Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear by Javier Marías

the Costa Brava, you know.' But Tupra did not respond at once (perhaps he was trying to remember), so I added as further orientation: 'The artists Dali and Miro.'
    'Mention Montserrat Caballe, the soprano,' De la Garza suggested, almost breathing down my neck. 'The silly git is bound to like opera.' He could clearly understand more than he could speak and was drawn like a magnet by any Spanish names he happened to catch. He had got up from the pouffe in order to pester me again (Beryl had crossed her legs now, that was probably the real reason). I assumed he had meant to use the word 'gypsy' again about Tupra (because of his curly hair, I assumed, those ringlets), but that, after all the outrageous toasts he had drunk, he could now only manage to say 'git'.
    'Gaudi, the architect,' I suggested, I had no intention of taking any notice of De la Garza, that would have been tantamount to giving him permission to join in the dialogue.
    'Yes, yes, of course, George Orwell and all that,' said Tupra at last, finally placing the name. 'Sorry, I was remembering . . . I've forgotten most of what I read about the Spanish Civil War, things I read in my youth, you know, you tend to read about that romantic war when you're nineteen or twenty, perhaps because of all those idealistic young British volunteers who died there, some of them poets, you identify easily with other people at that age. Well, I don't know about nowadays, I'm talking about my day, of course, although I would say it was still the same, for restless young people that is: they still read Emily Bronte and Salinger, Ten Days that Shook the World and books about the Spanish Civil War, things haven't changed that much. I remember being particularly impressed by what happened to Nin, I mean, how utterly ridiculous to accuse him of spying. And the complete farce of those German members of the International Brigade passing themselves off as Nazis come to liberate him, it just goes to show how even the craziest, most unlikely things have their moment to be believed. Sometimes the moment lasts only a matter of days, sometimes it lasts forever. The truth is that, initially, everything tends to be believed. It's very odd, but that's how it is.'
    'Nin, the Trotskyist leader?' I asked, surprised. I couldn't believe that Tupra knew nothing about Dali and Miro, Caballe and Gaudi (or so I deduced from his silence), and yet knew so much about the slandered Andres Nin, probably more than I did. Perhaps he didn't know about art and didn't like opera, and his field was politics or history.
    'Yes, who else? Although, of course, he did break with Trotsky in the end.'
    'Well, there was a musician called Nin, and, of course, that awful woman writer,' I began, but stopped myself. Things he had read in his youth, he had said. Something as real to me and still so close was, in another not so distant country, just like Wuthering Heights had been for years: that is, a fiction, a romantic fiction, read by the surlier, angrier university students in order, in their imaginings, to feel defeated, pure and perhaps heroic. It's probably the fate of all horrors and all wars, I thought, to end up abstract and embellished by dint of sheer repetition and, ultimately, to feed both youthful and adult fantasies, more quickly if the war happens abroad, perhaps for many foreigners our war seems as literary and remote as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns or perhaps even the sieges of Numantia or Troy. And yet my father had nearly died in that war, wearing the uniform of the Republic in our besieged city, and, when it was over, had endured a mock trial and imprisonment under Franco, and an uncle of mine aged seventeen had been killed in Madrid and in cold blood by those on the other side — that side split into so many factions, and so full of calumnies and purges — by the militiamen who wore no uniform and were subject to no control and who would bump off anyone, they had killed him for no reason