'What you're going to see is secret. Never talk about it or mention it, not even to me after tonight, because tomorrow I will never have shown it to you. These are recordings we keep just in case we need them one day'-'Just in case,' I thought, 'that, it seems, is our motto.'-'They contain shameful or embarrassing things, as well as crimes that have never been reported or pursued, committed by individuals of some consequence but against whom no steps have been taken or charges made because it wasn't or isn't worth it or because it's still not the moment or because little would be gained. It makes much more sense to hang on to them, to keep them, in case there's ever a use for them in the future, with some of them we could obtain a great deal in exchange. In exchange for them staying buried here, never seen by anyone, you understand, only us. With others we've already obtained a lot, made good use of them and, besides, their possible benefits are never exhausted, because we never destroy anything or hand it over, we just show them occasionally to the people who appear in them, to the interested parties, if they don't trust us or don't believe that such recordings exist and want to see them to make quite sure. Don't worry, they don't come here (very few people ever have), well, it's so easy now to make copies and you can even show them on your mobile phone or send them. So these videos are a real treasure: they can persuade, dissuade, bring in large sums of money, force some insalubrious candidate to stand down, they can seal lips, obtain concessions and agreements, foil maneuvers and conspiracies, put off or mitigate conflicts, provoke fires, save lives. You're not going to like the content, but don't scorn or condemn them. Bear in mind their value and the uses they can be put to. And the service they render, the good they sometimes do for our country'-He had used a similar expression the first time we met at Wheeler's buffet supper in Oxford, when I had asked him what he did and he had been evasive in his reply: 'My real talent has always been for negotiating, in different fields and circumstances. Even serving my country, one should if one can, don't you think, even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself He had repeated the word 'country' which can be translated as 'patria' in my language, a word which, given our history and our past, has become a disagreeable and dangerous term that reveals a great deal, all of it negative, about those who use it; its imperfect English equivalent lacks that emotive, pompous quality. 'Our country,' he had said.
How odd. Tupra had again forgotten that his country and mine were not the same, that I wasn't an Englishman but a Spaniard, probably, like De la Garza, a useless Spaniard. That was the moment when I came closest to believing that I had gained his trust without his noticing, that is, without his having decided to give it to me: when, late that night, in his house that almost no one ever visited, before the as yet blank screen, when he was about to show me those confidential images, he lost sight of the fact that as long as I was working for him, I was serving him, for a salary, and not working for his country. Nor, of course, mine. As for him, it was impossible to guess what services, indirect or otherwise, he rendered to his country, or if he always acted mainly to benefit himself. Perhaps, in his mind, the two things were now indistinguishable. He added: 'Prepare yourself. We're going to start. And not a word to anyone, is that clear?' And he pressed Play.
What I saw thereafter should not be told, and I should do so only in short bursts. Partly because some scenes were shown in fast-forward mode, as Tupra had promised, and so fortunately I just caught glimpses of them, but always enough and more than I would have wanted; partly because for a few seconds-one, two, three, four; and five-I turned away or closed my eyes, and on a couple of occasions I held my hand like a visor at eyebrow height, with my fingers ready, so that I could choose to see or not see what I was seeing. But I saw or half-saw enough of each film or episode, because Reresby urged me to keep looking ('Don't turn away, resist the desire not to look, I'm not showing you this so that you can cover your eyes, don't hide,' he ordered me when, in one way or another, I tried to avoid the screen, 'and tell me now if what you witnessed earlier was so very terrible, tell me now that I went too far, tell me now that it was of any importance at all'; and by 'earlier' he was referring to what had happened or to what he had made happen in the handicapped toilet, in my presence and in the face of my impotence, my passivity and fear, my cowardice pure and simple). And partly, last of all, because I dare not describe it or I'm not capable of doing so, not fully.
As I looked and half-looked and saw, a poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison,' I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus,' from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them. (Perhaps only when my eyes had recovered could I begin to doubt those images: when the time that levels and dissolves and mingles had passed.) And thus they entered, as if through a slow needle, things that were quite external to me and of which I was entirely ignorant, things I had never foreseen or conceived or even dreamed of, things so beyond my experience that it was of no use to me having read about similar cases in the press, for there they always seem remote and exaggerated, or in novels, or indeed in films, which we never quite believe because, deep down, we know it's all fake, however much we care about the characters or identify with them. Nevertheless, the first scenes Tupra showed me on the screen contained, relatively speaking, a deceptively comic element, which is why I could still make jokes and ask him about it (had he begun with what followed, I would probably have been struck dumb from the start): 'What's this? Porn?'
And this was tantamount to giving Reresby permission to enlighten me as much as he wanted-never very much, always concisely-about that initial recording and about others or most of them, although about two or three he kept a strange and total-or perhaps significant-silence, as if there were no need to say anything.
'That was neither the intention nor the result,' he replied very coldly, my comment had clearly not amused him. 'That woman is a very influential figure in the Conservative Party, one of the old school, and currently has high hopes of being promoted, as a reassuring counterweight for the more hard-line Tory voters; and since she usually gives fiery speeches about the decline in society's morals and habits, and about unbridled sex and all that, it's interesting to see what she gets up to in this video, and one day it might be useful to show it to her. Her husband, of course, is not present.'
There were no preliminaries, by which I mean that it had probably been cut to show only the basics, or the nitty-gritty, which I rather regretted because I would have liked to know where they had come from, or what they had proposed to her, or how they had reached that situation, the two guys who-the scene began, as I say, in medias res-were already enjoying a sex sandwich, the three of them writhing about on a rather faded green carpet, or perhaps it was the film quality, which was only fair, but clear enough for me to recognize the woman, that is, I remembered having seen her before on television, in Parliament or on the news. I even remembered her rather gruff voice, a voice like a hairdryer, she was one of those people who, even if they try, cannot or don't know how to speak softly or even to pause for a moment, which must be a torment for her nearest and dearest. Fortunately, there was no sound, if there had been, judging by the look of double ecstasy on her face at being impaled simultaneously by the two men, one from in front, one from behind-or intermittently, they were not very well synchronised or not always a very good fit, they came apart-her howls would have sounded to us like a gale or else a handsaw. As far as one could tell from their scant clothing, the two men might have been civil servants and neither was very young or very svelte, and one of them-with only his fly open, a sign of laziness rather than urgency-was wearing a pair of very bracing braces over his bare torso, which gave him an incongrous air, as if he were an impossible blend of office worker and butcher. As for the woman, she was about forty years old and, in turn, had not bothered to remove her skirt, which was transformed now into a crumpled belt, nor was she particularly attractive despite her bare and ample bosom, clearly unaugmented by surgery. They could have been in a hotel room or in an office, the narrow field of vision did little to clarify this, the camera being focused only on the fornicators, the two jerks in question were both fully paid-up ġe-bryd-guma, indeed, they were being so there and then. It really did look like a low-budget or amateur porn movie made with understudies. Just who had filmed the scene and how was, needless to say, a mystery, but nowadays anyone would be able to do it, by using their mobile phone or even from a distance, without being present at all, and so no one is safe from being caught on camera in the most intimate or the most outrageous situations.