‘My impression is that there are no serious plans for a coup d’état. Or if there are, then this man will play no part in it or will have very little say in the matter. I assume you’ve checked his identity. If he’s a soldier in exile or no longer in the army, or retired, an opponent with contacts in the country, but who acts from outside, then it’s likely that his task is to raise funds based on nothing or based only on the vaguest of plans and on very tenuous information. And his own pockets may be the final destination for whatever money he does collect, after all, people tend not to ask questions or provide answers about money spent on abortive clandestine operations. If, on the other hand, he still is a soldier and has some authority, and is living in the country, and presents himself to us as someone regretfully betraying his leader for the good of the nation, then it’s not impossible that the Comandante himself has sent him, to put out some feelers, to get in early, to make some enquiries, to be forewarned, and, if the opportunity arises, to raise funds from abroad that will doubtless end up in Chávez’s own pockets, quite a clever move really. I also think that he might be neither one nor the other, that is, that he may not be and may never have been a military man. Anyway, I don’t think he’s behind anything serious, anything that would actually happen. As he himself said, the truth is what happens, which is a rough-and-ready way of saying just that. I would guess that this plan of his is never going to come to anything, with or without support, with or without financial help, internal, external or interplanetary.’ I had got carried away by my own boldness, I stopped. I wondered if Tupra would say something now, even if only about the title under which the Venezuelan had presented himself to him (I had deliberately said ‘presents himself to us’, seeing that I was now included). ‘If he doesn’t,’ I thought, ‘he’s obviously one of those people who is impossible to draw out, and who only says what he really means or what he knows he can safely reveal.’ ‘All this is pure speculation, of course,’ I added. ‘Impressions, intuitions. You did ask me for my impressions.’
Now he too lit his cigarette, his precious, saliva-sodden Rameses II. He probably couldn’t stand to see me enjoying mine, or, rather, his, fifty pence going up in smoke in someone else’s mouth, in, what’s more, a continental mouth. He coughed a little after the first puff of that piquant Egyptian blend, perhaps he only smoked two or three a day and never quite got used to it.
‘Yes, I realise you can’t know anything for sure,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t either, or not much more. But, tell me, why do you think that?’
I continued to improvise, or so I thought.
‘Well, the man definitely looks the part of the Latin American military man, I’m afraid they’re not much different from their Spanish counterparts twenty or twenty-five years ago, they all have moustaches and they never smile. His appearance just cried out for a uniform, a cap, and a super-abundance of medals festooning his chest, as if they were cartridge belts. Yet there were some details that just didn’t fit. They made me think that he wasn’t a military man disguised as a civilian, as I at first thought, but a civilian disguised as a military man disguised as a civilian, if you see what I mean. They’re really insignificant details,’ I said apologetically. ‘And it’s not as if I’ve had many dealings with the military, I’m hardly an expert.’ I broke off, my momentary boldness was fading.
‘That doesn’t matter. And I do see what you mean. Tell me, what details?’
‘Well, they’re really tiny things. He used, how can I put it, inappropriate language. Either soldiers nowadays aren’t what they used to be, and have been infected by the ridiculous pedantry of politicians and television newscasters, or the man simply isn’t a military man; or he was, but hasn’t seen active service for a long time. And that gesture of tucking in his shirt was too spontaneous, like someone used to civilian clothes. I know it’s silly, and soldiers do sometimes wear a suit and tie, or a shirt if it’s hot, and it is hot in Venezuela. I just felt that he wasn’t a soldier, or else had been out of the army and hadn’t worn an army jacket for some time, or had been removed from his post, I don’t know. Or hadn’t worn even a guayabera or a liki-liki or whatever they call them over there, they’re always worn outside the trousers. And I felt, too, he was overly preoccupied with the crease in his trousers, and with creases in general, but then you get vain, dapper officers everywhere.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Tupra. ‘Liki-liki,’ he said, but didn’t ask any more. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, perhaps you noticed his boots. Short boots. They may have looked black from a distance or in a bad light, but they were bottle-green in colour and looked like crocodile, or possibly alligator. I can’t imagine any high-ranking officer wearing footwear like that, not even on his days of absolute leisure or total abandon. They seemed more suited to a drug-dealer or a ranch-hand on the loose in the big city or something.’ I felt like a minor Sherlock or, rather, a fake Holmes. I leaned back my chair a little in the sudden hope of catching sight of Tupra’s feet. I hadn’t noticed what he was wearing, and it had suddenly occurred to me that he might be wearing similar boots and that I might be making a grave mistake. He was an Englishman: it was unlikely, but one never knows and he did have a strange surname. And he always wore a vest, a bad sign that. As it turned out, I was unlucky, I couldn’t get far enough back, the desk prevented me from seeing his feet. I went on — although if he was himself sporting some rather eccentric footwear, I was only making matters worse: ‘Of course, in a country where the Commander-in-Chief appears in public dressed to look like the national flag and wearing a beret that’s a shade of brothel red, as he did recently on television, it’s not impossible that his generals and colonels do wear boots like that, or sabots or even ballet shoes, in these histrionic times and with a role model like him, anything’s possible.’
‘Sabots?’ asked Tupra, perhaps more out of amusement than because he hadn’t understood me. ‘Sabots?’ he said, since that was the term I had used: thanks to the translation classes I taught in Oxford and to my time spent toiling for various slave-drivers, I know the most absurd words in English.
‘Yes, you know, those wooden shoes with pointed tips like onions. Nurses wear them and the Flemish, of course, at least they do in their paintings. I think geishas do as well, don’t they, with socks?’
Tupra gave a short laugh, and so did I. Perhaps he had had a sudden image of the Venezuelan gentleman wearing clogs. Or perhaps Chávez himself, in thick-soled clogs and white socks. On a first meeting and at a party, Tupra struck one as a nice man. He did on a second meeting too and in his office, although there he let it be understood that he could never entirely forget the serious nature of his work, nor be entirely contained by it either.
‘Did you say he dresses to look like the national flag? You presumably meant draped in the flag, did you?’ he added.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The print on his shirt or army jacket, I can’t remember quite what he was wearing, was the flag itself, complete with stars.’
‘Stars? I can’t remember the Venezuelan flag at the moment. Stars?’ To my relief, he did not appear to have taken my comments about the shoes personally.
‘It’s striped, I think. A red stripe and a yellow one, I seem to recall, and possibly a blue one too. And there’s a sprinkling of stars on it somewhere. The President was definitely adorned with stars, of that I’m sure, and broad stripes, an army jacket or a shirt with horizontal stripes in those colours or similar. And stars. It was probably a liki-liki, which is a shirt they wear for special occasions, I think, well, they do in Colombia, I’m not sure about Venezuela.’
‘Stars indeed,’ he said. He gave another short laugh, and I did too. Laughter creates a kind of disinterested bond between men, and between women, and the bond it establishes between women and men can prove an even stronger, tighter link, a profounder, more complex, more dangerous and more lasting link, or one, at least, with more hope of enduring. Such lasting, disinterested bonds can become strained after a while, t
hey can sometimes become ugly and difficult to bear, in the long term, someone has to be the debtor, that’s the only way things can work, one person must always be slightly more indebted to the other, and commitment and abnegation and worthiness can provide a sure way of making off with the position of creditor. I’ve often laughed with Luisa like that, briefly and unexpectedly, both of us seeing the funny side of something quite independently, both us laughing briefly at the same time. With other women too, with my sister first of all; and with a few others. The quality of that laughter, its spontaneity (its simultaneity with mine perhaps) has led me, on occasions, to meet a woman and approach her or even to dismiss her at once, and with some women it’s as if I’ve seen them in their entirety before even meeting them, without even talking, without them having looked at me and with me barely having looked at them. On the other hand, even a slight delay or the faintest suspicion of mimetism, of an indulgent response to my stimulus or my lead, the merest suggestion of a polite or sycophantic laugh — a laugh that is not entirely disinterested, but is egged on by the will, the laugh that does not laugh as much as it would like to or as much as it allows itself or yearns or even condescends to laugh — is enough for me promptly to remove myself from its presence or to relegate it immediately to second place, to that of mere accompaniment, or even, in times of weakness and a consequent slide in standards, to that of cortège. But the other kind of laughter — Luisa’s, which almost anticipates our own laughter, my sister’s, which wraps around us, young Pérez Nuix’s, which fuses with our own and about which there is no hint of deliberation and in which we two are almost forgotten (although there is also detachment and arbitrariness and equality) — I have tended to give that a prime role which has subsequently turned out to be lasting or not, even dangerous at times, and, in the long run (when it has lasted that long), difficult to sustain without the appearance or intervention of some small debt, whether real or symbolic. However, the absence or diminution of that laughter is even harder to bear, and always brings with it the day when one of the two is obliged to get a little deeper into debt. Luisa had withdrawn her laughter from me some time ago, or else was rationing it out, I couldn’t believe she had lost it entirely, she would still, surely, offer it to others, but when someone withdraws their laughter from us, that is a sign that there is nothing more to be done. It is a disarming laugh. It disarms women and, in a different way, men too. I have desired women — intensely — for their laughter alone, and they have usually seen that this was so. And sometimes I have known who someone was simply by hearing their laugh or by never hearing it, the brief, unexpected laugh, and even what would happen between that person and me, whether friendship or conflict or irritation or nothing, and I haven’t been far wrong either, it might have taken some time to happen, but it always has, and, besides, there’s always time as long as you don’t die or as long as neither that other person nor I should die. That was Tupra’s laugh and mine too, and so I had to ask myself for a moment whether, in the future, he or I would be disarmed, or if, perhaps, both of us would. ‘Liki-liki,’ he said again. It’s impossible not to repeat such a word, irresistible. ‘Yes, but it’s true, is it not, that one cannot judge the customs of another place from outside?’ he added drily or only half-seriously.
‘True, true,’ I replied, knowing that what he had said was not (true, I mean) for either of us.
‘Anything else?’ he asked. He had given nothing away, not about the man’s identity (I wasn’t expecting him to), but not even about the supposed status or position of the Venezuelan to whom I had served as interpreter twice over. I had another go:
‘Could you give the gentleman a name? Just in case we have to refer to him again.’
Tupra did not hesitate. As if he had an answer already prepared for any attempt at probing, rather than for my curiosity.
‘That seems unlikely. As far as you’re concerned, Mr Deza, his name is Bonanza,’ he said, again mock-seriously.
‘Bonanza?’ He must have noticed my amazement, I couldn’t help pronouncing the ‘z’ as it is pronounced in my own country, or at least in part of it and, of course, in Madrid. To his English ears it would sound something like ‘Bonantha’, just as Deza would sound something like ‘Daytha’.
‘Yes, isn’t that a Spanish name? Like Ponderosa?’ he said. ‘Anyway, he’ll be Bonanza to you and me. Did you notice anything else?’
‘Only to confirm my initial impression, Mr Tupra: General Bonanza or Mr Bonanza, whoever he really is, would never make an attempt on Chávez’s life. Of that you can be sure, whether it suits your interests or not. He admires him too much, even if he is his enemy, which I don’t think he is.’
Tupra picked up the striking red packet with its pharaohs and gods and offered me a second Rameses II, an uncommon gesture in the British Isles, clearly no expense was being spared, Turkish tobacco, a piquant Egyptian blend, and I accepted. But it turned out to be one for the road, not to be smoked immediately, for at the same time as he was giving it to me, he stood up and walked around the desk to show me out, indicating the door with a slight gesture. I took the opportunity to glance down at his shoes, they were sober brown lace-ups, I needn’t have worried. He noticed, he noticed almost everything, all the time.
‘Is something wrong with my shoes?’ he asked.
‘No, no, they’re very nice. And very clean too. Splendid, enviable,’ I said. Unlike my black pair, also lace-ups. The truth was that, in London, I just didn’t have the discipline to clean them every day. There are some things one gets lazy about when away from home and living abroad. Except that I was at home, that is, as I kept forgetting, I had no other home for the moment, sometimes force of habit insisted on my feeling the impossible, that I could still go back.
‘I’ll tell you where to buy them another day.’ He was about to open the door for me, he had still not done so, he remained for a matter of seconds with a hand on each of the handles of the double door. He turned his head, looked at me out of the comer of his eye but did not see me, he couldn’t, I was immediately behind him. It was the first time during the whole of that session that his active, friendly, unwittingly mocking eyes had not met mine. I could see only his long lashes, in profile. They would be even more the envy of the ladies in profile. ‘Earlier on, if I remember rightly, you said something about “leaving aside principles”. Or perhaps “leaving theory aside”.’
‘Yes, I think I did say something like that.’
‘I was wondering.’ He still had his hands on the door handles. ‘Allow me to ask you a question: up to what point would you be capable of leaving aside your principles? I mean up to what point do you usually? That is, disregard it, theory I mean? It’s something we all do now and then; we couldn’t live otherwise, whether out of convenience, fear or need. Or out of a sense of sacrifice or generosity. Out of love, out of hate. To what extent do you?’ he repeated. ‘Do you understand?’
That was when I realised that not only did he notice everything all the time, he recorded and stored it away too. I didn’t like the word ‘sacrifice’, it had a similar effect on me to the expression he had used in Wheeler’s house, ‘serving my country’. He had even added: ‘one should if one can, don’t you think?’ Although he had immediately diluted this with: ‘even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself.’ I too recorded and stored things away, more than is normal.
‘It depends on the reason,’ I replied, and then went on to use a plural since it was, as I understood it, only my principles he was asking me about. ‘I can leave them aside almost completely if it’s just a matter of conversation, less so if I’m called on to make a judgement. Still less if I’m judging friends, because then I’m partial. When it comes to taking action, hardly at all.’
‘Mr Deza, thank you for your co-operation. I hope to be in touch with you again.’ He said this in an appreciative, almost affectionate tone. And this time he did open the door, both leaves at once. I saw his eyes again, more blue than grey in t
he morning light, but still pale, and always seemingly amused by whatever the dialogue or situation happened to be, attentive and always absorbing, as if they honoured what they were looking at, or at which they did not even need to be looking: whatever entered his field of vision. ‘Please be quite clear, however, that here we have no interests,’ he went on to say, even though he was referring to something from further back in the conversation. Most people would not have returned to it, they would not have retrieved that extremely marginal comment of mine (‘whether it suits your interests or not’), it’s incredible how quickly words, pronounced and written, frivolous and serious, all of them, insignificant or significant, get lost, become distant and are left behind. That’s why it’s necessary to repeat, eternally and absurdly to repeat, from the first human babble of sound and even from the first index finger silently pointing. Again and again and again and, vainly, again. Words did not slip quite so easily from our grasp, his and mine, but this was doubtless an anomaly, a curse. ‘We merely give our opinion and only when asked, of course. As you so kindly did now, when I asked you.’ And he again gave that brief laugh, revealing small, bright teeth. It sounded to me like a polite or possibly impatient laugh, and this time, mine did not accompany his.
I was never told directly whether or not I had been right in any way about Colonel Bonanza from Caracas or, should I say, from exile and abroad, I was never told the results, and certainly not directly: they were not my concern, or, possibly, anyone else’s. Probably sometimes there were no results, and the statements or reports would simply be filed away, just in case. And if decisions had to be taken about something (the support and financial backing for a coup, for example), they would doubtless be taken by the various people in charge — by those who had commissioned each report or requested our opinions — with no possibility of verification or certainty and purely at their own risk, that is, trusting or not trusting, accepting or rejecting what Tupra and his people had seen and thought, or perhaps recommended.
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear Page 21