Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

'You're a silly lot sometimes,' he said. And then he went back to addressing me as 'you' singular. 'All right. I won't tell you who he was, his name. I can't be sure that if you knew it you would keep quiet about it, as I have always done. From your point of view, you would have no reason to. You wouldn't feel obliged to, not even if I asked you to say nothing, and I would rather not take the risk, Jacobo. It's not out of consideration for him, because ever since I heard him tell the story, I've felt nothing but contempt and resentment for him. No, something stronger than that, more like disgust and loathing. Not, I think, a desire for revenge, mainly because of the way unfulfilled desires eat away at you, besides, there was I a victim of reprisals and there was he on the winning side and wielding considerable influence. But, you know, for fifty years he kept publishing books and receiving prizes and being praised to the skies and appearing in the press and on television, and for about half or more of those fifty years I don't think I read a single line of his, and I would quickly turn the page of any newspaper that carried an interview with him or a review of one of his books, I simply couldn't bear to see his face or his name in print. Later on, though, I felt curious to see just what he was capable of, how far he would go in the biographical fiction he had shamelessly started to weave about himself in public. But above all, purely by chance, through my work, I met his wife and got to know her. She was a really nice, cheerful person, who clearly knew nothing of her husband's more repulsive side, or the more repulsive facts about his behaviour during the War. She was quite a bit younger than him, ten or twelve years, they must have got married in about 1950, when he was thirty-five or more, fairly old for the time. And not only was she an extremely nice, cheerful, capable woman, on one occasion she was very helpful to us, and to your mother in particular. That's all by the bye now, but I've always had a sense of enormous gratitude towards her, and any consideration I've felt has always been for her, not for him.’

'Is she still alive? Are they still alive?' I asked.

'No, he died a few years ago, and she died not long afterwards.’

'So?' What I meant to say was 'So why maintain the consideration and the silence?' and my father understood.

'There are two daughters, two very sweet, pretty girls, I saw them a couple of times. And they were and are her daughters as well, not just the daughters of the important man. Well, he was important while he was alive and could fight his corner, and he used all available means to do so, but even though only a few years have passed, he barely merits a mention now, and his memory will continue to fade, he was a very overrated figure. But I wouldn't want to upset her daughters, whom she adored almost as much as she did her loathsome husband, she was I devoted to them all and especially to him, one of those steadfast I loves that remains undiminished and unquestioned, untouched by time or even infidelities (very minor infidelities, because, ial his superficial, egotistical way, he loved her very much and couldn't have coped without her; he was even lucky in respect too, in dying before her), the kind of love that is above such things. No, I would never bring such shame down upon her daughters, and even if they hadn't existed, I wouldn't br down posthumous shame on someone so affectionate compassionate. It seems to me that your generation, and the younger generations too, don't care much about the good bad name of the dead, but for us it still matters. Besides, give that he was a man in the public eye, one day someone probably reveal all anyway and, who knows, no one will much as bat an eye or see it as shameful, or even as a stain, his apologists will just ignore it as if it were purely anecdot this country is not only superficial, it's also arbitrary partisan, and once someone has been issued with an indulges it's rarely taken away. But I Won't be the one to tell the: nor will it come out because I was foolish enough to tell yc no, it won't come out through me or because of some slip of mine. Most of the other men who were present must be dead by now, there were five of us round the table when I heard him tell the story, and I'm sure it wasn't the only time he had told it so brazenly, quite a few people must know it (although there can't be many of us left alive). But I wouldn't be in the least surprised if that was the last time, if after that little gathering he tried to keep quiet about it and even began the meticulous cover-up job of later years. It's quite likely.’

'What little gathering? What was it he told you?' I asked, although without emphasising the interrogative tone. I realised that I did want to know, despite the fact that, generally speaking, I did not try to worm information out of my father even if I was really curious, I left him and his memories alone unless he summoned them up on his own account and of his own accord – and despite having lied to him a little and having, in passing, lied to myself a little too, albeit only momentarily: it wasn't true that he could tell me anything, with no consequences, I mean, for my state of mind or my sorrow, nor that the unpleasant events related by him were more bearable or less awful to know about than the worst atrocities read about in history books or the contemporary atrocities seen on television. What he told me was not only as real and true as the siege of Vienna in 1529 or the terrible fall of Constantinople to the Turkish infidels in 1453; as the slaughter in Gallipoli of Wheeler's compatriots and the three battles or bloodbaths at Ypres during the First World War; as the devastation of the village of Lidice and the bombing of Hamburg and Coventry and Cologne and London during the Second World War; it had, moreover, happened here, in the same bright, peaceful and, nowadays, prosperous cities and streets, the 'sweet lands', where I had spent the larger part of my life and almost the whole of my childhood; and it had not only happened here – as had the executions of 3 May 1808, during what the English call the Peninsular War, as had the siege of Numancia between 154 and 133 bc, and so many other incidents of unspeakable cruelty – they were things that had happened to him and which his blue eyes (dull now and with the iris dilated) had seen and which they now saw again, or which his defenceless ears had heard and now heard again (with stomach churning, with a weight on his chest as in murky, agitated dreams, all of it lying like lead upon his soul). What made his bad experiences more painful to me than almost any past misfortune or act of cruelty, or even present-day ones that take place somewhere far away, was that they had affected him personally and had cast a shadow over his biography, that of someone so close to me and who was there before me, still alive, still present – who knows for how much longer – with his mind still perfectly clear. No, you don't take in or receive first-hand testimony from a stranger – a journalist, a witness, a newsreader, an historian – in the same way as you do from someone you have known since birth. You see the same eyes that saw and, to their grief, found in a riling cabinet the photo of a young man who had been killed by a bullet in his head or ear; and you hear the same voice that had to tell the dead man's sister, or had to remain silent with horror or sorrow or suppressed rage when those same ears heard involuntarily, in a tram or a cafe, what they would prefer never to have heard It('Keep quiet and don't say a word. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it burns you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself').

'One morning, I went to the publishing house of Gomez-Antiguedad,' that voice told me, 'to see if they had any translation work for me to do, even though I wouldn't be able to sign it with my own name, or if there were any other anonymous, occasional jobs, reports on foreign books and so forth. The son, Pepito, was pretty much in charge of thlcompany at the time, and I knew him slightly from university and from the famous Mediterranean cruise we'd been on as students, and he was one of the few people on the winning side who, as you know, behaved with great decency and generosity he helped quite a number of people who were being singled out for reprisals, those whom he considered to be the most able, and he did that during the early years, when it was almost impossible for us to find any kind of work at all, things were really difficult up until 1945 and not a great deal easier between then and 1953. Your mother and I had only been able to get married thanks to the French classes she gave, a small loan from her godmother, who had money and had managed somehow to hang on to it, and to occasional commissions from the Revista de Occidente; but in order to keep going, I had to be constantly looking for more work, because three-quarters – or more – of the things I went after didn't come to anything. Antiguedad, the son, agreed to see me, and I explained my problem.' ('Whenever we ask for something, we are exposed, defenceless,' I thought, 'at the almost absolute mercy of the person giving or refusing’) 'Despite our political differences, he felt that I was being treated unfairly and gave me a couple of books to translate, I can still remember what they were, one from German, by Schnitzler, and the other by the French writer Hazard. At the time, this felt to me like winning the lottery, being able to get paid work, even if I wasn't getting paid very much. You just grabbed whatever there was, and as I've always told you, there's no such thing as a bad job if there's no better job in view. He was a very friendly man and, in order to celebrate our collaboration, he suggested having a drink at what used to be the Cafe Roma, in Calle de Serrano, close to his office in Calle de Ayala.’