So I’m back to Javier Marías. Your Face Tomorrow Volume III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell. At the point where he gave lengthy description and reflection on ge-bryd-guma after accidentally or premeditatedly sleeping with a young female colleague, an enlarging hole on whose stockings warranted numerous mentions as if that was the sole driving force of an eventful or tranquil rainy night. But now in Volume III, I’m finally starting to get what the title means or implies or insinuates. Time passes slowly in this book (one night in 50 pages or more? I’m losing count or sense of pages ever since I got used to reading on Kindle), while in reality, it might take years or decades to turn just one page. How do we know how our faces will be like tomorrow, tomorrow meaning an arbitrary amount of time later, be it a day, a month, a year or say, 5 years, 10 years, until one forgets when the initial counting point was? If I see your face tomorrow, would I be able to recognize it? Out of a crowd in a Sunday afternoon art museum, in a waiting line at an airport gate, or in a corridor inside of a gold-decorated concert hall? Does it make a difference if I do? How much time has to pass before a past has become a past and can no longer be disturbed or altered or continued? Will there eventually be a tomorrow where I will fail to recognize your face and you mine? The logical answer is yes, of course, a tomorrow far enough from a yesterday.
Maybe Marías was talking about trust. I was never sure what exactly he was talking about, as he never narrowed his adjectives or adverbs or verbs or nouns down to one definitive term. Maybe he was not able to make a decision. Maybe he did not see the necessity to make a decision. Maybe it’s just more practical to leave more options open, so that later on you can always say, but that’s not what I meant, or but that’s exactly what I meant. The other day I took out the music sheets of Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 to play again after a few years, just a day before the concert where a variety of his pieces, including this one, were performed by the Wiener Symphoniker with a young gleeful Austrian conductor. I watched attentively at his movements and gestures that, as I recall vividly and confidently expounded by Cate Blanchett in Tár, define and dictate time. Time can go faster or slower or stop altogether. Time is not the same when confronted by music; it’s only the backdrop that is steady, perpetual, but colorless, irrelevant. She didn’t receive the Best Actress Award, but to me the part where she gave the lecture at Julliard and played Bach’s Prelude in Major C while interpreting each bar with a meticulously planned tone of voice was brilliant and a classic, for which she deserves all the awards in the world (but congrats to Michelle Yeoh). As my piano teacher repeatedly tells me, in the end it’s all about time and dynamic. But the most important thing is intention. Why do I want to see your face tomorrow? A school friend that I haven’t seen since university suddenly wrote me today, let’s arrange to meet if you’re coming back. Life is short, and we probably won’t meet many more times. I replied with a sad face. Maybe that’s why. I want to see your face tomorrow because if not, I won’t recognize you the day after tomorrow because the changes bestowed on you by time will be too drastic. Does it make a difference if I don’t? “The one charm of the past is that it is the past.” wrote Oscar Wilde (but of course, if you know the characters well from The Picture of Dorian Grey, this one came from Lord Henry). How can you start playing a piece without intention, without emotion, without expression.
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