Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
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First published in Spain as Tu rostro mañana (1 Fiebre y lanza) by Alfaguara,
Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S. A. 2002
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 2005
First published in Penguin Classics 2018
Copyright © Javier Marías, 2002
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2005
The publisher is grateful to Ian Fleming Publications Ltd for permission to reproduce an extract from From Russia With Love © Gildrose Publications Ltd, 1957
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover photograph © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos
ISBN: 978-0-241-28890-0
1: FEVER
2: SPEAR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
For Carmen López M,
who will, I hope, want
to go on listening to me
And for Sir Peter Russell,
to whom this book is indebted
for his long shadow,
and the author,
for his far-reaching friendship
The translator would like to thank Javier Marías, Annella McDermott, Palmira Sullivan, Antonio Martín and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.
One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so tangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it. How many of my confidences remain intact, of all those I have offered up, I, who have always laid such store by my own instinct and yet have still sometimes failed to listen to it, I, who have been ingenuous for far too long? (Less so now, less, but these things are very slow to fade.) The confidences I shared with two friends remain preserved and intact, unlike those granted to another ten who lost or destroyed them; the meagre confidences shared with my father, and the chaste ones vouchsafed to my mother, which were very similar, if not the same, although those granted to her did not last very long, and she can no longer break them or, at least, only posthumously, if, one day, I were to make some unfortunate discovery, and something that was hidden ceased to be hidden; gone are the confidences given to sister, girlfriend, lover or wife, past, present or imaginary (the sister is usually the first wife, the child wife), for in such relationships it seems almost obligatory that one should, in the end, use what one knows or has seen against the beloved or the spouse – or the person who turns out to have been only momentary warmth and flesh – against whoever it was who proffered revelations and allowed a witness to their weaknesses and sorrows and was ready to confide, or against the person who absent-mindedly reminisced out loud on the pillow not even aware of the dangers, of the arbitrary eye always watching or the selective, biased ear always listening (often it’s nothing very serious, for domestic use only, when cornered or on the defensive, to prove a point if caught in a tight dialectical spot during a prolonged discussion, then it has a purely argumentative application).
The violation of a confidence is also this: not just being indiscreet and thereby causing harm or ruin, not just resorting to that illicit weapon when the wind changes and the tide turns on the person who did the telling and the revealing – and who now regrets having done so and denies it and grows confused and sombre, wishing he could wipe the slate clean, and who now says nothing – it is also profiting from the knowledge obtained through another’s weakness or carelessness or generosity, and not respecting or remembering the route by which we came to know the information that we are now manipulating or twisting – sometimes it’s enough just to say something out loud for the air to grasp and distort it: be it the confession of a night of love or of one desperate day, or of a guilty evening or a desolate awakening, or the drunken loquacity of an insomniac: a night or a day when the person talking talked as if there were no future beyond that night or that day and as if their loose tongue would die with them, not knowing that there is always more to come, that there is always a little more, one minute, the spear, one second, fever, another second, sleep and dreams – spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams – and then, of course, there is interminable time that does not even pause or slow its pace after our final end, but continues to make additions and to speak, to murmur, to ask questions and to tell tales, even though we can no longer hear and have fallen silent. To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death, and I least of all, for I have often told tales and even written reports, more than that, I look and I listen, although now I almost never ask questions. No, I should not tell or hear anything, because I will never be able to prevent it from being repeated or used against me, to ruin me or – worse still – from being repeated and used against those I love, to condemn them.
And then there is distrust, of which there has been no shortage in my life either.
It’s interesting how the law takes this into account and, even odder, takes the trouble to warn us: when someone is arrested, at least in films, he is allowed to remain silent, because, as he is immediately informed, ‘anything you say can be used against you’. There is in this warning a strange – or indecisive and contradictory – desire not to play entirely dirty. That is, the prisoner is told that the rules will, from now on, be dirty, he is informed and reminded that, somehow or other, they are going to catch him out and will make the most of any blunders, lapses and mistakes he might make – he is no longer a suspect, but an accused man whose guilt they are going to try to prove, whose alibis they will try to destroy, he has no right to impartiality, not between now and the day he appears in court – all their efforts will be channelled into gathering the evidence that will condemn him, all their vigilance and monitoring and investigation and research into collecting the clues that will incriminate him and support their decision to arrest him. And yet they offer him the opportunity to remain silent, indeed, almost urge it upon him; they tell him about this right which he may have known nothing about, and therefore, sometimes, actually put the idea in his head: not to open his mouth, not even to deny what he is being accused of, not to run the risk of having to defend himself alone; remaining silent appears or is presented as being clearly the most sensible option, one that could save us even if we know ourselves to be and are guilty, as the only way in which this self-declared dirty game can be rendered ineffectual or barely practicable, or at least not with the involuntary and ingenuous collaboration of the prisoner: ‘You have the right to remain silent’; in America, they call it the Miranda law and I’m not even sure if its equivalent exists in our countries, they used it on me once, a long time ago, well, not that long ago, but the policeman got it wrong, left out a bit, he forgot to say ‘in court’ when he rattled off the famous phrase, ‘anything you say can be used against you’, there were witnesses to this omission and the arrest was invalidated. The same strange spirit imbues that other right of the accused, not to testify against himself, not to prejudice himself verbally with his story or his answers, with his contradictions or stumblings. Not to harm himself by his own narrative (which can, indeed, cause great harm), in other words, to lie.
The game is, in fact, so dirty and so biased that, on such a basis, no justice system can possibly presume to be just, and perhaps, therefore, there is no possible justice, ever, anywhere, perhaps justice is a phantasmagoria, a false concept. Because what the accused is told boils down to this: ‘If you say something that suits us and is favourable to our aims, we will believe you and take it on board and use it against you. If, on the other hand, you allege something to your advantage or in your defence, something that proves exculpatory for you and inconvenient for us, we won’t believe you at all, they will be like words in the wind, given that you have the right to lie and that we simply assume that everyone – that is, all criminals – will avail themselves of that right. If you let slip an incriminating statement or fall into a flagrant contradiction or openly confess, those words will carry weight and will be used against you: we will have heard them, recorded them, noted them down, taken them as said, there will be written evidence of them, we will add them to the report, and they will be used against you. Any phrase, however, that might help to exonerate you will be considered frivolous and will be rejected, we will turn a deaf ear, ignore it, discount it, it will be so much air, smoke, vapour, and will not work in your favour at all. If you declare yourself guilty, we will judge it to be true and take your declaration very seriously indeed; if innocent, we will take it as a joke, and, as such, undeserving of serious consideration.’ It is thus taken for granted that both the innocent and the guilty will proclaim themselves to be the former, and so, if they speak, there will be no difference between them, they will be made equal, on a level. And it is then that these words are spoken: ‘You have the right to remain silent’, although this won’t help to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty either. (To remain silent, yes, silent, the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death, and yet, at critical moments, we are advised and urged to do just that: ‘Keep quiet and don’t say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat has got it. Keep quiet, then save yourself.’)
In our dealings with others, in ordinary, unsurprising life, no such warnings are given and we should perhaps never forget that absence or lack of warning, or, which comes to the same thing, never forget the always implicit and threatened repetition, be it accurate or distorted, of whatever we say and speak. People cannot help but go and tell what they hear, and they tell everything sooner or later, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, the sorrows and the joys and the resentments, the grievances and the flattery and the plans for revenge, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial – falling in love – and the insignificant – falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought. People are ceaselessly relating and narrating without even realising that they are, and quite unaware of the uncontrollable mechanisms of treachery, misunderstanding and chaos they are setting in motion and which could prove disastrous, they talk unceasingly about others and about themselves, about others when they talk about themselves and about themselves when they talk about others. This constant telling and retelling is perceived sometimes as a transaction, although it always successfully disguises itself as a gift (because it does have something of the gift about it) and is more often than not a bribe, or the repayment of some debt, or a curse that one hurls at a particular person or perhaps at chance itself, for chance to turn it, willy-nilly, into fortune or misfortune, or else it is the coin that buys social relations and favours and trust and even friendships and, of course, sex. And love too, when what the other person says becomes indispensable to us, becomes our air. Some of us have been paid to do just that, to tell and to hear, to put in order and to recount. To retain and observe and select. To wheedle, to embellish, to remember. To interpret and translate and incite. To draw out and persuade and distort. (I have been paid for talking about what did not exist and had not yet happened, the future and the probable or the merely possible – the hypothetical – that is, to intuit and imagine and invent; and to convince.)
Besides, most people forget how or from whom they learned what they know, and there are even people who believe that they were the first to discover whatever it might be, a story, an idea, an opinion, a piece of gossip, an anecdote, a lie, a joke, a pun, a maxim, a title, a story, an aphorism, a slogan, a speech, a quotation or an entire text, which they proudly appropriate, convinced that they are its progenitors, or perhaps they do, in fact, know they are stealing, but push the idea far from their thoughts and thus manage to conceal it. It happens more and more nowadays, as if the times we live in were impatient for everything to pass into the public domain and for an end to all notions of authorship, or, put less prosaically, were impatient to convert everything into rumour and proverb and legend that can be passed from mouth to mouth and from pen to pen and from screen to screen, all unconstrained by fixity, origin, permanence or ownership, all headlong, unchecked and unbridled.
I, on the other hand, always do my best to remember my sources, perhaps because of the work I’ve done in the past which remains always present because it never leaves me (I had to train my memory to distinguish what was true from what was imagined, what really happened from what was assumed to have happened, what was said from what was understood); and depending on who those sources are, I try not to make use of that information or that knowledge, indeed I even prohibit myself from doing so, now that I only work in that area very occasionally, when it can’t be helped or avoided or when asked to by friends who don’t pay me, at least not with money, only with their gratitude and a vague sense of indebtedness. A most inadequate recompense, by the way, for sometimes, indeed, not so very rarely, they try to transfer that feeling to me so that I am the one who suffers, and if I don’t agree to that swapping of roles and don’t make that feeling mine and don’t behave as if I owed them my life, they end up considering me an ungrateful pig and shy away from me: there are many people who regret having asked for favours and having explained what those favours were and having, therefore, explained too much about themselves.
A while ago, a woman friend of mine didn’t ask me a favour exactly, but she did oblige me to listen and informed me – not so much dramatically as fearfully – of her recently inaugurated adultery, even though I was more her husband’s friend than hers or, at least, had known him longer. She did me a very poor service indeed, for I spent months tormented by that knowledge – which she theatrically and egotistically expanded on and updated, ever more in thrall to narcissism – knowing that with my friend, her husband, I had to remain silent: not because I didn’t feel I had the right to tell him something about which he might – although how was I to know – have preferred to remain in ignorance; not just because I didn’t want to take responsibility for unleashing with my words other people’s actions and decisions, but also because I was very conscious of the manner in which that embarrassing story had reached me. I am not free to dispose of something I did not find out about by chance or by my own means, or in response to a commission or a request, I told myself. If I had spotted my friend’s wife and her lover boarding a plane bound for Buenos Aires, I could perhaps have considered finding some neutral way of revealing that involuntary sighting, that interpretable, but not incontrovertible fact (I would, after all, have had no knowledge of her relationship with the man, and it would have fallen to my friend and not to me to feel suspicious), although I would probably still have felt like a traitor and a busybody and very much doubt I would have dared to say anything in either case. But, I told myself, I would at least have had the option. Having found out what I knew from her, however, there was no way I could use this against her or pass it on without her consent, not even if I believed that doing so would be to my friend’s advantage, and I was sorely tempted by this belief on certain extremely awkward occasions, for example, when I was with them both or the four of us were having supper together (my wife being the fourth guest, not the lover) and she would shoot me a look that combined complicity and a shudder of pleasurable fear (and I would hold my breath), or he would blithely mention the well-known case of the well-known lover of someone or other whose spouse, however, knew nothing at all about it. (And I would hold my breath.) And so I remained silent for several months, hearing about and almost witnessing something I found both dull and highly distasteful, and all for what, I used to ask myself in my darker moments, probably to be denounced one day – when the unpleasant facts are revealed or the truth is told or flaunted and exhibited – as a collaborator or an accomplice, or co-conspirator if you like, by the very person whose secret I am keeping and whose exclusive authority on the subject I have always acknowledged and respected and never breathed a word about to anyone else. Her authority and her authorship, even though at least two other people are involved in her story, one knowingly and the other entirely unwittingly, or perhaps, despite all, my friend is still not yet involved and would only become involved were I to tell him. Maybe I am the one who is already involved because of what I know, and because I listened and interpreted – I used to think – that is what my long experience and my long list of responsibilities tell me and confirm to me daily, with each day that passes, making them grow ever dimmer and more distant, so that it seems to me sometimes that I must have read them or seen them on the screen or imagined them, that it is not so easy to disentangle oneself or even to forget. Or that it isn’t possible at all.
No, I should never tell anyone anything, nor hear anything either.
I did, for some time, listen and notice and interpret and tell, and I was paid to do so during that time, but it was something I had always done and that I continue to do, passively and involuntarily, without effort and without reward, I probably can’t help it now, it’s just my way of being in the world, it will go with me to my death, and only then will I rest from it. More than once I was told it was a gift, and Peter Wheeler was the one who pointed this out to me, alerting me to its existence by explaining and describing it to me, for, as everyone knows or, at least, senses, things only exist once they have been named. Sometimes, though, this gift seems more like a curse, even though I now tend to stick to the first three activities, which are silent and internal and take place solely in my mind, and therefore need affect no one but me, and I only tell anyone anything when I have no alternative or if someone insists. For during my professional or, shall we say, remunerated life in London, I learned that what merely happens to us barely affects us or, at least, no more than what does not happen, but it is the story (the story of what does not happen too), which, however imprecise, treacherous, approximate and downright useless, is nevertheless almost the only thing that counts, is the decisive factor, it is what troubles our soul and diverts and poisons our footsteps, it is doubtless also what keeps the weak, lazy wheel of the world turning.
It is not mere chance or fancy that in espionage, conspiracies, or criminal activities, what is known by the various participants in a mission or a plot or a coup – clandestinely, secretly – is always diffuse, partial, fragmentary, oblique, with each person knowing only about his or her particular task, but not about the whole, not the final aim. We’ve all seen this in films, the way the partisan, realising that he won’t survive the next ambush or the next inevitable attempt on his life, tells his girlfriend when they say their farewells: ‘It’s best if you know nothing; then, if they interrogate you, you’ll be telling the truth when you say you know nothing, the truth is easy, it has more force, it’s more believable, the truth persuades.’ (For lying does require certain imaginative and improvisational abilities, it requires inventiveness, a cast-iron memory, complex architectures, everyone does it, but few with any skill.) Or the way the mastermind behind the big robbery, the one who plans and directs it, informs his flunky or henchman: ‘If you know only about your part of the job, even if they catch you or you fail, the plan can still go ahead.’ (And it’s true that you can always allow for one link to break or for some mistake to be made, total failure is not something that is achieved quickly or simply, every enterprise, every action resists and struggles for some time before it stops altogether and collapses.) Or the way the head of Secret Services whispers to the agent about whom he has his suspicions and whom he no longer trusts: ‘Your ignorance will be your protection, so don’t ask any more questions, don’t ask, it will be your salvation and your guarantee of safety.’ (And the best way to avoid betrayals is to provide no fuel for them, or only rumours, valueless and weightless, mere husks, a disappointment to those who pay for them.) Or the way someone who commissions a crime or threatens to commit one, or someone who confesses to vile deeds thus exposing himself to blackmail, or someone who buys something secretly – keep your collar turned up, your face always in the shadows, never light a cigarette – warns the hired assassin or the person under threat or the potential blackmailer or the commutable woman once desired and already forgotten, but still a source of shame to us: ‘You know the score, you’ve never seen me, from now on you don’t know me, I’ve never spoken to you or said anything, as far as you’re concerned I have no face, no voice, no breath, no name, no back. This conversation and this meeting never took place, what’s happening now before your eyes didn’t happen, isn’t happening, you haven’t even heard these words because I didn’t say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I’m not saying them.’
(Keeping silent, erasing, suppressing, cancelling and having, in the past, remained silent too: that is the world’s great, unachievable ambition, which is why anything else, any substitute, falls short, and why it is pure childishness to withdraw what has been said and why retraction is so futile; and that is also why – because, unlikely though it may seem, it is sometimes the only thing that can effectively inject a little doubt – out-and-out denial is so irritating, denying that one said what was said and heard and denying that one did what was done and endured, it’s exasperating that the action announced by those earlier words can be carried out unwaveringly and to the letter, words that could be spoken by so many and by such very different people, the mouth of the instigator and the threatener, of the person living in fear of blackmail and the one who furtively pays for his pleasures or profits, as well as in the mouth of a lover or a friend, and that those words can then, equally exasperatingly, be denied.)
All the words we have seen uttered in the cinema I myself have said or have had said to me or have heard others say throughout my whole existence, that is, in real life, which bears a closer relation to films and literature than is normally recognised and believed. It isn’t, as people say, that the former imitates the latter or the latter the former, but that our infinite imaginings belong to life too and help make it broader and more complex, make it murkier and, at the same time, more acceptable, although not more explicable (or only very rarely). A very thin line separates facts from imaginings, even desires from their fulfilment, and the fictitious from what actually happened, because imaginings are already facts, and desires are their own fulfilment, and the fictitious does happen, although not in the eyes of common sense and of the law, which, for example, makes a vast distinction between the intention and the crime, or between the commission of a crime and its attempt. But consciousness knows nothing of the law, and common sense neither interests nor concerns it, each consciousness has its own sense, and that very thin line is, in my experience, often blurred and, once it has disappeared, separates nothing, which is why I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have therefore learned to fear not only what is thought, the idea, but also what precedes it and comes before. For I am myself my own fever and pain.
This gift or curse of mine is nothing very extraordinary, by which I mean it is nothing supernatural, preternatural, unnatural or contra natura, nor does it involve any unusual abilities, not divination, say, although something rather similar to that was what came to be expected of me by my temporary boss, the man who contracted me to work for him during a period that seemed to go on for a long time, more or less the same period of time as my separation from my wife, Luisa, when I came back to England so as not to be near her while she was slowly distancing herself from me. People behave idiotically with remarkable frequency, given their tendency to believe in the repetition of what pleases them: if something good happens once, then it should happen again, or at least tend in that direction. And it was all because I chanced to make a correct interpretation of a relationship that was of (momentary) importance to Señor Tupra, that Mr Tupra – as I always called him until he urged me to replace this with Bertram and later, much to my distaste, with Bertie – wanted to hire my services, initially on an ad hoc basis and subsequently full-time, with theoretical duties as vague as they were varied, including acting as liaison or occasional interpreter on his Spanish or Spanish-American incursions. But in reality or, rather, in practice, I was of interest to him and was taken on as an interpreter of lives, to use his own grandiose expression and exaggerated expectations. It would be best just to say translator or interpreter of people: of their behaviour and reactions, of their inclinations and characters and powers of endurance; of their malleability and their submissiveness, of their faint or firm wills, their inconstancies, their limits, their innocence, their lack of scruples and their resistance; their possible degrees of loyalty or baseness and their calculable prices and their poisons and their temptations; and also their deducible histories, not past but future, those that had not yet happened and could therefore be prevented. Or, indeed, created.
I had met him at the home of Professor Peter Wheeler, of Oxford, an eminent and now retired Hispanist and Lusitanist, the man who knows more than anyone else in the world about Prince Henry the Navigator and one of those who knows most about Cervantes, and who is now Sir Peter Wheeler and the first winner of the Premio Nebrija de Salamanca, awarded to the most brilliant members of a particular speciality or field and – rather surprisingly in the university world, which is either miserly or impoverished depending on the institution – worth a not insignificant amount of money, which meant that the narrowed eyes of his greedy or needy international colleagues rested enviously upon him on that penultimate occasion. I used to travel down from London to see him now and then (an hour on the train there, another hour back), having met and got to know him slightly many years before, when, for two years, I held the post of Spanish lector at Oxford University – I was single at the time, and now I was separated; I seem always to be alone in England. Wheeler and I had liked each other from the start, perhaps out of deference to the person who had first introduced us, Toby Rylands, Professor of English Literature, and a great friend of his since youth and with whom he shared a number of characteristics, as well as the age and status of the reluctantly retired. Although I often visited Rylands, I did not meet Wheeler until the end of my stay there, since he was teaching as emeritus professor in Texas during term time, and I went back to Madrid or went travelling during the vacation, and we did not, therefore, coincide. But when Rylands died, after I had left, Wheeler and I continued that deference which will, I suppose, since it became, from then on, deference to a memory or to a defenceless ghost, now last indefinitely: we used occasionally to write or phone, and, if I was going to be in London for a few days, I always tried to make time to visit him, alone or with Luisa. (Wheeler as substitute for or successor to Rylands, or as his inheritance: it’s shocking how easily we replace the people we lose in our lives, how we rush to cover any vacancies, how we can never resign ourselves to any reduction in the cast of characters without whom we can barely go on or survive, and how, at the same time, we all offer ourselves up to fill vicariously the empty places assigned to us, because we understand and partake of that continuous universal mechanism of substitution, which affects everyone and therefore us too, and so we accept our role as poor imitations and find ourselves surrounded by more and more of them.)
He amused me and taught me a great deal with his intelligent though never cruel brand of mischief, and with his astonishing perspicacity, so subtle and unostentatious that one often had to presume or decipher it from his remarks and questions, apparently innocuous, rhetorical or trivial, sometimes almost hieroglyphic if you were alert enough to spot them; you had to listen ‘between the words’, as sometimes you have to read between the lines of what he writes, although this predominantly indirect manner did not prevent him, if he suddenly grew bored with hints and judged them to be burdensome, from being franker and more ruthless – with third parties or with life or himself, although not usually with his immediate interlocutor – than anyone else I have ever known, with the possible exception of Rylands and, perhaps, myself, but only as disciple and pupil of both. And I – well, I didn’t dare think anything else – doubtless amused him, and even flattered him by my ready affection, my easy delight and my celebratory laughter, which never takes much coaxing in the presence of people who have earned my respect and admiration, and Wheeler deserves both. (I was, in his case, a replacement for or a successor to no one, or to no one known to me, possibly someone from his ancient past, the long-delayed or, who knows, long-since-ruled-out replace- ment of some remote figure whose echo or mere shadow or reflection he had already relinquished.)
So during my time in London, working for BBC radio, until Mr Tupra took me away, I used to go and see him where he lived in Oxford, by the River Cherwell, like Rylands, whose neighbour he had been, either on my own initiative or occasionally on his, when, for whatever reason, he required witnesses to his verbal interventions or to his disguised mises-enscène, or if he had visitors whom he wanted to provide with a little variety – for example, with a Latin who had nothing to do now with the all-too-familiar university world – or visitors he was looking forward to discussing with me afterwards, the next day when we were alone. I had that feeling on two or three occasions: it was as if Wheeler, well into his eighties, was always preparing conversations that might entertain or stimulate him in the near, or, to him, still foreseeable future. And if he foresaw that he would find it amusing later on to talk to me about Tupra, or to recount his indiscretions, his vices and enigmas and funny ways, it would be a good idea for me to meet Tupra first, or at least be able to put a voice and a face to him and have formed some impression, however superficial, which he, Wheeler, could then confirm or deny, or even argue about with unnecessary zeal, and only then would we get any real enjoyment out of the conversation. He needed a counterpoint to his perorations.
I wonder if this is what the enigmatic and fragmented time of the old is like, the paradoxical discovery – for those who manage to get that far and become part of it – that you have such a superfluity of that dwindling time that you can afford to devote no small part of it to the preparation or composition of prized moments; or, so to speak, to guiding the numerous empty or dead moments towards a few pre-planned and carefully considered dialogues, in which you have, of course, memorised your own part: it is as if the old took great care of their time – at once brief and slow, limited and abundant, the time of an astute old man – and planned and channelled and directed it as much as they could, and were no longer willing to accept – enough, no more: no more fever or pain; no word or spear, not even sleep and dreams – that it was a mere consequence of chance, of the unexpected or of something beyond them, but tried to convert it into a work of their own making, of their own dramaturgy and design. Or, which comes to the same thing, as if they took great pains to anticipate and configure it and to shape its content as much as possible; and that this was what they wanted, as being the only sure way of truly making the most of their remaining time, which seems to move so very slowly, but is, in fact, sliding from their shoulders like snow, slippery and docile. And the snow always stops.
I definitely had that feeling as regards Tupra, that Wheeler wanted me to meet him or see him, because he could easily just have phoned and said: ‘A few friends and acquaintances are coming here for a buffet supper two weeks on Saturday; why don’t you come too, I know how alone you are in London.’ He didn’t know if I was a little or very much alone or even suffering from an excess of company, but he tended to attribute to others his own situation, needs and even neglect, a trick of his, for if he got in first, no one was likely to point out the same thing in him or to return the favour, for it would have shown a lack of originality on their part – or mere childishness. But although that is more or less what he said, he remained on the line for a few seconds more, even when I had already accepted the invitation with pleasure and made a note of the date and the hour, and then he added with feigned hesitancy (but without concealing the fact that it was feigned): ‘Anyway, that fellow Bertram Tupra will be there, a former pupil of Toby’s.’ (He used the word ‘fellow’, which is perhaps less disparaging than the Spanish ‘individuo’: for we were speaking in both Spanish and English, or sometimes each of us in our own language.) And before I could make any comment on that unlikely surname, he anticipated me and spelled it out, agreeing: ‘Yes, I know, it sounds like an invented name, doesn’t it, and it might well be, though it’s more likely that the Bertram is false and not the Tupra, a name like that has to be genuine, Russian or Czech in origin, I don’t know, or Finnish perhaps, or maybe that’s just because it sounds a bit like “tundra” … Anyway, it’s glaringly obvious that he isn’t English, but all too frankly foreign, possibly Armenian or Turkish, so the man must have thought it prudent to compensate with a first name worthy of our English theatres, you know the sort of thing, Cyril, Basil, Reginald, Eustace, Bertram, they turn up in all the old comedies. Perhaps that’s why he changed it, he couldn’t have gone around here without arousing suspicion if he was called, oh, I don’t know, Vladimir Tupra or Vaslav Tupra or Pirkka Tupra, can you imagine how unfortunate that would have been up until a few years ago, the only job he could have got then would have been in the ballet or the circus, certainly not in his present line of work …’ Wheeler gave a short, scornful laugh, as if he had had a sudden vision of Tupra, whose appearance he was familiar with, got up in dark tights and a top with a low or plunging neckline, leaping about on stage, displaying his sturdy thighs and bulging, veiny calves; or in the leotard and brief, phosphorescent cape of a trapeze artiste. He even paused before continuing, as if he were expecting some kind of encouragement from me or was wondering whether to explain exactly what Tupra’s ‘line of work’ was. I said nothing, and he hesitated further, I noticed that he wasn’t really paying attention to what he went on to say, it seemed to me he was just playing for time and was merely improvising until he came to some decision: ‘I wonder if perhaps he drew his inspiration from that legendary bookseller near Covent Garden, Bertram Rota, you know the shop, I think his full name was Cyril Bertram Rota, I hadn’t realised until now what an unusual surname he had for someone with a business in Long Acre or wherever, it’s probably Spanish in origin, I should think. Do you know any other Rotas in Spain, apart from the venal ecclesiastical tribunal of course? Then again, Bertram could well be his real name, Tupra’s I mean, and it was perhaps his father, assuming he was the one who emigrated here from the tundra or the steppe, who had the idea of Britishising his son at birth in order to mitigate the barbarous, almost accusatory effect of Tupra, in Spain he would have had to drop it entirely, don’t you think, it sounds far too much like “estupro”, and he would doubtless have been the butt of endless cruel puns about rape. And these silly tricks work, Rota is a case in point, the penny hadn’t dropped until now, after all these years of frittering my fortune on expensive books from his catalogue; I’ll have to ask his son Anthony, who is still alive I think …’ Wheeler stopped again, he was weighing up the situation while he talked, did he or did he not want to tell me or forewarn me or ask me about something. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘being called Bertram would mean that he, Tupra, could be called Bertie in private, which would make him feel as if he had stepped straight out of a P. G. Wodehouse story, when he’s amongst friends or with his girlfriend, I mean, oh, by the way, she’ll be coming too, a new girlfriend whom he insists on introducing to us, though it’s bound to be her physique he’s proud of rather than her probable wisdom …’ He paused one last time, but since I was either not in a very communicative mood or had nothing to add, he resorted to another digression in order to conclude in style, a digression that proved far more intriguing to me than all the others: ‘Of course, he speaks English like a native, half-educated South Londoner, I’d say. In fact, when I think about it, he’s possibly more English than I am, after all, I was born in New Zealand and didn’t come here until I was sixteen, and I’d changed my surname too, for different reasons obviously, nothing to do with patriotic euphony or with the steppes. But then you know all that, and it’s hardly relevant, besides I’m taking up far too much of your time. I’ll expect you on that Saturday, then.’ And he said goodbye in his fondest tones, which rendered imperceptible his ever-present irony: ‘I await your arrival with the greatest impatience. You’re so alone in London. Don’t let me down now.’ That last phrase he said in my language: ‘No te me rajes.’