Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (24 page)

Wheeler was tireless when it came to discussing linguistic matters and idioms, he paused and lingered over them and momentarily forgot about everything else, and, as I knew, from the days when I first taught translation and Spanish at Oxford, I was profoundly ignorant of my own language, not that it mattered much, for it's an ignorance I share with almost all my compatriots and they couldn't care less. I was beginning to think that sometimes his mind wavered slightly, rather as he occasionally lost the ability to speak. Not in the same way, he didn't go blank, not at all, and he didn't talk nonsense or get confused, but he strayed from the subject more than usual and didn't listen with his usual alacrity and attention, as if he were less interested in the external, and as if the internal were gaining ground—his disquisitions, his deliberations, his insistent thoughts—and, as is often the case with the old, perhaps his memories too, although he didn't care to tell or share these, but maybe he did go over them in his mind, put them in order, unfold them to himself, and explain and weigh them up, or perhaps it was simply a matter of putting them straight and contemplating them, like someone taking a few steps back and surveying his library or his paintings or his rows of tin soldiers if he collects them, everything he has accumulated and arranged over a lifetime, probably with no other objective—this does happen—than that of stepping back and looking at them.

This form of loquacious introspection, which I noticed when we spoke on the phone, occasionally made me fear that I didn't have much time left in which to ask him all the things I'd always wanted to ask him and which I kept postponing for reasons of discretion, respect and a dislike of worming things out of people and stealing from them what they are keeping in reserve or storing away, or of seeming overly curious or even impertinent, together with a natural tendency to wait for people to tell me only what they really want to and not what they are tempted to tell me because of a particular conversational thread or the direction a conversation is taking or because they feel flattered or moved—the temptation to tell is as strong as it is transient, and it soon vanishes if you resist it or, indeed, give in to it, except that in the latter case, there's no remedy but regret or, as the Italians put it,
rimpianto,
a kind of sorrowful regret to be ruminated upon in private. And the truth is that I wanted to ask him those things before it became problematic or impossible, I wanted to know, however briefly and anecdotally, about his involvement in the Spanish Civil War—a war that had so marked my parents—and about which I had known nothing until recently; about his adventures with MI6, his special missions in the Caribbean, West Africa, and South East Asia between 1942 and 1946, according to
Who's Who,
in Havana and in Kingston and in other unknown places, although he was still not allowed to talk about them even after sixty years nor, doubtless, after however many years of life remained to him; he would take his story to the grave if I didn't get it out of him, that Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Wheeler, born in the antipodes as Rylands; about his unspoken relationship with his brother Toby, whom I had known first and admired and mourned, with no idea that they were related; as well as about his activities with the group that had no name when it was created and still has none now, nor any 'interpreters of people,' 'translators of lives' or 'anticipators of stories,' indeed, he had criticized Tupra for employing such terms in private: 'Names, nicknames, sobriquets, aliases, euphemisms are quickly taken up and, before you know it, they've stuck,' he had said, 'you find yourself always referring to things or people in the same way, and that soon becomes the name they're known by. And then there's no getting rid of it, or forgetting it'; and it was true, I couldn't forget those terms now, because I was part of that group and those were the terms I'd learned from Wheeler's diminished contemporary heirs; and I wanted to know, too, about the death of his young wifeVal or Valerie, although he always preferred to leave that for another day and, besides, he believed, deep down, that one should never tell anything.

It even seemed to me—I had no proof of this, it was only a suspicion—that Wheeler might be loosening the grip of that hand that never let go of its prey, as was not yet the case with Tupra or with me or, probably, with young Pérez Nuix, all three of us were still at the restless or at least vigilant age, how long do those energetic years last, the years of anxiety and quickened pulses, the years of movement, unexpected reversals, and vertigo, the years when all of that and so much more occurs, so many doubts and torments, in which we struggle and plot and fight and try to inflict scratches on others and avoid getting scratched ourselves and to turn things to our own advantage, and when all of those activities are sometimes so very skilfully disguised as noble causes that even we, the creators of those disguises, are fooled. I mean that Wheeler was distancing himself from his machinations and his plans, at least that was the impression he gave me, as if his will and determination were finally on the wane or as if he suddenly scorned them and saw them as pointless and futile, after decades of building and cultivating and feeding them and, of course, of applying them. He was focused entirely on himself, and little else interested him. But then he was over ninety, and so this was hardly surprising or deserving of reproach, it was high time really.

And despite these warnings and my growing fear that I didn't have, as I'd always felt I had, unlimited time with him, I continued putting off my visits and my questions and still did not go and see him. I would also have liked him to tell me more about Tupra, about his antecedents, his history, his potential dangerous-ness, his character, the 'probabilities that ran in his veins'—he would know more about those, he had known him for longer— especially after that night of the sword and the videos, the memory of which had been bothering me for weeks and would do so indefinitely; but given that I'd decided not to leave or decamp, not yet to abandon my post and with it my work, salary and general state of confusion, perhaps I was avoiding the possibility of really finding out and—if Wheeler did as I asked him and deciphered Tupra fully—of having to stop what I had, for the moment, not without some violence to myself, determined to continue. I realized that I had reached a point when each passing day made it harder and harder for me to go back, let alone just to pack it all in and return to Madrid—doing what exactly, living how, just to be closer to Luisa as she moved further away from me?—a place which, nevertheless, I had still not entirely left. My mind was largely there, but not my body, and the latter was growing accustomed to strolling about London and breathing in its smells on waking and on going to sleep (always with one eye open, because of the lack of shutters, and like just one more inhabitant of that large island), to spending part of the day in the company of Tupra and Pérez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel and, on occasions, Jane Treves or Branshaw, to the initially saving grace of certain routines in which, unexpectedly, you suddenly find yourself caught as in a spider's web, unable to imagine any other way of life, even if it isn't any great shakes and happened purely by chance and without your asking. No, it was no longer easy for me to think of myself taking another less comfortable and less well-paid job, less attractive and less varied, after all, each morning I was confronted by new faces or else went deeper into familiar ones, and it was a real challenge to decipher them. To guess at their probabilities, to predict their future behavior, it was almost like writing novels, or at least biographical sketches. And sometimes there were outings, on-the-spot translations and the occasional trip out of London.

And so I also kept delaying my return to Madrid, I mean, to see my children and my father and my siblings and my friends, too many months had passed without my setting foot in my own city and, therefore, without seeing or hearing Luisa, which was what most attracted and frightened me. I had told her, two days after that night when I'd phoned to consult her about botox and the blood stains left by women, that I would not be back for a while. 'The kids have been asking when you'll be coming to see them,' she had said, taking great care not to include herself and making it plain that she wasn't the one doing the asking. 'Not in the immediate future I shouldn't think,' I had replied and mentioned that I had a trip with my boss coming up, I didn't know exactly when yet, but it could be any time, so I was busy until then. And it was true, Tupra had told me this, although, in the end, he dragged me off, instead, on several different trips during that month, short hops lasting only a couple of days, three within the large island itself and one to Berlin, to the Continent. We went to Bath with Mulryan, to Edinburgh on our own and to York with Jane Treves, who, it seems, was from Yorkshire and knew the terrain, although it didn't seem to me that you needed to be an expert to find your way around those very human-sized cities. He didn't take Pérez Nuix with him, perhaps to punish her for trying to deceive him in the matter of Incompara and her poor beaten father, in which he must have considered me to be merely a naive and secondary accomplice, or perhaps, it occurred to me, so that she and I did not end up in the same hotel: sometimes I had the feeling that there was nothing he didn't know about, and that he was therefore sure to know what had happened in my apartment, in my bed, in silence and as if it hadn't happened, on that night of constant rain.

In each of those cities we only ever had one meeting at which I could prove useful as an interpreter, of languages or people, and if Tupra saw more people, as I imagined he did, he did so on his own and never invited me to join him. In Bath, he stayed at a very fine hotel, the Royal Crescent if I remember rightly (Mulryan and I stayed in another which was pleasant rather than fine—we, after all, occupied a different place in the hierarchy), in which there lived 'on an almost permanent basis,' according to my boss, a Mexican millionaire, 'officially retired but still very active from a distance and from the shadows,' with whom he wished to come to some agreement. This elderly man—with white hair and mustache, the vestiges of what was, by then, a very precarious elegance and a resemblance to the old actor Cesar Romero, and whose two surnames were Esperon Quigley—spoke impeccable English with a thick Spanish accent (it happens to many Latins on both sides of the Atlantic), and my help was only necessary on a few occasions, when the gentleman's diction proved so opaque to the purely English ear of Tupra and to the half-Irish ear of Mulryan that perfectly correct words became completely unrecognizable in Esperon Quigley's eccentric pronunciation. As usual, I paid no attention to what they were discussing, it was no business of mine, I was bored by it a priori and preferred not to know. The rest of the time I was free, and I spent it walking, looking at the River Avon, visiting the Roman baths and a few antique shops, and rereading Jane Austen in a place where she had spent a few years of scant literary productivity, as well as the odd page by William Beckford, who'd shut himself away there for a long time and where he reluctantly lived and died, far from his beloved Fonthill Abbey, which had led him to his ruin. On one of my strolls about the city, I was amazed to come across a shop, a rather average jeweler's, which, implausibly, bore the name of Tupra. It wasn't far from another shop with larger pretensions and which, if memory serves me right, declared itself in its window to be a supplier to the Admiralty (I imagine this referred only to watches, and not to precious stones and glass beads for the navy). When I mentioned this coincidence to Tupra, he replied tartly:

'Oh, yes, I know. Nothing to do with my family though. No relation at all. None.' This might have been true or totally false, and the watchmaker might have been his father. However, I didn't dare press the matter further.

Even so, I couldn't resist making a private joke: 'Nevertheless, it would be more appropriate for Tupra's jeweler's shop to be made supplier to the Admiralty rather than that other shop nearby which, I noticed, lays claim to just that. Even if only because of your connections, or, rather, our connections with the former OIC, don't you think?' I remembered what Wheeler had said that Sunday before lunch, in Oxford, when he spoke to me about the difficulties they'd had recruiting the first members of the group, just after it had been formed: 'It was necessary to comb the country for recruits as quickly as possible. Most came from the Secret Services, from the Army, a few from the former OIC, which you've probably never heard of, the Navy's Operational Intelligence Centre, there weren't many of them, but they were very good, possibly the best; and, of course, from our Universities.' And I saw a look of surprise and slight suspicion appear on Tupra's face (as if hearing that old acronym in my mouth—an odd thing for a twenty-first- or even late-twentieth-century Spaniard to know—made him wonder what else I knew and if he had underestimated how much I had learned).

He also allowed me some free time during the two days we spent in Edinburgh, and there, too, I walked and reread the work of two of that city's finest sons, Conan Doyle and Stevenson, just a few of their stories, and climbed up Calton Hill to see the view which so enthused the latter, and which is still astonishing even after all the time that has passed. I also took away with me a few poems by Stevenson and a little book about the city, subtitled
Picturesque Notes
and published in 1879 no less. In it he talks about Greyfriars, telling of how, close to this verdant cemetery, from the window of a house since demolished, but whose site was pointed out to him by a grave-digger, the body-snatcher Burke used to keep watch, for he and his mate Hare would disinter the still-fresh bodies from their graves in order to sell them to scientists and anatomists, and had eventually taken to murdering people so as to speed up the process and to prevent business from falling off: 'Burke, the resurrection man,' as Stevenson noted with irony, 'infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green.' Now there, I thought, was a man who lacked the patience to wait for tomorrow's faces to be revealed to him, no, he preferred to sit, smoking, and watch them file past, as they had been yesterday and would be always.