Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías

Author:Javier Marías
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241338087
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

And I continued to waste no time. I didn’t linger or delay or loiter or dally. I was longing to see my children again, not to mention Luisa and my sister, and, for the first time since my return, my brothers and a few friends, and to stroll around the city like a foreigner, but I felt I had something concrete and urgent to do, something to investigate and resolve and remedy. That was something I had learned from Tupra, at least in theory: Luisa was clearly in danger, and now I understood that sometimes one has no option but to do what has to be done and at once, without waiting or hesitating or delaying: I had to do this unthinkingly, like some very distracted, busy person, as if it were merely my job. Yes, there are occasions when one knows precisely what would happen in the world if no pressure or brake was imposed on what one perceives to be people’s certain capabilities, and that if those capabilities were to remain undeployed, it was necessary for someone – me, for example, who else in this case? – to dissuade or impede them. In order for Tupra to adopt the punitive measures which he deemed necessary and appropriate, he simply had to convince himself of what would happen in each case if he or another sentinel – the authorities or the law, instinct, the moon, the storm, fear, the hovering sword, the invisible watchers – did not put a stop to it. ‘It’s the way of the world,’ he would say, and he would say this about so many things and situations; he applied those words to betrayals and acts of loyalty, to anxieties and quickened pulses, to unexpected reversals and vertigo, to vacillations and torments and to the involuntary harm we cause, to the scratch and the pain and the fever and the festering wound, to griefs and the infinite steps we all take in the belief that we are being guided by our will, or that our will does at least play a part in them. To him all this seemed perfectly normal and even, sometimes, routine – prevention or punishment and never running too grave a risk – he knew too well that the Earth is full of passions and affections and of ill will and malice, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because they are the fuse and the fuel for their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they don’t even require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, gratitude nor insult, or at least not always, or as Wheeler said: ‘they carry their probabilities in their veins, and so time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment.’ And for Tupra this very radical and sometimes ruthless attitude – or perhaps it was simply a very practical one – was just another characteristic

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