I returned the postcard to him, he was standing next to my armchair, looking over my shoulder at me looking at the two actresses or bygone sex symbols-one far more remote than the other-sharing or rather studying my unexpected amusement.
'Why Jayne Mansfield?' I asked. 'What's she got to do with Kennedy? I presume you mean President Kennedy? Was he her lover too? Isn't it Marilyn Monroe who was supposed to have had an affair with him-didn't she sing him some sexy version of "Happy Birthday" at a party? Mansfield must have been an imitation of her.'
'Oh, well, there were several of them,' said Tupra, while he was returning the photo to its envelope, the envelope to the box and the box to the shelf, all in order. 'We even had one in England, Diana Dors. You probably don't remember her. She was pretty much for national consumption only. She was coarser, not bad-looking or a bad actress, but with a rather stupid face and eyebrows too dark for her platinum blonde locks, I don't know why she didn't have them dyed as well. In fact, I met her when she was in her forties, we went to some of the same places in Soho that were fashionable then, in the late sixties and early seventies, she was already beginning to get a bit matronly, but she'd always been drawn to the bohemian lifestyle, she thought made her more youthful, more modern. Yes, she was coarser than Mansfield, and somehow darker too, not so jolly,' he added, as if this were something he had pondered for a moment. 'But if she'd been sitting at the table in that postcard, I don't know who would have been most startled. In her youth, Diana Dors had a real hourglass figure.' And he made the familiar movement with his hands that many men make to indicate a woman with a lot of curves, I think the Coca-Cola bottle imitated that gesture and not the other way round. I hadn't seen anyone do that for a long time, well, gestures, like words, fall into disuse, because they're nearly always substitutes for words and therefore share the same fate: they're a way of saying something without using words, sometimes very serious things, which, in the past, might have proved the motive for a duel, and even nowadays can provoke violence and death. And so even when nothing is said, one can still speak and signify and tell, what a curse; if I'd patted myself under my chin two or three times with the back of my hand in Manoia's presence, he would have understood me to be making the Italian gesture indicating scornful dismissal of one's companion and would have unsheathed his sword against me, if he, too, had one hidden about his person, who knows, compared with him, Reresby seemed reasonable and mild.
Yes, Tupra was distracting me with his anecdotes, his conversation-or was it merely chatter? I was still furious, even though I sometimes forgot to be, and I wanted to show him that I was, to call him to account for his savage behavior, properly and more thoroughly than I had during our false farewell opposite the door to my house in the square, but he kept leading me from one thing to another, never getting to the point of what he had announced or almost demanded that I should hear, and I doubted if he would ever tell me anything about Constantinople or Tangiers, places he had mentioned while sitting at the wheel of his car, he'd specialized in Medieval History at Oxford, although you'd never know it, and in that field he might well have been an unofficial disciple of Toby Rylands, who, to his regret, had very briefly been Toby Wheeler, in that distant, forgotten New Zealand, just like his brother Peter. Tupra had also promised to show me some videos which he kept at home and not at the office, 'they're not for just anyone's eyes,' he had said, and yet he was going to show them to me, what could they possibly be about and why did I have to see them, I might wish I never had; I could always close my eyes, although whenever you decide to do that, you inevitably close them just a little too late not to catch a glimpse of something and to get a horrible idea of what's going on, too late not to understand. Or else, with your eyes screwed tight shut, once you think that the vision or scene has finished-sound deceives, and silence more so-you open them too soon.
'What happened to Jayne Mansfield, then? What did she have to do with Kennedy?' I asked again. I wasn't going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead. Tupra was capable of keeping you distracted indefinitely, of arousing your interest in a subject totally lacking in interest and entirely incidental, for he belonged to that rare class of individuals who seem themselves to be the embodiment of interest or else have the ability to generate it, they somehow carry it around inside them, it resides on their lips. They are the most slippery characters of all and the most persuasive.
He eyed me ironically, and I know he gave in only because he wanted to, he would have been perfectly capable of sustaining a protracted silence, withstanding it long enough for my two questions to dissolve in the air and thus be erased, letting them vanish as if no one had ever asked them and as if I were not there. But I was.
'Nothing. They're just two people marked by the final episode of their life. Exaggeratedly so, to the point that it defines or configures both of them and almost cancels out everything they did before, even if they had done important things, which Mansfield clearly hadn't. If they'd known what the end had in store for them, those two people would have had good reason to suffer from narrative horror, as you said of Dick Dearlove. Both Jack Kennedy and Jayne Mansfield would have suffered from their own complex, K-M as we call it, if they'd guessed or feared how they would die. There are, naturally, many more such examples, from, say, James Dean to Abraham Lincoln, from Keats to Jesus Christ. The first and almost only thing anyone remembers about them is the way-shocking or unusual, premature or bizarre-their lives ended. Dean dead at twenty-four in a car crash, with an extraordinary career as a movie star still before him and the whole world at his feet; Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, highly theatrically, in a box at the theatre, shortly after winning the War of Secession and having been re-elected; Keats dead in Rome from tuberculosis, at twenty-five, such a loss to literature; Christ on the cross at thirty-three, a mature adult in the eyes of the age he lived in, even a little slow off the mark in carrying out his work, but young, if not in years, and gone to an early grave according to our idle, long-lived times. As I said, it was at Mulryan's insistence that we called it the K-M complex, but any of those other names would have done, or many more, quite a few people owe their great celebrity or the fact of not being forgotten to the manner of their death or its timing, when it might be said that they weren't ready or that it was unfair. As if death knew anything about fairness or was concerned with meting it out, or could even understand the concept, quite absurd. At most, death is arbitrary, capricious, by which I mean that it establishes an order it doesn't always follow, one that it chooses either to follow or discard: sometimes it approaches filled with resolve and, as if intent on its business, draws near, flies over us, looks down, and then suddenly decides to leave it for another day. It must have a very good memory to be able to recall every living being and not miss a single one. Death's task is infinite, and yet it's been carrying it out with exemplary thoroughness for centuries. What an efficient slave, one that never stands idle and never wearies. Or forgets.'