‘What group are you talking about, Peter? You’ve mentioned it several times now.’ I tried a different question. But I no longer felt impatient, that had been just a reflex reaction, a moment. And if he had been in a hurry before, that had probably been due to my lateness in waking up and coming downstairs, which he had not counted upon, any failure to keep to his mental timetables and plans upset and bothered him. But now that I was there with him, he was enjoying intriguing me, enjoying my state of expectation: he wasn’t going to ruin his performance, which he had planned and possibly dreamed about, by rushing things. As expected, he did not answer my new question, but he did, at last, answer my previous one. With only half-truths, of course, or, at most, three-quarter truths. As I have said, he probably didn’t know any whole ones. They probably didn’t even exist.
‘Toby told me that he always admired, and, at the same time, feared, the special gift you had for capturing the distinctive and even essential characteristics, both external and internal, of friends and acquaintances, characteristics which they themselves had often not noticed or known about. Or even people you had only glimpsed or seen in passing, in a meeting or at high table, or whom you had passed a couple of times in the corridors or on the stairs of the Taylorian without exchanging a single word. I understand that, shortly before you left, you even wrote a few sketches of our colleagues for his amusement, is that right?’
I had a vague memory of this. It was so long ago that any trace of it had been erased. You forget much more of what you write than of what you read, assuming it’s addressed to you; much more of what you send than of what you receive, of what you say than of what you hear, your own offences more than those committed against you. And although you may not think so, the process of erasure happens more quickly with those who are dead. A few vignettes, perhaps, yes, a few lines about my colleagues of the time in Oxford, those in the sub-faculty of Spanish, whom Rylands, recently retired Professor of English Literature, knew well, although not as well as Wheeler himself, who was, for years, and up until his retirement, the direct boss of most of them, especially those who were, by then, already veterans. I felt a sudden retrospective shame, I was struggling to remember; perhaps they had been amusing, affectionate sketches, with just a touch of mischief or irony. That is why I felt it best to deny it, at least initially.
‘I don’t remember that,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever written a sketch about anyone. Possibly in conversation, yes. We talked a lot about everything, about everyone.’
‘Can you pass me that file, please, Estelle?’ Wheeler asked Mrs Berry, and she produced one and handed it to him, like a nurse promptly handing a doctor a medical instrument. She must have had it on her lap all that time, like a treasure. Wheeler put it under his arm, or, rather, under his armpit. He got up and said: ‘Let’s go out into the garden for a while, for a stroll on the lawn. I need the exercise and Mrs Berry will need to clear the table if we want to have lunch later on. It’s not that cold now, but you’d better wrap up, that river is treacherous, it gets into your bones before you know it.’ His eyes had resumed their mineral quality, and he added calmly and seriously (or, rather, carefully, as if he were holding on to me with his words, but did not want to frighten me off): ‘Listen, Jacobo, according to Toby, you had the rare gift of being able to see in people what not even they were capable of seeing in themselves, at least not normally. Or if they do see or glimpse something, they immediately block it out; the flash leaves them with sight in only one eye and then they look ever afterwards through that blind eye. It’s a very rare gift indeed nowadays, and becoming rarer, the gift of being able to see straight through people, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad, without effort, that is, without any fuss or squeamishness. That is the way, in which according to Toby, you might be like us, Jacobo, and now I think he was right. We could both see people like that, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad. Seeing was our gift, and we placed it at the service of others. And I can still see.’
One night in London, I thought I had merely frightened myself with the idea that someone was following me, possibly with threatening intent. It could have been the rain, I reasoned, when that first idea seemed convincing, for the rain always makes footsteps on pavements sound as if they were giving off sparks or polishing something, like the rapid brushing of old-fashioned shoe-shines; or it could have been my raincoat rubbing against my trousers as I walked briskly along (the sound of flapping, dancing coat-tails, my raincoat unbuttoned, buffeted in turn by the gusty wind); or the shadow of my own open umbrella, which I could feel all the time at my back like a lingering sense of unease, I was holding it at an angle, resting on one shoulder the way soldiers carry a rifle or a spear when they’re on parade; or perhaps the slight creak of its tense ribs as they were shaken by the wind. I had the constant feeling that someone was following close behind, sometimes I could hear what sounded like the short, rapid steps of a dog, for dogs always look as if they are walking over hot coals and being drawn airwards, so lightly do they place their eighteen invisible toes on the ground, as if they were always just about to leap up or levitate. Tis, tis, tis, that was the sound accompanying me, that was what I kept hearing and what made me turn round every few steps, a rapid turn of the head without stopping or slackening my pace, because of the wind the umbrella was only half-doing its job, I was walking at a steady rate, in a hurry to get home, I was returning after far too long a day at the building with no name, and it was late for London, although not at all late for Madrid (but I wasn’t in Madrid now); I had only eaten a sandwich or two for lunch, many hours and even more faces ago, some of which I had observed from the stationary train compartment or wood-panelled hiding-place, although most had been on video, and their voices heard or, rather, listened to, their various tones, sincere or presumptuous, timid or false, crafty or boastful, uncertain or shameless. The effort required of me in this picking up and tuning in never diminished, and I had the distinct impression that it would steadily increase: the more one satisfies people’s expectations, the more inflated these become and the more subtlety and precision they demand. And although I had, from the start (perhaps from Corporal Bonanza onwards) merely invented out of my own intuitions, the degree of irresponsibility and fiction being required or induced in me now by Tupra, Mulryan, Rendel and Pérez Nuix created a tension in me, almost an anxiety sometimes, usually before or after, but not during my inventive duties, which were termed interpretations or reports. I was aware that, with each day that passed, I was losing more and more scruples or, as Sir Peter Wheeler had put it, deferring my consciousness, letting it grow dim, deferring it indefinitely; and that I was venturing without its company ever farther away and with ever fewer qualms.
It was not, I thought, strange that I should frighten myself on a rainy night with the streets almost empty of other pedestrians and not a taxi in sight, although I had already abandoned that as an idea; or that my nerves should be on edge so that the slightest thing startled me, my loud, wet shoes, the anarchic flapping of my coat-tails, the battered dome of my umbrella whose floating image, in the more brightly lit areas, was reflected back up at me from the asphalt, as I passed by the monuments, gloomy in the evening dark, that pepper the many squares, the metallic creak of crickets produced by my every movement and by the gusty night wind, perhaps the real and weightless footsteps of some stray dog I could not yet see, but who, given the lack of other candidates — for I passed whole blocks without seeing a soul — was clearly following me, perhaps surreptitiously, until someone spotted it out all alone and took it away. Tis tis tis. I was aware of my own smells, but it was as if they had all been passed through water: damp silk and damp leather and damp wool, and I might have been sweating too, with not a trace left of the cologne I had put on that morning. Tis tis tis, I looked round, but there was nothing and nobody, just the sense of unease at the back of my neck and the feeling of menace — or was it merely vigilance — accompanying e
very rhythmic, constant step — one, two, three and four — as if I were on some interminable march with my umbrella-rifle or my umbrella-spear, even though their real function was that of a frail, oversized helmet or a rickety shield borne on an arm that trembles and dances. ‘I am myself my own fever and pain,’ I was thinking when I believed I was merely frightening myself. ‘I must be.’
No, it wasn’t strange. Anyone who spends his days passing judgement, prognosticating and even diagnosing (not to say predicting), giving what are often groundless opinions, insisting that he has seen something when he has, in fact, seen little or nothing — always assuming he isn’t pretending — ears pricked for any unusual emphases or vacillations, for any stumblings or quaverings, alert to the choice of words when those being observed have sufficient vocabulary to choose between several (which is not very often, some cannot even find the one possible word and have to be guided towards it, to have the word suggested to them, which makes them easy to manipulate), eyes tuned to detect any wilfully opaque glances, any excessive blinking, the drawing back of a lip as someone prepares to lie or the twitching jaw of the wildly ambitious, scrutinising faces to the point where you no longer see them as living, moving faces, observing them instead as if they were paintings, or as you might observe someone asleep or dead, or as you might observe the past; anyone whose main task is to trust no one ends up viewing everything in that suspicious, wary, interpretative light, dissatisfied with appearances and with the obvious and the straightforward; or, rather, dissatisfied with what is there. And then one easily forgets that what is there on the surface or in the first instance might sometimes be all there is, with no duplicity and no deceit or secrecy either, in the case of someone who is not hiding anything because they don’t know how, because they know nothing of the theory and practice of concealment.
I had been carrying out my duties for several months, almost on a daily basis, hardly a day went by without my being summoned to the building with no name, even if only briefly in order to report back on what I had analysed and picked up, or what I had decided earlier at home. I had travelled a fair way along the path typically followed by all audacities (if it wasn’t, in fact, mere insolence). You begin by prefacing everything with ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’m not sure’; or by qualifying and modifying as much as possible: ‘It could be,’ ‘I would say that…’, ‘I can’t be sure, but…’, ‘It seems likely to me that …’, ‘Possibly,’ ‘Possibly not,’ ‘This may be going too far, but…’, ‘This is pure supposition, but nevertheless …’, ‘Perhaps,’ ‘It might well be,’ the archaic ‘Methinks,’ the American ‘I daresay,’ there are all kinds of shadings in both languages. Yes, you avoid affirmations in your speech and banish certainties from your mind, knowing full well that the former brings with it the latter just as the latter brings with it the former, almost simultaneously, with no noticeable difference, it’s alarming how easily thought and speech contaminate each other. That is how it is at the beginning. But you soon grow more confident: you sense a commendation or a reproach in an oblique look or a chance remark, directed apparently at no one in particular and uttered in a neutral tone which you know, none the less, is intended for you, that it applies to you. You notice that ‘I don’t know’ does not please, that inhibition is little appreciated, and that ambiguities are met with disappointment and niceties fall on stony ground; that the overly uncertain and cautious does not count and is not taken up, that the doubtful does not even persuade that there might be some reason for doubt, and reservations are almost a let-down; that ‘Perhaps’ and ‘Maybe’ are tolerated for the good of the enterprise and of the group, who, for all their audacity, do not wish to commit suicide, but they never arouse enthusiasm or passion, or even approval, they come across as faint-hearted and meek. And the bolder you get, the more questions they ask and the more skills they attribute to you, the bounds of what is knowable are always within a hair’s-breadth of being lost, and one day you find that they are expecting you to see the indiscernible and to know the un-verifiable, to have an answer not just for the probable and even the merely possible, but for the unknown and unfathomable.
The most striking and most dangerous thing about this whole business is that you, too, begin to believe yourself capable of seeing and fathoming, of finding out and knowing, and, therefore, of hazarding an answer. Boldness never rests, it waxes or wanes, it burgeons or shrivels, it slips away or subjugates, and may disappear altogether after some major setback. But boldness, if it exists, is always on the move, it is never stable and never satisfied, it is the very opposite of stationary. And its main tendency is towards limitless increase, unless kept in check or brought up brutally short, or else systematically forced to retreat. In its expansive phase, perceptions become excitable or intoxicated, and arbitrariness, for example, ceases to seem arbitrary to you, believing, as you do, that your judgements and insights, however subjective, are based on solid criteria (a lesser evil, but what can you do); and there comes a point when it doesn’t much matter whether you get things right, especially since in my work this was rarely verifiable, or if it was, they certainly never told me. From my continuance there, from the fact that they continued to request my services — somewhat bureaucratically and absurdly — and did not get rid of me, I inferred that my success rate must be quite high, but I also wondered occasionally if such a thing could be determined, and if it was, if anyone would bother to do so. I gave my opinions and verdicts, my prejudices and judgements: they were read or listened to; they asked me concrete questions: I gave them my answers, expanding on them and making comments and observations, identifying and summarising, inevitably going too far. I didn’t know what they did with it all afterwards, if it had any consequences, if it was useful and had any practical effect or was merely fodder for the files, if it ever actually worked for or against someone; normally nothing was said, they never said anything to me afterwards, everything — for me at least — came down to that first act dominated by my ideas and a brief interrogation or dialogue; and the fact that, as far as I could see, there was no second or third or fourth act meant that the whole business (in day-to-day life, which is what matters most) seemed to me a rather silly game, or a series of hypothetical wagers, exercises in invention and perspicacity. And so, for a long time, I never had the feeling or the idea that I could be harming anyone.
When the coup d’état against Hugo Chávez took place in Venezuela, I couldn’t help wondering if we had had some indirect influence on it; first on its apparent initial success, then on its grotesque failure (there seems to have been a lack of resolve); and on its chaotic end. I watched the television intently in case General Ponderosa, or whatever his real name was, should suddenly appear, but I never saw him, perhaps he hadn’t been part of it at all. Perhaps the coup had failed because Tupra had advised against any financial aid and support, who knows. With Tupra I couldn’t remain entirely silent about it:
‘Have you seen what’s been going on in Venezuela?’ I asked him one morning, as soon as I went into his office.
‘Yes, I have,’ he replied, in the same tone of voice with which he had confirmed to the Venezuelan civilian soldier that he did not have our telephone number, but we had his. It was his conclusive tone of voice, or perhaps I should say concluding. And when he noticed that I was hesitating as to whether or not to pursue the matter, he added: ‘Anything else, Jack?’
‘No, nothing else, Mr Tupra.’
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear Page 26