Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (41 page)

why it was not possible to explain). And there were still more posters addressed to the members of the armed forces, whose carelessness could place everyone, as well, of course, as themselves, in greatest danger. A soldier in a helmet and with a telephone for a body warned: 'Stop! Think twice before making any trunk calls.' Or a uniformed man and woman with only feet and head visible behind a blue screen that concealed their respective ranks and was emblazoned, in white letters, with the word 'CENSORED'; the young man and woman were standing with the lighted ends of their cigarettes pressed together, one was giving the other a light and thus joining their lips, albeit with the interposition of tobacco and fire (smoking wasn't frowned upon or persecuted then, so things weren't all bad), but, they were warned: 'Your units must not be disclosed!' Most of the posters insisted, however, on the fundamental campaign slogan: 'Careless talk costs lives',
'Las conversaciones imprudentes cuestan vidas'.
Although another not entirely unfaithful translation might be:
'se cobran vidas'.

'I have a vague recollection that during our Civil War there were similar warnings against fifth columnists, but I'm not sure, can you remember, Peter?' I asked. 'There's a slogan going round in my head along the lines of "The enemy has a thousand ears", but I may be inventing it, I'm not sure, on the other hand, I haven't any images stored away, any equivalents to the kind of thing you've shown me, I can't remember ever having seen them reproduced.' I really didn't know, but it wasn't impossible that this was another initiative we had exported. Or perhaps I was getting it confused in my memory with the defamatory poster against the POUM in the spring of 1937, a face stamped with a swastika appearing from beneath a mask bearing the hammer and sickle; Nin had been the victim of the half-justified paranoia that made people see Franco's spies and collaborators on every corner, or, rather, his enemies had made use of that paranoia to accuse him of treachery and espionage. He was accused of having informed, of having talked, and that, paradoxically, is what his torturers could never force him to do.

He remained silent and did not save himself, he kept his mouth shout, he did not blab, he did not say a word, in short, 'he kept mum', what he knew he kept to himself or under his hat, or perhaps he said nothing because the accusations were all false, he would have had to invent some tall tales and stories in order to acknowledge and support them, to admit that he was the 'Trojan horse' as that poetic 'lover of the truth' and 'worthy Don Quixote' later described him in that 'lamp-light glow' of a voice which so bewitched Trapp-Tello, such a very slanderous voice.

'Last night I told you that before the war against Germany I had been briefly involved in yours, and I usually express myself with great precision, Jacobo. And I believe I am now. That means, I did not spend much time in Spain. I was just passing through,' Wheeler replied, and I noticed a slight touch of impatience in his voice, as if he were rather put out that I should, at that precise moment, want to drag in another war and another time, however closely related it was to his war and however close in time it might have been. 'But anyway, although I couldn't swear to it, I can't remember having seen such a thing in your country, I haven't read or heard anything about it either. If I'm not mistaken, though, there were posters, a campaign against fifth columnists; the populations of Madrid and Barcelona and possibly Valencia were urged to hunt them down and unmask them, to drag them out of the sewers and kill them, and it was the same on the other side: they were urged to track down and destroy intriguers, not that there would have been many left in an area full of talkative father-confessors, but that was what was asked of them. Obviously, they told people to keep their eyes open and to watch the rearguard, as they also did rather timidly, I believe, during the First World War, here and in France. But I don't think there was ever a campaign like this one against "careless talk", in which they not only put civilians on guard against possible spies, but recommended silence as the norm: people were prevailed upon not to speak, they were ordered, indeed, exhorted to keep silent. Suddenly people were made to see their own language as an invisible enemy, uncontrollable, unexpected and unpredictable, as the worst, most murderous and most fearful of enemies, like a terrible weapon which you, or anyone, could activate and set off without ever knowing when it might unleash a bullet, or if it would be transformed into torpedoes that would sink one of our battleships in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles away, or into bombs from a Junkers that would strike with deadly accuracy at our neighbourhoods and our houses, or fall on those military targets that most needed to be safeguarded and defended, on the most secret and most camouflaged and most vital of targets. I don't know if you quite realise what it meant, Jacobo: people were warned against using their main form of communication; they were made to distrust the very activity in which people most naturally indulge and always have indulged, without reserve, at all times and in all places, not just in this country and at that particular time; it made an enemy of what most defines and unites us: talking, telling, saying, commenting, gossiping, passing on information, criticising, exchanging news, tittle-tattling, defaming, slandering and spreading rumours, describing and relating events, keeping up to date and putting others in the picture, and, of course, joking and lying. That is the wheel that moves the world, Jacobo, more than anything else; that is the engine of life, the one that never becomes exhausted and never stops, that is its life's breath. And suddenly people were asked to turn it off, that engine, to stop it breathing. They were asked to give up the thing they most love, that is most indispensable to them, the thing we all live for and which everyone, without exception, can enjoy and make use of, both poor and rich, uneducated and educated, old and young, the sick and the healthy, soldiers and civilians. If there's one thing that they do or we do which is not a strict physiological necessity, if there is one thing that is truly common to all beings endowed with free will, it is talking, Jacobo. The fatal word. The curse of the word. Talking and talking, without stopping, that is the one thing for which no one ever lacks ammunition. Grammatical, syntactical and lexical skills matter little, oratorial gifts still less, and pronunciation, diction, accent, euphony, rhythm even less. The wisest man in the world will talk with greater order, appropriateness and precision, and perhaps to his listeners' greater advantage, or, rather, only to the advantage of those listeners who resemble him or want to resemble him. But he will not talk any more fluently than the semi-literate housewife who talks non-stop all day and who only stops at night because sleep and her sore, much-abused throat finally get the better of her. The most widely travelled man in the world will be able to tell endless marvellous and delightful stories, innumerable anecdotes about adventures in outlandish, remote, exotic and dangerous places. But he will not necessarily talk with any more confidence than the rough innkeeper who has never been further than his own bar and has only ever seen the twenty streets and two or three squares that make up his obscure village. The most inspired poet or the most zigzagging of narrators will be able to invent and recite on demand a stream of hypnotic words that will sound like music, so much so that those listening will not worry overmuch about the meaning, or, rather, they will capture the meaning effortlessly and without having to think about it before grasping or absorbing it, the process will be entirely simultaneous, although afterwards, when the music has stopped, those listeners might be quite incapable of repeating or summarising it, incapable possibly of continuing to understand what a moment ago they understood so well while they were rocked by the rhythm and while the enchantment lasted, resting as lightly upon the mind as upon the ear, each as permeable as the other. But those poets and narrators will not necessarily speak with more assurance or ease than the ignorant office worker, repetitive and dull, who believes himself to be full of
"donaire"
and
"gratia",
a tedious fixture in all the offices of the world, regardless of latitude or climate, even in the offices of interpreters and spies . . .'

Wheeler stopped for a moment, more than anything — it seemed to me — to catch his breath. He had said the words
'donaire
and
'gracia'
in Spanish, possibly paraphrasing Cervantes's words taken from somewhere other than
Don Quixote,
an unusual occurrence, but perfectly possible in his case. I could not resist trying to find out, and so I took advantage of his pause to quote slowly, little by little, almost syllable by syllable, as if casually or as if not quite daring to say it, murmuring:

'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo . . .'

Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying . . .

I could not complete the quotation. Perhaps Wheeler did not like to be reminded of that last phrase out loud, often the old do not even want to hear so much as a mention of such things, of their death, perhaps because they are beginning to see it as something likely or plausible and not dreamed or fictitious. No, I don't believe it, I can't be sure, but no one sees their own end like that, not even the very old or the very ill or those under threat and in constant danger. We, the others, are the ones who begin to see it in them. He ignored me and went on. He pretended not to notice what I had recited in my own language, and so I never knew if it had been a coincidence or if he had, in fact, been alluding to Cervantes's joyful farewell.

'Sometimes people say of someone that he lacks conversation. That's ridiculous. A cultivated person, the Prime Minister (well, all right, let's call him mentally adroit) might say it of someone who is not at all cultivated, for example, his barber. What the former is actually saying is that he doesn't care about and is hugely bored by anything the latter has to say. Doubtless almost as bored as the barber is by everything the Premier comes out with while he's having his hair cut, it's always a difficult chunk of time to fill, like journeys in lifts, especially if the scant head of hair requires all manner of primping if it's to look half-way presentable and not too much like an uprooted carrot. But the barber will certainly not lack conversation, he may have even more to say than the rather obtuse minister, who is more concerned with the progress of his country in the abstract and, more concretely, with the progress of his career. It seems to me that people who know absolutely nothing, people who have never consciously paused to think for a moment about anything, who do not have a single idea of their own or anyone else's really, nevertheless talk untiringly, unceasingly, without the slightest inhibition or self-consciousness. This is not just the case with people without training or education; there are far more astonishing cases than that of these rustics: you have only to see a group of Hooray Henries or idiotic snobs, most of them with PhDs from Cambridge or from us, and you wonder what the devil they can find to talk about amongst themselves after the first hour of exchanging greetings and telling each other the four miserable scraps of news that everyone knows about anyway because it's common gossip, or bringing each other up to date on their usual two bits of twaddle and three pieces of villainy (I've always wondered what such people can find to talk about at those lavish receptions, which are cram-packed with them). One imagines that they must often have to resort to saying nothing and to loudly clearing their throats, that they must have to suffer embarrassingly long pauses and endure witty comments about the rain and the clouds as well as the awkward silences characteristic of dead time at its most defunct and even stillborn, given their absolute lack of ideas, amusing remarks, knowledge and the necessary inspiration to recount anything, of ingenuity and dialogue and even monologue: of intelligence and substance. And yet that isn't the case. One doesn't know why or how or about what, but the fact is that they spend the hours and the days chatting endlessly, brutishly, spend whole evenings engaged in chit-chat, without once closing their mouths, even snatching the word from each other's lips, all intent on monopolising it. It's both a mystery and not a mystery. Speaking, far more than thinking, is something that everyone has within his or her grasp (I'm talking, of course, about things volitive, not merely organic or physiological); it's something which is shared and has always been shared by the bad and the good, by victims and their executioners, by the cruel and the compassionate, the sincere and the mendacious, by the not very bright and the extremely stupid, by slaves and their masters, by the gods and mankind. They all have it, imbeciles, brutes, merciless sadists, murderers, tyrants, savages, simpletons, and even the mad. And precisely because it is the one thing that makes us all equal we have spent centuries creating for ourselves all kinds of tiny differences, in pronunciation, diction, intonation, vocabulary, phonetics and semantics, all in order to feel that our group alone is in possession of a mode of speech unknown to others, of a password for initiates only. It is not only a matter for what used to be called the upper classes, eager to distinguish themselves from and scornful of everyone else; those known as the lower classes have done the same, they have proved no less scornful, and thus have forged their own jargons, their own ciphers, the secret or encrypted languages that allowed them to recognise each other and to exclude the enemy, that is, the learned and the powerful and the refined, and to prevent them from understanding, at least in part, what their members were saying, just as criminals invent their own argot and the persecuted their codes. Within the confines of the same language, their entirely artificial aim is
not
to be understood or at least only partially; it's an attempt to obscure, to conceal, and, with this end in mind, they seek out strange derivations and fanciful variants, defective and highly arbitrary metaphors, tangential or oblique meanings that can be separated off from the common norm, they even coin new and unnecessary substitute words, to undo what was said and to mask what was communicated. The reason being that what makes language intelligible is the habitual and the given. Moreover, that language, or tongue, is almost all that some people have and give and receive: the poorest, the most humble, the disinherited, the illiterate, the captive, the unhappy, the subjugated; the marginalised and the deformed, like that Shakespearean king of ours, Richard III, who did so well out of his persuasive gift of the gab. That's the one thing you can't take away from them, speech or language, perhaps the one thing they have learned and know, they use it to address their children or their lovers, to joke, to love, to defend themselves, to suffer, console and pray, to unburden themselves, to implore, persuade, save and convince; with it they also poison, instigate, hate, perjure, insult, curse and betray, corrupt, condemn and avenge themselves. Almost everyone has it, both the king and his vassals, the priest and his congregation, the marshal and his soldiers. That is why sacred language exists, a language that does not belong to everyone, a language intended not for men, but for the gods. People forget, however, that, according to our old and possibly now moribund beliefs, both God and the gods talk and listen too (what are prayers but sentences, words, syllables), and, in the end, that sacred language is deciphered and learned too, all codes are susceptible to eventual decoding, sooner or later, no secret can be a secret eternally.' Wheeler stopped again, very briefly, again to catch his breath. He placed one hand on the pictures we had laid out on the table, an instinctive gesture, as if he wanted to prevent them being carried off by a nonexistent gust of wind, or perhaps merely to caress them. It wasn't cold, the sun was very high, pale, lazy; it was pleasantly cool. 'Language so binds and assimilates us that the powerful have always had to find non-verbal signs and insignia and symbols in order to be obeyed and in order to differentiate themselves. Do you remember that scene in Shakespeare when, on the eve of battle, the king wraps himself in a borrowed cloak and goes and sits down in the camp with three soldiers, pretending to be just another combatant, ready for battle, and unable to sleep through what's left of the night or through the few remaining hours before dawn? He speaks to them, he presents himself as a friend, he talks to them, and when he does, the four seem similar, he more logical and educated, they rougher and more intuitive, but they understand each other perfectly, they are on the same plane of comprehension and speech and nothing gets in the way of that exchange of opinions and impressions and even fears, two of them even quarrel and almost come to blows, the king who is not the king and a subject who is not, at that moment, a subject. They talk for quite a while, and the king knows that, as they speak, they become equal, that, at least for as long as the dialogue lasts, they are the same. Which is why, when he is left alone, thinking about what he has heard, he tells us what the difference is, he murmurs in his soliloquy what it is that really distinguishes him from them. Do you remember that scene, Jacobo?'