. . . much of her success was due to the peculiar nature of her next most important instinct, the sex instinct. For Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a neuter . . . The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with. In her, the herd instinct would also be dead . . . And, of course, temperamentally, she would be a phlegmatic — imperturbable, tolerant of pain, sluggish. Laziness would be her besetting vice . . . She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant, thought Kronsteen, to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform . . . Rosa Klebb would be in her late forties, he assumed, placing her by the date of the Spanish Civil War . . . The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag . . .
('A bag of flour, a bag of meat,' I thought, 'that's what they use to practise sticking in bayonets and spears.')
The tricoteuses of the French Revolution must have had faces like hers, decided Kronsteen ... of coldness and cruelty and strength as this, yes, he had to allow himself the emotive word, dreadful woman of SMERSH.
Fleming also seemed very well-informed (SMERSH aside; I would have to ask Wheeler about that, he would be sure to know whether the organisation was real or an invention), the mention of the POUM and Andres Nin was an indication of that, even though he insisted on calling the latter 'Andreas'. According to his version, Nin might have been killed by a foreign woman — who may, who knows, have been 'singularly beautiful' in her youth in Spain — who had also been his collaborator and lover, to make the treachery and the bitterness still worse. Wheeler, at any rate, had made the link between the reference in the Doble Diario to 'several women' detained in Barcelona in June 1937 and the unkempt, sinister, neuter character in From Russia with Love (they would never have detained her), for he had marked the paragraph in Chapter 7 with two vertical lines and written in the margin 'Well, well, so many traitors'. So many indeed, in my own country then, and at other times, and, of course, at all other times since time immemorial, from the beginning of time itself and everywhere. How was it possible that there could have been and were so many betrayals, or so many successful betrayals, that is, ones that were never suspected or detected before they were carried out? What is this strange proclivity we have for trust? Or perhaps it isn't that, perhaps it's a desire not to see or know, or a proclivity for optimism or for complaisant deceit, or perhaps it is pride that leads us to believe that what happens and has always happened to our peers will not happen to us, or that we will be respected by those who — before our very eyes — have already been disloyal to others, as if we were different, and perhaps pride makes us think for no good reason that we will be spared the misfortunes suffered by our ancestors and even the disappointments experienced by our contemporaries: all those who are not 'I', I suppose, who are not and will not be and never have been 'I'. We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us. In the Doble Diario, which I had picked up again, there were a few articles by my father, from the time when, despite the war, he was still trusting and confident: one dated 2 July 1937, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the publication of Descartes's Discours de la Méthode in 1637 in Leiden; another dated 27 May, deploring the craze for changing the names of streets and squares (and even cities) which was prevalent in both 'the rebel-controlled zone' and in 'the loyal zone' (his terms) and, in particular, in Madrid: 'It is highly regrettable,' he said, 'that we should thus imitate the rebels, because we should never imitate them in anything.' Or:
The Prado, the Paseo de Recoletos and the Castellana have had their three names changed into one, the Avenida de la Unión Proletaria. In the first place, this proletarian union does not, alas, exist and it seems to us far more important to try to achieve this union rather than merely to write its name on street corners . . . It is, in a sense, as if these new signwriters wanted to complete the work of the rebel bombardments in disfiguring our capital.
There were purely political articles too, some signed with the pseudonym he was using at the time, others with his real name, Juan Deza, it seemed so strange to me to see my surname on those ancient pages reproduced in red print. Here were the articles written in his youth and which, no doubt, formed part of the many charges made against him — most of them invented, imaginary, false — shortly after the war had ended and was lost, when he was betrayed and denounced to the victorious rebel authorities by his best friend of the time, a certain Del Real with whom he had shared classes and conversations, interests and cafes and friendships and debates and cinemas and doubtless many parties over the years, all the years during which they had studied together, and I imagine, too, the years of the War itself and the siege of Madrid with its disfiguring rebel bombardments and the rebel fire that came from the outskirts and the hills, the so-called obuses or mortar bombs that traced a parabola and fell on the Telefónica and, when their aim was poor, on the neighbouring square, which is why the square was called, with the blackest of humour, the plaza delgua, the square of surprises, almost three whole years of both their lives, of everyone's lives, besieged and running through those streets and squares with their shifting names, clutching hats and caps and berets, with skirts flapping and laddered stockings or no stockings at all, trying to choose pavements that weren't targeted by the mortars in order to walk or run down them towards a metro entrance or a shelter.
Along with a third colleague who later died very young, the two friends had even shared the publication in 1934 of a little book comprising what the Geographical Society had judged to be the three best travel diaries written by students who had taken part in what was, at the time, called the University Mediterranean Cruise, organised by the Madrid Arts Faculty of the Republic, and which took students and lecturers to Tunisia and Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, Greece, Italy and Malta, Crete, Rhodes and Mallorca, and lasted forty-five enthusiastic and optimistic days of the summer of 1933, on one of which the passengers were honoured with a visit by the great Valle-Inclan, who, quite where or why I don't know, boarded the ship to give a talk. The Compania Trasmediterranea-owned ship on which they travelled was called the Ciudad de Cádiz ('City of Cádiz'), but its travels were brought to an end by the Italian submarine Ferrari, the pride of Mussolini, by which it was torpedoed and sunk in the waters of the Aegean Sea on 15 August 1937, at the height of the war, when, according to what my father had told me, the Republican merchant ship was returning from Odessa with food supplies and military equipment or possibly, as I happened to read in Hugh Thomas's book earlier on that interminable night, on 14 August, leaving the Dardanelles.
This publishing and travelling companion, this friend from university and even from school (as long a friendship, therefore, as mine and Comendador's), took it upon himself to promote and to lead the hunt for this person who was not as yet anyone's father. He carried out a smear campaign, sought 'witnesses for the prosecution' who would support any charges in a trial (or in a pretence of a trial, which was all there was during those days of triumph) and secured a signature of greater weight and authority than his own to place on the formal complaint that was lodged with the police one day in May 1939
- The signature belonged to a lecturer, Santa Olalla by name, from that same university, a man known for his fanaticism and with whom my father had had neither classes nor contact, although Santa Olalla had not apparently felt it necessary to deprive himself of a passage on that entirely unfanatical 1933 cruise. Many years later, when I was a student in those same lecture halls (which were Francoist then and seemed set to remain so eternally), Santa Olalla was still lecturing there in his role as veteran professor — he must have gained his chair swiftly and easily — and in my day, he was, in reality and by reputation, an out-and-out fascist, in all senses of the word, analogical, ideological, political and temperamental, that is, sensu stricto. I understand that the main betrayer, Del Real, also received a chair in some university in the north (La Coruña, Oviedo, Santander, Santiago, I'm not sure), doubtless as a reward for the immediate and spontaneous services he rendered to the new and hyperactive Francoist police of 1939. However, it seems that this other teacher-traitor still passed himself off as a 'semi-left-winger' to his rebellious students of the 1970s — nothing so very remarkable about that — and in those unruly times a few unwary and ignorant young women thought him 'charming'. So goes the world ('Talk, betray, denounce. Keep quiet about it afterwards, and save yourself). The last my father knew of him on a more or less personal level was in May 1939, a month and a half after the War had ended, at the height of the repression and suppression and systematic purging of the defeated, and shortly after his detention and imprisonment on the feast day of San Isidro, patron saint of Madrid, when some mutual friend — or it may have been my mother who went to visit him and who was not, at the time, either my mother or his wife — mentioned to him that Del Real was going around boasting of his great achievement, saying more or less: 'I'm going to make sure Deza gets thirty years in prison, or worse.' At the time, that 'or worse' could easily befall any detainee, with or without reason, with or without evidence: if there was no evidence, then they would manufacture it, and even that wasn't usually necessary, all that was required in principle for someone to be condemned was the word of a concierge, a neighbour, a rival, a priest, a malcontent, a professional or paid traitor, a spurned suitor, a spiteful girlfriend, a colleague, a friend, anyone would do, it was better to go too far than not far enough when it came to completing the 'attrition' — the word is Hugh Thomas's — begun in 1936. And that 'or worse' was the firing squad.
All in all, compared with so many others, Juan Deza was lucky, and his betrayer did not manage to get him lined up against a white wall. During the War, my father had been a soldier in the Popular or Republican Army, as he preferred to call it (he was twenty-two when war broke out, a few months younger than Wheeler), but, consigned to administrative duties in the rearguard in Madrid, he was placed first in a regiment in the service corps, and was subsequently employed as an army translator, later on again, he worked as collaborator and assistant to Don Julian Besteiro until the capitulation, and he therefore never saw battle. And since he had never been obliged to fire a single bullet from his rifle, he could also be absolutely certain that he had never killed anyone, which, he said, was a source of infinite joy to him. He wrote articles for Abc and for a few other publications, he broadcast radio programmes for a time in 1937 when he was sent to Valencia, and was charged by the general staff with translating a vast English tome whose author he could not recall, but which was entitled, Spy and Counterspy (A History of Modern Espionage), although his Spanish version, intended for the Ministry of War, probably never saw the light of day. The accusations made by his denouncers, though, included far more serious 'crimes' which — however fantastic — had been concocted with the very worst of intentions, lies that proved hard to rebut: these included having been a collaborator on the Moscow newspaper, Pravda, having worked as contact, interpreter and guide in Spain to the 'bandit Dean of Canterbury' (Dr Hewlett Johnson, known as 'the Red Dean', whom my father had never even seen), and having been privy to the whole web of 'red propaganda' throughout the conflict, which was tantamount to a direct invitation to prise such exceptional information out of him by any means available (as well as the usual one). Fortunately, none of this happened: he had some truthful witnesses, even amongst those hired for the purpose; miraculously, he came up in front of a remarkably decent second lieutenant, who, far from twisting his refutations during the hearing (as was normal in the judicial system of the time), proposed that they be taken down in writing for greater exactitude, fearing later imputations, and before returning my father to his cell, he said: I won't shake your hand because they can see us, but in spirit I'm on your side' ('Antonio Baena,' my father used to say, 'I'll never forget that name'); he was also lucky enough to get a blessedly lazy judge who mislaid his file and ended up dismissing the case due to confusion caused by the anomalous behaviour of one of the 'prosecution witnesses'. And so Juan Deza, my father, had a spell in prison, during which he taught illiterate fellow prisoners to read and write, to add, subtract and multiply (and taught the more educated a little French), and then he was released — he didn't get round to teaching them to divide — although he suffered reprisals for many years afterwards; he was, of course, banned from teaching at any level, unlike his enchaired accusers, and from printing a single line in his country's newspapers, the ink of which was now entirely blue. One of the 'prosecution witnesses', who found his own dark reflection in that role — another former fellow student whom the victim — my father — had visited and lent books to during the bombardments and who later enjoyed a little tawdry, commercial success as a novelist (Florez was his name) — gave my mother, the victim's friend, this message for him: 'If Deza forgets that he ever had a career, he'll live; otherwise, we'll destroy him.' But that is another story. Sometimes I saw my father grieve in silence over his unfortunate situation, and I saw him suffer. But I never saw him bitter, he did not pass on to his children any feelings of resentment, and any such feelings we may have are of our own making. Nor did I ever hear him complain or mention out loud the names of his betrayers outside the circle of family and close friends, some of whom had known them well — those two names — and at first hand, ever since the feast day of San Isidro in 1939. Despite all these difficulties and obstacles, he managed to get by in life, and if he never complained not even during the harshest and most painful of times, I was not the one to do it for him. Or perhaps I was. Perhaps I was and the only one too, along with my two older brothers and my younger sister, who could carry out the inoffensive task of bemoaning the lot of others, on behalf of my mother now and of my father as well.
In exactly the same way, I have never shrunk from mentioning those names whenever the opportunity arose or whenever it seemed relevant, because I've known them since I was a child, Del Real and Santa Olalla, Santa Olalla and Del Real, and for me they have always been the names of treachery, and as such they do not deserve protection. And this was what I was thinking about during that long night beside the River Cherwell as I finally started collecting together all the books I had taken from Wheeler's west shelves, and which were now scattered around his office or study, and restoring some kind of order, clearing and cleaning the desk and removing trays and bottles and my glass and the ice, an arduous task given how tired and absorbed in thought I was and how late it was too, though I preferred not to know just how late and so deliberately did not look at my watch or at a clock. How was it possible that my father never suspected or detected anything? He was a quick, intelligent, cultivated man, certainly no fool, but he was also an irredeemable optimist, whose first instinct was to trust everyone. But even so. How could he have spent half his life with a colleague, a close friend — half his childhood, his schooldays, his youth — without having so much as an inkling of his true nature, or, at least, of his possible nature? (But perhaps any nature is possible in all of us.) How can someone not see, in the long term, that the person who does end up ruining us will indeed ruin us? How can you not sense or guess at their plotting, their machinations, their circular dance, not smell
their hostility or breathe their despair, not notice their slow skulking, their leisurely, languishing waiting, and the inevitable impatience that they would have had to contain for who knows how many years? How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it? He must often have had to suppress his agitation and to bite his lips until they bled, and to cool his blood when it was already boding, and to put off again and again its final, imperfect, fetid fermentation. All these things can be noticed, observed, smelled and even, on occasions, felt, the chill shock of condensing sweat. At the very least you sense them. You know or should know. Or perhaps once these things have happened, we do not realise that we knew they were going to happen and that this was precisely how it would turn out. And isn't it true that, deep down, we are not as surprised as we pretend to others and, above all, to ourselves, and that we then see the logic of it all and recognise and even remember the unheeded warnings that some layer of our unconscious mind did, nevertheless, pick up? Perhaps we want to convince ourselves of our own astonishment, as if we might find in it a specious consolation and various pointless excuses that really do not work: 'But I had no idea, how could I have imagined, let alone suspected this, it's the last thing I would have expected, why, it would never even have occurred to me, I would have given my word, I would have sworn an oath, I would have put my hand in the fire, I would have staked my life on it, I would have bet all my money and my honour too, how deceived and disappointed I am, how unbelievable, how unreal this betrayal seems.' Yet hardly anyone ever feels such astonishment. Not deep down, not in the knowledge that dares not speak or declare itself or even allow itself to be known or to become conscious, not in that knowledge which so fears itself that it hates and denies and hides from itself, or looks at itself only out of the corner of one eye and with its face half-hidden. That degree of astonishment does, however, exist in the uppermost layers, not just the superficial, epidermic ones, but all of them, the intermediate, the deep and the profound, even the obscure, the subterranean and the venous, those outside and inside, and those right at the very bottom, those of daily, external, superficial life — the point of the spear — and those of each solitary pause, the layers that are there in gaily laughing company and at the moment before each abyssal plunge into sleep, when, just for a moment, we glimpse ourselves as a whole and glimpse, too, what story will be told when our ending ends. Yes, even that layer of surrender and anguish or premonition allows for such perplexity, such surprise. But not the most profound layer which we almost never reach, the one that lives on the other side of time and is never deceived or mistaken, and which is often confused with fear or adopts fear as a disguise, which is why we ignore it so as not to be controlled by fear or to allow it to dictate our steps and cause us to succumb to what we fear or, indeed, to bring it about. We dismiss the signs and refuse to interpret them ('Keep quiet, keep quiet, and then save me'), and so we relegate them to the realm of imaginings, and counter them with others which, basically, we know are not signs, but pretences and simulacra that seek our trust and our torpor or our drowsiness ('Sleep with one eye open when you slumber,' I quoted to myself). Because it would be impossible to deceive ourselves if that was what we really wanted — not to deceive ourselves, I mean — a vain and doomed endeavour. It isn't usually what we want. No, we don't usually want that, because protection and prevention and alertness all bore us, and we prefer to throw away our shield and march lightly ahead, brandishing our spear as if it were a decoration.
Fever and Spear Page 16
