De la Garza lowered the lid of the toilet seat and placed the packet and the wallet on the cistern behind, but immediately stopped when he realised that the cistern was white, and transferred them instead to the lid, which was made of moulded plastic or something similar, dark blue, polished and smooth, and he knelt down before it, almost resting his buttocks on his heels ('Ah, so now the little prat doesn't mind kneeling down,' I thought bitterly, 'a moment ago, he didn't even want to bend down to tie his own shoelaces and wanted me to tie his knots for him, but he's happy enough to do it now in order to prepare his line of cocaine and sniff it up, well, I hope he steps on his laces afterwards and falls over; right now, I'd willingly tie a knot in his neck'). He pushed the hairnet out of the way with a toss of his head so that it wouldn't bother him, as if the hairnet were a full head of hair; it hung limply to one side; he took a credit card out of his wallet, it was, I noticed, Platinum, he must have a fair amount of money in his account, or else was in charge of administering embassy funds under various headings, they don't give Platinum Visa cards to just anyone. He opened the packet carefully and rather ineptly, he must be only an occasional consumer; with the aid of one corner of the credit card he scattered a small amount of cocaine directly onto the lid of the toilet seat, having nothing else to hand that he could use as a paten or tray, the white powder could be seen quite clearly, which would not have been the case had he used the white porcelain cistern. With the stiff plastic card he formed the powder into a line, and he didn't take too much, he even returned a little of the powder to the sachet, which he pushed to one side, folded but not completely closed, as if suddenly aware that it was someone else's property. He did not manipulate the Visa card with great dexterity, he kept regrouping and shaping the line; I watched, perplexed, from the cubicle doorway and Tupra remained outside, behind me or so I assumed, I wasn't looking at him, only at Rafita on bended knee (he may not have been very experienced, but it was a brief operation, or should have been). The line did not seem to me either very long or very broad, at least compared with those I had seen Comendador and his friends prepare in earlier days, as well as other less nocturnal people at various parties and in the occasional toilet (the latter especially in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, but not only then), including a minister, a tycoon, the president of a football club, a judge with a very stem reputation and even their respective wives in all their finery and from different backgrounds and of assorted ideas and ages, both in England and in Spain, as well as a couple of actresses and a couple of bishops (on separate occasions: one Catholic and one Anglican, but both incognito), a multimillionairess from Opus Dei or from Christ's Legionnaires, I can't quite remember now, and, more recently, Dick Dearlove at the end of his celebrity supper along with some of his supper celebrities; and one time in America, a Pentagon chief, although I can say no more than that, I mean, who or where or what the circumstances were; but it was pure chance that I was there, and, besides, that happened later, and at the time I'm referring to, I hadn't yet seen all this (I think it was the reason I escaped arrest, or else it immediately invalidated the arrest, more surely even than the faulty recital of the Miranda law on the part of the detective who had ordered me, the Pentagon chief, two women and another two men to be handcuffed, 'You have the right to remain silent…': the fact is that if I hadn't remained silent, I could have landed that high-up chief with all those troops at his command in a very tight spot indeed).
De la Garza patted his trousers and his giant jacket (the tails of which were brushing the floor) and he looked at me without really focusing or entirely turning his head; I was afraid he was going to ask me, or even Tupra, for a banknote, he was quite capable of doing so. 'If you're going to stick a note up your nose, use one of your own, you drone,' I thought, unwittingly falling into rhyme. But, in the end, he stuck his hand in one of his pockets and brought out a five-pound note which he rapidly rolled up – he was more dexterous at that – to make the tube through which to inhale the powder that looked rather like talc. 'Yes,' I thought, 'it does smell a bit like talcum powder in here. They're so clean, the disabled,' although I was becoming increasingly convinced that it had been a very long time since any disabled person had visited that disco, perhaps the toilet had just been installed, a recent improvement. 'Or perhaps it isn't coke, but talc that Tupra's given him': that thought also occurred to me. I saw De la Garza bend his head and crane his neck forward, he was about to snort the line, or half of it, up his left nostril, he had closed his right nostril with his index finger. 'He looks like a condemned man in olden times,' I thought, 'offering his vanquished head, his bare neck to the axe or the guillotine, with the toilet-seat lid as stump or block, and if the seat was up, the toilet bowl would serve as a basket for his head as it fell – the way vomit does – into the blue water, that way, it wouldn't roll.’
19
Then I heard Tupra's commanding voice:
'Stand clear, Jack.' And at the same time, he grabbed my shoulder, firmly but not roughly, and drew me aside, removed me, I mean, from the doorway of that cubicle which was more like a small room, perhaps the same size as those minuscule mausoleums in the cemetery of Os Prazeres, summarily decorated and intended to be welcoming, at once inhabited and uninhabited. 'Stand clear, Jack' were his words, or perhaps 'Clear off' or 'Step aside' or 'Out of my way, Jack', it's hard to remember exactly something which, subsequently, disappears into nothing because of everything else that comes after, at any rate, I understood what he meant, whatever the phrase he used, that was the sense and it was, moreover, accompanied by that gesture, his firm hand on my shoulder, which allowed itself to be pushed out of the way; viewed positively, the phrase could have been understood as 'Step aside', more negatively as 'Out of my way, Jack, clear off, don't get involved and don't even think about trying to stop me', but his tone of voice sounded more like the former, a very gentle voice given that it was issuing an order that brooked no disobedience or delay, no hesitation in its performance, no resistance or questioning or protest or even any show of horror, because it is impossible to object to or to oppose someone who has a sword in his hand and who has already raised it up in order to bring it down hard, to deal a blow, to slice through something, when that is the first time you have seen the sword and have no idea where it came from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out of keeping with the times we live in, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just visceral fear, but atavistic fear too, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that caused most deaths throughout most centuries – it has killed at close quarters and when face to face with the person killed, without the murderer or the avenger or the avenged detaching or separating himself from the sword while he wreaks his havoc and plunges it in and cuts and slices, all with the same blade which he never discards, but holds onto and grips even harder while he pierces, mutilates, skewers and even dismembers, never a bag of flour, but always a bag of meat that gives and opens beneath this skin of ours that resists nothing, which offers no protection and is so easily wounded that even a fingernail can scratch it, and a knife can cut it and a spear rip it open, and a sword can tear it even as it slices through the air – that it is the most dangerous and tenacious and terrible of weapons, because unlike something that can be thrown or hurled, the sword can strike again and stab repeatedly, over and over, again and again, each strike worse and more vicious than the last, it isn't an arrow or a spear which may wound, but which will not necessarily be followed by others that will hit and penetrate the same body, one may be enough, it may cause only a single gash or a wound that will subsequently heal, unless the weapon has been dipped in some deadly poison, whereas the sword slices insistently in and out and in and out, it is capable of slaying the healthy and finishing off the wounded and dismembering the indefinitely dead, only stopping when the person wielding it drops from exhaustion, but who will otherwise never let go or lose it, unless he, in turn, is killed or has his arm torn off; which is why the gesture of unsheathing was enough of a threat and never a vain one, it was best to leave it half unsheathed as a warning or a doubt or a signal that one was alert, a visual message that one was on guard, because once the whole blade was out in the air, once the tip was free and looking around, that was a sign that bloodshed would inevitably follow.