Yes, I did remember, almost word for word, on no other occasion had Rylands spoken to me with such intensity, so immersed in his own memory and with such disregard for his own will. It was true: he didn’t like sharing his memories with others, and disliked revealing anything.
‘We were talking about death,’ I said. (‘The worst thing about the approach of death isn’t death itself and what it may or may not bring, it’s the fact that one can no longer fantasise about things still to come,’ Rylands had said, sitting in a chair in his garden next to the same slow river that we could see now, the River Cherwell with its muddy waters, except that Rylands’s house gave on to a wilder, more magical, and far less soothing stretch of water. Occasionally swans would appear, and he would throw them bits of bread.)
‘About death? That’s odd too,’ remarked Wheeler. ‘It’s odd that Toby should talk about that, odd that anyone should, especially once it’s inevitable, because of infirmity or old age. Or, indeed, character.’ (‘Wheeler is talking about it now,’ I thought, ‘but more because he’s an intelligent man than because of his age.’)
‘Cromer-Blake was already very ill, and we were worried then about what did, in the end, happen. Talking about that and about how little time there was left led Toby to speak of the past.’ (‘I’ve had what is commonly referred to as a full life, at least that’s how I regard it,’ Rylands had said. ‘I haven’t had a wife or children, but I’ve had a life spent in the acquisition of knowledge and that was what mattered to me. I’ve always gone on finding out more than I knew before, and it doesn’t matter where you put that “before”, even if it’s only today or tomorrow.’)
‘And is that when he told you what he had done, about his adventures?’ asked Wheeler, and I thought I noticed a touch of apprehension in his voice, as if he were referring to something more specific than having collaborated with MI6 which, in Oxford, was, after all, something trivial, commonplace.
‘He wanted to explain to me that he’d had a full life, that he hadn’t, as it might seem, devoted himself solely to study and knowledge and teaching,’ I replied. (‘But I’ve had a full life, too, in the sense that my life’s been crammed with action and the unexpected,’ Rylands had said.) ‘And that was when he confirmed the rumours I’d heard, that he’d been a spy, that was the word he used. And I assumed that he’d belonged to MI5, it didn’t occur to me to think of MI6, perhaps because it’s less familiar to us Spaniards. ’
‘That’s what he told you.’ There was no interrogative tone. ‘He used that word. H’m,’ murmured Wheeler, as so many people in Oxford did, including Rylands. ‘H’m.’ Seeing Peter so thoughtful and full of curiosity, it seemed to me selfish and unkind not to fill in the context, which I remembered so well, and not to quote to him verbatim his younger brother’s words. ‘H’m,’ he said again.
‘“As you’ll no doubt have heard,” he said, “I was a spy, like so many of us here, because that, too, can form part of our duties; but I was never just a pen-pusher like that fellow Dewar in your department, indeed like most of them. I worked in the field.”’ I could tell by the look in Wheeler’s eyes that he had noticed that his brother had used some of the same expressions he had just used.
‘Did he say anything else?’ he asked.
‘Yes, he did: he talked for quite a long time, almost as if I wasn’t there, and he added a few other things too. For example: “I’ve been in India and in the Caribbean and in Russia and I’ve done things I could never tell anyone about now, because they would seem so ridiculous that no one would believe me, I know only too well that what one can and cannot tell depends very much on timing, because I’ve dedicated my life to identifying just that in literature and I’ve learned to identify it in life too.’”
‘Toby was right about that, there are things that can’t be told now — or only with great difficulty — even though they really happened. The facts of war sound puerile in times of relative peace, and just because something happened doesn’t mean it can be talked about, just because it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s plausible. With the passing of time, the truth can seem unlikely; it fades into the background, and then seems more like a fable or simply not true at all. Even some of my own experiences seem like fiction to me. They were important experiences, but the times that follow begin to doubt them, perhaps not one’s own time, but the entirely new eras, and it’s those new eras that make what came before and what they didn’t see seem unimportant, almost as if they were somehow jealous of them. Often the present infantilises the past, it tends to transform it into something invented and childish, and renders it useless to us, spoils it for us.’ He paused, nodded at the cigarette I had hesitantly raised to my lips after drinking my coffee (I was afraid the smoke might bother them at that hour). He looked out of the window at the river, at his stretch of the river, more civilised and harmonious than Toby Rylands’s. He had momentarily lost all his previous haste and impatience, which is what usually happens when one remembers the dead. ‘Who knows, maybe that’s partly why we die: because everything we’ve experienced is reduced to nothing, and then even our memories languish and fade. First, it’s our personal experiences. Then it’s our memories.’
‘So everything also has its moment not to be believed.’
Wheeler smiled vaguely, almost regretfully. He had picked up on my inversion of the words he had used a short while before, of the possible motto that he shared with Tupra, if it was a motto and not just a coincidence of ideas, yet another affinity between them.
‘But nevertheless he told you,’ Wheeler murmured, and what I sensed now in his voice was, I thought, not so much apprehension as fatalism or defeat or resignation, in short, surrender.
‘Don’t be so sure, Peter. He did and he didn’t. He may have dropped his guard sometimes, but he never entirely lost his will, I don’t think, nor did he say more than he was aware he wanted to say. Even if that awareness was distant or hidden, or muffled. Just like you.’
‘What else did he tell and not tell you, then?’ He ignored my last comment, or kept it for later on.
‘He didn’t really tell me anything, he just talked. He said: “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this now, but the fact is that in my lifetime I’ve run mortal risks and betrayed men whom I had nothing against personally. I’ve saved a few people’s lives too, but sent others to the firing squad or the gallows. I’ve lived in Africa, in the most unlikely places, in other times, and was even a witness to the suicide of the person I loved.’”
‘He said that, “I was even a witness to the suicide …”’ Wheeler didn’t complete the phrase. He was astonished, or possibly annoyed. ‘And was that all? Did he say who or what happened?’
‘No. I remember that he stopped short then, as if his will or his conscious mind had sent a warning to his memory, to stop him overstepping the mark; then he added: “Oh, and battles, I’ve been a witness to those too,” I remember it clearly. Then he went on talking, but about the present. He said no more about his past, or only in very general terms. Even more general, that is.’
‘May I ask what those terms were?’ Wheeler’s question sounded not forceful, but timid, as if he were asking my permission; it was almost a plea.
‘Of course, Peter,’ I replied, and there was no reserve or insincerity in my voice. ‘He said that his head was full of bright, shining memories, frightening and thrilling, and that anyone seeing all of them together, as he could, would think they were more than enough, that the simple remembering of so many fascinating facts and people would fill one’s old age more intensely than most people’s present.’ I paused for a moment to give him time to listen to the words inside him. ‘Those, pretty much, were the terms he used or what he said. And he added that it wasn’t, in fact, like that. That it wasn’t like that for him. He did still want more, he said. He still wanted everything, he said.’
Wheeler now seemed at once relieved and saddened and uneasy, or perhaps he was none of those things, perhaps he was simply moved. It probabl
y wasn’t like that for him either, however many bright, shining memories he had. Probably nothing was enough to fill the days of his old age, despite all his efforts and his machinations.
‘And you believed all that,’ he said.
‘I had no reason not to,’ I replied. ‘Besides, he was telling me the truth, sometimes you just know, without a shadow of a doubt, that someone is telling you the truth. Not often, it’s true,’ I added. ‘But there are occasions when you have not the slightest doubt about it.’
‘Do you remember when this took place, this conversation?’
‘Yes, it was in Hilary term during my second year here, towards the end of March.’
‘So a couple of years before he died, is that right?’
‘More or less, or perhaps a bit more. I think he may not have even introduced us yet, you and me. You and I must have met for the first time in Trinity term of that year, shortly before I returned to Madrid for good.’
‘We were already quite old then, Toby and I, well into our emeritus years both of us. I never thought I would be so much older, I don’t know how he would have coped with all the additional time that I’ve had and he hasn’t. Badly I suspect, worse than me. He complained more because he was more optimistic than me, and therefore more passive too, don’t you agree, Estelle?’
I was surprised that he should suddenly address Mrs Berry by her first name, I had never heard him do so before, and yet he and I had often been alone together, but he had always addressed her as ‘Mrs Berry’. I wondered if the nature of the conversation had something to do with it. As if he were opening up for me one door or several (I didn’t yet know which one or how many), amongst them that of his unseen daily life. She always called him ‘Professor’, which in Oxford does not mean ‘lecturer’ or ‘teacher’ as it does in Spanish, but chair or head of department, and there is only one professor in each subfaculty, the others being merely ‘dons’. And this time Mrs Berry responded by calling him ‘Peter’. That’s what they must call each other when they’re alone, Peter and Estelle, I thought. It was, however, impossible to know if they addressed each other as ‘tú’, since in present-day English only ‘you’ exists, and there is no distinction made between ‘tú and ‘usted’.
‘Yes, Peter, you’re right.’ I decided to imagine that had they been speaking in Spanish, they would have used ‘usted’, as I always did mentally when speaking to Wheeler in his language. ‘He always assumed that people would come to him and that things would happen of their own accord, and so he tended perhaps to feel more let down. I don’t know quite whether he was more optimistic or simply prouder. But he never went after people and things himself. He didn’t seek them out the way you do.’ Mrs Berry spoke in her usual calm, discreet tone, I could not detect the slightest variation.
‘Pride and optimism are not necessarily mutually exclusive characteristics, Estelle,’ replied Wheeler in slightly professorial mode. ‘He was the one who told me about you,’ he went on to say, looking at me, and then I did notice a distinct change from the tone of voice he had used before: the fog had lifted (the apprehension or irritation or sense of doom), as if, after a few moments of alarm, he had been reassured to learn that I did not know too much about Rylands, despite the latter’s unexpected confidences to me that day in Hilary term during my second year in Oxford. That his reminiscences had not entailed a complete surrender of his will when I was present, and perhaps, therefore, not while anyone else was present either. That I knew about his past as a spy and a few imprecise facts without date or place or names, but nothing more. He felt once more in control of the situation after a brief moment of disequilibrium, I could see it in his eyes, I could hear it in the slight hint of didacticism in his voice. It doubtless made him feel uneasy to discover that he was not in possession of all the facts, always assuming he had believed he was, and he once more took it for granted that he had them all, those he needed or that afforded him a sense of ease and comfort. In the now rather late morning light his eyes looked very transparent, less mineral than they usually did and much more liquid, like Toby Rylands’s eyes, or like his right eye at least, the one that was the colour of sherry or the colour of olive oil depending on how the sun caught it, and which predominated and assimilated his other eye when seen from a distance: or perhaps it is simply that one dares to see more similarities between people when you know there is a blood relationship to back you up. Wheeler had still not explained to me about their hitherto unknown kinship, but it had taken barely any effort on my part to apply that correction to my thought and to see them no longer as friends, but as brothers. Or as brothers as well as friends, for that is what they must have been. Wheeler’s eyes seemed to me now more like two large drops of rosé wine. ‘It was Toby who suggested to me that you might perhaps be like us,’ he added.
‘What do you mean “like us”? What do you mean? What did he mean?’
Wheeler did not reply directly. The truth is he rarely did.
‘There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo. There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there’s a real dearth, it’s no cliché or exaggeration to describe us now as an endangered species. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don’t even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that’s a capital offence, it smacks of lèse-humanité, an attack on the dignity of the prejudged, of the prejudger, of everyone. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror. They require proof and verification of everything; the benefit of the doubt, as they call it, has invaded everything, leaving not a single sphere uncolonised, and it has ended up paralysing us, making us, formally speaking, impartial, scrupulous and ingenuous, but, in practice, making fools of us all, utter necios.’ That last word he said in Spanish, doubtless because there is no English word that resembles it phonetically or etymologically: ‘utter necios,’ he said, mixing the two languages. ‘Necios in the strict sense of the word, in the Latin sense of nescius, one who knows nothing, who lacks knowledge, or as the dictionary of the Real Academia Española puts it, do you know the definition it gives? “Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known.” Isn’t that extraordinary? That is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning. Un satisfecho insipiente.’ He resorted to Spanish for both the quote and for the last few words, which mean, more or less, ‘nincompoop’; in other languages one always remembers terms that are no longer in use or are unknown to native speakers. ‘And that’s how it is in our pusillanimous countries, people are educated from childhood on to be necios, fools. It isn’t a natural evolution or degeneration, it doesn’t happen by chance, it’s conscious, calculated, institutional. It’s a programme for the formation of minds, or for their annihilation (the annihilation of character, ça va sans dire!). People hate certainty; and that hatred began as a fashion, it was deemed trendy to reject certainties, simpletons put them in the same bag as dogmas and doctrines, the dolts (and there were a few intellectuals amongst them too), as if they were synonymous. But the idea has proved a tremendous success, it’s taken root with a vengeance. Now people hate anything definite or sure, and, consequently, anything that is fixed in time; and that is partly why people detest the past, unless they can manage to contaminate it with their own hesitancy, or infect it with the present’s lack of definition, which they try to do all the time. Nowadays people cannot bear to know that something existed; that it existed and in a particular way. What they cannot bear is not so much knowing that, as the mere fact of its existence. Just that: that it did exist. Withou
t our intervention, without our considered opinion, how can I put it, without our infinite indecision or our scrupulous acquiescence. Without our much-loved uncertainty as impartial witness. This era is so proud, Jacobo, far prouder than any other, certainly since I’ve been in the world or before that either, I should think (it makes Hitler look tame). Bear in mind that when I get up each morning, I have to make a real effort and to resort to the help of much younger friends like you in order to forget that I can actually remember the First World War, or what you young people call, to my great disgust and displeasure, the 14–18 War. Bear in mind that one of the first words I learned and retained, from hearing it so often, was “Gallipoli”, it seems incredible that I was already alive when that massacre took place. The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present’s resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without our gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all is that this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendours that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even the shadow or mist or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it’s just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us. It has escaped our control and our manoeuvrings and our decisions, despite all these leaders going around apologising for the outrages committed by their ancestors, even seeking to make amends by offering offensive gifts of money to the descendants of the aggrieved, regardless of how gladly those descendants may pocket those gifts and even demand them, for they, too, are opportunists, an eye on the main chance. Have you ever seen anything more stupid or farcical: cynicism on the part of those who give, cynicism on the part of those who receive. It’s just another act of pride: how can a pope, a king or a prime minister assume the right to attribute to his Church, to his Crown or to his country, to those who are alive now, the crimes of their predecessors, crimes which those same predecessors did not see or recognise as such all those centuries ago? Who do our representatives and our governments think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? If it was purely symbolic, it would be mere oafish affectation or propaganda. However, symbolism is out of the question as long as there are offers of “compensation”, grotesquely retrospective monetary ones to boot. A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life: they are lost for ever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are now formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, of their broken bones and slit throats. Of the real and unknown names of which they were stripped or which they renounced. 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 the 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.’
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear Page 24