Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  Suffering from a bad cold, he went to Liverpool by train, during a storm, to attend the 1922 Grand National, the last time he would ever watch or learn the outcome of that race. As usual, he picked the winning horse, which should only have heightened his charmed state. But when Stephen Graham went to visit him the next afternoon, Ewart told him that he couldn’t write, his hand did not obey him, it wouldn’t work. He said it slowly and with difficulty because his breakdown had also affected his speech, and he couldn’t be sure that the words ordained by his brain would emerge from his mouth rather than some treacherous, spectral diction. He was frightened, but took it calmly and quietly. He saw a doctor, spent several days in a clinic, and was then sent to the country. He lost weight and grew pale and scrawny, his clothes hung loosely. He spent his time watching birds (his former passion), as a form of therapy.

  By June he was somewhat better and able to write to Graham, who had left for America with his wife, whose maiden name, I believe, was Rose Savory. The handwriting was a scrawl, but a more or less legible one that indicated some degree of recovery, as did his mention of medium-term literary projects, once he had been cured, among them the history of the Scots Guards, which he had very willingly promised to write in the ever-modest aim of emulating his maternal great-grandfather Napier and describing the campaigns of the War of ’14 just as, a century earlier, his ancestor had described those of the Peninsular War, our War of Independence against Napoleon. Graham answered, encouraging Ewart to travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and his wife were staying, and there set forth the daring deeds of his beloved regiment: he offered him a house, a horse and absolute freedom, confident that Ewart wouldn’t be well enough to accept them. However, one day he received a cable naming the ship, the Berengaria, and the date in September when the presumed invalid would disembark.

  During the crossing, with New York already close at hand, a man, a third-class steward, fell into the water and could not be saved. The worst part was realizing that the ship, despite its shudderings and grindings, had moved away from the place where the loss had occurred within only a few seconds, enveloped in the wail of its siren which already sounded more like a first lament than a cry of alarm. By the time the ship reversed it was too late, there wasn’t even a place to go back to. That was the worst, for the living, the ship’s unstoppable wake, “like a white scar,” voracious upon the ocean, the all-too-visible manifestation of time that never waits and goes more quickly than any human will—for truce or salvation or hope—and so forces everything to remain unfinished; that, and the unceasing awareness that the only way to disrupt time is to die and emerge from it.

  Ewart spent a few days in New York with Graham, who had come to pick him up, and the American poet Vachel Lindsay, who was the oldest of the three and was always fearful that the younger and less-travelled of the two Englishmen would be mugged or run over by a car or get into some sort of trouble with his exaggeratedly British mannerisms, his vacillating speech (transformed by illness into a real defect), his way, when paying for anything, of holding his money in his hand and laboriously counting it out, his inordinate capacity for surprise, which he couldn’t conceal, and his stiffness. Though he had known the suffering of the trenches, Ewart still felt his world to be intact and consequently was amazed that no change took place when he left his boots outside the door of his room at night. “How do men get their boots blacked in this country?” he asked Graham, seriously intrigued. “In the country, I mean, where there are no shoeshine parlours.” “Clean them themselves,” Graham answered, and Ewart is known to have been unable to do more than mutter, “Extraordinary thing!”

  On the long train trip to Santa Fe they stopped in Chicago and Kansas City, and Ewart the whole way lugged along a large iron box he had brought with him from England which contained all the papers and documents he would need to write his regimental history. His travel attire consisted of a pair of army jodhpurs and khaki puttees topped with a vaguely military cap, and he carried a rucksack, more or less as if he had indeed undertaken a colonial adventure (the only thing missing was my pith helmet, but that wasn’t purchased until 1933, by my father, during a stopover of the ship Ciudad de Cádiz in Tunis). In Santa Fe his spirits improved a great deal as did his nearly paralyzed hands, and he was able to write around two thousand words a day, which—dear God—was not a particularly large output for him; he stayed at the home of the Cassidys, neighbors of Stephen and Rose; he bought a horse to go riding and took various excursions of a preeminently folkloric nature, during which he saw Navajo and Apache Indians (among the better-known tribes); the climate relaxed him and suited him well, his anguish was dissipating or perhaps was only deferred; there was greater coordination between his brain and his tongue. Then the Grahams announced that they were departing for Mexico, where they wanted to spend Christmas as the prologue to a stay of two or three months; their plan was to “follow in the footsteps of Hernán Cortés,” in preparation for a book Graham was working on about Spain (where he had spent time before embarking from Cádiz for America, and where he had been in contact with Jacobo FitzJames Stuart, undoubtedly a forerunner of the Jacobo Fitzjames Stuart I know, one of my more well-bred editors), the West Indies and Mexico, which he entitled In Quest of El Dorado, and dedicated “To the literary memory of my friend Wilfrid Ewart” in 1924.

  It appears that the Grahams were (understandably enough) not desirous of Ewart’s company in Mexico, or Mr. Graham, at least, was not. As he tells it in his halfhearted biographical volume The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, also dating from 1924, Graham tried to convince Ewart to take advantage of their absence from Santa Fe to finish his loyal history of the Scots Guards, because it was weighing too heavily on his mind, preventing him from starting on a new novel or, in general, making other plans. At first Ewart seemed to go along with this, but his restless spirit and the unusually cold winter that struck New Mexico that year made him change his mind a few days later and insist on accompanying the couple to Mexico. Still Graham tried to dissuade his former captain (clearly he didn’t want even to have to think of him during his time in Mexico), assuring him that the country was far too colorful and seditious for writing and that he wouldn’t progress by one line while there. So Ewart decided on New Orleans, and set out on December 15, sending his luggage ahead. Three days later, the Grahams left for Mexico City, secure in the illusion that they would not cross paths with Ewart again until the month of March, when they would pick him up in New Orleans on their way back from their Cortésbound pilgrimage. This was not to be. In El Paso, Ewart changed his mind once more and had his ticket validated for ten more days, resolving to “take a turn” through Mexico (no more than about four thousand additional miles, after all) before continuing on to Louisiana. Graham says that when a journalist from El Paso told them of this detour, he and his wife couldn’t help feeling some apprehension over the fate of their friend, travelling alone through a country still in the final throes of its Revolution and whose language, customs and grievances were unknown to him. The cloak room and safe deposit boxes of the El Paso train station were famous, apparently, for containing numerous items—jewels, money, suitcases, clothing—belonging to travellers who had paused there before making a brief excursion to Mexico and never returned to reclaim them. At least we can be sure that in those days there were mothballs.

  In Chihuahua (a very wild city), Graham saw Ewart’s signature in a hotel register, made inquiries about his passage through the place and learned that he had left safe and sound. This gesture seems odd, more appropriate to a lone pursuer than a man going along his way, accompanied by his wife, with a slight, distant concern about another man’s irresponsible meanderings: no one goes around randomly flipping through hotel registers, just in case; you do that only when you’re looking to find someone whose tracks you are following. It was as if the Grahams were now on a Wilfrid-bound pilgrimage, once they learned that Wilfrid was to be found in Mexico. They were most upset to realize, the husband wrote, th
at if Ewart wanted to abide by his ticket’s new period of validity, he would have to leave Mexico City before they got there; they even took the trouble to calculate, railway timetable in hand, which train he would have to take in order to be in Laredo in time to make the Southern-Pacific connection that would take him to New Orleans, his original destination. On discovering that there was a station at which their train to Mexico City and the train coming from there on its way to Laredo would arrive at the same hour, they struggled to glimpse the friend they might have been coinciding with there among the nocturnal mass of thirsty passengers, Chinese stewards, Indians hawking German costume jewelry and raucous vendors of strawberries, melons and mangos. But Ewart wasn’t there; in fact, he hadn’t left Mexico City.

  And the disproportionate and somewhat incomprehensible eagerness to locate him continued; first thing, the morning after their arrival, the Grahams passed by the Hotel Regis, much frequented by North Americans, where they imagined that Ewart, who always needed a room with a bath, might have stayed. He hadn’t set foot in the place, so they headed for the British Consulate in search of news, but he hadn’t made an appearance there either, nor had he been at the Hotel Cosmos or the Princesa. They conjectured that, pressed for time, he had departed for Laredo without delay. They were staying at the Hotel Iturbide, a place less frequented by tourists than by Mexicans, though they were tourists and busied themselves fulfilling that role during the following days.

  On December 30, during one of their outings, they saw Wilfrid Ewart in the distance. At the corner of San Juan de Letrán and 16 de Septiembre, completely unmistakable in his eye-catching jodhpurs and puttees, he was standing on tiptoe peering up at the sky through his tortoise-shell spectacles. In his book, Stephen Graham underscores all too heavily the joy that “surged up in our bosoms,” as he puts it, on seeing him. Anything is possible. They all went off to have lunch in a restaurant and the former orderly immediately scolded his former captain for his “willfulness,” oddly enough, and not for his uncertain, vacillating nature, as would have seemed more appropriate. Ewart explained that he was captivated by Mexico and had decided to stay. The ticket would expire and his baggage was in New Orleans, but “I’ve been looking for a place like this all my life,” he said to Graham, who didn’t pay much attention but tried to make him uneasy with the idea that he was almost sure to lose the box of the Scots Guards’ regimental papers. Perhaps the matrimonial pair were simply overprotective, but they seem to have searched desperately for Ewart only to try and get rid of him as soon as they found him, to drive him out of Mexico for the duration of their Cortés-istical stay. Wilfrid wasn’t terribly concerned, he would have the box sent from New Orleans along with his clothing, he had only his rucksack and a cane with him, and he was a bit uncomfortable because he didn’t have so much as a change of clothes in Mexico City. But he had opened a bank account and calculated that he could spend the winter inexpensively in Chapultepec or San Angel, where this time without a doubt he would finish his regimental history. Then he would go to Veracruz, return to New York, and spend the summer travelling along the Canadian border, writing a series of articles on relations between that country (Canada) and the United States, truly a gripping subject if ever one existed, and no one knows why an interest in it suddenly seized him, so far in advance and so many miles away.

  As he tells it in his In Quest of El Dorado, Graham went back with him to the Hotel Isabel, at the corner of República del Salvador and Isabel la Católica, where Ewart was lodging on the recommendation of “a Spaniard” who had given him the address on the train. It was kept by an English-speaking German who, still according to Graham, tried to be ingratiating. He visited his friend’s fifth-floor room and admired its view of the mountains. Still, it didn’t strike him as a good place to write and “I meditated getting him to change over to the Iturbide.” In The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, however, Graham says the hotel had been suggested by “a Mexican lady” whose card he found with its name written in pencil on the back. He also says that they first went to the Iturbide so Ewart could see the fountain and the “banana palms” that the conjugal couple could contemplate from their suite, and that Ewart, charmed, “had half a mind” to move there that very afternoon, at which point they made for the Isabel to ask for and immediately settle the bill. But the owner took so long drawing it up and made so many mistakes that Wilfrid left it for the next morning. I imagine that these small or not so small contradictions don’t mean much and may have arisen from the sheer boredom of having to recount the same thing twice in the same way. We all try to avoid that (to the annoyance of children), if only so that the same thing will never be quite the same. Nevertheless, the contradictions certainly fertilized the ingenious and entirely baseless speculations as to a possible crime made in the aforementioned 1989 article by Sergio González Rodríguez, who fantasized about the possibility that Graham had murdered Ewart out of jealousy related to his wife, literary jealousy, envy of his overnight success, or some brooding military rancor. In any case, Graham’s two books both date from 1924, so the hypothesis of lapses or treacheries of memory can be discarded, particularly for a man who turned forty that year, and would go on to live fifty years more.

  Ewart’s sudden fascination with Mexico City—a surly, quarrelsome place of no culture and no comfort, without one tolerable theatre—was odd. But he was much taken with the climate and the parks, especially Chapultepec, or so he said. He also liked the numerous booths or sidewalk stands run by young female manicurists who were sometimes curtained off and sometimes visible. During that lunch on the 30th he exhibited his gleaming nails to the Grahams with great satisfaction.

  Graham’s detailed account of the 31st day of December, 1922, in Mexico City, offers excellent proof that, however hard one tries, the events immediately prior to the final event, the catastrophe, have no reason to be perforce significant or even of any interest whatsoever. When someone dies unexpectedly, we try to reconstruct what they said the last time we saw them, as if this could somehow save them; we try to remember the final day, once we know it was final, with an effort we would never make had it been only the penultimate, or just any ordinary day of the many forgotten days of lost time, and so we deceive ourselves, shining on the occasion a light that did not belong to it, not its own light but that of the ending; death, with its suspended brilliance, illuminates whatever came before it (“Put out the light, and then put out the light”), even what was shadowy or grey, in and of itself, and unimportant, never intended or hoped or planned to leave a trace of any kind and was already fading away. Unforeseen or premature death contaminates what preceded it, shooting out its retrospective flames which change everything; what was no more than the day before yesterday is suddenly transformed into “the final years,” in the standard phrase of articles and biographies, which often speak of the deceased “during his final years,” as if anyone could have anticipated that; and some anodyne yesterday is stylized by the blade of repetition that chisels and idealizes and fixes it forever in our minds, because all at once it has acquired the ominous status of the day before the end, which in its own moment it did not have. We try to confer solemnity on what turned out to be the last thing, in most cases a charlatan, fictitious, inculcated, borrowed solemnity, as if it tormented us to think that we might, in our ignorance, lose some word or gaze or gesture of farewell, or to accept that the other person’s death caught us off guard, preventing us from seizing the final stretch of his life and being its attentive witnesses, before the metamorphosis. Our awareness of not having intuited this farewell—of not knowing that it was one—weighs on us, if we were convinced we’d see the other person at least once more, though he was already ill and we were afraid he wouldn’t last much longer. And we struggle to remember signals, signs, cruel ironies, unnoticed omens of what happened next, and that calms us, like seeing a film a second time or rereading a book and then taking note of the premonitions or forewarnings of its denouement, now that we know what it is and t
here is no one who can change it.

  Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to evoke the last time I saw Aliocha Coll or even to know with any certainty when it was; he was a friend who committed suicide quite a while after that last time and not long before our next meeting, which did not take place, and how could I know of his approaching end when perhaps even he didn’t know—but of course he did, he knew, he decided on the date—and so I let a couple of days go by in his city (Paris) without calling him, in the optimistic plan of doing it a little later, when I would have wrapped up my stupid activities (but those two adjectives, optimistic and stupid, belong above all to his death, the cessation of his light, which made my perfectly natural thought seem ridiculous and belittled my activities, which were probably only superfluous, and has now entirely erased them: I have no knowledge at all of what I did during those days; my date book says I travelled to Poitiers and returned to Paris, but my memory contains no trace of Poitiers). And given my difficulties with reconstructing that time, I attempted it in a semi-fiction or story entitled “Todo mal vuelve” or “Everything Bad Comes Back,” after one of the last phrases he wrote to me, in a telegram. But that story isn’t enough, because I believe I have still never confused fiction with reality—yes, I do believe that—and I know that my memory of his final words and gestures and his final state of mind and his final countenance is only amorphous, I think it was over lunch in the Brasserie Balzar on rue des Ecoles, but I’m not sure and don’t want to go paging through my date books right now—from which he will have disappeared after that final day, whenever it was—and in any case that lunch which may have been our last meeting is mingled with others that took place in the anodyne indifference of the time that went before and was lost. He was forty-two when he killed himself in 1990 with his unerring doctor’s hand, after rereading a last story—Nerval’s “Sylvie”—listening to a last piece of music—I don’t know what it was—and finishing his last glass of wine. In fact I wouldn’t have seen him again even if I had called him as soon as I arrived in Paris on November 20, because although I learned of his death on the 23rd, he had committed suicide on the 15th. He left two letters, neither was for me, he had already written me many.