We never know when we have entirely won someone's trust, still less when we have lost it. I mean the trust of someone who would never speak of such things or make protestations of friendship or offer reproaches, or ever use those words – distrust, friendship, enmity, trust – or only as a mocking element in their normal representations and dialogues, as echoes or quotations of speeches and scenes from times past which always seem so ingenuous to us, just as today will seem tomorrow for whoever comes after, and only those who know this can save themselves the quickening pulse and the sharp intake of breath, and thus not submit their veins to any unpleasant shocks. Yet it is hard to accept or to see this, and so hearts continue their somersaults, mouths their drynesses and inhalations, and legs their tremblings, how was I or how could I have been – men say to themselves – so stupid, so clever, so smug, so credulous, so dim, so sceptical, the trusting person is not necessarily more ingenuous than the wary, the cynic no less ingenuous than the person who surrenders unconditionally and places himself in our hands and offers us his neck for the last or the first blow, or his chest so that we can pierce it with our sharpest spear. Even the most suspicious and astute and the most cunning turn out to be slightly ingenuous when expelled from time, once they have passed and their story is known (it's on everyone's lips, which is how, ultimately, it takes shape). Perhaps that's all it is, the ending and knowing the ending, knowing what happened and how things turned out, who was in for a surprise and who was behind the deception, who came off well or badly or who came out quits and who did not bet at all and so ran no risk, who – even so – came out the loser because he was dragged along by the current of the broad, rushing river, which is always crowded with gamblers, so many that eventually they manage to get all the passengers involved, even the most passive, even the indifferent, the scornful and the disapproving, the hostile and the reluctant; as well as those who live along the banks of the river itself. It doesn't seem possible to remain apart, on the margins, to shut oneself up in one's house, knowing nothing and wanting nothing – not even wanting to want anything, that's not much use – never opening the letter-box, never answering the phone, never drawing back the bolt however loudly they knock, even if they seem about to break the door down, it doesn't seem possible to pretend that no one lives there or that the person who did has died and doesn't hear you, to be invisible at will and when one chooses, it isn't possible to be silent and to eternally hold your breath while still alive, it's not even entirely possible when you believe that you inhabit this earth no longer and have abandoned your name. It simply isn't that easy, it isn't that easy to erase everything and to erase yourself and for not a trace to remain, not even the last rim or the last remnant of a rim, it's not easy simply to be like the bloodstain that can be washed and scrubbed and suppressed and then… then one can begin to doubt that it ever existed. And each vestige always drags behind it the shadow of a story, perhaps not complete, doubtless incomplete, full of lacunae, ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary, like bits of gravestone or like ruined pediments with fractured inscriptions, and sometimes it's not even possible to know how a story really ended, as in the case of Andreu Nin and of my uncle Alfonso and his young friend with a bullet in her neck and no name at all, as in the case of so many others about whom I know nothing and about whom no one speaks. But the form is one thing and quite another the actual ending, which is always known: just as time is one thing and its content another, never repeated, infinitely variable, while time itself is homogeneous, unalterable. And it is that known ending which allows us to dub everyone ingenuous and futile, the clever and the stupid, the totally committed as well as the slippery and the evasive, the unwary, the cautious and those who hatched plots and set traps, the victims and the executioners and the fugitives, the innocuous and the malicious, from the position of false superiority – time will see it off, it will be time, time that will cure it – of those who have not yet reached their end and are still groping their way uncertainly forwards or walking lightly with shield and spear, or slowly and wearily with shield all battered and spear blunt and dull, without even realising that we will soon be with them, with those who have been expelled and those who have passed and then… then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous, why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my fever, my word, your pain, and all those doubts, all that torment?
That's how it is and will always be, Tupra more or less said as much to me on one occasion, and Wheeler said so quite clearly the following morning and over lunch. And if Tupra said it less clearly it was doubtless because he would never talk about such things or use words like 'distrust', 'friendship', 'enmity' or 'trust', at least not seriously, not in relation to himself, as if none of those words could apply to him or touch him or have any place in his experiences. 'It's the way of the world,' he would say sometimes, as if that really was all one could say on the subject, and as if everything else were mere ornament and possibly unnecessary torment. I don't think he expected anything, either loyalty or treachery, and if he came across one or the other, he didn't seem particularly surprised, nor did he take any precautions other than sensible practical ones. He didn't expect admiration or affection, but neither did he expect ill will or malice, even though he knew full well that the earth is infested with both the former and the latter, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because these are the fuse and the fuel for their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they do not require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, neither gratitude nor insult, or at least not always, according to Wheeler, who was more explicit: 'they carry their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment'.
So I never knew if I ever did win Tupra's trust, nor if I lost it or when, perhaps there was no one moment for either of those two phases or changes of mind, or perhaps one could not have given it a name, or not those names, of winning or losing. He didn't talk about such things, in fact, there was almost nothing about which he did speak clearly and directly, and had it not been for Wheeler's preliminary explanations on that Sunday in Oxford, it is quite possible that I would have known nothing either precise or imprecise about my duties, and that I would not even have guessed at their sense or their object. Not, of course, that I ever knew or understood this entirely: what was done with my rulings or reports or impressions, for whom they were ultimately intended or what purpose they served exactly, what consequences they would bring or, indeed, if they had any consequences, or belonged, on the contrary, to that category of task and activity which certain organisations and institutions carry out simply because they always have, and because no one can remember why these things were done in the first place or cares to question why they should continue. Sometimes I thought perhaps they simply filed them away, just in case. A strange expression, but one which justifies everything: just in case. Even the most absurd things. I don't think it happens any more, but any traveller visiting the United States used to be asked whether he or she had any intention of making an attempt on the life of the American President. As you can imagine, no one ever replied in the affirmative – it was a declaration made under oath – unless they wanted to make a joke, which could prove very costly on that stern, uncompromising border – least of all the hypothetical assassin or jackal who had disembarked with precisely that aim or mission in mind. The thinking behind this absurd question was, it seems, that should a foreigner take it into his or her head to assassinate Eisenhower or Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Nixon, then perjury could be added to the main charge; in other words, they asked the question in order to catch people out – just in case. I never understood, however, the relevance or advantage of that extra aggravating factor when used against someone accused of bumping off or trying to bump off the highest-ranking person in the land, a crime which would, one imagines, be of a gravity difficult to surpass. But that is the way with things that are done just in case. They anticipate the most unlikely and improbable events and are drawn up on that basis, and almost always in vain, since those events almost never happen. They perform fruitless or superfluous tasks that probably never serve any purpose or are never even used, they are based on eventualities and imaginings and hypotheses, on nothing, on the non-existent, on what never happens and has never happened. Just in case.
Initially, I was summoned three times in the short space of about ten days to act as interpreter, although they doubtless could have used others paid by the hour or some semipermanent member of staff like Pérez Nuix, the young woman whom I met later on. On two of those occasions I barely had to do anything, for the two Chileans and the three Mexicans with whom Tupra and his subordinate Mulryan shared two rapid lunches – all five were dull men engaged on dull business, vaguely diplomatic, vaguely legislative and parliamentary – spoke reasonable, utilitarian English, and my presence in the restaurant was only necessary to clear up the occasional lexical doubt and so that the final terms of the draft agreements they apparently reached were clear to both parties and left no room for subsequent misunderstandings, voluntary or involuntary. In fact, all I had to do was to summarise. I didn't understand much of what they were talking about, as happens in any language when I'm not really interested in what my ears are hearing. I mean that while I did, of course, understand the words and the phrases and had no problem converting them and reproducing them and transmitting them too, I understood neither the subjects discussed nor their respective backgrounds, they simply didn't interest me.
The third occasion was much odder and more amusing, and I had to do more to earn my money, because I was summoned to Tupra's office where I had to translate what seemed to me to be some sort of interrogation. Not that of a detainee or a prisoner or even a suspect, but possibly – shall we say – of an infiltrator or a turncoat or an informer whom Tupra and Mulryan did not as yet quite trust, both of them asked questions (but Mulryan more often, Tupra held back) which I repeated in Spanish to a tall, burly, middle-aged Venezuelan, dressed in civilian clothes and looking somewhat uncomfortable, or, rather, uneasy and unnatural, as if the clothes were borrowed and temporary and recently acquired, as if he felt insecure and a bit of a fraud without the more than probable uniform to which he was doubtless accustomed. With his stiff moustache and his broad, tanned face, his agile eyebrows separated only by two coppery brushstrokes that flanked the brief space between the eyebrows like two tiny tufts of hair transported from chin to forehead, with his convex chest perfect for showing off rows of medals and yet far too bulky to be contained by a simple white shirt, dark tie and pale double-breasted suit (an odd sight in London, he looked as if he was about to burst out of it, the three buttons firmly done up like a reminder of his army jacket), I had not the slightest difficulty in imagining him wearing the peaked cap of a Latin American military man, in fact, the thick, wiry, grizzled hair that grew too low down on his forehead cried out for a patent leather peak that would provide a focus of attention and would hide or disguise that overly invasive hairline.
Mulryan's questions, plus the occasional one from Tupra, were polite, but quick and very much to the point (both of them seemed always to go straight to the point, in their conversations with jurists and senators too, or with Chilean and Mexican diplomats, they weren't prepared to spend any longer than was necessary, they were clearly trained and experienced negotiators, and didn't mind if they seemed somewhat abrupt), and I realised that they expected the same from my translations, that I should exactly reproduce not just the words but also the sense of haste and the rather sharp tone, and when I hesitated a couple of times because such an absolute lack of preambles and circumlocutions does not always sit well in my language, Mulryan, on both occasions, made a gentle but unequivocal gesture with two fingers together, indicating that I should hurry up and not bother inventing my own formulations. The Venezuelan military man did not know a word of English, but he paid as much attention to the voices of the two British men while they were asking their questions as he did to mine when I was providing him with the meaning of their interrogations, although, inevitably, when he gave his replies, he looked at me and spoke to me, even though I was merely the messenger, all too aware that I was the only one who would immediately understand him. Not that I understood a great deal more of what was talked about, or understood with any great precision the background to the matters discussed, but my curiosity was definitely more aroused than during the two lunches, which were truly soporific and whose subject-matter had proved far more abstruse for a layman. I remember translating questions for that disguised, ill-at-ease military man about what forces could be rallied by him and his colleagues, whoever they were, the guaranteed and the probable numbers, and that he replied that nothing was ever guaranteed in Venezuela, that anything guaranteed was only ever probable, and that the probable was always a complete unknown. And I remember that this answer irritated Mulryan, who tended to the absolutely specific and precise, and provoked one of Tupra's interventions, Tupra being perhaps more used to vagueness and evasion from his years of possible adventures abroad, and his various jobs and missions in the field, and from agreements he had brokered with insurrectionists, or so I thought, having constructed this past for him the moment I met him at Wheeler's house. 'Tell me the probable numbers then,' he said, thus dealing with both the interrogatee's reservations and Mulryan's bad temper. He also asked about the logistical support guaranteed 'from abroad', which I translated as 'desde el extranjero', adding 'exterior, de fuera, just so that there would be no misunderstandings. He doubtless understood, as I did, that this was a euphemism referring to one specific source of support, the United States. He replied that this depended in large measure on the result and popularity of the first phase of operations, that 'people from outside' always waited until the last moment before taking part in any enterprise and committing themselves fully, 'lock, stock and barrel', that was the expression he used, perhaps here in both the literal and figurative sense. However, seeing Mulryan's visible and growing irritation, he added that 'el Ambásador – that's what he called him, in English but with a strong Spanish accent, thus clearing up any possible doubt as to who he meant – had promised them immediate official recognition if there were little opposition or if this remained, from the start, 'emburbujada' – 'enbubbled' – I had never heard this ridiculous word in Spanish before, but I had no problem understanding it. The term struck me as distinctly unmartial, more suited to some foolish, smooth-talking politician or some equally foolish top executive, the modern equivalents of snake-oil salesmen.
'And do you think that's likely, that there will be no resistance or that it will be reduced to a few isolated pockets?' Mulryan asked (that is how I had translated the absurd word, faithfulness here would have been not only difficult but embarrassing). And he added: 'That hardly seems feasible with such a stubborn, argumentative leader, one who was idolised in his day, I mean, I imagine he still has a lot of loyal supporters. And if there's strong resistance, the people from outside won't lift a finger or recognise anyone until they see that the situation has gone one way or the other, and that could take time. They'll await events, but I imagine they've told you as much already.'
'Well, yes, that's possible, and that is, perhaps, how we should understand their advice. But if we don't touch the leader, don't harm him physically I mean, I doubt that many units would risk their lives defending his office, nor would many Venezuelan citizens. The current widespread discontent would work in our favour, and, as long as we promise early elections, the full support of the traditional political class is guaranteed.'
'You mean probable, don't you?' asked Tupra.
'Yes, highly probable,' said the soldier, correcting himself, embarrassed and without even a hint of a smile, he seemed very self-conscious, tense and fragile, as if he felt he was at fault or had conflicting loyalties.
It did not escape my notice that, during the interrogation, neither Mulryan nor Tupra addressed him by name, they did not call this ill-disguised civilian anything, not once did they say 'Mr So-and-So', nor, of course, 'General' or 'Colonel' or 'Commander', or whatever the man's rank was. I assumed they preferred me not to know whom they were talking to, since I knew everything they were talking about.
'Now let's get one important, indeed, vital thing straight,' Tupra went on. 'You would definitely not attack the leader himself, is that correct? According to what you've said, you're only after his post. But you would never, under any circumstance, compromise his physical integrity. Have I understood you correctly?'
The Venezuelan gentleman instinctively loosened his tie, or, rather, eased his anxieties by making that gesture; he fidgeted in his chair; he stretched his legs a little as if he had suddenly realised that the crease in his trousers was not quite straight, in fact, he did discreetly straighten his two trouser legs, first one, then the other, his feet off the ground, and I noticed that he was wearing short boots, made of some very dark green leather, like crocodile skin, though whether they were imitation or not, I don't know, I can't tell the difference. It seemed to me that he was thinking and playing for time, that he wasn't quite sure what the best answer would be. It seemed to me that Tupra was more skilful than Mulryan, which is why he didn't ask many questions, so as not to reveal his hand or to wear himself out, so as to remain fresh, supervising things from a distance.
'That would be too much like tempting Fate, if you know what I mean. It would be dangerous, it could prove counterproductive, lighting a flame that should never be lit, not even one the size of a match-flame. He mustn't be harmed in any way, we're all quite clear about that, we'll treat him with kid gloves, don't worry, he can't be touched. Otherwise, the support we're counting on would collapse. Not entirely, of course, but partially.'
I remember that Tupra affected a pitying smile and paused, and that Mulryan didn't dare start asking questions again until he was sure that his superior had once again withdrawn momentarily from the interrogation. And he was right to hold back, because Tupra had not yet moved aside.
'You don't seem very determined,' he said. 'And in ventures like this, a lack of resolve means that failure is not only probable but guaranteed. As does a lack of hatred, you should know that, sir, either from your studies or from personal experience. In my experience, at least, you always need to be prepared to go further than is necessary, even if you don't go that far in the end, or decide to rein yourself in when the moment comes, or if it simply proves unnecessary. That, however, must be the prevailing spirit, not its opposite. You would agree, would you not, that one cannot impose a limit beforehand, setting the bar below what might prove necessary? If your resolve and your mood are as you say they are, then in my view you should hold back. And I would, for the moment, advise against any support or financial help.'
This somewhat unconvincing soldier shook his head vehemently while he listened to my Spanish version of Tupra's words, perhaps like someone who cannot believe what he is hearing or despairs over some extremely expensive misunderstanding, but perhaps, also, like someone who realises too late that he has given the wrong answer and, by doing so, has brought about an irremediable disaster, because, depending on the nature of the blunder, any retraction or rectification or clarification will always sound insincere and self-interested – like backing down. That phoney civilian or phoney soldier could well have been thinking: 'Oh, bollocks, what they wanted to hear was that we wouldn't blink an eye if we had to kill him and not, as I thought, that we would save the bastard's skin however difficult he made things for us.' Yes, he could have been thinking that, or something else which I had neither time nor imagination to elaborate in my mind, because as soon as my Spanish stopped, he was quick to protest.
'No, senores, you've misunderstood me,' he said anxiously and with rather more feeling than he had shown up till then. Or perhaps he didn't, but that's how I remember it, the precise way different Latin Americans speak gets very confused in one's memory and in the retelling too. 'Of course we'd be prepared to get rid of him, if we had no alternative. We certainly don't lack resolve and, as for hatred, well, you can summon up hatred in no time at all, from one moment to the next, all you need is a spark, a few well-chosen phrases and the fire spreads, but it's best not to start out with the flames too high, the fire might burn itself out, better a cool head than hand-to-hand combat, don't you agree? All I meant was that we believe that harming the leader might not be necessary, that it would be most unlikely and preferable for all concerned if we didn't. But, believe me, if he made any difficulties, and we had to kill him in order to keep things on an even keel, then we certainly wouldn't shrink from that. I mean, it's just a matter of a single shot, isn't it, and that's that, it's quick and it's easy, we have a number of men who are used to that kind of thing. And if his supporters complain, too bad, the liberator's gone. They can say what they like, but there's nothing they can do about it, the tyrant's dead, kaput.'
'It's quick and it's easy,' I thought. 'Don't I know it, there have always been a number of men used to that kind of thing. In the temple, in the ear, in the back of the neck, a gush of blood, but you can always clean that up later.' I translated his words with as much feeling as I could muster, Tupra and Mulryan weren't looking at me while I was doing this, but at him, at the Venezuelan, this was something I was always very struck by, because, normally, people instinctively look at the person emitting the sounds, the person speaking, even though he's only translating, even if he's only the person reproducing and repeating and not the person speaking, but they, on the other hand, invariably fixed their attention on the person originally responsible for uttering the words, even though the latter had to remain silent while his words were transmitted. This, I noticed, tended to make interrogatees nervous, for they always looked at me despite only understanding me by deduction (a fairly easy deduction on their part).
The civilian or fake soldier was no exception when it came to nervousness (though this was, admittedly, only my first experience), but possibly what upset him most, more than the four eyes trained on him while I emulated his words, was Tupra's immediate response:
'You must realise that if you shoot him, you'll have to shoot quite a lot of your fellow countrymen too, whether you hate them or not, in the heat of the moment and in cold blood, in combat and, who knows, in executions, which are also quick but not so easy. And nobody's going to like that, least of all the people outside, including us. With such a high risk of carnage, and with no guarantee that it will have the desired result, my opinion is that you really shouldn't try it. And I'm afraid that, for now, I'll have to advise against any support or financial aid.'
The Venezuelan crumpled his agile eyebrows into a frown, took a long, deep breath so that his chest puffed out even more, like that of a frog or a toad, he made as if to undo his tie (not just loosen it this time), hid his green boots under the armchair like someone moving them smartly out of the reach of some biting creature, or, more symbolically, like someone beating an instinctive retreat, overcome by confusion. I thought he might be thinking: 'What are these sons-of-British-bitches playing at? They don't want this, they don't want that, what do they want me to say, the stupid bastards?'
'What is it you want?' he said after a few seconds, like someone who has grown tired of guessing and gives up, it didn't even sound like a question.
It was Tupra again who replied:
'Just tell us the truth, that's all, without trying to read our minds and without trying to please us.'
The soldier's response was instantaneous, and I translated it as precisely as I could, although it wasn't easy:
'Oh, the truth. The truth is what happens, the truth is when it happens, how can you expect me to tell you that now? Until it happens, nobody knows.'
Tupra seemed somewhat surprised and amused by this reply, half-philosophical, half-crass, or perhaps he was just confused by it. He did not waver in his demand though. Instead, he smiled, and made sure he had the final word:
'And often not even afterwards either. And sometimes it doesn't happen at all. It just doesn't. Nevertheless, that is what we want, you see: we're asking you for the impossible, according to you. And if, at the moment, you're not in a position to satisfy that demand, if you want to consult with your colleagues to see if that impossibility could become a possibility,' he paused, 'feel free. I understand that you will be staying a few more days in London. We will phone you before you leave, to see if you have achieved it – the great deed, the impossible. We have your number. Mulryan, would you be so kind as to show the gentleman out.' Then he turned to me, and without changing his tone and with barely a pause, said: 'Mr Deza, would you mind staying behind for a moment, please?'
The fake or real soldier got up, smoothed tie, jacket and trousers, made the unnecessary gesture of tucking in his shirt, picked up from the floor a briefcase he had placed next to his armchair and which he had not had the chance either to take up or open. He shook Tupra's hand and mine in a distracted, preoccupied, absent way (a soft, rather limp hand, perhaps because he was preoccupied). He said:
'I don't believe I have your number.'
'No, I don't believe you have,' was Tupra's response. 'Goodbye.'
'Sir?' murmured Mulryan before disappearing, while, with both hands, he drew shut the two leaves of the door of that very unbureaucratic office, it was more reminiscent of the rooms of the various Oxford dons I had known, Wheeler's, Cromer-Blake's, Clare Bayes's, full of shelves overflowing with books, with a globe that looked like a genuine antique, the whole room was dominated by wood and paper, I saw no base materials, not even metal, I saw no filing cabinets, no computer. Mulryan murmured the word as if he were asking, in the manner of a major-domo, 'Anything else, sir?', but he looked more as if he was standing to attention (there was, however, no click of the heels). He was clearly devoted to his superior.
And it was then, when we were alone, with Tupra seated behind his ample desk and me sitting opposite him, that, for the first time, he required of me something similar to what subsequently became my main task during the period that I remained in his employ, and which was related, too, in a way, to what Wheeler had half-explained to me on that Sunday in Oxford, in the morning and during lunch. Tupra ran a hand over his cheeks the colour of barley, always so close-shaven and smelling always of after-shave as if the lotion impregnated his skin or as if he were constantly, secretly, applying more, he smiled again, took out a cigarette which he placed loosely between his threatening lips (as if they were always pursed, ready to inhale), but he didn't light it for the moment, and so I didn't dare light mine either.
'Tell me what you thought of him.' And with a lift of his head, he gestured towards the double doors. 'What did you learn about him?' And when I hesitated (I wasn't sure what he meant, he hadn't asked me anything about the Chileans or the Mexicans), he added: 'Say anything, whatever comes into your head, go on.' He usually withstood silence very well, except when it went against his own wishes or decisions; then his permanent state of vehemence and tension seemed to demand that he keep time filled up with things palpable, recognisable or countable. It was a different matter if the silence came from him.
'Well,' I said, 'I don't know quite what this Venezuelan gentleman wants from you. Support and financial help, I assume. I suppose he's preparing for, or considering the possibility of a coup against President Hugo Chavez, that much I gleaned. He was in plain clothes, but judging by his appearance and by what he said, he could be a military man. Or, rather, I assume he's presented himself to you as such.'
'What else? Anyone in your place and in your role could have deduced that, Mr Deza.'
'What do you mean "what else", Mr Tupra?'
'What makes you think he was a military man? Have you ever seen a Venezuelan military man?'
'No. Well, only on television, like everyone else. Chavez is a military man, he calls himself Comandante, or Major, doesn't he, or Sub-Lieutenant, or perhaps Parachutist-in-Chief, I don't know. But naturally I can't be sure that this gentleman was a military man. I'm just saying that he probably presented himself to you as that. Or so I imagine.'
'We'll come back to that later. What do you think of the plot, the threat of a coup against a government elected by a popular vote, more than that, by popular acclaim?'
'I think it's terrible, the worst possible thing that could happen. Remember that my country suffered for forty years because of just such a coup. Three years of romantic war perhaps (romantic at least to English eyes), followed by thirty-seven years of destruction and oppression. But leaving theory aside, that is, leaving aside principles, I wouldn't really care in this particular case. Chavez led an attempted coup once, if I remember rightly. He conspired with his troops and rose up against an elected civilian government. True, it may have been a corrupt and thieving government, but then what government isn't nowadays, they handle far too much money and are more like businesses than governments, and businessmen want their profits. So he couldn't really complain if he was ousted. The Venezuelan people are another matter. They might. Except that there seem to have been quite a few complaints already about this leader whom they elected by popular acclaim. Being elected doesn't immunise a leader against becoming a dictator.'
'You seem very well informed.'
'I read the newspapers, I watch television. That's all.'
'Tell me more. Tell me if the Venezuelan gentleman was telling the truth.'
'About what?'
'Generally. For example, as to whether, if it came to it, they would touch the Comandante or not.'
'He said two different things about that.'
Tupra looked slightly irritated, but only slightly. He gave me the impression that he was enjoying himself, that he liked this conversation and my quickness, once I had got over my initial hesitancy and once stimulated by his questioning, Tupra was a great one for asking questions, he never forgot what people had said in reply and so was able to return to that reply when the interrogatee least expected it and had forgotten about it, we forget what we say much more than what we hear, what we write much more than what we read, what we send much more than what we receive, that is why we barely count the insults we hand out to others, unlike those dealt out to us, which is why almost everyone harbours some grudge against someone.
'I know that, Mr Deza. I'm asking you if either of those two things is true. In your opinion. Please.'
That 'please' worried me. Later on, I learned that he always resorted to such formulae, 'if you would be so kind', 'if you wouldn't mind' when he was about to get really annoyed. On that occasion, I merely sensed this and so hastened to respond, without giving much thought to what I said and having given it no previous thought at all.
'In my opinion, one was not true at all. The other was, but the context in which it was given wasn't.'
'Explain that, will you?' He had still not lit the dangling cigarette, which, despite having a filter, would surely be getting soggy, I was familiar with the extravagant brand, Rameses II, Egyptian cigarettes made from slightly spicy-tasting Turkish tobacco, the lavish red packet on the desk looked like a drawing from Tintin, they would be very expensive nowadays, he must have bought them from Davidoff or Marcovitch or in Smith & Sons (if the last two still exist), I didn't recall him smoking them at Wheeler's house, perhaps he only smoked them in private. I didn't apply a match to my more commonplace cigarette either, although mine was still dry, my lips are not moist.
I merely improvised, that's all. I had nothing to lose. Nor to gain either, I had been summoned to act as translator and had performed that role. Remaining there was a courtesy on my part, although Tupra did not make me feel this to be the case, rather, perhaps, the opposite, for he was one of those rare individuals who can ask for a loan and manage to make the person giving the loan feel that he is the debtor.
'It didn't ring true to me at all that they were prepared to shoot the Lord High Parachutist, even if the success or failure of the operation depended on it. I did, therefore, believe him when he said that they wouldn't cause him any physical harm at all, if it turned out they couldn't get rid of him.'
'And what was the untrue context for this truth?'
'Well, as I say, I don't know why this gentleman came to see you, or what he wants to get out of you…'
'Oh, nothing from me, or from us, we have nothing to give,' broke in Tupra. 'They sent him to us merely so that we could pass judgement, that is, give our opinion on how convincing or truthful he is. That's why I'm interested to know your views, you speak the same language, or perhaps it isn't the same any more. I mean, I can't understand half the dialogue in some American films, they'll have to start adding subtitles soon when they show them over here, maybe it's the same with Latin American Spanish. There are subtleties of vocabulary, expressions I can't recognise or appreciate in translation. Other sorts of subtlety I can, precisely because I can't understand what someone is saying, and that sometimes proves very useful. Words distract sometimes, you see, and hearing only the melody, the music, is often fundamental. Now tell me what you think.'
Armed with boldness and indifference, I decided to improvise some more. I could hold out no longer, though, and finally lit a cigarette, not mine, however, but an expensive Rameses II, to which I asked his permission to help myself (he agreed of course, and didn't seem at all put out, although each cigarette must have cost around fifty pence).
'My impression is that there are no serious plans for a coup d'état. Or if there are, then this man will play no part in it or will have very little say in the matter. I assume you've checked his identity. If he's a soldier in exile or no longer in the army, or retired, an opponent with contacts in the country, but who acts from outside, then it's likely that his task is to raise funds based on nothing or based only on the vaguest of plans and on very tenuous information. And his own pockets may be the final destination for whatever money he does collect, after all, people tend not to ask questions or provide answers about money spent on abortive clandestine operations. If, on the other hand, he still is a soldier and has some authority, and is living in the country, and presents himself to us as someone regretfully betraying his leader for the good of the nation, then it's not impossible that the Comandante himself has sent him, to put out some feelers, to get in early, to make some enquiries, to be forewarned, and, if the opportunity arises, to raise funds from abroad that will doubtless end up in Chavez's own pockets, quite a clever move really. I also think that he might be neither one nor the other, that is, that he may not be and may never have been a military man. Anyway, I don't think he's behind anything serious, anything that would actually happen. As he himself said, the truth is what happens, which is a rough-and-ready way of saying just that. I would guess that this plan of his is never going to come to anything, with or without support, with or without financial help, internal, external or interplanetary.' I had got carried away by my own boldness, I stopped. I wondered if Tupra would say something now, even if only about the title under which the Venezuelan had presented himself to him (I had deliberately said 'presents himself to us', seeing that I was now included). 'If he doesn't,' I thought, 'he's obviously one of those people who is impossible to draw out, and who only says what he really means or what he knows he can safely reveal.' 'All this is pure speculation, of course,' I added. 'Impressions, intuitions. You did ask me for my impressions.'
Now he too lit his cigarette, his precious, saliva-sodden Rameses II. He probably couldn't stand to see me enjoying mine, or, rather, his, fifty pence going up in smoke in someone else's mouth, in, what's more, a continental mouth. He coughed a little after the first puff of that piquant Egyptian blend, perhaps he only smoked two or three a day and never quite got used to it.
'Yes, I realise you can't know anything for sure,' he said. 'Don't worry. I don't either, or not much more. But, tell me, why do you think that?'
I continued to improvise, or so I thought.
'Well, the man definitely looks the part of the Latin American military man, I'm afraid they're not much different from their Spanish counterparts twenty or twenty-five years ago, they all have moustaches and they never smile. His appearance just cried out for a uniform, a cap, and a superabundance of medals festooning his chest, as if they were cartridge belts. Yet there were some details that just didn't fit. They made me think that he wasn't a military man disguised as a civilian, as I at first thought, but a civilian disguised as a military man disguised as a civilian, if you see what I mean. They're really insignificant details,' I said apologetically. 'And it's not as if I've had many dealings with the military, I'm hardly an expert.' I broke off, my momentary boldness was fading.
'That doesn't matter. And I do see what you mean. Tell me, what details?'
'Well, they're really tiny things. He used, how can I put it, inappropriate language. Either soldiers nowadays aren't what they were and have been infected by the ridiculous pedantry of politicians and television presenters, or the man simply isn't a military man; or he was, but hasn't seen active service for a long time. And that gesture of tucking in his shirt was too spontaneous, like someone used to civilian clothes. I know it's silly, and soldiers do sometimes wear suit and tie, or a shirt if it's hot, and it is hot in Venezuela. I just felt that he wasn't a soldier, or else had been out of the army and hadn't worn an army jacket for some time, or had been removed from his post, I don't know. Or hadn't worn even a guayabera or a liki-liki or whatever they call them over there, they're always worn outside the trousers. And I felt, too, he was overly preoccupied with the crease in his trousers, and with creases in general, but then you get vain, dapper officers everywhere.'
'You can say that again,' said Tupra. 'Liki-liki,' he said, but didn't ask any more. 'Go on.'
'Well, perhaps you noticed his boots. Short boots. They may have looked black from a distance or in a bad light, but they were bottle-green in colour and looked like crocodile, or possibly alligator. I can't imagine any high-ranking officer wearing footwear like that, not even on his days of absolute leisure or total abandon. They seemed more suited to a drug-dealer or a ranch-hand on the loose in the big city or something.' I felt like a minor Sherlock or, rather, a fake Holmes. I leaned back my chair a little in the sudden hope of catching sight of Tupra's feet. I hadn't noticed what he was wearing, and it had suddenly occurred to me that he might be wearing similar boots and that I might be making a grave mistake. He was an Englishman: it was unlikely, but one never knows and he did have a strange surname. And he always wore a waistcoat, a bad sign that. As it turned out, I was unlucky, I couldn't get far enough back, the desk prevented me from seeing his feet. I went on – although if he was himself sporting some rather eccentric footwear, I was only making matters worse: 'Of course, in a country where the Commander-in-Chief appears in public dressed to look like the national flag and wearing a beret that's a shade of brothel red, as he did recently on television, it's not impossible that his generals and colonels do wear boots like that, or sabots or even ballet shoes, in these histrionic times and with a role model like him, anything's possible.'
'Sabots?' asked Tupra, perhaps more out of amusement than because he hadn't understood me. 'Sabots?' he said, since that was the term I had used: thanks to the translation classes I taught in Oxford and to my time spent toiling for various slave-drivers, I know the most absurd words in English.
'Yes, you know, those wooden shoes with pointed tips like onions. Nurses wear them and the Flemish, of course, at least they do in their paintings. I think geishas do as well, don't they, with socks?'
Tupra gave a short laugh, and so did I. Perhaps he had had a sudden image of the Venezuelan gentleman wearing clogs. Or perhaps Chavez himself, in thick-soled clogs and white socks. On a first meeting and at a party, Tupra struck one as a nice man. He did on a second meeting too and in his office, although there he let it be understood that he could never entirely forget the serious nature of his work, nor be entirely contained by it either.
'Did you say he dresses to look like the national flag? You presumably meant draped in the flag, did you?' he added.
'No,' I said. 'The print on his shirt or army jacket, I can't remember quite what he was wearing, was the flag itself, complete with stars.'
'Stars? I can't remember the Venezuelan flag at the moment. Stars?' To my relief, he did not appear to have taken my comments about the shoes personally.
'It's striped, I think. A red stripe and a yellow one, I seem to recall, and possibly a blue one too. And there's a sprinkling of stars on it somewhere. The President was definitely adorned with stars, of that I'm sure, and broad stripes, an army jacket or a shirt with horizontal stripes in those colours or similar. And stars. It was probably a liki-liki, which is a shirt they wear for special occasions, I think, well, they do in Colombia, I'm not sure about Venezuela.'
'Stars indeed,' he said. He gave another short laugh, and I did too. Laughter creates a kind of disinterested bond between men, and between women, and the bond it establishes between women and men can prove an even stronger, tighter link, a profounder, more complex, more dangerous and more lasting link, or one, at least, with more hope of enduring. Such lasting, disinterested bonds can become strained after a while, they can sometimes become ugly and difficult to bear, in the long term, someone has to be the debtor, that's the only way things can work, one person must always be slightly more indebted to the other, and commitment and abnegation and worthiness can provide a sure way of making off with the position of creditor. I've often laughed with Luisa like that, briefly and unexpectedly, both of us seeing the funny side of something quite independently, both us laughing briefly at the same time. With other women too, with my sister first of all; and with a few others. The quality of that laughter, its spontaneity (its simultaneity with mine perhaps) has led me, on occasions, to meet a woman and approach her or even to dismiss her at once, and with some women it's as if I've seen them in their entirety before even meeting them, without even talking, without them having looked at me and with me barely having looked at them. On the other hand, even a slight delay or the faintest suspicion of mimetism, of an indulgent response to my stimulus or my lead, the merest suggestion of a polite or sycophantic laugh – a laugh that is not entirely disinterested, but is egged on by the will, the laugh that does not laugh as much as it would like to or as much as it allows itself or yearns or even condescends to laugh – is enough for me promptly to remove myself from its presence or to relegate it immediately to second place, to that of mere accompaniment, or even, in times of weakness and a consequent slide in standards, to that of cortege. But the other kind of laughter – Luisa's, which almost anticipates our own laughter, my sister's, which wraps around us, young Pérez Nuix's, which fuses with our own and about which there is no hint of deliberation and in which we two are almost forgotten (although there is also detachment and arbitrariness and equality) – I have tended to give that a prime role which has subsequently turned out to be lasting or not, even dangerous at times, and, in the long run (when it has lasted that long), difficult to sustain without the appearance or intervention of some small debt, whether real or symbolic. However, the absence or diminution of that laughter is even harder to bear, and always brings with it the day when one of the two is obliged to get a little deeper into debt. Luisa had withdrawn her laughter from me some time ago, or else was rationing it out, I couldn't believe she had lost it entirely, she would still, surely, offer it to others, but when someone withdraws their laughter from us, that is a sign that there is nothing more to be done. It is a disarming laugh. It disarms women and, in a different way, men too. I have desired women – intensely – for their laughter alone, and they have usually seen that this was so. And sometimes I have known who someone was simply by hearing their laugh or by never hearing it, the brief, unexpected laugh, and even what would happen between that person and me, whether friendship or conflict or irritation or nothing, and I haven't been far wrong either, it might have taken some time to happen, but it always has, and, besides, there's always time as long as you don't die or as long as neither that other person nor I should die. That was Tupra's laugh and mine too, and so I had to ask myself for a moment whether, in the future, he or I would be disarmed, or if, perhaps, both of us would. 'Liki-liki,' he said again. It's impossible not to repeat such a word, irresistible. 'Yes, but it's true, is it not, that one cannot judge the customs of another place from outside?' he added drily or only half-seriously.
'True, true,' I replied, knowing that what he had said was not (true, I mean) for either of us.
'Anything else?' he asked. He had given nothing away, not about the man's identity (I wasn't expecting him to), but not even about the supposed status or position of the Venezuelan to whom I had served as interpreter twice over. I had another go:
'Could you give the gentleman a name? Just in case we have to refer to him again.'
Tupra did not hesitate. As if he had an answer already prepared for any attempt at probing, rather than for my curiosity.
'That seems unlikely. As far as you're concerned, Mr Deza, his name is Bonanza,' he said, again mock-seriously.
'Bonanza?' He must have noticed my amazement, I couldn't help pronouncing the 'z' as it is pronounced in my own country, or at least in part of it and, of course, in Madrid. To his English ears it would sound something like 'Bonantha', just as Deza would sound something like 'Daytha'.
'Yes, isn't that a Spanish name? Like Ponderosa?' he said. 'Anyway, he'll be Bonanza to you and me. Did you notice anything else?'
'Only to confirm my initial impression, Mr Tupra: General Bonanza or Mr Bonanza, whoever he really is, would never make an attempt on Chavez's life. Of that you can be sure, whether it suits your interests or not. He admires him too much, even if he is his enemy, which I don't think he is.'
Tupra picked up the striking red packet with its pharaohs and gods and offered me a second Rameses II, an uncommon gesture in the British Isles, clearly no expense was being spared, Turkish tobacco, a piquant Egyptian blend, and I accepted. But it turned out to be one for the road, not to be smoked immediately, for at the same time as he was giving it to me, he stood up and walked around the desk to show me out, indicating the door with a slight gesture. I took the opportunity to glance down at his shoes, they were sober brown lace-ups, I needn't have worried. He noticed, he noticed almost everything, all the time.
'Is something wrong with my shoes?' he asked.
'No, no, they're very nice. And very clean too. Splendid, enviable,' I said. Unlike my black pair, also lace-ups. The truth was that, in London, I just didn't have the discipline to clean them every day. There are some things one gets lazy about when away from home and living abroad. Except that I was at home, that is, as I kept forgetting, I had no other home for the moment, sometimes force of habit insisted on my feeling the impossible, that I could still go back.
'I'll tell you where to buy them another day.' He was about to open the door for me, he had still not done so, he remained for a matter of seconds with a hand on each of the handles of the double door. He turned his head, looked at me out of the corner of his eye but did not see me, he couldn't, I was immediately behind him. It was the first time during the whole of that session that his active, friendly, unwittingly mocking eyes had not met mine. I could see only his long lashes, in profile. They would be even more the envy of the ladies in profile. 'Earlier on, if I remember rightly, you said something about "leaving aside principles". Or perhaps "leaving theory aside".'
'Yes, I think I did say something like that.'
'I was wondering.' He still had his hands on the door handles. 'Allow me to ask you a question: up to what point would you be capable of leaving aside your principles? I mean up to what point do you usually do so? That is, disregard it, theory I mean? It's something we all do now and then; we couldn't live otherwise, whether out of convenience, fear or need. Or out of a sense of sacrifice or generosity. Out of love, out of hate. To what extent do you?' he repeated. 'Do you understand?'
That was when I realised that not only did he notice everything all the time, he recorded and stored it away too. I didn't like the word 'sacrifice', it had a similar effect on me to the expression he had used in Wheeler's house, 'serving my country'. He had even added: 'one should if one can, don't you think?' Although he had immediately diluted this with: 'even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself. I too recorded and stored things away, more than is normal.
'It depends on the reason,' I replied, and then went on to use a plural since it was, as I understood it, only my principles he was asking me about. 'I can leave them aside almost entirely if it's just in the interests of conversation, less if I'm called on to make a judgement. Still less if I'm judging friends, because then I'm partial. When it comes to taking action, hardly at all.'
'Mr Deza, thank you for your co-operation. I hope to be in touch with you again.' He said this in an appreciative, almost affectionate tone. And this time he did open the door, both leaves at once. I saw his eyes again, more blue than grey in the morning light, but still pale, and always seemingly amused by whatever the dialogue or situation happened to be, attentive and always absorbing, as if they honoured what they were looking at, or at which they did not even need to be looking: whatever entered his field of vision. 'Please be quite clear, however, that here we have no interests,' he went on to say, even though he was referring to something from further back in the conversation. Most people would not have returned to it, they would not have retrieved that extremely marginal comment of mine ('whether it suits your interests or not'), it's incredible how quickly words, pronounced and written, frivolous and serious, all of them, insignificant or significant, get lost, become distant and are left behind. That's why it's necessary to repeat, eternally and absurdly to repeat, from the first human babble of sound and even from the first index finger silently pointing. Again and again and again and, vainly, again. Words did not slip quite so easily from our grasp, his and mine, but this was doubtless an anomaly, a curse. 'We merely give our opinion and only when asked, of course. As you so kindly did now, when I asked you.' And he again gave that brief laugh, revealing small, bright teeth. It sounded to me like a polite or possibly impatient laugh, and this time, mine did not accompany his.
I was never told directly whether or not I had been right in any way about Colonel Bonanza from Caracas or, should I say, from exile and abroad, I was never told the results, and certainly not directly: they were not my concern, or, possibly, anyone else's. Probably sometimes there were no results, and the statements or reports would simply be filed away, just in case. And if decisions had to be taken about something (the support and financial backing for a coup, for example), they would doubtless be taken by the various people in charge – by those who had commissioned each report or requested our opinions – with no possibility of verification or certainty and purely at their own risk, that is, trusting or not trusting, accepting or rejecting what Tupra and his people had seen and thought, or perhaps recommended.
At first, though, I innocently assumed that I must have got something right, because not many days after that morning of dual interpretation, of language and intentions – the latter imprecise, but let's call it interpretation anyway – it was suggested that I abandon my post with BBC Radio and work exclusively (or principally) for Tupra, alongside the devoted Mulryan, young Pérez Nuix and the others, with, in theory, very flexible working hours and a considerably larger salary, I had no complaints on that score, on the contrary, I would be able to send more money home. The feeling of having successfully passed an exam was unavoidable, as was my joining whatever that organisation was, I didn't ask myself much about it then or later or now, because it was always very vague (and lack of definition was its essence), and because Sir Peter Wheeler had warned me about it in a way, or given me enough of a warning: 'You won't find anything about this in any books, none of them, not even the oldest or the most modern, not even the most exhaustive accounts being published now, Knightley, Cecil, Dorril, Davies, or Stafford, Miller, Bennett, I don't know, there are so many of them, but you won't find so much as a cryptic reference in the books that were, in their day, and which continue to be, the most cryptic of all, Rowan, Denham. Don't even bother consulting them. You won't find so much as an allusion. It'll be a waste of your time and your patience.' Throughout that Sunday in Oxford, he always spoke to me not exactly in half-truths, but in three-quarter-truths at most, never in whole truths. Perhaps he didn't know what they were, the whole truths, that is, perhaps no one did, not even Tupra, or Rylands when he was alive. Perhaps there were no truths.
The work got off to a gradual start, by which I mean that once the contract had been agreed, they began giving me or asking me to undertake various tasks, which then increased in number, at a brisk but steady rate, and, after only a month, possibly less, I was a full-time employee, or so it seemed to me. These tasks took various forms, although their essence varied little or not at all, since this consisted in listening and noticing and interpreting and reporting back, in deciphering behaviours, attitudes, characters and scruples, indifferences and beliefs, egotisms, ambitions, loyalties, weaknesses, strengths, truths and contradictions; indecisiveness. What I interpreted were – in just three words – stories, people, lives. Often stories that had not yet happened. People who did not know themselves and who could not have said about themselves even a tenth of what I saw in them, or was urged to see in them and to put into words, that was my job. Lives that could even come to an early end and not even last long enough to be called lives, unknown lives and lives still to be lived. Sometimes they asked me to be present and to help in asking questions, if any occurred to me, at interviews or meetings (or perhaps polite interrogations, with nothing intimidating about them), even though there was no problem of comprehension, no language to translate, and everything was in English and amongst fellow Britons. At other times, they did use me as an interpreter of language, Spanish and even Italian, but over the whole range of talks and supervisions (which is what my silent activities were called), that was what I did least of, and anyway now I never merely translated words, at the end, I was always asked for my opinion, almost, sometimes, for my prognosis, or, how can I put it, my wager. On other occasions, they preferred me to be an absent presence, and I would witness the conversations held by Tupra or Mulryan or young Nuix or Rendel with their visitors from a kind of booth next to Tupra's office, from which one could see and hear what was going on without being seen, just like in a police station. The elongated oval mirror in Tupra's office corresponded in the booth to a window of identical size and shape: clear glass from one side, from the other a mirrored surface that did not arouse the slightest suspicion amongst all those books and in what looked more like a club or a private drawing-room than an office. The booth was an older, home-made version of the invisible hiding-places from which the victims of a mugging or the witnesses of a crime view a line-up of suspects, or from which the superior officers secretly oversee the interrogations of detainees and make sure that the police don't overdo the slaps or the flicks with a wet towel. It must have been a pioneering booth, perhaps adapted or made in the 1940s or even the 1930s: it seemed to have been conceived as a small-scale imitation of a train compartment from that period or even earlier, all in wood, with two narrow benches facing each other and placed at right angles to the oval window, with a fixed table between the benches on which to take notes or lean one's elbows. One was thus obliged to supervise from a somewhat oblique angle, sideways on, with the inevitable feeling that one was looking out of a train window while travelling along, or, rather, while permanently stopped at a station, a strange station-studio, far more welcoming than any real station, where the landscape was an unvarying interior in which only the people changed, the visitors and the hosts, although the latter had only limited permutations, usually two or, at most, three, Tupra and Mulryan, or them plus me (as at the meeting with Comandante Bonanza), or Tupra and young Nuix and Rendel if they needed someone who spoke German or Russian or Dutch or Ukrainian (it was said that Rendel was originally from Austria, and that his surname had initially been Rendl or Randl or Redl or Reinl or even Handl, and that he had half-anglicised it, Randall or Rendell or Rendall or Randell would have been more usual, but not Haendel), or Mulryan and me and some other less assiduous assistant, or young Nuix, Tupra and me… He and Mulryan (or more likely one of the two) were always there. And given that I sometimes had to occupy the booth, I could only suppose that when I was on the other side, in the station-studio, one of those not present would be posted in the booth to watch us, although I wasn't entirely sure of this at first; and I could only imagine that on that first occasion with Captain Bonanza, Rendel and young Nuix ('I hope it was her,' I thought) would have been in the reserved carriage, eyes trained on the lieutenant, but almost certainly on me as well, and that afterwards they would have given their objective report on me as well as on the sergeant (he was gradually being demoted in my memory), the report of someone invisible is always more objective and dispassionate and reliable, that of someone who sits unseen and at ease, observing with impunity, is always more objective than that of someone who is looked at by his interlocutors and intervenes and speaks, and can never observe for very long in silence without creating enormous tensions, an embarrassing situation.
That is doubtless why television is such a success, because you can see and watch people as you never can in real life unless you hide, and even then, in real life, you only have one angle and one distance, or two if you're using binoculars, I sometimes put them in my pocket when I leave the house, and at home I always keep them handy. Whereas the screen gives you the opportunity to spy at your leisure and to see more and therefore know more, because you're not worrying about making eye contact or exposed in turn to being judged, nor do you have to divide your concentration or attention between a dialogue (or its simulacrum) in which you are taking part and the cold study of a face, of gestures and vocal inflections, even certain pores, of tics and hesitations, of pauses and dry mouths, of vehemence and falsehoods. And inevitably you pass judgement, you immediately utter some kind of verdict (or you don't utter it, but say it to yourself), it only takes a matter of seconds and there's nothing you can do about it, even if it's only rudimentary and takes the least elaborate of forms, which is liking or disliking (which are nevertheless judgements or their possible anticipation, what usually precedes them, although many people never take that step or cross that line, and so never go beyond a simple and inexplicable feeling of attraction or repulsion: inexplicable to them, since they never take that step and so remain forever on the surface). And you surprise yourself by saying, almost involuntarily, sitting alone before the screen: 'I really like him,' 'I can't stand the guy,' 'I could eat her up,' 'He's such a pain,' 'I'd do anything he asked,' 'She deserves a good slap around the face,' 'Bighead,' 'He's lying,' 'She's just pretending to feel pity,' 'He's going to find life really tough,' 'What a wanker,' 'She's an angel,' 'He's so conceited, so proud,' 'They're such phonies, those two,' 'Poor thing, poor thing,' 'I'd shoot him this minute, without batting an eyelid,' 'I feel so sorry for her,' 'He drives me bloody mad,' 'She's pretending,' 'How can he be so naive,' 'What a cheek,' 'She's such an intelligent woman,' 'He disgusts me,' 'He really tickles me.' The register is infinite, there's room for everything. And that instant verdict is spot-on, or so it feels when it comes (less so a second later). It carries a weight of conviction without having been subjected to a single argument. With not a single reason to sustain it.
That is why they also gave me videos. I would sometimes watch them right there, in that building with no name, just a number, with no sign or notice or any obvious function, alone or accompanied by young Nuix or by Mulryan or Rendel; and sometimes I would take them home, to look at them more closely, to unpick them and later present my report, which was, almost always, purely oral, they rarely asked me for anything in writing, at least not so much later on, because I do seem to have written quite a few.
There were all kinds of things on those videos, they contained the most heterogeneous subject-matter imaginable, often all jumbled up, almost crammed together on some tapes, while the content of others was more carefully grouped, and organised with more discernment, some were almost monographs: fragments of programmes or news bulletins that had been broadcast publicly, recorded from the television, and edited and put together later on (sometimes I had to sit through whole programmes, new and old, even programmes about people who were already dead, such as Lady Diana Spencer with her awful, mistake-ridden English and the writer Graham Greene with his impeccable English); parliamentary speeches, talks or press conferences given by prominent or obscure politicians, British or foreign, and by diplomats too; interrogations of prisoners in police cells and their subsequent testimony in the relevant court; as well as the sentences or warnings handed out by bewigged judges, yes, there were quite a lot of videos of severe judges, I don't know why; interviews with celebrities which did not always appear to have been made by journalists or intended to be shown, some had the air of informal or more or less private conversations, perhaps with hangers-on or people pretending to be fans (I remember seeing a priceless one with a buoyant Elton John, another nice one with the actor Sean Connery, the real James Bond who was kicked by Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, those deadly blades, and another equally funny one with the ex-footballer and drinker George Best; a terrible one with the businessman Rupert Murdoch and a rather pompous and comic one with Lord Archer, the ex-politician – he had, by then, been sent to prison for lying about something or other, I can't remember what – and author of a few somewhat contrived action novels); at other times, the names rang a bell, but they weren't famous enough for me to be able to identify them, perhaps they were very local luminaries (there wasn't always any indication of who was speaking, sometimes none at all, just a few letters and numbers next to each face deemed to be of interest or a valid subject for interpretation – A2, BH13, Gm9 and so on – to which I could refer subsequently in my reports); there were also interviews or scenes with anonymous people in various circumstances, often filmed, I think, without their knowledge and without, therefore, their consent: someone looking for work or offering to do something, anything, some were really desperate; a granite-faced functionary (rolling his eyes) listening to some member of the public telling him his problems, doubtless in the former's municipal or ministerial office; a couple arguing in a hotel room; a man in a bank asking for a loan at highly disadvantageous rates; four Chelsea fans in a pub, preparing to crush Liverpool by virtue of vast quantities of booze and vociferous enthusiasm; a business lunch put on by some company or other, with twenty or so guests (not the whole thing, fortunately, just highlights and a speech at the end); a university don giving an appalling seminar; the occasional lecture (not the whole thing, unfortunately, I saw a very interesting one by a lecturer at Cambridge, about literature that has never existed); the sermon (the whole thing this time) by an Anglican bishop who seemed slightly inebriated; the oral exams for students wanting to enter a particular university; a doctor giving a smug, detailed, verbose diagnosis; girls answering strange questions at casting sessions, perhaps for an advertisement or something far worse, all too monosyllabic for me to find out. Sometimes, the videos were obviously home-made or very personal, and consequently more mysterious (I couldn't help wondering how they had reached us and consequently me, unless we had private clients too): the patriarchal Christmas greeting of some absentee who clearly thought he was much missed and needed; the message of a rich man (presumably posthumous or intended to be) explaining to heirs and dispossessed alike the reasoning behind his arbitrary, capricious, disappointing and deliberately unfair will; the declaration of love by a sick man of self-confessed (or more likely alleged) timidity, who claimed he could not bear to experience 'live' the intended recipient's refusal, which he said he knew was inevitable, but which he clearly didn't think was inevitable at all, you could tell by the way he spoke. And this was just the British material, as the greater part of it was, of course. I became aware of the number of occasions and places where people are or can be recorded or filmed: to begin with, in nearly every situation in which we are submitted to a test or an exam, shall we say, and in which we are asking for something, a job, a loan, a chance, a favour, a subsidy, a reference, an alibi. And, of course, clemency. I saw that whenever we ask for something, we are exposed, defenceless, at the almost absolute mercy of the person giving or refusing. And nowadays we are recorded, immortalised, often when we are at our most humble, or, if you prefer, humiliated. But also in any public or semi-public place, the most obvious and flagrant ones being hotel rooms, we take it as read now that we will be filmed at a bank, a shop, a petrol station, a casino, a sports arena, a car park, a government building.
I was rarely told in advance what I should look out for, what character traits, what degree of sincerity, or what specific intentions I should try to decipher in each indicated person or face, when, that is, I took work home. The following day, or a few days later, I would have a session with Mulryan or Tupra or with both, and they would ask me then whatever they wanted to know, sometimes one small detail and sometimes a great deal, it all depended, referring to the people in the videos by their respective names if these appeared in the films or were so well known as to be unmistakable, or, if not, by their assigned letters and numbers: 'Do you think that, despite his words of contrition, Mr Stewart is defrauding the tax office again? He got caught out five years ago, but he came to an agreement and paid more than he owed to avoid any problems, so might he, therefore, believe that he is now free of suspicion?' 'Do you think FH6 intended to repay the loan when he applied to Barclays for it? Or did he never intend paying it back at all? He was given the loan three months ago, you see, and hasn't been seen since.' I would say what I thought or what I could, and then we would pass on to the next one, in the briefer, more practical and prosaic cases, that is. Most cases, however, were not like that at all, they were elusive and complex, often vague and even ethereal, always tricky to respond to, more like those that Wheeler had dealt with in his day and which he had forecast for my day too, or, rather, which he had suggested would come my way, even though there was no war on; that, sooner or later, they would be brought to me for my opinion. And for that majority of cases one needed in effect what he had distractedly called – as if to play down the solemnity of those two expressions, which appeared, at least initially or, indeed, not even then, to be contradictory – 'the courage to see' and 'the irresponsibility of seeing'. For a long time, I was far more conscious of the latter, until I got used to it and, when I did, stopped worrying. And then… Ah, then, it's true, came the great irresponsibility.
The process of getting used to it, however, had been started by Wheeler on that Sunday in Oxford when he also talked to me about myself. Or perhaps by Toby Rylands, who had, at some point, already spoken to Wheeler about me, and had singled me out as someone of like mind, made of the same clay from which they had been shaped. But, no, it wasn't Rylands, because it isn't what is said of us behind our backs which changes things – which transforms things inside ourselves – it is what someone with authority or armed with mere insistence tells us about ourselves to our face that reveals and explains and tempts us to believe. It is the danger that stalks every artist or politician, or anyone whose work is subject to people's opinions and interpretations. If a film director, writer or musician begins to be described as a genius, a prodigy, a reinventor, a giant, they can all too easily end up thinking that it might be true. They then become conscious of their own worth, and become afraid of disappointing or – which is even more ridiculous and nonsensical, but it can't be put in any other way – of not living up to themselves, that is, to the people it turns out they were – or so others tell them, and as they now realise they are – in their previous exalted creations. 'So it wasn't just a product of chance or intuition or even my own freedom,' they might think, 'there was coherence and purpose in everything I was doing, what an honour to discover this, but what a curse too. Because now I have no option but to abide by that and to reach the same wretched heights in order not to let myself down, how awful, what an effort, and what a disaster for my work.' And this can happen to anyone, even if neither their work nor their personality is public, they have only to hear a plausible explanation of their inclinations or behaviour, an incantatory description of their actions or an analysis of their character, an evaluation of their methods – and to know that such a thing exists, or is attributed to them – for them to lose their blessedly mutable course, unforeseeable and uncertain, and with it their freedom. We tend to think that there is some hidden order unknown to us and also a plot of which we would like to form a conscious part, and if we glimpse a single episode of that plot in which there seems to be room for us, if we sense that we are caught up in its weak wheel even for an instant, then it is hard for us ever again to be able to imagine ourselves torn from that half-glimpsed, partial, intuited plot – a mere figment of the imagination. There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one. Or if there is one, even worse: believing that the meaning of something, even of the most trivial detail, could depend on us and on our actions, on our intention or our function, believing that there is such a thing as the will or fate, and even some complicated combination of the two. Believing that we do not owe ourselves entirely to the most erratic and forgetful, rambling and crazy of chances, and that we should be expected to be consistent with what we said or did, yesterday or the day before. Believing that we might contain in ourselves coherence and deliberation, as the artist believes is true of his work or the potentate of his decisions, but only once someone has persuaded them that this is so.
Wheeler had, in the end, begun at the beginning, if anything ever really has a beginning. Anyway, that Sunday morning, when I woke up much later than I would have wanted to and, of course, much later than he was expecting me to, he allowed himself no further preambles or postponements or circumlocutions, in so far as it was possible for him entirely to renounce such long-established characteristics of thought and conversation. The incomplete words he had at his disposal to tell me what he was going to tell me were, I suppose, mystery and limitation enough. As soon as he saw me come downstairs looking sleepy and ill-shaven (just a quick once-over with the razor so as to appear presentable or not, at least, too thuggish), he urged me to take a seat opposite him and to the right of Mrs Berry, who occupied one end of the table at which they had both just had breakfast. He waited until she had very kindly poured me some coffee, but not until I had drunk it or woken up a bit. On the half of the table unoccupied by table-cloth and plates and cups and jams and fruit lay open a large, bulky volume, there were always books everywhere. I had only to glance at it (the attraction of the printed word) for Peter to say in urgent tones, doubtless because he had not counted on such a late awakening on my part:
'Pick it up, go on. I got it out to show you.'
I drew the volume to me, but before reading a single line, I half-closed it – with one finger keeping the place – to have a look at the spine and see what the book was.
' Who's Who? It was a rhetorical question, because it clearly was Who's Who, with its rich red cover, the guide to the more or less illustrious, that year's United Kingdom edition.
'Yes, Who's Who, Jacobo. I bet you've never thought of looking me up in that, have you? My name is on that page, where it's open. Read what it says, will you, go on.'
I looked, I searched, there were quite a few Wheelers, Sir Mark and Sir Mervyn, a certain Muir Wheeler and the Honourable Sir Patrick and the Very Reverend Philip Welsford Richmond Wheeler, and there he was, between the two last names: 'Wheeler, Prof. Sir Peter', which was followed by a parenthesis, which I did not, at first, understand, which said: '(Edward Lionel Wheeler)'. It only took me two seconds, though, to remember that Peter used to sign his writings 'P. E. Wheeler', and that the E was for Edward, so the parenthesis was only there to record his name in its official entirety.
'Lionel?' I asked. Another rhetorical question, although less so this time. I was surprised by that third name, which had always seemed so actorly, doubtless because of Lionel Barrymore, and because of Lionel Atwill, who played archenemy Professor Moriarty to the great Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, and because of Lionel Stander who was persecuted in America by Senator McCarthy and had to go into exile in England in order to continue working (and become a bogus Englishman). And then there was Lionel Johnson, but he was a poet friend of Wilde and Yeats, a man from whom John Gawsworth claimed descendance (John Gawsworth, the literary pseudonym of the man who was in real life Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, that secretive writer, beggar and king, with whom I had been rather obsessed during my time teaching in Oxford all those years ago: his fanciful ancestry also included Jacobite nobles, namely, the Stuarts, the dramatist Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's contemporary, and the supposed 'Dark Lady' of the Sonnets, Mary Fitton, the courtesan). 'Lionel?' I said again with just a hint of mockery, which did not escape Wheeler.
'Yes, Lionel. I never use it, though, but there's nothing wrong with that, is there? Anyway, don't get distracted by trivia, that's not what matters, that isn't what I want you to see. Read on.'
I returned to the biographical note, but I had to stop almost at once and look up again, after reading the facts about his birth, which said: 'Born 24 October 1913, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Eldest son of Hugh Bernard Rylands and of the late Rita Muriel, née Wheeler. Adopted the surname Wheeler by deed poll in 1929.'
'Rylands?' This time there was nothing rhetorical about the question, just spontaneous, sincere astonishment. 'Rylands?' I repeated. There must have been a look of distrust in my eyes, and perhaps a suggestion of reproach. 'It's not, it can't be, can it? It can't just be coincidence.'
The look that Wheeler gave me reflected a mixture of patience and impatience, or of annoyance and paternalism, as if he had known I would stop there, at his father's unexpected surname, Rylands, and as if he accepted and understood my reaction, but also as if the matter bored him, or he saw it merely as a tiresome stage that had to be gone through before he could focus on whatever it was he really wanted to get to grips with. To judge by his expression, he could easily have said: 'No, that's not what matters either, Jacobo. Read on.' And he almost did, although not immediately, he showed me some consideration; but not without first making a vague attempt to avoid my reproaches:
'Oh, come on, you're not going to tell me you didn't know.'
'Peter.' My tone was one of clear warning and overt reproach, like the one I used with my children sometimes when they insisted on ignoring me so they wouldn't have to do as they were told.
'Well, I thought you knew, I could have sworn you did. In fact, I find it very odd that you don't.'
'Please, Peter. No one knows, not in Oxford. Or if they do, they keep very quiet about it, in fact, they've been unusually discreet. Do you think that if Aidan Kavanagh or Cromer-Blake had known about it, or Dewar or Rook or Carr, or Crowther-Hunt, or even Clare Bayes, do you think they wouldn't have told me?' They were old friends or colleagues from my time in Oxford, some less prone to gossip than others. Clare Bayes had been my lover too, I hadn't seen her or heard anything about her in ages, nor about her little boy Eric, who would no longer be a little boy, not now, he would have grown up. Perhaps I wouldn't even like her any more, my distant lover, if I saw her. Perhaps she wouldn't like me. Best not to see each other, best not. 'Did you know, Mrs Berry?'
Mrs Berry started a little, but did not hesitate to say:
'Oh, yes, I knew. But bear in mind, Jack, that I've worked for both brothers. And I tend to keep things to myself.' She, like all English people who had difficulty in pronouncing the name Jacques and who did not know that the name could be converted into Spanish as Jaime or Jacobo or Diego, always called me Jack (a phonetic approximation), the diminutive of John or Juan, but not of James. When they stopped addressing me as 'Mr Deza' (as happened quite quickly), Tupra and Mulryan also called me Jack. Not Rendel though, he wasn't on such familiar terms with anyone, at least not in the building with no name and no obvious function. And young Nuix, like Luisa, inclined to Jaime, or sometimes to my surname only, plain Deza, as Luisa did too.
'Brothers,' I murmured, and on this occasion, I managed not to turn my repetition into a question. 'Brothers, eh? You know perfectly well, Peter, that I knew nothing about it. I didn't even know you were born in New Zealand until you mentioned it to me for the first time a few days ago, on the phone.' As I was speaking, memories of Rylands came rushing in on me, sometimes memories surface with such terrible speed. 'So Toby…' I said, rousing myself, '… but, he was supposed to have been born in South Africa, and I thought it must be true because once I heard him mention in passing that he didn't leave that continent, Africa, I mean, until he was sixteen. The same age that you were when you arrived here, which you also mentioned in passing for the first time during that phone conversation of a matter of days ago. You're not going to tell me now that you were twins, are you?'
Wheeler turned to look at me, but without speaking, his eyes said that he wasn't up to the labour of listening to reproaches or half-ironies, not that morning, he had other things on his mind, or on the repertoire drawn up for that performance.
'Well, if you really didn't know… I suppose you simply never asked me,' he replied. 'I've never concealed the fact. Toby might have preferred to, he may have concealed it from you, but I didn't. And I don't really know why I should have told you anyway.' He said these words in the same impassive, almost self-exculpatory tone, but I picked up on it, recognised it: it was intended to bring me up short. 'No, we weren't twins. I was nearly a year older. And now I'm considerably older still.'
I knew what Wheeler was like when something made him feel uncomfortable or when he became evasive, it was a waste of time insisting, you merely risked irritating him, he always decided the topic of conversation.
'All right, Peter. If you would be kind enough to explain, I'm all ears, curiosity and interest. I assume that's what you wanted me to see in Who's Who, and I trust you'll tell me why. Why now, I mean.'
'No, not at all,' he replied. 'I genuinely thought you knew all about that, otherwise I would never have risked us running aground here. No. There's something else I want to talk to you about, although it does indirectly have to do with Toby, in a way. Last night, if you recall, I put off telling you something until today. Read on, please, you haven't finished yet.' And with an imperative forefinger which moved up and down as if it had a life of its own (it now dropped almost vertically), he touched the large volume open before me.
'Peter, you can't just leave me dangling like that,' I ventured to protest.
'It will all become clear later on, Jacobo, don't worry, you'll find out. It's a trivial story, though; you'll be disappointed. Anyway, carry on. And read it out loud, will you. I don't want you to read the whole thing, that would be a terrible bore. So I'll tell you when to stop.'
I returned to the biographical note, to the next section, which was 'Education'. And I read out loud and in English, omitting all the incomprehensible abbreviations and acronyms:
'Cheltenham College; Queen's College, Oxford; Lecturer of St John's College, 1937-53, and Queen's College, 1938-45. Enlisted, 1940.' And I could not help but stop again, even though he had not yet told me to. I looked up. 'I didn't know you enlisted in 1940,' I said. 'And I see there's no mention anywhere of 1936. Was that perhaps when you were in Spain? A lot of the British people who went there left at the beginning or towards the middle of 1937, terrified or else wounded, they didn't last, well, George Orwell was one of them.' Then I remembered that, just in case and without success, I had also looked for the surname Rylands in the indices of names in the books I had consulted during the night, so his possible first or real name, Peter Rylands, had not been the one he had used in my country's war either. Or perhaps it had, but he had done nothing so outstanding there that he would merit a mention in the history books, and I had only allowed myself to imagine otherwise for my own amusement.
Wheeler seemed to read my thoughts, as well as my inopportune question.
'Many never left, there they still are, terrified and wounded. Wounded unto death,' he replied. 'But please, let's not talk about the Spanish Civil War now, however immersed you were in it last night. Almost no one used their real name there, nor did a lot of people in the Second World War. Not even Orwell was called George Orwell, if you remember.' I didn't remember, and seeing that I had forgotten, he added: 'His real name was Blair, Eric Blair, I knew him slightly during the war, he was in the BBC's India Section. Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in Bengal and had lived in Burma in his youth, he knew the East well. He was ten years older than me. Now I'm infinitely older. He died young, as you know, didn't even make it to fifty.' – 'Another one,' I thought, 'another foreign Britisher or bogus Englishman.' – 'Anyway, carry on reading, otherwise we'll never get to what I want to talk about.'
'Sorry, Peter.' And I read: 'Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940; Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942-46. Fellow of Queen's College, 1946-53…'
'That's enough,' he said in English, which was the language we were speaking, to do otherwise would have been a discourtesy to Mrs Berry, although I found it slightly odd that she had not left the table, as she usually did, even during more conventional conversations or ones that had no clear direction, not that I knew yet which direction this one was heading in. So this was what Wheeler wanted to show me: 'Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940 ('Cuerpo de Informatión in Spanish, not 'Cuerpo de Inteligencia' as a bad translator might render it, not that it matters, both refer to the Secret Service, MI5 and MI6, the initials mean Military Intelligence, a contradiction in terms some might say, the British equivalent of the Soviets' GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MGD, KGB, it has been called so many things over the years: MI5 for internal matters and MI6 for external ones, the first focused on the national and the second on the international); 'Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942-46'. That was what I had just read. 'The rest doesn't concern us now,' he added, 'it's all about awards and publications and jobs, blah-blah-blah.'
'Toby worked for MI5 too, or so people said when I was teaching here,' I said. 'And he did actually confirm that to me once.'
'He talked to you about it?' asked Wheeler. 'That's strange. That's very strange indeed, you must be one of the few people he did talk to. He was in MI6 actually, we both were during the war, as was nearly everyone in Oxford and Cambridge, I mean those of us with enough training and confidence and who knew languages; besides, we would have been much less use at the front, although some of us did spend time there too. Being recruited or summoned by MI6 or SOE soon ceased to be anything very special, indeed, they started appointing us to responsible positions and tasks.' He realised that I was not familiar with the last acronym he had mentioned, so he explained: 'Special Operations Executive, it only existed during the war, between 1940 and 1945. No, I lie, it was officially dismantled in 1946. Fully and completely, well, I suppose that nothing that exists is ever fully and completely dismantled. They were executioners, fairly inept ones too: MI6 was devoted to research and intelligence, well, call it espionage and premeditated deceit; the SOE to sabotage, subversion, murder, destruction and terror.'
'Murder?' I'm afraid that when confronted by this word, no one can possibly restrain themselves and keep quiet, even less when confronted by its companion 'terror'.
'Yes, of course. They bumped off Heydrich, for example, the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, in 1942, it was one of their major successes, they were so proud of it. Two Czech resisters actually hurled the grenades at his car and machine-gunned it, but the operation was masterminded by Colonel Spooner, one of the SOE's top men. With, as it happens, little foresight, poor judgement and only average implementation, you may have heard about this episode or seen it in films, I don't know how much you know about the Second World War. Heydrich wasn't in fact mortally wounded; people thought he would pull through, and one hundred hostages were shot at dusk each day of his convalescence (although it turned out to be his death agony). He took a whole week to die, imagine, and they say he only died in the end because the poison in the bullets was so slow to take effect. That was the German story anyway: they said the bullets had been impregnated with botulin brought from America by the SOE, I don't know though, maybe the Nazi doctors messed things up and invented the story to save their own necks. If the story is true, though, and Frank Spooner did poison the ammunition, he could have smeared it with something a bit deadlier and faster-acting, don't you think, curare perhaps, like the Indians use on their arrows and spears.' And Wheeler laughed a brief, mirthless laugh: for the first time his laugh reminded me of Rylands's laugh, which was short and dry and slightly diabolical and not aspirated (ha, ha, ha), but plosive, with a clear alveolar t, as the t always is in English: Ta, ta, ta, he said. Ta, ta, ta. 'Of course the same thing would have happened if it had been quick. When Heydrich did finally die, the Nazis exterminated the entire population of Lidice, the village the SOE's agents had parachuted into in order to direct the assassination in situ. Not a soul was left alive, but that wasn't enough for the Nazis, they reduced the place to rubble, they levelled it, erased it from the map, it was so odd that strong spatial sense of theirs, unhealthy, the malice they felt towards places, as if they believed in the genius loci, a kind of spatial hatred.' – 'Franco was the same,' I thought, 'and above all he hated my city, Madrid, because it had rejected him and refused to surrender to him until the bitter end.' – 'They were a pretty inept bunch, the men from the SOE, they often acted without establishing first whether the action was worth the consequences. Some soldiers hated them, despised them even. A few months ago I read in a book by Knightley that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, dubbed them amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious. Others said still worse things. In fact, their most beneficial effect was psychological, which was not without importance: knowing of their existence and their exploits (which were more legend than truth) raised the morale of the occupied countries, where they credited them with powers they lacked, and with far more intelligence, infallibility and cunning than they ever had. They made a lot of mistakes. But, as we know, people believe what they need to believe, and everything has its moment to be believed. Where were we? Why were we talking about that?'
'You were telling me about the people in Oxford and Cambridge who entered MI6 and the SOE.' Someone simply has to mention or explain a name for one to start using it almost with familiarity. Wheeler had used the same words Tupra had used, 'everything has its moment to be believed', I wondered if it was a motto, known to both. While Wheeler was talking I had been glancing over the rest of his biographical note which no longer concerned us: a man laden with distinctions and honours, Spanish, Portuguese, British, American, Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, of the Order of the Infante Don Henrique. Amongst his writings, I noticed this title from 1955: The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II. – 'He's spent his entire life studying his country's interference abroad,' I thought, 'from the fourteenth century, from the Black Prince on, perhaps he got interested after his time in MI6.' – 'You said Toby belonged to the former.'
'Ah, yes, that's right. Well, you know our privileged reputation: they think of us as prepared and qualified in principle for any activity, regardless of whether it bears any relation to our studies or our particular disciplines. And this university has spent too many centuries intervening, via its offspring, in the government of this country for us to refuse to collaborate when it most needed us. Not that we had any choice, it wasn't like in peacetime. Although there were people who did, who refused, and they paid for it, paid very dearly. All their lives. There were double agents and traitors too, you'll have heard of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, the scandal gradually dribbled out during the '50s and '60s, and even into the '70s, because no one knew anything about Blunt until 1979, when Mrs Thatcher decided to break the pact she had inherited and to make public what he had confessed in secret fifteen years before, thus completely destroying him and stripping him of everything, starting, ridiculously enough, with his title. Anyway, there were so many people involved, it's hardly surprising that four traitors should have emerged from our universities, fortunately the four came from the other place, not ours, and that's worked silently in our favour for the last half-century.' – 'Here too,' I thought, 'spatial malice, the punishment of place.' – 'Well, I say four: the Four of Fame from the Ring of Five, but there must have been many more.' – I didn't understand what he was referring to, but this time I gave no sign of my ignorance, not even by my expression, I didn't want to have to interrupt again. 'Ring' in English can also mean the kind of ring you wear on your finger. – 'I joined, Toby joined, as did so many others, and it's remained quite common practice, even after the war, they've always needed all kinds of expertise and have sought it out in the best and most appropriate places. They've always needed linguists, decoders, people who knew languages: I don't think there's anyone in the sub-faculty of Slavonic Languages who hasn't done some work for them at some time. Not in the field, of course, they haven't gone on missions, anyone working in Slavonic languages was already too marked out by his profession to be useful to them there, it would have been tantamount to sending a spy with a sign on his forehead saying "Spy". But they have used them to do translations, to act as interpreters, to break codes, authenticate recordings or polish accents, to carry out phone taps and interrogations, in Vauxhall Cross or in Baker Street. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course, now they don't need them so much, it's the turn of Arabists and Islamic scholars, they have no idea yet just what's hit them, they won't get a moment's peace.' – I thought of Rook with his massive head, the eternal translator of Tolstoy and the alleged and unlikely friend of Vladimir Nabokov, and about Dewar, a.k.a. the Ripper, the Butcher, the Hammer and the Inquisitor (poor Dewar and his insomnia, and how unfair all those nicknames were), a Hispanist who, as I discovered, could also read Pushkin in Russian, delighting in those iambic stanzas, either read out loud or to himself. Old acquaintances from the city of Oxford in which I had lived for two years – although I was only ever passing through – and with almost all of whom I had had no further contact once I returned to Madrid. Cromer-Blake and Rylands, with whom I had been friendliest, were both dead. Clare Bayes was back with her husband, Edward Bayes, or else with a new lover, but there would definitely be no room for me as a friend, there was no reason, our affair had been entirely secret. I was in sporadic contact with Kavanagh, the head of my sub-faculty, an amusing man and a great hypochondriac, which is perhaps why he wrote his horror novels under that pseudonym, two different forms of an addiction to fear. And Wheeler. Except that he really dated from after my time there, he was more like an inheritance from Rylands, his successor, his substitute or replacement in my life, I realised now the family nature of it, of that inheritance and that succession I mean. Wheeler remained thinking for a moment (perhaps he was feeling sorry for some Arabist acquaintance of his, and of his imminent fate under siege from MI6), and then returned to something from earlier in the conversation, saying: it's very odd that Toby should have told you about that. He didn't like anyone to know, he didn't even like thinking about it. Nor do I actually, so don't go imagining that I'm going to regale you with stories of my adventures in the Caribbean or in West Africa or in South-East Asia, according to Who's Who's rather imprecise accusations. What did he tell you? Can you remember how it came up?'
Yes, I did remember, almost word for word, on no other occasion had Rylands spoken to me with such intensity, so immersed in his own memory and with such disregard for his own will. It was true: he didn't like sharing his memories with others, and disliked revealing anything.
'We were talking about death,' I said. ('The worst thing about the approach of death isn't death itself and what it may or may not bring, it's the fact that one can no longer fantasise about things still to come,' Rylands had said, sitting in a chair in his garden next to the same slow river that we could see now, the River Cherwell with its muddy waters, except that Rylands's house gave on to a wilder, more magical, and far less soothing stretch of water. Occasionally swans would appear, and he would throw them bits of bread.)
'About death? That's odd too,' remarked Wheeler. 'It's odd that Toby should talk about that, odd that anyone should, especially once it's inevitable, because of infirmity or old age. Or, indeed, character.' ('Wheeler is talking about it now,' I thought, 'but more because he's an intelligent man than because of his age.')
'Cromer-Blake was already very ill, and we were worried then about what did, in the end, happen. Talking about that and about how little time there was left led Toby to speak of the past.' ('I've had what is commonly referred to as a full life, at least that's how I regard it,' Rylands had said. 'I haven't had a wife or children, but I've had a life spent in the acquisition of knowledge and that was what mattered to me. I've always gone on finding out more than I knew before, and it doesn't matter where you put that "before", even if it's only today or tomorrow.')
'And is that when he told you what he had done, about, his adventures?' asked Wheeler, and I thought I noticed a touch of apprehension in his voice, as if he were referring to something more specific than having collaborated with MI6 which, in Oxford, was, after all, something trivial, commonplace.
'He wanted to explain to me that he'd had a full life, that he hadn't, as it might seem, devoted himself solely to study and knowledge and teaching,' I replied. ('But I've had a full life, too, in the sense that my life's been crammed with action and the unexpected,' Rylands had said.) 'And that was when he confirmed the rumours I'd heard, that he'd been a spy, that was the word he used. And I assumed that he'd belonged to MI5, it didn't occur to me to think of MI6, perhaps because it's less familiar to us Spaniards.'
'That's what he told you.' There was no interrogative tone. 'He used that word. H'm,' murmured Wheeler, as so many people in Oxford did, including Rylands. 'H'm.' Seeing Peter so thoughtful and full of curiosity, it seemed to me selfish and unkind not to fill in the context, which I remembered so well, and not to quote to him verbatim his younger brother's words. 'H'm,' he said again.
' "As you'll no doubt have heard," he said, "I was a spy, like so many of us here, because that, too, can form part of our duties; but I was never just a pen-pusher like that fellow Dewar in your department, indeed like most of them. I worked in the field."' I could tell by the look in Wheeler's eyes that he had noticed that his brother had used some of the same expressions he had just used.
'Did he say anything else?' he asked.
'Yes, he did: he talked for quite a long time, almost as if I wasn't there, and he added a few other things too. For example: "I've been in India and in the Caribbean and in Russia and I've done things I could never tell anyone about now, because they would seem so ridiculous that no one would believe me, I know only too well that what one can and cannot tell depends very much on timing, because I've dedicated my life to identifying just that in literature and I've learned to identify it in life too.'"
'Toby was right about that, there are things that can't be told now – or only with great difficulty – even though they really happened. The facts of war sound puerile in times of relative peace, and just because something happened doesn't mean it can be talked about, just because it's true, doesn't mean it's plausible. With the passing of time, the truth can seem unlikely; it fades into the background, and then seems more like a fable or simply not true at all. Even some of my own experiences seem like fiction to me. They were important experiences, but the times that follow begin to doubt them, perhaps not one's own time, but the entirely new eras, and it's those new eras that make what came before and what they didn't see seem unimportant, almost as if they were somehow jealous of them. Often the present infantilises the past, it tends to transform it into something invented and childish, and renders it useless to us, spoils it for us.' He paused, nodded at the cigarette I had hesitantly raised to my lips after drinking my coffee (I was afraid the smoke might bother them at that hour). He looked out of the window at the river, at his stretch of the river, more civilised and harmonious than Toby Rylands's. He had momentarily lost all his previous haste and impatience, which is what usually happens when one remembers the dead. 'Who knows, maybe that's partly why we die: because everything we've experienced is reduced to nothing, and then even our memories languish and fade. First, it's our personal experiences. Then it's our memories.'
'So everything also has its moment not to be believed.'
Wheeler smiled vaguely, almost regretfully. He had picked up on my inversion of the words he had used a short while before, of the possible motto that he shared with Tupra, if it was a motto and not just a coincidence of ideas, yet another affinity between them.
'But nevertheless he told you,' Wheeler murmured, and what I sensed now in his voice was, I thought, not so much apprehension as fatalism or defeat or resignation, in short, surrender.
'Don't be so sure, Peter. He did and he didn't. He may have dropped his guard sometimes, but he never entirely lost his will, I don't think, nor did he say more than he was aware he wanted to say. Even if that awareness was distant or hidden, or muffled. Just like you.'
'What else did he tell and not tell you, then?' He ignored my last comment, or kept it for later on.
'He didn't really tell me anything, he just talked. He said: "I shouldn't be telling you any of this now, but the fact is that in my lifetime I've run mortal risks and betrayed men whom I had nothing against personally. I've saved a few people's lives too, but sent others to the firing squad or the gallows. I've lived in Africa, in the most unlikely places, in other times, and was even a witness to the suicide of the person I loved.'"
'He said that, "I was even a witness to the suicide…"' Wheeler didn't complete the phrase. He was astonished, or possibly annoyed. 'And was that all? Did he say who or what happened?'
'No. I remember that he stopped short then, as if his will or his conscious mind had sent a warning to his memory, to stop him overstepping the mark; then he added: "Oh, and battles, I've been a witness to those too," I remember it clearly. Then he went on talking, but about the present. He said no more about his past, or only in very general terms. Even more general, that is.'
'May I ask what those terms were?' Wheeler's question sounded not forceful, but timid, as if he were asking my permission; it was almost a plea.
'Of course, Peter,' I replied, and there was no reserve or insincerity in my voice. 'He said that his head was full of bright, shining memories, frightening and thrilling, and that anyone seeing all of them together, as he could, would think they were more than enough, that the simple remembering of so many fascinating facts and people would fill one's old age more intensely than most people's present.' I paused for a moment to give him time to listen to the words inside him. 'Those, pretty much, were the terms he used or what he said. And he added that it wasn't, in fact, like that. That it wasn't like that for him. He did still want more, he said. He still wanted everything, he said.'
Wheeler now seemed at once relieved and saddened and uneasy, or perhaps he was none of those things, perhaps he was simply moved. It probably wasn't like that for him either, however many bright, shining memories he had. Probably nothing was enough to fill the days of his old age, despite all his efforts and his machinations.
'And you believed all that,' he said.
'I had no reason not to,' I replied. 'Besides, he was telling me the truth, sometimes you just know, without a shadow of a doubt, that someone is telling you the truth. Not often, it's true,' I added. 'But there are occasions when you have not the slightest doubt about it.'
'Do you remember when this took place, this conversation?'
'Yes, it was in Hilary term during my second year here, towards the end of March.'
'So a couple of years before he died, is that right?'
'More or less, or perhaps a bit more. I think he may not have even introduced us yet, you and me. You and I must have met for the first time in Trinity term of that year, shortly before I returned to Madrid for good.'
'We were already quite old then, Toby and I, well into our emeritus years both of us. I never thought I would be so much older, I don't know how he would have coped with all the additional time that I've had and he hasn't. Badly I suspect, worse than me. He complained more because he was more optimistic than me, and therefore more passive too, don't you agree, Estelle?'
I was surprised that he should suddenly address Mrs Berry by her first name, I had never heard him do so before, and yet he and I had often been alone together, but he had always addressed her as 'Mrs Berry'. I wondered if the nature of the conversation had something to do with it. As if he were opening up for me one door or several (I didn't yet know which one or how many), amongst them that of his unseen daily life. She always called him 'Professor', which in Oxford does not mean 'lecturer' or 'teacher' as it does in Spanish, but chair or head of department, and there is only one professor in each sub-faculty, the others being merely 'dons'. And this time Mrs Berry responded by calling him 'Peter'. That's what they must call each other when they're alone, Peter and Estelle, I thought. It was, however, impossible to know if they addressed each other as 'tú', since in present-day English only 'you' exists, and there is no distinction made between 'tú' and 'usted'.
'Yes, Peter, you're right.' I decided to imagine that had they been speaking in Spanish, they would have used 'usted'', as I always did mentally when speaking to Wheeler in his language. 'He always assumed that people would come to him and that things would happen of their own accord, and so he tended perhaps to feel more let down. I don't know quite whether he was more optimistic or simply prouder. But he never went after people and things himself. He didn't seek them out the way you do.' Mrs Berry spoke in her usual calm, discreet tone, I could not detect the slightest variation.
'Pride and optimism are not necessarily mutually exclusive characteristics, Estelle,' replied Wheeler in slightly professorial mode. 'He was the one who told me about you,' he went on to say, looking at me, and then I did notice a distinct change from the tone of voice he had used before: the fog had lifted (the apprehension or irritation or sense of doom), as if, after a few moments of alarm, he had been reassured to learn that I did not know too much about Rylands, despite the latter's unexpected confidences to me that day in Hilary term during my second year in Oxford. That his reminiscences had not entailed a complete surrender of his will when I was present, and perhaps, therefore, not while anyone else was present either. That I knew about his past as a spy and a few imprecise facts without date or place or names, but nothing more. He felt once more in control of the situation after a brief moment of disequilibrium, I could see it in his eyes, I could hear it in the slight hint of didacticism in his voice. It doubtless made him feel uneasy to discover that he was not in possession of all the facts, always assuming he had believed he was, and he once more took it for granted that he had them all, those he needed or that afforded him a sense of ease and comfort. In the now rather late morning light his eyes looked very transparent, less mineral than they usually did and much more liquid, like Toby Rylands's eyes, or like his right eye at least, the one that was the colour of sherry or the colour of olive oil depending on how the sun caught it, and which predominated and assimilated his other eye when seen from a distance: or perhaps it is simply that one dares to see more similarities between people when you know there is a blood relationship to back you up. Wheeler had still not explained to me about their hitherto unknown kinship, but it had taken barely any effort on my part to apply that correction to my thought and to see them no longer as friends, but as brothers. Or as brothers as well as friends, for that is what they must have been. Wheeler's eyes seemed to me now more like two large drops of rose wine, it was Toby who suggested to me that you might perhaps be like us,' he added.
'What do you mean "like us"? What do you mean? What did he mean?'
Wheeler did not reply directly. The truth is he rarely did.
'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo. There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth, it's no cliché or exaggeration to describe us now as an endangered species. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence, it smacks of lese-humanite, an attack on the dignity of the prejudged, of the prejudger, of everyone. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror. They require proof and verification of everything; the benefit of the doubt, as they call it, has invaded everything, leaving not a single sphere uncolonised, and it has ended up paralysing us, making us, formally speaking, impartial, scrupulous and ingenuous, but, in practice, making fools of us all, utter necios.' That last word he said in Spanish, doubtless because there is no English word that resembles it phonetically or etymologically: 'utter necios,' he said, mixing the two languages. 'Necios in the strict sense of the word, in the Latin sense of nescius, one who knows nothing, who lacks knowledge, or as the dictionary of the Real Academia Espanola puts it, do you know the definition it gives? "Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known." Isn't that extraordinary? That is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning. Un satisfecho insipiente.' He resorted to Spanish for both the quote and for the last few words, which mean, more or less, 'nincompoop'; in other languages one always remembers terms that are no longer in use or are unknown to native speakers. 'And that's how it is in our pusillanimous countries, people are educated from childhood on to be necios, fools. It isn't a natural evolution or degeneration, it doesn't happen by chance, it's conscious, calculated, institutional. It's a programme for the formation of minds, or for their annihilation (the annihilation of character, ça va sans dire!). People hate certainty; and that hatred began as a fashion, it was deemed trendy to reject certainties, simpletons put them in the same bag as dogmas and doctrines, the dolts (and there were a few intellectuals amongst them too), as if they were synonymous. But the idea has proved a tremendous success, it's taken root with a vengeance. Now people hate anything definite or sure, and, consequently, anything that is fixed in time; and that is partly why people detest the past, unless they can manage to contaminate it with their own hesitancy, or infect it with the present's lack of definition, which they try to do all the time. Nowadays people cannot bear to know that something existed; that it existed and in a particular way. What they cannot bear is not so much knowing that, as the mere fact of its existence. Just that: that it did exist. Without our intervention, without our considered opinion, how can I put it, without our infinite indecision or our scrupulous acquiescence. Without our much-loved uncertainty as impartial witness. This era is so proud, Jacobo, far prouder than any other, certainly since I've been in the world or before that either, I should think (it makes Hitler look tame). Bear in mind that when I get up each morning, I have to make a real effort and to resort to the help of much younger friends like you in order to forget that I can actually remember the First World War, or what you young people call, to my great disgust and displeasure, the 14-18 War. Bear in mind that one of the first words I learned and retained, from hearing it so often, was "Gallipoli", it seems incredible that I was already alive when that massacre took place. The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present's resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without our gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all is that this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendours that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even the shadow or mist or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it's just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us. It has escaped our control and our manoeuvrings and our decisions, despite all these leaders going around apologising for the outrages committed by their ancestors, even seeking to make amends by offering offensive gifts of money to the descendants of the aggrieved, regardless of how gladly those descendants may pocket those gifts and even demand them, for they, too, are opportunists, chancers. Have you ever seen anything more stupid or farcical: cynicism on the part of those who give, cynicism on the part of those who receive. It's just another act of pride: how can a pope, a king or a prime minister assume the right to attribute to his Church, to his Crown or to his country, to those who are alive now, the crimes of their predecessors, crimes which those same predecessors did not see or recognise as such all those centuries ago? Who do our representatives and our governments think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? If it was purely symbolic, it would be mere oafish affectation or propaganda. However, symbolism is out of the question as long as there are offers of "compensation", grotesquely retrospective and monetary ones to boot. A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life: they are lost forever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are now formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, of their broken bones and slit throats. Of the real and unknown names of which they were stripped or which they renounced.
A mockery of the past. No, the past is simply not to be borne; we cannot bear not being able to do anything about it, not being able to influence it, to direct it; to avoid it. And so, if possible, it is twisted or tampered with or altered, or falsified, or else made into a liturgy, a ceremony, an emblem and, finally, a spectacle, or simply shuffled around and changed so that, despite everything, it at least looks as if we were intervening, even though the past is utterly fixed, a fact we choose to ignore. And if it isn't, if that proves impossible, then it's erased, suppressed, exiled or expelled, or else buried. And it happens, Jacobo, one or other of those things happens all too often because the past doesn't defend itself, it can't. And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were contagious diseases. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'
Wheeler's gaze had grown denser and brighter as he spoke, his eyes looked to me like two drops of muscatel now. It wasn't just that he enjoyed holding forth, as does any former lecturer or teacher. It was also because the nature of those thoughts illuminated him from within and from without, too, just a little, as if the burning head of a match sparked and sputtered in each pupil. He himself realised, when he stopped, that he was somewhat agitated, and so I had no qualms about cooling him down with my response, or disappointing him, the anxious look on Mr Berry's face – of which we each could see one half- reminded me that too much dialectical excitement was bad for him.
'Forgive me, Peter, but I'm afraid I don't entirely understand what you're saying,' I replied, taking advantage of a pause (which was perhaps merely a pause for breath), I haven't had much sleep and I'm probably a bit slow on the uptake, but I really don't know what you're talking about.'
'Give me a cigarette, will you,' he said. He didn't usually smoke cigarettes. I handed him my packet. He took one, lit it, held it rather awkwardly between his fingers, took two puffs and this, as I saw, had an immediate calming effect, tobacco sometimes does that, whatever the doctors say. I know, I know. I may appear to be rambling, but I'm not really, Jacobo. I was talking to you about what we've been talking about all along, so, please, don't give up on me just yet. I haven't forgotten your question. You wanted to know what I meant and what Toby meant when he said that you might be like us, that was it, wasn't it?'
'Exactly. What did he mean? You still haven't explained.' 'But I am explaining. Just wait.' The ash on his cigarette was already beginning to grow long. I handed him the ashtray, but he didn't notice. 'Although we were apart for many years and knew nothing about each other's lives, I nevertheless knew Toby well, and in some matters I put a great deal of trust in his judgement (not everything, of course, I had little confidence in his literary tastes). But I knew him pretty well, both the boy who, like me, was also in the world when they sent the older boys to be slaughtered in Gallipoli along with the Australians… like pigs, the lot of them, some of them equipped with only their bayonets and no bullets… and the retired university colleague and riverside neighbour that he was in his latter years; once I moved here, of course. When we met up again.' He made a brief reiterative, historical digression, perhaps the one he had postponed in order to complete his previous sentence; another pause: '("Anzac", they were called, I don't know if you know: that's the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; and the Anzacs, in the plural, was the now glorious name of all those men who were so pointlessly sacrificed, in Chunuk Bair, in Suvla… There have been so many in my time, so many sacrificed for the same reason, because they couldn't see what was there before them and didn't know what was known already, so many in the course of one life. Mine has been a long life, it's true, but it's still only one life. It's frightening to think how many have been sacrificed and will continue to be sacrificed because of that, because they didn't dare or didn't want to… What a waste.) We led surprisingly parallel lives, Toby and I, given that we had said goodbye to each other in pre-adolescence, and that he had changed country and continent. I mean as regards our careers, the odd coincidence of our both in the end getting chairs at the same English university (and not just any university either). It was less of a coincidence that we both formed part of the same group, well, I recruited him, I suppose. The story of our surnames is, as I warned you, a trivial matter, no great mystery. Our parents got divorced when we were eight and nine years old respectively, around 1922 or thereabouts, he was a year younger, as I said. We stayed with my mother, amongst other things because my father was in a hurry to leave, I think because he didn't want to see my mother getting together with another man, which he was sure would happen sooner or later (well, that's what I think now and have for some time). He moved to South Africa and hardly seemed to miss us at all. So much so, that for many years I took this as certain and unquestionable, and resentment came easily to me. Our maternal grandfather, Grandfather Wheeler, decided to take charge of his two grandchildren, financially speaking. And since he only had two grandchildren, both, of course, bearing the surname Rylands, my mother, doubtless knowing little about pre-adolescent psychology, changed her name and ours, that is, she reclaimed her maiden name and gave it to us as well: a way of perpetuating the grandfather, I imagine, through his name; perhaps he made her do it. Anyway, it was made official in 1929, by deed poll' – I had read this English expression earlier in Who's Who -'although we'd been using the surname Wheeler since shortly after the divorce. That was the name under which we were enrolled at school, and that was how we were known in Christchurch, where we were born. Poor Rita, my mother, probably did it as a show of gratitude or as a reward to my grandfather, her father, and more probably still, as a childish act of revenge on our father, her ex-husband Hugh. Almost from one day to the next, we went from feeling ourselves to be Peter and Toby Rylands to being the Wheeler brothers, with no father and no patronymic sensu stricto. But whereas I made no protest (later on, I realised what an upheaval it was, how messy, I mean, you can't with impunity change the label on an identity), Toby rebelled from the start. He continued answering "Toby Rylands" when asked his name and that was how he signed himself at school and even in exams. And after two or three years of these struggles and of evident unhappiness, at eleven, he expressed his strident desire not only to preserve his old surname, but to go and live with his father. He felt more affection for him than I did, more admiration, more comradeship and more dependence; he was more sentimental, and although, in the medium and long term, it must have been very painful to him to lose both me and my mother, he never said as much, he was too proud really; but he missed his father even more, immensely; and the bitterness I nurtured towards my father, Toby directed more and more at our mother. And (by assimilation or intuition) at Grandfather Wheeler, whom he could only ever see as a supplanter of or rival to his father, perhaps our grandfather was not that paternal towards his daughter. And I wasn't exempt either, no Wheeler was. In the end, Toby's misery and hostility became so intolerable, for him and for us, that my mother finally agreed to his moving out, as long as our father was prepared to take him and look after him, which seemed unlikely. The fact that my father took him in, contrary to all our predictions (or contrary to mine, which, I realised later, were more a desideratum than anything else) contributed in no small measure to my desire to eliminate him entirely from my consciousness, as if he had never existed, and then, very nearly, by assimilation and out of spite, to suppress all memory of my brother, because he had chosen my father and had gone away. As you know, that kind of thing is always happening, in adult life and even, I can assure you, in old age: but in childhood, that feeling of abandonment and despair (and of betrayal, that is, of desertion) is even more acute in the one who stays behind, while others leave and disappear. The impression is much the same when others die, for me at least, I always feel slightly resentful towards my dead. He went to South Africa, and I stayed in New Zealand. Not that South Africa was necessarily a better place, I had no objective reason to think so, but it became for me an infinitely more attractive place, and I soon began to grow impatient and to long to reach an age when I could leave my own country – clouded and diminished, in my eyes, by these absences – and come here to university. I finally did so when I was sixteen – and, by then, officially called Wheeler – on a boat so painfully slow I thought it would never reach its destination. I don't remember or believe it to be true, because I do have a kind of delayed sense of grievance regarding my change of name, the de facto change rather than the de jure one, but my mother said that the change by deed poll was done in my interests, even to please me. It's true that in the 1920s and 1930s everything was easier and less problematic, and in many respects one was freer than one is nowadays: neither the state nor the justice system were as regulatory or as interventionist as they are now, they allowed people room to breathe and move around, but that's all over now, our tutelary obsession did not exist, would not have been allowed. So it's possible that, in the end, my name would have been Wheeler anyway with no need for any red tape, simply sanctioned by use and by custom, just as Toby could go off to be with his father with only the agreement of his two progenitors and my mother's approval, without, as far as I know, any authority or judge interfering in such a private matter. Whatever the case, that was when I also started calling myself Wheeler legally, and perfectly willingly too. Needless to say, the deed poll only affected me and not Toby (that would have been the last straw), and from whom, by then, I had barely heard for four years. He didn't keep in direct contact, well, neither he nor I sought it out. From time to time I would get some vague bits of news about him from my mother, who received it, I fear, mainly from our father. And he would have received some news of me by the same channel, only in reverse. So I was born "Peter Rylands" and that was who I was until I was nine or ten, or indeed in paribus until I was sixteen. But then Toby was "Toby Wheeler" for a while too, much against his will, of course: you have no idea how he suffered at school in Christchurch, for example, when they called the register. It doesn't usually happen with the name they give you at birth, but it can with justice be said of Toby that, as well as receiving it, he also conquered and won his name.' Wheeler's expression changed for a moment, and when I saw this new expression, I imagined that some ironic or humorous comment was about to follow. 'He was never very keen on his first name either, which was Grandfather Wheeler's first name too, it was just bad luck that he got stuck with it. If that had been the name to be changed, he would have accepted with pleasure, I'm sure. And, who knows, we would probably have continued living together. He said it reminded him of that tedious character in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch, you know what "belch" means, I suppose? Then, as an adult, he became slightly reconciled to the name when he read Tristram Shandy, thanks to Uncle Toby.' And Wheeler appeared to conclude here his explanations about Wheeler and Rylands, because he added by way of bringing the matter to a close, 'So you see, as I told you, a trivial story. A divorce. An attachment to a name. To a mother. To a father. A separation. An aversion to another name. To a mother. And to a grandfather. To a father.' He was mixing the two points of view, his own and that of his brother. 'No great mystery.' I had the impression then, given the slowness with which he spoke, that he was expecting me to refute these words, now that he had told me the story: but that isn't what happened, he didn't get his refutation. He must have known that it wasn't a trivial story at all (that drastic separation of the two sides; Rylands saying to me once 'when I left Africa for the first time', as if he had been born there and denying, therefore, his first ten or eleven years in New Zealand, on another continent, albeit an island one), and that it did contain a mystery, despite the casual manner in which he had set out to tell it. And he must have told it in part only: he had not told the mystery itself, but the part around it, that pointed to it like an arrow.
'And then?' I asked. 'When did you meet up again?'
'In England, years later. By then I really was Wheeler and he was Rylands. I think that I was already the person I am, if I am who I think I am. I sought him out, we didn't just meet. Not exactly. But that's another story.'
'I'm sure it is,' I replied, perhaps with an unintentional touch of impatience: my lack of sleep caught up with me now and then, and when something, even a chance remark, refers in some way to ourselves, waiting becomes very difficult. 'And I assume that the answer to my original question, which you provoked, is hidden in there somewhere: in what way could I, according to Toby, be like the two of you? You're not going to tell me it was because of my variable first name, as you know, you and others call me Jacobo, but Luisa and many others call me Jaime, and there are even those who know me as Diego or Yago. Not to mention Jack, as I'm often called here in England.'
Wheeler noticed my slight impatience, such things never escaped him. I saw that he was amused, it didn't make him feel embarrassed at all, or pressured.
'I call you Jack,' said Mrs Berry shyly. 'I hope you don't mind… Jack.' And this time she hesitated before saying the name.
'Not at all, Mrs Berry.'
'And by which name do you know yourself?' Wheeler was quick to ask.
I didn't have to think about it even for a second.
'Jacques. That's the name I learned and made mine as a child. Even though my mother was almost the only one to call me that. Not even my father does.'
'There you are,' said Wheeler in an absurdly demonstrative tone. 'Ahí lo tienes' is the only way I can think to translate it into Spanish. 'But, no, Toby didn't mean that, neither did I,' he added at once. 'He had told me quite a lot about you, before you and I met. In fact, that's partly why we did meet, he aroused my curiosity. He said that you might perhaps be like us… That's what he had given me to understand, and he confirmed it later when we happened to talk about the old group. Of course, by then you were no longer living here, and it was unlikely that you would ever come back here to stay. Don't worry, I don't mean that now you're going to stay here for good, I'm sure you'll go back to Madrid sooner or later, you Spaniards don't survive very long far from your country; even though you're from Madrid, and madrileños tend to suffer least from homesickness. But you have, for the moment, come back to stay indefinitely, if you'll forgive the relative contradiction, and that's enough of a return. And so, posthumously, Toby's opinion suddenly acquires, how can I put it, an added practical interest. Especially as I share his opinion (after all, he no longer wields any influence, nor can he be pressed on the matter), having spent quite a lot of time with you since his death. Intermittently, of course, but it's been some years now. As I said, I didn't set great store by his literary judgements, but I did by his personal judgements, by his judgement of people, his interpretation and foresight, he could see straight through them, or, as you say in colloquial Spanish, las calaba. He could suss them out. He was rarely wrong, little short of infallible. Almost as infallible as me.' He gave a brief, studied laugh, to cancel out or mitigate his immodesty. 'More, possibly, than our friend Tupra, who is very good, or than that very competent girl of his, although you do, I suppose, live in less testing times: she's Spanish too, the girl, or half-Spanish at any rate, he's spoken to me about her several times, but I can never remember her name, he says that, with time, she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough, that's one of the difficulties, most of them get fed up and leave. Toby was almost as infallible as you must be, even given the less testing times you live in. According to him anyway. He believed that you would prove more infallible than him, that you might outdo him assuming that you first became conscious of your abilities and then immediately let go of that consciousness, or at least deferred it, as did those of us who had or have it still. Indefinitely, for the moment, if you'll again forgive that relative contradiction as regards the deferral of consciousnesses. But, to be honest, I don't know if you would ever reach those heights.'
'What group are you talking about, Peter? You've mentioned it several times now.' I tried a different question. But I no longer felt impatient, that had been just a reflex reaction, a moment. And if he had been in a hurry before, that had probably been due to my lateness in waking up and coming downstairs, which he had not counted upon, any failure to keep to his mental timetables and plans upset and bothered him. But now that I was there with him, he was enjoying intriguing me, enjoying my state of expectation: he wasn't going to ruin his performance, which he had planned and possibly dreamed about, by rushing things. As expected, he did not answer my new question, but he did, at last, answer my previous one. With only half-truths, of course, or, at most, three-quarter truths. As I have said, he probably didn't know any whole ones. They probably didn't even exist.
'Toby told me that he always admired, and, at the same time, feared, the special gift you had for capturing the distinctive and even essential characteristics, both external and internal, of friends and acquaintances, characteristics which they themselves had often not noticed or known about. Or even people you had only glimpsed or seen in passing, in a meeting or at high table, or whom you had passed a couple of times in the corridors or on the stairs of the Taylorian without exchanging a single word. I understand that, shortly before you left, you even wrote a few sketches of our colleagues for his amusement, is that right?'
I had a vague memory of this. It was so long ago that any trace of it had been erased. You forget much more of what you write than of what you read, assuming it's addressed to you; much more of what you send than of what you receive, of what you say than of what you hear, your own offences more than those committed against you. And although you may not think so, the process of erasure happens more quickly with those who are dead. A few vignettes, perhaps, yes, a few lines about my colleagues of the time in Oxford, those in the sub-faculty of Spanish, whom Rylands, recently retired Professor of English Literature, knew well, although not as well as Wheeler himself, who was, for years, and up until his retirement, the direct boss of most of them, especially those who were, by then, already veterans. I felt a sudden retrospective shame, I was struggling to remember; perhaps they had been amusing, affectionate sketches, with just a touch of mischief or irony. That is why I felt it best to deny it, at least initially.
'I don't remember that,' I said. 'No, I don't think I've ever written a sketch about anyone. Possibly in conversation, yes. We talked a lot about everything, about everyone.'
'Can you pass me that file, please, Estelle?' Wheeler asked Mrs Berry, and she produced one and handed it to him, like a nurse promptly handing a doctor a medical instrument. She must have had it on her lap all that time, like a treasure. Wheeler put it under his arm, or, rather, under his armpit. He got up and said: 'Let's go out into the garden for a while, for a stroll on the lawn. I need the exercise and Mrs Berry will need to clear the table if we want to have lunch later on. It's not that cold now, but you'd better wrap up, that river is treacherous, it gets into your bones before you know it.' His eyes had resumed their mineral quality, and he added calmly and seriously (or, rather, carefully, as if he were holding on to me with his words, but did not want to frighten me off): 'Listen, Jacobo, according to Toby, you had the rare gift of being able to see in people what not even they were capable of seeing in themselves, at least not normally. Or if they do see or glimpse something, they immediately block it out; the flash leaves them with sight in only one eye and then they look ever afterwards through that blind eye. It's a very rare gift indeed nowadays, and becoming rarer, the gift of being able to see straight through people, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad, without effort, that is, without any fuss or squeamishness. That is the way, in which according to Toby, you might be like us, Jacobo, and now I think he was right. We could both see people like that, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad. Seeing was our gift, and we placed it at the service of others. And I can still see.'
One night in London, I thought I had merely frightened myself with the idea that someone was following me, possibly with threatening intent. It could have been the rain, I reasoned, when that first idea seemed convincing, for the rain always makes footsteps on pavements sound as if they were giving off sparks or polishing something, like the rapid brushing of old-fashioned shoe-shines; or it could have been my raincoat rubbing against my trousers as I walked briskly along (the sound of flapping, dancing coat-tails, my raincoat unbuttoned, buffeted in turn by the gusty wind); or the shadow of my own open umbrella, which I could feel all the time at my back like a lingering sense of unease, I was holding it at an angle, resting on one shoulder the way soldiers carry a rifle or a spear when they're on parade; or perhaps the slight creak of its tense ribs as they were shaken by the wind. I had the constant feeling that someone was following close behind, sometimes I could hear what sounded like the short, rapid steps of a dog, for dogs always look as if they are walking over hot coals and being drawn airwards, so lightly do they place their eighteen invisible toes on the ground, as if they were always just about to leap up or levitate. Tis, tis, tis, that was the sound accompanying me, that was what I kept hearing and what made me turn round every few steps, a rapid turn of the head without stopping or slackening my pace, because of the wind the umbrella was only half-doing its job, I was walking at a steady rate, in a hurry to get home, I was returning after far too long a day at the building with no name, and it was late for London, although not at all late for Madrid (but I wasn't in Madrid now); I had only eaten a sandwich or two for lunch, many hours and even more faces ago, some of which I had observed from the stationary train compartment or wood-panelled hiding-place, although most had been on video, and their voices heard or, rather, listened to, their various tones, sincere or presumptuous, timid or false, crafty or boastful, uncertain or shameless. The effort required of me in this picking up and tuning in never diminished, and I had the distinct impression that it would steadily increase: the more one satisfies people's expectations, the more inflated these become and the more subtlety and precision they demand. And although I had, from the start (perhaps from Corporal Bonanza onwards) merely invented out of my own intuitions, the degree of irresponsibility and fiction being required or induced in me now by Tupra, Mulryan, Rendel and Pérez Nuix created a tension in me, almost an anxiety sometimes, usually before or after, but not during my inventive duties, which were termed interpretations or reports. I was aware that, with each day that passed, I was losing more and more scruples or, as Sir Peter Wheeler had put it, deferring my consciousness, letting it grow dim, deferring it indefinitely; and that I was venturing without its company ever farther away and with ever fewer qualms.
It was not, I thought, strange that I should frighten myself on a rainy night with the streets almost empty of other pedestrians and not a taxi in sight, although I had already abandoned that as an idea; or that my nerves should be on edge so that the slightest thing startled me, my loud, wet shoes, the anarchic flapping of my coat-tails, the battered dome of my umbrella whose floating image, in the more brightly lit areas, was reflected back up at me from the asphalt, as I passed by the monuments, gloomy in the evening dark, that pepper the many squares, the metallic creak of crickets produced by my every movement and by the gusty night wind, perhaps the real and weightless footsteps of some stray dog I could not yet see, but who, given the lack of other candidates – for I passed whole blocks without seeing a soul – was clearly following me, perhaps surreptitiously, until someone spotted it out all alone and took it away. Tis tis tis. I was aware of my own smells, but it was as if they had all been passed through water: damp silk and damp leather and damp wool, and I might have been sweating too, with not a trace left of the cologne I had put on that morning. Tis tis tis, I looked round, but there was nothing and nobody, just the sense of unease at the back of my neck and the feeling of menace – or was it merely vigilance – accompanying every rhythmic, constant step – one, two, three and four – as if I were on some interminable march with my umbrella-rifle or my umbrella-spear, even though their real function was that of a frail, oversized helmet or a rickety shield borne on an arm that trembles and dances. 'I am myself my own fever and pain,' I was thinking when I believed I was merely frightening myself. 'I must be.'
No, it wasn't strange. Anyone who spends his days passing judgement, prognosticating and even diagnosing (not to say predicting), giving what are often groundless opinions, insisting that he has seen something when he has, in fact, seen little or nothing – always assuming he isn't pretending – ears pricked for any unusual emphases or vacillations, for any stumblings or quaverings, alert to the choice of words when those being observed have sufficient vocabulary to choose between several (which is not very often, some cannot even find the one possible word and have to be guided towards it, to have the word suggested to them, which makes them easy to manipulate), eyes tuned to detect any wilfully opaque glances, any excessive blinking, the drawing back of a lip as someone prepares to lie or the twitching jaw of the wildly ambitious, scrutinising faces to the point where you no longer see them as living, moving faces, observing them instead as if they were paintings, or as you might observe someone asleep or dead, or as you might observe the past; anyone whose main task is to trust no one ends up viewing everything in that suspicious, wary, interpretative light, dissatisfied with appearances and with the obvious and the straightforward; or, rather, dissatisfied with what is there. And then one easily forgets that what is there on the surface or in the first instance might sometimes be all there is, with no duplicity and no deceit or secrecy either, in the case of someone who is not hiding anything because they don't know how, because they know nothing of the theory and practice of concealment.
I had been carrying out my duties for several months, almost on a daily basis, hardly a day went by without my being summoned to the building with no name, even if only briefly in order to report back on what I had analysed and picked up, or what I had decided earlier at home. I had travelled a fair way along the path typically followed by all audacities (if it wasn't, in fact, mere insolence). You begin by prefacing everything with 'I don't know', 'I'm not sure'; or by qualifying and modifying as much as possible: 'It could be,' 'I would say that…', 'I can't be sure, but…', 'It seems likely to me that…', 'Possibly,' 'Possibly not,' 'This may be going too far, but…', 'This is pure supposition, but nevertheless…', 'Perhaps,' 'It might well be,' the archaic 'Methinks,' the American 'I daresay,' there are all kinds of shadings in both languages. Yes, you avoid affirmations in your speech and banish certainties from your mind, knowing full well that the former brings with it the latter just as the latter brings with it the former, almost simultaneously, with no noticeable difference, it's alarming how easily thought and speech contaminate each other. That is how it is at the beginning. But you soon grow more confident: you sense a commendation or a reproach in an oblique look or a chance remark, directed apparently at no one in particular and uttered in a neutral tone which you know, none the less, is intended for you, that it applies to you. You notice that 'I don't know' does not please, that inhibition is little appreciated, and that ambiguities are met with disappointment and niceties fall on stony ground; that the overly uncertain and cautious does not count and is not taken up, that the doubtful does not even persuade that there might be some reason for doubt, and reservations are almost a let-down; that 'Perhaps' and 'Maybe' are tolerated for the good of the enterprise and of the group, who, for all their audacity, do not wish to commit suicide, but they never arouse enthusiasm or passion, or even approval, they come across as faint-hearted and meek. And the bolder you get, the more questions they ask and the more skills they attribute to you, the bounds of what is knowable are always within a hair's-breadth of being lost, and one day you find that they are expecting you to see the indiscernible and to know the un-verifiable, to have an answer not just for the probable and even the merely possible, but for the unknown and unfathomable.
The most striking and most dangerous thing about this whole business is that you, too, begin to believe yourself capable of seeing and fathoming, of finding out and knowing, and, therefore, of hazarding an answer. Boldness never rests, it waxes or wanes, it burgeons or shrivels, it slips away or subjugates, and may disappear altogether after some major setback. But boldness, if it exists, is always on the move, it is never stable and never satisfied, it is the very opposite of stationary. And its main tendency is towards limitless increase, unless kept in check or brought up brutally short, or else systematically forced to retreat. In its expansive phase, perceptions become excitable or intoxicated, and arbitrariness, for example, ceases to seem arbitrary to you, believing, as you do, that your judgements and insights, however subjective, are based on solid criteria (a lesser evil, but what can you do); and there comes a point when it doesn't much matter whether you get things right, especially since in my work this was rarely verifiable, or if it was, they certainly never told me. From my continuance there, from the fact that they continued to request my services – somewhat bureaucratically and absurdly – and did not get rid of me, I inferred that my success rate must be quite high, but I also wondered occasionally if such a thing could be determined, and if it was, if anyone would bother to do so. I gave my opinions and verdicts, my prejudices and judgements: they were read or listened to; they asked me concrete questions: I gave them my answers, expanding on them and making comments and observations, identifying and summarising, inevitably going too far. I didn't know what they did with it all afterwards, if it had any consequences, if it was useful and had any practical effect or was merely fodder for the files, if it ever actually worked for or against someone; normally nothing was said, they never said anything to me afterwards, everything – for me at least – came down to that first act dominated by my ideas and a brief interrogation or dialogue; and the fact that, as far as I could see, there was no second or third or fourth act meant that the whole business (in day-to-day life, which is what matters most) seemed to me a rather silly game, or a series of hypothetical wagers, exercises in invention and perspicacity. And so, for a long time, I never had the feeling or the idea that I could be harming anyone.
When the coup d'état against Hugo Chavez took place in Venezuela, I couldn't help wondering if we had had some indirect influence on it; first on its apparent initial success, then on its grotesque failure (there seems to have been a lack of resolve); and on its chaotic end. I watched the television intently in case General Ponderosa, or whatever his real name was, should suddenly appear, but I never saw him, perhaps he hadn't been part of it at all. Perhaps the coup had failed because Tupra had advised against any financial aid and support, who knows. With Tupra I couldn't remain entirely silent about it:
'Have you seen what's been going on in Venezuela?' I asked him one morning, as soon as I went into his office.
'Yes, I have,' he replied, in the same tone of voice with which he had confirmed to the Venezuelan civilian soldier that he did not have our telephone number, but we had his. It was his conclusive tone of voice, or perhaps I should say concluding. And when he noticed that I was hesitating as to whether or not to pursue the matter, he added: 'Anything else, Jack?'
'No, nothing else, Mr Tupra.'
No, they didn't usually tell me when I had been right and when I had been wrong.
'I might be going out on a limb here, but…' 'I could be wrong, but nevertheless…' That 'but' and that 'nevertheless' are the cracks that end up flinging all the doors wide open, and soon the actual verbal formulae we use betray our insolence: 'I bet you anything you like that he'd change sides as soon as things got even slightly difficult, and change back again as many times as he needed to, his biggest problem being that neither side would want him because he's such a manifest coward,' one says of a functionary face – gleaming bald head, smeared glasses – seen for the first time half an hour ago and whom one is observing now through the false window or false oval mirror in a state of mind that is a mixture of superiority and defencelessness (the defencelessness of believing that others are always out to deceive you, the superiority of looking while unseen, of seeing everything without risking one's own eyes).
'The woman is desperate for attention, she'd invent the craziest fantasies just to be noticed, she has a need to show off to anything that moves, in any situation, not just to people with whom it might be worth the effort and who might do her some good, but to the hairdresser and the greengrocer and even the cat. She isn't even capable of curbing her enthusiasm or selecting her audience: she just can't distinguish, she wouldn't be much use to anyone,' says Tupra of a famous actress – with beautiful long hair but a very tense chin, hard as stone; bewitched by her own vanity – on seeing her in a video, and we all know that he's right, that he is, as always, spot-on, although there isn't a shred of – how can I put it – credible judgement to support his assertions.
'The guy has principles and would definitely never succumb to a bribe, I'd stake my life on it. Or rather, it's not even a matter of principles, it's more that he aspires to so little and is so dismissive of everything that neither flattery nor reward would lead him to adopt views he didn't find persuasive or, at the very least, amusing. The only way you could get at him would be by threatening him, because he might be susceptible to fear, physical fear I mean, he's never had his ears boxed in his life, well, not since he left school. He would go to pieces at the first hint of pain. He would be completely taken aback. He would crumble at the first scratch, the first pinch. He could be useful in some cases, as long as he didn't have to run that kind of risk,' says Rendel of a pleasant, youthful-looking, fifty-something writer – with sharp, elfin features, a slow way of talking, a slight Hampshire accent, according to Mulryan, round-rimmed spectacles, an unaffected way of speaking – on seeing and hearing an interview filmed almost entirely in close-up, we didn't see his hands once; and it seems to us that Rendel is right, that the novelist is a valiant man in his attitudes and his words, but that he would flinch from the merest threat of violence because he cannot even imagine it in his daily reality: he is capable of talking about it, but only because he sees it as an abstraction. As in the videotape, he would have no hands with which to defend himself.
'I wouldn't even cross the street with this man, he might push me under the wheels of a car if the mood took him, in a fit of rage. He's impetuous and impatient, it's hard to understand how he can exercise authority over anyone, or how he's managed to build up a business, still less a prosperous one, let alone an empire. His natural bent is for mugging passers-by at dusk or beating the living daylights out of someone, a hired killer on the rampage. He's a bundle of nerves, he can't wait, doesn't listen, takes no interest in what other people tell him, can't bear to spend even five minutes alone, but not because he wants company, just an audience. He probably has a really nasty temper, too, it wouldn't take much to make him blow his top, and then there's his voice, he must spend all day and night bellowing at his employees, at his children, at his two ex-wives and his six lovers (or possibly seven, there's some doubt about that). It's a complete mystery how he ever came to be a businessman or the head of anything, apart perhaps from some Soho dive threatened with closure on a daily basis. The only possible explanation is that he must instil a great sense of panic in people, and his hyperactivity reaches such heights that some, at least, of his innumerable plans and sordid deals must inevitably turn up trumps: probably, and by sheer chance, the most profitable ones. He may also have a nose for it, although that doesn't really fit well with his general recklessness: since the former takes persistence and calm, and he doesn't know the meaning of the words: he just abandons anything that resists him or proves difficult, that's his way of gaining time. God knows what he'll get up to if he goes into politics, as he assures us he will. Apart from outrages and abuses, of course, aimed at the electorate, I mean, because he would insult any potential voters at the first hint of criticism, the slightest slip and he'd heap insults on them,' says Mulryan of a multimillionaire who can be seen smiling in almost every shot taken at various events, sporting, charitable and monarchical, about to climb into a hot-air balloon, at the Ascot races and the Epsom Derby, suitably and grotesquely attired for each, signing a contract with a record company, or with another American movie-cum-fairground company, at the University of Oxford in some exotic ceremony involving colourful robes (a one-off occasion perhaps, I certainly never saw anything like it), shaking the hand of the Prime Minister and of various secondary figures and that of some spouse ennobled precisely by his or her conjugal status, at premieres, inaugurations, concerts, ballets, at vaguely aristocratic gatherings, encouraging talent in all the most eye-catching arts, those that bring with them audiences, performances and applause; and although he's always smiling and contented in the television report or documentary – a receding hairline that nevertheless fails to make his forehead appear any higher, instead it appears horizontal, elongated; very strong, invasive, almost equine teeth; an anomalous tan; a tempting suggestion of curls hovering above his collar and even slightly below it as a vestige of his plebeian roots; the right clothes for every occasion, but which always look usurped or even hired; his body imprisoned, toned and furious, as if at odds with itself – we all believe that Mulryan is quite right, and we have no difficulty imagining this wealthy man slapping members of his entourage (and, needless to say, bawling at his subordinates) as soon as he could be quite sure that he wasn't being filmed.
'That woman knows a lot or has seen a lot and has decided not to talk about it, I'm sure of that. Her problem or, more than that, her torment is that it is there before her all the time, the terrible things she has witnessed or that she knows about and her personal vow to say nothing. It's not as if she had one day made a resolution which had subsequently brought her peace, however dear that resolution cost her. It's not as if from then on she has been able to live with the acceptable tranquility of at least knowing what she wants – or, rather, doesn't want – to happen; that she has been able to stow those facts or that knowledge away in one corner of her mind, to deaden them, and gradually give them the consistency and configuration of dreams, which is what allows many people to live with the memory of atrocities and disappointments: by doubting, at least, from time to time, that they ever existed; by blurring them, wrapping them in the smoke of the accumulated years, and thus devaluing them. On the contrary, this woman thinks about it constantly, intensely, not only about what happened and has been proved to have happened, but about the fact that she must or chooses to keep silent. It's not that she's tempted to go back on her word (she would only say this inwardly, to herself); it isn't that she feels the decision she took is permanently provisional, it isn't that she's considering reneging on that decision and spends sleepless nights going over and over it. I would say that it's irrevocable, indeed, if you pressed me, I'd say more than irrevocable, because it has nothing to do with a commitment made. It's always as if she had taken the decision only yesterday. As if she were under the troubling influence of something eternally new and that never grows old, when it's likely that now it's all very remote, both what happened and her initial desire that it would never become public knowledge, or not, at least, because of her. I'm not referring to events relating to her profession, although there will be some such events that are equally safe, but to her private life: events that affected her and affect her every day, or that wound and infect her and provoke a fever in her every night, when she goes to bed. "No one will find out anything about it from me, not from me," she must think all the time, as if those previous experiences were there pulsating beneath her skin. As if they were still the nucleus of her existence and as if they still required her maximum attention, they will be the first thing to greet her when she wakes, the last thing she says good night to when she falls asleep. Don't get me wrong, though, there's nothing obsessive about this, her daily life is light and energetic; she's very open, not embittered at all. It's something quite different: a kind of loyalty to her own story. Such a woman would be of great service to many people, she's a perfect receptacle for secrets and therefore perfect for administering or distributing them too, she's completely reliable in that respect, precisely because she remains alert all the time and because, for her, everything is always alive and present. However remote in time her secret becomes, it never grows dim, and it would be the same with any secrets transmitted. She doesn't miss a single detail. Once the roles have been distributed, she would never forget who knows what and who doesn't. And I'm sure she remembers every face and every name that has passed before her bench,' says the young Pérez Nuix of a female judge of a certain age and with a bright, placid face, whom we are observing together from our hiding-place while Tupra and Mulryan ask respectful, devious questions, ladies are always offered tea in the afternoon, if, given their position and poise, they really are ladies, but not the gentlemen, unless they're bigwigs or could be influential in a particular matter, at most a cigarette (although never of the Pharaonic variety), and, exceptionally, an aperitif or a beer if it's that time of day and things are dragging on (there's a minibar concealed amongst the bookshelves); and despite her serene appearance and jovial expression – the warm smile; the very white but healthy complexion; the quick, bright, albeit very pale blue eyes; the dark shadows under her eyes, so deep and so becoming she must have had them since childhood; her ready, generous laughter, with just a hint of politeness, which, while it in no way impedes spontaneity, banishes any suggestion of flattery, of which there is not a trace; her amused awareness that Tupra feels for her a degree of desire, despite the unpropitious age-difference (a theoretical desire perhaps, or else retrospective or imaginary), because he can still see the young woman she was, or can sense it, and this is seen in turn by the woman who is no longer young, and it pleases and rejuvenates her – when I listen to young Nuix everything she says and describes seems plausible, because I, too, can see in that judge something akin to the excitement or vitality which comes from knowing an important secret that you have sworn never to divulge.
Naturally, young Nuix does not talk like this while both of us are watching and taking notes in the compartment, not so fluently or precisely (I am ordering it and shaping it now, as we all do when we talk about something, as well as complementing it with her subsequent written report), instead she makes occasional remarks to me across the table, they cannot see or hear us, although they know where we are, posted here by Tupra himself. And when I listen to her, I remember – I remember it every time, not just when she's interpreting this judge, Judge Walton – the words that Wheeler attributed to Tupra that Sunday: 'He says that in time she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough,' and each time I wonder if she isn't already the best, the most exacting and the most gifted, the one who takes the most risks and who sees more deeply than any of the five of us, young Pérez Nuix, with a Spanish father and English mother, brought up in London but as familiar as I am with her father's country (not for nothing has she spent every summer for the last twenty or so years in Spain), and completely bilingual, not like me, for me the language that always prevails is the one in which I first began to speak, just as Jacques will always be for me the name, because it is the one I first answered to and the one by which I was called by the person who most often called to me. Her smile, too, is warm, her laughter ready and generous, the smile and laughter of a young woman, and her eyes, too, are quick and lively, all the more for being dark brown and as yet unburdened by tenacious memories that will not go away. She must be about twenty-five, or perhaps two years older or one year younger, and when our eyes meet, across the table or in any other situation, I notice that Luisa and my children begin to fade, whereas the rest of the time they seem all too clear even though they're so far away, and even though children's faces change so much that they never have one fixed image; I realise that the image that is taking root or that predominates is the one in the most recent photos I brought with me to England, I carry them in my wallet like any good or bad father, and I look at them too. I notice also that, despite the difference in our ages, young Nuix does not rule me out; or perhaps I should use the conditional: I cannot rid myself of the idea that she has or has had some sexual bond with Tupra, although there is nothing to indicate this unequivocally, and they treat each other with deference and humour, and with a kind of reciprocal paternalism, perhaps that is the main indicator. (But I can't get rid of the idea, and I know that one does not compete with Tupra.) The idea that she doesn't or won't or wouldn't rule me out is something I see in her eyes, as I have in the eyes of other women over the last few years without once being mistaken – when you're young, you're more myopic and more astigmatic and more presbyopic, all at the same time – and I breathe it and hear it in the brief gathering of energy that takes place, out of shyness or some lurking embarrassment, before she comes over to talk to me, that is, beyond the initial greeting or the isolated question or answer, as if she had to gather momentum or take a run-up, or as if she mentally constructed the whole of her first sentence (which, oddly enough, is never short), as if she structured it and memorised the whole thing before pronouncing it. This is often what one does when speaking a foreign language, but when we are alone or in any private exchanges, this young woman and I, we always opt for Spanish, which is also her language.
And I was left in no doubt of this one morning when, in a situation in which she should, by rights, have been assailed by blushes, there was no sign at all of any lurking embarrassment. I had been given the keys to the building with no name, and, believing myself to be the first to arrive that morning on the floor we occupied (a bout of dawn insomnia had driven me out of the house to begin the day in earnest and to finish off a report I was writing), and believing therefore that I was the first to turn the key (the night-time bolts still undrawn), I was puzzled to hear noises and a gentle humming coming from one of the offices, the door of which I opened not violently exactly, but with verve and élan, with the vague idea of disconcerting the potential intruder, the early-rising spy or surreptitious burglar, and thus having the advantage if it came to a confrontation, although this seemed unlikely given the apparently tranquil humming. And then I saw her, young Nuix, standing by the desk, naked from the waist up and with a towel in the hand with which, just at that moment, she was drying one armpit, her arm raised. On her lower half, she was wearing a tight skirt, the skirt she had had on the day before, I always make a note of her clothes. I was so surprised by this vision (and yet, at the same time, not very surprised, perhaps not surprised at all: I knew it was a woman's voice doing the humming) that I did not do what I should have done, mutter a hurried apology and close the door, with me, of course, on the outside. It was only a matter of seconds, but I allowed those seconds to pass (one, two, three, four; and five) all the while looking at her with, I think, an expression that was part questioning, part appreciative and part falsely embarrassed (and therefore decidedly stupid), before saying 'Good morning' in an entirely neutral tone, that is, as if she was as fully dressed as I was, or almost, I still had my raincoat on. In a sense, I suppose, I behaved hypocritically as if nothing was amiss, and as if I had seen nothing; but I was helped in this – I would like to think – by the fact that young Nuix did exactly the same and also behaved as if nothing was wrong. For those few seconds in which I held the door open before withdrawing, she not only did not cover herself up, out of fear or modesty or, at the very least, surprise (she could easily have done so with the towel), she remained quite still, like a freeze-frame in a video, in exactly the same posture as when I had burst into the office, looking at me with a questioning but not remotely stupid expression, neither falsely nor truly embarrassed. All she did, though, was to cease her humming and her movement: she was rubbing herself dry with a towel, and she stopped doing that, the towel arrested at rib-height. And in that position she not only did not conceal her nakedness (which she didn't, not even as a reflex action), she kept her arm raised and thus allowed me to observe her armpit, and when a naked woman allows you to do that, uncovering one or both, it's as if she were offering up to you an additional nakedness. It was, of course, a clean, smooth and, I deduced, newly washed armpit, and, needless to say, shaved, without that awful bush of hair that some women insist on preserving nowadays as some strange protest against the traditional taste of men, or most men. 'Good morning,' she said in the same neutral tone. It was only a matter of seconds (five, six, seven, eight; and nine), but the calm and nonchalance with which we behaved during their passing reminded me of the time when my wife, Luisa, shortly after our son was born, stood stock-still half-way through getting undressed (her upper body bare, her breasts still swollen with milk, she was just about to go to bed) and answered some absurd questions I was asking her about our newborn child ('Do you think this child will always live with us, as long as he is a child or at least while he's still very young?'). She was getting undressed, in one hand she held the tights she had just removed, in the other the nightdress she was about to put on ('Of course he will, don't be so silly, who else would he live with?'; and she had added: As long as nothing happens to us, that is'), while young Nuix held in her hand the towel with which she did not even think of covering herself and, indeed, did not cover herself, and the other hand free and held up high, like a statue in antiquity. They were both half-naked ('What do you mean?' I had asked Luisa then), and the nakedness of one had nothing to do with that of the other (I mean as far as I was concerned, because clearly there was, objectively speaking, a resemblance): that of my wife was familiar to me and even customary, which doesn't mean I was indifferent to it, far from it, in fact, even in that fleeting, domestic moment, I glanced at her swollen breasts; but it was normal for us to go on talking as if it didn't matter, and not to interrupt our conversation because of it ('Nothing bad, I mean,' she had replied); that of my young work colleague was, on the other hand, new, unexpected, unprecedented, entirely unforeseen and even undeserved and, from my point of view, furtive, the product of a misunderstanding or of carelessness, and so I looked at her differently, not shamelessly or lasciviously but with an attention that sought both to discover and to memorise, with the apparently veiled eyes of the time we live in and that were always the norm in England, where we were living and where that mode of looking without looking and that way of not looking yet looking has been developed and honed to perfection, and from which I only ever saw one person almost escape or step free, and that was Tupra; and she allowed me to look without looking, she did nothing to prevent it, but neither was there shamelessness or exhibitionism in her eyes or in her attitude, and when she added something more, an explanation that was neither expected nor necessary, and which, despite being the first phrase she had addressed to me that day, did not appear to have been composed beforehand in her head ('I slept here, well, I didn't exactly sleep much, I spent the night wrestling with a particularly fiendish report'), her voice and her tone did not sound so very different from the tone and voice of the married existence I know so well. And so once the remaining seconds had elapsed (nine, ten, eleven and twelve: 'Oh, don't worry, I came in early to see if I can finish a report of my own,' I said in turn, not so much in order to explain myself, but more by way of a belated and implicit apology), I finally closed the door, with one resolute, almost hasty movement (I hadn't let go of the handle), and withdrew to my office, which was next door and which I shared with Rendel, she shared hers with Mulryan. Young Nuix belonged to a different generation, I told myself; I told myself that she probably spent the summers bare-breasted on the beaches and beside the swimming-pools of Spain, that she would be used to being seen like that and admired, her sense of modesty diminished. I also thought that we were compatriots and that when abroad that was almost the same as being related; it creates unusual complicities and solidarities and gives rise to baseless confidences, as well as to friendships and loves that would be unimaginable, almost aberrant, in the common country of origin (a friendship with De la Garza, Rafita, the great moron). But she was probably more English than Spanish, I mustn't forget that. Besides, I know very well that when a woman surprised in her nakedness makes no immediate attempt to cover herself up, even if only instinctively (unless, of course, she's a striptease artiste or something, and I've known a few in my time), it is because she does not rule out the person who has taken her by surprise and is now looking at her, and that goes for all living generations, or at least for the adults of those generations. It isn't that the woman feels attracted to that person or necessarily desires him, my theory would never entertain such ingenuous suppositions. It is simply that she does not rule him out, or does not exclude him, not entirely, and it is highly likely that it is only then that she finds out or realises, in that moment of being seen by someone and deciding not to cover herself up for him, always assuming, of course, that any decision is involved. Young Nuix's raised arm did not, in the end, remind me of the arm of a statue, at least not in my memory: instead I imagined her as if she were gripping the rail on a bus, or strap-hanging in the carriage of an underground train. There she remained, still holding tight, her arm in the air, when I closed the door and ceased seeing both her arm and the smooth armpit that set off the rest. She must have put it down immediately afterwards. It lasted twelve seconds in all. I did not count them at the time, only afterwards, in memory.
At the time, I didn't quite know what was meant by certain frequently used expressions, which cropped up in both written and oral reports, and even in the spontaneous and apparently trivial comments exchanged while studying photos or videos or the flesh-and-blood people that Tupra had invited or, as was often the case, summoned, or even, it occurred to me, ordered to come. If we were commissioned to do this work by others, if we had no interests of our own and were merely giving our opinions, airing our views and making judgements, I assumed that the people we observed and who could be 'useful' or 'not useful', 'of great service' or 'of no service' (I myself quickly picked up these expressions, and grew accustomed to the concept without actually understanding it, practice makes up for so many things, as does unreflective habit), would be designated as such by the commissioners of the various tasks, depending on their specific needs and their particular investigations or problems, which must be more varied than I had imagined to begin with, when Wheeler spoke to me about the past or prehistory of the group, as he called it in order not to call it anything, lacking as it did a real name ('You won't find anything about this in any books,' he had warned me, 'don't even bother consulting them, you'll just waste your time and your patience').
I rarely knew the source or origin of each commission, and it was rarely alluded to, I tended to think that all of them or the great majority came from official, state, governmental or administrative authorities within Britain, or, on a few occasions (given the remote or repeated nationalities of the subjects under study), from their equivalents in friendly countries or in countries which, out of self-interest or circumstance, were their allies: I was surprised how many Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Egyptians, Saudis and Americans crossed our screens, especially the last. Nor could I really explain why some of these people were being submitted to our vigilance and judgement (because that was the predominant feeling, that we were watching and judging them), especially when we were not questioned afterwards regarding any particular area or subject or characteristic. That woman, Judge Walton, for example. Neither Tupra or Mulryan or Rendel asked me any specific questions about her after my turn on watch (although perhaps they did ask young Nuix, who had caught so much of her character), and I found it hard to imagine what possible point there could be in watching, interpreting, deciphering, unravelling or unmasking a woman as decent, intelligent and solid as she seemed to be. At other times, the type of question gave me some idea as to what was going on, as to what it was they were after, Tupra, Mulryan, Rendel, Nuix, or, more likely, what the superior or inferior authorities – the clients – were after, the people who contracted them and made use of them, that is, of us and our supposed gift, of our presumed abilities, or perhaps, merely, of our audacity, which was always on the increase, always growing.
As the weeks passed and then the months, I gradually broadened the spectrum of my responses, as well as my sheer bare-faced cheek.
'Do you think this woman is being unfaithful, even though she swears she's not and there's not a scrap of proof?' Mulryan asked me of a well-dressed woman with a slightly hooked nose who was there in her living-room denying any such infidelity to her husband, the two of them sitting on a sofa in front of the television, which was on at the time, and who were clearly being filmed by a hidden camera, possibly installed in the set by her very own spouse (a man with a broad face and a propensity for smiling, even when, as at that moment, this was entirely inappropriate), who had presumably come to us for advice, because he felt he could no longer distinguish her honest tones from her deceitful ones, custom and cohabitation do sometimes tend to level these things out, a certain lacklustre quality, a certain lethargy overtake dialogues and responses, and there comes a day when the important and the insignificant, the true and the false, all receive the same scant degree of emphasis.
'Yes, I think she is,' I replied. 'Her denial was too brazen, too eloquent, almost sarcastic. For all her gesticulating, his question didn't really take her by surprise. She wasn't offended by it either. She had been expecting this to happen for some time and had her response ready, had learned the words she was going to use almost by heart, had rehearsed precisely the tone and expression she would use when she spoke them. Not in front of the mirror, perhaps, but mentally. Her imagination was so imbued with it beforehand, all she had to do was to activate it. She was almost longing for the unpleasant moment to arrive.'
'You think. You think. Is that all, Jack? Or are you sure?' insisted Mulryan, ignoring what we all know: that no one can be sure of anything, unless they have acted or taken part or been a witness (and on many occasions, not even that: the drop of blood).
'I'm sure in so far as my sureness is based on what I see and perceive, on what you give me,' was my convoluted reply, a last attempt to protect my back slightly and not dive headfirst into further boldnesses. 'For example, she said she found his suspicions "hysterically funny". She wouldn't have used that adverb if she hadn't already considered, chosen, foreseen it. Nor would she if they really did strike her as funny. In that case, she wouldn't have used any adverb, or, at most, a more everyday one, like "terribly", less emphatic, less mocking. And if the accusation was false, she wouldn't have described it as "exhilarating", nor would she have lowered herself so much as to say how she, "little me", wished she could arouse the desires of other men. Few women, regardless of their age or physique, really and truly believe that they cannot still arouse someone's desire. I'm referring here to the wealthy, of course, to which class this lady apparently belongs. They might pretend that they believe it, they might complain in public so that others can contradict or reaffirm them, they might wonder to themselves and even doubt it in rare moments of depression or following a rejection. Rarely more than that. They soon recover from that kind of depression. They soon put the rejection down to a heart already taken, that usually provides them with a decorous, acceptable explanation.' – 'Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd,' I said to myself. And I thought: 'A bit of an exaggeration.' – 'And if they do one day believe it, they don't talk about it. Least of all to their partner.'
'But he believed her,' Mulryan objected or pointed out.
'Then he needs to be cured of his credulity,' I replied with more aplomb now. 'He can always choose to ignore our verdict, he can always tell us where to stick our verdict, assuming that the verdict is intended for him, assuming he's the one who commissioned it.' – By then, I knew that, during the sessions, there was no need to be overly careful with one's vocabulary. – 'But she's being unfaithful to him, I'll stake my life on it.' You always ended up putting your head on the block. Perhaps it was simply provoked pride, perhaps you really did see things more clearly as you talked; or convinced yourself that you did. Speaking is so dangerous. It isn't just that others can then no longer help but take account of what you've said. It's also that you yourself feel obliged to believe it, once it is there, floating in the air and not just in your head, where everything can still be ruled out. Once it has been heard and has gone on to form part of the knowledge of those other people, who can now make use of it and appropriate it, and even use it against us.
Or it could have been Tupra questioning me in his cosy office, the morning after a celebrity supper I had been drafted into as a guest – 'An old Spanish friend of mine who's just flown in, a real artist, I couldn't possibly leave him all alone in his hotel room': 'Being an artist is the perfect passport nowadays,' he used to say, 'because it doesn't commit you to anything, you can be an artist in any field, be it interior design, footwear, the stock market, tiling or confectionery' – because a couple of my compatriots were also going to be there – the man was an artist in the world of finance, and the woman in the world of theatre – whom he wanted me to entertain, at the same time finding out a little about our host, while Tupra took care of the host himself and a few other major British players:
'Tell me, Jack, what did you think of our buffoon of a host last night, yes, that ridiculous singer, do you think he would be capable of killing someone? In some extreme situation, for example, if he felt really threatened? Or would he be simply incapable of it, would he be the sort who would just give in and allow himself to be knifed to death, rather than get his blow in first? Or, on the contrary, do you think he could kill, even in cold blood?'
I paused to think for a moment, I never now answered straight off 'I don't know; how could I possibly know that?', I never replied like that to any question, however strange or convoluted or fantastical or overly precise, not even one as arcane as that, after all, who knows who would be capable of killing, or when, and whether in hot or cold or lukewarm blood. And yet I always ventured some answer, trying to be honest, that is, trying to see something before actually saying it, and avoiding talking for talking's sake, or simply because I was expected to talk. I tried at least to place myself in the situation or the hypothesis thrown at me by every question asked by my superiors or my colleagues. And the strangest or most terrifying thing was that I always managed to see or glimpse something (I mean I didn't invent it, they weren't visions or mere cunning tales), and therefore was able to suggest something, that is doubtless the process by which audacity advances, and so much depends on practice, on pushing yourself. Most people are limited by their own lack of persistence, because they are lazy or too easily satisfied, and also because they are afraid. Most people will go only so far and then apply the brakes, they suddenly stop and sit down to recover from the fright or else drop asleep, which is why they always fall short. Someone has an idea and normally that one idea is enough, they pause, pleased with that first thought or discovery and do not continue thinking, or, if they're writing, do not continue writing more profoundly, they do not drive themselves onwards; they feel satisfied with that first fissure or not even that: with the first cut, with piercing a single layer of people and events, intentions and suspicions, truths and quackery, the times we live in are the enemy of inner dissatisfaction and, therefore, of constancy, they are organised so that everything quickly palls and our attention becomes frolicsome and erratic, distracted by the mere passing of a fly, people cannot bear sustained investigation or perseverance, to immerse themselves properly in something in order to find out about that something. The prolonged gaze, Tupra's gaze, the gaze that ends up affecting everything it gazes at, is not permitted. Nowadays, eyes that linger offend, which is why they have to hide behind curtains and binoculars and telephoto lenses and remote cameras, to spy from their thousands of screens.
In one respect – but only one – Tupra reminded me of my father, who never allowed us, my siblings and me, to be satisfied with what appeared to be a dialectical victory in our debates, or a success in explaining ourselves. 'What else,' he would say when we had assumed, exhausted, that an exposition or an argument was over. And if we replied: 'Nothing. That's it. Isn't that enough?', he would reply, to our momentary wild despair: 'Why, you haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking. Having an idea, or identifying it, is something, but then again, once absorbed, it's almost nothing: it's like arriving at the first, most elementary level, which, it's true, is more than most people ever do. But the really interesting and difficult thing, the thing that can prove both truly worthwhile and very hard work, is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking beyond what is purely necessary, when you have the feeling that there is no more to think and no more to see, that the sequence is complete and that to continue would be a waste of time. In that wasted time lies the truly important, in the gratuitous and apparently superfluous, beyond the limit where you feel satisfied, or where you get tired or give up, often without even realising it. At the point where you might say to yourself there can't be anything else. So tell me, what else, what else occurs to you, what else can you bring to the argument, what else can you offer, what else have you got? Go on thinking, quickly now, don't stop, go on.'
Tupra did the same, by pointing out inadequacies, as he had ever since that first meeting with Soldier Bonanza, with his 'What else?', 'Explain that, will you,' 'Tell me what you think,' 'Why do you think that?', 'Go on,' 'Talk to me about those details,' 'Anything else?,' 'Is that all you noticed?' It was a gentle, measured tenacity, by which he nevertheless extracted everything you had thought or seen, even the dream or shadow of thoughts and images, what was not yet formulated or delineated and therefore not entirely thought or seen, but only sketched or intuited or still implicit, still unrecognisable and phantasmagoric, like the sculpture enclosed in the block of marble or the poems contained almost in their entirety by grammar books and dictionaries. He managed to make the illusory acquire speech and put on flesh. And find expression. Sometimes it felt to me like an act of faith on his part: faith in my abilities, in my perspicacity, in my supposed gift, as if he were sure that with just the right degree of insistence – guided by it, trained by it – I would always provide him at last with the drawing or the text, present him with the portrait he wanted from me, or needed.
Yes, that, more or less, was how it was, if the report I read about myself was authentic, and I had no reason to believe it wasn't. I came across it one morning while looking something up in one of the old filing-cabinets. What was not intended for everyone's eyes must have been kept and stored there rather than on computer, so insecure and unprotected. I saw my name, 'Deza, Jacques', and pulled out the file without even thinking about it. It was dated a couple of months after my first intervention (well, that's how I saw it), after my interpretation of Conscript Bonanza and the subsequent interrogation regarding my impressions of the man, and it wasn't really a proper report, just a few jottings, possibly handwritten – possibly made by Tupra himself – as a result of who knows what actions or interpretations on my part, although someone had clearly judged them of sufficient worth to be filed away and had had them transcribed on to a computer or typewriter – perhaps he had taken the trouble to do this himself. I read them quickly, then buried them again. No one had ever told me not to consult those old files, but I had the distinct feeling that it would be best if I was not found reading things that had been written about me and which I had not been shown. It was a brief report, a few impressionistic notes really, not at all systematic or organised, a bit confused and contradictory, almost indecisive. This, more or less, is what it said:
It's as if he didn't know himself very well. He doesn't think much about himself, although he believes that he does (albeit without great conviction). He doesn't see himself, doesn't know himself, or, rather, he doesn't delve into or investigate himself. Yes, that's it: it isn't that he doesn't know himself, merely that this is a kind of knowledge that doesn't interest him and which he therefore barely cultivates. He doesn't examine himself, he would see this as a waste of time. Perhaps it doesn't interest him because it's all water under the bridge; he has little curiosity about himself. He just takes himself for granted, or assumes he knows himself. But people change. He doesn't bother recording or analysing his changes, he's not up to date with them. He's introspective. And yet the more he appears to be looking in, the more he is, in fact, looking out. He's only interested in the external, in others, and that is why he sees so clearly. But his interest in people has nothing to do with wanting to intervene in their lives or to influence them, nor with any utilitarian aim. He may not care very much what happens to anyone. Not that he wouldn't regret or celebrate what happened, he's a caring person, not indifferent to others, but always in a rather abstract way. Or perhaps it's just that he's very stoical, about other people's lives and his own. Things happen and he makes a mental note, not for any particular reason, usually without even feeling greatly concerned most of the time, still less implicated. Perhaps that is why he notices so many things. So few escape him that it's almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows. About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do. About our characters I mean. Or, more than that, about what shaped us. With a knowledge to which we are not a party. He judges little. The oddest thing of all is that he makes no use of his knowledge. It's as if he were living a parallel theoretical life, or a future life that was awaiting its turn in the dressing-room. Waiting for its moment in another existence. And as if all the discoveries, perceptions, opinions and verifications ended up there. And not in his present, real existence. Even what does affect him, even his own experiences and disappointments seem to split into two parts, and one of the two is destined for that merely theoretical or future knowledge of his. Enriching it, nourishing it. Not, strangely enough, with a view to anything. Not at least to anything in this real life of his that does move forward. He makes no use of his knowledge, it's very odd. But he has it. And if he did one day make use of it, he would be someone to be feared. He'd be pretty unforgiving I think. Sometimes he seems to me to be a complete enigma. And sometimes I think he's an enigma to himself. Then I go back to the idea that he doesn't know himself very well. And that he doesn't pay much attention to himself because he's given up understanding himself. He considers himself a lost cause upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought. He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will. And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so. I don't think he's dangerous. But he is to be feared.
To be honest, all this left me fairly cold, although it did make me think that somewhere there must be a proper file on me, with dates and information, verifiable facts and detailed characteristics, along with my conventional CV (or, who knows, my unconfessable one), and with rather less ethereal and unverifiable observations and descriptions. There must be files on all of us, it would have been strange if there weren't, and I promised myself that I would one day quietly seek them out, those on Rendel and young Nuix might be of interest to me, though not so much Mulryan's; and Tupra's, of course, assuming he had a file. Before closing the drawer, I rested my thumb on the upper edge of the files and riffled through a few of them, not too quickly, just out of curiosity, stopping occasionally at random. I came across some very famous entries: 'Bacon, Francis', 'Blunt, Sir Anthony', 'Caine, Sir Michael (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite), 'Clinton, William Jefferson "Bill"', 'Coppola, Francis Ford', 'Le Carré, John (David Comwell)', 'Richard, Keith (The Rolling Stones)', 'Straw, Jack' (the British Foreign Minister, formerly Home Secretary, the one who so shamelessly let Pinochet go, he was the person I needed information on that morning, about his improper past), 'Thatcher, Margaret Hilda, Baroness'. Those were the files that my thumb stopped at, some were already dead. A lot of other names meant nothing, being unknown to me: 'Booth, Thomas', 'Dearlove, Richard', 'Marriott, Roger (Alan Dobson)', 'Pirie-Gordon, Sarah Jane', 'Ramsay, Margaret "Meta", Baroness', 'Rennie, Sir John', 'Skelton, Stanyhurst (Marius Kociejowski)', 'Truman, Ronald', 'West, Nigel (Rupert Allason)', my gaze fell on them, how many people there were who called themselves by other names, and I have an excellent memory for names.
It was pleasing that, in such company, they should take so much trouble over me; that they should want to get to the bottom of me, that they should take notice. The thing I found most intriguing was the moment in the report when the writer or thinker, whoever it was, openly addressed another person, indicating that his impressions or conjectures were directed at someone in particular: About me, about you, about her', he said. 'He knows more about us than we ourselves do,' and, by a process of elimination, I thought that young Nuix must be 'her', although I couldn't be absolutely sure. But who was that 'you', who was that 'I'? There were various possibilities, but there was no way I could find out. Nor could I imagine who it was, therefore, who believed I should be feared, that too struck me as very odd, because I didn't myself believe it at the time. (Unless the 'I', 'you' and 'her' were metaphorical, hypothetical, interchangeable, as if the expression had been 'It's almost frightening to imagine what he knows, how much he sees and how much he knows. About Tom, Dick or Harry.') Needless to say these notes were unsigned, like all the others in the file, or at least those in that drawer. They seemed to have been written rapidly, judging from the brief time I dared to spend looking at them, when my thumb lingered over some: the notes on me were as vague and speculative as were those devoted to ex-President Clinton or to Mrs Thatcher, which I glanced through quickly.
'Yes, I think he could,' I replied, having given a few seconds' thought to Tupra's questions regarding the host of that celebrity supper (the host was himself a singer-celebrity, I'll call him Dick Dearlove, one of the unknown or unlikely names I had seen in the file, and who, I learned, was a very high-ranking, very important civil servant in some ministry or other, I had only read a couple of lines about him, but with a surname like that he should really have been a great idol of the masses treading the boards of a thousand stages, like our ex-dentist singer-host). 'In a dangerous situation, he would, of course, get his blow in first, if he had the chance. Or even beforehand, I mean before the risk to his own life was imminent and certain. The mere suggestion of a grave threat would turn him into a man of excess, render him almost uncontrollable. He would, I believe, be quick to react violently. Or, rather, he would anticipate that violence: I don't know if the saying exists in English, but in Spanish we say that he who gives first gives twice. But that wouldn't be the reason, he wouldn't react in a calculating fashion, or out of bravery, or even out of nerves or, strictly speaking, panic. He's so pleased with his own biography and with the life he leads, so astonished and proud of what he has achieved and continues to achieve (he can't as yet see it ending), his fairy-tale is turning out so picture-perfect that he couldn't bear for it all to be destroyed in a matter of seconds, prematurely, by mistake and through bad luck, through recklessness or some unfortunate encounter. It's the idea he couldn't bear. Let's say burglars got into his house, ready for anything; or if he was mugged in the street; no, he wouldn't ever walk down a street. Let's say his car broke down while he was driving through a really rough area, that it conked out late one night as he was returning from his country house, alone at the wheel or accompanied by a bodyguard, he probably always has at least one with him, he wouldn't go a hundred yards without some protection. And that the moment they stepped out they were surrounded by a large, aggressive, armed gang, a band of desperadoes against whom two men could do nothing, especially when one of them was accustomed only to being flattered and pampered and to a complete absence of nasty surprises.'
'They would immediately call for help on their mobile phones or would already have done so on the car phone, to the police or whoever,' Tupra said, interrupting me. It amused me the ease with which he joined in or participated in my fantasies. I think he rather enjoyed listening to me.
'Let's say that the car phone died at the same time as the car did, and that their other phones were out of range, or had been taken off them before they had time to use them. I don't know about in England, but in Spain that's the very first thing criminals steal, they go for your mobile first and then your wallet, and that's why all muggers, even the really pathetic ones still clutching a needle in one trembling hand, all have mobiles. You won't see a single pickpocket in Madrid, or even a beggar, who hasn't got his own mobile phone.'
'Really,' said Tupra, tempted to smile. He was familiar with my exaggerations, and did not really disapprove of them.
'Yes, really. Just go to Madrid and you'll see that I'm right. Well, in that situation, if Dearlove was carrying a knife, or even a pistol (he'd be quite capable of owning one, licence and all), he would probably start shooting or lashing out without even trying to negotiate and without gauging the precise nature of the threat, the degree of the desperadoes' desperation or hatred, they might well turn out to be admirers of his who, when they recognise him, would end up asking for his autograph, it could happen, you can't overestimate his popularity. He's a huge star in Spain as well, especially, as you may or may not know, in the Basque Country.'
'I can imagine. Nowadays any buffoon is guaranteed universal acclaim,' said Tupra. 'Go on.' At the time, he used to call me Jack, although I still called him Mr Tupra.
'What Dearlove could not bear,' obviously I didn't call him Dearlove, but by his real name, 'is that his life should end like that; in short, he would find the manner of his death almost more unbearable than death itself. He would, of course, be terrified to see his successful existence truncated and to lose his life, as would anyone, even if that life had been a failure; what's more, I don't, as I said, believe him to be a brave man, he would be terribly afraid. What most horrifies Dearlove, though, as it does other show-business people (although they may not know it), is that the end of his story should be such that it overshadows and darkens the life he's lived and accumulated up until now, eclipsing it, almost erasing and cancelling out the rest and, in the end, becoming the only fact that counts and will be recounted. If he were capable of killing (and I believe he is), that would be the reason, narrative disgust, if I can put it like that. You see, Mr Tupra, if someone like him were killed by a group of criminals in Clapham or Brixton, or, even more conspicuously, if he was lynched, that kind of death would create such a scandal, it would so shock the world, that it would be brought up every time his name was mentioned, on every occasion and in every circumstance, even if they were talking about him for some other reason, because of his contribution to the popular music of his time or to the history and heyday of buffoons, or because of the vast fortune he amassed with his voice or as one of the more worrying examples of mass hysteria. It would make no difference, they would still always mention the tale of how he was lynched in Brixton due to some awful misunderstanding, or in Clapham one fateful night along with his best bodyguard, or at the hands of a few unspeakably cruel felons from Streatham. A time would come, indeed, when that would be all that was remembered of him. Mothers would even use it to scold their children with when they strayed into the wilder parts of town or into other dodgy areas: "Just you remember what happened to Dick Dearlove, and he was famous and had a bodyguard with him." A real posthumous curse, for someone like him I mean.'
Tupra, who was smiling broadly now, improved on this by saying: 'Remember Dickie Dearlove, darlin', and 'ow they did 'im in,' adopting a cockney accent (or possibly a half-educated South London accent, I can't really tell the difference) and putting on a mother's voice. 'Good grief, I'm sure he could never in his life imagine a more sordid epitaph for himself. Not even in his most humiliating nightmares. What else, though, go on.'
'I don't know if such a phobia has ever been recorded, or if it has a rather less pedantic name than the one I gave it. Dearlove himself, of course, would never use such terms. He wouldn't even understand what I was talking about, I might as well be speaking Greek. And yet that is what it is: narrative horror or disgust; a dread of having his story ruined by the ending, wrecked forever, destroyed, of its complete ruination by a finale too spectacular for the world's taste and hateful to himself; of the irreparable damage done to his story, of a stain so powerful and voracious that it would spread and spread until it had, retrospectively, wiped out everything else. Dearlove would be capable of killing in order to avoid such a fate. Or such an aesthetic, dramaturgical or narrative doom, as you prefer. I'm sure he would be capable of killing for that reason. At least so I believe.' When I finished, I would sometimes retreat a little, shrink back, not that it made any difference, I had spoken, I had said my piece.
'You'll all end up like Dick Dearlove, every one of you,' said Tupra, pursuing his imitation for a while longer, laughing briefly and wagging an admonitory finger. Then he added: 'The only thing is, Jack, that someone like him would never drive through Clapham or Brixton, either to enter the city or leave it.'
'All right, but he could get lost, take the wrong motorway exit and end up there high and dry, couldn't he? It does happen. I saw something similar in a film called Grand Canyon, have you seen it?'
'I don't go to the cinema much, unless obliged to by my work. I used to, when I was young. But I'm afraid you haven't quite grasped the economic level of these people, Jack. For short trips Dearlove probably travels around in a helicopter. And for longer trips he uses his private jet, with an entourage that would make the queen's look positively puny.' He fell silent for a moment, as if recalling a journey made in just such a private plane. Tupra was always very scornful of Dearlove and similar figures, but the fact is that he mixed on occasions with quite a few of them, from the worlds of television, fashion, pop music and cinema, and whenever I had seen him with them, he had always appeared to treat them with easy sympathy and trust. Sometimes I wondered if these contacts, difficult to achieve for most people, were provided from on high, as part of his job and to make his work easier. Naturally, I never knew exactly what his job was. On the other hand, he never seemed uncomfortable in the company of even the most frivolous of celebrities. It could just be part of his training, of his trade, it didn't necessarily mean he enjoyed it. The truth is that he never seemed uncomfortable in any social situation, with the brainy or the serious, with the pretentious or the idiotic, with the marginalised or with the simple, he was clearly a man who adapted to whatever was required of him. Then he returned to the subject: 'Tell me, do you think he would be capable of killing in any other circumstance, apart from one in which he saw that his life might not only be in danger, but also, according to you… called into question? You may be right, he might well be horrified to think that his end could prove ugly, inappropriate, onerous, humiliating, sarcastic, turbulent, dirty…'
'I don't know,' I replied, slightly put out by his realistic rigour, and I immediately regretted having spoken those words, the words most guaranteed to disappoint in that building, or the most despised. I quickly covered them up. 'That seems to me the principal motive, but I suppose it wouldn't be necessary for his life to be in danger, if, as I believe, he is, in a sense, more concerned with his history, with the story of his life than with that life itself. Although he is probably unaware of this. That priority has, I believe, less to do with any future or present biographers than with his need to retell the story to himself every day, to live with it. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear.'
'No, not entirely, Jack. Be more precise, please. Try a bit harder. Don't get yourself in such a tangle.'
Such comments spurred me on, a slight infantilism on my part, from which I've never managed to free myself and probably never will.
'He likes his image, he likes his story as a whole, even the odontological phase; he never loses sight of it, never forgets it.' I was trying to be more precise. 'He always has in his mind his entire trajectory: his past as well as his future. He sees himself as a story, whose ending he must take care of, but whose development he must not neglect either. It isn't that he will allow no upsets or weaknesses or stains in his story, he's not that naive. However, these must be of a kind that do not stand out too stridently, that do not inevitably leap out at him (a horrible protuberance, a lump) when, each morning, he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks about "Dick Dearlove" as a whole, as an idea, or as if he were the title of a novel or a film, which has, moreover, already achieved the status of a classic. It has nothing to do with morality or with shame, that's not it, indeed most people find it easy enough to look themselves in the face, they always find excuses for their own excesses, or deny that they are excesses; bad consciences and selfless regret have no place in our times, I'm speaking of something else. He sees himself from outside, almost exclusively from outside, he has no difficulty admiring himself. And perhaps the first thing he says when he wakes up is something like: "Goodness, it wasn't a dream: I am Dick Dearlove, no less, and I have the privdege of talking and living with that legend on a daily basis." This isn't really so very rare, whether you leave the word "legend" in or take it out. It has been known for writers who have won the Nobel prize to spend what remains of their life thinking all the time: "I'm a Nobel prizewinner, I won the Nobel Prize, and, my, how I shone in Stockholm," sometimes even saying this out loud, they've been overheard doing so by their anxious loved ones. But I know quite a lot of other people of no objective significance or fame, who, nevertheless, perceive themselves in just such a way, or similarly, and who watch their life as if they were at the theatre. A permanent theatre, of course, repetitive and monotonous ad nauseam, which does not scant on detail or on even two seconds of tedium. But those people are the most benevolent and easily pleased of spectators, not for nothing are they also the author, actor and protagonist of their respective dramatic works (dramatic is just a manner of speaking). This form of living and seeing oneself has become fact on the Internet. I understand that some people even earn money showing every soporific, wretched moment of their existences, endlessly filmed by a fixed camera. The astonishing, intellectually sick, seriously unhealthy thing is that there are people willing to watch this, and who even pay to do so; I mean spectators who are not also the authors, actors and protagonists, whose behaviour is not entirely anomalous or even incomprehensible.'
'Come on, Iago, please: get to the point. I get lost in your digressions. When do you think Dearlove would be most likely to bump someone off?'
Tupra was, of course, perfectly capable of following my digressions, he never got lost, even if he wasn't much interested in what he was hearing, although I don't think he did get bored with me, you can tell when you've got the attention of the people listening to you, not for nothing was I a teacher, although those classes are now moving further and further away in time. He would sometimes call me Iago, the classical form of my name, when he wanted to annoy me or force me to concentrate. He knew that Wheeler referred to me as Jacobo and probably didn't dare attempt the pronunciation, and so he placed my name somewhere half-way along the road, in familiar Shakespearean mode, possibly with some mocking undertone, I couldn't rule that out. Of course Tupra could follow me, but he would sometimes pretend that the traditional aversion to the speculative and theoretical, inherent in the education and mind of the English, prevented him from accompanying me very far on my digressions. He was not only following everything, he was recording it, filing it away, retaining it. And he was quite capable of appropriating it for himself.
'Sorry, Mr Tupra, I didn't mean to get diverted,' I said; I was still well behaved then. 'Well, they say that Dearlove is bisexual, or pentasexual, or pansexual, I don't know, but very highly sexed anyway, sex-mad, they hint at it all the time in the press. And last night he did seem rather overexcited when he slipped on his green gown and insisted on sorting out Mrs Thompson's tooth decay. Although he would doubtless have preferred to be rooting around in her young son's mouth. It was a shame for Dr Dearlove, I suppose, that the boy refused to oblige, however sweetly he insisted. They also say that he's very fond of… of the newly pubescent, shall we say.'
'They do say that,' replied Tupra gravely, but barely bothering to conceal the fact that he found all this highly amusing. 'And?'
'Well, supposing a minor, male or female, it doesn't matter, laid a trap for him. If my information is correct, he happily allows these rumours to spread, as long as they are only that, rumours. I imagine it's not a bad way of airing them: by ignoring them, by not even admitting their existence with denials and lawsuits and complaints. As I understand it, he has never said a word about his sexual predilections. Besides, everyone knows he's been married, twice, admittedly both marriages were childless, but that, nevertheless, is what he holds on to, officially at least.'
'More or less. I don't know much about that aspect of his life.'
'Anyway, suppose a minor, male or female, slipped a sleeping-pill into his drink. While they were at it, both of them stark naked. Suppose the minor takes some photos of him while he's off in Limbo, the boy or the girl also gets in on the shot, of course, puts the camera on automatic and takes charge of the stage direction, with our ex-dentist a limp rag-doll in his or her hands. Let's say, however, that the pill doesn't prove strong enough for the titanic Dr Dearlove: that an inner sense of alarm helps him pull himself together. So that he either doesn't fall very deeply asleep or else wakes up early. With one eye half-open he sees what's happening. With a quarter of his conscious mind he takes in the situation, or with even only a tenth part of it. It's not that he's puritanical in his attitudes or public declarations, that would lose him fans; he's quite daring, really, although he's careful never to go too far, he defends the legalisation of drugs, responsible euthanasia, the kind of cause that won't lose him any fans. But the appearance of such photos in the press belongs to an entirely different sphere, as would his knifing by thugs from Brixton, Clapham or Streatham. Exactly the same, I think you'll agree. Even though in one situation he would be the vile, despicable offender and in the other the poor, pitiful, much-mourned victim. As regards the effect on his narrative, they're not so very different, both are protuberances. In this case it wouldn't be an ending, the kiss of sleep and the photos I mean, but it would be an episode that would always have a place in his history, that could never be avoided in the story or in the idea of Dick Dearlove. And given the way the public feels about child abuse, it could lead to prison and an embarrassing trial. And even if he was absolved afterwards, the accusation alone and its reverberations, the images seen and repeated thousands of times, the scandal and the grave suspicions that will have lasted for months, could also end up as a warning used by mothers to their adolescent offspring: "Mind who you mix with, dear, you might end up with a Dick Dearlove." That's the trouble with being so famous: lose concentration for a moment and you could become the subject of a ballad.'
'You're very well informed about the buffoon. Even about his opinions; very impressive,' said Tupra wryly.
'As I say, he's almost as much of a superstar in Spain as he is here. He's given loads of concerts there. It would be hard not to know about him.'
'I always had the impression that the Basques were a very austere people, in the present context I mean,' he added, genuinely surprised. He never missed anything or forgot anything.
Austere? Well, that depends. There's no shortage of buffoons either. The leader sets the tone, you know. Like in Lombardy. Or anywhere else in Italy for that matter. Not to mention Venezuela; remember our friend Bonanza.'
'Well, we're not far behind,' he said, and that shocked me a little, for no reason really: I didn't know exactly who Tupra worked for (that is, who we worked for), I only had Wheeler's hints to go on and my own unreflective deductions. 'The kiss of sleep you called it.'
'Yes, that's how the trick is known in Spain, it's used mainly as a ruse to strip the sleeping person's house of all its valuables. That's what the media call it.'
'H'm, the kiss of sleep, not bad.' He liked the name. 'So what would happen with Dearlove. He wakes with a kiss, and only half an eye open. And then what?'
'Something outrageous, anything. That's what I was coming to. He could also kill in a situation like that, I mean, that's just a possible example, there would be others. Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material for some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and during the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit element of threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the rush of blood to the face, a snub, that least of all. Dearlove cannot abide that feeling of repugnance, that anxiety, he cannot cope with that vertigo, and when he succumbs to those feelings, when the fit is upon him, then he no longer thinks. When he half-opens his eye and realises what is going on, it probably won't even occur to him to try and acquire the photos, to offer more for them than any tabloid newspaper would ever pay, to reach an agreement with the boy or the girl, to negotiate, to bribe, to deceive, to hire their services forever. His fortune, if he has both a plane and a helicopter, would allow him to buy them ten thousand, a hundred thousand times over, in body, in bondage and in soul.'
'But he wouldn't do that, you say. What would he do, then? According to you, what would he do next?'
'The same as he would with the knife-wielding thugs from Brixton, I think. He would misjudge things. He would throw caution to the wind. He would try to kill them, he would kill them. He would kill the minor, male or female, whom he had taken to his house that night. A heavy ashtray kills, it shatters the skull. A jug, a paperweight, a letter-opener, anything can kill, not to mention the swords and spears with which he has adorned that wall in his living-room, the long wall next to the dining-room where we had supper; I imagine you noticed them last night.'
'I did,' said Tupra. 'It might not have been my first time there, you know.'
'No, of course. Yes, it figures that Dearlove would be a devotee of the medieval, of things Celtic and semi-magical. Of fantasy chic. This is what I imagine would happen: despite still feeling very groggy from the pill he was given, or perhaps precisely because he is still groggy, he draws strength from the terrible fright he has had and staggers over to that wall; he accepts as clear, established fact that this terrible narrative protuberance will live with him forever because of these images treacherously taken of him, and, in his mental fog, this is what permits or empowers him to be angry and immoderate. And so he takes down one of those spears and with it pierces the chest of the girl or boy and destroys the flesh he had earlier desired, without thinking about the consequences, not at that moment. At such times, men like him do not see, they do not see what only three minutes later will become obvious to them: that it is less difficult to get rid of a few photos than it is to get rid of a corpse, less arduous to cover someone's mouth than to clean up their many pints of spilt blood. I've known men like that, men who were nobody and yet who had that same immense fear of their own history, of what might be told and what, therefore, they might tell too. Of their blotted, ugly history. But, I insist, the determining factor always comes from outside, from something external: all this has little to do with shame, regret, remorse, self-hatred, although these might make a fleeting appearance at some point. These individuals only feel obliged to give a true account of their acts or omissions, good or bad, brave, contemptible, cowardly or generous, if other people (the majority, that is) know about them, and those acts or omissions are thus incorporated into what is known about them, that is, into their official portraits. It isn't really a matter of conscience, but of performance, of mirrors. One can easily cast doubt on what is not reflected in mirrors, and believe that it was all illusory, wrap it up in a mist of diffuse or faulty memory and decide finally that it didn't happen and that there is no memory of it, because there can be no memory of what did not take place. Then it will no longer torment them: some people have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what happened didn't happen and that what didn't exist did. For Dick Dearlove, the worst thing, the unbearable thing, would not be bumping off a mugger or a deceitful adolescent, but that people might find out, that the fact would remain attached (so to speak) to his file. Even in the midst of his confusion at the moment of the homicide, he perhaps knows that it might, albeit with enormous difficulty, be possible to conceal it. Not, on the other hand, his own death at the hands of savages, or photos of him naked with a young boy or a nymphette, once they have been printed and universally admired.' – I stopped for a moment. I thought, as I always did at the end of my interpretations or reports, that I had gone too far. And that I had again got caught up in digressions. It also occurred to me that I probably wasn't telling Tupra anything he didn't know already. He doubtless knew the score about such individuals, perhaps even as regards Dearlove, from previous visits, or, who knows, from plane journeys made together (Tupra as part of Dearlove's entourage, mingling with the other guests, the supervisors, the newly pubescent and the bodyguards). Perhaps he was not so much learning from what I was telling him as studying me. 'I've known men like that, Mr Tupra, of all ages, everywhere,' I added, as if apologising. 'You have too, I'm sure. We both have.'
'Cigarette, Jack?' he said. And he offered me one of the Pharaonic variety from his flashy red packet. It was a gesture of appreciation, at least that was how I understood it.
And I thought, or kept thinking: 'I've known Comendador, for example. Since forever.'
On that stubbornly rainy night in London, I decided to experiment by stopping suddenly, by coming to an abrupt halt without any warning in order to find out whether or not that light, almost imperceptible sound was coming from me, tis, tis, tis, whether it was the soft steps of a dog or the rustle of my raincoat as I walked briskly along, the shaking of my umbrella or the skulking step of some dubious character who did not come near and did not reveal himself, but who, nevertheless, persisted in following me – or accompanying me in parallel, at a distance of a few yards – if he should finally make up his mind, he still had time to think about it before I reached my house and opened the door and, before going in, furled my umbrella and shook it hard (a few more drops to add to the improvised lakes and miniature streams of the city streets), and then closed the door rapidly behind me, impatient to be upstairs, in my temporary home which was becoming ever more like a refuge and ever more mine, so that now it almost soothed me to go up the stairs and shut myself in and from my third-floor apartment – safe from questions and answers, from talk – to contemplate the square, with its murmuring trees in the middle, which seemed to accompany every meek surrender and rebellion of the mind; and the lights of the families or the other single people opposite (my fellows), the elegant hotel always lit up and lively, like a silent stage or like the pan shot in a film that never changed and never ended, the vast office blocks in repose now and guarded, from a cabin, by a night security guard who yawns as he listens to his radio, his cap pushed back on his head, the peak raised, and, in the darkness, the zigzagging, fugitive beggars who emerge to do their rummaging, and whose stiff clothes seem to emanate ashes, or perhaps it's just accumulated dust; and, of course, my dancing neighbour (who is so unconcerned about the world it cheers one to see him) and his occasional dancing partners, recently I had seen him launch boldly into the sirtaki, good grief, he looked poovey, not gay exactly, but something else – like an exquisitely dressed swank, a dummy, a honeyed, vainglorious rogue – the term has nothing to do now with the actual carnal preferences of the person thus described, I, at least, would make that distinction, and there is no more ridiculous dance for a man to dance alone than the Greek sirtaki, with the possible exception of the Basque aurresku, which, fortunately, my neighbour would not know.
So I experimented two or three times, I stopped suddenly without warning, and on those three occasions the sound of cautious or semi-aerial steps, the whirr of crickets, the swishing sound or whatever it was – like the crazy trot of an old wall clock, which also resembles the footsteps of a dog – took longer than usual to stop, I could hear it when I was already standing still and when I could not possibly be emitting any involuntary or uncontrolled sound. I did not turn my head when I made this experiment, to look behind or to the sides, as I did when I was walking steadily along, resting the umbrella on my shoulder, almost as one would with a sunshade when out for a stroll, as if I wanted above all to protect the back of my neck, to protect it from the wind and the water and from the possible looks of other people and from imaginary bullets that would have pierced both (the back of my neck and the umbrella), you think such absurd things when you have to walk a longish distance alone and at night, feeling as if you were being followed even though you can't actually see anyone following you. During the final stretch there were occasional grassy areas to the left and right, I took a short-cut through a small local park, so perhaps those unseen steps were made on the grass. I waited until I had left that barely lit park behind me and was already very close to home. I had only another two blocks to go and another square to cross when I tried again, and this time I did turn round when I stopped and then I saw them, two white figures at a distance that would not normally have allowed me to hear panting or footsteps. The dog was white and the woman, the person, was, like me, wearing a light-coloured raincoat. I thought, from the first, that she was a woman, and she was, because, after only a second or a sliver of doubt, I took an immediate fancy to her legs, when I saw that they were covered not by dark trousers, but by black, knee-high boots (with no heels, or only very low heels) which delineated or accentuated the curve of her strong calves. Her face was still hidden by her umbrella, she had both hands occupied, she was holding the dog's lead in one, the dog, somewhat hopelessly and possibly wearily, kept tugging on the lead, the creature had no protection at all, it must have been drenched, the rain doubtless continued to weigh on it however violently it shook itself each time they paused (for when they did, the rain didn't stop falling on the dog), and they were pausing then, because the two figures had also stopped, with a slight but inevitable delay after me or my very abrupt halt. I stood for a few, but not too few, seconds looking at them. The woman didn't seem to mind being seen, I mean she could just be someone who, despite the wild weather, had decided to take her dog for a walk, and she wouldn't have to explain herself to me were I to ask her to. It could just be a coincidence: sometimes you do find yourself following the same route as another pedestrian for many long minutes, even if your route is not a direct one, and sometimes you can start to feel annoyed by this, for no reason, it's merely a longing for that coincidence to end, to cease, because it seems somehow like a bad omen, or simply because it irritates you, so much so that you even go out of your way and make an unnecessary detour just to separate yourself from and to leave behind that insistent parallel being.
There was between the two of us, or, rather, between them and me, a distance of some two hundred or more yards, far enough for me to have to shout or to retrace my steps if I was going to speak to her, to ask a question of that human figure, who was clearly a young woman, her boots were waterproof, supple, shiny and close-fitting, they were not just any old rainboots, they had been chosen, studied, were possibly expensive, flattering, maybe by a well-known designer. I stared at them, she had not uncovered her face, at no point did she raise the umbrella covering it and did not, therefore, return my gaze, but neither was she troubled because a man was standing watching her from not very far away, at night and in all that rain. She crouched down, the skirts of her raincoat fell open when she did so and I could see part of her thigh, she patted and stroked the dog's back, probably spoke softly to him, then stood up again and the skirts of her raincoat closed once more over that glimpse of flesh, she did not move, did not set off in any direction, it occurred to me then that she might be in need of help, lost in an area she did not know, or a young blind woman out with her guide dog, or a foreigner who did not know the language, or a prostitute so hard up she could not miss even one night-time excursion, or was wondering whether or not to ask me for money, help, advice, something. Not because I was me, but because I was the only parallel being there. I had the feeling that any meeting was impossible, and, at the same time, that it would be a shame if it did not take place and that it would be better if it did not. The feeling was one of pity, whether for myself or for her, I don't know, certainly not for us both, because one of us would have come off worse – I thought – and the other would have benefited, that is usually how it is with such street encounters.
Many years before, in this same country, when I was teaching at Oxford, I had been followed off and on by a man with a three-legged dog, one of its back legs neatly amputated, and subsequently, without prior warning, he had visited my house, his name was Alan Marriott, he was rather lame in his left leg (although it was still intact) and he was a bibliomaniac who had learned of my own bookish interests, which coincided in part with his, from the second-hand booksellers I used to frequent there. The dog was a terrier, he'll be dead by now, poor thing, they do not last as long as we do. The young woman's dog seemed to me, from a distance, to be a pointer and still had all its four legs, which I found strangely cheering, in contrast with the crippled dog, I suppose, who came suddenly to mind in that night of eternal rain. 'But I don't want anything of anyone,' I thought, 'nor do I expect anything of anyone, and I'm in a hurry to get out of this rain and reach home, and forget all about the interpretations of this long day which doesn't end or which won't end until I'm safe up there on my third floor. Let her come to me if she wants something from me or if she's following me. That's her problem. She must have a reason, assuming she was following me or still is, it can't be in order not to talk to me.' I turned and hurried on to my destination, but I couldn't help listening out during the rest of my walk to see if I could or couldn't hear that tis tis tis which was, as it turned out, the sound of a dog and its eighteen toes, or perhaps of those long boots with such low heels that they glided over the asphalt without even striking it, without making a sound.
I reached my door, turned the key and opened it, and only then did I furl my umbrella and shake it so that it didn't drip too much indoors, and once upstairs, I immediately took the umbrella into the kitchen, leaving my raincoat there to dry as well, and then I went impatiently over to the window and scanned the square, but I saw neither the young woman nor the pointer, even though I had heard their weightless noise until the end, accompanying me as far as the door downstairs, or so I thought. I looked up and across at my dancing neighbour, who had often before had a calming effect on me. There he was, of course, he was unlikely to be out in that awful weather, and he had a visitor too, the black or mulatto woman with whom he sometimes danced: judging from their movements and posture and rhythm I was sure they were immersed in some pseudo-Gaelic dance, feet frantically flailing, but going nowhere (the feet keeping strictly to a point on which they insist and stamp and stamp again, an area no bigger than a house brick or, lest we exaggerate, a floor tile), while the arms are held, inert and very stiff, close to the body, it was likely, I thought, that the dancing couple would be listening to the music of one of those demented shows put on by that idol of the islands, Michael Flatley, who stamps his feet like a man possessed, they re-issue his old videos with remarkable frequency, maybe he's retired now and rations his appearances so as to make his furious boundings about the stage seem even more exceptional. Whether dancing alone or in company, my neighbour always seemed so happy that I sometimes felt tempted to imitate him, after all, that's something we can all do, dance alone at home when we think no one is looking. But you can never be sure that no one is looking or listening, we're not always aware of being watched, or followed.
Having one leg missing, the bibliomaniac Marriott's poor terrier would only have had fourteen toes, I thought. Perhaps I had remembered the dog because its image was forever associated with that of a young woman who also used to wear high boots, a gypsy flower-seller, who used to set up her stall opposite my house in Oxford, on the other side of the long street known there as St Giles'. Her name was Jane, and, despite her extreme youth, she was married; she usually wore jeans and a leather jacket; I would sometimes exchange a few words with her, and Alan Marriott had stopped at her stall to buy some flowers before ringing my doorbell on the morning or afternoon that he visited me, on one of those Sundays 'in exile from the infinite' (I quoted to myself). He and I had just been talking about the Welsh writer Arthur Machen (one of his favourites) and about the literature of horror or terror which the latter had cultivated to the great delight of Borges and of very few others, although I remember that Marriott had not heard of Borges. And suddenly he had given me an illustration of horror through a hypothesis involving his dog with its three legs and intelligent face and the flower-seller in the high boots. 'Horror depends in large measure on the association of ideas,' he had said. 'On the conjunction of ideas. On a capacity for bringing them together.' He spoke in short phrases and hardly used conjunctions at all, making minimal, but very deep, marked pauses, as if he held his breath while they lasted. As if his speech too were slightly lame. 'You might never see the horror implicit in associating two ideas, the horror implicit in each of those ideas, and thus never in your whole life recognise the horror they contain. But you could live immersed in that horror if you were unfortunate enough always to make the right associations. For example, that girl opposite your house who sells flowers,' he had said, pointing at the window with one very taut index finger, one of those fingers which, although clean, seems to be impregnated with whatever it spends its days touching, however frequently the owner of the finger may wash it: I've seen such fingers on coalmen and butchers and house painters and even greengrocers (on coalmen during my childhood); his fingers were impregnated with book dust, which always clings so and which is the reason I wore gloves when I went rummaging around second-hand bookshops, but, then again, the chalk I used when I was teaching had already started to stick. 'There's nothing terrifying about her, she doesn't in herself inspire horror. On the contrary. She's very attractive. She's nice and friendly. She stroked the dog. I bought these carnations from her.' He produced them from his raincoat pocket, into which he had carelessly crammed them, as if they were pencils or a handkerchief. There were only two, they were almost squashed. 'But she could inspire horror. The idea of that girl in association with another idea could. Don't you think so? We don't yet know the nature of that missing idea, of the idea required to inspire us with horror. Her horrifying other half. But it must exist. It does. It's simply a question of it appearing. It may also never appear. Who knows, it could turn out to be my dog.' He pointed downwards with his vertical finger, the terrier had lain down at his feet, it wasn't raining that day, there was no danger of it dirtying the sitting-room, it didn't deserve to be exiled to the kitchen on the ground floor (his index finger covered in invisible dust). 'The girl and my dog,' he repeated, and again pointed first at the window (as if the flower-seller were a ghost and had her face pressed to the glass, it was the window on the second floor, that pyramidal house had three, I slept on the top floor and worked in that living-room) and then at the dog, his finger always very erect and rigid. 'The girl with her long, chestnut hair, her high boots and her long, firm legs and my dog with his one leg missing.' I remember that he then touched the dog's stump affectionately or tentatively as if it might still hurt him, the dog was dozing. 'The fact that my dog goes everywhere with me is normal. It's necessary. It's odd if you like. I mean the two of us going around together. But there's nothing horrific about it. But if she went around with my dog. That might be horrific. The dog is missing a leg. I'm the only one who remembers him when he had four legs. My personal memory doesn't count. It's of no importance in the eyes of other people. In her eyes. In your eyes. In the eyes of other dogs. Now it's as if my dog had always had one leg missing. If it had been her dog, it would certainly never have lost its leg in a stupid argument after a football match.' Marriott had told me the story already, I had asked him: some drunken Oxford United fans, late at night on Didcot Station, the lame man beaten and held down by several of them, the dog, not as yet lame, placed on the railway line so that it would be killed by a through train. They had let it go, they had drawn back, frightened, at the last moment, the dog had rolled over, it was lucky in a way ('You can't imagine the amount of blood he lost'). 'That's an accident. An occupational hazard for a dog with a lame master. But if it had been her dog, perhaps it would have lost its leg some other way. The dog is still missing a leg. There must be some other reason, then. Something far worse. Not just an accident. You could hardly imagine that girl getting involved in a fight. Perhaps the dog would have lost its leg because of her.' He emphasised the word 'because'. 'Perhaps the only explanation of why this dog should have lost its leg, if it were her dog, would be that she had cut it off. How else could a dog who was so well looked after, cared for and loved by that nice, attractive flower-seller have lost its leg? It's a horrible idea, that girl cutting off my dog's leg; seeing it with her own eyes; being a witness to it.' Alan Marriott's words had sounded slightly indignant, indignant at the girl's behaviour. He had broken off then, as if he had conjured up too vivid an image with his own terrible hypothesis and had indeed seen the horrific couple. As if he had seen the couple through my window – 'with the eyes of the mind,' I quoted to myself. He seemed to have unnerved himself, to have frightened himself. 'Let's change the subject,' he said. And although I urged him to continue – 'No, go on, you were on the point of inventing a story' – he was not prepared to go on thinking about it, or imagining it: 'No, forget it. It's a poor example,' he had said firmly. 'As you wish,' I had said, and then we had passed on to something else. There would have been no way of persuading him to continue his fantasy, I knew this immediately, not once he had alarmed himself by it. Perhaps he had horrified himself. He must have been shocked by his own mind.
A dog and a young woman in high boots. That rainy night was in fact the first time I had seen this conjunction, this image, with my own eyes; but my memory had already recorded or made the sinister association many years before, in this same country which was not mine, when I was still not married and had no children. (This present time of mine was beginning to resemble that other time; I had no wife or children, although I relied on them and sent them money and missed them every day, at some moment of each day.) The flower-seller Jane used to wear her jeans tucked into her boots, almost musketeer-fashion. The woman hidden behind her umbrella was wearing a skirt, I had glimpsed one thigh. It was doubtless because of that invisible precedent, that imagined image transmitted to me once by the lame bibliophile, that I had felt so relieved to find that the nocturnal white pointer had all its four legs, I had counted them one by one even though I had seen them anyway at a glance. But I had wanted to make quite sure (an instance of reflex superstition, I realised) that he and his mistress did not form some horrific couple already dreamed up by someone else.
That was what I was paid to do in the building with no name. I ceaselessly made associations, rather than interpretations or decipherings or analyses, or, rather, those merely came afterwards, as a rather feeble consequence. Wheeler had more or less announced this to me that Sunday in Oxford, in his garden or during lunch: there is no such thing as two identical people, nor has there ever been, we know that; but nor is there anyone who is not related in some way to someone else who has traversed the world, who does not have what Wheeler called affinities with someone else. There is no one who has no ties, there never has been, no links of fate or character, which, anyway, comes to the same thing (I was paraphrasing Wheeler freely), except perhaps for the very first men, if they really did exist before all others rather than many of them springing up in many places simultaneously. You see two very different people and see them, moreover, separated by centuries from your own life, so much so that, by the time the second one appears, the first has been forgotten for all those centuries, just as I had stored away the anaesthetised image of that horrific couple dreamed up by Alan Marriott. They are people who differ in age, sex, education, beliefs, mentality, temperament, affections; they might speak different languages, come from countries far, far away from each other, have entirely contrary biographies and not share a single experience, not a single parallel hour in their long, respective pasts, not a single comparable one. You meet a very young woman, with her ambition so untouched and intact that you cannot yet tell if she has any ambition or not, I remember Wheeler saying. Her shyness makes her hermetic, so much so that you're not sure if her very shyness is not merely a pretence, a timid mask. She is the daughter of a Spanish couple you know and whom you visit, the parents force her to say hello, to join in, at least for a while, to have supper with the guest and with them. The young woman does not want to be known or even seen, she is there against her will, feigning indifference and coolness, waiting for the world – which she feels owes her a debt – to take an interest in her, to court her, seek her out and even offer her reparation, but feeling vastly bored if the friend of her parents (whom she does not consider to be part of the world: she has, by association, excluded him) displays an insistent curiosity in her, watches her with friendly concern, flatters her and draws her out. She is a slightly offended sphinx, or perhaps she is frightened, or vulnerable and uncertain, or deceitful, an impostor. She's impossible to fathom, she wants people to take notice of her and, at the same time, sees this as interference, she can't bear to be noticed by someone who doesn't count, someone who, according to her perceptions and criteria, has no right to notice her. She isn't and cannot be unpleasant, she doesn't go quite that far, besides, no one with a pretty, blushing face ever is, but it is impossible to imagine what lies behind the helmet of her extreme youth, it is as if she wore the visor lowered so that all one could see of her eyes were her eyelashes. The immature and the unfinished are the most unfathomable of things, like the four lines of a drawing, dashed off and left incomplete, which do not even allow you to speculate on the figure they aspired to be or were on the way to becoming. And yet something nearly always does emerge, says Wheeler. Rarely do you meet a person about whom you remain forever in the dark, rarely – by dint of sheer persistence on our part – does a figure fail to emerge, however blurred or tenuous, and however different from what you were expecting, remote, defined, or out of keeping with those few initial lines, even incongruous. You become accustomed to the darkness of each face or person or past or history or life, you begin, after unflagging scrutiny of the shadows, to be able to make something out, the gloom lifts and you grasp something, discern something: the discouragement abates then or else invades and wraps around us, depending on whether we wanted to see something or to see nothing, depending upon which characteristics, which affinities we find in which person, or whether these are merely our own marks, our own memories. Anyone who wants to see nearly always does end up seeing something, imagine, then, what a person committed to seeing could achieve, or someone who makes a career out of it, like you and like me, you think you haven't begun, but you began a long time ago, you just haven't yet been paid to do it, but now you will be, very soon; it's the way you live anyway. There are so few of us who have the courage and the patience to keep looking that we get well paid for it ('Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking and keep looking beyond the purely necessary, even when you have the feeling that there is no more, no more to think, that it's all been thought, that there's no more to see, that it's all been seen'), to examine in depth what appears to be as smooth, opaque and black as a field of heraldic sable, a compact darkness. Yet one suddenly catches a gesture, an intonation, a flicker, a hesitation, a laugh, a tic, an oblique look, it can be anything, even something very trivial. You hear or see something, whatever it might be, in the young daughter of the couple you are friendly with, you see something that you recognise and associate with something else, that you heard or saw in someone, I think, while Wheeler continues his explanation. You see in the girl the same conceited, cruel, neurotic expression, the identical expression, that you saw so often in a much older man, almost elderly, a magazine publisher with whom you worked for far too long, even a single day would have been too much. They are, in principle, unrelated, no one would have made the connection, it's ridiculous. There is no resemblance, nor, of course, any family relationship. The man had grey, almost bouffant hair, the young woman's is a glossy, dark brown mane; his flesh sags, his face grows visibly more haggard every day, her flesh is so firm and exultant that, beside her, her parents seem one-dimensional (as do you, probably, but you cannot see yourself), as if she were the only person in the room who had any volume, or as if only she had been carved in relief; his eyes were small and treacherous, greedy and malicious despite the smiles that frequented his wide-set teeth – which looked as if they had never been polished or buffed (or as if the enamel had worn away, so that they resembled the tiny, grubby teeth of a saw) – in the hope of making the whole more cordial (and he deceived many, even me for a while, or perhaps I merely averted my gaze from what I saw, that is what the world does constantly, and you cannot always separate yourself from the world), whereas her eyes are large and elusive and grave and seem to covet nothing, her lips do not bestow smiles on those who do not, from her miserly point of view, deserve it, and she doesn't mind appearing sullen (she's not as yet interested in seducing anyone with flattery), and the rare glimpse you get of her teeth is a radiant benediction. No, they are entirely unrelated, that devious owner and publisher of magazines, that boastful and unpleasant older man, so insecure about his acquisitions and so conscious of his monetary and intellectual thefts that he would do his best to crush, if he could, those from whom he pilfered; no, nothing connects them, he and this girl on whom one would say the curtain has not yet gone up, who is still all potentiality and enigma, a ready-prepared canvas on which only a few tentative brushstrokes have fallen, a few experiments with colour. And yet. In the end, at the last, it is only when your persistence finally runs out that you see, with a clear, disinterested bitterness, that flash, the expression or even the look of that man whom she does not resemble and whom she does not know (thus ruling out any idea of mimesis). It isn't just a matter of superimposing their two faces, so different, so opposed – that would be a visual aberration, an ocular absurdity. No, it's an association, a recognition, an affinity grasped. (A horrific couple.) It's the same flicker of irritation or the same demanding look, doubtless provoked by different causes or following such divergent trajectories that his is already declining and hers is barely starting. Or perhaps there is no cause in either case and the trajectories count for little, the flicker or the look do not have their origins in a setback or in a piece of good luck, nor in what events might bring. In the businessman, such expressions were already deeply rooted, permanently resident in his ruddy drinker's complexion threaded with broken veins, whilst in the young girl they are only a momentary temptation, a mist perhaps, something that could yet be reversible and which, at this precise moment, is of no importance. And yet, once you've noticed that link, you know. You know what she is like in one aspect, and that there can be no emendation in that crucial aspect: it will go hard for anyone who thwarts her and equally hard for those who try to please her ('Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, to cease to exist for them'). That look and that expression indicate something which you discerned and noted from the very first moment, but without making the link with that old, immensely arrogant petty thief, without noticing that the young woman shares that characteristic with him, or reproduces it (she doesn't even know him, yet she has produced an exact copy). Both feel, or perhaps judge, that the world is in their debt; that anything good which comes their way is merely their due – what else; they therefore know nothing of contentment or gratitude; they appreciate none of the favours done to them or the clemency with which they are treated; they see such things as evidence of respect, and respect they see as evidence of the weakness and fear of the person who had the cane in his hand, but chose not to beat them. They are quite simply insufferable, people who never learn, certainly not from their mistakes. They always feel that they are the creditors of the world, even though they spend their whole lives affronting and despoiling it, via any of the world's innumerable offspring who happen to stray into their line of fire. And if, given her age, the girl had not yet been able to shoot down many of these, I was quite sure that, swiftly and with great precocity, she would soon make up for the intolerably long waiting time that indolent physical growth imposes on the very determined. When you recognise that conceited, cruel, complex-ridden expression – which always presages anger – when you make that unhappy link, that is, when you cease to be curious about the young woman, or to look on her with sympathy, or to flatter her with the captivating questions of an adult. And she, who previously found those attentions so hard to bear and who spurned them because of the person they came from – a friend of her parents, so boring, so old – now finds it still harder to bear the withdrawal of that deferential behaviour. Which is why she bolts her dessert, gets up from the table and leaves the room without saying goodbye. She has suffered, she has collected and stored away yet another insult.
At other times, fortunately, it's quite the opposite: what you see or identify or associate is something so longed for and beloved that you immediately grow calm, Wheeler tells me. You hear the timbre and the familiar diction of the woman you're speaking to, to whom you have just been introduced. You hear her easy laugh with nostalgic pleasure, or, more than that, with distant emotion. You remember, you listen, you remember: why, of course, yes, I recognise that liking for parties, that infectious good humour, that rapid dissipation of all mists, that invitation to enjoy yourself, that spirit which quickly grows bored with its own sadness and does whatever it can to lighten or truncate the doses that life metes out to her as it does to everyone else, to her too, she doesn't get off scot-free. But neither does she surrender or yield, defenceless, and as soon as she sees that she can survive the burden, she straightens up a little and tries to shake it off, as far away as possible from her frail shoulders. Not in order to suppress sorrow, as if it had never existed, she doesn't wash her hands of it or wriggle out of it, she doesn't irresponsibly forget; but she knows that she can only watch over that sadness if she keeps it in perspective, at a distance, that she might then be able to understand it. And in that middle-aged woman you see an unmistakable affinity with a young woman who is gone forever, with your own wife – Valerie, Val, almost all that remains is the memory of her name, but now, vital, living traces of her appear again, in that other voice and face – the wife who died young and could never even have dreamed of reaching this great age, nor, of course, of giving birth to a child or possibly even fantasising about one, she died too young to imagine herself a mother, almost too soon to imagine herself married to Peter Wheeler, or Peter Rylands, too young either to imagine herself married, let alone actually being married. She had dreamy, diaphanous eyes and very happy, affectionately ironic lips. She joked a lot, she never lost her youthful ways, she never had the chance. Once, with those same lips, she told me why she loved me: 'Because I like to see you reading the newspaper while I'm having my breakfast, that's all. I can read in your face the mood in which the world has got out of bed this morning and the mood in which you have got out of bed too, since you are the world's main representative in my life. And by far its most visible representative too.' Those words return unexpectedly, when you hear that identical timbre and diction, and see that oh so comparable smile. And you know at once that this mature woman to whom you have just been introduced can be trusted absolutely. You know that she will do you no harm, or not at least without warning you first.
'This ability or gift was very useful during the war, indeed, in time of war it always proves invaluable, which is why the powers-that-be of the day did their best to organise and channel it, they combed the population for it, because they quickly came to realise how very few people had that gift or faculty, possibly even fewer then than now, war has an incredibly distorting effect on people's perceptions, half the people see ghosts and witches everywhere and the other half merely perfect their habitual tendency to see nothing at all, and do their best not even to see that. But it was the war that brought it to the forefront, ideas only surface when we need them, even the very simplest of ideas,' Wheeler had murmured to me in the garden, while we strolled slowly along by the river, waiting for lunch. 'It's just a shame that the idea didn't come up a few months earlier, who knows, Val, my wife Valerie, might not have died. But unfortunately, by the time someone had thought of it, she was already dead. I'm not sure who it was, Menzies or Ve-Ve Vivian, or Cowgill or Hollis or even Philby (I don't think it was Jack Curry, no, I'd rule him out), they were all vying with each other to be the most inventive, they've always prided themselves on that in MI5 and MI6, they kept a watchful eye on what their colleagues did, even ended up spying on each other, it probably still happens. It's likely that it was Churchill himself who had the idea, he was the brightest and boldest of the lot, the least afraid of ridicule. Not that it matters. It's impossible ever to know the true paternity of these things, and no one cares, apart from the candidates claiming to have given birth to that brief diversion from dusty death in our now distant yesterdays,' said Wheeler, adapting Shakespeare's famous words with a touch of bitter humour, 'everyone tells their story and no one believes a word of it or pays the slightest attention. Whatever the truth of the matter, it all started with the campaign against careless talk, have you heard of that?' It rang a bell that expression, literally 'charla despreocupada' or 'negligente' or 'descuidada' or 'conversation imprudente', it was difficult to find a satisfactory and exact translation, I related it to what in Spanish we term 'hablar a la ligera', although it isn't quite that either, or 'cotilleo' or 'chismorreo' or 'habladurtas'. I shook my head: I didn't, at any rate, know of a campaign by that name. Nor, at the time, did I know any of the names that Wheeler had trotted out, apart from that of Churchill, of course, and of Kim Philby (that other foreign or bogus Englishman, born in India and the son of an explorer and orientalist who was, in turn, a native of Ceylon and who, in his forties, converted to Islam), who had also been in Spain during the Civil War as the Times correspondent on the side of the insurrectionists, but apparently under orders (from the Soviets, not the British) to take advantage of his proximity to assassinate Franco (he failed, of course, and didn't even try very hard: now for that he really should have been punished). Only later did I learn that they had all been civil servants or spies with grave responsibilities, just as it also took me a while to discover, for example, (I'm not going to pretend to any God-given knowledge) that the first surname mentioned by Wheeler was written Menzies, even though he pronounced it as 'Mingiss'. 'You haven't, eh?' Wheeler went on, at the same time opening his folder and rummaging around in it. 'It began during the war, they plastered the whole country with posters, notices and illustrated examples, with radio and press announcements, using drawings by Eric Fraser and many others, Eric Kennington, Wilkinson, Beggarstaff (I've got a few of them here, see?), when we were all convinced and obsessed by the idea that England, Scotland and Wales were infested with Nazi spies, many of them as British as anyone else by birth, education and interests, people who had been bought, fanatical people under a spell, treacherous people, sick, infected people. Everyone distrusted everyone else, especially once the campaign started, with very uneven results in practice (we were, after all, fighting an invincible foe), but it was quite effective mentally or psychologically: people were suspicious of their neighbour, their relative, their teacher, their colleague, the shopkeeper, the doctor, their wife, their husband, and many took advantage of such easy, widespread suspicions, perfectly understandable given the climate at the time, to get rid of a hated spouse. You might not be able to prove that you were living with a German undercover agent or infiltrator, but mere insuperable doubt was enough of an obstacle to prevent you remaining by the side of the supposed monster you had detected, in other words, it provided sufficient grounds for divorce. How could you share a pillow, night after night, with someone about whom you harboured such very grave doubts, with someone so fearsome that he or she would not hesitate to kill you if they suspected they had been unmasked or were under threat? That was what people thought enemy spies were like, whether young or old, male or female, British or foreign, they were all ruthless individuals, with no scruples, no limits, always ready to inflict the greatest possible harm, direct or indirect, on the rearguard or at the front, on group morale or on military equipment, on the civilian population or the troops, it didn't matter. And that wasn't an entirely wrong-headed idea either. People exaggerated their fears in order not entirely to believe in them, to conclude, after all, that nothing could possibly be as malign as they imagined, it's something we all do, deliberately, but apparently unconsciously, thinking the worst, in ridiculous, paranoid fashion, imagining the most gruesome things merely to end up dismissing them in our heart of hearts: at the end of that process, that awful mental journey, shall we say, we always tell ourselves: oh, it won't be that bad. The funny or dismal fact is that the truth usually is just as bad, if not worse. In my experience and to my knowledge, reality often matches the most cruel of presentiments, and even, sometimes, surpasses them, that is, it provides a precise match for those ideas rejected at the very height or peak of fear, for ideas that were ultimately dismissed as the crazed, immoderate nightmares of anxiety and the imagination. Numerous Nazi agents on British soil did, of course, kill anyone they had to, anyone who posed the slightest threat to them, as did our agents in occupied Europe, ours being mainly but not exclusively members of the SOE. In time of peace it's impossible to understand or to know what war is like, it really is inconceivable, it's not even possible to remember the wars one has actually experienced, those that happened and happened right here, even wars in which one took part; just as in time of war it's impossible to remember or to conceive of peace. People don't realise to what extent the one negates the other, how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts (like pain and pleasure when they are no longer present), or, at most, converts it into something fictitious, you have the feeling that you've never really known or experienced what is, at any given moment, absent; and when absent, always assuming that it existed before, it doesn't function in the same way, it doesn't resemble the past or whatever else is now gone, it's more like a novel or a film. It 'becomes unreal, a lie. And as regards war, it just seems unbelievable to us, all that waste.' I was tempted to ask Wheeler if he too had killed, in MI6 (a bag of meat, a bloodstain), perhaps in the Caribbean, or in West Africa, or in South-East Asia; or before that, in Spain. But he did not allow time for that temptation to become fact, because he barely paused before adding: 'We find it unutterably hard to believe it afterwards, as soon as war is over; the moment we're faced by defeat or victory, especially victory. They're like watertight compartments, the state of peace and the state of war. Such a waste.' And then he immediately returned to what he had mentioned earlier: 'Look at this, have you ever seen this before?'
Wheeler took out of his file a yellowing newspaper cutting
showing a drawing on which the first thing that leapt out at you was the large swastika in the middle, like a hairy spider, and the web that the spider had woven, which wrapped around or, rather, trapped inside it a number of scenes. 'Information to the Enemy,' it said in large letters, the tide of a play presumably, to judge by the small print at the bottom, which said: 'This play by G. R. Rainier, which illustrates how careless talk, however innocent it may seem at the time, might be pieced together by the enemy and give away a vital secret, will be broadcast again tonight at 10.00.' There were four scenes: three men talking in a pub over a game of darts, the man lurking behind them must be the spy, given that he has a hooked nose, an artist's long hair and prissy beard, and is wearing what appears to be a monocle; a soldier is sitting on a train talking to a blonde lady, she must be the spy, not just by a process of elimination, but also given her elegant appearance; two couples are talking in the street, one composed of two men and the other of a man and a woman: the respective spies must be the man in the bow tie and the man in the scarf, although here it wasn't quite so clear (but it seemed to me that they were the ones doing the listening); lastly, a pilot is welcomed home, doubtless by his parents, and alongside them stands a young woman in apron and cap: she is clearly the spy, since she is young, an employee and an intruder. In addition, at the top and the bottom, there was a plane, the one at the top positioned very close to a mysterious van (possibly just a front) with the words 'Laundry' painted on its side.
'No, I haven't,' I said, and after carefully studying the drawing by Eric Fraser, I turned the cutting over, as I always do with old cuttings. Radio Times, 2 May 1941. It appeared to be part of the schedule for that week, for the BBC, I assumed, which, at the time, broadcast only radio. The complete tide of this didactic play by Mr Rainier (his name sounded more German than English, or perhaps he was a Monegasque) was, I saw, Fifth Column: Information to the Enemy. That expression, 'fifth column', had originated, I believe, in my city, in Madrid, which was besieged for three years by Franco and his troops and his German aviators and his Moroccan guards, and infested by his own fifth columnists, we swiftly exported both terms to other languages and other places: in May 1941, it had been a mere twenty-five months since some of us had met with defeat and others with victory, my parents were amongst the former, as was I when I was born (there are more losses amongst the vanquished and those losses last longer). Included in that radio schedule of sixty long years ago (one's eyes are always drawn to words in one's own language) was a performance by 'Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros, with Dorothe Morrow', they were due to be on for half an hour before the close of programming at eleven o'clock: 'Time, Big Ben: Close down'. Where would they be now, Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros and the inappropriately named Dorothe Morrow, presumably the vocalist? Where would they be, whether alive or dead? Who knows if they would have managed to perform that night or if they would have been prevented from doing so by a Luftwaffe bombing raid, planned and directed by fifth columnists and informers and spies from our territory. Who knows if they even survived that day.
'What about this? And this? Look at this, and this, and this.' Wheeler continued to take drawings from his file, in colour now and not originals this time, but cut out of magazines or possibly books, or else postcards and playing-cards from the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth Road and from other institutions, they must sell them now as nostalgic souvenirs or as curios, there was a whole pack of cards illustrated with them, it's odd how the useful and even essential things in one's own life become ornaments and archaeology when that life is still not yet over, I thought of Wheeler's life and thought too that I would one day see, in catalogues and in exhibitions, objects and newspapers and photographs and books whose actual creation or taking or writing I had witnessed, if I lived long enough or not even necessarily that long, everything becomes remote so quickly. That museum, the Imperial War Museum, was very close to the headquarters or head office of MI6, that is, the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, in Vauxhall Cross, which was far from being architecturally secret, it verged, rather, on the flamboyant, on the prominent rather than the discreet, a ziggurat, a lighthouse; and it was very close to the building with no name to which I went every morning over what seemed to me a long period, even though I didn't know then that it would be for me another place of work, of which I've already had quite a few.
'Do you collect them, Peter?' I asked as I studied them. We sat for a moment on the chairs Wheeler had in his garden, they were protected by canvas or waterproof covers and arranged around a small table, he got the chairs out in early spring and took them in again in late autumn, when the days began to grow shorter, but he and Mrs Berry kept them covered up depending on what the day was like, on most days, in fact; the weather is always so changeable in England; that's why they have the expression 'as changeable as the weather', which they apply, for example, to very fickle people. We sat down directly on the canvas covers, the colour of pale gabardine, they were perfectly dry, a pause so that we could more easily sort out and arrange the drawings on the table, which was also covered, the tables and chairs disguised as modern sculptures, or tethered ghosts. There had been similar furniture in Rylands's garden, I recalled, in his nearby garden beside this same river.
'Yes, more or less, there are some things that one wants to remember as clearly as possible. Although it's more Mrs Berry who collects them, she's interested too and she goes to London more often than I do. You never think to keep the unimportant things when they occur in your own time, when they exist naturally, you think of them as easily available and assume they always will be. Later, they become real rarities, and before you know it, they're relics, you just have to see the silly things they sell at auctions nowadays, simply because they're not made any more and so they can't be found. There are collections of picture cards from forty years ago which fetch the most exorbitant prices, and the people who bid for them like mad things are usually the same ones who collected them as children and who, as young adults, threw them out or gave them away, who knows, perhaps, after a long journey, after the albums have passed through many hands, they're buying back the ones they themselves once collected and filed with such childish perseverance. It's a curse, the present, it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing. Whoever decided that we should live in the present played a very nasty trick on us,' said Wheeler jokingly, and then showed me the drawings, his index finger trembled slightly: 'Look, you can see now what they were recommending. It's odd, isn't it, especially seen from a modern perspective, in these voracious, unrestrained times, so incapable of not asking questions or of keeping silent.'
One showed a warship sinking on the high seas in the middle of the night, doubtless having been hit by a torpedo, the sky is full of smoke and the glow of flames, and a few survivors are rowing away from it in a boat, though, like any crew member or shipwreck victim, without turning their backs on it, their gaze fixed on the disaster from which they have only half-escaped. 'A few careless words may end in this,' said the caption of what must have been a poster, or perhaps an advertisement from a magazine; and in smaller print: 'Many lives were lost in the last war through careless talk. Be on your guard! Don't discuss movements of ships or troops.' The 'last war' was the 1914-18 war, of which Wheeler retained direct, childhood memories, when he was still called Rylands.
Another depicted a more worldly scene: an attractive woman lounges in an armchair (necklace, evening dress, corsage, long, painted fingernails) and stares coolly and mockingly ahead while she is encircled and courted and fawned upon by three officers at a party, each holding a cigarette and a drink, they are presumably regaling her with tales of recent escapades or announcing imminent exploits in order to impress her, or else talking amongst themselves, unconcerned that the woman might be listening to them. The caption says: 'Keep mum, she's
not so dumb!' (in Spanish: 'Chiton, ella no es tan tonta!', although in English there is a play on the word 'dumb' which means both 'silent' and 'stupid', and which also rhymes with 'mum'). In red letters underneath is the main campaign slogan: 'Careless talk costs lives.'
Another was even more explicit and didactic, and warned of the possible chain of communication, unwitting and uncontrollable, to which the spoken word is always vulnerable, and here the spy – male or female – is not there at the start, listening, but waiting at the end. The drawing was divided into four parts, two with a red background and two with a white background. The picture at top left showed a sailor talking to a young blonde woman (his girlfriend, his sister, perhaps a friend) whom he has no reason to distrust, on the contrary, she listens with disinterested interest (that is, she is more interested in him than in what he reveals to her or tells her), and gazes at him admiringly, almost spellbound. Underneath, in capital letters, is the word 'TELLING'. The next picture, top right, shows the same young blonde woman chatting to a female friend with brown hair drawn up on top of her head and who is listening with a look of amazement on her face, but her interest seems less disinterested: she is, at the very least, savouring in advance the prospect of passing on this titbit of news; she may not be ill-intentioned, but simply gossipy, one of those people who enjoy retailing and acquiring any hot news to show how well-informed they are and thus surprising others with how much they know about everything. Underneath, in lower-case letters, is printed: 'a friend may'. The picture at bottom left shows the woman with the brown hair telling what she has heard to another female friend, this woman has black hair parted in the middle and arranged in a kind of low bun, she has cold, almond-shaped eyes and an interested expression on her face, an expression which, this time, is entirely self-interested, for as she is listening, she is thinking of the next person she will speak to, and to whom she will give not just a snippet of news, but some very valuable information. Underneath, again in lower case, is printed: 'mean telling'. Lastly, the picture bottom right showed the third woman, the one with the black hair – her eyes malevolently closed – almost whispering into the ear of a fair-haired man with shifty eyes and very hard features, doubtless a ruthless Nazi whose next step will not be to tell someone else, but to act, to take measures that will probably result in the deaths of many men, including that of the guilty and innocent sailor. Underneath, the letters were once more printed in upper case, 'THE ENEMY', and so the whole message was 'TELLING a friend may mean telling THE ENEMY', the principal message being the one conveyed by those capital letters set against the red background. I couldn't help smiling to myself and noticing the careful gradation of the three women: the 'good' one was blonde with shortish hair and wore a simple, modest white bow around her neck; the 'frivolous' or 'silly' one wore her brown hair swept up and had a necklace on (she was more of a coquette); the 'bad' one, the spy, had black hair arranged rather more elaborately, and around her neck she was wearing a kind of black choker with a lustrous, greenish-coloured brooch in the middle, and she was also the only one to wear earrings (she was doubtless a proper femme fatale). Many of my female compatriots, amongst them my mother, would, I thought, have received a very bad press in England at that time.
Another drawing showed an infantryman looking straight out at us: a middle-aged man (a veteran) with a cigarette between his lips and the forefinger of his left hand resting on his temple underneath his helmet, recommending us to 'Keep it under your hat', an idiom that translates into Spanish as 'De esto, ni palabra' or 'De esto no sueltes prenda' or perhaps in purer and slightly more antiquated Spanish: ' Guárdatelo para tu coleto'. And at the top, in red letters, "Ware spies!'
'Were these intended mainly for the forces, these posters?' I asked Wheeler.
'Yes, but not solely,' he replied with a slight tremor in his voice. 'That's the most interesting thing, the message wasn't intended just for soldiers, who knew more and so needed to take more care and be more discreet, but for everyone, including civilians. Look at these.' And he removed from his file a few other examples which were, indeed, not addressed to the military alone, but to the whole population.
Some were cartoons. One showed a man talking on the phone inside one of those red public telephone boxes that you occasionally still see in England: according to the caption, he was saying '… but for heaven's sake, don't say I told you!', while around the walls and roof of the booth appear the cloned faces of fourteen or fifteen small Hitlers. Another showed two ladies sitting on the Underground, and one was saying to the other: 'You never know who's listening!' A couple of seats behind them sit two uniformed Nazi bigwigs, one thin, the other fat and heavily bemedalled, the former also resembled Hitler. In another poster, based perhaps on a photograph, an ordinary man wearing tie, raincoat and cap (possibly a Cockney) seemed to wink at the viewer and say: 'What I know – I keep to myself.' There were others intended to persuade children and, by imitation, to inculcate in them the importance of keeping silent ('Be like Dad, Keep Mum!'), or purely typographical official warnings with no illustration ('Thousands of lives were lost in the last war through valuable information being revealed to the enemy through careless talk. Be on your guard!'), which must have filled the noticeboards and pinboards of offices and schools and pubs and factories, as well as streets, walls, the insides of trains and buses, railway and Underground stations. Others explained, in verse, why censorship was being imposed on apparently innocuous information which, in time of peace, would have been issued without any difficulty, which would, indeed, have been mandatory, for example, the reasons for a train being delayed or stopping or arriving very late: 'In peace-time railways could explain/When fog or ice held up your train/But now the country's waging war/To tell you why's against the law…/That's because it would be news /The Germans could not fail to use.. .' (a display of consideration and public spirit, explaining to the population
why it was not possible to explain). And there were still more posters addressed to the members of the armed forces, whose carelessness could place everyone, as well, of course, as themselves, in greatest danger. A soldier in a helmet and with a telephone for a body warned: 'Stop! Think twice before making any trunk calls.' Or a uniformed man and woman with only feet and head visible behind a blue screen that concealed their respective ranks and was emblazoned, in white letters, with the word 'CENSORED'; the young man and woman were standing with the lighted ends of their cigarettes pressed together, one was giving the other a light and thus joining their lips, albeit with the interposition of tobacco and fire (smoking wasn't frowned upon or persecuted then, so things weren't all bad), but, they were warned: 'Your units must not be disclosed!' Most of the posters insisted, however, on the fundamental campaign slogan: 'Careless talk costs lives', 'Las conversaciones imprudentes cuestan vidas'. Although another not entirely unfaithful translation might be: 'se cobran vidas'.
'I have a vague recollection that during our Civil War there were similar warnings against fifth columnists, but I'm not sure, can you remember, Peter?' I asked. 'There's a slogan going round in my head along the lines of "The enemy has a thousand ears", but I may be inventing it, I'm not sure, on the other hand, I haven't any images stored away, any equivalents to the kind of thing you've shown me, I can't remember ever having seen them reproduced.' I really didn't know, but it wasn't impossible that this was another initiative we had exported. Or perhaps I was getting it confused in my memory with the defamatory poster against the POUM in the spring of 1937, a face stamped with a swastika appearing from beneath a mask bearing the hammer and sickle; Nin had been the victim of the half-justified paranoia that made people see Franco's spies and collaborators on every corner, or, rather, his enemies had made use of that paranoia to accuse him of treachery and espionage. He was accused of having informed, of having talked, and that, paradoxically, is what his torturers could never force him to do.
He remained silent and did not save himself, he kept his mouth shout, he did not blab, he did not say a word, in short, 'he kept mum', what he knew he kept to himself or under his hat, or perhaps he said nothing because the accusations were all false, he would have had to invent some tall tales and stories in order to acknowledge and support them, to admit that he was the 'Trojan horse' as that poetic 'lover of the truth' and 'worthy Don Quixote' later described him in that 'lamp-light glow' of a voice which so bewitched Trapp-Tello, such a very slanderous voice.
'Last night I told you that before the war against Germany I had been briefly involved in yours, and I usually express myself with great precision, Jacobo. And I believe I am now. That means, I did not spend much time in Spain. I was just passing through,' Wheeler replied, and I noticed a slight touch of impatience in his voice, as if he were rather put out that I should, at that precise moment, want to drag in another war and another time, however closely related it was to his war and however close in time it might have been. 'But anyway, although I couldn't swear to it, I can't remember having seen such a thing in your country, I haven't read or heard anything about it either. If I'm not mistaken, though, there were posters, a campaign against fifth columnists; the populations of Madrid and Barcelona and possibly Valencia were urged to hunt them down and unmask them, to drag them out of the sewers and kill them, and it was the same on the other side: they were urged to track down and destroy intriguers, not that there would have been many left in an area full of talkative father-confessors, but that was what was asked of them. Obviously, they told people to keep their eyes open and to watch the rearguard, as they also did rather timidly, I believe, during the First World War, here and in France. But I don't think there was ever a campaign like this one against "careless talk", in which they not only put civilians on guard against possible spies, but recommended silence as the norm: people were prevailed upon not to speak, they were ordered, indeed, exhorted to keep silent. Suddenly people were made to see their own language as an invisible enemy, uncontrollable, unexpected and unpredictable, as the worst, most murderous and most fearful of enemies, like a terrible weapon which you, or anyone, could activate and set off without ever knowing when it might unleash a bullet, or if it would be transformed into torpedoes that would sink one of our battleships in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles away, or into bombs from a Junkers that would strike with deadly accuracy at our neighbourhoods and our houses, or fall on those military targets that most needed to be safeguarded and defended, on the most secret and most camouflaged and most vital of targets. I don't know if you quite realise what it meant, Jacobo: people were warned against using their main form of communication; they were made to distrust the very activity in which people most naturally indulge and always have indulged, without reserve, at all times and in all places, not just in this country and at that particular time; it made an enemy of what most defines and unites us: talking, telling, saying, commenting, gossiping, passing on information, criticising, exchanging news, tittle-tattling, defaming, slandering and spreading rumours, describing and relating events, keeping up to date and putting others in the picture, and, of course, joking and lying. That is the wheel that moves the world, Jacobo, more than anything else; that is the engine of life, the one that never becomes exhausted and never stops, that is its life's breath. And suddenly people were asked to turn it off, that engine, to stop it breathing. They were asked to give up the thing they most love, that is most indispensable to them, the thing we all live for and which everyone, without exception, can enjoy and make use of, both poor and rich, uneducated and educated, old and young, the sick and the healthy, soldiers and civilians. If there's one thing that they do or we do which is not a strict physiological necessity, if there is one thing that is truly common to all beings endowed with free will, it is talking, Jacobo. The fatal word. The curse of the word. Talking and talking, without stopping, that is the one thing for which no one ever lacks ammunition. Grammatical, syntactical and lexical skills matter little, oratorial gifts still less, and pronunciation, diction, accent, euphony, rhythm even less. The wisest man in the world will talk with greater order, appropriateness and precision, and perhaps to his listeners' greater advantage, or, rather, only to the advantage of those listeners who resemble him or want to resemble him. But he will not talk any more fluently than the semi-literate housewife who talks non-stop all day and who only stops at night because sleep and her sore, much-abused throat finally get the better of her. The most widely travelled man in the world will be able to tell endless marvellous and delightful stories, innumerable anecdotes about adventures in outlandish, remote, exotic and dangerous places. But he will not necessarily talk with any more confidence than the rough innkeeper who has never been further than his own bar and has only ever seen the twenty streets and two or three squares that make up his obscure village. The most inspired poet or the most zigzagging of narrators will be able to invent and recite on demand a stream of hypnotic words that will sound like music, so much so that those listening will not worry overmuch about the meaning, or, rather, they will capture the meaning effortlessly and without having to think about it before grasping or absorbing it, the process will be entirely simultaneous, although afterwards, when the music has stopped, those listeners might be quite incapable of repeating or summarising it, incapable possibly of continuing to understand what a moment ago they understood so well while they were rocked by the rhythm and while the enchantment lasted, resting as lightly upon the mind as upon the ear, each as permeable as the other. But those poets and narrators will not necessarily speak with more assurance or ease than the ignorant office worker, repetitive and dull, who believes himself to be full of "donaire" and "gratia", a tedious fixture in all the offices of the world, regardless of latitude or climate, even in the offices of interpreters and spies…'
Wheeler stopped for a moment, more than anything – it seemed to me – to catch his breath. He had said the words 'donaire and 'gracia' in Spanish, possibly paraphrasing Cervantes's words taken from somewhere other than Don Quixote, an unusual occurrence, but perfectly possible in his case. I could not resist trying to find out, and so I took advantage of his pause to quote slowly, little by little, almost syllable by syllable, as if casually or as if not quite daring to say it, murmuring:
'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo…'
Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying…
I could not complete the quotation. Perhaps Wheeler did not like to be reminded of that last phrase out loud, often the old do not even want to hear so much as a mention of such things, of their death, perhaps because they are beginning to see it as something likely or plausible and not dreamed or fictitious. No, I don't believe it, I can't be sure, but no one sees their own end like that, not even the very old or the very ill or those under threat and in constant danger. We, the others, are the ones who begin to see it in them. He ignored me and went on. He pretended not to notice what I had recited in my own language, and so I never knew if it had been a coincidence or if he had, in fact, been alluding to Cervantes's joyful farewell.
'Sometimes people say of someone that he lacks conversation. That's ridiculous. A cultivated person, the Prime Minister (well, all right, let's call him mentally adroit) might say it of someone who is not at all cultivated, for example, his barber. What the former is actually saying is that he doesn't care about and is hugely bored by anything the latter has to say. Doubtless almost as bored as the barber is by everything the Premier comes out with while he's having his hair cut, it's always a difficult chunk of time to fill, like journeys in lifts, especially if the scant head of hair requires all manner of primping if it's to look half-way presentable and not too much like an uprooted carrot. But the barber will certainly not lack conversation, he may have even more to say than the rather obtuse minister, who is more concerned with the progress of his country in the abstract and, more concretely, with the progress of his career. It seems to me that people who know absolutely nothing, people who have never consciously paused to think for a moment about anything, who do not have a single idea of their own or anyone else's really, nevertheless talk untiringly, unceasingly, without the slightest inhibition or self-consciousness. This is not just the case with people without training or education; there are far more astonishing cases than that of these rustics: you have only to see a group of Hooray Henries or idiotic snobs, most of them with PhDs from Cambridge or from us, and you wonder what the devil they can find to talk about amongst themselves after the first hour of exchanging greetings and telling each other the four miserable scraps of news that everyone knows about anyway because it's common gossip, or bringing each other up to date on their usual two bits of twaddle and three pieces of villainy (I've always wondered what such people can find to talk about at those lavish receptions, which are cram-packed with them). One imagines that they must often have to resort to saying nothing and to loudly clearing their throats, that they must have to suffer embarrassingly long pauses and endure witty comments about the rain and the clouds as well as the awkward silences characteristic of dead time at its most defunct and even stillborn, given their absolute lack of ideas, amusing remarks, knowledge and the necessary inspiration to recount anything, of ingenuity and dialogue and even monologue: of intelligence and substance. And yet that isn't the case. One doesn't know why or how or about what, but the fact is that they spend the hours and the days chatting endlessly, brutishly, spend whole evenings engaged in chit-chat, without once closing their mouths, even snatching the word from each other's lips, all intent on monopolising it. It's both a mystery and not a mystery. Speaking, far more than thinking, is something that everyone has within his or her grasp (I'm talking, of course, about things volitive, not merely organic or physiological); it's something which is shared and has always been shared by the bad and the good, by victims and their executioners, by the cruel and the compassionate, the sincere and the mendacious, by the not very bright and the extremely stupid, by slaves and their masters, by the gods and mankind. They all have it, imbeciles, brutes, merciless sadists, murderers, tyrants, savages, simpletons, and even the mad. And precisely because it is the one thing that makes us all equal we have spent centuries creating for ourselves all kinds of tiny differences, in pronunciation, diction, intonation, vocabulary, phonetics and semantics, all in order to feel that our group alone is in possession of a mode of speech unknown to others, of a password for initiates only. It is not only a matter for what used to be called the upper classes, eager to distinguish themselves from and scornful of everyone else; those known as the lower classes have done the same, they have proved no less scornful, and thus have forged their own jargons, their own ciphers, the secret or encrypted languages that allowed them to recognise each other and to exclude the enemy, that is, the learned and the powerful and the refined, and to prevent them from understanding, at least in part, what their members were saying, just as criminals invent their own argot and the persecuted their codes. Within the confines of the same language, their entirely artificial aim is not to be understood or at least only partially; it's an attempt to obscure, to conceal, and, with this end in mind, they seek out strange derivations and fanciful variants, defective and highly arbitrary metaphors, tangential or oblique meanings that can be separated off from the common norm, they even coin new and unnecessary substitute words, to undo what was said and to mask what was communicated. The reason being that what makes language intelligible is the habitual and the given. Moreover, that language, or tongue, is almost all that some people have and give and receive: the poorest, the most humble, the disinherited, the illiterate, the captive, the unhappy, the subjugated; the marginalised and the deformed, like that Shakespearean king of ours, Richard III, who did so well out of his persuasive gift of the gab. That's the one thing you can't take away from them, speech or language, perhaps the one thing they have learned and know, they use it to address their children or their lovers, to joke, to love, to defend themselves, to suffer, console and pray, to unburden themselves, to implore, persuade, save and convince; with it they also poison, instigate, hate, perjure, insult, curse and betray, corrupt, condemn and avenge themselves. Almost everyone has it, both the king and his vassals, the priest and his congregation, the marshal and his soldiers. That is why sacred language exists, a language that does not belong to everyone, a language intended not for men, but for the gods. People forget, however, that, according to our old and possibly now moribund beliefs, both God and the gods talk and listen too (what are prayers but sentences, words, syllables), and, in the end, that sacred language is deciphered and learned too, all codes are susceptible to eventual decoding, sooner or later, no secret can be a secret eternally.' Wheeler stopped again, very briefly, again to catch his breath. He placed one hand on the pictures we had laid out on the table, an instinctive gesture, as if he wanted to prevent them being carried off by a nonexistent gust of wind, or perhaps merely to caress them. It wasn't cold, the sun was very high, pale, lazy; it was pleasantly cool. 'Language so binds and assimilates us that the powerful have always had to find non-verbal signs and insignia and symbols in order to be obeyed and in order to differentiate themselves. Do you remember that scene in Shakespeare when, on the eve of battle, the king wraps himself in a borrowed cloak and goes and sits down in the camp with three soldiers, pretending to be just another combatant, ready for battle, and unable to sleep through what's left of the night or through the few remaining hours before dawn? He speaks to them, he presents himself as a friend, he talks to them, and when he does, the four seem similar, he more logical and educated, they rougher and more intuitive, but they understand each other perfectly, they are on the same plane of comprehension and speech and nothing gets in the way of that exchange of opinions and impressions and even fears, two of them even quarrel and almost come to blows, the king who is not the king and a subject who is not, at that moment, a subject. They talk for quite a while, and the king knows that, as they speak, they become equal, that, at least for as long as the dialogue lasts, they are the same. Which is why, when he is left alone, thinking about what he has heard, he tells us what the difference is, he murmurs in his soliloquy what it is that really distinguishes him from them. Do you remember that scene, Jacobo?'
I too placed my hand on the drawings, as if I feared the breeze.
'No, Peter,' I said. 'What king is that?'
But Wheeler did not reply to my question, he went on, instead, to quote out loud, and this time I was in no doubt that he was quoting, for very few writers other than Shakespeare would ever have written 'great greatness' (and so many teachers and critics in my country now would have crucified him for doing so).
'"What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?" That is what the king says when he's alone, and a little further on he reproaches ceremony for singling him out: "Oh ceremony! Show me but thy worth!" And he goes on to challenge it: "O! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!" What does it actually achieve, if it achieves anything? And later still, the king dares to envy the wretched slave who labours in the sun all day but then sleeps deeply "with a body fill'd and vacant mind" and "never sees horrid night, the child of hell" and who "follows so the ever-running year with profitable labour to his grave". And the king concludes with the obligatory exaggeration of all those monologues that no one else hears on the stage and which are heard only off-stage, in the auditorium: "And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.'" That is more or less what Wheeler said and quoted, then he added: 'Kings of old were shameless creatures, but at least Shakespeare's kings did not entirely deceive themselves: they knew their hands were stained with blood and they did not forget how they came to wear the crown, apart from murders and betrayals and plots (perhaps they were too human). Ceremony, Jacobo, that's all. Changing, limitless, general ceremony. As well as secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence. But never speaking, never talking, never using words, however exquisite or captivating they might be. Because that, deep down, is within the grasp of any beggar, any outcast, any poor wretch, any one of the dispossessed. In that regard, they only differ from the king in the insignificant and ameliorable matter of perfection and degree.'
'What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy!' were the words quoted by Sir Peter Wheeler, as I found out later, when I located and recognised the texts. And he recited word for word the whole of the rest of the soliloquy, for that kind of memory he preserved intact.
'But it's not within the reach of the very young,' I commented, 'or the dumb or those whose tongues have been cut out or to whom the word is simply not given or permitted, there's been a lot of that in history, and, as I understand it, there are Islamic countries in which women still do not have that right. As far as I understand it, and if my memory serves me right, that was the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan.'
'No, Jacobo, you're wrong: the young are merely waiting, their inability is purely transitory; I imagine they are preparing themselves from that very first yell when they're born, and they make themselves understood very early on: they use other means, but they are still saying things. As for the dumb and those with no tongue, and those denied voice and word, they are exceptions, anomalies, punishments, coercions, outrages, but never the norm, and, as such, they do not count. Besides, that is not enough in itself to render that norm null and void or even to contradict it. Those thus afflicted resort to other sign systems, to non-verbal codes which they quickly establish, and you may rest assured that what they are doing is neither more nor less than talking. They are soon telling and transmitting again, like everyone else; even if it's in writing or through signs and without uttering a sound; they are still saying even if they are doing so silently.' Wheeler stopped talking and looked up at the sky, as if, having spoken of silence, he wanted to immerse himself for a moment in the eloquent silence he had evoked. The whitish, indifferent sun lit up his eyes, and to me they looked like glass marbles flecked with colour in which the dominant shade was dark red. 'Earlier, I said that speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods, you have only to read the Bible and Homer or, of course, in Spanish, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. But some people cease to share it, how can I put it, they do not possess it, and they are neither dumb nor very young.' He looked down for a second, and still had his eyes fixed on the grass, or perhaps beyond that, on the earth beneath the grass, or beyond that, on the invisible earth beneath the earth, then added after a brief pause: 'The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.'
'It seems to me that time is the only dimension they share and in which they can communicate, the only dimension they have in common and that unites them.' That quotation, or perhaps paraphrase, came into my mind, and I felt I had to say it out loud at once, or at least mumble it to myself.
But Wheeler was, I thought, gradually coming to the end of his digression. In fact, he always knew precisely where he was, and what seemed in him random or involuntary, a consequence of distraction or of age or of a somewhat confused perception of time, of his digressive and discursive tendencies, was always calculated, measured and controlled, and formed part of his machinations and of trajectories he had already drawn up and planned. I told myself that it would not be long now before he returned to the subject of 'careless talk' and the posters, indeed, he was once more looking at them intently, where they lay on the waterproof canvas cover as if they were cards in a game of patience, we, too, were sitting on the protective covers, and their folds gave to that simulacrum of an old man and to me, too, I suppose, a slightly Roman look, made us look, perhaps, vaguely like senators taking the air, our feet almost engulfed by the skirts of some very long, exaggerated tunics. Anyway, he either didn't hear me or preferred to ignore me, or simply didn't notice the words I had said, which were not mine but another's, the words of a dead man when he was still alive.
'But it wasn't always so,' he continued with his own thoughts. 'Throughout the centuries, they too shared speech and language, at least in the imaginations of the living, that is, of the future dead. Not just the talkative ghosts and loquacious phantoms, the chatty spirits and garrulous spectres present in almost all traditions. It was also assumed that they would, quite naturally, talk and speak and tell tales in the other world. In that same scene from Shakespeare, for example, before the king gives his soliloquy, one of the soldiers with whom he speaks says that the king will have a hard time of it should the cause of the war prove to have been a bad one: "When all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle," he says, "shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, 'We died at such a place.'" You see, that was what they believed, not only that the dead would speak and even protest, but that their scattered, separated heads and limbs would protest as well, once reunited to present themselves for judgement with due decorum.'
'We died at such a place.' That was what Wheeler had said in his language, and in my own language I completed the Cervantes quotation to myself, the one he had not allowed me to finish and which also bore witness to that same belief: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying, and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.' That was what Cervantes hoped for, I thought, no complaints and no accusations, no reproaches, no settling of accounts or demands for compensation for all his earthly troubles and grievances, of which he had known not a few. Not even a final judgement, which is what the unbeliever most misses. Instead a renewed encounter with wit and charm, with his dear, delightful friends, who would also find contentment in the next life. That is the only thing from which he takes his leave, the only thing he would wish to preserve in the eternity for which he is bound. I had often heard my father speak of that written farewell, which is not as famous as it deserves to be, it can be found in a book which almost no one reads and which may, nevertheless, be greater than all the others, greater even than Don Quixote. I would have liked to remind Wheeler of the whole quotation, but I did not dare to insist or to cause him to deviate from his path. Instead, I accompanied him along the way, saying:
'The very idea of a Final Judgement meant that, according to common expectations, that would be what people would mostly be doing after death: telling everyone's story, then talking, relating, describing, arguing, refuting, appealing and, in the end, hearing sentence. Besides, a trial on such a monumental scale, the trial on a single day of everyone who had ever lived on Earth, Egyptian pharaohs rubbing shoulders with modern-day business executives and taxi-drivers, Roman emperors with modern-day beggars and gangsters and astronauts and bullfighters. Imagine the noise, Peter, the entire history of the world with all its individual cases transformed into a madhouse. And the more remote and ancient dead would get fed up with waiting, with counting the uncountable time that would elapse before their Judgement, doubtless furious about the literally infinite delay. They who had remained silent and alone for millions of centuries, waiting for the last person to die and for no one else to be left alive. That belief condemned us all to a very long silence. There you have a true example of "the whips and scorns of time", "the law's delay",' and this time I was the one to quote from his poet. 'And according to that belief, the very first man ever to die would, right now, still be counting the hours of his silent solitude, those that had passed and those still to come; and if I were him, I would be selfishly longing for the world to end once and for all and for there finally to be nothing.'
Wheeler smiled. Something in what I had said, or perhaps more than one thing, had amused him.
'Exactly,' he replied. 'A silence sine die: that would be the best-case scenario, assuming one's faith was unshakeable. But there is, of course, the aggravating factor that, by then, during the Second World War, hardly anyone believed in that parliament or justification or final report by each individual at the end of time, and it was hard to think that the heads and limbs which, night after night, were being shattered by the bombs raining down on those cities could ever one day be reunited in order to cry out at some later date: "We died at such a place"; and it was little consolation that the causes were just, and it mattered still less if they were or weren't good, when the main cause of all the dying and killing became instead mere survival, one's own or that of those one loved. It probably hadn't been much believed before that either, perhaps not since the First World War, which was no less ghastly for the world that watched it and which is also my world, don't forget, as is this world that contains both you and me today, or is perhaps merely dragging us along with it. Atrocities make men into unbelievers, at least in their innermost consciousness and feelings, even if, out of some superstitious reflex reaction, or some other reaction based on a mixture of tradition and surrender, they decide to pretend the opposite and gather together in churches to sing hymns in order to feel closer and to instil themselves not so much with courage as with integrity and resignation, just as soldiers used to sing as they advanced, almost defenceless, bayonets fixed, mostly in order to anaesthetise themselves a little with their cries before the impact or the blow or being hurled into the air, in order to numb thoughts that had been wounded long before the flesh ever was, and to silence the various sounds made by death as it prowled around on the look-out for easy prey. I know this, I've seen it in the field. But it isn't only the acts of savagery, the cruelties, those one has suffered and those one has oneself committed, all in the cause of survival, which is as just as it is unjust. It is also the stubbornness of the facts: the fact that no one has ever come to talk to us after they have died, despite all the efforts of spiritualists, visionaries, phantasmophiles, miraculists and even our present-day unbelieving believers, who, even though their belief is only residual and habitual, can be counted in their millions; long experience has forced us to recognise over the centuries, perhaps only in our heart of hearts and possibly without ever actually admitting as much to ourselves, that the only people who have no language and never speak or tell or say anything are the dead.' Peter stopped and looked down again, and added at once, without looking up: 'And that includes us, of course, when we join their ranks. But only then and not before.'
He remained like that, staring at the grass. He seemed to be waiting for me to make some comment or to ask some question. But I didn't know which, which of those two things he wanted and for which one he was silently asking me, or if he really needed either. And so the only thing that occurred to me was to whisper in my own language, a language in which the words had not originally been written, but the only one in which I knew them:
'It is strange to inhabit the earth no longer. Strange no longer to be what one was…and to abandon even one's own name. Strange no longer to desire one's desires. And being dead is such hard work.'
Fortunately, I suppose, Wheeler ignored this too.
'Yes, they only talk to us in our dreams,' he went on, as if my unattended half-verses had, none the less, triggered some reaction. 'And we hear them so clearly, and their presence is so vivid, that, as long as sleep lasts, these people with whom we can never exchange a word or a look when awake, or make any contact, seem to be the very people who are, in fact, telling us things and listening to us and even cheering our spirits with their longed-for laughter, identical to the laughter we knew when they were alive on this earth: it's exactly the same, that laughter; we recognise it unhesitatingly. It really is very strange; if pressed, I would say inexplicable, it is one of the few intact mysteries left to us. One thing is certain, though, at least for rationalists like you and like me, and as Toby was and Tupra still is, those voices and their new voices are inside us, not somewhere outside. They are in our imagination and in our memory. Let's put it like this: it is our memory imagining, and not, for once, only remembering, or, rather, doing so in impure, motley fashion. They are in our dreams, the dead; we are the ones dreaming them, our sleeping consciousness brings them to us and no one else can hear them. It is more like an impersonation' (a word that translates into Spanish as a mixture of encarnación, suplantación and personificación) 'than a supposed visitation or warning from beyond the grave. Such a mechanism is not unknown to us, when we're awake I mean. Sometimes you love someone so much that it's very easy to see the world through their eyes and to feel what that other person feels, in so far as it's possible to understand another person's feelings. To foresee that person, to anticipate them. Literally, to put yourself in their place. That's why the expression exists, very few expressions in a language exist in vain. And if we do that when we're awake, then it's hardly surprising that these fusions or conversions or juxtapositions, metamorphoses almost, should occur while we're asleep. Do you know that sonnet by Milton? Milton had been blind for some time when he wrote it, but he dreamed one night of his dead wife Catherine, and he saw and heard her perfectly in that dimension, that of the dream, which so welcomes and withstands the poetic narrative. And in that dimension he recovered his vision threefold: his own, as faculty and sense; the impossible image of his wife, for neither he nor anyone else could still see her in the present, she had been erased from the earth; and, above all, her face and figure, which, in him, were not even remembered but imagined, new and never seen before, because he had never seen her in life other than with his mind and with his touch, she was his second wife and he was already blind when they married. And as he leaned forwards to embrace her in the dream, "I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night", that's how it ends. With the dead you always return to night and to hearing only their silence and to never receiving a reply. No, they never talk, they are the only ones; and they are also the majority, if we count all those who have passed through the world and left it behind. Although they all doubtless talked when they were here.' Wheeler touched the drawings again, tapped them with his index finger, pointing at them vehemently as if they were more than they were. 'Do you realise what this meant, Jacobo? They were asking people to be silent, to sew up their lips, to keep their mouths tight shut, to abstain from all careless talk and even from talk that might not seem careless. They filled everyone with fear, even children. Fear of themselves and of betraying themselves, and, of course, fear of other people, even the person one most loved, the person who was closest and most trusted. So, when you think about it, what they were asking with these slogans was not just that people should renounce the air, but that by doing so, they should become assimilated with the dead. And this at a time when each day brought us news of so many new dead, those on the infinite fronts scattered around half the globe, or those you could see in your own neighbourhood, in your own street, victims of the night-time bombing raids, when anyone might be the next. Weren't those deaths enough? Wasn't it enough, that definitive and irreversible silence imposed on so many without those of us still alive having to imitate them and fall silent before our time? How could they ask that of a whole country or of anyone, even of an isolated individual? If you look at these posters (and there were more), you'll see that no one, however insignificant, was excluded. What interesting or dangerous information, for example, could those two ladies travelling on the Underground be harbouring, they're probably talking about their hats or about the most innocuous details of their daily lives. Ah, but their husband or brother or son might have been called up, that was the norm, and although their men, already forewarned, would not have told them much, they might know something of importance that could be used, how can I put it, without their even knowing that they knew it or unaware of its importance. Everyone could know something, even the most misanthropic beggar to whom nobody speaks, not just in time of war but never, and even though the majority aren't aware of the precious nature of what they know. And the less conscious one is, the more dangerous one becomes. It may seem like an exaggeration, but everyone is capable of unleashing calamities, disasters, crimes, tragic misunderstandings and acts of revenge merely by speaking, innocently and freely. It is always possible and even easy to let the cat out of the bag or, as you say in Spanish, irse de la lengua, what a lovely expression, at once so broad and so precise, covering both the intentional and the involuntary nature of the action.' And Wheeler, of course, said that lovely expression, irse de la lengua, in Spanish. 'Whatever the era or the circumstances, no one is safe from that. And never forget: everything has its moment to be believed, however unlikely or anodyne, however incredible or stupid.'
Wheeler looked up again, as if he had heard before I did what I heard immediately afterwards, but only after a few seconds, the noise of an engine in the air and that of a propeller too, perhaps he had got used to picking up the slightest sound or aerial vibration during the war or during his wars, before it was even audible, I suppose it's also possible to learn to have a presentiment of a presentiment. Then a helicopter appeared, flying low over the trees, an odd sight in the Oxford sky, still more so at a weekend, on one of those Sundays in exile from the infinite, perhaps some academic ceremony was being held that required the presence of the Prime Minister or some other high-ranking official or someone else from the crowded monarchical ladder (the Duke and Duchess of Kent seem to be in a dozen places at once, with, it's said, supernatural help) and about which we knew nothing, Wheeler had been retired for so long now that, with each year that passed, the university authorities were more and more inclined to forget to invite him to their solemn feasts. British premiers have traditionally shown a kind of homing instinct for our university, although, during my time as a teacher there, I still remember how we members of the congregation denied a doctorate honoris causa, by a majority vote, to the modest Mrs Thatcher (the rancorous Margaret Hilda) when she was still only Mrs and not Baroness or Lady. She was an Oxford graduate and was in power at the time, but that didn't help her much. I had a temporary right to vote and it was with great excitement and pleasure that I gave my vote to the nay-saying majority. The woman took the snub badly, and later appeared to exact her revenge by imposing restrictions and laws prejudicial to Oxford University and to others too, but she was the first Prime Minister to whom such a degree had been denied, for it had been awarded to all or almost all her predecessors, with barely any opposition, a mere formality, or, shall we say, graciously.
The noise of the blades immediately became unbearable, Peter clapped his hands over his ears and at the same time screwed up his eyes hard, as if the clatter – a giant rattle – hurt his eyes too, and thus he could not prevent the drawings from being blown about in the turbulence. He didn't even see this happen. I tried to hold down those I could with my hands, but only very few. The helicopter started making passes overhead, as if we were the object of its vigilance, perhaps it amused the pilot to see this frightened old man and to watch his companion chasing after some elusive bits of paper that were heading in the direction of the river. I had to hurl myself flat on the grass (not just once or twice either) to rescue the more graspable papers before they fell into the water, while the helicopter circled overhead with what I perceived, possibly erroneously, to be mockery, as I hurled myself this way and that. Then it moved off and disappeared in a matter of seconds, just as it had come. A few drawings were still flying about, especially the newspaper cuttings, which were the lightest, I feared that Fraser's 'Information to the Enemy' might not only crumble like a papyrus (it was over sixty years old that bit of paper), but also get a soaking. I was still chasing after various of these when I saw that Wheeler had finally opened his eyes as well as his ears, and – with his hands free again – was now raising one arm to his forehead – or it may have been his wrist to his temple – as if he were in pain or were checking to see if he had a fever, or perhaps it was a gesture of horror. And I saw that he had stretched out his other arm, pointing with his forefinger just as he had the previous night when he couldn't find the word he wanted and I had to guess or work out what it was. I would have assumed that this was the same thing again, this momentary aphasia, had it not been preceded by the helicopter flying over and by Peter's contrived deafness and blindness while the blades thundered above us, I had seen him, how can I put it, defenceless and helpless, and possibly overcome. I went fearfully over to him, I abandoned the bits of paper for the moment, abandoned my hunt for the remaining rebellious items.
'Peter, are you feeling ill, is something wrong?' He shook his head and continued pointing with a look of alarm on his face at the banks of the peaceful Cherwell, I didn't need approximations this time: 'The cartoon?' I asked, and he nodded at once even though I think I may have used the wrong term, it was the original cutting that was worrying him, he had only become aware of the danger when he opened his eyes after his initial fright or his lightning realisation, not before; and so off I went again, I ran, leapt, fell, caught it, closing my fingers on it, still intact, on the very edge of the gently flowing stream, I must have looked like one of those fielders in cricket who hurl themselves to the ground, in that quintessentially English game about which I understand nothing, or else a goalkeeper in a football match performing a full-length save, in that no longer so quintessentially English game which I understand perfectly. The air had grown still again, I picked up another two or three bits of paper from the ground, they were all safe, none had been lost, none had got wet, a few were merely slightly crumpled. 'Here you are, Peter, I think they're all here, and they hardly seem to be damaged at all,' I said, smoothing some of them out. But Wheeler was still unable to speak, and he pointed at me repeatedly with his finger as if at an heir or at an addressee, and I understood that these drawings were for me, that he was giving them to me. He opened the file and I began putting the drawings back, apart from the one by Fraser, the one that was not a reproduction but an original cutting, because he raised his forefinger again to stop me as I was about to put it back with the others, then immediately touched his own chest with his thumb. 'No, not that one, that's for me,' said the gesture.
'You're keeping this one?' I asked, trying to help him out. He nodded, I set it aside. It was strange that he should suddenly have been left speechless, just when he had been talking about the few or the many – depending on how one looked at it – who were also speechless. The previous night, when he had been unable to come out with the word 'cushion', he had explained afterwards, when he had recovered his voice or his fluency: 'It happens from time to time. It only lasts a moment, it's like a sudden withdrawal of my will.' And it was then that he had used that rather recondite word, although less so in English than in Spanish: 'It's like a warning, a kind of prescience…' without actually completing the sentence, not even when I had urged him to do so shortly afterwards; to which he had replied: 'Don't ask a question to which you already know the answer, Jacobo, it's not your style.' Prescience means a knowledge of future events, or knowing beforehand exactly what will happen. I don't know if such a thing exists, but sometimes we also give a name to what does not exist, and that is where uncertainty begins. I had no doubts now as to how that sentence should end, I had wondered about it and had guessed at it the previous evening, now I knew the answer even though he had not told me: 'It's like a warning, a kind of prescience, a foreknowledge of what it's like to be dead.' And he could perhaps have added: 'It's not being able to talk, even though you want to. Except that you don't want to, your will has withdrawn. There is no wanting and no not wanting, both have gone.' I looked back at the house, Mrs Berry had opened a window on the ground floor and was waving to us. Perhaps she had looked out as soon as she heard the racket made by that predatory helicopter and had, without our realising it, seen me haring around and diving to the ground. I raised my voice to ask: 'Time for lunch?' and accompanied my cry with the rather absurd gesture of one hand held at mouth level, like someone twirling spaghetti round a fork. I don't think she heard me, but she understood. She said 'No' with her hand and then used it to indicate waiting, as if to say: 'No, not yet,' and then pointed at Peter with a gesture of disquiet or uncertainty, 'Is he all right?', was the translation. I nodded several times to reassure her. She raised both hands at once, as if she were being held up at gunpoint, 'Good,' then closed the window and disappeared inside. Wheeler recovered his voice:
'Yes, I'll keep that one, but I can get you a copy if you like,' he said, meaning the drawing by Fraser. 'You can have the others, I've got several copies, or else reproductions of them in books; I have a few other originals too. I particularly like the spider-cum-swastika. Wretched helicopter,' he added without a pause and with a hint of annoyance, 'What on earth was it up to, hanging around a studious area like this? I hope they don't come back again to ruffle our hair; by the way, have you got a comb on you? You Latins usually do.' Wheeler's hair was indeed like the furious foam on the crest of a wave, and mine had clearly become tangled. 'What did Mrs Berry want?' he said, again without a pause. He had gone back to referring to her as he did in company. He was regaining his composure and that must have helped him; or perhaps it was just force of habit in him to dissemble. 'Was she calling us in for lunch already?' He looked at his watch without actually looking at it, he was trying to get over his shock with no need for any remarks from me, although he knew I wasn't going to let him off that easily.
'No, it's not ready yet. I imagine she was frightened by the noise, she wouldn't have known what it was,' I replied, and added, in turn, without a pause: You lost your voice again, Peter. Last night, you told me it only happened occasionally. But that's twice now in one weekend.'
'Bah,' he replied evasively, 'it was just a coincidence, bad luck, that damn helicopter. They're absolutely deafening, it sounded almost like an old Sikorsky H-5, the noise alone used to be enough to provoke panic. Besides, I've been talking a lot, I talk far too much when you're here, and then I suffer the consequences, I'm not really used to it any more. You let me ramble on, you pretend to be interested and I'm very grateful to you for that, but you should interrupt me more, make me get to the point. I suppose I've been a bit alone here in Oxford lately, and with Mrs Berry there's nothing more to be said, of what can be said between us, I mean, or of what she might want to talk about. I don't have that many visitors, you know. A lot of people have died, others went to America when they retired and live there like parasites, I didn't want to do that, they just lounge around, getting as much sun as possible, they even go so far as to wear bermuda shorts, they get hooked, via television, on that football they play over there, all padding and helmets, they worry about their digestion and eat nothing but broccoli, they prowl around the library and whatever campus it is that they've landed up in, and allow their departments to exhibit them now and then like prestigious foreign mummies or the wrinkled trophies of some vaguely heroic times that nobody there knows anything about. In short, they're like antiques, most depressing. Besides, I like talking to you. The English shy away from anything that isn't either anecdote, fact, event or ironic gloss or comment; they don't like speculation, they find reasoning superfluous: and that's precisely what I most enjoy. Yes, I like talking to you very much. You should come down more often, especially as you're so alone there in London. Although perhaps soon you'll be much less alone. I still have a proposal to put to you, and I ask you, please, to accept it without giving it too much thought or asking me too many questions. You can't really waste time that you already consider to be wasted, these periods of sentimental convalescence can be filled up with anything, the content doesn't really matter, whatever happens by and helps to push them along will do, one tends, I think I'm right in saying, not to be too choosy. Afterwards, it's hard even to remember those times or what one did while they lasted, as if everything had been permissible then, and one can always cite disorientation and pain as justification; it's as if those times had never existed and as if, in their place, there was a blank. They're free of responsibilities too, "I wasn't myself at the time, you know." Oh, yes, pain has always been our best alibi, the one that best exonerates us of every action. It has always been man's best alibi, I mean, the best alibi for humankind, for both individuals and nations.'
He said all this quite casually, but I couldn't help but feel a twinge of excitement and another of pride, I had always thought that I amused him and that he liked me, and that perhaps I flattered him a little, that he found me easy to be with, but never more than that. He always had a lot to say and to discuss, although he was very sparing with the former; his conversation taught me, instructed me and provided me with new ideas or else renewed ideas that I already had; in short, he captivated me. I don't think I offered him much in return, apart from company and an attentive ear, the look of interest on my face was real not fake. Rylands had bequeathed him to me and, more than that, had turned out to be his brother. Perhaps Peter regarded me with benevolent, affectionate eyes because he, too, saw me partly as a bequest from Toby, although I could never be a substitute for him, as Wheeler was for me. I wasn't old enough, I lacked the shared past, the acuteness, the knowledge, the mystery. I felt slightly embarrassed, I didn't know what to say, so I removed from my inside jacket pocket the Latin comb he had asked me for.
'Here you are, Peter,' I said. 'One small comb.' He looked at it for a second, disconcerted, he had forgotten that he still needed it. Then he gingerly took it from me, held it up to the light (it was clean) and recomposed his hair as best he could, it's not easy without a mirror and with only a small comb. He tamed the top, but not the sides, the aeronautical wind had blown them forward and they were rebelliously invading his temples, giving him a still more Roman air. 'Allow me,' I said. He trustingly handed me the comb, and with three or four rapid movements I smoothed the sides of his hair too. I hoped Mrs Berry wasn't watching us, she would have taken me for a mad, frustrated barber.
'You'd better comb your hair too,' said Wheeler, regarding my head critically, almost with distaste, as if I had a parrot perched on top of it. 'I don't know how you managed it, but you've got grass stains all over you. And you hadn't even noticed.' He indicated the front of my pale shirt, revealing that he didn't make the connection between the two or three smudges of green and my rescue of his drawings. What with the party the night before, my subsequent studies and the glasses of wine, the lack of sleep, the very rapid shave I had given myself and my recent vicissitudes al fresco, I must have looked like a beggar down to his last penny or a disgraced criminal fallen on very hard times. My jacket and trousers were crumpled from rolling around on the grass. 'Honestly,' said Wheeler, 'you're just like a child.' He was probably pulling my leg, and that cheered him up too. I ran my fingers over the small comb (a mechanical gesture) and then disentangled my hair, by touch alone. When I had finished, I turned to him for his opinion:
'How do I look?' I said, theatrically displaying my two profiles.
You'll pass,' he said, after casting a condescending eye over me, like a superior officer making a cursory inspection of a soldier's head. And then he returned to where he had been just before the aerial attack, he never lost the thread unless he wanted to. Despite the many detours, meanderings, diversions, he always concluded his trajectories. 'So what happened with that campaign?' he asked rhetorically. 'Well, overall, naturally enough, it failed. A failure to which it was irremissibly condemned from the start. Well, it served some purpose, obviously, quite a good purpose really: people became aware of the dangers of talking too much, something that had never even occurred to most of them. It doubtless had an effect on many in the armed forces and that was the main thing, since they would be the best-informed and the most vulnerable to the consequences of verbal excess or carelessness. And the leaders, both political and military, were, of course, very careful indeed. There was an increased tendency to communicate in code, or else through doubles entendres and semantic transpositions, using improvised or rough-and-ready synecdoches and metalepses, and this happened spontaneously throughout the population, depending on the individual's talents and abilities. The idea that someone, anyone, could be listening with hostile intent was created and implanted. You could say (and this, in itself, was both unusual and admirable) that people became fully and collectively aware, however temporarily, of what was depicted in that sequence of scenes that begins with the sailor talking to the young woman: the fact that our words, once uttered, are beyond our control. They, more than anything, cease to belong to us, far more so than our actions which, in a way, good or bad, stay inside ourselves, and cannot be appropriated by anyone else, except in flagrant cases of usurpation or imposture, which, however tardily, can always be denounced, aborted, undone or unmasked.' Wheeler used the Spanish verb 'desfacer' for 'undone'. He had also used the Spanish 'como estaba mandado' and 'de andar por casa' for 'naturally enough' and 'rough-and-ready' – he liked to show off both his colloquial and his bookish Spanish, as he did with his Portuguese and French, I suppose, those were the three languages he knew best, and possibly others, he certainly, to my knowledge, had a smattering of Hindi, German and Russian. 'Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word. One pronounces words and immediately lets them go and gives possession, or, rather, usufruct, to the person who hears them. That person may agree with them, to start with, which is not necessarily pleasing because in a sense, by doing so, he or she takes them over; the person may refute them, which is equally unpleasing; more than that, he or she can, in turn, transmit them limitlessly, acknowledging their source or making them theirs depending on their mood, depending on how decent they are or on whether or not they want to ruin or betray us, depending on the circumstances; not only that, they can elaborate on them, improve on them or mar them, distort them, slant them, quote them out of context, change their tone, alter their emphasis and thus easily give them a different and even a contrary meaning to the one they had on our lips, or when we conceived them. And they can, of course, repeat them exactly, verbatim. This was what people most feared during the war, which is why many people tried to speak obliquely, metaphorically or nebulously, with deliberate vagueness or even resorting to secret languages. Many learned to say things without really saying them, and became accustomed to that.'
'Something of the sort happened during Franco's dictatorship in Spain, to get around the censorship laws,' I said; Wheeler had, after all, invited me to interrupt him more often. 'Many people started talking and writing in a symbolic, allusive, parabolic or abstract way. You had to make yourself understood within the deliberate obscurity of what you were saying. A complete nonsense: camouflaging yourself, concealing yourself and yet, nevertheless, wanting to be recognised and wanting the most diffuse, cryptic and confused of messages to be picked up and understood. People have no patience for the hard work involved in deciphering codes. It lasted far too long, and at one point it looked as if it wasn't just a passing phase either, but was here to stay. Some people never managed to lose the habit afterwards, and that was when they fell silent.'
Wheeler listened to me, and it occurred to me that if he took me up on what I had said, he might get diverted once more from his trajectory. Now, however, he seemed resolved to continue along that path, albeit at his own measured pace:
'Many learned to say things without really saying them,' he repeated, 'but what almost no one learned to do was to say nothing, to keep silent, which is what was being asked of them and what was needed. It was normal, it's only natural: it's an impossible thing for most ordinary mortals, believe me, it's asking too much of them, it goes against their very essence, that's why the campaign was always doomed to more than partial failure. It was tantamount to saying to people: "Right, not only have you got to put up with all the shortages, the hardships and the rationing, endure enemy bombing raids – never knowing, despite the wailing sirens, who might not wake up tomorrow or tonight – see your homes set on fire or reduced in an instant to rubble after the explosion and the noise, and sit buried for hours in deep shelters so as not to be burned in streets that still seem just the same, and suffer the loss of husbands and sons or, at the very least, their absence and the constant torment of anxiety over their daily survival or death, to climb into planes and, while you do battle with the air, to be machine-gunned by the enemy, who do everything possible to bring you down, to be sunk and go under, in distant, flaming waters, in submarines and destroyers and warships, and suffocate or be burned alive inside a tank, and parachute out over occupied territory only to come under artillery fire or be set upon by dogs if you manage to land safely, and be blown to pieces if you have the bad but very possible luck to be hit by a shell or a grenade, and then face torture and the executioner if you're caught on your mission in forbidden territory wearing civilian clothes, or engage in hand-to-hand combat at the front with bayonets fixed, in fields, in woods, in jungles, in swamps, in arctic and in desert conditions, and blithely blow off the head of the boy who peers out at you wearing the hated helmet and uniform, and not know, day or night, whether or not you will lose this war, a war which may turn out, in the end, to have served only to make of you forgotten corpses or the perpetual prisoners or slaves of your conquerors, and put up with extreme cold and hunger and thirst and distress and, above all, fear, fear and more fear, a continual terror to which you will eventually become habituated even though you have already spent several years like this and that eventual state of habituation has not yet arrived…" Yes,' added Peter, coming to an abrupt halt, making a minimal pause and then taking a long breath, 'it was like saying to people: "As well as all this, you must keep silent too. You must not speak any more, or tell stories or jokes, or ask, still less answer questions, not of your wife, not of your husband, not of your children, not of your father and definitely not of your mother, your brother or your best friend. And as for your beloved… don't even whisper in your beloved's ear, not a word, no truths or sweet nothings or lies, don't say goodbye to her, don't even give her the consolation of voice and word, don't leave as a souvenir even the murmur of the last false promises we always make when we say goodbye."' Wheeler stopped and became suddenly abstracted, banging his knuckles on his chin, a few soft taps, as if he were remembering, I thought, as if he had experienced this too, withholding the truly important words from his beloved, the words that cry out to be heard and to be said, the words that are so easily forgotten afterwards and become confused with other words or are repeated to other people with identical lightness and with just the same joy, but which, at each last moment, seem so necessary, even though they may only be sweet nothings, extravagant and therefore somewhat insincere, that's the least important thing, at each last moment. 'That's how it was, or pretty much. Not put so crudely, not in those terms. But that's how it was understood by many, that's how it was understood and accepted by the most pessimistic and demoralised, by the very frightened and the very despondent and the already defeated, and in time of war they make up the majority. In time of uncertain wars, that is, those which, quite rightly, people fear might be lost at any moment and which are always hanging by a thread, day after day and night after night, over long, eternal years, wars that really are a matter of life and death, of total extermination or battered, besmirched survival. The most recent ones don't fall into that category, the wars in Afghanistan or Kosovo or the Gulf, or the Falklands War, what a joke. Or the Malvinas, if you prefer, oh, you should have seen how pathetically worked up people became, in front of their television sets I mean, I found it all very upsetting. In today's wars, the euphoric abound, smugly following the wars from their armchairs. Euphorically, of course. The great fools. The criminals. Oh, I don't know. But then, it was just too much to ask, don't you think? To expect people to put up with all that and then to keep silent about the very thing tormenting them, without letting up even for an hour. The innumerable dead had been quite silent enough.'
'And did you yourself keep silent?' I asked. 'Did the campaign affect you?'
'Of course. It affected me, as it did most people. In theory, you see, a lot of people took the recommendations absolutely literally. And not only in theory, but in the collective memory too. Overall, I'd say it was, inevitably, a failure, but if you ask other people who lived through that period or who've heard about it first hand, or if you look up references to "careless talk" in certain books, whether historical or sociological or that mixture of both which is now pretentiously known as microhistory, you'll find that the accepted version, and even genuine personal recollections of the time, all affirm and believe that the campaign was a great success. And it's not that they're consciously lying or have come to some common agreement on the subject or that they're all quite mistaken, it's just that the real impact of something like that is barely verifiable or measurable (how can we possibly know how many catastrophes were unleashed by careless talk or how many avoided by secrecy?), and when wars are won (particularly a war in which all the odds are stacked against you), it's easy, almost unavoidable really, to think, in retrospect, that every effort made was selfless and vital and heroic, and that each and every one contributed to the victory. We had such a bad time and were so consumed by uncertainty, let us at least tell ourselves the tale that most lightens our mourning and compensates us for our sufferings. Oh, I'm sure there were millions of well-intentioned British people who took the warnings and the slogans very seriously indeed, and believed themselves to be scrupulously applying them in practice: that's what they believed in their consciences, and some actually did comply, especially, as I said, the troops and the politicians and the civil servants and the diplomats. As, of course, did I, but this involved no particular merit on my part: bear in mind that between 1942 and 1946 I was only in England for very short periods of time, when I was home on leave or on some specific mission which rarely detained me here for very long, my main base was miles away, my postings far too variable. As you saw in Who's Who, I ended up in the most diverse places during those years, and in jobs that already entailed or required secrecy, discretion, caution, pretence, deceit, betrayal if necessary (in the line of duty), and, needless to say, silence. I had an advantage, it cost me nothing to observe that last stricture to the letter. More than that, perhaps because I was on a constant state of alert wherever I was posted, I was more aware of what was happening to people generally, here at home, in the rearguard. The campaign was also a tremendous temptation, in a way, for the entire population: as immense as it was disregarded, as irresistible as it was unconscious, as unforeseen as it was sybilline.'
'What are you talking about, Peter? I don't understand.'
'The citizens of any nation, Jacobo, the vast majority, normally have nothing of any real value to tell anyone. If you stop each night to think about what has been told or recounted to you during the day by the many or few people with whom you have spoken (their degree of culture and knowledge is irrelevant), you will see how rare it is ever to hear anything of real value or interest or discernment, leaving to one side details and matters of a merely practical nature, but including, of course, on the other hand, everything that has reached you via the newspaper, the television or the radio (it's different if you've read it in a book, although that depends on the book). Almost everything that everyone says and communicates is humbug or padding, superfluous, commonplace, dull, interchangeable and trite, however much we feel it to be "ours" and however much people "feel the need to express themselves", to use the appallingly "cursi" phrase of the day. It would have made not a jot of difference if the millions of opinions, feelings, ideas, facts and news that are expressed and recounted in the world had never been expressed at all.' (Needless to say, Wheeler resorted to my language for that word 'cursi', which has no exact equivalent in any other, but which here would mean something like 'corny'.) '"Hablando se entiende lagente", you often say in Spanish. "Talk things over and sort things out". "It's good to talk," people say in various situations and contexts. All it needed was for psychologists and the like to put that absurd notion into the heads of talkers for the latter to give even freer rein to what has always been their natural tendency. Talking is not in itself either good or bad, and as for people sorting things out by talking to each other, well, talking is just as much a source of conflict and misunderstanding as it is of harmony and understanding, of injustice and reparation, of war and armistice, as much a source of crimes and betrayals as it is of loyalties and loves, of condemnations and salvations, of insults and rages as it is of consolations and mollifications. Talking is probably the biggest waste of time amongst the population as a whole, regardless of age, sex, class, wealth or knowledge, it is wastage par excellence. Almost no one has anything to say that their potential listeners might consider to be of any real value, worth listening to, let alone bought, I mean no one pays for something that is normally free, apart from in a few very exceptional cases, and yet sometimes you're obliged to. Strangely, though, and despite everything, the majority continues to talk endlessly and every day. It's astonishing, Jacobo, when you stop to think: men and women are constantly explaining and recounting, as well as explaining themselves to themselves ad nauseam, looking for someone to listen to them or imposing their diatribes on others if they can, fathers on children, teachers on pupils, parish priests on parishioners, husbands on wives and wives on husbands, commanding officers on troops and bosses on subalterns, politicians on their supporters and even on the nation as a whole, television on its viewers, writers on their readers and even singers on their adolescent fans, who pay them the still greater tribute of chanting the choruses of their songs. Patients impose their diatribes on their psychiatrists too, except that here the nature of the relationship is revealing, it's a very clear transaction: the listener charges, the speaker pays. He who talks most pays most.' (These last words were again in Spanish: 'Desembolsa quien raja, se retrata quien larga – I thought of a woman friend of mine in Madrid, Dr Garcia Mallo, a very wise psychiatrist: I would advise her to increase her fees without the slightest twinge of conscience.) 'That is an exemplary relationship, and it would, in fact, be the most appropriate relationship for all occasions. For there's a real shortage of people willing to listen, there are never many, mainly because there are infinitely more who aspire to be in the other man's trench, that is, to be the ones doing the talking and, therefore, being listened to. In fact, if you think about it, a permanent and universal struggle is being waged to grab the floor: in any crowded place, private or public, there are dozens if not hundreds of irrepressible voices fighting to prevail or to cut in, and the desideratum of each voice would be to rise above all the others and silence them: and that, within tolerable limits, is what they try to do. It could be a street or a market or Parliament, the only difference is that, in the end, they agree to take turns and those waiting are forced to pretend to be listening; it could be in a pub or at a tea-party in a stately home, only the intensity and the tempo vary, in the latter one moves very slowly, one dissembles a little in order to gain confidence before holding forth as if in a tavern, albeit with the volume turned down. Gather four people round a table and very soon at least two of them will be competing to call the tune. I did well to become a teacher: for many years I enjoyed, unimpeded, the enormous privilege of not being interrupted by anyone, or, at least, not without my prior consent. And I still enjoy that privilege in my books and articles. That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing. It is and always has been, believe me, I know from my own experience and from that of others, you, as far as I know, have so far escaped, you have no idea how wise you have been not to be tempted by writing. For that is the illusory idea of all novelists, who publish their various immense tomes full of adventures and endless reflections, like Cervantes in Spain, like Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, and the author of that tedious quartet about Alexandria that was once all the rage, or Oxford's own Tolkien (who really was born in South Africa), the number of times I passed him in Merton College or saw him with Clive Lewis, enjoying a drink of an evening at The Eagle and Child, and not one of us had an inkling of the fate that awaited his three eccentric volumes, he even less than us, his highly sceptical colleagues; it's an illusion shared by poets too, who pack so much into those deceptively short lines, like Rilke and Eliot, or before them, Whitman and Milton, and, before them, your own great poet, Manrique; it's shared by playwrights who aim to keep an audience in their seats for four or more hours, as Shakespeare himself did in Hamlet and Henry IV: of course, at the time, a lot of the audience would have been standing and would have quite happily strolled in and out of the theatre as many times as they wished; it's shared by all those chroniclers and diarists and memorialists like Saint-Simon, Casanova, El Inca Garcilaso and Bernal Diaz or our own illustrious Pepys, who never tire of furiously filling up those sheets with ink; it's shared by such essayists as the incomparable Montaigne or me (not, I can assure you, that I'm comparing myself with him), who ingenuously imagine, while we write, that someone will have the miraculous degree of patience required to swallow everything we want to tell them about Henry the Navigator, it's madness, isn't it, I mean, my latest book about him is nearly five hundred pages long, it's rank discourtesy, an abuse really. Have you read it yet, by the way?'
'No, Peter, I haven't, you must forgive me, I'm truly sorry. I find it very hard to concentrate on reading at the moment,' I replied, and I wasn't lying. 'But when I do read it, don't worry, I'll be sure to read the whole thing from start to finish, holding my breath and barely pausing,' I added, smiling, and in a tone of gentle, affectionate fun, and he reciprocated with a slight smile, with that rapid glance of his, with those eyes so much younger than the rest of him. And then I asked: 'Anyway, what temptation? I mean the one that the campaign against careless talk brought with it. You were telling me about that, weren't you, or were about to?'
'Ah, yes. Good, I like it when you do as you're told and keep me on a tight rein.' And there was a mocking quality about his reply too. 'No one realised at first, but the temptation was very simple and hardly surprising really: you see, this same population who normally never had anything of vital interest to tell anyone were suddenly informed that their tongue, their chatter and their natural verbosity could constitute a danger, they were urged to watch what they talked about and to keep an eye on where, when and with whom they talked; they were warned that almost anyone could be either a Nazi spy or someone in their pay listening in to what they said, as illustrated by the cartoon of the two housewives travelling on the Underground or the men playing darts. And this was tantamount to saying to the people: "You probably won't notice, but important, crucial information could occasionally emerge from your lips, and it would be best, therefore, if it was never uttered at all, in any circumstance. You probably won't recognise it, but amongst the rubbish that pours daily from your mouths, there could be something of value, of immense value to the enemy. Contrary to the normal state of affairs, that is, other people's general lack of interest in whatever you insist on telling them or explaining to them, it is likely that, amongst you now, there could be ears that would be more than happy to pay you all the attention in the world, and even to draw you out. In fact, there definitely are: a lot of German parachutists have been landing in Britain lately, and they are all well prepared, specially trained to deceive us, they know our language as well as if they were natives of Manchester, Cardiff or Edinburgh, and they know our customs too, because quite a few of them have lived here in the past or are half-English, on their mother's or their father's side, although now they have opted for the worse of their two bloods. They land or disembark bereft of all scruples, but amply provided with arms and perfectly forged documents, or, if not, their accomplices here will soon obtain them for them, many of these accomplices are our genuine compatriots, as British as our grandparents, and these traitors are hanging on your every word, to see what they can pick up and transmit to their butchering bosses, to see if we let something slip. So be very careful: the fate of our air force, our navy, our army, our prisoners and our spies could depend on your irresponsible chitchat or on your loyal silence. The fate of this war, which has already cost us so much blood, toil, tears and sweat'" (and Wheeler quoted the words in their correct order, without forgetting 'toil', as people always do) '"may lie not perhaps in your hands, but definitely in your tongue. And it would be unforgivable if we were to lose the war because of a slip on your part, because of an entirely avoidable act of imprudence, because one of us was incapable of biting or holding his tongue." That is how people saw the situation, the country plagued with Nazi agents all with ears cocked, ready to eavesdrop' (a rather difficult word to translate into Spanish) 'not just in London and in the big cities but in the smaller ones too and in villages, not to mention on the coast and even in the fields. The few anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians who had sought refuge here years before, after the rise to power of Hitler, had a pretty awful time of it, I knew Wittgenstein, for example, who had spent half his life in Cambridge, I met the great actor Anton Walbrook and the writer Pressburger and those magnificent scholars at the Warburg Institute of Art: Wind, Wittkower, Gombrich, Saxl, and Pevsner too, some of whose oldest neighbours suddenly began to distrust them, poor things, they were British citizens and probably had a keener interest than anyone in seeing Nazism defeated. It was at this time that they first brought in an official identity card, against our tradition and our preference, to make things a little more difficult for any would-be German infiltrators. But people weren't used to carrying such a document and kept losing it, and there was such generalised hostility to it that, around 1951 or 1952, the card in question was suppressed in order to quell the discontent provoked by its obligatory nature. According to Tupra, there is talk in government circles of imposing something similar, along with other inquisitorial measures, these mediocrities who rule over us in such a totalitarian spirit and who have more or less been given carte blanche to do so by the Twin Towers massacre. I hope they don't get their way. They can insist all they want, but we are not truly at war now, not a war of constant uncertainty and pain. And although there are only a few of us left who played an active part in the Second World War, for us it's insulting, an out-and-out mockery, what these pusillanimous, authoritarian fools want to do and impose on us in the name of security, that prehistoric pretext. We didn't fight those who wanted to control each and every aspect of our lives only to see our grandchildren come along and slyly but very precisely fulfil the crazed fantasies of the very enemies we vanquished. Oh, I don't know… but then, whatever happens, I won't be here much longer to see it, fortunately.' And Wheeler looked down at the grass again while he muttered these superfluous phrases, or perhaps he was looking at the various cigarette ends I had been scattering on the ground and stubbing out with my shoe. This time, however, he immediately took up the thread on his own: 'So what was the effect of telling all this to the citizens of the time? They found themselves in a strange, almost paradoxical situation: they might possibly be in possession of valuable information, but most of them had no idea whether or not it really was or, if it was, what the devil that information could be; they had no idea either who in their world would find it of value, which close friends or acquaintances or, indeed, anyone else, which meant that no one could ever be discounted as a potential danger; they knew, lastly, that if these two eternally unverifiable factors or elements should occur – that is, their unconscious possession of some piece of valuable information and the proximity of a concealed enemy who might extract it from them or happen to overhear it' (here he used another verb in the same semantic area -'overhear' – which, again, has no exact equivalent in my language), 'that conjunction could be of enormous significance and could have calamitous results. The idea that what one says, speaks, comments upon, mentions or recounts could be of importance and cause harm and be coveted by others, even if only by the Devil and all his hosts, is irresistible to most people; and, consequently, two opposing, contradictory and conflicting tendencies came together and coexisted in them: the first meant keeping silent about everything all the time, even the most anodyne and innocuous of facts, in order to ward off any threat as well as any feeling of guilt, or any sense of having fallen into some horrific error; the second entailed telling and talking about absolutely everything in front of everyone everywhere (whatever one knew or had heard, most of it trivia, froth, nothing), in order to have a taste of adventure, or its ghost, to feel a frisson of danger, as well as the new and unfamiliar thrill of one's own importance. What's the point of having something valuable if you don't parade and exhibit and rub it in people's faces, or of having something covetable if you can't feel other people's covetousness or at least the possibility and the risk that they might snatch it from you, or of having a secret if, at some point, you don't reveal or betray it. Only then can you get the true measure of its enormity and its prestige. Sooner or later, you get tired of thinking to yourself: "Ah, if they only knew, ah, if he ever found out, oh, if she knew what I know." And sooner or later, the moment comes to produce it, to get rid of it, to surrender it, even if it's only once and to only one person, it happens to us all sooner or later. But since the citizens (with some exceptions) were incapable of distinguishing gold from mere trinkets, many would, with a pleasurable shudder of excitement, place everything they had on the counter or the table, attracted by the thought that they might have before them some evil spy, at the same time, crossing their fingers and praying to heaven that they didn't, and that there wouldn't be anyone either who could pass it on, their confusing or impetuous story I mean. And nothing could be more thrilling than that some more responsible, upright compatriot should tell them off and reproach them for being so flippant, because that was an almost unmistakable sign to the speaker that he had entered the forbidden territory of the serious, the meaningful and the weighty where he had never before set foot. That state of fearful excitement, of laying oneself open to harm and simultaneously exposing the whole nation to harm as well, is illustrated by that cartoon of a man phoning from a public call-box besieged by little Fuhrers, and by the third, rather than the second, scene of the sequence that begins with the sailor and his girlfriend, that's them to a T. Most people, whether intelligent or stupid, respectful or inconsiderate, vitriolic or kindly, resemble, to a greater or lesser extent, that young woman with her brown hair caught up on top of her head: generally speaking, they listen with amazement and glee, even if they're being told something really terrible, because (and this is the reason why, briefly and occasionally, they deign to pay attention, because they can already imagine themselves retelling it) it's overlaid with the anticipated pleasure of themselves passing on the news, even if it's repugnant, horrifying, or brings with it awful sorrow, or provokes in others the very reaction being provoked in them now. Basically, all that interests us and matters to us is what we share, pass on, transmit. We always want to feel part of a chain, we are, how can I put it, the victims and agents of an inexhaustible contagion. And that is the greatest contagion, the one that is within the grasp of everyone, the one brought to us by words, this plague of talking from which I, too, suffer, well, you can see what happens, how I launch off once you let go of the rope. All credit, then, to anyone who has ever refused to follow this predominant inclination. And even more credit to anyone who was brutally interrogated and who, nevertheless, said nothing, gave nothing away. Even if their life depended on it, and they lost their life.'
I heard the sound of the piano coming from the house, background music to the river and the trees, to the garden and to Wheeler's voice. A Mozart sonata perhaps, or it could be by one of the Bachs, Johann Christian, one of Mozart's teachers and the poor, brilliant son of the genius, he lived in England for many years and is known there as 'the London Bach' and his music is often remembered and performed, an English German like those who worked at the Warburg Institute and like that admirable Viennese actor who was known first as Adolf Wohlbruck, and who also abandoned his name, and like Commodore Mountbatten, who was originally Battenberg, bogus Britons all of them, not even Tolkien was free of that. (Like my colleague, Rendel, who was an Austrian Englishman.) Mrs Berry must have finished all her chores and was amusing herself until it was time to call us in for lunch. She and Wheeler both played; she played with great energy, but I had rarely seen or heard him playing at all, I remembered one occasion when he wanted to introduce me to a song entitled Lillabullero or Lilliburlero or something rather Spanish-sounding like that, the piano was not in the living-room, but upstairs, in an otherwise empty room, there was nothing you could do there except sit down at the instrument. Maybe it was the contrast of the present cheerful music with his own mournful words, but Wheeler seemed suddenly very tired, he raised one hand to his forehead and allowed the full weight of his head to fall on his hand, his elbow resting on the table with its full-skirted canvas cover. 'And so the centuries pass,' I thought, while I waited for him to go on or else put an end to the conversation, I feared he might opt for the latter, he had become too conscious that he was lecturing, and I saw him close his eyes as if they were stinging, although they were hidden by the fingers resting on his forehead. 'And so the centuries pass and nothing ever yields or ends, everything infects everything else, nothing releases us. And that "everything" slides like snow from the shoulders, slippery and docile, except that this snow travels through time and beyond us, and may never stop.'
'Andreu Nin lost his life,' I said at last, my improvised studies of the long previous night still floating in my head. 'Andres Nin,' I said, when I noticed Wheeler's confusion, which I noticed despite the fact that he had still not moved, and remained motionless and apparently drained. 'He didn't talk, he didn't answer, he gave no names, he said nothing. Nin, I mean, while they were torturing him. It cost him his life, although they would probably have taken his life anyway.' But Wheeler still did not understand or perhaps he simply did not want any more bifurcations.
'What?' he managed to ask, and I saw that he was opening his eyes, saw a gleam of stupefaction, as if he thought I had gone mad, what's that got to do with anything. His mind was too far from Madrid and Barcelona in the spring of 1937, maybe what he had experienced in Spain, whatever it was, had dwindled in importance compared with what came afterwards, from the late summer of 1939 to the spring of 1945, or possibly even later in his case. And so I tried to return to the country we were in, to Oxford, to London (sometimes I forgot that he was well over eighty; or, rather, I forgot all the time, and only occasionally remembered):
'So the campaign was counterproductive, then?' I said.
He slowly uncovered his face and I saw that he was looking refreshed again, it was extraordinary how he recovered or recomposed himself after those moments of low spirits or of weariness or inability to speak, it was usually interest – his scheming mind, or the desire to say or hear something, something more – that revived him. Or else humour, a flash of irony, charm, wit.
'Not exactly,' he replied, slightly screwing up his eyes, as if they were still stinging. 'It would be both facile and unfair to say that. There was very little malice in people, not really, not even amongst the most indiscreet and boastful of blockheads.' And this last word he said in Spanish, 'botarates', sometimes you could tell that he hadn't visited my country for quite some time, because you never hear that word there now, or, for obvious reasons, other similar words: after all, when a society consists largely of imbeciles, halfwits, blockheads and oafs there is no point in anyone calling anyone else by those names. 'And there were others, too, who remained silent as the grave. I'm not referring to the dead, but to certain scrupulous, strong-willed, tenacious people with a keen sense of duty, who unhesitatingly sealed their lips, even though no one would ever know of their obedient response or congratulate them on it. There were many such people, although perhaps not that many, it was a very difficult order to carry out, almost absurd really, "Don't speak, not a murmur, not a whisper, nothing, because they can read your lips, so forget your language.'" ('Keep quiet, then save yourself, was what crossed my mind and, also, just for a second, I wondered whether my Uncle Alfonso would have talked or kept silent, we would never know.) 'The reason I say that the campaign failed overall is not because people were not prepared to comply, the majority were; and it served a purpose, it served to give us a general awareness that we were not alone, but had as many companions as actors in a theatre; and that beyond the spotlights, in the penumbra, in the shadows or the darkness, we had a packed and very attentive audience, each member of which was endowed with an excellent memory, however invisible, unrecognisable and scattered that audience might be, and was made up of spies, eavesdroppers' (again that word which is so difficult to translate into Spanish), 'fifth columnists, informers and professional decoders; that each word of ours they heard could prove fatal to our cause, just as those we stole from the enemy were vital to us. But at the same time, this campaign – and this was where it was bound to fail despite its indisputable benefits and successes – increased, inevitably and incredibly, the numbers of the verbally incontinent, the out-and-out blabbermouths. And although many people who had previously always talked freely and unconcernedly did learn, as one of these cartoons recommends, to think twice before speaking, there were many others who had always tended to be silent or, at least, laconic, inhibited or taciturn, not out of choice or prudence, but because they felt that anything they might say or tell would be dull, unworthy of anyone's interest and utterly inconsequential, but now they found themselves unable to resist the temptation of feeling dangerous and reprehensible, a threat, and thus deserving of attention, to feel, in a way, that they were the protagonists of their own small world, even though, for the most part, that protagonism was mad, unreal, illusory, fictitious, mere wishful thinking. Whatever the reason, they began to talk nineteen to the dozen; to give themselves airs and pretend they were in the know, and anyone who pretends that usually ends up trying to be genuinely in the know, within their capabilities, of course, and thus becomes yet another entirely gratuitous spy. And whether they succeed or not, it is also true to say that everyone knows something, even when they don't know that they do, even when they imagine that they know absolutely nothing. But even the shyest and most solitary of men who merely grunts at his landlady if he should happen to meet her during the day, even the scattiest or most obtuse of women with barely an ounce of intellect, and even the least curious or sociable and most self-absorbed child in the kingdom, all know something, because words, that fierce contagion, spread without any need for help, they overcome all obstacles and proliferate and penetrate more, much more, unspeakably more than you, or indeed anyone, could ever imagine. All it takes is a sharp, detective's ear and a malicious, associative mind to capture and make the most of that something and to express it. The people in charge of the campaign were aware of this, that all of us know some effects and some causes, however unconnected. As I said, what valuable information could those two ladies on the Underground possibly know, or that very ordinary man in the cap, saying: "What I know – I keep to myself"'? And yet the campaign was also directed at them, at people like them, trying to persuade them to forget their language. A vain endeavour, don't you think, trying to encompass everyone? And a pretty pointless task given that a partial result was no use at all.'
Wheeler stopped and indicated my packet of cigarettes. I held it out to him, offered him a cigarette, and immediately lit it for him. He took a few puffs and looked with bemusement at the lighted end, thinking perhaps that it had not taken, doubtless unaccustomed to the feeble, insipid cigarettes I usually smoke.
'And what did you have to do with all that?' I finally asked.
'Nothing. With that, nothing at all, or, rather, I was just one of many, albeit in a privileged position. As I told you, for most of that time, I was in far less uncomfortable places than London, something that still weighs on my conscience. But I was involved in what the campaign indirectly brought with it: the formation of that group. When MI6 and MI 5 realised what was tending all too frequently to happen, what we would nowadays call the collateral effect, which, indeed, ran counter to the initiative, it occurred to someone that we should take advantage of that, or at least turn it a little in our favour, place it at our service. Someone, whoever it was (Menzies, Vivian, Hollis or even Churchill himself, it doesn't "matter), saw that just by listening attentively and allowing people who wanted to talk and wanted to be heard (sometimes not even that much was necessary), and observing them with a mixture of shrewdness, deductive ability, interpretative boldness and a talent for making associations, that is, with precisely the skills that we assumed and even conceded in the German experts who were infiltrating us and in the hidden pro-Nazis who were on our territory from the start – just by doing all this, we could get to the depths or the bottom, almost to the essence of people; to find out what they would and wouldn't be capable of doing and how far they could be trusted, their characteristics and qualities, their defects and limitations, if they were by nature strong or fragile, corruptible or incorruptible, cowardly or intrepid, treacherous or loyal, impervious or susceptible to flattery, egotistical or generous, arrogant or servile, hypocritical or candid, resolute or hesitant, argumentative or docile, cruel or compassionate, everything, anything, everything. One could also find out beforehand who would be capable of killing in cold blood or who would submit to being killed, should that prove necessary or were they ordered to do so, although the latter is always the most difficult thing to be sure of in anyone; who would turn tail and who would go forward, however insane such a decision might seem; who would betray, who would support, who would fall silent, who would fall in love, who would feel envious or jealous, who would abandon us to the elements and who would always cover us. Who would sell us down the river; and who would do so dearly or cheaply. It might be that the people who rarely spoke would have nothing very grave or interesting to say, but they always ended up revealing almost everything about themselves, even if they were pretending. That is what they discovered. That is what continues to happen today, and that is what we know.'
'But people aren't all of a piece,' I said. 'It all depends on the circumstances, on what happens to turn up, people can change, they can get worse or better or stay the same. My father always says that if we hadn't gone through a war like our Civil War, most of the people who acted despicably during the War or afterwards, once it was over, would probably have led perfectly respectable lives, or lives, at least, that were relatively un-besmirched; and they would never have found out what they were capable of, fortunately for them and for their victims. My father, as you know, was one of the latter.'
'No, people aren't all of a piece, Jacobo, and your father is right. And no one is ever always this way or that, which of us hasn't seen some alarming or unexpected streak appear in someone we love (and then your whole world collapses); you must always remain alert and never imagine that anything is definitive; although there are some things on which there is no going back. And yet, and yet… it is also true that, right from the start, we see much more in others and in ourselves, much more than we think we do. As I said before, the biggest problem is that we don't usually want to see, we don't dare to. Almost no one really dares to look, still less to confess or tell themselves what they really see, because often it isn't very pleasant what one observes or glimpses with that undeluded gaze, with that profound gaze which, not content with penetrating every layer, keeps going beyond even the very last one. That, generally speaking, is how it is, both as regards others and oneself; and most people, in order to go on living with a degree of calm and confidence, need to delude themselves and to be slightly optimistic, and that's something I can understand, and something which, throughout the many days of my life, I have missed greatly, that calm and that confidence: it's harsh and unpleasant having to live in that knowledge and expecting nothing else. But that was precisely what the group suggested or proposed, finding out just what individuals, independent of their circumstances, would be capable of and thus being able to know today what face they would wear tomorrow, if I can put it like that: to know right now what their face would be like tomorrow; and, to use your or your father's words, to try and ascertain if a respectable life would have been respectable anyway or was only on loan to them because no opportunity to tarnish that life had yet presented itself, no serious threat of some indelible stain.' ('I still haven't asked him about the bloodstain,' I thought suddenly, 'the stain I cleaned up last night from the top of the stain'; but I immediately realised that this was not the moment, nor could I now see the stain so very clearly in my mind.) 'But that is knowable, because men carry their probabilities in their veins, and it's only a matter of time, temptation and circumstance before these, at last, lead those probabilities to their realisation. So it is knowable. You can get it wrong, of course, but more often than not you get it right. Besides, it still provides you with some sort of basis to work on, even though the main cornerstone is always something of a gamble.' ('He's right about that,' I thought, 'if another Civil War ever broke out in Spain, I have a pretty good idea who would come and shoot me – I cross my fingers and touch wood, or touch iron as the Italians say; I know who wouldn't think twice before putting a bullet in my brain, just as they did with my Uncle Alfonso. Too many friends have destroyed the trust I placed in them, and when someone is disloyal to you, they never forgive you for their having failed you; and – at least in my country – the greater the betrayal, the greater the offence committed by the betrayed, the greater the traitor's sense of grievance. When it comes to enemies, they are perhaps the one thing of which there has never been any shortage there, almost all us have a few.') 'What proved unexpectedly difficult was finding people who were able to see, interpret and apply that gaze with sufficient dispassion and serenity, without flailing blindly, or even half-blindly, about.' (Wheeler kept resorting more and more frequently to Spanish words and expressions, he doubtless enjoyed making these lightning visits to a language that he had few opportunities to speak any more.) 'Even then it was a rare gift, and it soon became clear that such people were far rarer than one might at first have thought, when the group was thrown together or created in that impromptu, ad hoc fashion, their initial, urgent mission (it later changed direction or broadened out) was to uncover, while the war still raged, not just spies and informers but also possible spies and informers of our own (I mean men and women who might be suitable for that purpose), as well as people who would prove easy or propitiatory prey for the former, the chatterboxes who could not resist temptation and who always showed an imprudent predisposition for talk; and that applied as much to our territory as to other places in the rearguard or places that were neutral, for there were spies and informers and dupes and blabbermouths everywhere, even, I can assure you, in Kingston, by which I mean Kingston, Jamaica, not Kingston-upon-Hull or Kingston-upon-Thames. And in Havana too, of course.' ('So the Caribbean meant Cuba and Jamaica,' I stopped to think for a moment, unable to avoid consciously registering the fact. 'What would they have sent Peter there to do?') 'At the time, an awful lot of British people had developed an inquisitorial spirit or a paranoid mentality or both, and their suspicious nature drove them to denounce almost anything that moved, to see Nazis in the mirror before realising they were looking at their own reflection, and so they were no use at all. Then there were the great distracted masses, who tend to see little and observe nothing and to distinguish still less, who seem to be permanently wearing tight earflaps over their ears and a blindfold over their eyes, or, at best, a mask with eye-slits that were very narrow or virtually stitched shut. Then there were the impetuous and the frivolous and the gung-ho, who were so eager to be involved in something useful and important (not all of them, poor things, were ill-intentioned), they would gaily come out with the first bit of nonsense that popped into their heads, so having them passing judgement was like throwing a dice, since their opinions lacked all validity and foundation. Then there were the many who, exactly as happens now, had a real aversion, no, more than that, a terror of the arbitrariness and possible unfairness of their own views: the sort who prefer never to declare themselves, hamstrung by the responsibility and by their invincible fear of making a mistake, the ones who anxiously asked themselves when confronted by a face: "And what if this man whom I believe to be honest and trustworthy turns out to be an enemy agent, and my incompetence leads to my own death and that of my compatriots?" "And what if this woman whom I consider to be suspicious and devious turns out to be entirely harmless and my hasty judgement leads to her ruin?" They couldn't even point us in the right direction. So, foolish though it may seem, it immediately became apparent that there wasn't much to choose from, not, at least, with any confidence. It was necessary to comb the country for recruits as quickly as possible, there were no more than twenty or twenty-five here in England, plus a few others where we happened to be, and we joined when we came back. Most were from the Secret Services, from the Army, a few from the former OIC, which you've probably never heard of Wheeler caught my blank look, 'the navy's Operational Intelligence Centre, there weren't many of them, but they were very good, possibly the best; and, of course, from our universities: they always turn to the studious and the sedentary when it comes to difficult, delicate tasks. It's almost unimaginable the debt they owe us 6ince the war, which is when they first began using us seriously, and they should have respected Blunt's immunity and their pact until the day he died, even until Judgement Day' ('We died at such a place,' I thought or quoted to myself), 'even if only out of gratitude and deference to the profession. Obviously we all had to get used to the job, and work to improve, refine and hone our gaze and attune our listening, practice is the only way to sharpen any sense, or gift, which comes to the same thing. We never had a name, they never called us anything, not during the war or afterwards. You can only convincingly deny or conceal the existence of something if it doesn't have a name; that's why you'll find nothing in books, not even in the really thoroughly researched ones, at most, hints, conjectures, intuitions, the odd isolated case, loose ends. It was better like that: we even wrote reports on the trustworthiness of the top brass, Guy Liddell, Sir David Petrie, Sir Stewart Menzies himself, and I think someone drew up a report on Churchill based on newsreels and which was, therefore, not entirely to be trusted. In a way, we placed ourselves above them all, it was an experiment in audacity. Of course, they never found out about our excesses, it was semi-clandestine. That's why it seems a grave mistake on Tupra's part, this tendency of his to speak in private (only amongst ourselves I trust, but that already constitutes a risk) of "interpreters of people" or "translators of lives" or "anticipators of histories" and suchlike; rather smugly too, given that he's in charge and is therefore including himself among them. Names, nicknames, sobriquets, aliases, euphemisms are quickly taken up and, before you know it, they've stuck, you find yourself always referring to things or people in the same way, and that soon becomes the name they're known by. And then there's no getting rid of it, or forgetting it.' ('And yet so many of us abandon even our own name.')
Wheeler fell silent then and glanced at his watch, and this time he did register the position of the hands; then he looked back at the house, Mrs Berry's piano-playing was still providing us with an accompaniment.
'Shall I go and see how lunch is coming on, Peter?' I suggested. 'We might be running a bit late. My fault.'
'No, the music is reaching the end now, there's just a very brief minuetto to come. She'll call us at five minutes to, it's only twelve minutes to at the moment. I know this piece.'
I was tempted to ask him what the piece was, but I wanted him to answer another question, and opportunities vanish so quickly:
'Am I to understand, Peter, that what you call "the group" is still active, and that Mr Tupra is in charge?'
'We'll talk more about that in a minute, because I want you to do me a favour in that regard. It would be a good thing for you too, I think; in fact, I phoned Tupra this morning, while you were still asleep, to tell him that you had shown great perspicacity in the test, about him and Beryl I mean. But, yes, I suppose you could say that; although it's changed so much I barely recognise it. It's difficult to be sure that anything or, for that matter, anyone, has remained unchanged. As far as I can tell, these anonymous duties and activities have evolved a lot, and are required for very different purposes. I imagine they've gone downhill, like everything else: that's just a realistic supposition, I don't say that in order to criticise or blame anyone. I simply don't know. Look at me: am I the same as I was then? Can I, for example, be the man who was married to a very young girl who has stayed forever young and who has not accompanied me on one single day of my long old age? Doesn't that possibility, that idea, that apparent truth, doesn't it seem totally incongruous, for example, with the man I've been since? Or with the acts I committed later, when she was no longer there to witness them? Or even, simply, with the way I look now? She was so very young, you see, how can I possibly be the same man?'
Wheeler again raised one hand to his forehead, but not this time out of sudden exhaustion or fright, his gesture was a thoughtful one, as if he were intrigued by his own questions. And then I tried to get him to answer another question, although it was perhaps absurd to do so at that precise moment, when lunch with Mrs Berry was only a matter of minutes away. Although, had he chosen to respond, he probably wouldn't have minded answering the question in her presence, for she would know the whole story.
'How did your wife die, Peter? I've never known. I've never asked you. You've never told me.'
Wheeler removed his hand from his forehead and looked at me, red-faced, not from surprise or annoyance, but with his eyes alert.
'Why do you ask me that now?' he said.
'Well,' I replied, smiling, 'perhaps so that you won't one day reproach me for never having shown any interest, for never having asked you about it before, as you did last night when I finally found out about your part in our War. That's why I'm asking now.'
Wheeler suppressed a smile, immediately erasing the temptation. He raised his hand to his chin and made the same sound that Toby Rylands used to make when he was considering how best to answer:
'H'm,' that was the sound. 'H'm', the sound of Oxford. Then he spoke: 'It's not because you're worried about Luisa, is it, and that you suddenly thought the worst and saw yourself reflected in me? Is that it? You're not afraid you might end up widowed rather than divorced, are you? Be careful with such apprehensions. Distance invokes many ghosts. Loneliness does too. And ignorance even more.'
This disconcerted me slightly, it could be a cunning ploy on Wheeler's part to avoid the question, a swift change of direction. But I wasn't going to let him go. I nevertheless paused to think. He was, unwittingly, quite right, at least in part, and I didn't see why he shouldn't know that, for he so enjoyed his own perspicacity:
'Yes, I am a bit worried. And about the children, too, of course. I haven't really had much news of them since I've been here, and even less of Luisa. There's a kind of opacity, even though we talk to each other fairly frequently. I don't know who she's seeing, or not seeing, who comes in and who goes out, it's a kind of process of creeping ignorance, of her and her replacement world, or perhaps that world is still in flux. The truth is I no longer know what's going on in my own house, I have no images any more. It's as if the old images had grown dimmer and get darker every day. But that isn't why I asked you, Peter, it was because you mentioned her – Valerie, I mean.' And I dared to pronounce that name, so private that I had never even heard it until that morning. I had a sense of sacrilege on my lips. 'What did she die of?'
Then Wheeler stopped playing. I saw him tense his jaw, I noticed him clenching his teeth, lining up top teeth with bottom teeth, like someone summoning up enough composure so that his voice won't break when he speaks again.
Ah…'he said. 'Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' He seemed to be asking me a favour, every word was painful.
I did not insist. It occurred to me to whistle the melody I had just heard on the piano, a particularly catchy tune, to see if I could dissipate the mists that had suddenly wrapped about him. But I still had to answer him, silence here was not a reply.
'Of course,' I said. 'Tell me about it when you want to, and if you don't want to tell me, don't.'
Then I began my whistling. I know how infectious whistling is, and so it turned out: Wheeler immediately joined in, probably without even thinking about it; no wonder he knew the piece by heart, he probably played it too. Then he suddenly stopped short and said:
'One shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything.'
Wheeler said this standing up, as soon as he got to his feet, and I immediately followed suit. He grasped my elbow, held on to me to recover his strength. Mrs Berry was waving to us from the window. The music had stopped, and now all that could be heard was our whistling, thin and out of time, as we turned our backs on the river and walked up to the house.
, It was still raining and I had not yet grown tired of watching it from my window overlooking the square, it was a steady, comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that it alone seemed to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears, it was as if it were driving out the night forever and discounting the possibility of any other weather ever appearing in the sky, or even the possibility of its own absence, just like peace when there is peace and like war when war is all that exists. My dancing neighbour opposite had performed a few ridiculous square dances with his partner, such anodyne moves and measured steps after the machine-gun fire of those Gaelic feet, and both had put on cowboy hats for this disappointing end-of-party dance, the mad or very fortunate fools. They had just turned out the lights and, given the rain, the mulatto woman would surely be staying the night, but before I could sit thinking warmly of her for a while, I had to be sure, and so for a few minutes, I looked down, beyond the trees and the statue, I watched the square in the unlikely event that she would emerge and leave. And it was then that I saw the two figures coming towards my front door, the woman and the dog, she with her umbrella covering her, and the dog, uncovered, wandering here and there – tis tis tis. As they approached the front of the building, they almost entirely disappeared from my field of vision, by the time they stopped at the door, they were immediately below me, and I could see only a fragment of the cupola of the open umbrella. The bell rang, the downstairs bell. I again looked vainly out for a second, with the window open, leaning out, bending over (my neck and back got wet), before going to pick up the entry-phone: everything except that fragment of curved cloth remained outside my perpendicular line of sight. I picked up the phone. 'Yes?' I said in English, a literal translation from my own language in which I had been thinking, and it was in Spanish that the other person spoke to me: Jaime, soy yo,' – 'Jaime, it's me' – said a female voice. 'Can you open the door, please? I know it's a bit late, but I must talk to you. It'll only take a moment.'
The kind of people who, on the phone or at the door, say simply 'It's me' and don't even bother to give their name are those who forget that 'me' is never anyone, but they are also those who are quite sure of occupying a great deal or a fair part of the thoughts of the person they're looking for. Or else they have no doubt that they will be recognised with no need to say more – who else would it be – from the first word and the first moment. And the woman with the dog was right about this, even if only unconsciously and without having stopped to think about it. Because I did recognise her voice, and I opened the front door for her from upstairs without wondering why she was entering my house that night and coming upstairs to speak to me.