Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  'What about this? And this? Look at this, and this, and this.' Wheeler continued to take drawings from his file, in colour now and not originals this time, but cut out of magazines or possibly books, or else postcards and playing-cards from the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth Road and from other institutions, they must sell them now as nostalgic souvenirs or as curios, there was a whole pack of cards illustrated with them, it's odd how the useful and even essential things in one's own life become ornaments and archaeology when that life is still not yet over, I thought of Wheeler's life and thought too that I would one day see, in catalogues and in exhibitions, objects and newspapers and photographs and books whose actual creation or taking or writing I had witnessed, if I lived long enough or not even necessarily that long, everything becomes remote so quickly. That museum, the Imperial War Museum, was very close to the headquarters or head office of MI6, that is, the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, in Vauxhall Cross, which was far from being architecturally secret, it verged, rather, on the flamboyant, on the prominent rather than the discreet, a ziggurat, a lighthouse; and it was very close to the building with no name to which I went every morning over what seemed to me a long period, even though I didn't know then that it would be for me another place of work, of which I've already had quite a few.

  'Do you collect them, Peter?' I asked as I studied them. We sat for a moment on the chairs Wheeler had in his garden, they were protected by canvas or waterproof covers and arranged around a small table, he got the chairs out in early spring and took them in again in late autumn, when the days began to grow shorter, but he and Mrs Berry kept them covered up depending on what the day was like, on most days, in fact; the weather is always so changeable in England; that's why they have the expression 'as changeable as the weather', which they apply, for example, to very fickle people. We sat down directly on the canvas covers, the colour of pale gabardine, they were perfectly dry, a pause so that we could more easily sort out and arrange the drawings on the table, which was also covered, the tables and chairs disguised as modern sculptures, or tethered ghosts. There had been similar furniture in Rylands's garden, I recalled, in his nearby garden beside this same river.

  'Yes, more or less, there are some things that one wants to remember as clearly as possible. Although it's more Mrs Berry who collects them, she's interested too and she goes to London more often than I do. You never think to keep the unimportant things when they occur in your own time, when they exist naturally, you think of them as easily available and assume they always will be. Later, they become real rarities, and before you know it, they're relics, you just have to see the silly things they sell at auctions nowadays, simply because they're not made any more and so they can't be found. There are collections of picture cards from forty years ago which fetch the most exorbitant prices, and the people who bid for them like mad things are usually the same ones who collected them as children and who, as young adults, threw them out or gave them away, who knows, perhaps, after a long journey, after the albums have passed through many hands, they're buying back the ones they themselves once collected and filed with such childish perseverance. It's a curse, the present, it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing. Whoever decided that we should live in the present played a very nasty trick on us,' said Wheeler jokingly, and then showed me the drawings, his index finger trembled slightly: 'Look, you can see now what they were recommending. It's odd, isn't it, especially seen from a modern perspective, in these voracious, unrestrained times, so incapable of not asking questions or of keeping silent.'

  One showed a warship sinking on the high seas in the middle of the night, doubtless having been hit by a torpedo, the sky is full of smoke and the glow of flames, and a few survivors are rowing away from it in a boat, though, like any crew member or shipwreck victim, without turning their backs on it, their gaze fixed on the disaster from which they have only half-escaped. 'A few careless words may end in this,' said the caption of what must have been a poster, or perhaps an advertisement from a magazine; and in smaller print: 'Many lives were lost in the last war through careless talk. Be on your guard! Don't discuss movements of ships or troops.' The 'last war' was the 1914-18 war, of which Wheeler retained direct, childhood memories, when he was still called Rylands.

  Another depicted a more worldly scene: an attractive woman lounges in an armchair (necklace, evening dress, corsage, long, painted fingernails) and stares coolly and mockingly ahead while she is encircled and courted and fawned upon by three officers at a party, each holding a cigarette and a drink, they are presumably regaling her with tales of recent escapades or announcing imminent exploits in order to impress her, or else talking amongst themselves, unconcerned that the woman might be listening to them. The caption says: 'Keep mum, she's

  not so dumb!' (in Spanish: 'Chiton, ella no es tan tonta!', although in English there is a play on the word 'dumb' which means both 'silent' and 'stupid', and which also rhymes with 'mum'). In red letters underneath is the main campaign slogan: 'Careless talk costs lives.'

  Another was even more explicit and didactic, and warned of the possible chain of communication, unwitting and uncontrollable, to which the spoken word is always vulnerable, and here the spy — male or female — is not there at the start, listening, but waiting at the end. The drawing was divided into four parts, two with a red background and two with a white background. The picture at top left showed a sailor talking to a young blonde woman (his girlfriend, his sister, perhaps a friend) whom he has no reason to distrust, on the contrary, she listens with disinterested interest (that is, she is more interested in him than in what he reveals to her or tells her), and gazes at him admiringly, almost spellbound. Underneath, in capital letters, is the word 'TELLING'. The next picture, top right, shows the same young blonde woman chatting to a female friend with brown hair drawn up on top of her head and who is listening with a look of amazement on her face, but her interest seems less disinterested: she is, at the very least, savouring in advance the prospect of passing on this titbit of news; she may not be ill-intentioned, but simply gossipy, one of those people who enjoy retailing and acquiring any hot news to show how well-informed they are and thus surprising others with how much they know about everything. Underneath, in lower-case letters, is printed: 'a friend may'. The picture at bottom left shows the woman with the brown hair telling what she has heard to another female friend, this woman has black hair parted in the middle and arranged in a kind of low bun, she has cold, almond-shaped eyes and an interested expression on her face, an expression which, this time, is entirely self-interested, for as she is listening, she is thinking of the next person she will speak to, and to whom she will give not just a snippet of news, but some very valuable information. Underneath, again in lower case, is printed: 'mean telling'. Lastly, the picture bottom right showed the third woman, the one with the black hair — her eyes malevolently closed — almost whispering into the ear of a fair-haired man with shifty eyes and very hard features, doubtless a ruthless Nazi whose next step will not be to tell someone else, but to act, to take measures that will probably result in the deaths of many men, including that of the guilty and innocent sailor. Underneath, the letters were once more printed in upper case, 'THE ENEMY', and so the whole message was 'TELLING a friend may mean telling THE ENEMY', the principal message being the one conveyed by those capital letters set against the red background. I couldn't help smiling to myself and noticing the careful gradation of the three women: the 'good' one was blonde with shortish hair and wore a simple, modest white bow around her neck; the 'frivolous' or 'silly' one wore her brown hair swept up and had a necklace on (she was more of a coquette); the 'bad' one, the spy, had black hair arranged rather more elaborately, and around her neck she was wearing a kind of black choker with a lustrous, greenish-coloured brooch in the middle, and she was also the only one to wear earrings (she was doubtless a proper femme fatale). Many of my female compatriots, amongst them my mother, would, I thought, have received a very bad press in Englan
d at that time.

  Another drawing showed an infantryman looking straight out at us: a middle-aged man (a veteran) with a cigarette between his lips and the forefinger of his left hand resting on his temple underneath his helmet, recommending us to 'Keep it under your hat', an idiom that translates into Spanish as 'De esto, ni palabra' or 'De esto no sueltes prenda' or perhaps in purer and slightly more antiquated Spanish: ' Guárdatelo para tu coleto'. And at the top, in red letters, "Ware spies!'

  'Were these intended mainly for the forces, these posters?' I asked Wheeler.

  'Yes, but not solely,' he replied with a slight tremor in his voice. 'That's the most interesting thing, the message wasn't intended just for soldiers, who knew more and so needed to take more care and be more discreet, but for everyone, including civilians. Look at these.' And he removed from his file a few other examples which were, indeed, not addressed to the military alone, but to the whole population.

  Some were cartoons. One showed a man talking on the phone inside one of those red public telephone boxes that you occasionally still see in England: according to the caption, he was saying '. . . but for heaven's sake, don't say I told you!', while around the walls and roof of the booth appear the cloned faces of fourteen or fifteen small Hitlers. Another showed two ladies sitting on the Underground, and one was saying to the other: 'You never know who's listening!' A couple of seats behind them sit two uniformed Nazi bigwigs, one thin, the other fat and heavily bemedalled, the former also resembled Hitler. In another poster, based perhaps on a photograph, an ordinary man wearing tie, raincoat and cap (possibly a Cockney) seemed to wink at the viewer and say: 'What I know — I keep to myself.' There were others intended to persuade children and, by imitation, to inculcate in them the importance of keeping silent ('Be like Dad, Keep Mum!'), or purely typographical official warnings with no illustration ('Thousands of lives were lost in the last war through valuable information being revealed to the enemy through careless talk. Be on your guard!'), which must have filled the noticeboards and pinboards of offices and schools and pubs and factories, as well as streets, walls, the insides of trains and buses, railway and Underground stations. Others explained, in verse, why censorship was being imposed on apparently innocuous information which, in time of peace, would have been issued without any difficulty, which would, indeed, have been mandatory, for example, the reasons for a train being delayed or stopping or arriving very late: 'In peace-time railways could explain/When fog or ice held up your train/But now the country's waging war/To tell you why's against the law . . ./That's because it would be news /The Germans could not fail to use . . .' (a display of consideration and public spirit, explaining to the population

  why it was not possible to explain). And there were still more posters addressed to the members of the armed forces, whose carelessness could place everyone, as well, of course, as themselves, in greatest danger. A soldier in a helmet and with a telephone for a body warned: 'Stop! Think twice before making any trunk calls.' Or a uniformed man and woman with only feet and head visible behind a blue screen that concealed their respective ranks and was emblazoned, in white letters, with the word 'CENSORED'; the young man and woman were standing with the lighted ends of their cigarettes pressed together, one was giving the other a light and thus joining their lips, albeit with the interposition of tobacco and fire (smoking wasn't frowned upon or persecuted then, so things weren't all bad), but, they were warned: 'Your units must not be disclosed!' Most of the posters insisted, however, on the fundamental campaign slogan: 'Careless talk costs lives', 'Las conversaciones imprudentes cuestan vidas'. Although another not entirely unfaithful translation might be: 'se cobran vidas'.

  'I have a vague recollection that during our Civil War there were similar warnings against fifth columnists, but I'm not sure, can you remember, Peter?' I asked. 'There's a slogan going round in my head along the lines of "The enemy has a thousand ears", but I may be inventing it, I'm not sure, on the other hand, I haven't any images stored away, any equivalents to the kind of thing you've shown me, I can't remember ever having seen them reproduced.' I really didn't know, but it wasn't impossible that this was another initiative we had exported. Or perhaps I was getting it confused in my memory with the defamatory poster against the POUM in the spring of 1937, a face stamped with a swastika appearing from beneath a mask bearing the hammer and sickle; Nin had been the victim of the half-justified paranoia that made people see Franco's spies and collaborators on every corner, or, rather, his enemies had made use of that paranoia to accuse him of treachery and espionage. He was accused of having informed, of having talked, and that, paradoxically, is what his torturers could never force him to do.

  He remained silent and did not save himself, he kept his mouth shout, he did not blab, he did not say a word, in short, 'he kept mum', what he knew he kept to himself or under his hat, or perhaps he said nothing because the accusations were all false, he would have had to invent some tall tales and stories in order to acknowledge and support them, to admit that he was the 'Trojan horse' as that poetic 'lover of the truth' and 'worthy Don Quixote' later described him in that 'lamp-light glow' of a voice which so bewitched Trapp-Tello, such a very slanderous voice.

  'Last night I told you that before the war against Germany I had been briefly involved in yours, and I usually express myself with great precision, Jacobo. And I believe I am now. That means, I did not spend much time in Spain. I was just passing through,' Wheeler replied, and I noticed a slight touch of impatience in his voice, as if he were rather put out that I should, at that precise moment, want to drag in another war and another time, however closely related it was to his war and however close in time it might have been. 'But anyway, although I couldn't swear to it, I can't remember having seen such a thing in your country, I haven't read or heard anything about it either. If I'm not mistaken, though, there were posters, a campaign against fifth columnists; the populations of Madrid and Barcelona and possibly Valencia were urged to hunt them down and unmask them, to drag them out of the sewers and kill them, and it was the same on the other side: they were urged to track down and destroy intriguers, not that there would have been many left in an area full of talkative father-confessors, but that was what was asked of them. Obviously, they told people to keep their eyes open and to watch the rearguard, as they also did rather timidly, I believe, during the First World War, here and in France. But I don't think there was ever a campaign like this one against "careless talk", in which they not only put civilians on guard against possible spies, but recommended silence as the norm: people were prevailed upon not to speak, they were ordered, indeed, exhorted to keep silent. Suddenly people were made to see their own language as an invisible enemy, uncontrollable, unexpected and unpredictable, as the worst, most murderous and most fearful of enemies, like a terrible weapon which you, or anyone, could activate and set off without ever knowing when it might unleash a bullet, or if it would be transformed into torpedoes that would sink one of our battleships in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles away, or into bombs from a Junkers that would strike with deadly accuracy at our neighbourhoods and our houses, or fall on those military targets that most needed to be safeguarded and defended, on the most secret and most camouflaged and most vital of targets. I don't know if you quite realise what it meant, Jacobo: people were warned against using their main form of communication; they were made to distrust the very activity in which people most naturally indulge and always have indulged, without reserve, at all times and in all places, not just in this country and at that particular time; it made an enemy of what most defines and unites us: talking, telling, saying, commenting, gossiping, passing on information, criticising, exchanging news, tittle-tattling, defaming, slandering and spreading rumours, describing and relating events, keeping up to date and putting others in the picture, and, of course, joking and lying. That is the wheel that moves the world, Jacobo, more than anything else; that is the engine of life, the one that never becomes exhausted and never stops, that i
s its life's breath. And suddenly people were asked to turn it off, that engine, to stop it breathing. They were asked to give up the thing they most love, that is most indispensable to them, the thing we all live for and which everyone, without exception, can enjoy and make use of, both poor and rich, uneducated and educated, old and young, the sick and the healthy, soldiers and civilians. If there's one thing that they do or we do which is not a strict physiological necessity, if there is one thing that is truly common to all beings endowed with free will, it is talking, Jacobo. The fatal word. The curse of the word. Talking and talking, without stopping, that is the one thing for which no one ever lacks ammunition. Grammatical, syntactical and lexical skills matter little, oratorial gifts still less, and pronunciation, diction, accent, euphony, rhythm even less. The wisest man in the world will talk with greater order, appropriateness and precision, and perhaps to his listeners' greater advantage, or, rather, only to the advantage of those listeners who resemble him or want to resemble him. But he will not talk any more fluently than the semi-literate housewife who talks non-stop all day and who only stops at night because sleep and her sore, much-abused throat finally get the better of her. The most widely travelled man in the world will be able to tell endless marvellous and delightful stories, innumerable anecdotes about adventures in outlandish, remote, exotic and dangerous places. But he will not necessarily talk with any more confidence than the rough innkeeper who has never been further than his own bar and has only ever seen the twenty streets and two or three squares that make up his obscure village. The most inspired poet or the most zigzagging of narrators will be able to invent and recite on demand a stream of hypnotic words that will sound like music, so much so that those listening will not worry overmuch about the meaning, or, rather, they will capture the meaning effortlessly and without having to think about it before grasping or absorbing it, the process will be entirely simultaneous, although afterwards, when the music has stopped, those listeners might be quite incapable of repeating or summarising it, incapable possibly of continuing to understand what a moment ago they understood so well while they were rocked by the rhythm and while the enchantment lasted, resting as lightly upon the mind as upon the ear, each as permeable as the other. But those poets and narrators will not necessarily speak with more assurance or ease than the ignorant office worker, repetitive and dull, who believes himself to be full of "donaire" and "gratia", a tedious fixture in all the offices of the world, regardless of latitude or climate, even in the offices of interpreters and spies . . .'