Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  Wheeler stopped for a moment, more than anything — it seemed to me — to catch his breath. He had said the words ‘donaire’ and ‘gracia in Spanish, possibly paraphrasing Cervantes’s words taken from somewhere other than Don Quixote, an unusual occurrence, but perfectly possible in his case. I could not resist trying to find out, and so I took advantage of his pause to quote slowly, little by little, almost syllable by syllable, as if casually or as if not quite daring to say it, murmuring:

  ‘Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo…’

  Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying …

  I could not complete the quotation. Perhaps Wheeler did not like to be reminded of that last phrase out loud, often the old do not even want to hear so much as a mention of such things, of their death, perhaps because they are beginning to see it as something likely or plausible and not dreamed or fictitious. No, I don’t believe it, I can’t be sure, but no one sees their own end like that, not even the very old or the very ill or those under threat and in constant danger. We, the others, are the ones who begin to see it in them. He ignored me and went on. He pretended not to notice what I had recited in my own language, and so I never knew if it had been a coincidence or if he had, in fact, been alluding to Cervantes’s joyful farewell.

  ‘Sometimes people say of someone that he lacks conversation. That’s ridiculous. A cultivated person, the Prime Minister (well, all right, let’s call him mentally adroit) might say it of someone who is not at all cultivated, for example, his barber. What the former is actually saying is that he doesn’t care about and is hugely bored by anything the latter has to say. Doubtless almost as bored as the barber is by everything the Prime Minister comes out with while he’s having his hair cut, it’s always a difficult chunk of time to fill, like journeys in elevators, especially if the scant head of hair requires all manner of primping if it’s to look half-way presentable and not too much like an uprooted carrot. But the barber will certainly not lack conversation, he may have even more to say than the rather obtuse minister, who is more concerned with the progress of his country in the abstract and, more concretely, with the progress of his career. It seems to me that people who know absolutely nothing, people who have never consciously paused to think for a moment about anything, who do not have a single idea of their own or anyone else’s really, nevertheless talk untiringly, unceasingly, without the slightest inhibition or self-consciousness. This is not just the case with people without training or education; there are far more astonishing cases than that of these rustics: you have only to see a group of rich loudmouths or idiotic snobs, most of them with PhDs from Cambridge or from us, and you wonder what the devil they can find to talk about amongst themselves after the first hour of exchanging greetings and telling each other the four miserable scraps of news that everyone knows about anyway because it’s common gossip, or bringing each other up to date on their usual two bits of twaddle and three pieces of villainy (I’ve always wondered what such people can find to talk about at those lavish receptions, which are cram-packed with them). One imagines that they must often have to resort to saying nothing and to loudly clearing their throats, that they must have to suffer embarrassingly long pauses and endure witty comments about the rain and the clouds as well as the awkward silences characteristic of dead time at its most defunct and even stillborn, given their absolute lack of ideas, amusing remarks, knowledge and the necessary inspiration to recount anything, of ingenuity and dialogue and even monologue: of intelligence and substance. And yet that isn’t the case. One doesn’t know why or how or about what, but the fact is that they spend the hours and the days chatting endlessly, brutishly, spend whole evenings engaged in chit-chat, without once closing their mouths, even snatching the word from each other’s lips, all intent on monopolising it. It’s both a mystery and not a mystery. Speaking, far more than thinking, is something that everyone has within his or her grasp (I’m talking, of course, about things volitive, not merely organic or physiological); it’s something which is shared and has always been shared by the bad and the good, by victims and their executioners, by the cruel and the compassionate, the sincere and the mendacious, by the not very bright and the extremely stupid, by slaves and their masters, by the gods and mankind. They all have it, imbeciles, brutes, merciless sadists, murderers, tyrants, savages, simpletons, and even the mad. And precisely because it is the one thing that makes us all equal we have spent centuries creating for ourselves all kinds of tiny differences, in pronunciation, diction, intonation, vocabulary, phonetics and semantics, all in order to feel that our group alone is in possession of a mode of speech unknown to others, of a password for initiates only. It is not only a matter for what used to be called the upper classes, eager to distinguish themselves from and scornful of everyone else; those known as the lower classes have done the same, they have proved no less scornful, and thus have forged their own jargons, their own ciphers, the secret or encrypted languages that allowed them to recognise each other and to exclude the enemy, that is, the learned and the powerful and the refined, and to prevent them from understanding, at least in part, what their members were saying, just as criminals invent their own argot and the persecuted their codes. Within the confines of the same language, their entirely artificial aim is to be not understood or at least only partially; it’s an attempt to obscure, to conceal, and, with this end in mind, they seek out strange derivations and fanciful variants, defective and highly arbitrary metaphors, tangential or oblique meanings that can be separated off from the common norm, they even coin new and unnecessary substitute words, to undo what was said and to mask what was communicated. The reason being that what makes language intelligible is the habitual and the given. Moreover, that language, or tongue, is almost all that some people have and give and receive: the poorest, the most humble, the disinherited, the illiterate, the captive, the unhappy, the subjugated; the marginalised and the deformed, like that Shakespearean king of ours, Richard III, who did so well out of his persuasive gift of the gab. That’s the one thing you can’t take away from them, speech or language, perhaps the one thing they have learned and know, they use it to address their children or their lovers, to joke, to love, to defend themselves, to suffer, console and pray, to unburden themselves, to implore, persuade, save and convince; with it they also poison, instigate, hate, perjure, insult, curse and betray, corrupt, condemn and avenge themselves. Almost everyone has it, both the king and his vassals, the priest and his congregation, the marshal and his soldiers. That is why sacred language exists, a language that does not belong to everyone, a language intended not for men, but for the gods. People forget, however, that, according to our old and possibly now moribund beliefs, both God and the gods talk and listen too (what are prayers but sentences, words, syllables), and, in the end, that sacred language is deciphered and learned too, all codes are susceptible to eventual decoding, sooner or later, no secret can be a secret eternally.’ Wheeler stopped again, very briefly, again to catch his breath. He placed one hand on the pictures we had laid out on the table, an instinctive gesture, as if he wanted to prevent them being carried off by a non-existent gust of wind, or perhaps merely to caress them. It wasn’t cold, the sun was very high, pale, lazy; it was pleasantly cool. ‘Language so binds and assimilates us that the powerful have always had to find non-verbal signs and insignia and symbols in order to be obeyed and in order to differentiate themselves. Do you remember that scene in Shakespeare when, on the eve of battle, the king wraps himself in a borrowed cloak and goes and sits down in the camp with three soldiers, pretending to be just another combatant, ready for battle, and unable to sleep through what’s left of the night or through the few remaining hours before dawn? He speaks to them, he presents himself as a friend, he talks to them, and when he does, the four seem similar, he more logical and educated, they rougher and more intuitive, but they understand each other perfectly, they are on the same plane of compreh
ension and speech and nothing gets in the way of that exchange of opinions and impressions and even fears, two of them even quarrel and almost come to blows, the king who is not the king and a subject who is not, at that moment, a subject. They talk for quite a while, and the king knows that, as they speak, they become equal, that, at least for as long as the dialogue lasts, they are the same. Which is why, when he is left alone, thinking about what he has heard, he tells us what the difference is, he murmurs in his soliloquy what it is that really distinguishes him from them. Do you remember that scene, Jacobo?’

  I too placed my hand on the drawings, as if I feared a breeze.

  ‘No, Peter,’ I said. ‘What king is that?’

  But Wheeler did not reply to my question, he went on, instead, to quote out loud, and this time I was in no doubt that he was quoting, for very few writers other than Shakespeare would ever have written ‘great greatness’ (and so many teachers and critics in my country now would have crucified him for doing so).

  ‘“What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?” That is what the king says when he’s alone, and a little further on he reproaches ceremony for singling him out: “Oh ceremony! Show me but thy worth!” And he goes on to challenge it: “O! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!” What does it actually achieve, if it achieves anything? And later still, the king dares to envy the wretched slave who labours in the sun all day but then sleeps deeply “with a body fill’d and vacant mind” and “never sees horrid night, the child of hell” and who “follows so the ever-running year with profitable labour to his grave”. And the king concludes with the obligatory exaggeration of all those monologues that no one else hears on the stage and which are heard only off-stage, in the auditorium: “And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.’” That is more or less what Wheeler said and quoted, then he added: ‘Kings of old were shameless creatures, but at least Shakespeare’s kings did not entirely deceive themselves: they knew their hands were stained with blood and they did not forget how they came to wear the crown, apart from murders and betrayals and plots (perhaps they were too human). Ceremony, Jacobo, that’s all. Changing, limitless, general ceremony. As well as secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence. But never speaking, never talking, never using words, however exquisite or captivating they might be. Because that, deep down, is within the grasp of any beggar, any outcast, any poor wretch, any one of the dispossessed. In that regard, they only differ from the king in the insignificant and ameliorable matter of perfection and degree.’

  ‘What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy!’ were the words quoted by Sir Peter Wheeler, as I found out later, when I located and recognised the texts. And he recited word for word the whole of the rest of the soliloquy, for that kind of memory he preserved intact.

  ‘But it’s not within the reach of the very young,’ I commented, ‘or the dumb or those whose tongues have been cut out or to whom the word is simply not given or permitted, there’s been a lot of that in history, and, as I understand it, there are Islamic countries in which women still do not have that right. As far as I understand it, and if my memory serves me right, that was the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan.’

  ‘No, Jacobo, you’re wrong: the young are merely waiting, their inability is purely transitory; I imagine they are preparing themselves from that very first yell when they’re born, and they make themselves understood very early on: they use other means, but they are still saying things. As for the dumb and those with no tongue, and those denied voice and word, they are exceptions, anomalies, punishments, coercions, outrages, but never the norm, and, as such, they do not count. Besides, that is not enough in itself to render that norm null and void or even to contradict it. Those thus afflicted resort to other sign systems, to non-verbal codes which they quickly establish, and you may rest assured that what they are doing is neither more nor less than talking. They are soon telling and transmitting again, like everyone else; even if it’s in writing or through signs and without uttering a sound; they are still saying even if they are doing so silently.’ Wheeler stopped talking and looked up at the sky, as if, having spoken of silence, he wanted to immerse himself for a moment in the eloquent silence he had evoked. The whitish, indifferent sun lit up his eyes, and to me they looked like glass marbles flecked with colour in which the dominant shade was dark red. ‘Earlier, I said that speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods, you have only to read the Bible and Homer or, of course, in Spanish, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. But some people cease to share it, how can I put it, they do not possess it, and they are neither dumb nor very young.’ He looked down for a second, and still had his eyes fixed on the grass, or perhaps beyond that, on the earth beneath the grass, or beyond that, on the invisible earth beneath the earth, then added after a brief pause: ‘The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.’

  ‘It seems to me that time is the only dimension they share and in which they can communicate, the only dimension they have in common and that unites them.’ That quotation, or perhaps paraphrase, came into my mind, and I felt I had to say it out loud at once, or at least mumble it to myself.

  But Wheeler was, I thought, gradually coming to the end of his digression. In fact, he always knew precisely where he was, and what seemed in him random or involuntary, a consequence of distraction or of age or of a somewhat confused perception of time, of his digressive and discursive tendencies, was always calculated, measured and controlled, and formed part of his machinations and of trajectories he had already drawn up and planned. I told myself that it would not be long now before he returned to the subject of ‘careless talk’ and the posters, indeed, he was once more looking at them intently, where they lay on the waterproof canvas cover as if they were cards in a game of patience, we, too, were sitting on the protective covers, and their folds gave to that simulacrum of an old man and to me, too, I suppose, a slightly Roman look, made us look, perhaps, vaguely like senators taking the air, our feet almost engulfed by the skirts of some very long, exaggerated tunics. Anyway, he either didn’t hear me or preferred to ignore me, or simply didn’t notice the words I had said, which were not mine but another’s, the words of a dead man when he was still alive.