Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - Opening

'While it isn't ever something we would wish for, we would all nonetheless always preder it to be the person beside us who dies, whether on a mission or in battle, in an air squadron or under bombardment or in the trenches when there were trenches, in a mugging or a raid on a shop or when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us. Whenever someone covers another person with his own body, or places himself in the path of a bullet or a knife, these are all extraordinary exceptions, which is why they stand out, and most are fictitious and only appear in novels and films.

For Carmen Lopez M, who has been kind

enough to hear me out patiently until the end

And for my friend Sir Peter Russell and

my father, Julian Marias,

who generously lent me

a large part of their lives,

in memoriam.

Copyright 2007 by Javier Marias

English translation copyright 2009 by Margaret Jull Costa

Forst published in Spain in 2007 as Tu rostro manana, 3 Veneno y sombra y adios by Alfaguara, Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S.A.

Published by arrangement with Mercedes Casanovas Agencia Literaria, Barcelona, and in association with Chatto & Windus, The Random House Group UK.

The translator would like to thank Javier Marias, Annella McDermot, Palmira Sullivan, and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Ins., for permission to reprint from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke the line from the first "Duino Elegy," copyright 1989 by Stephen Mitchell. The Eliot lines are quoted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," copyright 1917 by T. S. Eliot.

The publication of this book has been assisted with a translation subvention from the Director of Books, Archives, and Libraries of the Cultural Ministry of Spain.

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