Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  But nothing will ever make me believe that this was my destiny or that anything else will be, or that there was a reason for my birth.

  Some time will have to pass before this voice or writing speaks more clearly and I can tell what it tells, I have to take a certain distance from recent events; I prefer to pause here and wait a while, everything is still changing. It isn’t only that I have yet to tell of all the short-cuts and twisted paths along which this fantasmal literary title came to attach itself to my name (and I don’t know whether it transposes me into what, for me, was fiction only fourteen or even nine years ago, or whether, instead, fiction is embedding itself in my life and making it even more unreal and chimerical, as well as absurd, indicisive and somewhat calamitous). It isn’t only the accession that remains to be told; the whole story is intricate and possibly picturesque and also comical, of course. And neither is it only the ludicrous characteristics and vicissitudes of this kingdom, which, though imaginary—and it is that, above all—is not free from what all kingdoms have known throughout history: usurpers, imposters, intrigues, lunatics, betrayals, “subjects,” patrons, rebellions, chroniclers, false favorites, “dynastic” disputes—in which I shall certainly not be participating, all I need right now is to engage in heated epistolary arguments over “legitimacy” or “lineages” that are no such thing, for kinship matters not at all here—and I believe there’s also been a bloody deed. And a modest legend, which I’m told I now incarnate. I’ll have to name my own peers, since I must play along with the game. Perhaps there will soon be a Duke of Svolta, a Duke of Norte, a Duke of Caronte, a Duke of Babel, or a Duke of Tigres, possibly. A Duke of Región is no longer possible.

  When from time to time I’ve hinted at what was happening or revealed some isolated fact, making tentative probes among those of my friends who wouldn’t make fan of me or disapprove, I’ve seen them all react with an incredulity that’s never entirely left them; they, better than anyone, know of my inclination towards fabulation and levity, and they can’t be sure that I’m not making up stories. I doubt this skeptical reaction will ever disappear, even after they’ve read these pages and seen the images I’ve placed in them, though each one’s incredulity had its own character and stance: Eric Southworth’s combined mirth with ingenious ideas and glosses; Mercedes López-Ballesteros’ concern over the more somber aspects of the invading fiction was infused with a childlike enchantment, the sheer pleasure of an arbitrary tale; Daniella Pittarello’s fragile irony, overcoming her theoretical perplexities, let her youthful spirit embrace the coincidences; Anna Sala’s, or just “Anna’s,” apprehensive anticipation, as if she feared these adventures might change my life or do me harm, was also tinged with the bewildered contentment of being present at the unfolding of a fable; in Ruibérriz de Torres, whose surname I bear as I do Custardoy and Manera and Cao, the incredulity was mingled with a sarcasm that couldn’t quite banish his curiosity, at least not to the point of telling me to be quiet and stop bothering him with this foolishness; Manolo Rodríguez Rivero’s critical distance ultimately concealed a perfect understanding of this type of deliberately provoked, hilarious English extravagance and of the temptation writers sometimes feel to dilute themselves in their own pages; and Julia Altares’ incredulity was, how shall I put it, seasoned with revelry and fantastical plans and the maximum degree of encouragement, or rather, more precisely, with binges. All of them are good at playing along, and all are a little worried and don’t know whether to believe me, but at least they listen and ask for more information, which until now I’ve strictly rationed and parcelled out among them. My agent Mercedes Casanovas, to whom I was forced—red-faced and worried that she might take me for a madman—to spill the story several months ago, in order to find out if she would agree to handle the rights to Shiel and Gawsworth in my name, can’t, I believe, quite get used to the idea that she’s now part of what was for her, less than a year ago, only the vague memory of a novel, though she conducts herself with cheerful professionalism and has already negotiated our first Shiel contract, for an edition of the novel The Yellow Danger, from 1898, a century ago. Only my brother Miguel, after raising an eyebrow and taking his pipe from his mouth for a moment, immediately banished all doubt and listened to my news as if it were perfectly natural, he’s known me since I was a child, and not in vain, and he does have a memory now. It’s curious that I find myself enveloped in all of this without having sought it out or tried to attain it—or only with my writing—when at heart I’m a republican and islands make me nervous. But the same things exist in republics as in kingdoms: imposters and intrigues, lunatics and rebellions, and bloody deeds. And legends. Maybe I’m the lunatic.

  I’ll hazard a guess that the reason for all the quarreling over something that is imaginary is not the dream or symbol of a literary realm made of paper and ink (no usurper or pretender to the throne has been a real writer, the primary, implicit requirement), but the geographical location and material existence of the territory that accompanies it, the Leeward Isle; for it seems that when Queen Victoria annexed Redonda in 1872, through the government of Gladstone, in order to thwart the United States which was trying to do the same in order to exploit the phosphate of alumina in its poor, rocky soil, the British Colonial Office, in response to the protests first of Shiel’s father and then, later, of Shiel himself, made no objection to the latter’s title (“King of Redonda”), assuring him he could use it as long as his kingdom were devoid of substance and he refrained from rebelling against the colonial power. Besides, it’s debatable whether Shiel’s sovereignty fell under the jurisdiction of British law, and even the Colonial Office harbored some doubts as to the validity of his claim and right to an uninhabited island.

  Redonda was discovered by Columbus during his second voyage, on the 10th, 11th, 12th or 13th of November, depending on the source. His illegitimate son Hernando Colón has this to say about the discovery in his biography of his father, Vida del Almirante: “Sunday, November 10th the Admiral weighed anchor and took the fleet northwest along the coast of the island of Guadalupe in the direction of Hispaniola [Haiti]. He reached the island of Montserrat, to which he gave that name because of its height; and he learned from the Indians he was carrying with him that the Caribs had unpeopled it by eating all its inhabitants. From there he proceeded to Santa María la Redonda, so named because it is so round and smooth that it seemed impossible to climb its sides without a ladder; the Indians called this island Ocamaniro,” a name which, incidentally, is almost an anagram of Manera Cao, or at least has all the same consonants, which are the substance of words.

  It was also mentioned by the famous historian and humanist Pietro Martire d’Anghiera or Peter Martyr of Angleria, an official chronicler of the Indies, in his De Orbe Novo or The Decades of the new world, written in Latin after the manner of Titus Livius, beginning in 1511. From what he says in his lengthy description of the neighboring island of Madanino, it can be surmised that Columbus did not disembark at Redonda, though, as with everything else he caught sight of, he made note of it, christened it and claimed it for the Crown of Spain: “The Prefect,” (this was the classical term Peter Martyr used to designate the Admiral) “for the desire he had to see his companions, which at his first voyage he left the year before in Hispaniola to search the country, let pass many islands both on his right hand and left hand and sailed directly thither. By the way there appeared from the North a great Island which the captives that were taken in Hispaniola called Madanino, affirming it to be inhabited only with women to whom the Cannibals have access at certain times of the year, as in old time the Thracians had to the Amazons in the Island of Lesbos. The men children they send to their fathers. But the women they keep with themselves. They have great and strong caves or dens in the ground, to the which they fly for safeguard if any men resort unto them at any other time than is appointed, and there defend themselves with bows and arrows against the violence of such as attempt to invade them. They could not at this time approach to th
is Island, by reason of the Northnortheast wind which blew so vehemently from the same, whereas they now followed the East southeast.” This island, which also appears as “Matinina” and “Matinino” is believed to be the eastern side of Guadalupe. And Peter Martyr goes on: “After they departed from Madanino and sailed the space of forty miles, they passed not far from another Island which the captives said to be very populous and replenished with all things necessary for the life of man. This they called Mons Serratus [Montserrat], because it was full of mountains. The captives further declared that the Cannibals are wont at some time to go from their own coasts above a thousand miles to hunt for men. The day following, they saw another Island the which, because it was round, they called Sancta Maria Rotunda.… They affirm all these islands to be marvelous fair and fruitful.” De Orbe Novo was first translated into English by Richard Eden, in 1555, and into German in 1582.

  And there is even a first-hand description by Doctor Diego Alvarez Chanca of Seville, physician to the King and Queen and to the Princess, Doña Juana la Loca, who at his own request went “as doctor on the second fleet Columbus prepared for the Indies.” Prose was not his strong point, but he says in a letter to the Cabildo of Seville: “We went along the coast of this island and the Indian women we were carrying said it was not inhabited, that those of Caribe had unpeopled it and so we did not stop there.” That was Montserrat; then comes Redonda: “Later that afternoon we saw another, night by then, near that island we missed some shoals for fear of which we lay at anchor, for we didn’t dare go unless it was day.” It would appear from all of this that though they never set foot on the island, probably because access to Redonda was so difficult, they did spend a night near it, because of some shoals.

  A much more recent mention, and in another language, is that of the historian and professor, first at Oxford—where else?—then at Harvard, Samuel Eliot Morison, who, in addition to writing an important biography of the Admiral in 1942 for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, led the Harvard Columbus Expedition, which in the autumn of 1939 and winter of 1940 followed the Navigator’s routes in two schooners, in order to describe in detail all that Columbus found, saw and did in his journeys, point by point and step by step. In the biography he said, “Proceeding in a general northwesterly direction, the fleet passed along a small, steep and rounded but inaccessible rock less than a mile long which Columbus named Santa María la Redonda, ‘St. Mary the Rotund.’ Redonda retains her name and her importance as a sea mark to this day; but she has never been worth inhabiting.” His mention of it in a later book, dating from 1974, is less reserved: “Then came a minuscule, round island, Santa Maria la Redonda: it has never been inhabited, though a crazy American once declared himself its king.” Of course the word had to be “crazy,” the same word that, according to the British press, the Gestapo used, in its day, to describe Hugh Oloff de Wet. If only Professor Morison were still alive, and knew.

  Accustomed to the robbery, looting, plagiarism and endless espionage of the contemporary university, which leads professors to avoid breathing a word about any project-they’re working on until it is no longer at the research stage but is safely entombed in shelvable print, my friend Eric Southworth sometimes asks if, since I’m dividing these pages into two volumes, I’m not worried that someone will “appropriate” the “real characters” while I write or think about or await the second volume, and, for example, recount all that I have yet to tell or still don’t know about Ewart or De Wet or Gawsworth or the bandit Red Dean or the Maneras.

  That might not be very pleasant, but I don’t fear it, and anyway, these “characters” don’t really belong to anyone, they are real, and if I feel that they are in some way mine it’s only because I happened to notice them while I was writing novels or plotting stories and they were hardly remembered by a living soul: perhaps only by Hugh Cecil, Anthony Edkins, Steve Eng, Roger Dobson, Jon Wynne-Tyson, my estimable father and myself—I mean until recently. Or it may be that it was these characters who crossed paths with me. Nor would I want to know everything, about them or about anyone, least of all about myself. And if I did know everything I don’t believe I would ever tell it, we’re always selecting and discarding, knowing or not knowing often doesn’t matter much. Or sometimes true knowledge turns out to make no difference, and then invention can begin.

  Anyway, as I’ve already said, I’m devoid of scholarly or journalistic inclinations and would never dive into libraries and collections of periodicals or the Internet, which I don’t use, I write on a typewriter and go over the pages by hand; I would never dash off to interview witnesses or heirs or survivors, recording their scraps of memory in order to find out things that don’t come to find me spontaneously and of their own accord, without any effort on my part, without my moving from here, from my place, from where I can send requests to the booksellers of Oxford and York and London or challenge Don Juan Benet to demonstrate his sagacity. It’s as if I scorned any knowledge that is achieved by force or seized, that is active and anxious and dependent upon the will, my own will, of course: any knowledge I don’t deserve. This attitude would be unforgivably incompetent in a scholar, reporter or scientist, but I am none of those things nor am I thinking of becoming any of them in order to speak of things that have happened to me or interest me or affect me, or of things that have not happened to me but that I have slowly learned of and therefore remember.

  It wouldn’t be particularly unlikely or strange were some thief or looter or plagiarist or opportunist, who also abound, silent and masked amid the tempest of literature, to speed-read all of Cardboard Crucifix, if it can be found (but Ben Bass has disappeared), and all of whatever Wilfrid Ewart and James Denham published in their short lives and Stephen Graham in his long one, and a biography of the bandit Dean of Canterbury, if any such thing exists, and all the unknown short novels of Enrique Manera, my Antillean great-grandfather. Or were they to dredge up the living relatives or resentful ex-lovers or the silent papers, waiting without impatience. That is not my work. The most such a person could ever tell would be the facts, and facts in themselves are nothing, language cannot reproduce them just as any number of repetitions, with their sharp edges, cannot reproduce the time that is past or gone, or revive the dead who have already gone past us and been lost in that time. And at this point who knows what has become real and what has become fictitious.

  Who can say if the unlikely news I’m now pondering is real or fictitious, about a Spanish daughter of Matthew Phipps Shiel, native of Montserrat with its high mountains and first king of Redonda (but perhaps it’s no more incredible than the fact that his royalties now belong to me): a child born on July 16, 1900, in London, to his ephemeral wife Carolina or Lina, inscribed in the register of births on August 30 as Dolores Katherine Shiel, the only known legitimate descendent of Felipe I, whose parents called her Lola like my grandmother or Lolita like my mother, as women named Dolores are always called. Shiel and Lina were married in the Italian church of St Peter in the London district of Holborn on November 3, 1898, soon it will be a century ago, in the presence of their respective mother-in-law and mother, another Lola, and a friend, Arthur Machen, Archduke of Redonda. Shiel was thirty-three years old; Lina was only eighteen.

  It isn’t necessarily texts that make things most real, but it’s worth listening to Shiel’s voice for a moment as he speaks of himself when he was still young and in Paris, it isn’t hard to imagine that voice, looking at his brilliant, magnetic, disturbing eyes, his gleaming black hair and smooth skin, he may have been a touch mulatto on his mother’s side: “In the thick of [this],” he says, “my fate takes me one afternoon into the Palais de Glace in the rue de Madrid” (what other street could it have been) “where I see a girl of sixteen skating, a Parisian Spaniard. Of course, I had seen lovely girls—in Cuba—in Andalusia—in Martinique—but never before seen a beauty; and she resembled a girl I had loved at seven, another girl whom I had loved at thirteen, and my mother. Now, I had long ceased ‘to pray’ like my paren
ts, considering that improper; but that afternoon I dashed in a cab to my chamber, and, prostrating myself, I prayed, ‘God! give her to me!’ And the good God did. I did not know her name to begin, but out of the grasp and drag of some twenty I grabbed her, got her. It was natural, after this, for me to pray for girls; and I can say that, if ever I have prayed for a girl, I have got her from God. She—Lina—was the ‘Laura’ of my Cold Steel” (one of his best novels) “at least her face and manner; in the streets of London every creature turned the head to look back at her, and observe the handicraft of her Father. But she did not think London ‘pretty’ (‘Londres n’est pas jolie’), and it was thus that I got the habit of living long in Paris. However, she was not strong—died after five years, leaving me and a daughter; and it was some fifteen years before I married again, when I met at a lecture Lydia, who resembles Lina and my mother.”

  “Leaving me and a daughter.” So the news I received some time ago but am only now pondering must be true, despite everything. Shiel may not have been entirely sincere, however, because he also reports that before Lina’s death he had rejected her in a letter of June 12 1903, returning to London shortly thereafter and abandoning her in Paris with her daughter. Apparently Carolina died at the end of that year at the age of only twenty-three, who knows how much the rejection and abandonment of the man who had prayed to get her had to do with it. An older sister, Salva, and perhaps a younger one, Micaela, the two aunts, took little Lola to Madrid, she was a three-year-old then who may not have remembered her father if she never saw him again, a little Madrileña who must be dead by now, or no less than ninety-seven years of age, and the bearer of these distant tidings—arrived from Dayton, Ohio—asks me about her and her Spanish history, asks that I apply myself and track her down and find out about her life and learn about her descendents, if she had any. Perhaps I should try it this time, despite my disinclination toward journalism, not to mention biography, which all too frequently has become among the most vile and defamatory activities of our time. Or else, as always, I’ll have to wait for Lola Shiel or her ghost or offspring to come to me and tell me.