Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (14 page)

'He must have it really bad,' I said, 'he must be completely blind if he's only "worried". It stands out a mile that she's more interested in almost any other possible future than in a present existence spent by his side. Obviously I can't be sure, but, I don't know, it was as if from time to time she would suddenly remember that she was supposed to be trying to win back her husband, which, as you say, is her announced intention, and then she would try a bit harder for a while, or, rather, she would apply herself to routinely pleasing or even flattering him, I suppose. But she wasn't even capable of remembering that reminder or of making that impulse last, it must be too artificial, pure invention, it doesn't even exist in ghost form, and, as you know, the hardest part about fictions is not creating, but maintaining them, because, left to their own devices, they tend to fall apart. It takes a superhuman effort to keep them in the air.' I stopped, perhaps I'd gone too far, I sought solid, prosaic support, I mean, even De la Garza could see that Beryl
no le hacía ni puto caso,
that's what he saw and said, he didn't mince his words. And I think he was right, he had a good look at Beryl because he thought she was
pistonuda,
that's what he said, you know. Or perhaps that was what he said about the widowed deaness, but it doesn't matter: he barely took his eyes off Beryl, especially from the waist down and from the thighs up.'

I shifted into Spanish where I had to:
'no le hacía ni puto caso'
— she didn't take a blind bit of notice of him —
'pistonuda' —
bloody gorgeous. Untranslatable really. Or perhaps not, there's a translation for everything, it's just a question of working at it, but I wasn't prepared to do that work then. The reappearance of my language made Wheeler move into it momentarily too.

' "Pistonuda"? "Pistonuda"
did you say?' He asked this with a degree of confusion as well as annoyance, he didn't like to discover gaps in his knowledge. 'I don't know that term. Although I think I can grasp what it means. Is it the same as
"cojonuda"?'

'Well, yes, pretty much. But don't worry, Peter. I can't really explain it to you now, but I'm sure you've understood it perfectly.'

Wheeler scratched himself just above one sideburn. Not that he wore them long or carefully sculpted, not at all, but he was, in his own way, elegant; he didn't lack sideburns either, certainly not, he wasn't one of those obscene men who do not frame their faces with hair, faces that look fat even when they're not. They are bad people in my experience (with, in my experience, one major exception, there's always one, which is awkward and disconcerting, it really throws you), almost as bad as someone who sports a chin-tuft, a newgate frill, an imperial. (Proper goatee beards are another matter.)

'I assume it has something to do with pistons,' he muttered, suddenly deep in thought. 'Although I can't really see the connection, unless it's like that other expression
"de traca",
which I do know, I learned it a few months ago. Do you use
"de traca"?
Or is it very vulgar?'

'It's the kind of thing young people say.'

'I really should visit Spain more often. I've visited so rarely in the last twenty years that I'll be incapable of reading and understanding a newspaper soon, colloquial language changes all the time. Don't do yourself down, though. Rafita may not be quite as imbecilic as we thought, and if so, I'd be very pleased for his good father's sake. But his perceptive powers are nothing in comparison with yours, you can be quite sure about that, so don't delude yourself.'

I noticed that he looked suddenly tired. A few minutes before he had been jolly, smiling vivaciously, now he seemed worn out, sunk in himself. And then I noticed my own tiredness too. For a man his age, such a long, busy day must have been utterly exhausting, with all the preparations, the fuss, the waiters, the party, the cigarette smoke and the clever comments, lots of drink and lots of talk. Perhaps the final surrender of his socks had been the limit, or the cause.

'Peter,' I said, perhaps out of superstition, and showing a definite lack of prudence, 'I don't know if you realise, but your socks have slipped down.' And I managed to point with one timid finger at his ankles.

He immediately pulled himself together, blinked away his fatigue and had sufficient presence of mind not to look down and check. Perhaps he'd already noticed, perhaps he knew and didn't care. His gaze had grown sombre or dull now, his eyes were two newly extinguished match-heads. He smiled again, but feebly this time, or with fatherly compassion. And he reverted to English, it was less of an effort for him, as it is for me to speak in my own language.

'Another time I would have been infinitely grateful to you for pointing that out, Jacobo. But it's of little importance now. I'm going to get straight into bed and I'll be sure to take them off first. We'd both better get some sleep if we're to be fresh in the morning, we have a lot of unfinished business to deal with. Thanks for telling me, though. Good night.' He turned and started up the stairs that lay between him and the first floor, where he had his bedroom, the guest room that I would occupy and had occupied on other occasions was on the second and penultimate floor. As he turned, Wheeler accidentally kicked the ashtray, which was still there along with the corpse of his cigar. It rolled away, without breaking, its fall cushioned by the carpeted area on which the ash fell like snow, I hurried to pick it up when it was still spinning. Wheeler heard and identified the noise, but did not turn round. Still with his back to me, he said, unconcernedly: 'Don't bother cleaning it up. Mrs Berry will restore order tomorrow. She can't stand dirt. Good night.' And with the aid of his walking-stick and the banister, he began the ascent, overwhelmed once more by exhaustion, as if a great wave had suddenly broken over him, leaving him soaked and shaken, a suddenly dislocated figure, slightly shrunken despite his great size, as if he were shivering, his steps hesitant, each stair a struggle, his lovely new shiny shoes seeming to weigh heavily, his walking-stick merely a stick now. I listened, I could hear very clearly the quiet or patient or languid murmur of the river. It seemed to be talking, calmly or indifferently, almost indolently, a thread. A thread of continuity, the River Cherwell, between the dead and the living with all their similarities, between the dead Rylands and the living Wheeler.

'Sorry, Peter, can I just delay you a second longer? I wanted to ask you . . .'

'Yes?' said Wheeler, stopping, but still not turning round.

'I don't think I'll be able to get to sleep straight away. I imagine you've got Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia
and Thomas's history of the Spanish Civil War somewhere. I'd like to have a quick look at them, to check something before I go to bed, if you don't mind, that is. If you wouldn't mind lending them to me, and if they're more or less to hand.'

Now he did turn round. He raised his walking-stick and with it indicated a place above my head, moving the stick gently from side to side to his left, that is, to my right, like a pointer. His muscles had slackened, his skin, like tree bark or damp earth, seemed suddenly terribly worn.

'Almost everything about the Spanish Civil War is in there, in the study, behind you. The west bookshelf' Then, irritated, he said in scolding tones: "I imagine", he says. "I imagine." Of course I've got them. I am a Hispanist, remember. And although I've written about centuries of greater interest and momentum, the twentieth century is still my period too, you know, the one I've lived through. And yours too, by the way. Even though you've got a lot of the next century to live through as well.'

'Yes, sorry, Peter, and thanks. I'll go and find them now, if that's all right. Sleep well. Good night.'

He turned his back on me again, he only had a few more stairs to climb. He knew I wouldn't take my eyes off him until I saw that he'd reached the top, safe and sound, I feared those too-smooth soles. And doubtless knowing this, he didn't even turn his head when he spoke to me again for the last time that night, but continued to present me with the back of his neck as the obscure origin of his words. With its wavy white hair, the back of his neck was the same as Rylands's, like a carved capital grown blurred over time. From behind they were even more alike, the two friends, the similarities even more marked. From behind they were identical.

If you're thinking of looking me up in the index of names, to see if I appear and to find out what I did in the Civil War, don't lose a minute's sleep over it. I don't think Orwell's book even has that kind of index. Bear in mind, too, that in Spain my name wasn't Wheeler.'

I couldn't see his face, but I was sure that he'd recovered his vivacious smile while he was saying this. I didn't know whether to reply or not. I did:

'I see. So what did you call yourself then?'

I saw that he was tempted to turn round again, but each time he did so was something of an effort, at least it was that night, at that late hour.

'That's asking an awful lot, Jacobo. Tonight anyway. Perhaps another time. But as I say, don't waste your time, you'll never find me in those indices of names. Not in those of that period.'

'Don't worry, Peter, I won't,' I said. 'Actually, that isn't what I wanted to look up, honestly, it hadn't even occurred to me. I wanted to check something else.' I fell silent. He did not move.

He did not speak. He still did not move. He still did not speak. I added quickly, anxious not to slight him, 'It's an excellent idea though.'

Wheeler had just climbed to the top of the stairs in silence. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw him there. Then he again placed his walking-stick on his shoulder, he again turned it into a spear, and, flattered, he mumbled, without looking back at me, while he turned to the left and disappeared from view:

'An excellent idea, indeed!'

Books speak in the middle of the night just as the river speaks, quietly and reluctantly, or perhaps the reluctance stems from our own weariness or our own somnambulism and our own dreams, even though we are or believe ourselves to be wide awake. Our contribution is minimal, or so we think, we have the feeling of understanding almost effortlessly and without needing to pay much attention, the words slip by gently or indolently, and without the obstacle of the alert reader, or of vehemence, they are absorbed passively, as if they were a gift, and they resemble something easy and incalculable that brings no advantage, their murmur, too, is tranquil or patient or languid, those words are a connecting thread between the living and the dead, when the author being read is already deceased, or perhaps not, but who interprets or relates past events that show no sign of life and yet can be modified or denied, can be seen as vile deeds or heroic exploits, which is their way of remaining alive and continuing to trouble us, never allowing us to rest. And it is in the middle of the night that we ourselves most resemble those events and those times, which can no longer contradict what is said about them or the stories or analyses or speculations of which they are the object, just like the defenceless dead, even more defenceless than when they were alive and over a longer period of time too, for posterity lasts infinitely longer than the few, evil days of any one man. Even then, when they were still in the world, few could undo misunderstandings or refute calumnies, often they didn't have time, or didn't even have the chance to try because they knew nothing about them, because such things always happened behind their backs. 'Everything has its moment to be believed, even the craziest, most unlikely things,' Tupra had said casually. 'Sometimes that moment lasts only a matter of days, but sometimes it lasts forever.'

Andres Nin certainly didn't have time to deny the slanders or to see them refuted by others later on, according to Hugh Thomas's summary, in which, with its index of names, it was easy to find the references, unlike in Orwell's book, it was astonishing that Wheeler should remember such a detail, or perhaps he had deduced it from the fact that
Homage to Catalonia
was published in 1938, while the war was still on, no one then would have been concerned about mere names. First, though, just in case, I looked up Wheeler's name in Hugh Thomas's book, Peter could so easily have lied to me about that to make sure I wouldn't find it, always assuming I believed him, of course, and didn't even bother to look. But it was true, he wasn't there, nor was Rylands — I checked for checking's sake, it wasn't hard. What name could Wheeler possibly have used in Spain, for he
had
now managed to prick my curiosity. Perhaps some exploit of his was recorded in that book or in Orwell's, or in one of the many other books about the Civil War on the west bookshelf in Peter's study (and over which I lingered far too long), and, if that were the case, I found it extremely irritating to be unable to find out about it even though the exploit was public knowledge. What wasn't public knowledge was his name, or alias, a lot of people used them during the War. I remembered who Nin was, but not the details of his tragic end, to which Tupra had presumably been referring. He had worked as Trotsky's secretary in Russia, where he had lived for most of the 1920s, until 1930; he had translated quite a bit from Russian into Catalan, and a certain amount into Spanish, from
The Lessons of October
and
The Permanent Revolution,
written by his protector and employer, to Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
and Chekhov's
The Shooting Party
and
The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea
by Boris Pilniak, as well as some Dostoyevsky.

When the War began, he was political secretary of the POUM or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (the Workers' Marxist Unification Party), of which Moscow always took a dim view. That I did remember, as well as the 'shooting party' to which the Stalinists submitted POUM members in the spring of 1937, especially in Catalonia, where the party was more established. That was why Orwell left Spain in such a hurry, in order not to be imprisoned or, possibly, executed, for he had been very close to the POUM and may even have been a member — I was reading snippets here and there, skipping and dipping and passing from one volume to another (I'd made quite a pile of them on Peter's immaculate desk), looking in particular for that business about the German members of the International Brigade that had so impressed Tupra — and Orwell had, at any rate, fought with the Twenty-ninth Division, which was formed by the POUM militia, on the Aragon front, where he had been wounded. As with so many individuals, movements, organisations and even whole peoples, the party was more famous and most remembered for its brutal dissolution and persecution rather than for its constitution or its deeds, some endings leave a deep mark. In June 1937, as Orwell describes in great detail and (very much) at first hand, with Thomas and others providing a briefer and more distanced account, the POUM was declared illegal by the Republican government at the request of the Communists, not so much the Spanish Communists — although they were involved too — as the Russians, and, it seems, on the decision or personal insistence of Orlov, the head in Spain of the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Service or Security Service. To justify this measure and the detention of its main leaders (not just Nin, but also Julián Gorkin, Juan Andrade, Major José Rovira and others) as well as activists, sympathisers and militiamen, however loyally the latter had fought on the front, they trumped up false and somewhat grotesque bits of evidence, everything from a letter supposedly signed by Nin and addressed to Franco no less, to the incriminating contents of a suitcase (various secret documents bearing the stamp of the POUM military committee, in which the latter revealed themselves to be fifth columnists, traitors and spies in the service of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, paid by the Gestapo itself) which was found, conveniently enough, in a bookshop in Gerona, where it had been left for safekeeping shortly before by a well-dressed individual. The owner of the bookshop, a certain Roca, was a Falangist recently unmasked by the Catalan Communists, as was the probable writer of the forged letter, a certain Castilla, who had been picked up in Madrid along with other conspirators. Both were converted into
agents provocateurs
and forced to collaborate in the farce so as to give some shabby verisimilitude to the connection between the POUM and the fascists. It is possible that this saved their lives.