The man who has just walked in reminds me of someone. But I still haven’t been able to work out who. Tall, elegant, well dressed. His grey hair, cropped short, gives him an air of nobility, an air which his broad, rather coarse face quickly dispels. I watch him make his way across the sleeping evening light, as a tiger. He ignores the hand Félix proffers him, and then – apparently a little bored – sits down with legs crossed on the leather sofa. He sighs deeply. His fingers drum on the sofa’s arm.
‘I’m going to tell you an improbable story. I’m going to tell you because I know you won’t believe me. I’d like to trade this improbable story, the story of my life, for another story – one that’s simple, and solid. The story of an ordinary man. I’ll give you an impossible truth, and you give me a vulgar and believable lie – OK?’
He’d started well. Interested, Félix sat down.
‘You see this face?’The man pointed to his face with both hands.‘Well, it’s not mine.’
A long pause. He hesitated. Then at last he began:
‘They stole my face. Oh… how can I explain this to you? They stole me from myself. I woke up one day to discover that they’d done plastic surgery on me, and left me in a clinic with an envelope full of dollars and a postcard: We thank you for the services rendered – consider your job done. That’s what it said on the postcard. They could have killed me. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me. Maybe they thought that this way I’m even deader… Or rather, that’s what I thought at first, that they wanted me to suffer. And I did, those first days I really did suffer. I considered reporting what had happened. I sought out my friends. Some of them didn’t believe me. Others did believe me, in spite of the mask I now wear, because after all I know certain things – but they pretended not to believe me. I thought it would be dangerous to insist. And then one evening, an evening like this one, sitting alone at a table outside a bar at the end of the Island, I began to enjoy an amazing sensation – I wasn’t sure what to call it; but I do know now, it was Freedom! I’d been transformed into a free man. I had funds, I had access to accounts abroad that would see me out for the rest of my life. And I had the weight of no responsibilities – no critics, no remorse, no envy, no hatred, no rancour, no court intrigue, still less any fear that one day someone would betray me…’
Félix Ventura shakes his head, troubled:
‘I used to know someone – he was crazy, one of those unfortunates you find wandering around the city, getting in the way of the traffic, and he had a very strange theory. He believed that the President had been replaced by a double. Your story reminds me of that…’
The man looked at him, curious. His voice became more gentle, almost dream-like:
‘All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.’ A sigh. ‘But only a few lunatics – very few of them, and they do have to be very crazy indeed – are able to understand this. Anyway. What I’m after is for you to arrange for me exactly the opposite of what you usually do for people – I want you to give me a modest past. A name with no lustre to it whatsoever. A genealogy that is obscure, and irrefutable. There must be men who are rich but who have no family and no glory, surely? I want to be like that…’