Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  “Well, I still don’t know exactly what kind of novel it will be, I don’t know much about my books until I’m done with them, and even then. But of course it won’t be a roman à clef about all of you, I don’t think my colleagues should worry about that. Though a few may insist on seeing it that way, nevertheless, or believe they recognize descriptions of themselves. You know how it is, the fact that I lived here will be enough to create suspicion, people always think we’re less imaginative, less capricious than we are. And the truth is that I wouldn’t like it if anyone were upset, I’m thinking especially of Alec, Fred and Pring-Mill, not so much of John or of you three, you’re more frivolous and I say that as a compliment. Philip certainly wouldn’t have worried me, either.”

  Alec Dewar, that was the name I gave, in All Souls, to a character some people identified as the real person I will now, as with Rylands, call by his alleged fictional name and nicknames—the Ripper, the Inquisitor, the Butcher, the Hammer. Alec Dewar was a solemn man who strove to give the impression that he was severe and unyielding. In fact he seemed to me not to know what to do with himself after the close of the work day when the disappearance of the students (who enlivened him by irritating him) forced him to lay aside his role as ogre, and, cast out until morning, he would gaze nostalgically at the closed gates of the Taylorian; he appeared disconcerted by any foreign element in the stubborn routine of many, many years, and if you took an interest in him or asked him any question that was at all personal, as if he might have an existence beyond the university limits, he looked grateful and uncomfortable and immediately lost all his pomp and circumstance, answering timidly, but with the audacious expression of one who has done some extravagant thing, or as if he had been caught out in a gratifying fault. He liked to cultivate an appearance of ferocity and sarcasm and managed to be convincing to the students and the guests at seminars who underwent his scrutiny, but not to his colleagues who were sometimes the recipients of his creaky, hesitant attempts at being pleasant or even witty, which is one of the forms of cordiality in Oxford. His spoken Spanish was timid too, he preferred to speak English with me. Unaccustomed as he was to speaking of himself or of matters unrelated to work, he would, by the second or third exchange, begin to spout phrases that were part cliché and part enigma and that meant nothing. “So it goes in this day and age,” he would say without any particular meaning, after explaining, for example, that he didn’t have a house of his own in the city and slept in his rooms at his college, I don’t remember if it was Trinity or Christ Church or Corpus Christi. These phrases could bring the conversation to a dead stop, transforming his peevishness into a kind of helplessness that was embarrassing to see.

  Fred Hodcroft, a charming man, very tall and slim with a woodpecker profile and a feigned air of professorial absent-mindedness, used to set grammatical and syntactic traps for me to test the extent of my knowledge, acting as if he really did not know the answers he was trying to extract from me. He was continually pushing his glasses back into place, as if he knew that a fall from his great height was sure to be fatal to them. He was so congenial that you could never let your guard down with him; his Spanish was excellent. He didn’t appear to be a devotee of the institution but he probably was, one of those men who can be offended for their entire life without anyone every learning of it or suspecting it: they are all affability, even with those they find reprehensible or who have done them a bad turn.

  Robert Pring-Mill, stubby, clerical, and cagey, a close friend of Ernesto Cardenal, the revolutionary Nicaraguan poet-priest, lacked any sense of humor, or rather, his did not coincide with mine, and wary and severe as he was he used to take everything literally to a tedious degree. I didn’t see much of him, I don’t think he liked me, I was too indifferent to what he venerated: his trans-oceanic friendship must have been more sacerdotal than insurrectionist. His Spanish was excellent, but he tended to avoid speaking it. He seemed permanently displeased—they said he’d been hoping for the position that went to Ian Michaels, who, to make matters worse, wasn’t even from Oxford, and perhaps that alone explained why his figure seemed evasive and halfhearted.

  John Rutherford, who was at that time translating the nineteenth-century Spanish novel La Regenta, which had yet to be published in English, spoke Spanish with a strong Galician accent acquired from his Galician wife and his unvarying summers in Ribadeo: a quiet, patient and worthy man, a magnificent person, with perhaps a touch of unconfessed resentment that even he himself did not grasp. Seen from outside, his life—the whole family playing musical instruments, daughters he sang with at home—seemed idyllic. It was unlikely that anything would anger him, but there could be a certain danger in him: no one is ever entirely resigned, not even to what he chooses.

  Then there was Philip Lloyd-Bostock, who died not long after I left Oxford; during my two years there he was often absent because of his illness, but not enough to keep us from seeing one another and giving a few classes together, shoulder to shoulder, as I had occasion to do, one term or another, with each of my colleagues in turn, classes in practical literary translation, in both directions, Gómez de la Serna and Valle-Inclán into English and Woolf and Hopkins into Spanish. Lloyd-Bostock gave the impression of belonging to another world and only passing through Oxford, quite against his will, in order to earn his salary; this set him apart from the others who were visibly assimilated, more or less, to the city and its life of placid valor, if one can put it that way. Some of them may not have had any other life, not when they went home to their houses or rooms at the end of the day nor even during the long summer vacation, though it surely afforded them sufficient time to become their opposites or Hydes—I’m sure Philip took advantage of the opportunity. Some of them must have waited impatiently for the beginning of each new school year in order to feel centered again, sustained, in harmony with their surroundings, justified. For Philip Lloyd-Bostock, however, this world seemed no more than a nuisance, something out of the past to which a certain amount of attention must still be paid, or to which we can turn without embarrassment in case of need because it will always be on our side—in reserve, like the family we come from, perhaps. But perhaps it’s only that I knew him when he was already very sick, to those who are dying, everything may start to appear superfluous and already past or gone. He had a carefully groomed moustache and watery blue eyes and exhibited a no doubt deceptive docility—that of a person so tortured he’s beyond arguing, or maybe nothing matters to him. Some people wanted to recognize him in the character I called Cromer-Blake, probably because of the double surname and because that character died at the end of the book. Of course Cromer-Blake was also identified with my living and single-surnamed friend Eric Southworth, so in this case, absurdly, two different men were identified with one character.

  Eric Southworth: a person of fanatical nobility, so loyal and upright that most of those around him must find it irritating, there aren’t many people like that now, maybe a few women. And at the same time he was an easygoing man of extraordinary wit, one of those rare individuals capable of gravity and jest in the same paragraph, so to speak, and sincerely. I’ve seen him hooting with laughter like a wayward schoolboy over some piece of tomfoolery—an old-fashioned, grandfatherly word, but the right one—and I’ve also seen him adopt the grave and fearsome mien of a hero of the lecture hall. His Spanish was good, if a touch Renaissance-sounding because of its bookish origins; he couldn’t be bothered to speak it there, in the chambers and dining rooms and hallways of Oxford. He was a few years older than I am and his hair was already grey; he used it to inspire the students with respect, though not always successfully, his readily mirthful side betrayed him. He did panic them sometimes, though, when he donned his clerical cap for their oral exams, playing a malevolent character out of Dickens or imitating the exhortatory demeanor of old-fashioned Spanish ecclesiastics—index finger raised, eyes narrowed, voice muted—which amused him a great deal, Catholicism as folklore. Once he asked me to pick up a bishop’s or ar
chbishop’s biretta for him on calle de Segovia, so I sent him two, one made of silk with a green tassel and the other of satin with a red tassel (or vice versa, I don’t know much about such vestments, perhaps they were meant only for a parish priest). He was very enthusiastic about these gifts, though I didn’t ask and don’t know why he wanted them, I imagine he’ll make some private use of them. He gave me no cause for concern with respect to the novel, nor did Ian Michael; both men were overflowing with sharp wit and devilry and had sound knowledge of fiction. Toby Rylands shared these characteristics, but he was more venerable and less predictable, and when I spoke to him about the book I was really confiding my fears as to his possible reaction.

  He gave me another of his sidelong glances and what he then said, with some sarcasm, was enough to calm my fears. “I don’t think you need worry about that, Javier. But perhaps about the opposite case. It’s more likely that those who may feel upset or offended will be the ones who don’t recognize themselves in your novel and think they don’t appear in it, not even camouflaged or in disguise, vilified or ridiculed. In the end, it’s more humiliating not to be a source of inspiration than to be one, not to be considered worthy of fiction than to be worthy, even at the cost of some indiscretion, or of appearing in a bad light as the inspiration for some depraved or absurd character. The worst thing is not to figure in a book at all, when there was a possibility of doing so.” He broke off for a few seconds and gazed at the river as if keeping an eye on it, then added with kindly mockery, tapping his craggy fingers on the arm of his foundering deck chair, “Besides, who knows, you could be writing a future classic. All the work we scholars do is condemned to being outdated, unusable, forgotten. That goes for those of us who write; those who don’t, like Eric … well, his knowledge is scattered to the winds as soon as he leaves the classroom, or even before then, you know that, Eric, you know, don’t you?” Yes, Eric knew perfectly well, he knows it and that’s how he wants it. “It may be that the only way we’ll reach posterity is in a contemporary novel we have no reason to pay the slightest attention to. Can you imagine? How unjust, how grotesque, what a cruel joke. Remembered for what we disdained. That’s how it is, that’s how it is. It seems unlikely that any contemporary novel will last. Too many are published and the newspaper critics have almost no discernment, but it’s possible, at least. What most assuredly will not endure is our research and our explications, which could only be of interest to our future archeological selves—how should I put it?—to a repeat version of ourselves that isn’t going to happen. Not even our increasingly impersonal and superfluous erudition will last, with these computers that steal it and devour and store everything and then release it to the first illiterate who knows how to push a button. Hmm. I don’t like it.” Rylands plunged a hand into the white meringue of his hair, without mussing it, as if trying to protect his archaic brain from this glimpsed future that was paining him, where there would be no place for anyone like him—and surely he had resigned himself to that—but neither would there be a place for people like Ian, who was younger, or Eric, still younger, and both with many active years ahead of them, and this must have struck him as too violent, an amputation or a sacrifice. “I don’t like it. Hmm. Even now, these texts of ours, crammed with laborious notes and exegeses, aren’t read much; most of their readers are resentful colleagues who read them with ill will, to object to or belittle them, or plagiarize them if we’re lucky. To disparage us while we’re alive, once we’re dead it’s not worth the trouble. So what you must do is try not to leave any of us out of your novel; you could be depriving one or another of us of immortality—unforgivable, don’t you agree? It seems to me that all you need fear is the fury of those you’ll be leaving without a literary posterity. Ta-ta-ta. Can you imagine? People like us, a century hence, doing research on the people we are now. Ta, ta, ta.” Rylands often laughed at his own quips.

  Eric and Ian laughed as well, aspirating their consonants as they did so. Ian Michael wrote detective novels featuring an inspector named Bernal, but only to enjoy himself and make money in Japan (apparently the trick is to have five or six books with the same character and then success and addiction arrive automatically, especially in Japan with its fondness for repetition, or so they say), and he did not count on occupying a place in the history of literature. Neither did I, with my non-detective novels. Or maybe I do, it isn’t an easy thing to say. No, what I aspire to is something else.

  “I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” I answered Toby. “If it depends on me, I’m afraid all of you are going to have to go on being mortal.”

  I must make a digression—this is a book of digressions, a book that proceeds by digression—to admit that I’ve occasionally put Toby Rylands’ idea to use as a persuasive measure or bargaining tool. Once, while still writing All Souls, I convinced Francisco Rico himself of what the eminent gentleman from New Zealand had banteringly formulated in Ian Michael’s garden while watching the river. To me, at that time, Paco Rico was “Professor Rico, man of vast knowledge,” laboriously disdainful, insolent in his vanity and congenial in spite of himself, a complacent man who liked to surround himself with acolytes (and did so). On one occasion, nevertheless—it may have been in Vitoria—I managed to depress him by pointing out that all his professorial prestige and fanfare, his potential halo as a member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua—he was pushing his candidacy—and his many acclaimed critical writings were destined to last only as long as he did. After him would come others who were by definition more competent, more informed and more advanced in their methodologies, individuals who might well manage to find out all there was to know about Lazarillo de Tormes, for example, or the Quijote, and who would render his interpretations and discoveries outdated or even absurd in their naiveté—the past always seems naive—and ignorance of new and fundamental information. On the other hand, it can be stated, I told him, that every contemporary novelist—even the most inept of us, the one from Manzaneela de Torio, or the one from Quicena, among the Spaniards; no, it has to be the one from Las Palmas—is in some way superior to Cervantes, though only because we know Cervantes and have his lessons and can rely on him, and what’s more we know what has come along in his wake, which in theory gives us a great advantage; yet none of us are better than him, neither our existence nor our pages erase or annul his, which continue to be studied and read without ever becoming outdated or invalid; this is a field in which the passage of additional time doesn’t advance or improve or determine the course of what came before; it may be the only field in which time past is not lost but won, not for individuals—we are always losing time—but for our intentions and the body of work we create, if it does last. No one pays any attention to what we write today, but there is a remote possibility that people like Rico may do so many years from now, or people like Rylands, or Michael, or Southworth, and that will never happen to what Professor Rico himself delivers to the presses today, however great its value and merit.

  “It’s possible,” I told him, “that you may be remembered more for having appeared as a character in a novel so enduring that it will be pored over throughout eternity, than for anything it lies within your power to achieve, with all your assiduity and expository talent and all the knowledge you’ve amassed.”

  At first the professor made a show of disdain, as was his practice, and even looked a bit piqued.

  “Bah,” he said, with a haughty pout. “I’ve already appeared in a novel, as the one and only protagonist, the central and dominant character, the catalyst of the action and, above all, of the passion. An entire novel written against me by a woman, poor thing, to work through her heartbreak.”

  “Yes, I’ve read it,” I answered, which appeared to surprise and furthermore to gratify him. (“Really? You’ve read it?” he couldn’t help saying, unable to conceal his delight, and that made me think that Rylands was on to something.) “But you didn’t come off very well, which I suppose is natural since it was written to
settle a score with you. Nor were you particularly recognizable, physically enhanced to make the ridiculous passion more credible. You were taller, I think. And in general a loathsome and clichéd character, if I recall correctly, professor. Papier maché.”

  The professor had the audacity to defend his achievement anyway; he’s not a man to give in easily, only when he’s grown bored with the argument.

  “Don’t be impertinent, young Marías. I came off terribly, but in any case it was obvious she had suffered a great deal over me and that makes me interesting. Doesn’t it?”

  “Young Marías”: that’s what Don Juan Benet and a few other friends have long been in the habit of calling me, to differentiate me from my estimable father, who is also a writer though not of fiction. I can well imagine that forty years from now there will still be someone who, on seeing me walk into a room, will say, “Here comes young Marías,” and when the others turn around they’ll see an eighty-five-year-old man; I’ve grown used to the idea and even to the scene, there’s no way around it, names can do so much. Nowadays Rico calls me “Javier” and I call him “Paco,” but at that point we didn’t know each other as well and went by other names, “young Marías” and “Professor Rico, man of vast knowledge.”

  “Not very,” I answered. “Making people suffer is the easiest thing in the world, it lies within anyone’s power, the biggest fool or idiot, the most ordinary man and the least mysterious woman. In fact, everyone makes everyone suffer, a little or a great deal but always to some degree, even the people who are good to us and take care of us, contact is all it takes. And then, inevitably, there’s the other person’s disgust which is sometimes apparent and always makes you suffer, doesn’t it? But that’s not the point, nor does it matter whether, as a fictional character, you’re made to seem more interesting than you are. The point is to be a character in an immortal book, if such a thing can happen today; even if you come off looking like a heartless brute, a rat, a moron. Of course it’s best not to come off like that, because you’ll appear in that light until the end of literature, but being left out would be even worse. At least that’s what a foreign mentor of mine thinks. Tell me, do you think that little novel about you is going to last?”