Yes, it took me a few seconds. 'What is this guy saying?' I thought. 'He's telling me that Luisa enjoys being knocked around, he's telling me that? That's impossible. It's a lie,' I thought, 'I've known her intimately for years, although less so lately, and I've never seen the slightest suggestion of that, I'd have noticed it, however slight, a hint, a question mark, a glimpse, this guy's trying to slither out of it, trying to justify himself, to escape, he knows why I'm here and that my reason is a grave one and he's been thinking up this false explanation for a while now, he knows for certain that I'm not going to ask Luisa about it and he's taking advantage of that to tell me he only hurts women who want to be hurt, or something of the sort, but Cristina told me how frightened the women were who had slept with him, some at any rate, and their subsequent silence about or concealment of what went on, why wouldn't they speak, if he was a violent brute, they'd report him, they'd alert other women, they'd forewarn them, for example those prostitutes he goes with, sometimes two at a time. No, it can't be true, it's not,' I thought, shrugging off the idea. It's dreadful to be told anything, anything at all, it's dreadful to have ideas put in your head, however unlikely or ridiculous and however unsustainable and improbable (but everything has its time to be believed), any scrap of information registered by the brain stays there until it achieves oblivion, that eternally one-eyed oblivion, any story or fact and even the remotest possibility is recorded, and however much you clean and scrub and erase, that rim is the kind that will never come out; it's understandable really that people should hate knowledge and deny what is there before their eyes and prefer to know nothing and to repudiate the facts, that they should avoid the inoculation and the poison and push it away as soon as they see or feel it near, it's best not to take risks; it's understandable, too, that we almost all ignore what we see and divine and anticipate and smell, and that we toss into the bag of imaginings anything that we see clearly-for however short a time-before it can take root in our mind and leave it forever troubled, and so it's hardly strange that we should be reluctant to know anyone's face, today, tomorrow or yesterday 'What face am I wearing now?' I wondered. 'And what about Luisa's face, one I thought I had plumbed and deciphered and knew, to all intents and purposes, from top to bottom, from past to future and from tomorrow to yesterday, and then along comes this son-of-a-bitch talking about her sexuality and telling me she likes him to get rough with her in bed, it's a joke, I mustn't believe him or think about it, but people do change and, above all, make discoveries, the kind of wretched discovery that takes those people from us and carries them far away, as with young Pérez Nuix when I discovered the pleasure of pretending that I wasn't doing what I was doing or of making believe that what was happening wasn't happening, which is not, I think, quite the same thing, that had been political, a tacit game, but that's what this bastard would say, damn him, that it's all a game, an erotic game, anything is possible, but it can't be true. Luisa's black eye wasn't the result of some game, like hell it was, and yet Custardoy said: "What? Oh. The bruises," why did he use the plural when I've only seen one bruise, perhaps there are more underneath her clothes, on her body, I haven't seen Luisa naked on this visit nor will I, I'll probably never see her naked again, but this bastard will unless I stop him and make sure he's out of the picture now and for good, with no going back and no further delay, don't ever linger or delay, just cock the gun again and squeeze the trigger, it's a simple matter of running my hand over the slide to release it and moving a finger, this and then this, forward and back and a bullet in the head and that will be that, I am, after all, wearing gloves, he'll be out of the picture forever and no more bruises, no more bed, no more wit or charm, it's in my hands to do all of that and I don't even have to listen to him or speak to him again.'
And so I did cock the pistol, and for the first time I moved my index finger from the guard to the trigger, remembering Miquelin's warning and believing that I was following his advice, 'Never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot.' And for a few seconds-one, two, three, four, five; and six-I did know, but not afterwards. I have no idea what saved him that time, it wasn't his silence, perhaps there were several things-thoughts, memories, and a recognition- all crowded together into six or possibly seven seconds, or perhaps other things came to me later and so had more time to be thought or remembered once I was back in my hotel room. 'What face am I wearing now?' I thought again. 'It's the face of all those men and rather fewer women who have held someone else's life in their hands and it could, from one moment to the next, come to resemble the face of those who chose to take that life. Not Reresby's face, who did not, in the end, snatch away De la Garza's life, and who, if he has killed other people, did not do so in my presence, like Wheeler with his outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague. But it would join the face of that vicious malagueño who baited and killed Mares, the face of that Madrid woman who boasted on the tram of having killed a child by smashing its head against a wall, of those militiamen who finished off my young Uncle Alfonso and left him dead in the gutter, even the faces of Orlov and Bielov and Carlos Contreras, who tortured Andreu Nin in Alcala and possibly flayed him alive; of Vizconde de La Barthe, who ordered Torrijos and, according to the painting, seventeen of his followers to be shot on the beach as soon as they disembarked, but in reality and in history there may have been many more; the faces of the Czech resistance fighters or students who made an attempt on the life of the Nazi Protector Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and the face of Spooner, the director of the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, who planned it all; the faces of the German occupiers who, in reprisal and with their hatred of place, destroyed the village of Lidice and killed either instantly or slowly one hundred and ninety-nine men and one hundred and eighty-four women on June 10, 1942; the faces of the thugs who machine-gunned those four unfortunates on another hidden beach, in Calabria this time, not far from Crotone, on the Golfo de Taranto, three men and a woman, a killing I myself watched; and the face of the man who screamed at another man in a garage, his mouth so close to the other's face that he sprayed him with saliva, and then shot him at point-blank range beneath the earlobe, as I could do now to Custardoy with no one here to cry out 'Don't!' as I did to Reresby and probably stopped him, I could put the barrel right there and that would be it, blood spurting out and tiny bits of bone; the face of the woman in green, her skirt all rucked up and wearing a sweater and a pearl necklace and high heels but with no stockings, who crushed the skull of a man with a hammer and sat astride him to strike his forehead over and over; the face of the European officer or mercenary who ordered the massacre of twenty Africans who fell in swift succession, like dominoes; the face of Manoia, yes him too, who scooped out the eyes of his prisoner as if they were peach stones and then, according to Tupra, slit his throat; and all those centuries before, the face of Ingram Frizer, who stabbed to death the poet Marlowe in a tavern in Deptford, even though his face is unknown and his name, too, remains uncertain; and, of course, the face of King Richard, who ordered his two little nephews in the Tower to be strangled, and had many others killed too, whether in his angry mood or not, including poor Clarence, drowned by two henchmen in a butt of disgusting wine and held by the legs, which remained outside the barrel and flailed ridiculously about in the air he would never breathe again… My face will resemble and be assimilated into that of all those men and rather fewer women who were once masters of time and who held in their hand the hourglass-in the form of a weapon, in the form of an order-and decided suddenly, without lingering or delaying, to stop time, thus obliging others no longer to desire their own desires and to leave even their own first name behind. I don't like being linked to those faces. On the other hand, I must remove Luisa from all danger and suffering and torment, so that her ghost will not one day say to this man what Lady Anne's ghost said to her husband on the eve of battle, nor hurl at him the curse that I am failing to carry out despite being in a position to do so: "Thy wife, that wretched Luisa thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee… Let me sit heavy on thy soul, and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die!" Yes, it would be best to kill him while I still have time,' I thought, 'I might not have another opportunity in the future, perhaps there is no other way of removing him from the picture forever and this is the only way to make us safe.' That 'us' surprised me. And it gave me strength and encouragement to discover that I still thought of us as 'us.'