‘Yes, I’ll keep that one, but I can get you a copy if you like,’ he said, meaning the drawing by Fraser. ‘You can have the others, I’ve got several copies, or else reproductions of them in books; I have a few other originals too. I particularly like the spider-cum-swastika. Wretched helicopter,’ he added without a pause and with a hint of annoyance, ‘What on earth was it up to, hanging around a studious area like this? I hope they don’t come back again to ruffle our hair; by the way, have you got a comb on you? You Latins usually do.’ Wheeler’s hair was indeed like the furious foam on the crest of a wave, and mine had clearly become tangled. ‘What did Mrs Berry want?’ he said, again without a pause. He had gone back to referring to her as he did in company. He was regaining his composure and that must have helped him; or perhaps it was just force of habit in him to dissemble. ‘Was she calling us in for lunch already?’ He looked at his watch without actually looking at it, he was trying to get over his shock with no need for any remarks from me, although he knew I wasn’t going to let him off that easily.
‘No, it’s not ready yet. I imagine she was frightened by the noise, she wouldn’t have known what it was,’ I replied, and added, in turn, without a pause: ‘You lost your voice again, Peter. Last night, you told me it only happened occasionally. But that’s twice now in one weekend.’
‘Bah,’ he replied evasively, ‘it was just a coincidence, bad luck, that damn helicopter. They’re absolutely deafening, it sounded almost like an old Sikorsky H-5, the noise alone used to be enough to provoke panic. Besides, I’ve been talking a lot, I talk far too much when you’re here, and then I suffer the consequences, I’m not really used to it any more. You let me ramble on, you pretend to be interested and I’m very grateful to you for that, but you should interrupt me more, make me get to the point. I suppose I’ve been a bit alone here in Oxford lately, and with Mrs Berry there’s nothing more to be said, of what can be said between us, I mean, or of what she might want to talk about. I don’t have that many visitors, you know. A lot of people have died, others went to America when they retired and live there like parasites, I didn’t want to do that, they just lounge around, getting as much sun as possible, they even go so far as to wear bermuda shorts, they get hooked, via television, on that football they play over there, all padding and helmets, they worry about their digestion and eat nothing but broccoli, they prowl around the library and whatever campus it is that they’ve landed up in, and allow their departments to exhibit them now and then like prestigious foreign mummies or the wrinkled trophies of some vaguely heroic times that nobody there knows anything about. In short, they’re like antiques, most depressing. Besides, I like talking to you. The English shy away from anything that isn’t either anecdote, fact, event or ironic gloss or comment; they don’t like speculation, they find reasoning superfluous: and that’s precisely what I most enjoy. Yes, I like talking to you very much. You should come down more often, especially as you’re so alone there in London. Although perhaps soon you’ll be much less alone. I still have a proposal to put to you, and I ask you, please, to accept it without giving it too much thought or asking me too many questions. You can’t really waste time that you already consider to be wasted, these periods of sentimental convalescence can be filled up with anything, the content doesn’t really matter, whatever happens by and helps to push them along will do, one tends, I think I’m right in saying, not to be too choosy. Afterwards, it’s hard even to remember those times or what one did while they lasted, as if everything had been permissible then, and one can always cite disorientation and pain as justification; it’s as if those times had never existed and as if, in their place, there was a blank. They’re free of responsibilities too, “I wasn’t myself at the time, you know.” Oh, yes, pain has always been our best alibi, the one that best exonerates us of every action. It has always been man’s best alibi, I mean, the best alibi for humankind, for both individuals and nations.’
He said all this quite casually, but I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of excitement and another of pride, I had always thought that I amused him and that he liked me, and that perhaps I flattered him a little, that he found me easy to be with, but never more than that. He always had a lot to say and to discuss, although he was very sparing with the former; his conversation taught me, instructed me and provided me with new ideas or else renewed ideas that I already had; in short, he captivated me. I don’t think I offered him much in return, apart from company and an attentive ear, the look of interest on my face was real not fake. Rylands had bequeathed him to me and, more than that, had turned out to be his brother. Perhaps Peter regarded me with benevolent, affectionate eyes because he, too, saw me partly as a bequest from Toby, although I could never be a substitute for him, as Wheeler was for me. I wasn’t old enough, I lacked the shared past, the acuteness, the knowledge, the mystery. I felt slightly embarrassed, I didn’t know what to say, so I removed from my inside jacket pocket the Latin comb he had asked me for.
‘Here you are, Peter,’ I said. ‘One small comb.’ He looked at it for a second, disconcerted, he had forgotten that he still needed it. Then he gingerly took it from me, held it up to the light (it was clean) and recomposed his hair as best he could, it’s not easy without a mirror and with only a small comb. He tamed the top, but not the sides, the aeronautical wind had blown them forward and they were rebelliously invading his temples, giving him a still more Roman air. ‘Allow me,’ I said. He trustingly handed me the comb, and with three or four rapid movements I smoothed the sides of his hair too. I hoped Mrs Berry wasn’t watching us, she would have taken me for a mad, frustrated barber.
‘You’d better comb your hair too,’ said Wheeler, regarding my head critically, almost with distaste, as if I had a parrot perched on top of it. ‘I don’t know how you managed it, but you’ve got grass stains all over you. And you hadn’t even noticed.’ He indicated the front of my pale shirt, revealing that he didn’t make the connection between the two or three smudges of green and my rescue of his drawings. What with the party the night before, my subsequent studies and the glasses of wine, the lack of sleep, the very rapid shave I had given myself and my recent vicissitudes al fresco, I must have looked like a beggar down to his last penny or a disgraced criminal fallen on very hard times. My jacket and trousers were crumpled from rolling around on the grass. ‘Honestly,’ said Wheeler, ‘you’re just like a child.’ He was probably pulling my leg, and that cheered him up too. I ran my fingers over the small comb (a mechanical gesture) and then disentangled my hair, by touch alone. When I had finished, I turned to him for his opinion:
‘How do I look?’ I said, theatrically displaying my two profiles.
‘You’ll pass,’ he said, after casting a condescending eye over me, like a superior officer making a cursory inspection of a soldier’s head. And then he returned to where he had been just before the aerial attack, he never lost the thread unless he wanted to. Despite the many detours, meanderings, diversions, he always concluded his trajectories. ‘So what happened with that campaign?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Well, overall, naturally enough, it failed. A failure to which it was irremissibly condemned from the start. Well, it served some purpose, obviously, quite a good purpose really: people became aware of the dangers of talking too much, something that had never even occurred to most of them. It doubtless had an effect on many in the armed forces and that was the main thing, since they would be the best-informed and the most vulnerable to the consequences of verbal excess or carelessness. And the leaders, both political and military, were, of course, very careful indeed. There was an increased tendency to communicate in code, or else through doubles entendres and semantic transpositions, using improvised or rough-and-ready synecdoches and metalepses, and this happened spontaneously throughout the population, depending on the individual’s talents and abilities. The idea that someone, anyone, could be listening with hostile intent was created and implanted. You could say (and this, in itself, was both unusual and admirable) that people beca
me fully and collectively aware, however temporarily, of what was depicted in that sequence of scenes that begins with the sailor talking to the young woman: the fact that our words, once uttered, are beyond our control. They, more than anything, cease to belong to us, far more so than our actions which, in a way, good or bad, stay inside ourselves, and cannot be appropriated by anyone else, except in flagrant cases of usurpation or imposture, which, however tardily, can always be denounced, aborted, undone or unmasked.’ Wheeler used the Spanish verb ‘desfacer’ for ‘undone’. He had also used the Spanish ‘como estaba mandado’ and ‘de andar por casa’ for ‘naturally enough’ and ‘rough-and-ready’ — he liked to show off both his colloquial and his bookish Spanish, as he did with his Portuguese and French, I suppose, those were the three languages he knew best, and possibly others, he certainly, to my knowledge, had a smattering of Hindi, German and Russian. ‘Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word. One pronounces words and immediately lets them go and gives possession, or, rather, usufruct, to the person who hears them. That person may agree with them, to start with, which is not necessarily pleasing because in a sense, by doing so, he or she takes them over; the person may refute them, which is equally unpleasing; more than that, he or she can, in turn, transmit them limitlessly, acknowledging their source or making them theirs depending on their mood, depending on how decent they are or on whether or not they want to ruin or betray us, depending on the circumstances; not only that, they can elaborate on them, improve on them or mar them, distort them, slant them, quote them out of context, change their tone, alter their emphasis and thus easily give them a different and even a contrary meaning to the one they had on our lips, or when we conceived them. And they can, of course, repeat them exactly, verbatim. This was what people most feared during the war, which is why many people tried to speak obliquely, metaphorically or nebulously, with deliberate vagueness or even resorting to secret languages. Many learned to say things without really saying them, and became accustomed to that.’
‘Something of the sort happened during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, to get around the censorship laws,’ I said; Wheeler had, after all, invited me to interrupt him more often. ‘Many people started talking and writing in a symbolic, allusive, parabolic or abstract way. You had to make yourself understood within the deliberate obscurity of what you were saying. A complete nonsense: camouflaging yourself, concealing yourself and yet, nevertheless, wanting to be recognised and wanting the most diffuse, cryptic and confused of messages to be picked up and understood. People have no patience for the hard work involved in deciphering codes. It lasted far too long, and at one point it looked as if it wasn’t just a passing phase either, but was here to stay. Some people never managed to lose the habit afterwards, and that was when they fell silent.’
Wheeler listened to me, and it occurred to me that if he took me up on what I had said, he might get diverted once more from his trajectory. Now, however, he seemed resolved to continue along that path, albeit at his own measured pace:
‘Many learned to say things without really saying them,’ he repeated, ‘but what almost no one learned to do was to say nothing, to keep silent, which is what was being asked of them and what was needed. It was normal, it’s only natural: it’s an impossible thing for most ordinary mortals, believe me, it’s asking too much of them, it goes against their very essence, that’s why the campaign was always doomed to more than partial failure. It was tantamount to saying to people: “Right, not only do you have to put up with all the shortages, the hardships and the rationing, endure enemy bombing raids — never knowing, despite the wailing sirens, who might not wake up tomorrow or tonight — see your homes set on fire or reduced in an instant to rubble after the explosion and the noise, and sit buried for hours in deep shelters so as not to be burned in streets that still seem just the same, and suffer the loss of husbands and sons or, at the very least, their absence and the constant torment of anxiety over their daily survival or death, to climb into planes and, while you do battle with the air, to be machine-gunned by the enemy, who do everything possible to bring you down, to be sunk and go under, in distant, flaming waters, in submarines and destroyers and warships, and suffocate or be burned alive inside a tank, and parachute out over occupied territory only to come under artillery fire or be set upon by dogs if you do manage to land safely, and be blown to pieces if you have the bad but very possible luck to be hit by a shell or a grenade, and then face torture and the executioner if you’re caught on your mission in forbidden territory wearing civilian clothes, or engage in hand-to-hand combat at the front with bayonets fixed, in fields, in woods, in jungles, in swamps, in arctic and in desert conditions, and blithely blow off the head of the boy who peers out at you wearing the hated helmet and uniform, and not know, day or night, whether or not you will lose this war, a war which may turn out, in the end, to have served only to make of you forgotten corpses or the perpetual prisoners or slaves of your conquerors, and put up with extreme cold and hunger and thirst and distress and, above all, fear, fear and more fear, a continual terror to which you will eventually become habituated even though you have already spent several years like this and that eventual state of habituation has not yet arrived… Yes,’ added Peter, coming to an abrupt halt, making a minimal pause and then taking a long breath, ‘it was like saying to people: “As well as all this, you must keep silent too. You must not speak any more, or tell stories or jokes, or ask, still less answer questions, not of your wife, not of your husband, not of your children, not of your father and definitely not of your mother, your brother or your best friend. And as for your beloved … don’t even whisper in your beloved’s ear, not a word, no truths or sweet nothings or lies, don’t say goodbye to her, don’t even give her the consolation of voice and word, don’t leave as a souvenir even the murmur of the last false promises we always make when we say goodbye.”’ Wheeler stopped and became suddenly abstracted, banging his knuckles on his chin, a few soft taps, as if he were remembering, I thought, as if he had experienced this too, withholding the truly important words from his beloved, the words that cry out to be heard and to be said, the words that are so easily forgotten afterwards and become confused with other words or are repeated to other people with identical lightness and with just the same joy, but which, at each last moment, seem so necessary, even though they may only be sweet nothings, extravagant and therefore somewhat insincere, that’s the least important thing, at each last moment. ‘That’s how it was, or pretty much. Not put so crudely, not in those terms. But that’s how it was understood by many, that’s how it was understood and accepted by the most pessimistic and demoralised, by the very frightened and the very despondent and the already defeated, and in time of war they make up the majority. In time of uncertain wars, that is, those which, quite rightly, people fear might be lost at any moment and which are always hanging by a thread, day after day and night after night, over long, eternal years, wars that really are a matter of life and death, of total extermination or battered, besmirched survival. The most recent ones don’t fall into that category, the wars in Afghanistan or Kosovo or the Gulf, or the Falklands War, what a joke. Or the Malvinas, if you prefer, oh, you should have seen how pathetically worked up people became, in front of their television sets I mean, I found it all very upsetting. In today’s wars, the euphoric abound, smugly following the wars from their armchairs. Euphorically, of course. The great fools. The criminals. Oh, I don’t know. But then, it was just too much to ask, don’t you think? To expect people to put up with all that and then to keep silent about the very thing tormenting them, without letting up even for an hour. The innumerable dead had been quite silent enough.’
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear Page 36