I had to leave that busy and entirely inappropriate toilet, it was, after all, not my toilet, a long queue would be forming outside, I had been in there for a couple of minutes now, during which time no one had entered or left, the women inside being occupied, while those behind me, in the area by the mirrors, were by now, most of them, laughing openly at my exchange of words with the seated Caribbean woman – Cuban, Puerto Rican, Nicaraguan, or from further south, Colombian or Venezuelan or even Brazilian; or Spanish, that, too, was a possibility. But I could not possibly fail to draw the stain to the attention of this young woman with the powerful thighs which I knew then I would think about later, on other nights or days. She had very almond-shaped eyes, that much I did have time to see, although not the colour, and a rather broad nose, or perhaps her nostrils were flared or it was a combination of both things, she struck me as one of those beauties who look as if they had just breathed out, it's a common look in all races now, perhaps it's one of the more sought-after types of nose among women who go in for such operations, almost no one is content with the sum of their features. So I said to her through the now closed door, with my left hand still on the handle so that it wouldn't open again of its own accord (the bolt was on her side, inside, and I had not heard her slide it shut) or so that she would not try to open it again herself, who knows: 'You've got a red stain on your white shoe, madam. I just thought I'd tell you.’
She could have told me that it didn't matter and that it was none of my business anyway, in the same tone that Wheeler had used (or an even surlier one) when, very late on that Saturday night, just before he turned round and finally went up the first flight of stairs to bed, I pointed out to him that his socks had slipped down. But the woman said only 'Thank you', and again I did not notice any accent. A 'red stain', I said. I did not dare to say 'bloodstain', although I was sure that the drop on her shoe and the one on the floor were drops of blood, newly spilled, newly fallen.
11
I left the toilet as resolutely as I had entered it, muttering, 'No luck, no luck,' as if I were explaining or making excuses to myself, I didn't even look at the women inside or, when I strode past them, those waiting outside (there were once again three or four), I had to find Flavia and take her back to her husband's table, not that my mind wasn't on the job or that I had lost sight of my mission, it had simply got mixed up with a few other things: lines of poetry, images and inherited memories as well as a story, none of which managed to fill my mind entirely, because none was particularly pressing, but they were all floating around in there, perhaps waiting to be picked up later by idle thought – that is, by thought at its most active – at the end of the day, when I finally went to bed.
The song from Laredo and from Armagh was still going round and round in my head despite the blaring music, which once again grew deafening as soon as I walked through the double doors and found myself back in the main room, I hadn't been gone very long and yet the crowd had grown, things were moving towards their apogee. But when a tune we used to know reappears and lodges itself in our brain, there is no way of getting rid of it without the mediation of something from outside, something entirely different (perhaps, as with hiccups, a shock), 'And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me', that was the Irish version from Armagh, in English the idea still survives of death as a masculine being or figure although – with the exception of 'ship', I believe – ordinary nouns lack any grammatical gender; it was not always thus, however, at least not for everyone, the related language of German does have genders and there is no doubt at all that death is masculine and that it is always shown as a man, as in the classic subject of Death and the Maiden, so often seen in paintings and engravings, in which he is depicted as a knight with helmet and armour and spear, or perhaps with a sword, or with both, Sir Death he was called in more than one English medieval play, and he also turned up disguised as a white-coated doctor in certain pictures from the Nazi era, watching and waiting with his lamp on his forehead and with a predilection for half-naked young women like Perez Nuix on that other day and like the woman with her skirt hitched up that night in the Ladies' toilet, just like his fierce antecedents from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who pursued maidens through woods and over fields; the poor, desperate women, according to the fantasies illustrated in the pictures, tore their clothes in their futile flight. While for us Latins, whose words are more or less obliged to have a gender, death is a feminine being and old too, the decrepit old lady with the scythe of so many paintings and so many illustrations, and perhaps that is why her victims are more often men than women, although she visits and hunts us all or literally cuts us down with her rustic tool, it makes sense for her to be old, she's been working furiously for a long time now and hasn't stopped for a single hour, day or night, since she made her debut with that first remote, unknown dead man who is still waiting for the world to end and for no one else to be left, in order finally to be judged and to tell his story and to set out his case, 'when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, "We died at such a place."' And it makes sense, too, that in the Germanic imagination he should be a knight in his prime, a strong, spirited warrior, capable of relentlessly snatching lives, a skilled professional with the cold arms of a disciplined sergeant, because no other being could cope with such an infinite task in those ancient times: and many centuries later, the Nazi leaders faced the same problem and sought faster, cheaper, less tiring methods of mass extermination, and so resorted to the intelligence of the men in white coats, physicists and chemists and biologists, as well as doctors wearing head-lamps, killing is not so easy, it takes time. And, of course, it's tiring, even exhausting.
'We died at such a place,' Wheeler had said to me in his own language, quoting from Shakespeare, and one assumes that this Final Judgement foreseen by the steadfast faith of the times, with the whole of the world's history recounted at once and in detail by all those people who had made and composed it, from the powerful emperor who left a more enduring mark to the newborn baby who departed this earth with his first cry and never traversed it or set foot on it and did not leave in anyone's memory even the image of his perfectly formed face, one assumes that on that final day, with all time and all space transformed into a madhouse and an uproar, as I had suggested to Wheeler – perhaps that day would already belong to eternity, and thus would have existence but not duration – the condemned and those who'd condemned them, the betrayed and their betrayers, the persecuted and their persecutors, the tortured and their torturers, the mutilated and their mutilators, the murdered and their murderers, the victims and their executioners, along with those who urged them on or issued the order, would also all meet up and gather together and once more see each other's faces as they stood before that Judge to whom no one lies (a judge lenient or wrathful, implacable or kindly, that is something no one knows). And all of them would have great difficulty justifying their respective causes and thereby their innocence or the attenuation of their guilt, that was what the soldiers were saying to Henry V (now I knew which Shakespeare king it was) when he joined them incognito, wrapped in a cloak, on the eve of battle, as Wheeler remembered and described, all of them ready for combat; and one of them even said: 'If the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make.’