Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  The case recalled here his book Cardboard Crucifix, which was published in 1939 and dealt with the Spanish civil war.

  The third clipping is an advertisement for Crucifix placed by its publisher, Blackwood. The only odd thing about it is something that doesn’t really belong to it: the note written by hand, vertically, on the left. It isn’t entirely legible, at least not to me, but from what I understand of it, the handwriting must be that of someone who knew de Wet personally, someone close to him or his family, since it refers to him as “Hugh,” the first of his Christian names, apparently not often used, even Edkins called him “Oloff” both in person and in his letters. Looked at long and hard, the first line says: “Hugh has just written. I thought it might” (though I wouldn’t swear to the “just”). The sentence does not go on in what’s left of the second line; the clipping was probably larger and the note began and continued further below, in the part later cut off and lost. In that second line—darker, the penstrokes thicker—I can only manage to read, I think, the last four words: “… daughter are quite well.” I can’t make out anything in the third line, that of the farewell and signature. Someone sent this advertisement to someone else, saying something like “So you can see what Hugh has just written. I thought it might interest you. I hope your wife and daughter are quite well.” Impossible to know who this copy belonged to before briefly passing through Ben Bass’s hands, then into mine, and then belonging to Benet, and after January 5, 1993, who knows.

  In the first clipping, the rather jovial and not very mournful profile done by the reporter named Stanford, there is something remarkable, over and above the string of storybook elements, the suites, champagne, beautiful women and boozing spies in and around the bars of Prague, the vain, hedonistic, enigmatic and belligerent character of the man portrayed (a combination of Beau Brummell, Blackbeard Teach and the Scarlet Pimpernell—he would have been right at home in the General History of the Pyrates), not to mention his Russian wife and accomplice and of course the spectacularly flashy figure of the very fabulous, fearsome and fatuous Herbert Fauntleroy Julian or Terror of the Air of Addis Ababa. I mean the tense in which the sketch or article is written—the past tense, as if De Wet had already been executed, were already dead. Though the date is missing, it must be close to that of the trial in Berlin, yet Stanford, perhaps involuntarily but certainly without great sorrow, uses a tense that makes a death sentence the same thing as an execution. Perhaps he knew that for the accusers and judges, there can be no difference between the two. (There was a difference once in 1939, against all the odds, and that’s why I’m here to make trouble.) But still death passed De Wet by, as it had passed Ewart by precisely when it was most likely to notice him, flung into the mud of the front with his lone, defective eye, and pause.

  Whether it was true in the mercenary’s case, or a sham adornment, both men appear to have been one-eyed, Ewart by maternal inheritance as I said, but De Wet from a Spanish war wound, according to Stanford. But as I mentioned a few pages back, a book came into my possession by his presumed grandfather or perhaps great-uncle, the Vechtgeneraal Christiaan Rudolf de Wet, which is, naturally, about the war in which he played such a significant part, titled Three Years War (three years, like our war, when the wind swept away the weeks and death did not know how to walk slowly, No sabe andar despacio is what Miguel Hernández said, and it almost never passed by), the English edition dating from 1902. That book’s portrait of the Vechtgeneraal, while not bearing a striking resemblance to his degenerate descendent, does allow for a certain shared family air, or let’s say that no one would doubt their possible kinship on seeing them; there is some similarity in the shape of the eyes and nose, the old man older, of course, with a profuse beard rather than a mannered goatee, his gaze softer or more defeated, he could be a tranquilized Redbeard (he, too, would have had his place in the General History of the Pyrates, which I still read sometimes when I’m under attack by the pirates of contemporary culture who are more like petty thieves disguised as patrons); he can’t yet be fifty in the picture, and who knows if he and his guerrillas had fought some skirmish against Wilfrid Ewart’s great-uncle, Sir John Spencer Ewart his name, who went on to fight in the South African war after having fought at Khartoum, as if he hadn’t had his fill; it’s more than probable that the two great-uncles saw each others’ faces or rather the distant forms that are to be feared, advancing fiercely with their imagined faces and taking aim at each other to fire off a hot or cold bullet that did not in any case find its billet in either; it wouldn’t be strange at all, because on the elder Ewart’s service record appear the places that the younger, more pretentious De Wet reeled off to impress and earn some respect from the fisher of cetaceans, but without taking the trouble to make his pronunciation conform to the Spanish diction he and the dictator had been using until that Anglo-Dutch torrent erupted: Magersfontein, Koedoesberg, Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Bloemfontein, Waterval Drift, River Vet. And also Driefontein, Blaauwberg, Roodepoort, Wittebergen, Slaapkranz, Retief’s Nek.

  Conan Doyle also speaks of all those battles or skirmishes in one of his “serious” books which he so stupidly preferred to the ones about Sherlock Holmes: The Great Boer War (1900), partially based on his own experience during his five months as a volunteer field doctor (at first he wanted to enlist, but all the corps told him he was too old for military service; he hadn’t yet turned forty-one), though neither as serious nor as long as the book in six volumes he later wrote, under the title The British Campaign in France and Flanders, about the First World War of Stephen Graham, the orderly, and Wilfrid Ewart, his captain. In The Great Boer War, Conan Doyle makes only one reference to Major Ewart, who as at Khartoum, accompanied Lord Kitchener, but devotes numerous pages to the stratagems and feats of the two De Wets, for there was a second general of the same name, though of lesser rank, Christiaan’s brother Piet de Wet; and a bullet did find its billet in another person of that name, for this De Wet’s son, Johannes de Wet, fell at one of those sonorous sites and did not rise again, and a son of the Vechtgeneraal, Jacopus de Wet, was taken prisoner. Conan Doyle, by the way, returned to the subject again in 1902, with his shortest book, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, to refute the many lies about the British troops’ supposed brutality that were being published everywhere, particularly in England itself. That didn’t keep him from admiring the strategically astute and audacious tactics of the great De Wet; according to Conan Doyle’s memoirs, the worst reproach that could be levelled at him from the perspective of military ethics—“one of his least sporting actions, or the only one,” he wrote—was his incineration of the sacks of mail on a British mail train he attacked and looted at Roodewal Station, which darkened the air with thousands of floating cinders. None too grave an iniquity, really, for a guerrilla leader, who, in addition, was immortalized by the creator of Holmes in a brief description at the beginning of Chapter XXVII of The Great Boer War:

  “Christian de Wet, the elder of two brothers of that name, was at this time in the prime of life, a little over forty years of age. He was a burly middle-sized bearded man, poorly educated but endowed with much energy and common sense. His military experience dated back to Majuba Hill and he had a large share of that curious race hatred which is intelligible in the case of the Transvaal, but inexplicable in a Freestater who has received no injury from the British Empire.” And then comes the most arresting detail: “Some weakness of his sight compels the use of tinted spectacles, and he had now turned these, with a pair of particularly observant eyes behind them, upon the scattered British forces and the long exposed line of railway.” And a little further along he insists on this detail, which it’s impossible not to associate with the eyepatch or smoked glass monocle worn by his mercenary descendant who was most assuredly deceptive but perhaps not so fraudulent as all that, “The tinted spectacles” he says “were turned first upon the isolated town of Lindley.”

  Ewart’s sightless eye was undoubtedly hereditary and perhaps De We
t’s was, as well, despite his fascinating and fantastical stories, as Anthony Edkins described them, so both were one-eyed soldiers—Ewart in the trenches and the De Wet in the air—very ill-equipped to keep death from passing through space with its single eye and time with its rusting lances. My father hasn’t seen through one of his eyes for years now, either; when he’s not wearing his glasses his eyes look even bluer, which is why my mother would say, whenever he took them off, “You’ve put on your German face.” But he doesn’t wear any sort of patch or monocle, nor has he ever in his life worn dark or tinted or smoked glasses, though I do from time to time. My eyesight, too, has a certain weakness (which is of no importance to me because I may not have it any more these days), though in the past it was a slow but certain cause of ultimate pain and blindness, and perhaps death, too, I don’t know. To mention only men of letters, a weakness of the eyes embittered James Joyce’s existence; operated on eleven times with hardly any improvement, he appears in many of his photographs with a bulky black patch over his left eye, though there are those who say he wore it less out of necessity than out of affectation, to make himself more original. I know what it is to have one eye covered: as a child of eight or nine I had to wear a patch over my left eye for several months when the right one was diagnosed as “lazy,” thus forcing it to work and strive to make up for lost ground, while my better eye, which tended to take the whole task of looking and seeing upon itself, was covered up. I remember detesting that piece of gauze or bandage or patch over my good eye, and I think I cheated and took the dressing off during recesses at school and then stuck it back on carelessly; fortunately the torture didn’t last long but perhaps it’s because of that long-ago impatient disobedience that today my bad eye continues to be lazy, I think, or in any case, less active and perspicacious than the other one, whose superiority I always attributed to the fact of its being on the left, just as my left hand was stronger and more skillful than the right one, I found nothing strange in observing this ascendancy throughout the body. I was lucky that no attempt was ever made to correct my lefthandedness during a period when it was almost mandatory to do so, I wouldn’t have been able to stand having my left arm tied in a sling, and to have felt one-armed and one-eyed: the school I went to, the Estudio, was liberal and secular and clandestinely co-educational, a disguised appendix or remainder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza from the time of the Republic, before the wind swept away the weeks; and my parents were also liberal and would have had their work cut out for them, since my unknown brother Julianin was also left-handed as is my brother Álvaro, three out of five. When I learned to write names, among them my own, I wrote the letters from right to left, as Arabs do, and though I read “XAVIER”—that was what they named me, Xavier with an X, and that’s how I wrote it as a child and how my mother always wrote it—what was really written or what everyone but me read was “REIVAX,” and when she, laughing, wouldn’t give me her approval, I didn’t understand why and protested, since it looked to me as though I had written all the letters in the right order, without leaving any out or making any mistake; I still read “XAVIER” where apparently, by other peoples’ standards, I had written “REIVAX,” and when my mother said I had at last written “XAVIER,” I read “REIVAX.”

  I sometimes think that time must be different for someone who began writing and reading in reverse—a tendancy that naturally corrected itself—than it is for most people, who have never tried to go from back to front but have always progressed from front to back, never trying to begin at the end but only to adjust to it, to the expectation and fear of it and to its arrival; and I sometimes think that might be why I often move through what I’ve called in several books “the other side of time, its dark back,” taking the mysterious expression from Shakespeare to give a name to the kind of time that has not existed, the time that awaits us and also the time that does not await us and therefore does not happen, or happens only in a sphere that isn’t precisely temporal, a sphere in which writing, or perhaps only fiction, may—who knows—be found. That might be why I often see the past as future—I see it when it was only that: future—and the future as past, what must come as if it had already arrived and happened and, what’s more, as if it no longer had much importance since even its vanishing or oblivion has already begun, so far gone, so lost is everything, with time. Or perhaps only what has occurred and can be told is lost and gone, or so it may appear, and therefore it is the only ambiguous thing or the only thing that permits of ambiguity, as Don Juan Benet wrote thirty years ago. And he also made another enigmatic statement at that time which I hadn’t read until thirty months ago in the old article that contains it, and about which I can no longer ask him anything: “… it seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can speak to each other and communicate, the only one they have in common,” that’s what he said. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all, but I know he did not write gratuitously, though like all good writers he did sometimes write arbitrarily. I don’t understand it unless I think instead of that other side, that dark back through which the fickle and unpredictable voice we all know nevertheless passes, the voice of time when it has not yet gone by or been lost and perhaps for that reason is not even time, the voice that is permanently in our ears and that is always fictitious, I believe, as perhaps is and has been and will be until its end the voice that is speaking here.

  Perhaps in that time, which has so often invaded my own time, I mean, the time assigned to me by other peoples’ standards, fiction is compounded with reality, or with realities that are not only improbable and implausible but incompatible. Perhaps in that time a novel can interfere in real life, and it would not be strange that Sir John Spencer Ewart had aimed his rifle at the tinted lenses of Christaan Rudolf de Wet at Paardeberg or River Vet, or perhaps it was George Steabben who drew a bead on him at Magersfontein or Retief’s Nek, centuries before dying in Mexico of a gunshot to the forehead during the famous shootout between Constantino and Leovigildo at the doors of the Salón Phalerno; it would not be strange that the letter opener with the inscription of the years and the bloody river, “15 Yser 16,” had been carved by Stephen Graham or Wilfrid Ewart in their muddy trenches without truce, or that Hugh Oloff de Wet had sculpted the death mask of the poet monarch John Gawsworth, beggar, or that the spent New Year’s Day or New Year’s Eve bullet didn’t spend itself quickly enough to initiate its downward curve and miss the target, or that the porter Tom and the porter Will of the Taylorian are one and the same traveling back and forth through their eternal territory, “Good luck, professor,” with a festive, obliging hand raised high. It’s possible that in that dimension or time my friend Eric Southworth died seven years ago at the hands of the Galdosistas (truly a sad fate) and my friend Aliocha Coll is still finishing his last glass of wine, and that the patriotic doctor Conan Doyle, the model of all recruits, and Lawrence of Arabia, the unattainable ideal of all adventurers, were the very men who happen to have bestowed the highest praise on the ill-fated talent of the war veteran novelist who didn’t see the bullet his blind eye was to billet in the pandemonium of Mexico City; it may be that the balcony which does not exist on the fifth floor of the Hotel Isabel has always moved through that time, and always, too, the Austrian Ödön von Horváth’s German girlfriend, who saw the same impossible accidental death happen to her father and her lover in the course of a single lifetime, her life, both struck by lightning and the younger man on New Year’s Day; and that this is where Toby Rylands enjoyed his binges with a witty prince of Haiti or Honduras, Antigua or Barbuda or Belize or volcanic Montserrat, or perhaps of Redonda, which is uninhabited; it may be that the entire kingdom, which sometimes appears on maps and sometimes does not, lies and resides within that dimension or time, as befits a place that simultaneously exists and is imaginary, the Realm of Redonda, the Kingdom of Redonda with its intellectual aristocracy of fake Spanish names and its four kings, and it may be that following the abdication of the th
ird one in my favor, since July 6, 1997 I have been the fourth of those kings, King Xavier or still King X as I write this, and also the literary executor and legal heir of my predecessors Shiel and Gawsworth, or Felipe I and Juan I: it’s hard to resist the chance to perpetuate a legend, it would be mean-spirited to refuse to play along; in that nebula must float my alternating memory and non-memory of a scar on a thigh like a smooth, scorched crater that I saw and kissed every day for three distant years, and certainly also the occasional thought or the now almost fictitious memory of the person who bore it (“Oh yes, a young man used to live here with me, he was from Madrid, I wonder what’s become of him, that was so long ago”) and in that penumbra must invisibly smolder the kinship I’ve acquired with the actor Robert Donat through the objects of his that are mine now, the cigarette case in our pockets and the pin in our ties or on my lapel; and maybe De Wet is still piloting his Nieuport through that domain or in that wind, who knows if it isn’t that very airplane which is moving off, high and alive, while the enemy falls into an inferno (but it may be a Polikarpov and not a Nieuport, and then it would not be De Wet who pursued and brought down); and it may be that that adventurer coincided in Spain with another one whose escapades were of longer standing, the Red Dean, the bandit Dean of Canterbury, for whose cause and involuntary trumped-up accompaniment death was on the point of not passing my father by, and of leaving me without existence. Perhaps the unlived and truncated life of my small elder brother Julianin also moves through the other side of time, along with the person I would have been, or the one I would not have been if I hadn’t been born. And so what, if I hadn’t been born.

  One person who was not born, for example, was a firstborn son of my family who was under a curse, and was therefore expected in order to see the curse fulfilled in its entirety. And though I’ve already told the story twice—once as fiction, in a short story with false names, “El viaje de Isaac” or “Isaac’s Journey” its title, and again as fact in an article on real names, soberly called “Una maldición” or “A Curse”—not many people will remember it or will have read it, and its most fitting place is here, or so I believe, as if for once, and without my foreseeing it in 1978 or in 1995, I had followed the precept of the eminent short-story writer Isak Dinesen, whom I translated during my time at Oxford and according to whom “only if you are able to imagine what has happened, to repeat it in your imagination, will you see stories, and only if you have the patience to carry them within you for a long, long time, and to tell them to yourself and retell them again and again, will you be capable of telling them well.”