Tu rostro mañana 2: Baile y sueño was published by Alfaguara in 2004 (English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 2006), and it is the darkest volume of the trilogy — the one in which the narrator’s comfortable position as an interpreter of faces confronts the brutal reality of what intelligence services actually do with the knowledge they gather.
The central event is a scene of extreme violence: Tupra, in a nightclub bathroom, attacks a man with a sword — a scene that Marías extends over dozens of pages, rendering each moment with excruciating precision, forcing the reader to inhabit the narrator’s consciousness as he watches, paralyzed, unable to intervene or look away. The violence is not gratuitous; it is the logical endpoint of the power to “read” people — to know their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Knowledge, in this world, is always potentially weaponized.
The title — Dance and Dream — captures the two modes of the narrator’s existence in this volume: the social world (the dance — parties, dinners, conversations, the performance of normality) and the inner world (the dream — memory, reflection, the processing of traumatic knowledge). The two interpenetrate: waking life takes on the unreality of dreams, and dreams carry the weight of waking experience.
Collecting Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream
First Spanish edition (Alfaguara, Madrid, 2004): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $15–$35
- First English edition (Chatto & Windus, 2006): $15–$30
- First US edition (New Directions, 2006): $10–$20