Free Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías

and their meanderings, and that she tried hard to do so; Mulryan had no option, since he was the one - at least this was my impression — who kept, how can I put it, the diary, accounts and inventory of all matters left unresolved, untamed or unfinished; as for Rendel, it would be difficult to say, for he tended to remain silent for long periods or else, when he was drinking or perhaps smoking - my cigarettes were not the only ones filling our office with smoke - he would suddenly start lecturing or telling a whole string of jokes which he himself would greet with loud guffaws, until he returned to his usual mute state, both modes of being framed by a kind of uneasy cloud or cumulus of smoke.) The only reason I took in anything on that particular night was because the English spoken by the Italian husband was rather less intelligible than he himself thought, and Tupra would call on me (asking for help with a rapid movement of his fingers or of those eyebrows like two black smudges) to help him out and translate a few phrases or some key word when he and Manoia got themselves into a prolonged tangle and ran the grave risk of understanding entirely the opposite of what they were reciprocally proposing or agreeing, or were prepared to accept.
    The surname Manoia sounded southern to me, more by intuition than knowledge, as did the man's accent in Italian (he converted unvoiced consonants into voiced, so that what one heard him say was, in fact, ho gabido instead of ho capita), but he had more the look of a Roman - or, rather, Vatican - mafioso than of a Sicilian or Calabrian or Neapolitan one. The large glasses — the glasses of a rapist or a hard-working civil servant, or both, for they are not mutually exclusive types - which he kept pushing up with his thumb even when they had not slipped down, and his gaze, almost invisible due to reflected light and his incessantly shifting, lustreless eyes (the colour more or less of milky coffee), as if he found it hard to keep them still for more than a few seconds, or else could not stand people examining them. He spoke in a low, but doubtless powerful, voice, it would be strident if raised, which is perhaps why he moderated it, resting one hand on the other, but without leaning his elbows on the table, not even one, so that they remained there, unsupported, a position which, after a few minutes, must inevitably have caused some discomfort, or perhaps it was the small voluntary, commemorative mortification of a Catholic of the greatest integrity or, possibly, intensity, from the obscurest and most legionary wing of the Church. He seemed, in the first instance, mild and anodyne, apart from having too long a chin (not, however, to the point of prognathism) which would doubtless have led him to nurse stubborn feelings of resentment - that is, with no one target -during adolescence and perhaps childhood, even if that childhood had been only a moderately introverted or burdensome one; and in the way he had of drawing in that chin, of gnawing at the inside of his cheek, one sensed a mixture of deep-seated, never-banished embarrassment and a general readiness to take reprisals, which he probably did, I would guess, at the slightest provocation or on the least excuse or even with no need for either, as vengeful people - or at least the more subjective of them - do. An irascible man, then, although he would doubtless be considered, rather, as measured, because he would almost never give vent to that anger and would be the only person who knew about it and discussed it, if that verb can be applied to something that would take place only in his own overheated interior. The few occasions when his rage surfaced would doubtless be terrifying and best not witnessed.
    His wife might possibly have done so, but she would certainly not have been its object, how else explain her impulsiveness or her ease: she must have known, in advance, that she had been granted a plenary indulgence or a full papal bull.