Fever and Spear, Page 7

  He had drunk his coffee down in one (that large mouth) and, with real urgency, had immediately placed the empty cup and saucer on the low table next to the sofas, as if what had already been used and therefore served no further function made him impatient or troubled him. As he bent down to do so, he shot a rapid glance at his girlfriend Beryl, whose minuscule skirt barely covered her legs which were now uncrossed (and this was perhaps the reason behind the glance), so that from lower down than we were you might have been able to see, how can I put it, the crotch of her knickers, if she was wearing any, I noticed that De la Garza was sitting on a pouffe at just the right height, and it seemed highly unlikely that this was pure chance. Beryl was talking and laughing with a very fat young man, slouched on the sofa, who had been introduced to me as Judge Hood and about whom I knew nothing except that, despite his plumpness and his youth, he was presumably a judge, and she continued to pay scant attention to Tupra, as if he were the dull husband who no longer represents for her diversion or fun and is just part of the house, not quite part of the furniture, more perhaps like a portrait, which, even though it is generally ignored, still has eyes to see and to watch what we get up to. Tupra also exchanged a glance with Wheeler, who was concentrating on applying a very long match to a cigar that was already very much alight (if not positively ablaze) and was speaking to no one while thus engaged, by his side the ecclesiastical widow of York appeared sleepy and rather less pneumatic, she probably rarely stayed up late or wine perhaps diminished her. I noticed no gesture or signal pass between Wheeler and Tupra, but the eyes of the former permitted themselves a moment of elevation and fixity, through the flames and the smoke, which seemed to me to suggest some implied meaning and recommendation, as if with that unblinking look he were advising him: 'Fine, but don't delay much longer', and as if the message were referring to me. Just as Peter had singled out Tupra for my attention, so he must have told Tupra something about me, although I didn't know what or why. But the fact was that Tupra had said 'and if you've had it up to here with the job already', and I hadn't mentioned how long I had been at the BBC or back in England — how could I possibly be back, my previous stay belonged to the remote past that can never be re-created, or, indeed, to the past from which no one returns — so he must have found out from Wheeler that it was only three months. Yes, only three months ago I had still been in Madrid and had normal access to my home or our home, since I still lived and slept there, although Luisa's increasing remoteness from me had already begun and was advancing with frightening speed, an advance that was troubling, disturbing, and daily — if not hourly — it's astonishing how swiftly what is and has endured suddenly ceases to be, and becomes null and void, once the last line of light has been crossed and the processes of darkness and ambiguity begin. You lose the trust of the person with whom you have shared years of continuous narrative, that person no longer tells you things or asks or even responds and you yourself don't dare to ask or tell, you grow gradually more and more silent and there comes a time when you don't talk at all, you try to pass unnoticed or to make yourself invisible in the home you share in common, and once you know and it has been agreed that it will soon cease to be the common home and which one of you will have to leave, you have the feeling that you're living there on sufferance until you find somewhere else to seek refuge, like an impertinent guest who sees and hears things that should not concern him, goings-out and comings-in that are not commented on before or talked about afterwards, enigmatic phone calls that remain unexplained, and which are possibly no different from those which, a short time before, you didn't even listen to or register, nor, of course, did you retain them in your memory as you do — every one of them — now, because then you weren't alert, you didn't wonder about them or think they concerned you or constituted an implied threat. You know all too well that the phone calls do not concern you now and yet you jump every time the phone rings or you hear her dial a number. But you say nothing and listen fearfully and say nothing, and there comes a point when your only means of communication or contact are the children, whom you often tell things purely so that she will hear you in the next room, or so that they'll reach her ears eventually, or in order to make amends, although this will never now be perceived as that, just as feelings will be disregarded too, and, besides, no child in the world can be entirely trusted as an emissary. And the day that you finally leave you feel a touch of relief as well as sadness and despair — or is it shame — but even that meagre sense of mingled relief will not last, it disappears at once, the moment you realise that your relief is as nothing compared with that felt by the other person, the one who stays and does not move and breathes easily at last to see you leaving, disappearing. Everything is so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other, what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissible — it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it, the person who built a home finds himself barred from entering it, the merest contact, a touch so taken for granted it was barely conscious, becomes an affront or an insult and it is as if one had to ask permission to touch oneself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed-for would now poison the air or provoke nausea, they must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition); the reverse is true too: what was once mocked is taken seriously, and the person once deemed repugnant is told: 'I was so wrong about you, come here.' 'Sit down here beside me, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before.' That is why one must always ask for a postponement: 'Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!' I quoted to myself. Tomorrow you might want me alive, even for only half an hour, and I won't be there to grant your wish, and your desire will be as nothing. It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there is only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still travelling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, insubstantial and unfinished me, no one should trust me either . . . Of course I had had it up to here already and even before it began, I'd never been interested in that job with the BBC, it had merely been the one reasonable way of ceasing to be irrelevant and phantasmagoric and so very silent, the one way of leaving there and disappearing.

  'I've only ever dared translate from English and I didn't do it for very long. I have no problem speaking and understanding French and Italian, but I don't have a good enough command of them to be able to translate literary texts from those languages into Spanish. I can understand Catalan pretty well, but I would never even attempt to speak it.'

  'Catalan?' It was as if Tupra had heard the name for the first time.

  'Yes, it's the language spoken in Catalonia, as much or more, well, much more nowadays than Spanish or castellano, as we often call it. Catalonia, Barcelona, the Costa Brava, you know.' But Tupra did not respond at once (perhaps he was trying to remember), so I added as further orientation: 'The artists Dali and Miro.'

  'Mention Montserrat Caballe, the soprano,' De la Garza suggested, almost breathing down my neck. 'The silly git is bound to like opera.' He could clearly understand more than he could speak and was drawn like a magnet by any Spanish names he happened to catch. He had got up from the pouffe in order to pester me again (Beryl had crossed her legs now, that was probably the real reason). I assumed he had meant to use the word 'gypsy' again about Tupra (because of his curly hair, I assumed, those ringlets), but that, after all the outrageous toasts he had drunk, he could now only manage to say 'git'.

  'Gaudi, the architect,' I suggested, I had no intention of taking any notice of De la Garza, that would have b
een tantamount to giving him permission to join in the dialogue.

  'Yes, yes, of course, George Orwell and all that,' said Tupra at last, finally placing the name. 'Sorry, I was remembering . . . I've forgotten most of what I read about the Spanish Civil War, things I read in my youth, you know, you tend to read about that romantic war when you're nineteen or twenty, perhaps because of all those idealistic young British volunteers who died there, some of them poets, you identify easily with other people at that age. Well, I don't know about nowadays, I'm talking about my day, of course, although I would say it was still the same, for restless young people that is: they still read Emily Bronte and Salinger, Ten Days that Shook the World and books about the Spanish Civil War, things haven't changed that much. I remember being particularly impressed by what happened to Nin, I mean, how utterly ridiculous to accuse him of spying. And the complete farce of those German members of the International Brigade passing themselves off as Nazis come to liberate him, it just goes to show how even the craziest, most unlikely things have their moment to be believed. Sometimes the moment lasts only a matter of days, sometimes it lasts forever. The truth is that, initially, everything tends to be believed. It's very odd, but that's how it is.'

  'Nin, the Trotskyist leader?' I asked, surprised. I couldn't believe that Tupra knew nothing about Dali and Miro, Caballe and Gaudi (or so I deduced from his silence), and yet knew so much about the slandered Andres Nin, probably more than I did. Perhaps he didn't know about art and didn't like opera, and his field was politics or history.

  'Yes, who else? Although, of course, he did break with Trotsky in the end.'

  'Well, there was a musician called Nin, and, of course, that awful woman writer,' I began, but stopped myself. Things he had read in his youth, he had said. Something as real to me and still so close was, in another not so distant country, just like Wuthering Heights had been for years: that is, a fiction, a romantic fiction, read by the surlier, angrier university students in order, in their imaginings, to feel defeated, pure and perhaps heroic. It's probably the fate of all horrors and all wars, I thought, to end up abstract and embellished by dint of sheer repetition and, ultimately, to feed both youthful and adult fantasies, more quickly if the war happens abroad, perhaps for many foreigners our war seems as literary and remote as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns or perhaps even the sieges of Numantia or Troy. And yet my father had nearly died in that war, wearing the uniform of the Republic in our besieged city, and, when it was over, had endured a mock trial and imprisonment under Franco, and an uncle of mine aged seventeen had been killed in Madrid and in cold blood by those on the other side — that side split into so many factions, and so full of calumnies and purges — by the militiamen who wore no uniform and were subject to no control and who would bump off anyone, they had killed him for no reason at an age when almost all one does is fantasise and when there are only imaginings, and his older sister, my mother, had searched that same besieged city for his body without finding it, only the tiny, bureaucratic photograph of his corpse, which I've seen and which is now in my possession. Perhaps in my country, too, without my realising it, this was all turning into fiction, everything moves ever faster, is less enduring, more quickly cancelled out and filed away, and our past grows ever denser and fuller and more crowded because it has been decreed — and even accepted as true — that yesterday is passé, the day before yesterday mere history, and what happened a year ago remote and immemorial. (Perhaps what happened three months ago too.) I thought that the time had come to find out at last what his 'line of work' was, I had earned enough brownie points, always assuming I needed them. In my thoughts I didn't believe this to be so, yet I had the distinct feeling that it was. 'Tell me, Mr Tupra, what is your field, if you don't mind my asking? It's not, by any chance, the history of my country, is it?' I realised that I was still awaiting permission to ask the easiest and most harmless of questions asked in our societies.

  'No, no, of course not, you can be quite sure of that,' he replied, laughing loudly and with genuine mirth, his teeth were small but very bright, his long eyelashes danced. When you had got used to it, his was the sort of face to which you warmed more and more with each minute, objectivity would not last long with him, and suspicion would quickly dissolve. You noticed at once the generosity of the interest he took in you, as if at every moment he was concerned only with the person he was with and as if, behind you, the lights of the world had gone out and the world had been transformed into a mere backdrop designed to set you off. He also knew how to hold the attention of the person he was talking to, in my case that mention of Andres Nin had been enough to intrigue me, and not merely because of what he knew, for I was filled now with a desire to plunge into Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or into Hugh Thomas's summary and to brush up on the story of the slandered Andres Nin, of which I could barely remember a thing. One also noticed in Tupra that strange tension — a sort of postponed vehemence — but I took it at first as simply part of his natural alertness. He was well dressed, but not extravagantly so, discreet fabrics and colours (the cloth was always of extraordinarily high quality, his superb ties always pinned with a tie-pin), his vanity evident only — unless it was a remnant of past bad taste — in the perennial waistcoats he wore under his jacket, and one of which he was wearing at Wheeler's buffet supper. 'No, my activities have been as diverse as yours, but my real talent has always been for negotiating, in different fields and circumstances. Even serving my country, one should if one can, don't you think, even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself.'

  He had evaded the question, this was all very vague, he hadn't even said what he had studied at Oxford, although Toby Rylands, one of his teachers, had been Professor of English Literature. Not that this meant anything. In that university it doesn't really matter what you study, what counts is to have been there and to have submitted to its method and its spirit, and no course of study, however eccentric or ornamental, prevents its postgraduates and graduates from going on to do whatever they choose to do afterwards, however different that may be: you can spend years analysing Cervantes and end up in the world of finance, or studying the traces left by the ancient Persians and convert that afterwards into the extravagant preamble to a career in politics or diplomacy, doubtless the latter for Tupra, I thought again, basing this now not only on my intuition or on his appearance, but on that verb 'negotiate' and that expression, 'serving my country'. He was lucky — in a way — that there is no one-word English equivalent for the unequivocal 'patría' of my own language (or only highly recondite, rhetorical ones): the word he had used, 'country', means different things depending on the context, but is less emotive and less pompous and should almost always be translated as 'país'. Otherwise, I might perhaps have thought — that is, if he had used the Spanish word 'patría', which was impossible; and yet the shadow of that mad idea did cross my mind, though without taking proper shape — that he had a fascist mind, in the analogical sense, despite the evident solidarity and sympathy with which he had referred to the fate of Nin, Trotsky's former secretary, for in the colloquial or analogical sense the word is compatible with all ideologies, one's ideology isn't necessarily relevant, which is why it has become such a vague term, I've known official champions of the old Left, the apparently incontrovertible Left, who were intrinsically fascist by nature (and in their writing style too, if they were writers). In that idea of serving one's country I had noticed a hint of coquetry and a touch of arrogance. The coquetry of someone who enjoys appearing mysterious, the arrogance of someone who sees or conceives of himself as a granter of favours, even to his own country. A third foreign Briton, perhaps, a third bogus Englishman, I thought, like Toby, according to all the rumours, and like Peter, as he himself had confessed a few weeks ago. I had still not had a chance to ask him about that. Bogus at least to judge by the surname, that strange name Tupra, though perhaps not by birth in his case, the newly arrived and those with suspicious names are always
and everywhere the most patriotic, the readiest to render a service, noble or base, clean or dirty, they feel grateful and volunteer, or perhaps it is their way of believing themselves to be indispensable to the country that one day allowed them to stay and continues to do so, as it would even if they had changed their name, like that poor Anatolian Hohanness who went on to be Joe Arness in America, or the fabulously wealthy Battenburg, who was transformed into Mountbatten for his English existence. It was strange that Tupra should have kept his name, perhaps it seemed excessive or too risky, 'strange to abandon even one's own name'.

  'Hey, Deza,' I heard De la Garza's voice in Spanish beside me again, he never tired of his prowling, 'if you keep nattering on to this gypsy, we're going to miss all the totty. The rate we're going, Miss Longlegs here will end up going off with the fat guy, look at the way the great tub of lard is sweet-talking her. Bloody shameless.'

  Not even Wheeler would have understood a word this time, for all his impeccable bookish Spanish. It was true that young Judge Hood was whispering in Beryl's ear and was being rewarded by peals of laughter, the neglectful girlfriend's upper lip had been hidden for some time now; they were inevitably sitting very close to each other on the sofa, the judge being extremely large and voluminous. I did not respond to the attaché, not yet, as if he did not exist, he seemed to have forgotten who Longlegs had come with. But Tupra himself alluded to him, he had, like me, been observing him out of the corner of his eye, or else guessed what was going on despite not knowing our language, still less De la Garza's slang, which tended to the artificial or wilful, and sounded affected, put on. His sleek hair was becoming soft and unruly, no one in Oxford escapes unscathed from sharing a few drinks with The Flask.