Tupra moistened his lips, not with his tongue but with his lips themselves, as if pressing them together would be enough-they were, after all, very large and fleshy and would always have a little saliva on them. Then he took a sip from his glass, and I had the disquieting sense that he was licking his lips. He again offered me some port, and this time I accepted, my palate felt as if it were covered by a communion wafer or a veil, he poured from the bottle until I raised my hand to say 'Enough.'
'Now you're beginning to get there,' he replied, which again made me think that he was driving or leading me; yes, as long as I was the one demanding an explanation, he was the person doing the leading. A bad defendant and a bad witness. He looked at me smugly from his blue or grey eyes, from his eyelashes shaped like half-moons, which gleamed in the firelight. 'Now you're going to start criticizing me again, asking why I did what I did and all that. You're too much a man of your time, Jack, and that's the worst thing to be, because it's hard if you always feel other people's suffering, there's no room for maneuver when everyone agrees and sees things the same way and gives importance to the same things, and the same things are deemed serious or insignificant. There's no light, no breathing space, no ventilation in unanimity, nor in shared commonplaces. You have to escape from that in order to live better, more comfortably. More honestly too, without feeling trapped in the time in which you were born and in which you'll die, there's nothing more oppressive, nothing so clouds the issue as that particular stamp. Nowadays, enormous importance is given to individual deaths, people make such a drama out of each person who dies, especially if they die a violent death or are murdered; although the subsequent grief or curse doesn't last very long: no one wears mourning any more and there's a reason for that, we're quick to weep but quicker still to forget. I'm talking about our countries, of course, it's not like that in other parts of the world, but what else can they do in a place where death is an everyday occurrence. Here, though, it's a big deal, at least at the moment it happens. So-and-so has died, how dreadful; such-and-such a number of people have been killed in a crash or blown to pieces, how terrible, how vile. The politicians have to rush around attending funerals and burials, taking care not to miss any-intense grief, or is it pride, requires them as ornaments, because they give no consolation nor can they, it's all to do with show, fuss, vanity and rank. The rank of the self-important, super-sensitive living. And yet, when you think about it, what right do we have, what is the point of complaining and making a tragedy out of something that happens to every living creature in order for it to become a dead creature? What is so terrible about something so supremely natural and ordinary? It happens in the best families, as you know, and has for centuries, and in the worst too, of course, at far more frequent intervals. What's more, it happens all the time and we know that perfectly well, even though we pretend to be surprised and frightened: count the dead who are mentioned on any TV news report, read the birth and death announcements in any newspaper, in a single city, Madrid, London, each list is a long one every day of the year; look at the obituaries, and although you'll find far fewer of them, because an infinitesimal minority are deemed to merit one, they're nevertheless there every morning. How many people die every weekend on the roads and how many have died in the innumerable battles that have been waged? The losses haven't always been published throughout history, in fact, almost never. People were more familiar with and more accepting of death, they accepted chance and luck, be it good or bad, they knew they were vulnerable to it at every moment; people came into the world and sometimes disappeared at once, that was normal, the infant mortality rate was extraordinarily high until eighty or even seventy years ago, as was death in childbirth, a woman might bid farewell to her child as soon as she saw its face, always assuming she had the will or the time to do so. Plagues were common and almost any illness could kill, illnesses we know nothing about now and whose names are unfamiliar; there were famines, endless wars, real wars that involved daily fighting, not sporadic engagements like now, and the generals didn't care about the losses, soldiers fell and that was that, they were only individuals to themselves, not even to their families, no family was spared the premature death of at least some of its members, that was the norm; those in power would look grim-faced, then carry out another levy, recruit more troops and send them to the front to continue dying in battle, and almost no one complained. People expected death, Jack, there wasn't so much panic about it, it was neither an insuperable calamity nor a terrible injustice; it was something that could happen and often did. We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last forever. We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword. And we're bound to be cowed when confronted by those who still see death, their own or other people's, as part and parcel of their job, as all in a day's work. When confronted by terrorists, for example, or by drug barons or multinational mafia men. And so it's true, Iago.' I didn't like it when he called me by the name of that troublemaker; it sounded grubby to me, it wasn't a name I wanted to answer to (I, who answered to so many). 'It's important that some of us don't think much of death. Of other people's deaths, as you said, outraged, oh, I noticed despite your neutral tone, it was a good try, but not enough. It's lucky that some of us can step out of our own era and look at things as they used to in more robust times, past and future (because those times will return, I assure you, although I don't know whether you and I will live to see them), so that we don't collectively suffer the fate described by a French poet: Par delicatessen j'ai perdu ma vie.' And he took the trouble to translate these words for me, and in that I saw a remnant of the yokel he had left behind: 'Out of delicacy I lost my life.'
I glanced down at his feet, his shoes, as I had during one of our first meetings, fearing that he might be wearing some abomination, short green boots in alligator skin, like Marshal Bonanza, or even clogs. This wasn't the case, he always wore elegant brown or black lace-ups, they were certainly not the shoes of a yokel; only the waistcoats he was rarely seen without were questionable, although now they looked more old-fashioned and dated than ever, like a leftover from the seventies, at the time when he would have been starting to take life more seriously, I mean, to be fully aware of his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, or with a proper sense of the options available to him. Nevertheless, there was something about him that did not quite ring true: his work, his gestures, his surroundings, his accent, even that very comfortable English house, so textbook perfect, like something out of an expensive film, or a picture in a storybook. Perhaps it was the abundant curls on his bulging cranium, or the apparently dyed ringlets at his temples, perhaps the soft mouth seemingly lacking consistency, a piece of chewing gum before it goes hard. Many people doubtless found him attractive, despite that slightly repellent element I could never entirely identify or isolate or pin down with any exactitude, perhaps it didn't depend on just one characteristic, but on the whole. Perhaps I was the only person to see it, women clearly didn't pick it up. Not even perceptive women like Pérez Nuix, accustomed to noticing and intuiting everything, and with whom he had probably been to bed. That's something we would have in common, Tupra and I, or should that be I and Reresby. Or Ure or Dundas.
'And because of that you allow yourself to beat up and scare to death a poor inoffensive fool, and with my help too; except, of course, I had no idea what you were planning to do to him. And for no reason, just because, because one shouldn't take death too seriously. Well, I couldn't disagree with you more. By the way, I believe that line is from Rimbaud,' I added to make him feel inadequate, he'd already gained far too much ground. I was taking a risk, though, because I wasn't sure at all.