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

'What did you do in Spain during the Civil War, Peter?' I asked straight out. 'How long were you there? Not long, I imagine. Before, you told me that you were just passing through. Who were you working with? Where were you?'

Wheeler gave an amused smile as he had on that earlier night, when he had played with my newly aroused curiosity and said things like: 'If you'd ever asked me about it…But you've never shown the slightest interest in the subject. You've shown no curiosity at all about my peninsular adventures. You should have made the most of past opportunities, you see. You have to plan ahead, to anticipate.' He raised his hand to the back of his armchair and felt around without success. He wanted his walking stick and couldn't find it without turning round. I stood up, grabbed the stick and handed it to him, thinking he was going to use it to help him get to his feet. Instead, he placed it across his lap or, rather, rested the ends on the arms of his chair and gripped the stick with both hands, as if it were a pole or a javelin.

'Well, I went twice, but on both occasions I was there only briefly,' he said, very slowly at first, as if he did not entirely want to release the information or the words; as if he were forcing his tongue to anticipate his actual decision, the not entirely definite decision to tell me all: he might want to tell me, but, as he had explained with some embarrassment, he might not yet be authorized to do so. 'The first time was in March of 1937, in the company of Dr. Hewlett Johnson, whose name will mean nothing to you. However, you might be familiar with his nickname, "the Red Dean," by which he was known then and later.' We were speaking in English. Of course I knew the name, of course I had heard of it. In fact, I could scarcely believe it.

'El bandido Deán de Canterbury!' I exclaimed in Spanish. 'Don't tell me you knew him.'

'I beg your pardon!' he said, momentarily disconcerted by that sudden intrusion in Spanish and by that strange way of referring to the Dean as 'the bandit Dean of Canterbury'

'As you may well remember from what I've told you before, my father was arrested shortly after the end of the Civil War. And several false accusations were made against him, one of them, as I've often heard him say, was that he had been "the willing companion in Spain of the bandit Dean of Canterbury." Imagine! That strange cleric was very nearly responsible-albeit indirectly, unwittingly and involuntarily-for my not being born, nor any of my siblings either. I mean that in the normal course of events my father would have been summarily condemned and shot; they came for him in May, 1939, only a month and a half after the Francoists entered Madrid, and in those days if you denounced someone, even if you did so as a mere private individual, you didn't have to prove their guilt, they had to prove their innocence, and how could my father possibly have proved that he had never in his life seen that Canterburian Dean' (I was speaking in English again and so didn't need to resort to the strange Spanish equivalent 'cantuariense') 'or the falsity of the other charges, which were far graver. He was immensely lucky, and after a few months in prison was acquitted and released, although he suffered reprisals for many years afterwards. But imagine…'

'It's certainly a striking coincidence,' Wheeler said, interrupting me. 'Very striking. But let me continue my story, otherwise I'll lose the thread.' It was as if he thought the coincidence to be of no importance, as if he felt coincidences to be the most natural thing in the world, as did Pérez Nuix and I myself. Or perhaps, I thought, he had been planning his next encounter with me for a while, hoping that it would happen, and that I would deign to go and see him, and so knew exactly what he was going to tell me, what partial information he was going to give me, and did not want to be forced to depart from his script by impromptu remarks or distractions or interruptions (he never lost the thread). He may not have wanted any interruptions, but he would have to put up with at least one, when I told him what had happened to Dearlove and demanded, if not an explanation, at least some pronouncement on Tupra's behavior. And so he set my father aside and continued, still slowly, rather like someone reciting something they have previously memorized. 'We were the first to break the naval blockade set up by the Nationalists (I always thought it scandalous that they should call themselves that) in the Bay of Biscay. We set sail from Bermeo, near Bilbao, in a French torpedo boat, and reached Saint Jean de Luz without mishap, despite the widespread and widely believed rumors that the whole area had been mined. That was a Francoist lie, and a very effective one, because it kept boats away and stopped provisions reaching the Basque Country. The Dean described the crossing in The Manchester Guardian and a few days later, a merchant vessel, the Seven Seas Spray, tried its luck in the other direction, leaving Saint Jean de Luz after dark. And the following morning, when it sailed up the river to the dock in Bilbao, having encountered neither mines nor warships en route, the people of Bilbao massed on the quay and cheered the Captain, who was standing on the bridge with his daughter, and cried: "Long live the British sailors! Long live Liberty!" It was terribly moving apparently. And we paved the way. It's just a shame we were going in the other direction. The Captain was called Roberts.' Wheeler, eyes very wide, paused for a moment, deep in thought, as if he were reliving what he had not actually lived through, but of which he felt himself, in part, the artificer. Then he went on: 'Before that, we'd witnessed the bombing of Durango. We missed being caught in it ourselves by about ten minutes, it happened when we were approaching by road. We saw it from a hillside, in the distance. We saw the planes approaching, they were Junkers 52s, German. Then we heard a great roar and a vast black cloud rose up from the town. By the time we finally drove into the town after nightfall, the place had been almost completely destroyed. According to the first estimates, there had been some 200 civilian deaths and about 800 wounded, among them two priests and thirteen nuns. That same night, Franco's general headquarters announced to the world by radio that the Reds had blown up churches and killed nuns in Durango, in the devoutly Catholic Basque Country, as well as two priests while they were saying mass, one when he was giving communion to the faithful and the other while elevating the Host. All of this was true: the nuns had died in the chapel of Santa Susana, one priest in the Jesuit church and the other in the church of Santa Maria, but they had been bombed, as had the Convento de los Augustinos. I remember the names or those were the names I was given. It wasn't the Reds who had done it, though, it was those Junkers 52s. That was on March 31".'-He fell silent for a moment, a look of anger on his face, as if he were feeling the anger he had felt then, some seventy years before. 'That was what your War was like. One lie after another, every day and everywhere, like a great flood, something that devastates and drowns. You try to take one apart only to find there are ten new lies to deal with the next day. You can't cope. You let things go, give up. There are so many people devoted to creating those lies that they become a tremendous force impossible to stop. That was my first experience of war, I wasn't used to it, but all wars are full of lies, they're a fundamental part of them, if not their principal ingredient. And the worst thing is that none are ever completely refuted. However many years pass, there are always people prepared to keep an old lie alive, and any lie will do, even the most improbable and most insane. No lie is ever entirely extinguished.'