Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  A mockery of the past. No, the past is simply not to be borne; we cannot bear not being able to do anything about it, not being able to influence it, to direct it; to avoid it. And so, if possible, it is twisted or tampered with or altered, or falsified, or else made into a liturgy, a ceremony, an emblem and, finally, a spectacle, or simply shuffled around and changed so that, despite everything, it at least looks as if we were intervening, even though the past is utterly fixed, a fact we choose to ignore. And if it isn't, if that proves impossible, then it's erased, suppressed, exiled or expelled, or else buried. And it happens, Jacobo, one or other of those things happens all too often because the past doesn't defend itself, it can't. And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were contagious diseases. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'

  Wheeler's gaze had grown denser and brighter as he spoke, his eyes looked to me like two drops of muscatel now. It wasn't just that he enjoyed holding forth, as does any former lecturer or teacher. It was also because the nature of those thoughts illuminated him from within and from without, too, just a little, as if the burning head of a match sparked and sputtered in each pupil. He himself realised, when he stopped, that he was somewhat agitated, and so I had no qualms about cooling him down with my response, or disappointing him, the anxious look on MR Berry's face — of which we each could see one half— reminded me that too much dialectical excitement was bad for him.

  'Forgive me, Peter, but I'm afraid I don't entirely understand what you're saying,' I replied, taking advantage of a pause (which was perhaps merely a pause for breath), I haven't had much sleep and I'm probably a bit slow on the uptake, but I really don't know what you're talking about.'

  'Give me a cigarette, will you,' he said. He didn't usually smoke cigarettes. I handed him my packet. He took one, lit it, held it rather awkwardly between his fingers, took two puffs and this, as I saw, had an immediate calming effect, tobacco sometimes does that, whatever the doctors say. I know, I know. I may appear to be rambling, but I'm not really, Jacobo. I was talking to you about what we've been talking about all along, so, please, don't give up on me just yet. I haven't forgotten your question. You wanted to know what I meant and what Toby meant when he said that you might be like us, that was it, wasn't it?'

  'Exactly. What did he mean? You still haven't explained.' 'But I am explaining. Just wait.' The ash on his cigarette was already beginning to grow long. I handed him the ashtray, but he didn't notice. 'Although we were apart for many years and knew nothing about each other's lives, I nevertheless knew Toby well, and in some matters I put a great deal of trust in his judgement (not everything, of course, I had little confidence in his literary tastes). But I knew him pretty well, both the boy who, like me, was also in the world when they sent the older boys to be slaughtered in Gallipoli along with the Australians . . . like pigs, the lot of them, some of them equipped with only their bayonets and no bullets . . . and the retired university colleague and riverside neighbour that he was in his latter years; once I moved here, of course. When we met up again.' He made a brief reiterative, historical digression, perhaps the one he had postponed in order to complete his previous sentence; another pause: '("Anzac", they were called, I don't know if you know: that's the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; and the Anzacs, in the plural, was the now glorious name of all those men who were so pointlessly sacrificed, in Chunuk Bair, in Suvla . . . There have been so many in my time, so many sacrificed for the same reason, because they couldn't see what was there before them and didn't know what was known already, so many in the course of one life. Mine has been a long life, it's true, but it's still only one life. It's frightening to think how many have been sacrificed and will continue to be sacrificed because of that, because they didn't dare or didn't want to . . . What a waste.) We led surprisingly parallel lives, Toby and I, given that we had said goodbye to each other in pre-adolescence, and that he had changed country and continent. I mean as regards our careers, the odd coincidence of our both in the end getting chairs at the same English university (and not just any university either). It was less of a coincidence that we both formed part of the same group, well, I recruited him, I suppose. The story of our surnames is, as I warned you, a trivial matter, no great mystery. Our parents got divorced when we were eight and nine years old respectively, around 1922 or thereabouts, he was a year younger, as I said. We stayed with my mother, amongst other things because my father was in a hurry to leave, I think because he didn't want to see my mother getting together with another man, which he was sure would happen sooner or later (well, that's what I think now and have for some time). He moved to South Africa and hardly seemed to miss us at all. So much so, that for many years I took this as certain and unquestionable, and resentment came easily to me. Our maternal grandfather, Grandfather Wheeler, decided to take charge of his two grandchildren, financially speaking. And since he only had two grandchildren, both, of course, bearing the surname Rylands, my mother, doubtless knowing little about pre-adolescent psychology, changed her name and ours, that is, she reclaimed her maiden name and gave it to us as well: a way of perpetuating the grandfather, I imagine, through his name; perhaps he made her do it. Anyway, it was made official in 1929, by deed poll' — I had read this English expression earlier in Who's Who -'although we'd been using the surname Wheeler since shortly after the divorce. That was the name under which we were enrolled at school, and that was how we were known in Christchurch, where we were born. Poor Rita, my mother, probably did it as a show of gratitude or as a reward to my grandfather, her father, and more probably still, as a childish act of revenge on our father, her ex-husband Hugh. Almost from one day to the next, we went from feeling ourselves to be Peter and Toby Rylands to being the Wheeler brothers, with no father and no patronymic sensu stricto. But whereas I made no protest (later on, I realised what an upheaval it was, how messy, I mean, you can't with impunity change the label on an identity), Toby rebelled from the start. He continued answering "Toby Rylands" when asked his name and that was how he signed himself at school and even in exams. And after two or three years of these struggles and of evident unhappiness, at eleven, he expressed his strident desire not only to preserve his old surname, but to go and live with his father. He felt more affection for him than I did, more admiration, more comradeship and more dependence; he was more sentimental, and although, in the medium and long term, it must have been very painful to him to lose both me and my mother, he never said as much, he was too proud really; but he missed his father even more, immensely; and the bitterness I nurtured towards my father, Toby directed more and more at our mother. And (by assimilation or intuition) at Grandfather Wheeler, whom he could only ever see as a supplanter of or rival to his father, perhaps our grandfather was not that paternal towards his daughter. And I wasn't exempt either, no Wheeler was. In the end, Toby's misery and hostility became so intolerable, for him and for us, that my mother finally agreed to his moving out, as long as our father was prepared to take him and look after him, which seemed unlikely. The fact that my father took him in, contrary to all our predictions (or contrary to mine, which, I realised later, were more a desideratum than anything else) contributed in no small measure to my desire to eliminate him entirely from my consciousness, as if he had never existed, and then, very nearly, by assimilation and out of spite, to suppress all memory of my brother, because he had chosen my father and had gone away. As you know, that kind of thing is always happening, in adult life and even, I can assure you, in old age: but in childhood, that feeling of abandonment and despair (and of betrayal, that is, of desertion) is even more acute in the one who stays behind, while others leave and disappear. The impression is much the same when others die, for me at least, I al
ways feel slightly resentful towards my dead. He went to South Africa, and I stayed in New Zealand. Not that South Africa was necessarily a better place, I had no objective reason to think so, but it became for me an infinitely more attractive place, and I soon began to grow impatient and to long to reach an age when I could leave my own country — clouded and diminished, in my eyes, by these absences — and come here to university. I finally did so when I was sixteen — and, by then, officially called Wheeler — on a boat so painfully slow I thought it would never reach its destination. I don't remember or believe it to be true, because I do have a kind of delayed sense of grievance regarding my change of name, the de facto change rather than the de jure one, but my mother said that the change by deed poll was done in my interests, even to please me. It's true that in the 1920s and 1930s everything was easier and less problematic, and in many respects one was freer than one is nowadays: neither the state nor the justice system were as regulatory or as interventionist as they are now, they allowed people room to breathe and move around, but that's all over now, our tutelary obsession did not exist, would not have been allowed. So it's possible that, in the end, my name would have been Wheeler anyway with no need for any red tape, simply sanctioned by use and by custom, just as Toby could go off to be with his father with only the agreement of his two progenitors and my mother's approval, without, as far as I know, any authority or judge interfering in such a private matter. Whatever the case, that was when I also started calling myself Wheeler legally, and perfectly willingly too. Needless to say, the deed poll only affected me and not Toby (that would have been the last straw), and from whom, by then, I had barely heard for four years. He didn't keep in direct contact, well, neither he nor I sought it out. From time to time I would get some vague bits of news about him from my mother, who received it, I fear, mainly from our father. And he would have received some news of me by the same channel, only in reverse. So I was born "Peter Rylands" and that was who I was until I was nine or ten, or indeed in paribus until I was sixteen. But then Toby was "Toby Wheeler" for a while too, much against his will, of course: you have no idea how he suffered at school in Christchurch, for example, when they called the register. It doesn't usually happen with the name they give you at birth, but it can with justice be said of Toby that, as well as receiving it, he also conquered and won his name.' Wheeler's expression changed for a moment, and when I saw this new expression, I imagined that some ironic or humorous comment was about to follow. 'He was never very keen on his first name either, which was Grandfather Wheeler's first name too, it was just bad luck that he got stuck with it. If that had been the name to be changed, he would have accepted with pleasure, I'm sure. And, who knows, we would probably have continued living together. He said it reminded him of that tedious character in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch, you know what "belch" means, I suppose? Then, as an adult, he became slightly reconciled to the name when he read Tristram Shandy, thanks to Uncle Toby.' And Wheeler appeared to conclude here his explanations about Wheeler and Rylands, because he added by way of bringing the matter to a close, 'So you see, as I told you, a trivial story. A divorce. An attachment to a name. To a mother. To a father. A separation. An aversion to another name. To a mother. And to a grandfather. To a father.' He was mixing the two points of view, his own and that of his brother. 'No great mystery.' I had the impression then, given the slowness with which he spoke, that he was expecting me to refute these words, now that he had told me the story: but that isn't what happened, he didn't get his refutation. He must have known that it wasn't a trivial story at all (that drastic separation of the two sides; Rylands saying to me once 'when I left Africa for the first time', as if he had been born there and denying, therefore, his first ten or eleven years in New Zealand, on another continent, albeit an island one), and that it did contain a mystery, despite the casual manner in which he had set out to tell it. And he must have told it in part only: he had not told the mystery itself, but the part around it, that pointed to it like an arrow.

  'And then?' I asked. 'When did you meet up again?'

  'In England, years later. By then I really was Wheeler and he was Rylands. I think that I was already the person I am, if I am who I think I am. I sought him out, we didn't just meet. Not exactly. But that's another story.'

  'I'm sure it is,' I replied, perhaps with an unintentional touch of impatience: my lack of sleep caught up with me now and then, and when something, even a chance remark, refers in some way to ourselves, waiting becomes very difficult. 'And I assume that the answer to my original question, which you provoked, is hidden in there somewhere: in what way could I, according to Toby, be like the two of you? You're not going to tell me it was because of my variable first name, as you know, you and others call me Jacobo, but Luisa and many others call me Jaime, and there are even those who know me as Diego or Yago. Not to mention Jack, as I'm often called here in England.'

  Wheeler noticed my slight impatience, such things never escaped him. I saw that he was amused, it didn't make him feel embarrassed at all, or pressured.

  'I call you Jack,' said Mrs Berry shyly. 'I hope you don't mind . . . Jack.' And this time she hesitated before saying the name.

  'Not at all, Mrs Berry.'

  'And by which name do you know yourself?' Wheeler was quick to ask.

  I didn't have to think about it even for a second.

  'Jacques. That's the name I learned and made mine as a child. Even though my mother was almost the only one to call me that. Not even my father does.'