'What little gathering? What was it he told you?' I asked, although without emphasising the interrogative tone. I realised that I did want to know, despite the fact that, generally speaking, I did not try to worm information out of my father even if I was really curious, I left him and his memories alone unless he summoned them up on his own account and of his own accord - and despite having lied to him a little and having, in passing, lied to myself a little too, albeit only momentarily: it wasn't true that he could tell me anything, with no consequences, I mean, for my state of mind or my sorrow, nor that the unpleasant events related by him were more bearable or less awful to know about than the worst atrocities read about in history books or the contemporary atrocities seen on television. What he told me was not only as real and true as the siege of Vienna in 1529 or the terrible fall of Constantinople to the Turkish infidels in 1453; as the slaughter in Gallipoli of Wheeler's compatriots and the three battles or bloodbaths at Ypres during the First World War; as the devastation of the village of Lidice and the bombing of Hamburg and Coventry and Cologne and London during the Second World War; it had, moreover, happened here, in the same bright, peaceful and, nowadays, prosperous cities and streets, the 'sweet lands', where I had spent the larger part of my life and almost the whole of my childhood; and it had not only happened here - as had the executions of 3 May 1808, during what the English call the Peninsular War, as had the siege of Numancia between 154 and 133 BC, and so many other incidents of unspeakable cruelty — they were things that had happened to him and which his blue eyes (dull now and with the iris dilated) had seen and which they now saw again, or which his defenceless ears had heard and now heard again (with stomach churning, with a weight on his chest as in murky, agitated dreams, all of it lying like lead upon his soul). What made his bad experiences more painful to me than almost any past misfortune or act of cruelty, or even present-day ones that take place somewhere far away, was that they had affected him personally and had cast a shadow over his biography, that of someone so close to me and who was there before me, still alive, still present — who knows for how much longer - with his mind still perfectly clear. No, you don't take in or receive first-hand testimony from a stranger - a journalist, a witness, a newsreader, an historian — in the same way as you do from someone you have known since birth. You see the same eyes that saw and, to their grief, found in a filing cabinet the photo of a young man who had been killed by a bullet in his head or ear; and you hear the same voice that had to tell the dead man's sister, or had to remain silent with horror or sorrow or suppressed rage when those same ears heard involuntarily, in a tram or a café, what they would prefer never to have heard ('Keep quiet and don't say a word. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it burns you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself').
'One morning, I went to the publishing house of Gómez-Antigüedad,' that voice told me, 'to see if they had any translation work for me to do, even though I wouldn't be able to sign it with my own name, or if there were any other anonymous, occasional jobs, reports on foreign books and so forth. The son, Pepito, was pretty much in charge of the company at the time, and I knew him slightly from university and from the famous Mediterranean cruise we'd been on as students, and he was one of the few people on the winning side who, as you know, behaved with great decency and generosity he helped quite a number of people who were being singled out for reprisals, those whom he considered to be the most able, and he did that during the early years, when it was almost impossible for us to find any kind of work at all, things were really difficult up until 1945 and not a great deal easier between then and 1953. Your mother and I had only been able to get married thanks to the French classes she gave, a small loan from her godmother, who had money and had managed somehow to hang on to it, and to occasional commissions from the Revista de Occidente; but in order to keep going, I had to be constantly looking for more work, because three-quarters - or more - of the things I went after didn't come to anything. Antigüedad, the son, agreed to see me, and I explained my problem.' ('Whenever we ask for something, we are exposed, defenceless,' I thought, 'at the almost absolute mercy of the person giving or refusing') 'Despite our political differences, he felt that I was being treated unfairly and gave me a couple of books to translate, I can still remember what they were, one from German, by Schnitzler, and the other by the French writer Hazard. At the time, this felt to me like winning the lottery, being able to get paid work, even if I wasn't getting paid very much. You just grabbed whatever there was, and as I've always told you, there's no such thing as a bad job if there's no better job in view. He was a very friendly man and, in order to celebrate our collaboration, he suggested having a drink at what used to be the Café Roma, in Calle de Serrano, close to his office in Calle de Ayala.'
'Oh, I remember the Café Roma,' I said, 'it was still there during my first year at university.'
'Possibly,' he replied, not wanting to pause. I felt that it was best not to interrupt him again, he had embarked on a story that was very hard for him to tell, and it was best not to give him time to have second thoughts or doubts, as he had with my mother, when he returned home after hearing the story and decided to keep it to himself. 'As soon as we went in, some friends or acquaintances of his called him over to their table and asked us to join them. I don't know if they knew who I was, I mean, if my name meant anything to them when I was introduced, but I certainly knew who two of them were, although not the other two. One was the writer I've told you about, and who, at the time, was still a shiny new Falangist, and the other I was a monarchist, of the kind with infinite patience and in no particular hurry, that is, a Francoist through and through. Both were already safely ensconced in their respective cushy jobs. The writer was really only beginning to be talked about as such: he had published a volume, or possibly two volumes, of rather old-fashioned verse, much praised for obvious reasons; later on, he abandoned poetry and devoted himself to the novel, which is where he made his name; he also wrote a few dull plays and the odd dull essay as well. These two men appeared not to have seen the others for a very long time, and people then were still in the habit of recounting to each other what had happened to them during the War, what they'd suffered or made other people suffer. And this was the case with them. They were swapping experiences, stories, the occasional exploit, the occasional hardship, the occasional atrocity. Gómez-Antigüedad contributed a little, I not at all. And in the middle of all this, the writer mentioned a name which I knew and admired, that of a former university friend. We hadn't been close friends, he was a year below me, but I'd enjoyed talking to him from time to time, and he was just a very nice man: Emilio Mares, an Andalusian, very friendly and bright, he was rather vain, but in a funny, self-consciously frivolous way, he made out he was an anarchist, but there was nothing solemn about him at all; even when he got on his high horse about something, he did so with a degree of self-mockery, and he always looked immaculate, impeccably dressed, certainly not the kind of anarchist you read about in novels; a really lovely man, always in a good mood. He was in Andalusia when the War broke out; by 18 July a lot of students who weren't from Madrid had gone back home to spend the summer with their families, and he was from a village near Malaga or Granada, I'm not quite sure where, but his father was, I think, the socialist mayor, in Grazalema or Casares off Manilva, somewhere round there. We had heard, when the War was already in full swing, that he'd been killed in Malaga by the Nationalists, and we assumed that he'd been killed there in February 1937 when the Italian blackshirts moved in, more than ten thousand of them. We imagined that he would have been summarily shot. The repression or, rather, revenge was particularly ferocious there, because the city had resisted for seven months and the people of Malaga had committed a lot of barbarous acts themselves, random shootings, indiscriminate looting, the burning of churches, the settling of personal accounts, just as happened at the beginning of the War here. It was said that when the Nationalists took the city, under the Duque de
Sevilla, they corrected the imbalance and went still further, and that in the first week alone about four thousand people were shot. It may have been fewer than that, but it doesn't matter, they certainly served up plenty of coffee, because that, as you know, was the euphemism used by Franco and his cohorts for ordering executions, "Dadles café" - "Give them some coffee" — they would say, and the prisoners would be put up against the wall and shot. In Malaga, a lot of them were taken to the beach to be shot. The Italians protested at such brutality, they felt splattered by all that spilled blood, so much so that the ambassador, Cantalupo, spoke to Franco about it and went there himself to stem the violence. I read somewhere that he was stunned at the furious cruelty that had been unleashed, and how even wealthy matrons, all of them good Catholics, were busily desecrating Republican graves.' My father stopped and drew one hand across his forehead or, rather, almost squeezed it with his four fingers, as if he were trying to remove something, images perhaps, perhaps stories. He was then in his eighties. But it was a very brief pause and he immediately resumed his account: 'I can't remember exactly how the episode came up in the conversation, in the old Café Roma, but what was said about Mares is engraved on my memory. I think one of them remarked in offended tones that many Republicans, when they surrendered or were detained, "got very hoity-toity", he said, or something along those lines. And it was more or less then, spurred on by the mention of such arrogance, that the writer decided to describe the lesson they had taught just one such Republican. He told how once, in Ronda (Ronda had fallen long before Malaga, in September or October of 1936), they took three prisoners out at dawn to shoot them, and how, as was the custom, they ordered them to dig their own grave (it was the custom on both sides, and I fear it may still be so in any war). One of them, "a dandified little fellow called Emilio Mares", those were his words, "the son of a Commie mayor from some village around there" refused and said to his executioners: "You can and will kill me, I know that, but I'm not a bull to be baited." He wasn't prepared to do their work for them, let's say. The comment was just what I would have expected from the man I had known, who had, on that I particular day, unsurprisingly lost his usual good humour: a final impudent remark, he obviously didn't want to spend his last moments digging and sweating and getting himself dirty. "The fellow got really uppity," the writer went on, "as if he was in a position to impose conditions. However much of a red he claimed to be, you could see, straight off, that he was just a little rich kid, done up to the nines, quite the young master. And he even urged his two companions to refuse as well. Luckily for them, though, they were too frightened, and kept on digging. He must have assumed we would just shoot all three of them afterwards beside the open grave. One man in our group, a local chap who clearly had it in for him from the start, struck him in the face with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground, and told him again to start digging. But the fellow still refused, and repeated that we could kill him if we wanted to, beat him to death if we liked, but that he wasn't going to be our plaything, a bull to be baited 'as sure as my name is Emilio Mares', he said. That's how he put it, with his name and everything - jumped up little man. Well, all I can say is that it was a most unfortunate turn of phrase to choose because, do you know what we did?" And the writer waited a moment, as if for dramatic effect, to arouse our expectations, as if he really needed us to say "No, what did you do?", although he didn't, in fact, wait that long, because it was a purely rhetorical question, pure theatre Then he brought his index finger down through the air, stopping just short of the table, as if he were pointing something out or underlining it, as if he were proud of the answer, and at the same time as he made this gesture, he gave the answer, gave us the answer: "We baited him," he said smugly, pleased with the lesson they had taught the man. I remember that this was followed by a shocked, uncomprehending silence. I don't think any of us could grasp what he meant, because up until then it had been clear that the man had been speaking figuratively, and, of course, the whole thing was utterly inconceivable. Surprised and slightly apprehensive, Antigüedad was the one to ask him: "What do you mean?" "Precisely what I said, we took him at his word and we baited him like a bull. We played matador to his bull," replied the writer. "It was the chap from Malaga's idea, the one who'd had it in for him from the start. 'Oh, so you're not a bull to be baited, eh?' he said to him. 'I don't think you've quite got the measure of us.' And he climbed into the van and drove into town and in less than half an hour, he was back with all the stuff. We stuck banderillas in him, stood on the roof of the van and drove very slowly past him, jabbing at him like picadors, and then the malagueño delivered the coup de grâce with the sword. He was a nasty piece of work, a real bastard, but he obviously knew what he was doing, and he went in for the kill with genuine style, straight in, through the heart. I only stuck a couple of short banderillas in him, round the neck and shoulders. Oh, Emilio Mares got the measure of us all right. The other two men were our audience and we forced them to cheer and clap. We didn't shoot them until the show was over, as a reward for having dug their own graves. That way they could see what they had escaped. The malagueño insisted on cutting off one ear as a prize. That was perhaps going a bit too far, but we weren't going to stop him." And that was the story that the famous, celebrated writer told over drinks,' added my father, and as soon as he stopped speaking, his voice sounded suddenly weary, 'although he never told it again later on, when he was really famous. A solemn funeral mass was held when he died. I think one very democratic minister even helped carry his coffin.'
He fell silent for longer this time, his gaze again that of an old man remembering, as if he really had returned to the long-since disappeared Café Roma on Calle Serrano or to Ronda where he had not been, at least not in September 1936, when they baited his friend like a bull in the ring and delivered the coup de grâce with a sword. It was on the 16th of that month I found out later, when that 'heroic and fantastical' city, with its huge precipice or gorge, fell into the white-gloved hands of General Varela - or perhaps he was only a colonel then: it was said that he slept with his medals on - a far crueller man than the head of the Italian blackshirts, Colonel Roatta, who advanced on Malaga and was nicknamed 'Mancini' — like my musical protector - following the norm set by many others who passed through that war, when names were routinely renounced or lost; but no less cruel, at any rate, than the person who took over and controlled Malaga once it had fallen, the Duque de Sevilla was his somewhat inappropriate title: ah, these rapacious Spaniards, some silent, some verbose; ah, 'these men full of rage', as so many of them so often are.
The poet Rilke had stayed in Ronda for a couple of months twenty-four years before, at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, when not even Wheeler had yet arrived in the world - in the Antipodes and as Peter Rylands. And there is a statue of him, of the poet, a very black, life-size one, in the garden of a hotel from whose long balcony you can see the broad, sweet lands of Spain, perhaps one of those fields was the scene of that brief one-man corrida: it's unlikely, but not impossible, because at dawn, there would be no one standing there contemplating the fields, or else the area would be occupied by victorious troops who would have had no objection to such sport should some guard have spotted it: perhaps among them would be some of the requetés, the Carlist militiamen trained up by Varela as he travelled around the villages of Navarra, disguised as a priest and going by the colourful sobriquet of Tio Pepé; as well as legionnaires and Moroccans, a grotesque 'crusade' - Varela's favourite word - of fanatical Catholic volunteers and Muslim mercenaries engaged together in destroying and laying waste this secular land. That hotel is, I believe, the 'Reina Victoria', which, as Rilke put it, 'the devil persuaded the English to build here'; you can even visit the room in which he stayed, a kind of mini-museum or minuscule mausoleum, adorned with a portrait and a few bits of furniture, some old books, some jottings by him in German, possibly a bust (it's been years since I visited it, so I can't be sure). It may have been there that he began to conceive the
se lines, or, rather, fragments, which I often recall: "Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn; not to be what one was and having to leave even one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that once clung together floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work ..." Perhaps, who knows, this is what Emilio Mares thought, although not in these words.
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