Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

He fell silent for longer this time, his gaze again that of an old man remembering, as if he really had returned to the long-since disappeared Cafe Roma on Calle Serrano or to Ronda where he had not been, at least not in September 1936, when they baited his friend like a bull in the ring and delivered the coup de grace with a sword. It was on the 16th of that month I found out later, when that 'heroic and fantastical' city, with its huge precipice or gorge, fell into the white-gloved hands of General Varela – or perhaps he was only a colonel then: it was said that he slept with his medals on – a far crueller man than the head of the Italian blackshirts, Colonel Roatta, who advanced on Malaga and was nicknamed 'Mancini' – like my musical protector – following the norm set by many others who passed through that war, when names were routinely renounced or lost; but no less cruel, at any rate, than the person who took over and controlled Malaga once it had fallen, the Duque de Sevilla was his somewhat inappropriate tide: ah, these rapacious Spaniards, some silent, some verbose; ah, 'these men full of rage', as so many of them so often are.

The poet Rilke had stayed in Ronda for a couple of months twenty-four years before, at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, when not even Wheeler had yet arrived in the world – in the Antipodes and as Peter Rylands. And there is a statue of him, of the poet, a very black, life-size one, in the garden of a hotel from whose long balcony you can see the broad, sweet lands of Spain, perhaps one of those fields was the scene of that brief one-man corrida: it's unlikely, but not impossible, because at dawn, there would be no one standing there contemplating the fields, or else the area would be occupied by victorious troops who would have had no objection to such sport should some guard have spotted it: perhaps among them would be some of the requetés, the Carlist militiamen trained up by Varela as he travelled around the villages of Navarra, disguised as a priest and going by the colourful sobriquet of Tio Pepe'; as well as legionnaires and Moroccans, a grotesque 'crusade' – Varela's favourite word – of fanatical Catholic volunteers and Muslim mercenaries engaged together in destroying and laying waste this secular land. That hotel is, I believe, the 'Reina Victoria', which, as Rilke put it, 'the devil persuaded the English to build here'; you can even visit the room in which he stayed, a kind of mini-museum or minuscule mausoleum, adorned with a portrait and a few bits of furniture, some old books, some jottings by him in German, possibly a bust (it's been years since I visited it, so I can't be sure). It may have been there that he began to conceive these lines, or, rather, fragments, which I often recall: 'Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to leam; not to be what one was and having to leave even one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that once clung together floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…" Perhaps, who knows, this is what Emilio Mares thought, although not in these words.

'But what happened, what did you do, how did you react?' I asked my father, not just to draw him out of his silence and away from his long journey. I was intrigued to know what, if anything, he could have done or said. At that time, he could have been arrested on the slightest pretext and returned to prison, and probably with far worse luck, for he had had exceptional luck before, and in 1939 too, a year when anyone on the losing side had hardly any luck at all.

With some effort, he returned from far away. A sigh. One hand on his forehead, with the wedding ring he had never taken off. A clearing of the throat. Then he focused his gaze. He looked at me and answered me. Slowly at first, as if with sudden caution, perhaps the same caution he had had to use then, in the Cafe Roma.

'Well,' he said, 'the moment I heard Mares' name I feared the worst, and I was even more on my guard. I didn't at all like the turn the conversation was taking. But I did nothing while he was telling the story. It didn't even occur to me to interrupt him. I felt sick and angry as I listened, the two things at once, rather than alternating between them. I would have preferred not to be there, not to know what he and others had done to a former university friend whom I had liked and admired. I knew that Mares had been killed for no reason, and that was enough, that was bad enough, but he had not been such a close friend that I would not occasionally forget this fact. On the other hand, I realised that, once the horror story had begun, there was no stopping halfway. I must have turned very pale or very red, I don't know, I felt cold and hot, again both at the same time. Whatever colour I turned, however, no one else would have noticed, it wouldn't have aroused suspicions or given me away, because every other face round the table looked equally distraught, deathly pale, even though all four men present were Francoists and had doubtless witnessed similar acts of brutality or even committed them themselves.' My father stopped for a second and looked around him – we were in his living room, at the end of the twentieth century or possibly the beginning of the twenty-first, in the late morning: he was bringing himself back to the present – then he continued, more easily this time: 'I think the writer had miscalculated. He started telling the tale almost proudly, boastfully, but as he continued, and even though it didn't take him long to tell it, he must have realised that his story was going down very badly indeed, that it went too far, that it had shocked us all. Amid the sound and fury of the Civil War it might have amused someone (if I can put it like that), but not now. It was entirely inappropriate to describe such an episode seated around a cafe table, on a sunny Madrid morning, over a few beers and some olives. The silence which had fallen when he said "We baited him" and brought his index finger down like a banderilla or a lance or a sword, continued until the end of the story, and remained unaltered at its conclusion. And when it became embarrassing, and since the writer was probably the most influential person there, one of the other men whom I didn't at the time even know by name, the most deferential among them, broke the silence with a joke in the worst possible taste, one he was incapable of keeping to himself, or perhaps, being a rather stupid man, it was the only thing that occurred to him to fill the void and applaud the anecdote: "How come, while he was at it, he didn't award himself both ears and the tail?" he asked, referring to the malagueno and the ear he had cut off. And the writer again miscalculated, or perhaps the icy atmosphere left behind by his story made him feel, I don't know, uncomfortable, awkward, and in situations like that, any attempt to put things right almost only ever succeeds in making matters worse, it's best just to keep very still and quiet. He smiled as if he saw his chance. Perhaps he was still clinging to the idea that his story had had the effect he was hoping for, a slightly delayed effect given the shocking nature of the lesson dealt out, or perhaps he considered it an exploit to be proud of. He wasn't an intelligent man, only clever. And vain to his boot-tips, too, as tends to be the case with people who know their talents are overvalued, for spurious reasons or by dint of their own pushiness and sheer insistence. They can't bear to look bad or to feel they've been caught out, and everything about them is so fragile and so false that the slightest lack of enthusiasm, the smallest reservation upsets them. And so he replied, half coy, half derisive: "No, well, I didn't want to shock anyone. And I'm not saying he didn't cut the lot off. He was a dangerous man, our comrade. You should have seen him, doffing his red beret like a hunter and displaying his three trophies." I don't know if that was true or not, or if, goaded by the other man's comment, he simply made it up in order to show off; he probably felt he hadn't gone quite far enough and that this was the reason for his audience's cool response. I didn't care either way; or, rather, it was almost worse that he should have invented it on the spur of the moment, to flatter us, according to his criteria, or to make us shudder. I couldn't take any more. I couldn't before either, but I was suddenly assailed by a vague image of a mutilated Mares after he had been tortured and killed, of the amusing man I had known before, so delightfully full of himself, converted into mere mangled remains, more animal than human. I got up and, addressing only Gomez-Antiguedad, murmured: "I have to go, I'm late already. I'll pay for this round." And I went over to the bar to ask for the bill. I made my exit in two stages because I felt it would attract less attention and seem less abrupt than if I headed straight for the door. I couldn't really afford to pay for anything, as you can imagine, and it was, as far as I was concerned, a very expensive bar, I wasn't even sure I had enough money on me; and I can't tell you how it disgusted me having to buy a round of drinks for those four men. But I considered it would be money well spent if I could get away from them there and then, and not have to listen to their affected, mocking laughter or to the voice of that murderous thug; and to get out of there, of course, without any mishap. With my record, the last thing I wanted was to be arrested. I was standing not too far from them, with my back turned, while I waited for a barman or waiter to appear, and I heard the writer say to Antiguedad: "What's got into him? His name's Deza, isn't it? Where's he from anyway? Did I say something he didn't like?" It's always a bad thing when someone takes your name and notices it and remembers it, whether it's the authorities or a bunch of criminals, let alone when the authorities are the criminals. I thought I wasn't going to be able to escape, that the writer would not simply let me leave in peace, that he would want to find out what was wrong with me, and I was sure, then, that I would no longer be able to contain myself. If he demanded an explanation from me, I was likely to hurl myself at him without another word. He certainly wouldn't have come out of that very well, but I would have come out of it even worse. I would have got a sound beating in a prison cell that night, and they might well have decided to haul me into court again, on whatever charges they fancied. Fortunately, Antiguedad's response was immediate, and that's another reason I remained grateful to him for the rest of his life: "The same thing has got into him as into me, for fuck's sake, what a sickening story," he said. He was not a man who normally resorted to bad language, but, depending on who one is talking to, it's useful to know how to use it if necessary. Sometimes, it's just a question of authority. And he used that authority to rebuke the writer, to tear him off a strip: "Do you honestly believe it's all right to speak so lightly about an atrocity like that? Do you really believe it's a joking matter? Think about it, man, think about it. It's high time we put all that bad blood behind us." The writer may have been better placed within the regime, but Antiguedad was from a very influential, staunchly right-wing family, he had ended the war with the rank of captain and was entirely above suspicion; besides, he would one day be the owner of a publishing house and already pretty much called the shots there, and that is something any new writer must always bear in mind, because he never knows when he might need a publisher. So he swallowed his pride and accepted this dressing-down. "There's no need to get so het up about it, Pepito, it's not that big a deal, is it? We could all of us tell some pretty ugly stories, I'm sure. But I agree, it probably isn't a suitable tale for peacetime." And Antiguedad immediately softened. He gave the writer a fatherly pat on the back and said: "Oh, that's all right, let's get together for a chat when we've got more time. See you, gentlemen." He said goodbye to the others as a group, without shaking them by the hand, and joined me at the bar, just as the waiter who had served us came over. "Give me that, Deza, after all, I was the one who invited you for a drink," and he grabbed the bill before the waiter could hand it to me. I was already anxiously counting my money out into the palm of my hand, worried that I wasn't going to have enough. We left together, he turned at the door and raised one arm in the direction of the other four men, as a gesture of goodbye. Then, once out in the street, he apologised to me, even though none of it had been his fault. "I'm so very sorry, Deza, I had no idea," he said. "You were friendly with Mares, weren't you? I only knew him by sight myself." He was one of the few on the winning side who tried to mitigate the situation, one of the few who did not blindly follow Franco's instructions to mete out constant humiliation and continual punishment to the defeated. And you've no idea how glad I was to be able to reciprocate later on in a not inconsiderable way: in the 1980’s, I managed to keep him out of prison over some matter to do with company accounts, with the illegal transfer of funds, well, it doesn't really matter now what it was. Obviously, I would have preferred him not to have got into trouble in the first place, but for me it was a real blessing to be in a position to throw him a line and pull hard on it until I'd got him out. When someone helps you when times are really bad, for no real reason (you children have never known what really bad times are), well, you never forget it. If you're a decent person, that is, and don't take that help as a kind of personal humiliation or as a public insult.’