Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  'What are you talking about, Peter? I don't understand.'

  'The citizens of any nation, Jacobo, the vast majority, normally have nothing of any real value to tell anyone. If you stop each night to think about what has been told or recounted to you during the day by the many or few people with whom you have spoken (their degree of culture and knowledge is irrelevant), you will see how rare it is ever to hear anything of real value or interest or discernment, leaving to one side details and matters of a merely practical nature, but including, of course, on the other hand, everything that has reached you via the newspaper, the television or the radio (it's different if you've read it in a book, although that depends on the book). Almost everything that everyone says and communicates is humbug or padding, superfluous, commonplace, dull, interchangeable and trite, however much we feel it to be "ours" and however much people "feel the need to express themselves", to use the appallingly "cursi" phrase of the day. It would have made not a jot of difference if the millions of opinions, feelings, ideas, facts and news that are expressed and recounted in the world had never been expressed at all.' (Needless to say, Wheeler resorted to my language for that word 'cursi', which has no exact equivalent in any other, but which here would mean something like 'corny'.) '"Hablando se entiende lagente", you often say in Spanish. "Talk things over and sort things out". "It's good to talk," people say in various situations and contexts. All it needed was for psychologists and the like to put that absurd notion into the heads of talkers for the latter to give even freer rein to what has always been their natural tendency. Talking is not in itself either good or bad, and as for people sorting things out by talking to each other, well, talking is just as much a source of conflict and misunderstanding as it is of harmony and understanding, of injustice and reparation, of war and armistice, as much a source of crimes and betrayals as it is of loyalties and loves, of condemnations and salvations, of insults and rages as it is of consolations and mollifications. Talking is probably the biggest waste of time amongst the population as a whole, regardless of age, sex, class, wealth or knowledge, it is wastage par excellence. Almost no one has anything to say that their potential listeners might consider to be of any real value, worth listening to, let alone bought, I mean no one pays for something that is normally free, apart from in a few very exceptional cases, and yet sometimes you're obliged to. Strangely, though, and despite everything, the majority continues to talk endlessly and every day. It's astonishing, Jacobo, when you stop to think: men and women are constantly explaining and recounting, as well as explaining themselves to themselves ad nauseam, looking for someone to listen to them or imposing their diatribes on others if they can, fathers on children, teachers on pupils, parish priests on parishioners, husbands on wives and wives on husbands, commanding officers on troops and bosses on subalterns, politicians on their supporters and even on the nation as a whole, television on its viewers, writers on their readers and even singers on their adolescent fans, who pay them the still greater tribute of chanting the choruses of their songs. Patients impose their diatribes on their psychiatrists too, except that here the nature of the relationship is revealing, it's a very clear transaction: the listener charges, the speaker pays. He who talks most pays most.' (These last words were again in Spanish: 'Desembolsa quien raja, se retrata quien larga – I thought of a woman friend of mine in Madrid, Dr Garcia Mallo, a very wise psychiatrist: I would advise her to increase her fees without the slightest twinge of conscience.) 'That is an exemplary relationship, and it would, in fact, be the most appropriate relationship for all occasions. For there's a real shortage of people willing to listen, there are never many, mainly because there are infinitely more who aspire to be in the other man's trench, that is, to be the ones doing the talking and, therefore, being listened to. In fact, if you think about it, a permanent and universal struggle is being waged to grab the floor: in any crowded place, private or public, there are dozens if not hundreds of irrepressible voices fighting to prevail or to cut in, and the desideratum of each voice would be to rise above all the others and silence them: and that, within tolerable limits, is what they try to do. It could be a street or a market or Parliament, the only difference is that, in the end, they agree to take turns and those waiting are forced to pretend to be listening; it could be in a pub or at a tea-party in a stately home, only the intensity and the tempo vary, in the latter one moves very slowly, one dissembles a little in order to gain confidence before holding forth as if in a tavern, albeit with the volume turned down. Gather four people round a table and very soon at least two of them will be competing to call the tune. I did well to become a teacher: for many years I enjoyed, unimpeded, the enormous privilege of not being interrupted by anyone, or, at least, not without my prior consent. And I still enjoy that privilege in my books and articles. That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing. It is and always has been, believe me, I know from my own experience and from that of others, you, as far as I know, have so far escaped, you have no idea how wise you have been not to be tempted by writing. For that is the illusory idea of all novelists, who publish their various immense tomes full of adventures and endless reflections, like Cervantes in Spain, like Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, and the author of that tedious quartet about Alexandria that was once all the rage, or Oxford's own Tolkien (who really was born in South Africa), the number of times I passed him in Merton College or saw him with Clive Lewis, enjoying a drink of an evening at The Eagle and Child, and not one of us had an inkling of the fate that awaited his three eccentric volumes, he even less than us, his highly sceptical colleagues; it's an illusion shared by poets too, who pack so much into those deceptively short lines, like Rilke and Eliot, or before them, Whitman and Milton, and, before them, your own great poet, Manrique; it's shared by playwrights who aim to keep an audience in their seats for four or more hours, as Shakespeare himself did in Hamlet and Henry IV: of course, at the time, a lot of the audience would have been standing and would have quite happily strolled in and out of the theatre as many times as they wished; it's shared by all those chroniclers and diarists and memorialists like Saint-Simon, Casanova, El Inca Garcilaso and Bernal Diaz or our own illustrious Pepys, who never tire of furiously filling up those sheets with ink; it's shared by such essayists as the incomparable Montaigne or me (not, I can assure you, that I'm comparing myself with him), who ingenuously imagine, while we write, that someone will have the miraculous degree of patience required to swallow everything we want to tell them about Henry the Navigator, it's madness, isn't it, I mean, my latest book about him is nearly five hundred pages long, it's rank discourtesy, an abuse really. Have you read it yet, by the way?'

  'No, Peter, I haven't, you must forgive me, I'm truly sorry. I find it very hard to concentrate on reading at the moment,' I replied, and I wasn't lying. 'But when I do read it, don't worry, I'll be sure to read the whole thing from start to finish, holding my breath and barely pausing,' I added, smiling, and in a tone of gentle, affectionate fun, and he reciprocated with a slight smile, with that rapid glance of his, with those eyes so much younger than the rest of him. And then I asked: 'Anyway, what temptation? I mean the one that the campaign against careless talk brought with it. You were telling me about that, weren't you, or were about to?'

  'Ah, yes. Good, I like it when you do as you're told and keep me on a tight rein.' And there was a mocking quality about his reply too. 'No one realised at first, but the temptation was very simple and hardly surprising really: you see, this same population who normally never had anything of vital interest to tell anyone were suddenly informed that their tongue, their chatter and their natural verbosity could constitute a danger, they were urged to watch what they talked about and to keep an eye on where, when and with whom they talked; they were warned that almost anyone could be either a Nazi spy or someone in their pay listening in to what they said, as illustrated by the cartoon of the two housewives travelli
ng on the Underground or the men playing darts. And this was tantamount to saying to the people: "You probably won't notice, but important, crucial information could occasionally emerge from your lips, and it would be best, therefore, if it was never uttered at all, in any circumstance. You probably won't recognise it, but amongst the rubbish that pours daily from your mouths, there could be something of value, of immense value to the enemy. Contrary to the normal state of affairs, that is, other people's general lack of interest in whatever you insist on telling them or explaining to them, it is likely that, amongst you now, there could be ears that would be more than happy to pay you all the attention in the world, and even to draw you out. In fact, there definitely are: a lot of German parachutists have been landing in Britain lately, and they are all well prepared, specially trained to deceive us, they know our language as well as if they were natives of Manchester, Cardiff or Edinburgh, and they know our customs too, because quite a few of them have lived here in the past or are half-English, on their mother's or their father's side, although now they have opted for the worse of their two bloods. They land or disembark bereft of all scruples, but amply provided with arms and perfectly forged documents, or, if not, their accomplices here will soon obtain them for them, many of these accomplices are our genuine compatriots, as British as our grandparents, and these traitors are hanging on your every word, to see what they can pick up and transmit to their butchering bosses, to see if we let something slip. So be very careful: the fate of our air force, our navy, our army, our prisoners and our spies could depend on your irresponsible chitchat or on your loyal silence. The fate of this war, which has already cost us so much blood, toil, tears and sweat'" (and Wheeler quoted the words in their correct order, without forgetting 'toil', as people always do) '"may lie not perhaps in your hands, but definitely in your tongue. And it would be unforgivable if we were to lose the war because of a slip on your part, because of an entirely avoidable act of imprudence, because one of us was incapable of biting or holding his tongue." That is how people saw the situation, the country plagued with Nazi agents all with ears cocked, ready to eavesdrop' (a rather difficult word to translate into Spanish) 'not just in London and in the big cities but in the smaller ones too and in villages, not to mention on the coast and even in the fields. The few anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians who had sought refuge here years before, after the rise to power of Hitler, had a pretty awful time of it, I knew Wittgenstein, for example, who had spent half his life in Cambridge, I met the great actor Anton Walbrook and the writer Pressburger and those magnificent scholars at the Warburg Institute of Art: Wind, Wittkower, Gombrich, Saxl, and Pevsner too, some of whose oldest neighbours suddenly began to distrust them, poor things, they were British citizens and probably had a keener interest than anyone in seeing Nazism defeated. It was at this time that they first brought in an official identity card, against our tradition and our preference, to make things a little more difficult for any would-be German infiltrators. But people weren't used to carrying such a document and kept losing it, and there was such generalised hostility to it that, around 1951 or 1952, the card in question was suppressed in order to quell the discontent provoked by its obligatory nature. According to Tupra, there is talk in government circles of imposing something similar, along with other inquisitorial measures, these mediocrities who rule over us in such a totalitarian spirit and who have more or less been given carte blanche to do so by the Twin Towers massacre. I hope they don't get their way. They can insist all they want, but we are not truly at war now, not a war of constant uncertainty and pain. And although there are only a few of us left who played an active part in the Second World War, for us it's insulting, an out-and-out mockery, what these pusillanimous, authoritarian fools want to do and impose on us in the name of security, that prehistoric pretext. We didn't fight those who wanted to control each and every aspect of our lives only to see our grandchildren come along and slyly but very precisely fulfil the crazed fantasies of the very enemies we vanquished. Oh, I don't know… but then, whatever happens, I won't be here much longer to see it, fortunately.' And Wheeler looked down at the grass again while he muttered these superfluous phrases, or perhaps he was looking at the various cigarette ends I had been scattering on the ground and stubbing out with my shoe. This time, however, he immediately took up the thread on his own: 'So what was the effect of telling all this to the citizens of the time? They found themselves in a strange, almost paradoxical situation: they might possibly be in possession of valuable information, but most of them had no idea whether or not it really was or, if it was, what the devil that information could be; they had no idea either who in their world would find it of value, which close friends or acquaintances or, indeed, anyone else, which meant that no one could ever be discounted as a potential danger; they knew, lastly, that if these two eternally unverifiable factors or elements should occur – that is, their unconscious possession of some piece of valuable information and the proximity of a concealed enemy who might extract it from them or happen to overhear it' (here he used another verb in the same semantic area -'overhear' – which, again, has no exact equivalent in my language), 'that conjunction could be of enormous significance and could have calamitous results. The idea that what one says, speaks, comments upon, mentions or recounts could be of importance and cause harm and be coveted by others, even if only by the Devil and all his hosts, is irresistible to most people; and, consequently, two opposing, contradictory and conflicting tendencies came together and coexisted in them: the first meant keeping silent about everything all the time, even the most anodyne and innocuous of facts, in order to ward off any threat as well as any feeling of guilt, or any sense of having fallen into some horrific error; the second entailed telling and talking about absolutely everything in front of everyone everywhere (whatever one knew or had heard, most of it trivia, froth, nothing), in order to have a taste of adventure, or its ghost, to feel a frisson of danger, as well as the new and unfamiliar thrill of one's own importance. What's the point of having something valuable if you don't parade and exhibit and rub it in people's faces, or of having something covetable if you can't feel other people's covetousness or at least the possibility and the risk that they might snatch it from you, or of having a secret if, at some point, you don't reveal or betray it. Only then can you get the true measure of its enormity and its prestige. Sooner or later, you get tired of thinking to yourself: "Ah, if they only knew, ah, if he ever found out, oh, if she knew what I know." And sooner or later, the moment comes to produce it, to get rid of it, to surrender it, even if it's only once and to only one person, it happens to us all sooner or later. But since the citizens (with some exceptions) were incapable of distinguishing gold from mere trinkets, many would, with a pleasurable shudder of excitement, place everything they had on the counter or the table, attracted by the thought that they might have before them some evil spy, at the same time, crossing their fingers and praying to heaven that they didn't, and that there wouldn't be anyone either who could pass it on, their confusing or impetuous story I mean. And nothing could be more thrilling than that some more responsible, upright compatriot should tell them off and reproach them for being so flippant, because that was an almost unmistakable sign to the speaker that he had entered the forbidden territory of the serious, the meaningful and the weighty where he had never before set foot. That state of fearful excitement, of laying oneself open to harm and simultaneously exposing the whole nation to harm as well, is illustrated by that cartoon of a man phoning from a public call-box besieged by little Fuhrers, and by the third, rather than the second, scene of the sequence that begins with the sailor and his girlfriend, that's them to a T. Most people, whether intelligent or stupid, respectful or inconsiderate, vitriolic or kindly, resemble, to a greater or lesser extent, that young woman with her brown hair caught up on top of her head: generally speaking, they listen with amazement and glee, even if they're being told something really terrible, because (and this is the reason why, briefly and occasi
onally, they deign to pay attention, because they can already imagine themselves retelling it) it's overlaid with the anticipated pleasure of themselves passing on the news, even if it's repugnant, horrifying, or brings with it awful sorrow, or provokes in others the very reaction being provoked in them now. Basically, all that interests us and matters to us is what we share, pass on, transmit. We always want to feel part of a chain, we are, how can I put it, the victims and agents of an inexhaustible contagion. And that is the greatest contagion, the one that is within the grasp of everyone, the one brought to us by words, this plague of talking from which I, too, suffer, well, you can see what happens, how I launch off once you let go of the rope. All credit, then, to anyone who has ever refused to follow this predominant inclination. And even more credit to anyone who was brutally interrogated and who, nevertheless, said nothing, gave nothing away. Even if their life depended on it, and they lost their life.'

  I heard the sound of the piano coming from the house, background music to the river and the trees, to the garden and to Wheeler's voice. A Mozart sonata perhaps, or it could be by one of the Bachs, Johann Christian, one of Mozart's teachers and the poor, brilliant son of the genius, he lived in England for many years and is known there as 'the London Bach' and his music is often remembered and performed, an English German like those who worked at the Warburg Institute and like that admirable Viennese actor who was known first as Adolf Wohlbruck, and who also abandoned his name, and like Commodore Mountbatten, who was originally Battenberg, bogus Britons all of them, not even Tolkien was free of that. (Like my colleague, Rendel, who was an Austrian Englishman.) Mrs Berry must have finished all her chores and was amusing herself until it was time to call us in for lunch. She and Wheeler both played; she played with great energy, but I had rarely seen or heard him playing at all, I remembered one occasion when he wanted to introduce me to a song entitled Lillabullero or Lilliburlero or something rather Spanish-sounding like that, the piano was not in the living-room, but upstairs, in an otherwise empty room, there was nothing you could do there except sit down at the instrument. Maybe it was the contrast of the present cheerful music with his own mournful words, but Wheeler seemed suddenly very tired, he raised one hand to his forehead and allowed the full weight of his head to fall on his hand, his elbow resting on the table with its full-skirted canvas cover. 'And so the centuries pass,' I thought, while I waited for him to go on or else put an end to the conversation, I feared he might opt for the latter, he had become too conscious that he was lecturing, and I saw him close his eyes as if they were stinging, although they were hidden by the fingers resting on his forehead. 'And so the centuries pass and nothing ever yields or ends, everything infects everything else, nothing releases us. And that "everything" slides like snow from the shoulders, slippery and docile, except that this snow travels through time and beyond us, and may never stop.'