Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  'Barcelona 17, 4 p.m.,' said the first and briefest part of the report:

  The Police have arrested various prominent members of the POUM, amongst them Jorge Arques, David Pérez, Andrade and Ortiz. Nin, who was arrested yesterday, has been moved to Valencia.

  This was signed 'Febus', another obvious alias. The second part added:

  Barcelona 17, 12 midnight. During the day the Police have continued their arrests of prominent members of the POUM. As readers will be aware, the best-known of the party's leaders, Andres Nin, was arrested a few days ago and taken from the Delegacion del Estado in Catalonia to Valencia and from there to Madrid. There were approximately fourteen subsequent arrests, amongst them, that of the editor of the newspaper La Batalla, the organ of the POUM, and of some of that newspaper's journalists. The newspaper's printing works, editorial and administrative offices were seized by the authorities. Following statements made by those under arrest, further investigations ensued, which led to the arrest of another fifty people. They have all been taken to the Delegacion del Estado in Catalonia. Amongst those arrested are several singularly beautiful foreign women. This work is being carried out by officers of the criminal and social brigades with the assistance of officers from the Public Order and Security divisions. All the organisation's offices in Barcelona have been seized and a specialist team of twenty-five officers have carried out a detailed study of documents found in the files there. A meticulous search is being made of a house in San Gervasio, which was the property of Beltrán y Musitu, where the POUM had set up a barracks, and where several thousand complete sets of kit for soldiers, all of the latest design, were found.

  Again this was signed by 'Febus'.

  The underlining had been added not by the pseudonymous writer or by me, but by Wheeler, and was quite a common feature in the many books of his I had now leafed through or even plundered, as were notes in the margin, which were very brief indeed and usually in some kind of code or so abbreviated as to be barely comprehensible to me or to anyone else who happened upon them. On this occasion, to the right of the half-column reproduced in red ink, he had written vertically (there was barely any space), in ink as always and in the unmistakable hand that I knew so well: 'Cf. From Russia with Love,' even in the margins he used Latin expressions, although the abbreviation 'Cf' is a common way in English of referring in one text to another work, the equivalent of the Spanish ' Vide' or ' Vease'. From Russia with Love, the second James Bond adventure or instalment if I remembered correctly, at most the third or fourth. And I went on to wonder if it referred to the film, which I had, of course, seen at the time (still with the great Sean Connery, of that I was sure), or to the novel by the ill-fated Ian Fleming on which it was based. Gratuitous or motiveless curiosity (which is what afflicts the erudite) turns us into puppets, shakes us up and hurls us about, weakens our will and, worse, divides and disperses us, makes us wish that we had four eyes and two heads or, rather, several existences, each of them with four eyes and two heads. Nevertheless, I managed to keep my mind trained for a while longer on that Doble Diario, but it had little to say about the vicissitudes of Nin and the POUM, which, on the other hand — I realised — didn't interest me much in themselves, or at least hadn't interested me until I had opened those books, Orwell and Thomas to begin with. (It was all Tupra's fault, he had drawn me in, from the very first moment.)

  In the same Republican Abc from the following day, 19 June 1937. I found a whole page about the plenary meeting of the Communist Party Committee that had just opened in Valencia. In the first session, there had been a 'report' by Dolores Ibarruri, doubtless better known then and now and in the future by her alias, La Pasionaria, who, 'always addicted to Stalin' and possibly 'in an hysterical outburst', as Benet had murmured a short while before, dedicated a few furious, pitiless words to the purges taking place at the time: in the ceremony at the Monumental Cinema,' she said, 'we raise the flag of the Popular Front. The enemies of this union are certain left-wingers and Trotskyites. No measures taken to liquidate them can ever be too extreme.' I felt like underlining that last sentence, such an open invitation to the liquidations that did in fact follow, but I refrained from doing so, after all, the books belonged to Peter, and I was unlikely to consult them ever again, after that night of strange, unforeseen wakefulness.

  I saw that, for its part, the pro-Franco Abc of Seville almost inaudibly echoed the Catalan purges in a succinct and dispassionate note written on 25 June, the indifferent tone of which hardly squared with the accusations that placed the POUM and its leaders at the service of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, his Gestapo and even the Moroccan Guard: 'Following the loss of Bilbao,' read the headline, 'the Red Government shoots several leaders of the POUM. The situation in Catalonia.' The article said:

  Salamanca, 24th. French news reports state that following the loss of Bilbao, the Government of Valencia has gone on the offensive against the POUM and other dissident parties, in order to prevent the contrary happening.

  (An almost unintelligible sentence, incidentally, the Right always was more stupid than the Left.)

  According to these reports, Andrés Nin, Gorkin and a third leader whose name we do not know, have been taken to Valencia and executed. All the Trotskyist leaden have been arrested by order of the Soviet consul, Ossenko, who has received orders from his Government to carry out a purge in Catalonia similar to that carried out in Russia against Tukachewsky and his friends.

  Obviously the information was entirely wrong, and not just as regards Nin, for more than a month later, on 29 July 1937, the Republican Abc in Madrid, in another article again signed by Febus, reproduced without comment the note published by the Ministry of Justice 'about those accused of High Treason'. 'Statements have been handed to the Tribunal of Espionage and High Treason' (which had, in fact, been specially created on 22 June, as proved by the fact that Summary No. 1 for that Special Court was the statement issued against the POUM) relating to eleven defendants, ten from the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and one from the Falange Espafiola (Spanish Falangist Movement), and among the first to be mentioned are Juan Andrade and 'Julián Gómez Gorkin'. These statements were compiled from 'abundant documentation found in the POUM offices: ciphers, telegraphic codes, papers referring to arms trafficking, the smuggling of money and valuable goods, various newspapers from various capital cities, mainly from Barcelona; communications from foreigners alluding to interviews held inside and outside loyalist territory, and to the participation of foreigners in the weeks prior to the espionage and subversive activity of last May'. The report ended with an eloquent warning to anyone who might intercede: 'Any steps other than those intended to bring about the strict and faithful application of the laws are, therefore, useless.' That bit about 'various newspapers from various capital cities' seemed to me the most indefensible and treacherous of all, and about them being 'mainly from Barcelona', the POUM offices being registered in precisely that city, an obvious aggravating factor and doubtless damning. The ten POUM defendants were all men and had Spanish names, so the various foreign women of singular beauty seem to have got off scot-free and to have vanished, as befitted women of their ilk.

  As for 'the Soviet consul, Ossenko', according to the blue-grey ink — his name was in fact Antonov-Ovseenko — if the arrests had indeed been ordered by him, in response to orders from his own Russian government, it must have been in extremis, and his obedience certainly did not get him very far, since in June — in late June one assumes, so that he at least had time to issue the orders and to know that Nin had been executed — he was called back to Moscow to be appointed People's Commissar for Justice and to take up his post with immediate effect: 'a joke typical of Stalin', muttered Thomas in a footnote, for the old revolutionary Antonov-Ovseenko never reached his post and disappeared without trace, whether he died a slow death in some distant concentration camp or was promptly despatched underground as soon as he stepped out on to Russian soil is not known. His compatriot in Madrid, Orlov, cle
arly learned the fatal lesson taught him by the consul — a veteran of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and formerly a personal friend of Lenin — when, a little later on, he, in turn, received the call from Russia with love.

  For its part, that note of Wheeler's continued to call to me: 'Cf. From Russia with Love'. What the devil did that novel or film about long-since cold spies have to do with Nin, or with the POUM, or with those beautiful foreign women? And although the Doble Diario still drew my attention for a thousand other reasons and, however late it was, I was certainly not going to abandon my readings just yet — everything aroused my gratuitous curiosity, from incomprehensible headlines like this one from 18 July 1937 which said and I quote: 'Brooklyn-born bullfighter Sidney Franklin exposes Franco's lies', to articles, which I kept stumbling across, written by my father when he was very young, in the Madrid Abc and therefore reproduced now in red ink, either signed with his own name, Juan Deza, or with the pseudonym he had sometimes used during the conflict — I suddenly remembered something that made me put the large volumes to one side and get hesitantly to my feet. In a small room next to the guest room where I had stayed on other occasions and which would already be prepared for that night, I had noticed some detective novels and mystery novels, to which Wheeler, like all people of a speculative or philosophical bent, was quietly addicted (not secretly, but he would never keep that part of his vast library in one of his living-rooms or in the study, in full view of any snooping, slanderous colleague who might visit him). I had occasionally wondered if he didn't write them himself under a pseudonym, like so many other Oxbridge dons who, in principle, do not wish to have such plebeian activities mixed up with their real names as savants, scholars or sages, but they nearly always end up unmasking themselves, especially if high praise and good sales accompany those novels, minor works or mere diversions to which they never give any importance, but which prove far more lucrative than the books they do consider valuable and serious and which, nevertheless, almost no one reads. There are many such cases: the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Cecil Day-Lewis, was Nicholas Blake to fans of enigmas, the English scholar, J. I. M. Stewart, also at Oxford, was Michael Innes, and even one of my former colleagues, the Irishman Aidan Kavanagh, an expert on the Golden Age and head of the sub-faculty of Spanish where I taught, had published successful full-blown horror novels beneath the extravagant alias of Goliath Cherubim, no one would ever have a name like that.

  On the occasional sleepless night spent in that house, I had browsed a little in that small room, I remembered having seen works by classic detective novelists, Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, Van Dine and Van Gulik, Woolrich, Highsmith and Dexter, and, of course, Conan Doyle, Simenon and Chesterton, names I knew from my father — who was of a much more speculative bent than me — although not their actual creations (with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Maigret, who are part of basic general culture). Perhaps I would be in luck — curiosity is very pressing when it gets us in its grip — and Fleming would be there amongst them, although he wasn't, properly speaking, a detective novelist, I imagine all the above-named would have sneered at him, there are always plebeians for the plebeians, and pariahs for pariahs (just big-fish-eats-little-fish voracity, I suppose). I hesitated for a few seconds. If I went up those two flights of stairs now, I would run a greater risk of waking Wheeler and Mrs Berry, but I would have to go up them later anyway in order to go to bed (although I wouldn't then come down and go up them again), and the noise of the old typewriter I had been blithely using had already represented a considerable risk, I realised. I wasn't sure whether or not I should first impose some kind of order on the mess in the study; but I wanted to continue leafing through that Doble Diario with its ridiculous news items and unfamiliar articles written by my young, very young father, when he had no idea that the red-ink side would lose the War nor that, after the defeat, he would be betrayed by his best friend, in cahoots with another man whom he did not even know — possibly hired for the task, possibly happy to add his signature and thus get into the good books of the pro-Franco victors — nor that, because of this, his main vocations and aspirations, in the teaching and speculative lines, would all be dashed. So without so much as an attempt to put anything to rights, I left the junk room into which the study had now been transformed and went slowly and cautiously up the stairs, like an intruder or a spy or a burglar (there is no specific word for this in my language, for the kind of thief who sneaks into houses), I held on to the banister as Peter had done, my balance wasn't perfect, I had, without even trying, had quite a lot to drink, by which I mean that with those last few solitary drinks I had unwittingly slid into the very early stages of emulation of The Flask.

  Despite all my precautions, I nevertheless turned on various lights, it would have been a great deal worse to trip and roll down far more stairs than the ashtray had simply because I couldn't see clearly enough to make those inebriated, silent steps. Wheeler had a good collection of detective novels, larger than I remembered, he was clearly very keen, also represented were Stout, Gardner and Dickson, MacDonald (Philip) and Macdonald (Ross), Iles and Tey and Buchan and Ambler, the last two belonged more to the spy sub-genre or so it seemed to me — again I knew all these names from my father — so I had high hopes of finding Fleming there, and these were fulfilled when I realised that the books were in alphabetical order, allowing me to focus my search: it didn't take me long to spot the spines of the complete collection containing the famous missions of Commander Bond, there was even a biography of his creator. I picked up From Russia with Love, it looked like a first edition, as did the other volumes, all of them in faded dust jackets, and when I looked for the imprints page to verify this, I saw that the book was dedicated to Wheeler in the author's own hand, so they must have known each other, Fleming's handwritten note did not allow one to infer any more than that, that they were perhaps friends: ' To Peter Wheeler, who may know better. Salud! from Ian Fleming 1957', the year of publication. The very brevity of the phrase 'who may know better' was highly ambiguous — that, at least, was partly the reason — which could be translated or even understood in various ways: 'Who may know more', 'Who may be better informed', 'Who may be more up to date', even 'Who may be wiser' (about something in particular in this case). But there was also a whole range of less literal interpretations, given the sense that the expressions 'to know better' or 'to know better than' often have, and in all those possible versions there would have been a touch of warning or reproach, something like, 'For Peter Wheeler, who would be advised not to . . .' or 'who should be careful not to . . .' follow whatever course of action he was referring to; or 'who would be better off; or 'who presumably knows what he's doing'; or even 'who can make his own choices' or 'who can do what he likes', or some other such hint or suggestion. I looked at the other novels, from Casino Roy ale, 1953, to Octopussy and The Living Daylights, 1966, published posthumously. The five oldest all had written dedications, the one in From Russia with Love was, in fact, the last, and those published afterwards bore no dedication at all, and none of the four previous ones was any more expressive, on the contrary, they were either more anodyne or frankly laconic, 'To Peter Wheeler from Ian Fleming', 'This is Peter Wheeler's copy from the Author and so on. Perhaps Wheeler and Fleming had stopped seeing each other around 1958. And Fleming — as I learned from the blurb on a book about his life — had died in 1964, at the age of fifty-six, at the height of his success or, rather, that of the Bond films starring Sean Connery, which were the real impetus behind the success of his novels. As for the Spanish word 'Salud!', I assumed there was nothing more mysterious behind this than the simple fact that the dedicatee was a Hispanist. That relationship or friendship between the eminent Oxonian and the inventor of 007 didn't match up at first, but then, lately, almost nothing did match up. And Wheeler had not, after all, been as eminent in the 1950s — not to speak of the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War — as he was later on (the title of Sir had been given to him afte
r we met, for example, he was still plain 'Professor Wheeler' when Rylands had introduced me to him).