The poet Rilke had stayed in Ronda for a couple of months twenty-four years before, at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, when not even Wheeler had yet arrived in the world – in the Antipodes and as Peter Rylands. And there is a statue of him, of the poet, a very black, life-size one, in the garden of a hotel from whose long balcony you can see the broad, sweet lands of Spain, perhaps one of those fields was the scene of that brief one-man corrida: it's unlikely, but not impossible, because at dawn, there would be no one standing there contemplating the fields, or else the area would be occupied by victorious troops who would have had no objection to such sport should some guard have spotted it: perhaps among them would be some of the requetés, the Carlist militiamen trained up by Varela as he travelled around the villages of Navarra, disguised as a priest and going by the colourful sobriquet of Tio Pepe'; as well as legionnaires and Moroccans, a grotesque 'crusade' – Varela's favourite word – of fanatical Catholic volunteers and Muslim mercenaries engaged together in destroying and laying waste this secular land. That hotel is, I believe, the 'Reina Victoria', which, as Rilke put it, 'the devil persuaded the English to build here'; you can even visit the room in which he stayed, a kind of mini-museum or minuscule mausoleum, adorned with a portrait and a few bits of furniture, some old books, some jottings by him in German, possibly a bust (it's been years since I visited it, so I can't be sure). It may have been there that he began to conceive these lines, or, rather, fragments, which I often recall: 'Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to leam; not to be what one was and having to leave even one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that once clung together floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…" Perhaps, who knows, this is what Emilio Mares thought, although not in these words.
'But what happened, what did you do, how did you react?' I asked my father, not just to draw him out of his silence and away from his long journey. I was intrigued to know what, if anything, he could have done or said. At that time, he could have been arrested on the slightest pretext and returned to prison, and probably with far worse luck, for he had had exceptional luck before, and in 1939 too, a year when anyone on the losing side had hardly any luck at all.
With some effort, he returned from far away. A sigh. One hand on his forehead, with the wedding ring he had never taken off. A clearing of the throat. Then he focused his gaze. He looked at me and answered me. Slowly at first, as if with sudden caution, perhaps the same caution he had had to use then, in the Cafe Roma.
'Well,' he said, 'the moment I heard Mares' name I feared the worst, and I was even more on my guard. I didn't at all like the turn the conversation was taking. But I did nothing while he was telling the story. It didn't even occur to me to interrupt him. I felt sick and angry as I listened, the two things at once, rather than alternating between them. I would have preferred not to be there, not to know what he and others had done to a former university friend whom I had liked and admired. I knew that Mares had been killed for no reason, and that was enough, that was bad enough, but he had not been such a close friend that I would not occasionally forget this fact. On the other hand, I realised that, once the horror story had begun, there was no stopping halfway. I must have turned very pale or very red, I don't know, I felt cold and hot, again both at the same time. Whatever colour I turned, however, no one else would have noticed, it wouldn't have aroused suspicions or given me away, because every other face round the table looked equally distraught, deathly pale, even though all four men present were Francoists and had doubtless witnessed similar acts of brutality or even committed them themselves.' My father stopped for a second and looked around him – we were in his living room, at the end of the twentieth century or possibly the beginning of the twenty-first, in the late morning: he was bringing himself back to the present – then he continued, more easily this time: 'I think the writer had miscalculated. He started telling the tale almost proudly, boastfully, but as he continued, and even though it didn't take him long to tell it, he must have realised that his story was going down very badly indeed, that it went too far, that it had shocked us all. Amid the sound and fury of the Civil War it might have amused someone (if I can put it like that), but not now. It was entirely inappropriate to describe such an episode seated around a cafe table, on a sunny Madrid morning, over a few beers and some olives. The silence which had fallen when he said "We baited him" and brought his index finger down like a banderilla or a lance or a sword, continued until the end of the story, and remained unaltered at its conclusion. And when it became embarrassing, and since the writer was probably the most influential person there, one of the other men whom I didn't at the time even know by name, the most deferential among them, broke the silence with a joke in the worst possible taste, one he was incapable of keeping to himself, or perhaps, being a rather stupid man, it was the only thing that occurred to him to fill the void and applaud the anecdote: "How come, while he was at it, he didn't award himself both ears and the tail?" he asked, referring to the malagueno and the ear he had cut off. And the writer again miscalculated, or perhaps the icy atmosphere left behind by his story made him feel, I don't know, uncomfortable, awkward, and in situations like that, any attempt to put things right almost only ever succeeds in making matters worse, it's best just to keep very still and quiet. He smiled as if he saw his chance. Perhaps he was still clinging to the idea that his story had had the effect he was hoping for, a slightly delayed effect given the shocking nature of the lesson dealt out, or perhaps he considered it an exploit to be proud of. He wasn't an intelligent man, only clever. And vain to his boot-tips, too, as tends to be the case with people who know their talents are overvalued, for spurious reasons or by dint of their own pushiness and sheer insistence. They can't bear to look bad or to feel they've been caught out, and everything about them is so fragile and so false that the slightest lack of enthusiasm, the smallest reservation upsets them. And so he replied, half coy, half derisive: "No, well, I didn't want to shock anyone. And I'm not saying he didn't cut the lot off. He was a dangerous man, our comrade. You should have seen him, doffing his red beret like a hunter and displaying his three trophies." I don't know if that was true or not, or if, goaded by the other man's comment, he simply made it up in order to show off; he probably felt he hadn't gone quite far enough and that this was the reason for his audience's cool response. I didn't care either way; or, rather, it was almost worse that he should have invented it on the spur of the moment, to flatter us, according to his criteria, or to make us shudder. I couldn't take any more. I couldn't before either, but I was suddenly assailed by a vague image of a mutilated Mares after he had been tortured and killed, of the amusing man I had known before, so delightfully full of himself, converted into mere mangled remains, more animal than human. I got up and, addressing only Gomez-Antiguedad, murmured: "I have to go, I'm late already. I'll pay for this round." And I went over to the bar to ask for the bill. I made my exit in two stages because I felt it would attract less attention and seem less abrupt than if I headed straight for the door. I couldn't really afford to pay for anything, as you can imagine, and it was, as far as I was concerned, a very expensive bar, I wasn't even sure I had enough money on me; and I can't tell you how it disgusted me having to buy a round of drinks for those four men. But I considered it would be money well spent if I could get away from them there and then, and not have to listen to their affected, mocking laughter or to the voice of that murderous thug; and to get out of there, of course, without any mishap. With my record, the last thing I wanted was to be arrested. I was standing not too far from them, with my back turned, while I waited for a barman or waiter to appear, and I heard the writer say to Antiguedad: "What's got into him? His name's Deza, isn't it? Where's he from anyway? Did I say something he didn't like?" It's always a bad thing when someone takes your name and notices it and remembers it, whether it's the authorities or a bunch of criminals,
let alone when the authorities are the criminals. I thought I wasn't going to be able to escape, that the writer would not simply let me leave in peace, that he would want to find out what was wrong with me, and I was sure, then, that I would no longer be able to contain myself. If he demanded an explanation from me, I was likely to hurl myself at him without another word. He certainly wouldn't have come out of that very well, but I would have come out of it even worse. I would have got a sound beating in a prison cell that night, and they might well have decided to haul me into court again, on whatever charges they fancied. Fortunately, Antiguedad's response was immediate, and that's another reason I remained grateful to him for the rest of his life: "The same thing has got into him as into me, for fuck's sake, what a sickening story," he said. He was not a man who normally resorted to bad language, but, depending on who one is talking to, it's useful to know how to use it if necessary. Sometimes, it's just a question of authority. And he used that authority to rebuke the writer, to tear him off a strip: "Do you honestly believe it's all right to speak so lightly about an atrocity like that? Do you really believe it's a joking matter? Think about it, man, think about it. It's high time we put all that bad blood behind us." The writer may have been better placed within the regime, but Antiguedad was from a very influential, staunchly right-wing family, he had ended the war with the rank of captain and was entirely above suspicion; besides, he would one day be the owner of a publishing house and already pretty much called the shots there, and that is something any new writer must always bear in mind, because he never knows when he might need a publisher. So he swallowed his pride and accepted this dressing-down. "There's no need to get so het up about it, Pepito, it's not that big a deal, is it? We could all of us tell some pretty ugly stories, I'm sure. But I agree, it probably isn't a suitable tale for peacetime." And Antiguedad immediately softened. He gave the writer a fatherly pat on the back and said: "Oh, that's all right, let's get together for a chat when we've got more time. See you, gentlemen." He said goodbye to the others as a group, without shaking them by the hand, and joined me at the bar, just as the waiter who had served us came over. "Give me that, Deza, after all, I was the one who invited you for a drink," and he grabbed the bill before the waiter could hand it to me. I was already anxiously counting my money out into the palm of my hand, worried that I wasn't going to have enough. We left together, he turned at the door and raised one arm in the direction of the other four men, as a gesture of goodbye. Then, once out in the street, he apologised to me, even though none of it had been his fault. "I'm so very sorry, Deza, I had no idea," he said. "You were friendly with Mares, weren't you? I only knew him by sight myself." He was one of the few on the winning side who tried to mitigate the situation, one of the few who did not blindly follow Franco's instructions to mete out constant humiliation and continual punishment to the defeated. And you've no idea how glad I was to be able to reciprocate later on in a not inconsiderable way: in the 1980’s, I managed to keep him out of prison over some matter to do with company accounts, with the illegal transfer of funds, well, it doesn't really matter now what it was. Obviously, I would have preferred him not to have got into trouble in the first place, but for me it was a real blessing to be in a position to throw him a line and pull hard on it until I'd got him out. When someone helps you when times are really bad, for no real reason (you children have never known what really bad times are), well, you never forget it. If you're a decent person, that is, and don't take that help as a kind of personal humiliation or as a public insult.’
It occurred to me that when he made that last comment, he was thinking of Del Real, the treacherous friend whose future face, that of 1939, he had failed to foresee throughout the 1930’s.
'And did you ever meet the writer later on, in person?' I asked.
'Only very belatedly, thirty or forty years afterwards, at a couple of public events to which we were both invited. The first time, he was with his wife, and, of course, I shook his hand then so as not to wound or worry her in any way, and the three of us spoke briefly, about nothing really, just a polite exchange. The second time he was on his own, or, rather, with his usual entourage of admirers, he never went anywhere alone. He saw me and avoided me, avoided my eye. Not that I, heaven forbid, was trying to catch his. But just in case. You can always tell these things. He knew exactly who I was. I mean, not only what I did, or the fact that his wife and I had a very civilised friendship based on great mutual respect, I mean that he remembered my name from that morning in the cafe, and had, ever since then, been conscious that I'd heard his story. He must have regretted time and again letting his mouth or his smugness run away with him in that cafe. That's why I think it was perhaps the last time he revealed it to anyone, his disgusting contribution to that "bullfight". Antiguedad's reaction must have provided a warning. That and the ensuing silence. So you won't be surprised to learn that I never told your mother, however much I wanted to share the state of despondency in which I arrived home that day, even though I'd just received commissions for two translations. She had known Mares at university too and really liked him, well, almost everyone did, he was one of those people who light up any gathering and make it seem more promising and more worthwhile. Why bring her more grief, why afflict her with some new horror that could not be changed and for which there could be no solace and, of course, no compensation. Especially since she really liked bullfighting, much more than you might realise, a liking she inherited from her father, but one that she preferred not to pass on to you children. On more than one occasion, when we told you we were going to the theatre or the cinema, we actually went to the bulking.' And my father chuckled briefly to remember and to confess that small, innocuous deception. 'I didn't want to ruin bullfighting for her, because it doubtless would have. I myself didn't particularly enjoy bullfights, they left me pretty cold really, but it took a long time and a lot of effort on my part to prevent the story of Mares' death spoiling them for me entirely: at first, every fight we went to reminded me of him, and that cast a pall over the whole event, I felt his shadow slip in between me and each stage of the corrida. It's just the same, I suppose, as when I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I always think of the little child whom the militia-woman claimed to have killed by slamming against the wall.’
My father had grown tired, as I saw when he paused again; he closed his eyes as if they ached from having gazed for too long into the far distance. But it was not yet time for lunch; I glanced at my watch, it would be another twenty minutes before the woman who did the cooking came in to call us to the table or before my sister arrived, she'd said she would drop in and have lunch with us if she managed to finish what she had to do early. And he had not yet taken up the thread again; then, after a while, he decided to continue talking, although without immediately opening his eyes. 'I saw many things, we saw possibly worse things,' he said, using an ambiguous plural after that unequivocally singular T. 'Many simultaneous deaths, people I knew and didn't know, suddenly, during a bombardment, and then you don't have time to think about any of them, not even for a second, what tends to prevail is a sense that it's all over, a desire simply to give up, a feeling of being on the brink of extermination, that is what you feel then, and you're full of contrary impulses, wanting to survive at all costs, to simply step over the surrounding corpses, to seek shelter and save yourself, but also to stay with them, I mean to join them, to lie down by their side and form part of the inert pile of bodies and stay there; it's a feeling almost akin to envy. It's odd, but even in the din and the collapsing buildings and the chaos, as you're racing to help someone who's wounded or to protect yourself, you know at once when someone's a hopeless case. Not a threat to anyone, but at peace, at rest, gone in a flash. It's likely, in fact, that if you followed the second impulse, you would unintentionally achieve the same effect as the first, because the next bomb would never fall in the same place as the previous ones: the besiegers didn't squander their bombs, the safest place might well be alongside the a
lready dead. But, as you see, I've told you about two things that I didn't see, that we didn't see, but which were recounted to me or, rather, which I happened to hear, in neither case were the words addressed to me personally, or at least not exclusively; and yet they've stayed in my memory as clearly as if I had seen it myself, possibly more clearly, it's easier to suppress an unbearable image than it is to suppress someone's account of an event, however loathsome those events might be, precisely because narrative always seems more bearable. And in a sense it is: what you see is happening; what you hear has happened already; whatever it is, you know that it is over, otherwise no one would be able to tell you about it. I believe that the reason I have such a vivid memory of those two stories, those two crimes, is because I heard them from the mouths of the people who had committed them. Not from a witness, not from a victim who had survived, whose tone would have been one of justifiable reproach and complaint, but also, therefore, of a more dubious veracity, there is always a tendency to exaggerate any description of suffering, because the person who endured it tends to present it as a virtue or as something to be admired, a noble sacrifice, when sometimes that isn't the case at all and it was just bad luck. Both of the people who told the stories did so unhesitatingly and boastfully. Yes, they were showing off. To me, though, it was as if they were accusing themselves and without even having been asked to do so, the Falangist writer and the woman on the tram. That, at least, is how my ears reacted, they were not amused, they did not admire the cruel acts they described, but were horrified and disgusted; and my judgement condemned them, passively of course.' ('With my tongue silenced," I thought.) 'It gives you an idea of how other people experience violence; of how simpler, more superficial people – although they're not necessarily more primitive or less educated – grow accustomed to it and then see no need to place limits on it and consequently don't; and it gives you an idea of just how much violence there was. So much, and so taken for granted, that the people who perpetrated the most brutal and gratuitous acts of violence, committed out of a senseless, baseless hatred, could talk about it in public with perfect aplomb, could boast about it. I mean what possible need was there to bash a baby's brains out; what need was there to stick banderillas and lances into a condemned man and then mutilate his body. But there were others among us who never got used to it, you never do if you keep your sense of perspective and don't fell into the lazy way of thinking that says "What does it matter, after all…" which lay behind the comment that other man made to the writer when he asked if the malagueno had claimed the other ear and the tail too "while he was at it", if you refuse to allow the concrete to become abstract, which is what happens today with so many people, starting with terrorists and followed soon after by governments: they don't see the concreteness of what they set in motion, nor, of course, do they want to. I don't know, it seems to me that most people in these societies of ours have seen too much violence, fictitious or real, on the screen. And that confuses them, they accept it as a lesser evil, as not being of great importance. But neither fictitious nor real violence is real on screen, as a flat image, however terrible the events we're shown. Not even on the news. "Oh, how terrible, that really happened," we think, "but not here, not in my room." If it were happening in our living room, what a difference that would make: feeling it, breathing it, smelling it, because there is always a smell, it always smells. The terror, the panic. People would find it unbearable, they would really feel the fear, their own and other people's, the effect and the shock of both are similar, and nothing is as contagious as fear. People would run away to take shelter. Look, all it takes is for someone to give someone else a shove, in a bar, say, or in the street or in the metro, or for two uncouth motorists to come to blows or to grapple with each other, for those nearby to tremble with shock and uncertainty, for them to grow tense and filled with often uncontrollable alarm, both physical and mental, it happens to most people. Worse still if there's a crowd. And if you punch someone really hard, you'll probably do them quite a lot of damage, but your own hand will be a mess too and will be inflamed for several days afterwards. After just one blow with the fist. It's no joke.' ('That's true,' I thought, but didn't say anything so as not to worry him, 'it happened to me once, and I could hardly move my hand afterwards.') 'Anyone who, at some stage in his life, has lived with violence on a daily basis will never take any risks with it, never take it lightly. He'll administer it not just with care and with extreme caution, but in as stingy and miserly a way as he can. He won't allow himself to be violent, not as long as he can avoid it, and it almost always is avoidable, although he'll be able to withstand it better should violence ever return.' Then my father opened his pale eyes again, and they were once more serene; they had been troubled by all those memories. 'Apart from in fiction, that's different, although people should be more aware of that than they are. Exaggerated violence is even funny, watching film violence is like watching acrobatics or fireworks, it makes me laugh, all those bodies sent flying, all that blood spattered about, you can see a mile off that they're wearing springs and bags of liquid that they puncture and burst. People who are shot in real life don't leap into the air, they just drop and cease moving. That kind of violence is perfectly innocuous or, at least, it would be if there hadn't been such a decline in people's general levels of perceptiveness. For someone as ancient as me, it's astonishing to see how stupid the world has become. Inexplicable. What an age of decline, you have no idea. Not just intellectual decline, but a decline in discernment too. Oh well. That kind of violence is not much different from the beatings described in Don Quixote or the ones shown in those Tom and Jerry cartoons you enjoyed so much as children, when you know deep down that no one has been badly hurt, that they'll get up afterwards unscathed and go out to supper together like good friends. There's no need to get all puritanical about it, or prudish for that matter, like those people who reduce the classics to pure saccharine. With real violence, on the other hand, you must take no chances. But look how things have changed, and attitudes too: when war was declared on Hitler, and it may be that there has never been an occasion when a war was more necessary or more justifiable, Churchill himself wrote that the mere fact of having come to that pass, to that state of failure, made those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before History. He was referring to the governments of his own country and of France, you understand, and, by extension, to himself, although he would have preferred that state of blameworthiness and failure to have been reached at a much earlier stage, when the situation was less disadvantageous to them and when it would not have been so difficult or so bloody to fight that war. "… this sad tale of wrong judgements formed by well-meaning and capable people…": that is how he described it. And now, as you see, the same people who are scandalised by the rough and tumble of Tom and Jerry et al. unleash unnecessary, selfish wars, devoid of any honourable motives, and which sidestep all the other options, if they don't actually torpedo them. And unlike Churchill, they are not even ashamed of them. They're not even sorry. Nor, of course, do they apologise, people just don't do that nowadays… In Spain, the Francoists established that particular school of thought long ago. They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war. The worst of all possible wars. And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents… It was absurd, all of it.' I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.' And in the thought that followed he used a word which I heard Wheeler use later on, when talking about wars, although he had said it in English, and the word was, if I'm n
ot mistaken, 'waste'. 'And what a terrible waste… I don't know, I remember it and I can't believe it. Sometimes, it seems unbelievable to me that I lived through all of that. I just can't see the reason for it, that's the worst of it, and with the passing of the years, it's even harder to see a reason. Nothing serious ever appears quite so serious with the passing of time. Certainly not serious enough to start a war over, wars always seem so out of proportion when viewed in retrospect… And certainly never serious enough for anyone to kill another person.' (And then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous. Why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart? And of me they will say: Why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: Why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, the dance, and all those doubts, all that torment?)
Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream Page 28
