Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (30 page)

'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 M
R
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.