Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  And in fitting recompense for the many bookish errands Don Juan Benet had sent me on over the years (all of them a mite tricky, as if he were forever putting me to the test), I took the liberty of asking him to hunt down references to the pirate-pilot in his magnificent library on the Spanish Civil War, which was one of his specialties. After a week, no doubt piqued by curiosity and the bibliographic challenge (I had put it to him in the most woundingly effective terms, “So, Don Juan, you who spend your life boasting about your great knowledge of the war: let’s see what you can show us”), Benet sent me from his country house in Zarzalejo, where he kept the literature on the war he was so proud of, the following handwritten report, under the mocking title, “Note for Mr. Javier Marías, B.A.”:

  As regards Oloff de Wet, I’ve found some references in the bibliography on the Civil War. Jesús Salas Larrazábal mentions him in two of his books, La guerra de España desde el aire (The Spanish Civil War from the Air), Barcelona: Ariel, 1972, and Intervención extranjera en la guerra de España (Foreign Intervention in the Spanish Civil War), Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1974. In the first of these, De Wet is mentioned in relation to the creation, by the new Undersecretary of the Air, of at least fifteen pursuit and bombardment units using imported equipment that went into operation in September, 1936. According to Salas, De Wet was piloting a Nieuport 52 at that time. There are also isolated references to De Wet in Alcofar Nassaes, La aviación legionaria en la guerra española (Legionnaire Aviation in the Spanish Civil War), Barcelona: Euros, 1975. However, I’ve found no mention of him in Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty, which claims to provide a very extensive list of the British volunteers, almost all of them posted to the British Battalion in which the author served. Nor does he appear in the documents and memoirs of members of the brigades and British fellow travellers.

  In general, these references are due to the publication by Oloff de Wet of Cardboard Crucifix, London: Blackwood, 1938, which I’ve not succeeded in finding and don’t believe has been translated or published in Spanish. An excellent angle for further recherches: let’s see what you can do this time: give us a further display of your skills. From what I can deduce, it’s an autobiographical story of his experience as a fighter pilot in Spain, and a well-placed eyewitness account of the birth of the Republican Air Force. A quite extensive excerpt (fourteen pages) from Cardboard Crucifix is included in The Civil War in Spain by Robert Payne, London: Secker & Warburg, 1962, who is not to be confused with Stanley G. Payne, the historian of Spanish fascism. The fragment isn’t much: a journalistic impression of Madrid in the revolutionary autumn of ’36, some impressions of flying in the Nieuport and a few quick sketches of leading figures in the International Brigades.

  —Zarzalejo, January 1992

  January 1992, only a year before his death. No one could have imagined it then, he himself least of all, no one ever knows the order of these things.

  I believe I remember that the next time we saw each other I had the nerve and the ingratitude to belittle his findings and throw back in his face the skimpy, insipid pickings he had served up to me, much of it useless because already known to me (but that was always the style with Benet, those of us who were his friends tended to take our mutual competence for granted and not acknowledge any merit in each other except on very rare occasions, which made it all the more exceptional and unforgettable: my family is of the same school, a prickly, jesting school—a little grace and good humor are required—which I’ve noticed most other writers won’t tolerate, forced as they all too often are into reciprocal cloying adulation and even reverence, constantly addressing each other as Maestro This and Maestro That, as some of them do both in public and in print, to help each other over their complexes, inferiority complexes, that is). In fact, with an eye to my own impending display of prowess, I took care not to applaud him openly, for in his report he had seized the opportunity to issue a challenge, which he then repeated in person and in the presence of witnesses, as I had issued mine: “Look here you great bloodhound of the Baskervilles, you Arsène Lupin of literature, look here, young Marías: is it not your boast that no book, however unattainable, can elude you? I want you back here with that Oloff de Wet, which sounds like the name of a perfume; let’s see if you can deliver us a copy of this Cardboard Crucifix that you tell us you’re so very much in the know about.” Thus had Don Juan turned the tables and the investigative challenge on me. “I’ve done my part. It’s your turn now,” he said, “and I hope you won’t have the shamelessness to appear at the next dinner without that book under your arm.” We were always like that, like kids daring each other to do harmless, trivial things (or some things that weren’t so harmless), for the fun and excitement of it, and above all for the continuity and deferral, there was always something pending and we’d have to see each other again. Of course I was far from being the only one, he used the same tactic on everyone, Azúa, Molina Foix, Hortelano, Daniella and her famous episteme, Mercedes, the engineers, Peche, any friend who had earned the affection embodied in his irony.

  One of those idiotic and dispassionate challenges gave rise to a brief, memorable text he wrote me in a letter dating from my Oxford years, and this book will have been worth the trouble if only to make that text public (though I won’t cite all of it verbatim, to avoid ruffling any feathers). He had dared me to guess his new bête noire of the moment (November, 1984), and in my answer I got it right on the first try (“Has the same initials as Jaime Salinas,” I had said); I also fired off a volley of minor hieroglyphics—a further series of otherwise unidentified initials—and announced that I had an excellent little gift for him that he would find very useful, and that I would present him with on my next trip to Madrid: “an ingenious instrument,” I called it, as can be deduced from his answer. Benet had grown a moustache not long before, and though in time we grew so accustomed to it that it isn’t easy now to remember what he looked like clean-shaven, at that point his friends were still pondering the daring novelty on his upper lip and hesitating between approval, rejection, condemnation and a forced visit to the barbershop. Meanwhile, what I had bought for him, was a tiny, ridiculous comb glimpsed in a specialty shop in London, designed especially for the grooming and hygiene of such appurtenances, as they used to say in more indirect times.

  “It was indeed J S,” he acknowledged in the second paragraph of his letter, “a perfect imbecile who mixes piety with arrogance, like Xirinachs. I haven’t deciphered a single one of your initials, but to stave off and give the lie to any avowed ‘blunting of my intellect,’ I’ve decided to predict that the ‘ingenious instrument’ you’re going to give me is neither more nor less than a small comb. Naturally, you’re in the perfect position to deny this and even to acquire a new little gift in order to prove that it wasn’t a small comb, but I shall remain persuaded all my life that originally it was a small comb (I give no further details because this alone should suffice to make you blush), and if you conduct yourself ignobly in this grave matter and pull a switch on me, I, for my part, will forever hide the reasons that have led me to unmask the comb. For if you put your mind to it a little, you’ll quickly conclude that it couldn’t have been anything but a small comb.”

  Here I was forced to pay tribute to his divinatory gifts or perspicacity, though it irritated me enormously that he had spoiled the mystery of my small, specialized comb, which in due time I gave him, without making a switch, but in a rather peeved, grudging and even spiteful spirit. I often saw him use it in the years that followed, he would take it out during some gathering and, in my presence, delicately preen his moustache for a while with a distracted air, blatantly alluding to his brilliant deductive triumph. (Depending on my mood I either pretended not to notice or gratified him by taking the hint and saying: “Very well, Don Juan, that’s fine, yes, I remember, you hit the bull’s-eye, you can stop now, there’s not a hair out of place.”) Very typical of him, that recurrent retrospective delectation.

  But let’s return to 1
992. My self-esteem at stake, I immediately alerted my booksellers, G. Heywood Hill and Bell, Book & Radmall and Veronica Watts certainly, and a few others specializing in military matters, though I didn’t know that field very well; I also alerted Eric Southworth and Ian Michael in Oxford, on the unlikely chance that they might run across the damned Crucifix in some secondhand bookshop, and I suppose I also said something to Roger Dobson, who is a true, indefatigable bloodhound, but whose streaks of magnificent good fortune alternate with periods of total loss of nose (and consequent bibliographic famine), so everything depended on whether my mission found him in one phase or the other. I told them how much I was willing to spend, which was quite a lot in relation to the probable cost of an utterly forgotten 1938 book on the Spanish Civil War by an author who was known or of interest to almost no one and whose name, like Gawsworth’s (but more understandably), did not appear in any encyclopedia, dictionary or literary biography, even if some mention of it was made in certain studies of the Spanish Civil War, according to Benet’s information, though not in as many as might have been expected, given his singular, pioneering performance in the airways of the Iberian peninsula—lutos tras otros lutos y otros lutos, sorrow after sorrow and more sorrow—or in the wind that sweeps away the weeks, el viento que se lleva las semanas.

  And it was Ben Bass, whereabouts now unknown but then of Greyne House in Avon, who, not much later, worked the miracle and sent me a note in his flowery handwriting to inquire as to whether I would be interested in one copy each of Crucifix and Valley (the other volume by Oloff de Wet, about his imprisonment by the Gestapo), available to me for thirty-five and thirteen pounds respectively, plus shipping and handling. The Crucifix was a little pricey, still I didn’t waste a second on the wretched mails but phoned him right away, wondering all the while why on earth he was asking me if I wanted them rather than sending them to me at once, and before the next dinner with Don Juan Benet and friends both titles were in my clutches and I arrived at the restaurant very pleased with myself, carrying them under my arm and ready to settle the score, many years later, for the humiliation endured by my minuscule, absurd and unmasked comb. I remember Benet’s feigned disappointment as I tossed the books on the table with a movement of the thumb and index finger as if they were cards (“Who knows what vile acts you’ve lowered yourself to in order to get your hands on these rarities so fast, young Marías,” he said, irked and suspicious), which was immediately replaced by an expression of avid curiosity as he expertly thumbed through the newly bagged specimens. Many months later the great bookhunter Ben Bass (who would have to be hunted down himself now) was able to find me a second copy of Cardboard Crucifix, subtitled The Story of a Pilot in Spain, which I could then offer as a gift to Don Juan for the enrichment of his collection and in belated thanks and reward for his generous research and his note for the young Bachelor of Arts. (I’m still waiting for someone to come up with a third copy that I can give to Edkins.) He read it, not long before his death—but we didn’t know that yet—and, like the excerpt cited by Robert Payne, it didn’t strike him as any great thing. I’ll never know if this was his true opinion or just an effort to detract literary merit from this figure I had discovered and thereby make light of my irritating prowess as a digger-up of books. In any case, whatever literary interest the work of Hugh Oloff de Wet might have had, it did not by any means match its author’s biographical and novelistic interest. But I’ll speak of the texts later, perhaps.

  Neither of the two copies—mine or Benet’s—had kept its jacket, so the books bore no information on their author and no description of his work. But The Valley of the Shadow did have its jacket, in good condition, it was published eleven years after Cardboard Crucifix—the Civil War well over and the times thoroughly crushed underfoot, even the Second World War was over—and two years prior to the writer-pilot’s second strange stay in Madrid in 1951, when, of all possible spots, he frequented the Café Gijón, favored haunt of the leisured Spanish literati—or perhaps no one lacked for time back then, it hardly existed, not even Benet, who must have gone there occasionally at the age of twenty-four—and, of all governments in the world, he sought to persuade the predatory but ultra-tightfisted Franco to finance his partisan project in the Carpathians. On the jacket’s front flap were a photograph and a good number of facts, most already reported by Edkins, the protegé. Not all, however.

  In the picture, De Wet has the unmistakable look of a British military man, despite his Boer origin—if that was in fact his extraction, and perhaps it wasn’t: the moustache is thick and curly and very well groomed, perhaps he kept its tips upturned by means of an indispensable small, special comb. The long tuft on the chin is a bit jarring, giving him the look of a musketeer or an aspiring cardinal—or Buffalo Bill or Custer—inappropriate to a serious soldier of his time; it suggests an extravagant, roguish side to his character that, taken to an extreme in a foreign country, might give rise to an indecent ponytail, of which there isn’t a glimpse here. Nor does he sport an eyepatch or smoked monocle, and as for the famous earring, unless it adorned the barely visible right ear which is covered in shadow, he seems not to have dared wear it for the portrait done by the Weitzmann Studio, London. He’s dressed as a civilian, which he would have been at that time, and very dapper: the tie is elegant and the jacket’s wool fabric is so excellent that its texture is palpable to the eye. He appears somewhat older than thirty-six (his age then, perhaps) but more because of his robust physique and respectably parted hair than because of any noticeable ravages left by his reckless life. Seeing him so imperturbable, no one would ever guess he had been a prisoner for so long or that he’d been tortured. The clear eyes have a penetrating gaze typical of dark eyes, and neither looks sightless, his features are very correct: a fine-looking man easy to imagine in uniform or in some past century, particularly the seventeenth century, as a corsair or noble or both things together in a not infrequent combination, or in the nineteenth century, but farther away, across the ocean in the Wild West. The signature on the photograph is hard to make out against the dark background.

  The text on the front flap of the jacket begins and ends with a set of quotation marks and ellipses; the provenance of these citations is then explained on the back flap. “This extract, described by Mr. de Wet as ‘founded on fact,’ though ‘in various respects slightly inaccurate,’ is taken from the Vôlkischer Beobachter’s report of his trial in the People’s Court at Berlin, when he was found guilty and condemned to death.” And, in a more overtly promotional tone, it continues, “In The Valley of the Shadow Mr de Wet gives his own version of his experiences as a secret agent of France in Prague, and of his capture and imprisonment by the Gestapo. It is almost incredible that he should have survived successively the attentions of his gaolers and inquisitors, his own attempts to escape and suicide, and finally, for four years, a death sentence delivered in the earlier part of the war.” The last paragraph is even more market-minded and not worth bothering with. But it is worth having a look at the article from the Vôlkischer Beobachter of Berlin, dated February 8, 1941, partially reproduced in its original language on pages VI and VII, following the table of contents, the half title, an extremely sinister frontispiece in yellow and black showing a skeletal, chained man seated on the floor of a cell with his eyes shut—a drawing done by De Wet himself—and, filling the entire page that opens the volume, a phrase in quotation marks as if it were a motto or a line of poetry or a Biblical citation that I don’t recognize: “And still death passed me by,” it says, in other words, “And death continued to pass me by,” although, with a bit of a stretch, the word still could be understood as an adjective here rather than an adverb, in which case the motto would mean “And silent death passed me by.” But I don’t think so, because “still” in the first sense has, in Hugh Oloff de Wet’s case, all too much significance: the death sentence he received in Berlin was the second of his life, following the one in Valencia five years earlier; he was sentenced to death by the Rep
ublicans on whose side he fought in Spain and by the Nazis he fought against in Germany, that is, by both warring parties in the space of a few years. Neither of those two deaths would have been silent. The illustration I described also appears on the jacket and is not the only one in the book, which contains a total of four, all in yellow and black, all sinister, and all done by the volume’s imprisoned mercenary author. The graphic ability thus evinced was the first piece of information that could explain or justify the strange task by which I initially learned of his existence—or only of his name, misspelled—as maker of the death mask of Gawsworth, the poet, who was also Juan I, king of Redonda, Armstrong the beggar, and undoubtedly De Wet’s contemporary, for he, too, was a pilot during those years, under orders from the Royal Air Force in North Africa and the Middle East.

  The article, from the North German edition of the Vôlkischer Beobachter, which was kindly loaned by Her Majesty’s Foreign Office according to a footnote, is translated into English by De Wet at the beginning of The Valley of the Shadow and goes more or less like this:

  THE DE WET CASE

  BERLIN, JANUARY 1941

  In a two-day sitting, the People’s Court proceeded against the 28-year-old Britisher de Wet and condemned him to death. De Wet was a paid spy in the service of the French Deuxième Bureau, his task being the spying out of military installations. He was arrested by the German counter-espionage on German territory.