Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear by Javier Marías Page A

out a mile in England, in marked contrast to the prevailing affectation of indifference), not just the woman he was with, but almost any woman, even one of mature years, it was as if he were able to see them in their previous state, when they were young women or, who knows, young girls, to be able to read them retrospectively and, with those eyes of his that probed the past, to make the past once more present during the time that he chose to reclaim and study it, and to cause women, who were in the process of shrinking or fading or withdrawing, to recover, in his presence, lust and vigour (or was it just a flash: the mad, ephemeral spluttering, more ephemeral even than the flame of a match newly struck). The most remarkable thing was that he made this happen not only in his own eyes, but in those of others, as if, when he talked about it, his vision became contagious, or, put another way, as if he persuaded and taught us all to see what he was seeing at that precise moment and which we would never have perceived without his help and his words and without his index finger pointing it out to us.
    I observed this at the buffet supper at Sir Peter Wheeler's house and, of course, later on, when I knew more about him. Later, I realised, in fact, that his perspicacity as regards half-written biographies and half-travelled trajectories applied to everyone, women and men, although he found the former more stimulating and more interesting. At Wheeler's party, he arrived accompanied by the woman whom he had announced to Wheeler as his new girlfriend, a woman ten or twelve years younger than him and who appeared to find no novelty either in Tupra or in the situation: she lavished smiles on the wealthier-looking guests and half-heartedly rubbed shoulders with them, struggling to pay attention to their conversations as if she were playing an all-too-familiar role and kept mentally consulting her watch (she did look at it a couple of times without any apparent mental co-operation). She was tall, almost unusually so, in her well-trained high heels, and had the strong, solid legs of an American and a rather horse-like beauty of face, with attractive features, but a threatening jaw and such compact, excessively rectangular teeth that when she laughed, her upper lip curled back so far it almost disappeared — she was best when she wasn't laughing. She smelled good, of her own smell, one of those women whose pleasant, sour smell — a very sexual, physical smell — prevails over any other, this would doubtless be what most excited her boyfriend (that and her much-flaunted thighs).
    Tupra was about fifty and shorter than she was, as were most of the other men present; he looked like a well-travelled diplomat who still did a lot of extempore dashing about, or else a high-ranking civil servant who spent more time out of the office than in, that is, someone not particularly important as a name but indispensable when it came to practical matters, more accustomed to putting out major conflagrations and covering up large holes, to sorting out messy pre-bellum situations and calming down or hoodwinking insurrectionists, rather than organising strategies from a desk. He looked like a man with his feet firmly on the ground, not lost somewhere in the upper echelons or bedazzled by protocol: whatever it was that he did ('his present line of work'), he probably spent more time padding streets not carpets, although now, perhaps, any streets he padded down would all be very elegant and well-to-do. His bulging cranium was softened by a head of hair considerably darker, thicker and curlier than one normally finds in Britain (with the exception of Wales), and which, particularly at the temples where the curls were almost ringlets, was probably dyed, revealing a premature but deferred greyness. His eyes were blue or grey depending on the light and he had long eyelashes, dense enough to be the envy of any woman and to be considered highly suspect by any man. His