Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

However, I found it hard to believe that, doing our kind of work and with files so easily to hand, she hadn't known my address already, she could have waited for me outside my front door and thus avoided having to trail me through the disagreeable night, or waited in still more comfort in the foyer of the hotel opposite, from where she would have seen me arrive or would have noticed my lights on (although, during the hours that I'm away, there is always at least one light on day and night), and she could then simply have crossed the square and barely got wet at all. I asked if she would like something to drink, something hot, alcoholic, or water perhaps, but she didn't want anything just then, she lit a cigarette, we all smoked in our office despite the regulations, apart from Mulryan who was trying to give it up, and she continued talking quickly and volubly in order not to get to the point or to the one thing that she was obliged to tell me - what a night, it feels as if it were raining all over the world, no, she didn't say that, but something similar with the same trivial meaning, if one pretends there is nothing extraordinary about one's extraordinary behaviour it can end up not seeming extraordinary at all, this very dumb trick works with the dozy, passive majority and there's nothing more useful than liberties taken and left unchecked, but neither she nor I, Tupra or Wheeler belonged to the majority, rather, we were the sort who never let go of our prey, are never dazzled and never entirely lose the thread or lose sight of our objective, or only in part or apparently. She did not cross her legs until a little while later, as if her indecisiveness about the zips on her boots were only possible while her legs remained parallel and at a right angle, nor did she use the towel I quickly handed her to dry her legs (she was wearing dusky tights, not dark or transparent; I noticed a loose thread which would soon become a ladder, even though they were winter tights), she applied it to her face, hands, throat and neck, not this time to her sides or armpits or breasts, none of those was visible. Her thigh was the one I had glimpsed before when the skirt of her raincoat fell open, in the street, at a distance, except that now I could see both thighs, in their entirety, as one usually does, a good reason to look at the dog lying at her feet, an even better reason to lean forward and pat the dog, I remembered De la Garza at Wheeler's cold buffet supper making himself dwarfishly small by sitting on a very low pouffe in order to inspect Beryl Tupra's uninhibited thighs beneath her very short skirt (although hardly beneath, rather, outside her skirt, although it may not have been her thighs for which he was watching and waiting). Pérez Nuix's skirt wasn't anywhere near as short, although it did ride up slightly or quite a lot when she sat down; and I, of course, would never stoop to such puerile tricks, for a start, spying isn't my style, at least not with an ulterior motive, which there clearly was in this instance — a remnant of discretion on my part perhaps.
    'What a night, it feels as if it were raining all over the world,' she said again, well, either that or her more prosaic equivalent, and this meant that she had done with all the preambles and diversionary manoeuvres and her dilatory fiddling with the zips on her boots (they were zipped now, although not fully) and with the towel, which she still held scrunched up in the hand that was now resting on the sofa, like someone keeping hold of a used handkerchief which they might need again at any moment, with sneezes one never knows if another one is on the way. She was showing quite a lot of leg and she must have been aware of just how much, but nothing in her attitude indicated that she knew - it wasn't at all obvious - and when it comes to things that are not entirely manifest, you must always allow room for doubt, however clearly you think you can see them. 'She's very