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

of political-cum-literary tension proved no impediment, as I said, to the attaché who remained glued to my side or hard on my heels with scarcely a break once that initial encounter of ours was over and despite the fact that I overtly and frequently turned my back on him and talked to some of the other guests in the most obscure, affected and, for him, off-putting English I could muster. Thus, for example, the brief opportunity I had to speak to Tupra was marred by De la Garza's occasional and entirely inappropriate interpolations in Spanish. This was not until some time later, when the two of us were standing up drinking coffee by the sofas which, at that moment, were occupied by Wheeler, Beryl the girlfriend, the Dean of York's very buxom widow and two or three others, there is always a constant coming and going and changing of positions at these nomadic, informal buffet suppers.
    The fact is that Wheeler had done nothing to bring us together, Tupra and me, and I began to think that his telephonic lecture about this fellow or, rather, about his surname and his first name had been pure chance and without any hidden agenda, however difficult I found it to imagine Peter restricting himself to a plain and boringly open agenda, let alone to the absolute absence of any agenda at all. He had been equally attentive to almost all his guests, assisted by Mrs Berry (more smartly dressed than usual), the housekeeper he had inherited from Toby Rylands when the latter had died years before, and by three waiters hired for the evening along with the viands and whose shift ended at midnight exactly, as Peter had slightly anxiously informed me (he was hoping that, by then, there wouldn't be many guests still hanging around). He and I had barely spoken, knowing that we would have time to talk the next day: I would stay the night at his house, as I sometimes did, so that I could spend the following morning with him and have Sunday lunch there. Studying him from afar, I hadn't noticed him paying particular attention to any one person, like the good host he was, nor bringing particular people together, at least not in my case, because I couldn't believe that he would deliberately have thrown me together with De la Garza, who had soured my soul and hampered my every conversation with his attempts at chit-chat and his comments that had nothing at all to do with what was being discussed; and although he understood English better than he spoke it, the large quantity of alcohol with which he had filled his unintended soliloquies — he wanted to be part of things and wasn't at all happy being his own audience — brought about a rapid deterioration in his intellectual faculties (if you can call them that) and coarsened the nature of his remarks.
    While I spoke briefly to Beryl, for example, fairly early on in the evening (she replied reluctantly and purely out of duty, I obviously didn't strike her as being sufficiently well-heeled), he prowled tirelessly around us, coming out with crass comments about her which, fortunately, no one else could understand ('Bloody hell, have you seen the legs on this woman? You could practically toboggan down them. What do you reckon, eh? Do you think we could steal her from that gypsy she arrived with? She doesn't take a blind bit of notice of him; but then again, he never takes his eyes off her and he could turn out to be the sort who would knife you, however British he might be.'). And while I was conducting a soporific conversation about terrorism with an Irish historian called Fahy, his wife and the Labour mayor of some unfortunate town in Oxfordshire, the attaché, when he heard a few Basque names fall from my lips, tried to butt in with a little folklore ('Hey, tell them that San Sebastian is only the city it is because of us madrileños, dammit, because us people from Madrid used to go and spend our summer holidays there and wrapped it all up for them with a nice pink ribbon, otherwise it would be a complete