Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Read Online Free PDF Page A

been re-elected; Keats dead in Rome from tuberculosis, at twenty-five, such a loss to literature; Christ on the cross at thirty-three, a mature adult in the eyes of the age he lived in, even a little slow off the mark in carrying out his work, but young, if not in years, and gone to an early grave according to our idle, long-lived times. As I said, it was at Mulryan's insistence that we called it the K-M complex, but any of those other names would have done, or many more, quite a few people owe their great celebrity or the fact of not being forgotten to the manner of their death or its timing, when it might be said that they weren't ready or that it was unfair. As if death knew anything about fairness or was concerned with meting it out, or could even understand the concept, quite absurd. At most, death is arbitrary, capricious, by which I mean that it establishes an order it doesn't always follow, one that it chooses either to follow or discard: sometimes it approaches filled with resolve and, as if intent on its business, draws near, flies over us, looks down, and then suddenly decides to leave it for another day. It must have a very good memory to be able to recall every living being and not miss a single one. Death's task is infinite, and yet it's been carrying it out with exemplary thoroughness for centuries. What an efficient slave, one that never stands idle and never wearies. Or forgets.'
    His way of referring to death, of personalizing it, again made me think that he must have had more dealings with it than most, that he must have seen it in action many times and had perhaps, on a few occasions, himself taken on the role of death. That very night he had approached De la Garza filled with resolve, he had drawn near, flown over him wielding his Landsknecht sword just like the helicopter with its whirling blades that had so frightened Wheeler and me in his garden by the river: in the end, it had merely ruffled our hair, and Tupra had merely cut off De la Garza's fake ponytail and plunged his head into the water and beaten him, and left him for another day, as if he really were Sir Death on a night when he had decided not to follow his own established order of things. Or perhaps Tupra, as a medievalist, albeit non-practicing, was accustomed to the anthropomorphic vision of past centuries: the decrepit old woman with her scythe or Sir Death in full armor and bearing a sword and a lance; but just whose 'efficient slave' did he think death was: God's, the Devil's, mankind's, or life's, even though life only has this one method of proceeding?
    'I know what happened, I mean I know, as does everyone else, how President Kennedy died,' I replied. 'But I don't know what happened to Jayne Mansfield. In fact, I know almost nothing about her and her extraordinary hourglass figure.' And after humorously quoting his own words back at him, I added a Spanish note to what I had said: 'I suppose Garcia Lorca would fit that complex too. We wouldn't evoke him so frequently, he wouldn't be remembered or read in the same way if he hadn't died the way he did, shot and thrown into a common grave by the Francoists, before he was even forty. However good a poet he was, he wouldn't be missed or praised half as much.'
    'Exactly, that's another clear example of a death defining a life, of ever-present death enfolding and sweeping someone along,' replied Tupra, not really listening to what I'd said; I wondered how much he knew about the circumstances of Lorca's murder. 'Throughout her brief and brilliant career and her almost equally brief decline, Jayne Mansfield was always ready to turn her hand—and certainly her bust—to doing whatever was necessary to attract the attention of the press and to publicize herself. She always kept her door open to reporters, wherever she was, in motels when she was on the road, in the suites she stayed in and even in hotel bathrooms; she loved them to come and photograph her in her pink Spanish-style mansion on