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| Author | Javier Marías |
|---|---|
| Original title | Tu rostro mañana |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Alfaguara |
Publication date | 2002 |
| Publication place |  Spain |
| Pages | 1592 (1 Fever and Spear: 475; 2 Dance and Dream: 410; 3 Poison, Shadow and Farewell: 707) |
| ISBN | 978-0811217279 |
| OCLC | 57422319 |
| Preceded by | Dark Back of Time |
| Followed by | The Infatuations |
Your Face Tomorrow is Javier Marías' tenth novel. This story narrates the story of Jaime Deza, who is a Spanish academic at the service of the MI5. He comes back to Oxford after separating from his partner, and he is also the character of the previous novel All Souls (1989), which finishes when Deza moves from Oxford to Madrid.
At first Your Face Tomorrow was conceived as a two-volume book project. However, it ended up being a novel of 1592 pages, three volumes, and seven parts: Fever, Spear, Dance, Dream, Poison, Shadow and Farewell. In Spain, the first volume called Your Face Tomorrow: 1 Fever and Spear appeared in 2002. The second volume, Your Face Tomorrow: 2 Dance and Dream, was published in 2004. Finally, the last one, Your Face Tomorrow: 3 Poison and Shadow and Farewell, came out on October 24, 2007.
Plot
[edit]I. Fever
[edit]After a recent divorce, Jaime Deza lives in London and works for the BBC. He frequents Sir Peter Wheeler, a professor at the University of Oxford. They were introduced by a mutual friend, professor Toby Rylands, who was a friend of Deza while he was working at the University of Oxford.
Thinking that Deza must be feeling lonely, Wheeler invites him for dinner at his house at the borders of the River Cherwell, under the false pretext that he is worried about Deza. There, the main character has the opportunity of meeting Bertram Tupra, who is clearly a mysterious guy. Nevertheless, during the dinner, Deza barely manages to talk with Tupra, since another Spaniard, Rafita de la Garza, follows him sticking on him like a leech. During the brief time in which Deza talks with Tupra, the latter mentions some events of the Spanish Civil War. As a matter of fact, it is because of this war that Deza's dad was imprisoned. His dad got out of jail almost miraculously, after having been accused of being communist by whom he considered to be his best friend.
Having had dinner, Wheeler asks Deza about his conversation with Tupra and the woman who was accompanying him. Deza thinks Tupra and his “girlfriend” have a very cold relationship. He thinks they maintain another kind of relationship, an expired one, which is barely trying to persist. Wheeler proves that there is a reason for making this question but he refuses to talk to Deza until the next morning and goes up to sleep.
Deza has a name going around his head: Andrés Nin. It was mentioned during his talk with Tupra. This is why he decides to explore Wheeler’s library, where not only does he find some articles written by his father, Juan Deza, but he also discovers links between Nin’s real story and the novel From Russia with Love.
II. Spear
[edit]The next morning, Wheeler admits that Tupra and himself had been testing Deza, because years ago Rylands suggested that Deza had enough skills to dedicate himself to reading faces, to probing intentions and to knowing the future behaviour of people, to finding out what would be “their face tomorrow”. Deza ends up joining Tupra’s team, on Wheeler’s explicit request. This team drafts reports for unspecified interests in an ordinary building through carrying out interviews and translations, looking through the glass or making interpretations. He joins a team which is made up of Tupra, Mulryan, second in charge; Rendel, from Austria, and Patricia Pérez Nuix, a half Spanish and half English woman.
Being with Wheeler in the morning, Deza finds out that the professor was born in New Zealand and his surname was Rylands before his father fled to South Africa. Wheeler’s father took that decision after losing his mother and realising that his youngest brother preferred going with their father and living with him. They both met in Oxford during the Second World War. Wheeler invited him to join the service following Deza’s example, just as Deza had done, though it was at Rylands' suggestion. During a long talk, Wheeler tells Deza for the first time that he had been married once. However, his wife Valerie died at a very young age. Deza asks him the cause of her death, but Wheeler replies he’d better postpone the story for some other time.
Working with Tupra makes Deza be constantly alert. In fact, at a rainy night he feels persecuted throughout several blocks. To check if his suspicions are correct he decides to stop twice, and the second time he discovers that a woman with a dog is following him. He reaches his house door and gets inside. He thinks that maybe he and the woman were just sharing paths, but after having looked at the square from his flat for a while, he sees that the woman is approaching his building and she finally rings the bell.
III. Dance
[edit]The woman who is looking for Deza turns out to be Pérez Nuix. She wants to ask him a favour: to help someone who Tupra is going to interview. This makes Deza remember the time when his ex-wife, Luisa, met a poor Eastern European immigrant girl in Madrid and did her some favours. She was around 20 years old and had two little kids.
Deza also remembers the time he was asked by Tupra to accompany him to a nightclub in order to do business with Mr. Manoia, an Italian old man who apparently had influence on the Vatican. Manoia was accompanied by his wife, Flavia, who was suffering the gloom of losing youthfulness and, therefore, required dedicated and courteous attentions but without ever cheating on her husband, since marital faithfulness was vastly valued by the Italian couple. Deza's mission consisted in pampering Flavia while Tupra did business.
Deza and Flavia got to dance when Rafita de la Garza approached them from the bar with intentions of getting close to the lady. Tupra called Jaime Deza to solve some problems of Mr. Manoia with the English language. Meanwhile, Flavia sat in Rafita's table and then disappeared. Tupra ordered Deza to find her and suggested to look for her in the toilet first.
Deza left the toilet empty handed and Tupra joined the search. They found the couple in the dance floor. While Tupra brought back Mrs. Flavia to her husband's table, Deza took De la Garza to the accessible toilet in order to neutralize him for a while. Deza decided to consult two doubts with Luisa: how the botox worked and whether it was possible for a woman to leave a drop in the ground because of menstruation. Luisa laughed and answered promptly, and Deza thought that maybe no one had filled his place yet.
IV. Dream
[edit]Having in mind a fake offer of a cocaine line to De la Garza, Tupra returned to the toilet and gave him a package. Then, De la Garza started to prepare the line over the toilet seat. Tupra took advantage of the distraction and pulled a Lansquenet sword from his coat and wielded it repeatedly against De la Garza's head. This action caused a panic attack in Deza, who had seen it all and remembered a story about the Spanish Civil War that his father told him. In this story, an Andalusian friend of his father was humiliated by being treated as a fighting bull and even being poked by Franco's troops.
He does not kill De la Garza, he just frightens him. Then Tupra sinks his head in the bowl and hits him several times against the disabled grab rail. Tupra and Deza leave the toilet and Tupra finishes his talking with Manoia.
After leaving the Italians in their hotel, Tupra brings Deza home while he tells him off for losing control during the sword scene. Deza answers that what he witnessed was really excessive in his opinion and asks Tupra where he had learnt such a thing. He responds that it was the Kray brothers, criminals from the East End in London, who taught him that. However, faced with the persevering questions of Deza, he decides that it is better to continue the conversation at his place. Furthermore, he promises to show him something.
V. Poison
[edit]Back to the present, at Tupra's house, they have a pointless conversation for a long time while they smoke and drink port wine. They talk about the tragic death of the American actress Jayne Mansfield and finish remembering the dinner with Manoia and the operated breasts of his wife, Flavia. They roar with laughter, which leads Deza to think that they have something in common, since they both laugh when facing some situations, besides having slept with Patricia Pérez Nuix. That happened the night she asked Deza the favor of speaking well of someone called Incompara to Tupra, with whom the father of the girl had gambling debts. She is sure that if Incompara gets away, he will forgive his father.
When Deza says it is late, Tupra reminds him that he has not seen yet what he wanted to show him. Then he brings Deza to a studio where he plays a DVD full of compromising scenes of celebrities from all around the world. Deza feels he is being inoculated with a poison.
Sometimes, Tupra shows the footage normally and then faster. Deza feels attracted by one of them: an old man being hit on a pool table. He turns out to be Mr. Pérez Nuix, so his intervention in favor of Incompara was useless. Nevertheless, that is not what Tupra wants to show him, but a recording of Manoia, where the Italian can be seen gouging the eyes of a man and cutting his throat. Deza feels he is fainting, but decides to stay strong. When Tupra inquires again about the questions of Deza, the latter feels stucked and answers something unexpected. Then a woman interrupts the conversation.
VI. Shadow
[edit]After the night when Tupra attacked De la Garza, Deza feels the need to apologize to him. He buys the newspapers El País and ABC, hoping that the incident is reported, and finds out that De la Garza ended up being hospitalised. Some time afterwards, Deza decides to visit him to apologize, but De la Garza panics and therefore Deza decides to leave.
Shortly later, after accompanying Tupra in some trips over England and Germany, Deza takes a two-week-vacations to visit his city, Madrid. He decides not to tell Luisa, so it can be a surprise. Once accommodated, he phones Luisa and tells her that he is going to visit their children. She asks him to take his time and leaves the house. Once Deza has put his kids to bed, he decides to wait for his ex-wife, and finds out that she has a bruise in one eye, which makes him come to the conclusion that Luisa is being mistreated by the man she’s going out with.
He asks his sister-in-law about the subject and she happens to share the same impression. Furthermore, she tells him the name of the guy Luisa is dating: Esteban Custardoy, a copyist and forger of paintings; she describes his appearance and explains where Custardoy lives to Deza. Deza finds someone with those characteristics in the Prado Museum, he follows him and checks he is who Deza was hoping for.
VII. Farewell
[edit]Deza decides to take Custardoy out of the picture, so he threatens him with an old gun, not registered to the police, but forgives his life in the last moment. Nevertheless, he grabs a poker from one chimney and he uses it to break Custardoy’s left hand. He also makes a cut in his face. Finally, Deza advises Custardoy on how to get away of Luisa. Lastly, when Deza says goodbye to Luisa before going back to London, he checks with a phone call that Custardoy is following his instructions.
On his plane back to England, Deza reads in a newspaper that one of the people he interpreted for had killed a young Russian or Bulgarian man, exactly as predicted, and he decides to leave the group. However, before going back to Madrid, he decides to go to Oxford to bid farewell to Peter Wheeler. The latter, behaving in a different way than usual, is particularly eloquent about his past and tells Deza about some of his secret missions, however, above all he tells the story of the death of his wife Valerie. She killed herself after finding out that a couple of girls had died due to an act of black propaganda that she had promoted during the Second World War. Wheeler tells Deza his stories, since he is aware that he is close to death, so that his stories can keep on living when he is no longer in our world.
A week after Deza’s arrival in England, his father dies. Due to that, Deza rushes his retreat of his safe town to go back to Madrid. After his return, his relationship with Luisa starts again, however, with both of them living in different places.
References
[edit]Category:Novels by Javier Marías Category:2002 novels Category:Spanish novels Category:Spanish-language novels Category:2009 novels