Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  Some time later, in May, Ian kindly sent me a copy of his letter to Mr. Guido Waldman of Harvill. He pointed out that neither the Spanish nor the French edition of the book described it as a roman à clef, and that if the English edition did not present or promote it as such he saw no reason for concern. He noted the advantage of eliminating Leigh-Peele and did not refrain from adding that no one could prevent readers in Oxford from making mistaken identifications, “but that is as much a problem for Iris Murdoch, A. N. Wilson, Colin Dexter, Evelyn Waugh, in the past, or any novelist who uses Oxford as a setting, as for Javier Marías.” He enclosed for Harvill, and for me as well, Masterman’s famous defensive preface, so long that, to tell the truth, I was too lazy to read it and never did. The letter concluded with a decorative phrase which Harvill could, if they liked, cite on the back cover or inside flap of their edition and attribute to David Serafin, which is the pseudonym, no longer at all secret, by which Ian Michael signs his detective novels about Inspector Bernal.

  And so Todas las almas at last came out in England in 1992, under the natural title of All Souls and with the incidental character of Dr. Leigh-Peele transformed into “Dr. Leigh-Justice” in vague memory of the English supporting actor of my childhood, James Robertson Justice; there’s been too much deeply resented censorship for a Spanish author to be prepared, today, to eliminate passages from a book, and for the same reason I refused to pay attention to a discreet suggestion about a couple of minimal pontifical wisecracks—it particularly pains me to renounce a joke. As for the protectory preface, I did no more than add, at the beginning, an “Author’s Note” similar to the one that appears in the final credits of movies, though I fear that, if read closely, it incorporated an ironic internal contradiction and therefore said something different than what was and is initially understood. It went like this, “Given that both the author and the narrator of this novel spent two years in the same post at Oxford University, it may not be out of order for the former to take the floor a moment before yielding it, until the end, to the latter, to say that any resemblance between any of the characters in All Souls (including the narrator, excluding ‘John Gawsworth’) and any person living or dead (including the author, excluding Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) is pure coincidence, and the same can be said with respect to the story, the anecdotes and the action. The Author.” The English wording was slightly different, but I believe that neither the translator nor the publishers noticed the contradiction, which went tranquilly to the presses. Amid the growing confusion between reality and invention, the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, to whom I owe so much, noticed the lines from Lawrence Durrell that I cited in All Souls and have also cited here, about the dazzling friend of his youth, John Gawsworth, and they struck her as so implausible or overly ben trovate that she thought they were apocryphal and coined by me; fortunately a residual trace of doubt led her to consult me, and thus she was able to cite verbatim from Durrell’s Spirit of Place instead of laboriously translating from Spanish to English the sentences I had previously translated from that language to my own.

  It was after the book’s publication in England that the tempo of events and coincidences and confirmations I hadn’t sought began to accelerate, and it hasn’t yet slowed and may never stop, and I sometimes have the feeling that you must be careful about what you make up and write down in books because occasionally it comes true. And if this rhythm never stops, as I foresee, it’s very possible that one part of my life—but only one part—will forever be determined and ruled by a fiction, or by what this novel has brought me so far and what it has yet to bring.

  Before that, however, something quite remarkable—though more so for the man who wrote to me than for me—had already happened. A few days after November n, 1991, when it was dated, I received a letter from one Anthony Edkins who lived on Deronda Road in London. The letter said we had seen each other once in Madrid at the home of Alvaro Pombo, but very much in passing and I might not remember it (and indeed, I hardly remembered it, though my memory isn’t generally that bad). Now he had read—in Spanish, clearly—Todas las almas, and was stunned when he reached the chapter on John Gawsworth. “Gawsworth, whom I never met in person,” he wrote, “was the first editor who accepted one of my poems (just, it so happens, as I was about to set out on my first trip to Spain in 1951). At that time, he was editor-in-chief of the Poetry Review: he wrote me, by hand, a five-page letter. (I’ve just located and reread that letter, dated 13–3–51, from Shepperton in Middlesex, and I see that we appear to have had a phone conversation.)” While this was undeniably a great and almost an excessive coincidence, there was really nothing too extraordinary about it up to this point, given that Gawsworth, in the course of the tireless activities he engaged in before becoming vagrant and passive, must have known an infinity of people related to literature, novices and acclaimed authors alike. But the following paragraph of Edkins’ letter made his perplexity and even his fear (or mine on reading it) more understandable, that bearable, brief fear that comes over us when we see things fitting together unexpectedly and with too much precision, the fear that the world is more orderly than we like to believe, or that we are better at ordering it. “Subsequently you mention and reproduce,” Edkins went on, “Gawsworth’s death mask made by Oloff de Wet, someone I met that same summer in the Café Gijón in Madrid. I was having a rough time of it, and he kept me in ham sandwiches and Pernod for a week or more, in exchange for which I had to listen to his fantastical but fascinating stories.” And the letter ended amid exclamations: “So, there I was, last week, reading a novel by someone I knew—though very slightly—which presented me with two people who, though I’ve never in my life run across them again, were of great importance to me forty years ago!”

  I had no doubts as to the authenticity of the letter or Edkins’ veracity, though anyone who had wanted to play a trick on me couldn’t have come up with a better one. In addition to the incredible coincidence, there were certain ironic details that might have induced some suspicion in a less trusting individual: not only had my correspondent had dealings with Gawsworth and with De Wet, but he had known them separately and had never established any link whatsoever between the two men, who were nevertheless united at Gawsworth’s death; his contact with both Gawsworth and De Wet had taken place in the same year, 1951, which was also the year when his lasting relationship with Spain began and when, as it happens, I was born in Madrid, not far from the Café Gijón, the place where De Wet protected and fed him for a week or more; finally, Edkins lived on an implausible street named Deronda, and though I know and knew then that Daniel Deronda is the title of a famous nineteenth-century English novel, the truth is that the name, in this context, seemed a mocking and facile anagram for Redonda, the Antillean island of which Gawsworth was king.

  I answered him immediately, asking for a copy of the letter from the king without a kingdom, if he would be so kind as to send me one; I told him that until then the only thing I had known about Oloff de Wet was his name, which appears as “Hugh Olaff de Wet” in the commemorative pamphlet on Gawsworth’s death from which I took the photograph of his plaster death mask. “And if you have the time and don’t mind remembering out loud,” I added, “I’d like to know more about De Wet, what kind of man he was, what sort of work he did, what type of ‘fantastical but fascinating stories’ he used to tell, how old he was and what it was that had set him adrift in Madrid at that point.” Since the publication of All Souls, I told him, a few more diverse facts about Gawsworth had reached me, but this was the first time I had received word from someone who had been in more or less direct contact with him. When I think of that observation, I can’t suppress a quick internal laugh, given all the things that have changed in that respect in the little more than six years since I read Edkins’ letter, and having in my house, as I now do, what I’ve grown used to calling “Gawsworth’s room.”

  Edkins’ generous response is dated December 8. He sent me the requested photocopy of the letter. “A
s for Oloff de Wet, well …,” he wrote, “I could spend hours talking about him, though I was in contact with him for only a week; later I met two people who had known him: one, a very famous second-hand bookseller here in London, Bernard Stone (perhaps you know him), and the other, like Oloff himself, one of the first mercenary pilots, an American named Jim Tuck, who died a couple of years ago.… In 1951, De Wet was about thirty-eight; it was his first visit to Spain since the Civil War, when he had fought on the side of the Republic (having been rejected by Franco’s camp, probably because he had previously flown for Haile Selassie against Mussolini in the war of Abyssinia), with which, nevertheless, he was later in conflict; he only escaped being executed in Valencia through the personal intervention of Cisneros.” (Edkins was referring to Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, commander of the Republican air force.) “He later worked for the Deuxième Bureau and the Germans arrested him in Prague, so he spent the entire war in a cellblock for men condemned to death … He published two books (and some childrens’ books as well, I believe). The first, about his aerial escapades during the Spanish Civil War, entitled Cardboard Crucifix” (a horrible title if ever one existed), “was published by Blackwood in 1938 and in America by Doubleday as The Patrol Is Ended; I’ve never managed to get my hands on a copy of that book or read it; Bernard Stone promised to loan it to me but never kept his promise. It was from Stone that I learned Oloff had died, in the early 1970s, he thought. The second book is The Valley of the Shadow, Blackwood, 1949, with a paperback reprint in 1956, which is the version I have, about his German experience; the promotional copy on the cover indicates that he had appeared on the BBC television program This Is Your Life, so he couldn’t have been a complete unknown at that point! There was a time when I intended to write a comic novel, with Oloff as protagonist, but reading his book about the cell on death row put me off it.…” He then proposed that we see each other the next time he came to Madrid, which would probably be around Easter; he would tell me more then. He also suggested I ask Pombo for the manuscript of another unfinished novel of his which incorporated episodes from the abandoned project inspired by De Wet. He could be recognized beneath the name and mask of the character named Hugo van Renssaler.… But Pombo had almost certainly misplaced it, as he had done on other occasions.

  My mind can sometimes be of a detectivish and therefore deductive bent, though never scholarly or journalistic, of course. I realize that I don’t even do much to track down or seek out the things that arouse my curiosity or interest me, but limit myself to registering them, taking them in; I keep still and wait as if I believed that only what comes to me anyway, without any effort on my part, will be worthwhile or deserved. At times I wonder if this might not be a way of protecting myself or defending my daily life and my few sustaining habits; if so many things, good and strange and bad, come to me anyway with almost no effort on my part, an active approach might deluge my life with good, strange, or bad things, and I’m disinclined to have that happen, even if they were all fantastic. (Or, more likely, then nothing would come to me.) If I were superstitious—I only pretend to be now and then, for fun—I would believe I possessed a strange magnetic force, tangential to my will, that attracts events and coincidences and fulfills many desires that even in thought are unexpressed; the salt and vinegar affair wouldn’t be so nonsensical if this ungoverned force were believed to have turned against the vinegar people. Unfortunately for them, the futility of their primitive saline solution has become obvious. Perhaps they should try other remedies, and several occur to me. But it’s not up to me to provide them with ideas.

  The truth is that I did not call Pombo to ask him to rummage around for the manuscript, undoubtedly lost amid his overflowing morass of papers (so thankless a task would have annoyed him), nor did I shoot off to London to meet Bernard Stone (I already had my own Stones, and my Alabasters, too) or to interview Edkins of Deronda Street without waiting for Easter, and when he at last came to Madrid and we saw each other for a while in my house, it never occurred to me to take notes or record the conversation and the information he was able to give me on De Wet and Gawsworth (what nonsense I’m writing; I don’t even possess a tape recorder), most of it concerning De Wet, who, at least, had been his mentor for a week. So I no longer remember much of it, and I’m not writing him back now to put him to the trouble of again composing a few pages for my benefit (this book isn’t that important, not even to me). But maybe I don’t remember much because there wasn’t all that much more to what he finally told me in person, and that, too, is logical: however great an impression the former mercenary pilot had made on him when he was twenty-five, forty years had gone by since that brief encounter or tutelage in Madrid.

  Edkins was more than seventy, a bit shy, very affable and discreet, with a guarded way of speaking, a reserved sense of humor, and the vague air of a man with a bohemian past. His eyes were confident and his nose and chin were sharp, which gave him a comical resemblance to his host and friend Pombo, both of them more reminiscent of Dickens’ Fagin than of Daniel Deronda, however Jewish Deronda was. He presented me with two booklets containing poems of his and some translations of Cernuda, and out of everything he told me about De Wet I remember only this: the self-assured, jovial De Wet was rather conspicuous in Madrid in 1951 because he sported an earring dangling from one ear, and for all I know he may also have had a blondish and piratical ponytail; he wore a black patch or smoked monocle over one eye, and his face was adorned with a moustache alone or perhaps with a moustache and beard, people’s features fade in our undulating visual memory. Though he was well-dressed and wore a tie, it was strange that he wasn’t arrested every night by Franco’s police, looking like that; being a foreigner must have protected him, or maybe he had some sort of safe-conduct, for of course he had no dearth of criminal and diplomatic contacts. The reason he had returned to Spain, where he had killed and had almost been put to death, was ludicrous, if it really was the reason and not simply a fantasy, a tall tale to entertain the boy while he ate his ham sandwiches washed down with Pernod. De Wet proposed to convince Franco to create and organize groups of partisan guerrillas, based in the Carpathian mountains, which would make raids on the Soviets (from quite a distance away, actually). The reasons he gave for this, however, weren’t exactly political, much less ideological; rather, he was convinced that once the Communist regimes had been overthrown, everything confiscated in Russia and the satellite countries after 1917 would be restored to its legitimate owners, among whom was his current wife—or perhaps she was his only wife—a Russian woman whose family had apparently lost, after the October Revolution, the best and most expensive hotel in Moscow: the Metropol, if memory does not fail. As director-general and proprietor-consort of the Metropol, he would often say, he could at last lead, without obstacles, the eventful and effervescent life that he was destined for—and from which, in any case, he was certainly not abstaining, hotel or no hotel. He must have promised himself a long youth and an even longer life if, to arrive at this goal, his first step was to persuade a numskull like Franco to finance a group of impromptu partisans who would then go cavorting around the Carpathians (and without knowing any of the languages, either, if most of them were to be Spaniards). And of course with that earring he wouldn’t have gotten very far with the puffy-cheeked, weak-jawed dictator, who would only have looked him up and down and then noted on the corner of a blank card, with petit bourgeois apprehension and preordained disgust: “Effeminate.”