Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (20 page)

All in all, compared with so many others, Juan Deza was lucky, and his betrayer did not manage to get him lined up against a white wall. During the War, my father had been a soldier in the Popular or Republican Army, as he preferred to call it (he was twenty-two when war broke out, a few months younger than Wheeler), but, consigned to administrative duties in the rearguard in Madrid, he was placed first in a regiment in the service corps, and was subsequently employed as an army translator, later on again, he worked as collaborator and assistant to Don Julian Besteiro until the capitulation, and he therefore never saw battle. And since he had never been obliged to fire a single bullet from his rifle, he could also be absolutely certain that he had never killed anyone, which, he said, was a source of infinite joy to him. He wrote articles for
Abc
and for a few other publications, he broadcast radio programmes for a time in 1937 when he was sent to Valencia, and was charged by the general staff with translating a vast English tome whose author he could not recall, but which was entitled,
Spy and Counterspy (A History of Modern Espionage),
although his Spanish version, intended for the Ministry of War, probably never saw the light of day. The accusations made by his denouncers, though, included far more serious 'crimes' which — however fantastic — had been concocted with the very worst of intentions, lies that proved hard to rebut: these included having been a collaborator on the Moscow newspaper,
Pravda,
having worked as contact, interpreter and guide in Spain to the 'bandit Dean of Canterbury' (Dr Hewlett Johnson, known as 'the Red Dean', whom my father had never even seen), and having been privy to the whole web of 'red propaganda' throughout the conflict, which was tantamount to a direct invitation to prise such exceptional information out of him by any means available (as well as the usual one). Fortunately, none of this happened: he had some truthful witnesses, even amongst those hired for the purpose; miraculously, he came up in front of a remarkably decent second lieutenant, who, far from twisting his refutations during the hearing (as was normal in the judicial system of the time), proposed that they be taken down in writing for greater exactitude, fearing later imputations, and before returning my father to his cell, he said: I won't shake your hand because they can see us, but in spirit I'm on your side' ('Antonio Baena,' my father used to say, 'I'll never forget that name'); he was also lucky enough to get a blessedly lazy judge who mislaid his file and ended up dismissing the case due to confusion caused by the anomalous behaviour of one of the 'prosecution witnesses'. And so Juan Deza, my father, had a spell in prison, during which he taught illiterate fellow prisoners to read and write, to add, subtract and multiply (and taught the more educated a little French), and then he was released — he didn't get round to teaching them to divide — although he suffered reprisals for many years afterwards; he was, of course, banned from teaching at any level, unlike his enchaired accusers, and from printing a single line in his country's newspapers, the ink of which was now entirely blue. One of the 'prosecution witnesses', who found his own dark reflection in that role — another former fellow student whom the victim — my father — had visited and lent books to during the bombardments and who later enjoyed a little tawdry, commercial success as a novelist (Florez was his name) — gave my mother, the victim's friend, this message for him: 'If Deza forgets that he ever had a career, he'll live; otherwise, we'll destroy him.' But that is another story. Sometimes I saw my father grieve in silence over his unfortunate situation, and I saw him suffer. But I never saw him bitter, he did not pass on to his children any feelings of resentment, and any such feelings we may have are of our own making. Nor did I ever hear him complain or mention out loud the names of his betrayers outside the circle of family and close friends, some of whom had known them well — those two names — and at first hand, ever since the feast day of San Isidro in 1939. Despite all these difficulties and obstacles, he managed to get by in life, and if he never complained not even during the harshest and most painful of times, I was not the one to do it for him. Or perhaps I was. Perhaps I was and the only one too, along with my two older brothers and my younger sister, who could carry out the inoffensive task of bemoaning the lot of others, on behalf of my mother now and of my father as well.

In exactly the same way, I have never shrunk from mentioning those names whenever the opportunity arose or whenever it seemed relevant, because I've known them since I was a child, Del Real and Santa Olalla, Santa Olalla and Del Real, and for me they have always been the names of treachery, and as such they do not deserve protection. And this was what I was thinking about during that long night beside the River Cherwell as I finally started collecting together all the books I had taken from Wheeler's west shelves, and which were now scattered around his office or study, and restoring some kind of order, clearing and cleaning the desk and removing trays and bottles and my glass and the ice, an arduous task given how tired and absorbed in thought I was and how late it was too, though I preferred not to know just how late and so deliberately did not look at my watch or at a clock. How was it possible that my father never suspected or detected anything? He was a quick, intelligent, cultivated man, certainly no fool, but he was also an irredeemable optimist, whose first instinct was to trust everyone. But even so. How could he have spent half his life with a colleague, a close friend — half his childhood, his schooldays, his youth — without having so much as an inkling of his true nature, or, at least, of his
possible
nature? (But perhaps any nature is possible in all of us.) How can someone not see, in the long term, that the person who does end up ruining us will indeed ruin us? How can you not sense or guess at their plotting, their machinations, their circular dance, not smell their hostility or breathe their despair, not notice their slow skulking, their leisurely, languishing waiting, and the inevitable impatience that they would have had to contain for who knows how many years? How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it? He must often have had to suppress his agitation and to bite his lips until they bled, and to cool his blood when it was already boding, and to put off again and again its final, imperfect, fetid fermentation. All these things can be noticed, observed, smelled and even, on occasions, felt, the chill shock of condensing sweat. At the very least you sense them. You know or should know. Or perhaps once these things have happened, we do not realise that we knew they were going to happen and that this was precisely how it would turn out. And isn't it true that, deep down, we are not as surprised as we pretend to others and, above all, to ourselves, and that we then see the logic of it all and recognise and even remember the unheeded warnings that some layer of our unconscious mind did, nevertheless, pick up? Perhaps we want to convince ourselves of our own astonishment, as if we might find in it a specious consolation and various pointless excuses that really do not work: 'But I had no idea, how could I have imagined, let alone suspected this, it's the last thing I would have expected, why, it would never even have occurred to me, I would have given my word, I would have sworn an oath, I would have put my hand in the fire, I would have staked my life on it, I would have bet all my money and my honour too, how deceived and disappointed I am, how unbelievable, how unreal this betrayal seems.' Yet hardly anyone ever feels such astonishment. Not deep down, not in the knowledge that dares not speak or declare itself or even allow itself to be known or to become conscious, not in that knowledge which so fears itself that it hates and denies and hides from itself, or looks at itself only out of the corner of one eye and with its face half-hidden. That degree of astonishment does, however, exist in the uppermost layers, not just the superficial, epidermic ones, but all of them, the intermediate, the deep and the profound, even the obscure, the subterranean and the venous, those outside and inside, and those right at the very bottom, those of daily, external, superficial life — the point of the spear — and those of each solitary pause, the layers that are there in gaily laughing company and at the moment before each abyssal plunge into sleep, when, just for a moment, we glimpse ourselves as a whole and glimpse, too, what story will be told when our ending ends. Yes, even that layer of surrender and anguish or premonition allows for such perplexity, such surprise. But not the most profound layer which we almost never reach, the one that lives on the other side of time and is never deceived or mistaken, and which is often confused with fear or adopts fear as a disguise, which is why we ignore it so as not to be controlled by fear or to allow it to dictate our steps and cause us to succumb to what we fear or, indeed, to bring it about. We dismiss the signs and refuse to interpret them ('Keep quiet, keep quiet, and then save me'), and so we relegate them to the realm of imaginings, and counter them with others which, basically, we know are not signs, but pretences and simulacra that seek our trust and our torpor or our drowsiness ('Sleep with one eye open when you slumber,' I quoted to myself). Because it would be impossible to deceive ourselves if that was what we really wanted — not to deceive ourselves, I mean — a vain and doomed endeavour. It isn't usually what we want. No, we don't usually want that, because protection and prevention and alertness all bore us, and we prefer to throw away our shield and march lightly ahead, brandishing our spear as if it were a decoration.

When I grew up, I asked my father about this, although I never liked to press him. He had told the story to my siblings and myself when we were children and adolescents, but only the bare bones, the minimum, as if he and my mother did not want us to find out too much about what awaits everyone to a greater or lesser extent and which does, in fact, begin in childhood — betrayal, tale-telling, treachery, back-stabbing, denunciation, calumny, defamation, accusation — even though, at the time, we were — through various channels — inevitably exposed to the founding example or ultimate instance of this as recounted in the Gospels, because other older examples, those of Jacob and David, Absalom, Adonijah, those of Delilah and Judith and even of unloved Cain, had a goal and adduced a cause, which was why their treacheries were less pure and disinterested, more expected and understandable, less gratuitous and less grave (the famous thirty pieces of silver were never the motive, merely a facade and a tangible symbol with which to clothe and represent the act). Juan Deza, however, had never said much about the subject, perhaps because the mere memory of it hurt him, perhaps so that he would not be tempted into expressions of rancour, or perhaps so as not to give importance — not even by talking about him — to someone who had deserved only scorn ever since the feast day of San Isidro in 1939, or possibly even before.

'But didn't you ever suspect anything?' I had asked, taking advantage of some occasion when he was recalling other episodes from that period.

'Before my detention, you mean? Well, yes, naturally, I'd heard that there was a smear campaign against me. Only indirectly, though, from the Nationalist zone, into which he crossed over without saying a word to anyone, we never knew exactly when or how he went (getting out of Madrid wasn't easy, in fact, it was well nigh impossible without outside help); and we found out too late, of course, when he'd already defected. I don't know why he went, I suppose he could see defeat looming and was already getting into position. It's not that I didn't realise how dangerous that could be, or how far-reaching. Someone who has been your friend for many years speaks with an authority that can prove lethal if used against you. People assume he knows what he's talking about. But in those days, convincing or persuading someone of something was hardly indispensable. A little vigour and vehemence were all you needed, and sometimes not even that.'

'No, I meant before, before you knew about the malicious lies he was spreading. Didn't you ever suspect anything, didn't it ever occur to you that he might turn against you, that he had it in for you, that he was trying to destroy you?'

My father said nothing for a moment, but not like someone hesitating and pondering in order not to give an inexact response, it was more the silence of someone who wants to underline a truth or a certainty.

'No. I never imagined anything of the sort. When I found out, I didn't believe it at first, I thought it must be a mistake or a misunderstanding, or a lie being told by others, whose intention I couldn't quite grasp. Someone acting deceitfully, trying to spread discord. Then, when I had heard the same story from several sources and could no longer ignore it and had to resign myself to believing and accepting it, I simply found it incomprehensible, inexplicable.'

That was the word he always used, 'incomprehensible', I mean, on the few occasions when I had dared to try and get him to talk to me about it.

'But throughout all those years of knowing each other,' I had said, 'had you never had the slightest indication, the slightest moment of doubt, no inner warning, a pang, a presentiment, something?'

'No, nothing,' he had said, growing ever more laconic and more sombre, and so I changed the subject in order not to depress him further. I suppose it upset him to remember his own ingenuousness and good faith, not so much because he had had those feelings as because he had been unable to preserve them. Or so he must have thought. The truth is that he had preserved them, rather too well in my view (they brought him other heart-aches too, perhaps not so bitter and with the difference that now they only half surprised him), I have proved more cynical and sceptical, I think, although possibly not cynical or sceptical enough given the disloyal times in which we live. Perhaps it is simply that I've always kept my feet more firmly on the ground and have been more pessimistic, and sadder too.