Famous Last Words (24 page)

I was angry, then.

The streets of Valencia were full of bodies. People had been dying violent deaths on every doorstep. 1 mvself had just been witness to the mutilated bodies of a dozen priests.

Why must there be such a crowd—such a crush at the Hotel Alcador when it was vital I get inside and discover whether Isabella lived or was dead? Could they not go out and stare at the corpses in the square?

“But this,” I was told, “was suicidio.”

Someone had done this terrible thing to themself. And

this, I was told, was different than doing “some terrible thing upon the selves of others”—whether with guns or bombs.

Thus, suicidio was suddenly unique in a world where mur—

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der and slaughter were the commonplace—though why I

should be surprised or upset by this in the land of bullfights I do not know.

It took me a quarter of an hour to reach the other side of the lobby. The suicide’s corpse was lying on the makeshift catafalque of the registry counter. I could only see it was a man: with his brains blown out and his arms hanging down.

When I got to our suite the doors were all locked and I had to swear to Isabella I was alone before she would let me in. I found her packing her steamer trunk—and I could see there had been a fire in the metal waste paper basket.

Isabella was pale and weakened but decisive.

“We must leave,” she said. “You must pack at once and

we must leave as soon as it is dark. If anyone comes to the door, we are not here.”

“There has been a suicide in the lobby,” I said, like a child who will not be denied the privilege of telling whatever gruesome news there is to tell.

“I know all that,” she said. “I know.”

I waited—thinking she might go on and explain what our departure had to do with the corpse. But she was playing a different game.

“Any news of who it was?” she said. Her tone was that

of a very bad actress who had been told to throw the line away.

The only thing 1 had heard was that it was someone whose passport had been revoked—and so I told her this.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “The game of invalid passports. So soon.”

I asked her what she meant by that.

“In Italy, shortly after the regime became a dictatorship, a great many passports were revoked. Though it took a good deal longer to happen than this. After all. General Franco’s troops have only just arrived. There is not even yet a proper government here.”

I thought of Dmitri Karaskavin and the long, long wait for passports and sisters that never arrived. But they were murdered.

This—in the Alcador lobby—was suicidio.

Isabella then did something I had never seen her do before.

i’:y-“- I ..’”’^t!

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She withdrew a bottle from one of the drawers of the steamer trunk and poured herself over half a tumbler of Calvados.

She then leaned back against the edge of the desk and, picking’up one or two sheets of paper, she carefully set each one

on fire with a match and let them fall on top of the ashes in the wastepaper basket.

“May 1 ask what you’re doing?” I said:

“You may,” she said, “but 1 shall not answer.”

Oh. ^,

She looked at me. . ^

“Do you trust me?” she said. s”;

I nodded.

“Then do not ask what I am doing.”

The silence that followed was among the hardest I have

ever endured.

At last she was finished with her burning. “We must take these into the lavatory and flush them down the W.C. No matter how fine the ashes may be, a person with the proper .

skills can read them.”

This I found very hard to believe—and said so.

“Come here,” she said and selected, at random, a piece

of burnt paper three or four inches square. Even as she lifted it, part of it fell away. But what remained was large enough to have contained a phrase or more of writing. Very carefully, Isabella held this up beneath the lamp and tilted it this way and that until she had achieved a particular angle—slanting away from the light. “There,” she said. “Read.”

I looked; and read.

The ink, very shiny against the charcoal colour of the

fragment, was brown that had once been blue. But the words were as distinct as if they had just been written: sangre del honor. And then Isabella crumpled them and swept them

back into the basket.

Flushing the ashes down the toilet, I was alarmed to discover they were so light in texture all of them would not go

down the chute.

“What shall we do?”

“Put something heavy in on top of them. Here…” said Isabella. And she handed me a fine lace handkerchief. “Wet it first and lay it over them.”

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I did so—and flushed the toilet one last time. Every remaining trace of the ashes was carried away into the sewers

of Valencia. And when I analysed the incident, later, for myself, I thought Isabella’s advice had been the advice of an expert. How many ashes had she flushed down the toilet, I wondered. And why?

We “escaped” from the Hotel Alcador later that night in the dark. There was a blackout, due to the threat of retaliatory raids by the Loyalists—which never came. But this was not to say they could not create chaos and confusion, even in spite of their lack of air power. The war in Spain that year, and the next (and, in fact, right up to the end of 1939) took on the character of an amoeba: dividing and subdividing, spreading out here and there, never still, always shapeless, but always vital and alive and self-sustaining right to the very end when, like a creature having fed too long upon itself, it convulsed one final time and shrivelled. And died.

But its shape in the closing months of 1937 was still in motion—and the changes could occur so rapidly you could go to sleep and wake in a Loyalist Hotel that in the middle of the night had been the Insurgent’s H.Q.

After we left Valencia that night, it was necessary to return a week later in order to retire from Spain on board a ship and run the blockade to Palma.

It was there, on Mallorca, that I read in the papers of the death of the young Spanish poet Luis Quintana, who committed suicide in the lobby of the Hotel Alcador at Valencia.

The most disturbing aspect of his suicide, so far as I was concerned, was revealed in the concluding paragraphs of his obituary. Here, where the print was finest, there was a quote from Quintana’s final communique to the world which had been “smuggled out of Spain by an unnamed friend”.

The quote that caught my attention was short and pertinent and ran as follows: “El amor por la vercfad es la sangre del honor.” Love of truth is the blood of honour. When 1 saw the words sangre del honor, my heart stopped.

Quintana’s “unnamed friend” was Isabella.

Quintana himself was an antiFascist.

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Of Spain, there only remains one thing to say which I have left until the end because it overrides the whole of that time.

I have spoken already of the caves at Altamira. My visit there with Isabella had been in the early weeks of our Spanish sojourn. The Insurgents were shelling the coast from

offshore and every day there was a ration of terror starting at 2:00 and lasting through the afternoon till 4:00. A person could set all the clocks by the precision of this event.

So it was that Isabella and I went down into the caves—

with others—during one of these bombardments. Now the

others are only shadows in my mind. I cannot give them

faces. All I know is they were there, and we were not alone.

Some of the local peasants had taken up residence there.

Others made it their daily shelter during the raids. As a consequence some had brought candles while others had.

commandeered lamps from the local public buildings, setting them out in rows along the floor. It was a muted, gentle atmosphere and all the talk was in whispers, falling away at the height of bombardment into silence. The air was cool and far, far away you could hear the sound of water. Somehow, the presence of that sound was a comfort. Everyone’s

patience flourished and we sat in rows, while some even slept.

And there above us, clustered in juxtapositions the meanings of which are lost beyond the barricades of time. were

the drawings of all those animals whose shapes have long since been altered and disappeared from the view of men.

“Bison” 1 knew they were called, though little enough like any bison I had ever seen; and “deer” that were recognizable as such, though longer of leg and more delicate of hoof than the deer 1 remembered passing over Nauly’s lawns; and

“men” as simply drawn as any stick men made by the children of the human race since the dawn of time and pencils.

And waving blades of grass—or were they trees?—and constellations here and there of fingerprinted stars: black dots.

And out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of

something irresistible above my head, seen in the ebb and flow of the swinging light: the imprint of a human hand.

God only knew how long ago it had been put there. Maybe

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ten—and maybe twenty thousand years before. This is my mark; it said. My mark that I was here. All I can tell you of my self and of my time and of the world in which J Jived is in this signature: this hand print; mine.

I saw these animals. I saw this grass. I saw these stars.

We made these wars. And then the ice came.

Now the stars have disappeared. The grass is gone; the

animals are calling to us out beyond this place—the frozen entrance to this cave.…

Jn days or hours we will have died. We cannot breathe.

The lanthorn flickers. All the air is gone. I leave you this: my hand as signature beside these images of what I knew. Look how my fingers spread to tell my name.

Some there are who never disappear. And I knew I was

sitting at the heart of the human race—which is its will to say I am.

In January of 1939, Isabella Loverso and I came up here to the Grand Elysium Hotel. Our journeys, for a while, were over and we needed rest. Isabella stayed in this very room.

One day, we were leaning on the parapet staring down

into the valley of the Adige. Isabella wore her sables, and I was dressed in Harris tweed, woollen scarves from Ottingers on the Ringstrasse and a pair of fleece-lined boots that were sold exclusively in a little shop in Linz. The Anschluss was over. Germans were everywhere, including many soldiers.

There were charabancs full of people down from Munich

and up from Italy to spend the holidays. Herr

Kachelmayer’s hotel was filled to overflowing. This was the golden age of the Fascist powers. All of Europe was in thrall of Hitler.and of Mussolini and the air was alive with excitement and anticipation.

Slowly, this day, as I stood there pressing my elbow close to Isabella’s, I became aware I was being watched.

Turning, I saw a slight young man who was leaning, like us, against the parapet.

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“Lorenzo! Lorenzo!” Isabella called.

She waved and the slight young man came over through

the snow.

“Lorenzo de Broca,” Isabella smiled at him. “How can it be? Everyone says you have gone to America.”

“No.”

For a moment, he did not move, but stood and stared at

Isabella, then at me, and then at the ground.

“Don’t be shy, Lorenzo.” Isabella touched him on the arm and laughed. “Don’t be shy of us. Please say hello.” She spoke to him very like a chiding mother to a favourite child.

A prodigal child. “This is Signer Mauberley, whose writing I am sure you know.”

de Broca looked up and nodded. Only nodded. But looked

at once away.

“Dear Hugh,” said Isabella, taking my arm. “This is Italy’s youngest genius: Lorenzo de Broca.”

“Yes.” I stuck out my hand. “I’ve read your work. It’s very fine.”

de Broca had blue eyes. He was slim and perhaps consumptive.

Something was wrong with the way he stood and

the way he breathed. It seemed a tremendous effort just to be there: alive.

He regarded my hand and finally removed his own from

its pocket. But instead of shaking hands with me, he reached across and lifted Isabella’s fingers to his lips. and bowed.

“Baronessa.”

“Signer Mauberley and I are here for the Nativity. And

you?”

de Broca scowled.

I drew my hand back through the air.

“I am merely passing through,” the young man said. “I

should not even be here, now.”

“Is it true, then? Have you gone to live in America?”

“No, Baronessa. I have gone to live in Paris.”

“Ah…”

He was lying, and it showed. He was not very good at

hiding what was passing through his mind.

In a moment, after an extended and embarrassing silence,

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he excused himself and started toward the hotel portico. But all at once he turned in his tracks and made his way very slowly back until he could reach out—if he had wanted to—

and touch us both.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I cannot go away without 1 tell you something very closely to my heart.” He was speaking English, whereas before we had all been speaking Italian. He

turned to me and spoke directly into my eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to strike me. But he didn’t. He need not. His words struck for him. “I am always a student of your books,” he said. “I am always your lover—of your

books. But I am not your lover now, Signer Mauberley. Not any more. You used to have been a great good man. As I saw you first in my student days. A genius. But now you have gone away from all the good and genius I saw before and I am thinking, when I see you a moment ago, that you were throwing down your good words and breaking them below

us in the valley. And I ask of you: why have you left from us? Why have you gone away from your self?”

I waited, astounded. Isabella’s fingers had tightened on my arm.-And I thought of the Marquesa spitting on Ernest’s shoes, and I knew de Broca’s passion was the same as hers had been. And I knew—and was shaken by the knowing—