'Yes, well, I don't know, they both seemed to be too much into doing their own thing to be a new item, which wouldn't have surprised me if they'd been a battle-hardened couple, in a marriage where the excitement has become so faded and worn that it's basically well past its sell-by date, except when the couple are left alone with nothing to keep them amused, and even then. You, of course, didn't have time to experience that, with your brief marriage all those years ago, but you must have noticed such things: there is a terrible moment, a moment of tacit grief, in almost every such marriage, in which all it takes is for a third person to be present, anyone will do, even a taxi driver with his back to them, for either the wife or the husband to pay the other not the slightest attention. Fun is no longer ever to be found in themselves, his in her or hers in him or that of either in either, it depends who loses interest first or whether the sense of boredom is simultaneous, but it almost always ends up enveloping or affecting both if they stay together, and then neither suffers too much or only from their own disappointment or withdrawal, but during periods when that balance is lacking, this saddens one partner and irritates the other beyond words. The sad one doesn't know what to do or how to behave, trying first one thing and then another and then the opposite of each, racking their brains for ways to make themselves interesting again or to be forgiven even though they don't know what fault it is they've committed, and nothing works because they are already condemned, they try being charming or unpleasant, gentle or surly, indulgent or critical, loving or belligerent, attentive or uncouth, flattering or intimidating, understanding or impenetrable, but the result is confusion and a lot of wasted time. And the irritated partner is occasionally aware of his or her partiality and unfairness, but can do nothing to avoid it, they just feel permanently irascible, and everything about the other person gets on their nerves, and this is the ultimate proof, in personal, day-to-day life, that nothing is ever objective and that everything can be misinterpreted and distorted, that no merit or value is worth anything in itself without the recognition of another person which, more often than not, is purely arbitrary, that actions and attitudes always depend on the intention attributed to them and on the interpretation someone chooses to give them, and that without that interpretation they are nothing, they do not exist, they are either merely neutral or can, without a moment's hesitation, be denied. The most obvious truths are denied, something that has just happened and been witnessed by two people can be immediately denied by one of them, one can deny what the other has just said or heard that very moment, not yesterday or some time ago, but just the minute before. It's as if nothing mattered, nothing accrued or had weight and was, simultaneously, being destroyed, out of sheer indifference, mere uncounted, unremembered air, and grubby air at that, and it's equally maddening for both, although in a different way for each of them and more intensely so for the sad one. Until everything breaks apart. Or doesn't, and then the whole thing drags on, it's assimilated internally, while on the outside all is calm and languor, or else it's stored away and quietly, secretly rots, like something buried. And even though it's all over, the two remain together, as it seemed to me, more or less, Tupra and Beryl have stayed together.'
Wheeler clearly didn't want to lose sight of them, and I had returned to them at last after my long digression, which I was, nevertheless, thinking of continuing. But instead of taking advantage of my return to the subject, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten about the couple and to be interested in what I was saying, even though he thus ran the risk that I might once more go off the subject. It was probably just curiosity, because he couldn't resist asking:
'Was that what happened with you and Luisa? Except that it didn't drag on and you didn't stay together.' He observed me for a second with that look of compassion which he immediately corrected or toned down. He didn't dismiss or reject or withdraw it, far from it, he merely adjusted it after its first appearance, which was entirely sincere and spontaneous.
But it could never persist in him, that state of innocence or elementality, as he might have put it, were he describing it.
'No, I or we didn't let it get that far. It was something else, something simpler perhaps and certainly faster. Less cloying. Cleaner perhaps.'
'Some day you'll have to tell me a little more about it. If you want to, of course, and if you can, sometimes it's impossible to explain the really important things, those that have affected us most deeply, and keeping silent is all that saves us in difficult times, because explanations almost always sound so lame with respect to the pain we have inflicted or that others have inflicted on us. They tend not to match up to the evil suffered or caused and so they break down. I don't understand what's happened between you two, although I can understand why I don't. I was very fond of you both. Well, it's absurd to talk about you in the past: I am very fond of you both. I suppose it's because as a couple you seem to belong to the past, for the moment. Because you never know with such bonds, do you, regardless of their actual nature. Bonds.' He stopped for a moment, as if weighing the word or remembering some particular bond of his own. 'I meant that I liked you together, and usually one tends to prefer people separately, on their own, without conjugal or family accretions. Although, now that I think of it, I don't know if I've ever seen Luisa without you, if I've ever seen her alone, can you remember? I have an idea that I have, but I'm not entirely sure.'
'I don't think so, Peter, I don't think you've seen her without me being there. Though obviously you've spoken on the phone.' I must have sounded reluctant to take up this final and, for me, unexpected tangent. But it did not escape me that if Wheeler and Luisa had not seen each other without me (I wasn't quite sure about this either, some vague, ungraspable memory was nagging at me), what he had just said was that he liked me more with Luisa than on my own, as I was when he had first met me. I was not offended by the inference: I was in no doubt that she had improved me, had made me happier and lighter, less given to brooding, less dangerous and much less opaque.
'My dear, my dear,' I thought, and I thought it in English because that was the language I was speaking and because some things are less embarrassing in a language not your own, even if you only think them. 'If I could only forget,' I thought now in Spanish. 'If you would only grant me your forgetting.'
But before getting back to the Tupras – or, rather, to Tupra and Beryl – Peter added something of his own to this detour, or as he would doubtless have called it, this excursus.
'I don't know if you realise,' he said, as he rekindled his cigar with another match, so that, as he spoke, he was enveloped in a cloud of smoke worthy of a steam engine, 'but everything you have described as happening in the conjugal or private world happens in every other sphere as well, at work, in public life, in politics. The denial of everything, of who you are and who you've been, of what you do and what you've done, of what you're trying or have tried to do, of your motives and intentions, of your professions of faith, your ideas, your greatest loyalties, your causes… Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenceless, lost. That's how it is with persecutions, purges, with the worst of intrigues and plots, you have no idea how frightening it is when someone with power and influence decides to deny you, or when many people band together in agreement, although agreement isn't always necessary, all that's needed is a malicious deed or word that takes and spreads like fire, and convinces others, it's like an epidemic. You don't know how dangerous persuasive people can be, never pit yourself against such people unless you are prepared to become even more despicable than they are and unless you're sure that your imagination, no, your capacity for invention is even greater than theirs, and that your outbreak of cholera will spread faster and in the right direction. You have to bear in mind that most people are stupid. Stupid and frivolous and credulous, you have no idea just how stupid, frivolous and credulous they are, they're a permanently blank sheet without a
mark on it, without the least resistance, and though you may think you know this, you can never really know it, after all, you haven't lived through war, and I hope you never will. The person doing the persuading relies on that stupidity, he may rely on it too much and yet he's never wrong, he relies on it to the utmost, to the point of exaggeration, and that reliance confers on him an almost limitless boldness. If he's good, he never makes a mistake.' He stopped talking for a moment and allowed the smoke, which seemed now to be emerging from his white, pastry-like hair, to subside, then he looked at me very hard, with a mixture of curiosity and confirmation, as if he were both seeing me for the first time and recognising me (perhaps as the subject of the last sentence he had uttered), or were comparing me with someone else or with himself, or as if he were perhaps blessing me. 'You have that quality, you're very persuasive. It would be most unwise of anyone to pit themselves against you.' The cigar was drawing well again, he observed its glowing red end with satisfaction and even blew on it for sheer pleasure, to see it blush redder still. 'Nowadays, people don't often use the expression "to fall from grace", do they? To fall from grace. It's interesting and rather odd that it should be so little used, when what it denotes, better than any other expression, is happening all the time, unstoppably and everywhere and possibly more than ever, although more quietly and more surreptitiously than in the past, and it often entails the destruction of the person who falls, who is literally one of the fallen, who is, how can I put it, a casualty, a non-person, a felled tree. I've seen it often, more than that, I've even been a party to it myself, by which I mean that I've contributed to the fall from grace of a number of individuals, a horrible fall which no one ever recovers from. I've even brought it about myself. Or, rather, I've helped to bring about a fall from grace decreed by others. I've helped carry it out.'
'Here, at the university?'
'No. Well, yes, but not only here. On fronts where that fall was far more serious and brought with it far worse consequences than not being invited to high tables' – the dinners of which I had endured a good few in my time at Oxford – 'or becoming the object of gossip and criticism or finding oneself in a social or academic vacuum or being discredited professionally. But we'll talk about that tomorrow too, perhaps, a little, just enough. Or perhaps we won't, I don't know, we'll see. Tomorrow we'll see.'
I don't know quite how I looked at him, but I know that he did not like that look. Not so much because of what it revealed – surprise perhaps, curiosity, slight incredulity, a touch of suspicion, but not, I think, disapproval or censure, it was intuitively impossible for me to harbour such feelings towards him – but because of the mere fact that my look existed. It was as if it made him doubt his previous statement or comparison or recognition, when it was too late or was inappropriate.
'Have you spread any outbreaks of cholera?' That was the question that accompanied my look.
He rested the end of his walking-stick on the ground, grabbed hold of the banister and, with cigar and handle in the same hand, tried to get up, but couldn't. He remained like that, two arms raised, as if he were hanging from both supports or was caught in a gesture reminiscent of the one people make to proclaim their innocence or to announce that they are carrying no weapons: 'Frisk me, if you like.' Or: 'It wasn't me.'
'You're far too intelligent, Jacobo, for it even to occur to me to think that you could have understood that turn of phrase as anything but metaphorical. Of course I've spread them.' And that convoluted Jamesian gibe and the subsequent defiant affirmation were swiftly followed by the dilution of the latter, or its diminishment or an attempt at a nebulous, partial explanation, as if Wheeler did not want my vision of him to be muddied or spoiled by a misunderstanding or by an unpleasant metaphor. I don't know how he could possibly think that I would take him for a callous swine. 'That was a long time ago,' he said. 'Don't forget, I was born in 1913. Before, can you imagine it, the Great War. It doesn't seem possible, does it, that I should still be alive. Some evenings it doesn't seem possible to me either. In a life like mine there is time for too many things. Well, there's simultaneously not time for anything and, yes, time for too much. My memory is so full that sometimes I can't bear it. I'd like to lose more of it, I'd like to empty it a little. No, that's not true, I would rather it didn't fail me just yet. I just wish it wasn't quite so full. When you're young, as you know, you're in a hurry and always afraid that you're not living enough, that your experiences are not varied enough or rich enough, you feel impatient and try to accelerate events, if you can, and so you load yourself up with them, you stockpile them, the urgency of the young to accumulate scan and to forge a past, it's so odd that sense of urgency. No one should be troubled by that fear, the old should teach them that, although I don't know how, no one listens to the old any more. Because at the end of any reasonably long life, however monotonous it might have been, however anodyne and grey and uneventful, there will always be too many memories and too many contradictions, too many sacrifices and omissions and changes, a lot of retreats, a lot of flags lowered, and a lot of acts of disloyalty, that's for sure. And it's not easy to put all that in order, even to recount it to yourself. Too much accumulation. Too much vague material collected together and yet somehow dispersed as well, too much for one story, even for a story that is only ever thought. Not to mention the infinite number of things that fall within the eye's blind spot, every life is full of episodes that are literally invisible, we don't know what happened because we didn't see it, couldn't see it, much of what affects us and determines us is concealed or, how can I put it, not available for viewing, kept out of sight, out of shot. Life is not recountable, and it seems extraordinary that men have spent all the centuries we know anything about devoted to doing just that, determined to tell what cannot be told, be it in the form of myth, epic poem, chronicle, annals, minutes, legend or chanson de geste, ballad or folk-song, gospel, hagiography, history, biography, novel or funeral oration, film, confession, memoir, article, it makes no difference. It is a doomed enterprise, condemned to failure, and one that perhaps does us more harm than good. Sometimes I think it would be best to abandon the custom altogether and simply allow things to happen. And then just leave them be.' He stopped, as if he realised that he had moved a long way away from his planned conversation. But he had not lost sight of Tupra and Beryl, of that there was no doubt, he could allow himself digression upon digression upon digression and still come back to where he wanted to be. He grew defiant again and then immediately moderated that defiant tone: 'Of course I've spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague too. I would remind you that we fought a long war against Germany far fewer years ago than I've been alive, I was already an adult by then. And before that, I was briefly involved in your war too. I was an adult then as well, you can do the calculations yourself.'
I rapidly did the calculations in my head. Wheeler's birthday was on 24 October, and so he wouldn't even have been twenty-three in July 1936, when the Civil War broke out, and in April 1939. when it ended, he would have been twenty-five. His involvement in the Civil War was a further revelation, he had never mentioned it. 'And before that, I was briefly involved in your war,' he had said, which must mean that he had taken part, had fought or perhaps spied or simply made propaganda, or perhaps he had been a correspondent, or a nurse with the Red Cross, or had driven ambulances. I couldn't believe it. Not the fact itself, but not knowing about it until that night, after we'd known each other all these years.
'You never told me you were involved in the Spanish War, Peter.' I used the expression 'the Spanish War', in excessive obedience to the language I was speaking, for that is how it is occasionally referred to in English. 'You've never even mentioned it.' I really couldn't believe it. 'How is that possible? You've never even so much as hinted at it.'
'No, I don't think I have,' Wheeler agreed gravely, as if he had no intention of adding anything further now either. And then his face lit up with a smile of undisguised delight which made him look still younger, he
loved to get me all intrigued and then leave me dangling, I assume he did it with everyone if the opportunity arose, in that respect, too, he resembled Toby Rylands, who would often hint at deplorable events in his past, or remote, semi-clandestine activities, or unexpected or clearly inappropriate friendships for an academic, and yet never told a single one of those stories in its entirety. He would insinuate something and then fall silent, he would fire the imagination, but not stir or feed it, and if he did begin a story, it was as if it were only his memory and not his will – his memory talking out loud – that led him to do so, and he would immediately stop, pull himself up short, so that he never told the whole story of those possibly testing or adventurous times, he allowed only glimpses. They belonged to the same school and to the same past era, he and Wheeler, it wasn't surprising that they'd been friends for such a long time, he, the still-living, must miss his dead friend very much, immensely. 'But I didn't conceal it from you either,' Wheeler added with a broad grin, as he finally stubbed out his cigar, pressing it hard down in the ashtray, in one vertical movement, as if it were an undesirable insect to be crushed, if you'd ever asked me about it…' And, still more amused, he took great pleasure in saying to me reproachfully: 'But you've never shown the slightest interest in the subject. You've shown no curiosity at all about my peninsular adventures.'
Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear Page 10
