we find ourselves vulnerable, at a loss what to do, helpless, easy prey, and it takes us a while to react, and we do so disproportionately and blindly, missing the target. And with too much retrospective fear as well, as happened with the attacks here and in your own city of Madrid, not to mention the attacks on New York and Washington.'
'Nothing much has changed in Madrid,' I said. 'It's almost as if it had never happened.'
But he wasn't listening, he had his own agenda. His deep voice had grown mournful. It always did sound slightly mournful, like the sound made by a bow moving over the strings of a cello. Sometimes, though, that tonality was more marked and it produced in the person hearing it a gentle, almost pleasant feeling that eased all affliction; at least in me it did.
'I'm not saying there's nothing to be afraid of, you understand. It's just that we should have been frightened before and to have taken fear as much for granted as the air we breathe, and to have instilled fear too. Instilling and feeling fear, all the time, that's the unchanging way of the world, which we've forgotten. It's normal in other countries that are more alert to these things. But no one here realizes it and we fall asleep without keeping one eye open, we get caught unawares and then we can't believe it's happened. Retrospective fear is useless, even more so than anticipatory fear. That's not much good either, but at least it puts one, if not on one's guard, at least in a state of expectancy. It's always best to be in a position to instil fear in others. Anyway, let me show you these scenes, they're not long. Some I'll fast-forward for you.'
He poured me some port without first consulting me, thinking perhaps that I would need it in order to face these unpleasant but instructive scenes, then he picked up his own glass and, at his urging, I picked up mine; he beckoned to me with a motion of his head and one finger and led me to a smaller room which he unlocked with a key from his key-ring. Given that Tupra clearly didn't want anyone to enter that room without his permission or alone, I wondered who else lived in the house, or perhaps it was just the domestic staff who were barred. He turned on a couple of lights. It was a kind of study which immediately reminded me of his office in the building with no name, it was full of books as costly as those in the living room or possibly more so-perhaps they were his bibliophile's jewels; on the other hand, there were no paintings, only the framed drawing of a soldier, just head and shoulders, with a slightly curled mustache, perhaps some idol of his from MI6 or whatever it used to be called; it appeared at first sight to date from the First World War or, at the latest, from the 1920s, I didn't think it was an ancestor, a Tupra, for he was wearing the uniform of a British officer, though what rank I couldn't say. There was a desk with a computer on it; a chair on casters behind the desk, which must be where Reresby worked when he was at home; and two ottomans. He maneuvered these with his foot so that they were in front of a low cabinet whose wooden doors he opened to reveal a television inside, an absurd piece of camouflage, like the minibars you get in certain posh hotels, ashamed of having them in their rooms. He indicated that I should sit down on one of the ottomans and I did so. He went over to the desk, walked round it and removed a DVD from a drawer, which, again, he opened with a key, he obviously kept a few DVDs in there, well, more than one and probably more than two. He turned on the television, the DVD player was underneath and he put the disk in. He sat down on the other ottoman, to my left, almost next to me and a little behind, both of us were very close to the now blue screen, but I was closest, he picked up the remote control, I had to look at him out of the corner of my eye and turn my neck if I wanted to see the expression on his face. We were each holding a glass, he did everything with one hand or else, as I said, with his foot.
'So what are we going to watch, what are you going to show me?' I asked with a mixture of impatience and self-assurance. 'It's not a film, is it? It's hardly the right time for that.'
I still felt no fear, I was prevented from doing so by irritation and tiredness, it seemed unlikely to me that anything could wake me up. Besides, I'd seen quite enough unpleasant and painfully instructive things for one night, and not on a video but in palpable, breathable reality, right next to me, I could still feel in my body, albeit less keenly, the shock of that sword being brought down on the numbskull's neck, and in my head was the echo of the useless thoughts that had assailed me then: 'He's going to kill him, no, he can't, he won't, yes, he is, he's going to decapitate him right here, separate his head from his trunk, this man full of rage, and I can do nothing about it because the blade is going to come down and it's a two-edged sword, it's like thunder-less lightning that strikes in silence, and he's going to cut right through him.' I didn't believe there could be anything worse, and whatever Tupra showed me would, moreover, belong to the past, it would be something that had already happened, that was over and had been filmed, and in which I would not be expected to intervene. There would be nothing to be done about it; with every viewing, the same thing would be repeated identically. But I must have felt it, the dread, the apprehension, the cringing, the shrinking back in fear, from the moment when Tupra's voice had suddenly grown more mournful than usual and awoken in me a suggestion of motiveless, meaningless anguish, the way mournful music does, for no reason-yes just a few notes on a cello or violin or viola da gamba, or on a piano-as if he knew all there was to know about those retrospective disasters which could, nevertheless, be reproduced and made present again an infinite number of times, because they had been recorded or registered, the kind of disaster of which I had no knowledge or even the tiniest suspicion.