Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

And look at this next one: they refer to the eavesdropper as "The beast": "The beast is listening. Watch what you say!" and the beast is wearing a crown on his head and a cross dangling from a necklace, which makes him look rather effeminate, don't you think? It's describing the ambushee, it's saying who he is and what he's like, it's pointing him out. The other posters, though,

the ones by the celebrated artist Renau with the eye and the ear and the one published by the Direccion General de Bellas Artes addressed to militiamen, are more like ours, less aggressive, more to do with defense and prevention, more neutral perhaps.

They are simply a warning against spies. The text of the latter could easily have appeared on one of the later British posters: "Don't give away any details about the situation at the front. Not to your comrades. Not to your brothers or sisters. Not to your girlfriends." Those wretched girlfriends again.

One tended to confide in them and they, in turn, confided in you, too much really, at a time when no one could trust anyone. It really is a most fascinating book, Jacobo, thank you so much for thinking of me and bringing it all the way from Spain, especially given that it weighs a ton.' He thought for a few seconds, then added: 'Yes, that hatred is very striking. Quite different. I'm not sure we experienced it in the same way here.'

'Perhaps in our War it was necessary to describe and characterize the spy like that,' I said, 'because they had fewer distinguishing marks and it was easier for them to pretend and to hide. Don't forget, for example, that we all spoke the same language, not like here, where you were fighting the Nazis.'

Wheeler shot me one of those occasional looks of fleeting annoyance and displeasure-those mineral eyes, like two marbles almost violet in color, or like amethysts or chalcedony or, when narrowed, like the seeds of pomegranates-that made you feel you had said something stupid. That was when he most resembled Toby Rylands.

'I can assure you that most of those who spied here could speak English as well as you or I. In fact, probably better than you.

They were Germans who had lived here since they were children, or who had an English father or mother. Some were renegade purebred Englishmen, and there was quite a large number of fanatical Irishmen too. It was the same with those who spied for us in Germany or Austria. They all spoke excellent German.

My wife Valerie's German, for example, was impeccable, without a trace of accent. No, that wasn't the reason, Jacobo. I may have had only a very brief experience of your War, but I felt that hatred when I was in Spain. It was a kind of all-embracing hatred that surfaced at the slightest provocation and wasn't prepared to consider any mitigating factor or information or nuance.

An enemy could be a perfectly decent person who had behaved generously towards his political opponents or shown pity, or perhaps even someone completely inoffensive, like all those schoolteachers who were shot by the beasts on one side and the many humble nuns killed by the beasts on the other. They didn't care. An enemy was simply that, an enemy; he or she couldn't be pardoned, no extenuating circumstances could be taken into consideration; it was as if they saw no difference between having killed or betrayed someone and holding certain beliefs or ideas or even preferences, do you see what I mean? Well, you'll know all this from your father. They tried to infect us foreigners with the same hatred, but, needless to say, it wasn't something that could be passed on, not to that degree. It was a strange thing your War, I don't think there's ever been another war like it, not even other civil wars in other places. People lived in such close proximity in Spain then, although it's not like that now'-'Yes, it is,' I thought, 'up to a point.' 'There were no really big cities and everyone was always out in the street, in the cafes or the bars. It was impossible to avoid, how can I put it, that epidermal closeness, which is what engenders affection but also anger and hatred. To our population, on the other hand, the Germans seemed distant, almost abstract beings.'

That mention of his wife, Val or Valerie, hadn't escaped me, but I was even more interested in the fact that, for the first time, he should refer openly to his presence in my country during the War; it wasn't that long since I had first found out about his participation, of which he had never spoken to me before. I looked at his suddenly gaunt face. 'Yes, his features have grown sharper and he has the same look in his eyes as my father,' I thought or regretfully acknowledged, 'that same unfathomable gaze'; and it occurred to me that he probably knew he did not have much more time, and when you know that, you have to make definitive decisions about the episodes or deeds which, if you tell no one, will never be known. ('It's not just that I will grow old and disappear,' poor, doomed Dearlove had said in Edinburgh, 'it's that everyone who might talk about me will gradually disappear too, as if they were all under some kind of curse'; and who could say any different?) It is, inevitably, a delicate moment, in which you have to distinguish once and for all between what you want to remain forever unknown-uncounted, undiscovered, erased, nonexistent-and what you might like to be known and recovered, so that whatever once was will be able one day to whisper: 'I existed' and prevent others from saying 'No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened.' (Or not even that, because in order to deny something you have to have a witness.) If you say absolutely nothing, you will be impeding another's curiosity and, therefore, some remote possible future investigation. Wheeler must, after all, have remembered that on the night of his buffet supper I had asked him by what name he had been known in Spain, and that, had he told me, I would have immediately gone to look up that name in the indexes of all his books, in his War library, on his west shelves, and later on in other books as well. In fact, he was the one who had put the idea in my head, it hadn't even occurred to me until then: perhaps he had done so out of mere congenital pride and vanity, or perhaps, more deliberately, so that having once inoculated me with the thought, I would not be satisfied and would not let go of my prey, something which, as he knew perfectly well, I, like himself and Tupra, never did. Perhaps now he was ready to give me a few more facts and to feed my imagination before it was too late and before he would cease to be able to feed or direct or plot or manipulate or shape anything. Before he was left entirely at the mercy of the living, who are rarely kind to the recent dead. 'That's asking an awful lot, Jacobo,' he had said then in reply to my direct question. 'Tonight anyway. Perhaps another time.' Maybe that 'other time' had come.