Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  I see the scene now, if it ever did take place; I see it even if it didn’t, but who knows, maybe De Wet moved heaven and earth through his friends in embassies and underworlds and was granted a very brief audience, ten or twelve minutes to describe his plans to the Soviet Union’s greatest enemy, arranging matters so that Franco wouldn’t know or remember his henchmen’s rejection of this volunteer pilot at the beginning of the war, or the services then provided to the Republic by this refoulé, or his years as an inmate condemned to death in the Gestapo’s prisons, or his early flights against Mussolini in Abyssinia. I see Franco, disguised as an admiral, sitting with his feet solidly planted, heel to toe flat on the floor, as if they had no joints and lacked all ability to move—the long, white shoes, the white socks that leave his squalid ankles all too visible—and taking a small, provincial satisfaction in the fact of having a foreigner in front of him, and what’s more a British subject, there to ask for his help. I see Hugh Oloff de Wet with his imperfect Spanish and contagious joviality running up against the brick wall of this interlocutor incapable of humor or benevolence or enthusiasm, only silent and vegetative, observing the mercenary’s far-fetched appearance rather than listening to him, the vehement verbiage merely a distraction, like a murmur that didn’t quite reach his ears. And when De Wet had finished explaining his visionary strategy—most assuredly without mentioning the coveted Hotel Metropol or the wife he already had—the dictator probably stared at him with opaque eyes and remained silent a while as if he were unacquainted with the rules of dialogue and the man in front of him had to continue speaking forever, or as if he could never be expected—no more than a totem pole could be, or a suit of armor—to say or answer anything, concrete or abstract. He may have raised a finger to his uninhabited temple, more a sign of vacuity and absence than of calculation or doubt, given a laborious sniff of his anchor-shaped nose which always seemed to be dripping, and cast a sidelong glance at the resplendent gilded buttons on his cuff, and then—perhaps—he spoke, with his long teeth clamped shut and his lips barely moving:

  “And tell me, how do you manage to keep that circle of glass you’re wearing in your eye from falling off?”

  It was the type of thing likely to attract the dictator’s attention during that time, which was already beginning to settle down, though death still passed through it, and salt rained down and skulls were scattered: or rather it didn’t settle down, it was crushed underfoot, that time. His capacity for comment of any kind was virtually nonexistent; years later, after a series of tempestuous dances was performed for him and his guests by the flamenco dancer Antonio, and the dancer (avid for dictatorial congratulations or accolades) was brought to his box to receive his compliments, the best the usurper managed to say was, “Let’s see now. You look as if you’re made of rubber.”

  De Wet knows very well that he must answer the question, though the time allotted for the audience is about to run out and four phrases about his smoked monocle could steer them irretrievably off the subject and use up the two or three minutes still granted.

  “Oh, it’s a matter of practice, Excelencia. Training and discipline, as in all else. After a time the orbital muscles become so strong that in the end one doesn’t even remember the lens is there.”

  “I see: effort,” the false admiral answers coldly, and De Wet realizes that the dictator was expecting something more along with the explanation, probably that he would take off and replace the monocle a couple of times without hesitation or error, giving an on-the-spot demonstration of his highly developed orbital muscles, but De Wet has no intention of baring his eye, not even for the Metropol, it’s a very intimate thing, nor does he expect the dictator to go so far as to ask him to do so, though he understands clearly now that such would be his desire; this is a man accustomed to being interpreted, unused to asking for or requesting anything; perhaps he is one of those people who only know what would please them once someone else has suggested it, formulating possible ideas for their cruelties or whims, all welcomed. Franco Bahamonde sits in silence again, for too many seconds, and De Wet seizes the opportunity to try to recuperate his partisans.

  “So, what do you make of the plan, mi generali Does it strike you as feasible? Will you consider it? We could goad them incessantly, we would be a nightmare for the Soviet authorities, whose lives are too calm. They have crushed time itself underfoot, they have crushed those countries.”

  But the fancy-dress sailor who never sailed except in pleasure boats is interested only in what’s in front of his eyes and in that alone, he may not even be aware of the mercenary’s puerile and senseless proposal, the moment the usher showed De Wet in he wrote him off as an arrogant European, an outlandish Englishman.

  “And tell me,” he says at last, after the latest silence and with an absolute minimum of expression in his tiny and faintly grubby-looking eyes, “the earring: does it hurt? Because you’re wearing it pierced through the earlobe, aren’t you? It’s not a clip-on, it goes all the way through like a pin, doesn’t it? They’re called clip-ons, the kind that don’t pierce the ear, according to what I’ve heard on the radio. I listen to the radio quite a bit, to stay informed.”

  De Wet instinctively takes his earlobe between thumb and index finger, his earring is a hoop, with no pendant, and indeed it does not clip on. He strokes his earlobe and strokes the hoop, again understanding by some process of infusion or mesmerism that the dictator wants not only a response but to see the ornament up close, as if to admire some minor phenomenon, no doubt it scandalizes and upsets him to see an earring worn by a man, but he also feels a minimal, indolent curiosity towards the thing he disapproves of, he wants to verify with his own eyes the degree of shamelessness attained by this pretentious individual who, on inexplicable recommendations, has wormed his way as far as the dictator’s office, heads will roll in the Ministry of the Interior and the embassies, Peman’s head will roll and so will Camilo’s, Starkie’s head will roll and also the heads of some lawyers and a maître d’. And his son-in-law’s head, too.

  “Yes, señoría, I wear it pierced through the lobe, it’s an old military badge of my family’s,” De Wet tries to justify himself. “We are of South African origins, and down in South Africa it isn’t viewed as improper. It’s a family tradition, as I said, I maintain it out of loyalty. My grandfather used to put it on to win battles.”

  “But your family are not negros,” says the dictator, staring hard at De Wet’s blond ponytail. “Not by your skin, you’re not negros.”

  “No, we are not negros, Excelencia, as can be seen.”

  “I’ve known negros,” Franco comments, pensively.

  “I don’t doubt it, mi general. Su señoría must have travelled a great deal,” answers De Wet, ever more bewildered as to the direction the conversation is taking. He knows that from one second to the next the door will open and the usher will lead him out to the street, his partisans in limbo, the Hotel Metropol still confiscated.

  “Travel, what you’d call travel, not so much,” acknowledges the impostor dressed as an admiral. And he adds, laconic, “I’m a man of experience. Negros can be seen from far away.” Then he falls silent again, but seems to be searching for words or for their proper order rather than signalling the end of his turn. Or perhaps he is trying to recall something very recent because he then repeats, “So, you say it doesn’t hurt, this trinket?”

  “No, mi general, it doesn’t hurt, I’ve been wearing it since I was very young and again it’s a matter of getting used to it, our ears aren’t any different from women’s, are they?”

  “It is true that they are similar. But that depends on how you look at it,” says the phony naval officer enigmatically, but there may be no enigma to it at all, just simplemindedness, and as he says it he lifts his thumb and index finger to one of his elephantine ears, as instinctively as De Wet just did, and De Wet realizes just how large Franco’s ears are—they look like the soles of feet set into his temples—and tries to imagine an earring embel
lishing one of them but immediately suppresses the disrespectful and revolting vision. The dictator keeps his neck stiffly erect, as if he were waiting for something, he’s almost seventy, very soon that neck will be wattled. He still has his feet, real feet, and so white, pressed down on the carpet, as if, instead of shoes, he were wearing a pair of steam irons. He gives the impression of not being prepared to stand or even sit up straight in his chair for anything in the world, so De Wet opts to move closer, turning to reveal his profile and inclining his torso slightly the better to show the mechanics of his trinket, which is not as intimate as the eye, it doesn’t bother him to give in to Franco on this.

  “If Su Excelencia would like to see it in greater detail,” he said.

  “Come closer. Closer,” the Chief of State orders in his always uninterested voice, stretching out the neck that will soon look like a turtle’s. De Wet turns even more to the side and leans closer, but between them is the large table, almost empty, the administration doesn’t spend much on paper. “Let’s see, come over on this side,” the dictator dictates, motioning him around the table, “I can’t quite make out this badge of war you speak of.” De Wet does as he is told and stands to the right of the general’s chair, and since the general has no thought of moving and De Wet is a man of some height, he kneels, in an agile motion, to place the ornamented ear at the proper altitude, that is, at the level of the hooded eyes that scrutinize the appendage which is now very close, it looks as if the dictator were whispering into the ear or were about to lick it, De Wet can feel Franco Bahamonde’s breath on his face like a steady, sibilant snore. “Let’s see now. You pierce your flesh, that must make a pulp of it,” says Franco as if he were issuing a decree. “I know negros pierce themselves, too. But not all of them. Moors, no; they don’t.”

  Then the door opened to let the usher in: time’s up. The usher stopped short at this unexpected tableau: the fictitious navigator seemed to be whispering a secret to the swaggering Englishman, or else making a confession, a thing unheard of, the trumped-up admiral never confided in anyone. The usher gracefully cleared his throat (certain occupations require this skill) and announced to Su Excelencia that his presence was awaited at that afternoon’s bullfight, which was to feature yearling bulls. De Wet stood up with a start and immediately retreated to his original position on the other side of the table. Then the tauromachy-loving dictator made an unmistakable gesture of farewell with his hand, a gesture that was mild and almost affable, and said, “Adiós. Good luck with your project.”

  De Wet understood. There was no point in making any further attempt. The gesture had been dubiously affable and the words, though they wished him well, cutting: in a single instant this man was capable of rotting blood and making the somberest shadow flow, Blaw for Blaw, or, for Franco, golpe por golpe. Or no: for every blow he got he gave back far too many, which is typical of the insecure. The former pilot stood at attention and expressed his gratitude for the honor done him, the time spent, the ear lent. The dictator did not answer but looked at the usher and said, “Garralde, show Señor de Bet out and then come back here.”

  De Wet turned on his heel and made his way towards the open door, but before he had gone through it the pinched voice stopped him.

  “You haven’t told me which battles your grandfather won in Africa.”

  The mercenary faced him and straightened his shoulders once more.

  “With your permission, señor: Vechtgeneraal Christiaan Rudolf de Wet. He was at Majuba, Ladysmith, Waterval, Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Sanna’s Post, Bloemfontein, Magersfontein, Roodewal, Koedoesberg, Mafeking, Reddersburg, Tweefontein, Mushroom and River Vet among others, he didn’t win them all. He was particularly adept at guerilla warfare, and some of that must have passed down to me.”

  That last observation was the final attempt he had already decided against. As expected, it was futile. The chimerical commodore made no answer, but only murmured coldly, or his tone may have been disdainful, or surly, or perhaps suspicious, “Those names are not known to me.”

  “La Guerra Boer, señor,” De Wet clarified, in translated English. “It lasted three years.” He was about to add, “Like yours, like ours, señor,” but forbore.

  “Ah, La Guerra de los Boers,” said Franco slowly as he began writing something down, also slowly, on the note card where a while before he had written “Effeminate.” What he now noted was: “Dandified adventurer. Degeneration of a family.” And he then added, speaking out loud: “Your grandfather, then, was a member of the expeditionary forces.”

  “No señor, with your permission, señor. I’m British, but my grandfather was Boer. He became commander-in-chief of the Boer army against the English. Later things changed and the family emigrated.”

  It must have struck Franco Bahamonde as peculiarly contemptible that the commander-in-chief’s grandson had the nationality of the enemy, and he lowered his gaze to go on writing, this time noting in more lively fashion, “With that awful ponytail the only place for you is the bullring.” He then raised his eyes and covered what he had written with his hand, though there was no chance that De Wet could make it out from the doorway, where he was waiting, turning his hat in his hands, immaculately well dressed. The dictator repeated the gesture of farewell, like someone who is giving his consent, but more distracted, and De Wet heard him mutter: “La Guerra de los Boers, and what else. I followed that war in the newspapers when I was a boy. The names would have rung a bell. You don’t fool me, ponytail.”

  De Wet was led out to the street by Garralde, the usher, who had a ruddy face and dense, provincial hair, and as he walked through hallways and down stairs, covertly observed, he thought that at least he had learned a new Spanish word during that audience which had turned out to be such a resounding failure. “Punzar, to pierce” he hadn’t known it before and now it stayed on his tongue (“Punzar, punzar,” he repeated to himself), and what was more he had understood it, from the context. And perhaps it was due to the usher, who was quite a gossip, that De Wet managed not to be arrested every night by the police for his adventuresome, dandified look in the Madrid of 1951, not in the Café Gijón with his disciple Edkins or in El Molino Rojo, Pasapoga, El Biombo Chino or in Conga, El Avión, J’Hay, Tarzán (formerly Satán) or Chicote, and not in House of Ming or even Las Palmeras, if all of them existed already or still, or even in better spots than these and in the best company of bullfighters and actresses: he must have been out all night every night, there’s no dictatorship that can put a stop to Madrid’s nocturnal ways. Perhaps Garralde, the usher—who may himself have been a little effeminate, though he served the asexual Franco (who would never have suspected it in his life)—couldn’t help telling his boyfriend, a policeman, about the incredible sight of the dictator confiding in that tall, blond, kneeling man, with the ponytail, earring and eyepatch, speaking into his ear, so close he could have licked the earlobe. A key figure, that foreigner, what with all the whispered secrets, best to be on good terms and not give him any trouble; on the contrary, best to smooth the way for his escapades during his brief or lengthy stay in Madrid. Or maybe Garralde wasn’t gay and had no lover, only a wife who badgered him, but he might have been receiving money from some favored minister who often came to visit, Girón or Solís or Camilo Alonso Vega, Don Camulo they called him (if any of them were around during that period, I no longer remember, nor am I thinking of going and looking it up), so that he would let his tongue run away with him in gratitude; or the bribe may have come from the only son-in-law of the megalomaniac harpooner (hardly anyone remembers this now, but they used to set moribund sperm whales free within firing range to make him believe he was bagging them like some tourist Ahab, poor Melville again), who was reputed to do his utmost to pry into and spy on everything, the better to ingratiate himself with his father-in-law, and there were also rumors that the son-in-law had no objection at all to frequenting the most revelrous and dubious milieux (full of adventurers and even dandies, including Riscal and El Copacabana), de
spite the strict asexual who kept him under surveillance. So perhaps, in the end, it was the earring itself, rather than any influence, that served as a safe-conduct here in Spain for the mercenary named Hugh Oloff de Wet, or that may only have been one of his names.

  Even though I didn’t leap for the telephone to call the untidy Mr. Pombo or race off immediately to Barajas airport to jump on the next flight to London, and failed, as well, to take the precaution of acquiring a device with which to record Edkins’ words when I had him in front of me, I wasn’t entirely inactive: I did put several British antiquarian or second-hand book dealers (Bertram Rota and Bernard Kaye, the Stones of Titles in Oxford, Ben Bass, who has since disappeared) on the alert so they would keep me in mind if they ever ran across a copy of either of the two rare and inaccessible books De Wet had written.