Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

'Don't worry, Peter, I won't,' I said. 'Actually, that isn't what I wanted to look up, honestly, it hadn't even occurred to me. I wanted to check something else.' I fell silent. He did not move.

He did not speak. He still did not move. He still did not speak. I added quickly, anxious not to slight him, 'It's an excellent idea though.'

Wheeler had just climbed to the top of the stairs in silence. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw him there. Then he again placed his walking-stick on his shoulder, he again turned it into a spear, and, flattered, he mumbled, without looking back at me, while he turned to the left and disappeared from view:

'An excellent idea, indeed!'

Books speak in the middle of the night just as the river speaks, quietly and reluctantly, or perhaps the reluctance stems from our own weariness or our own somnambulism and our own dreams, even though we are or believe ourselves to be wide awake. Our contribution is minimal, or so we think, we have the feeling of understanding almost effortlessly and without needing to pay much attention, the words slip by gently or indolently, and without the obstacle of the alert reader, or of vehemence, they are absorbed passively, as if they were a gift, and they resemble something easy and incalculable that brings no advantage, their murmur, too, is tranquil or patient or languid, those words are a connecting thread between the living and the dead, when the author being read is already deceased, or perhaps not, but who interprets or relates past events that show no sign of life and yet can be modified or denied, can be seen as vile deeds or heroic exploits, which is their way of remaining alive and continuing to trouble us, never allowing us to rest. And it is in the middle of the night that we ourselves most resemble those events and those times, which can no longer contradict what is said about them or the stories or analyses or speculations of which they are the object, just like the defenceless dead, even more defenceless than when they were alive and over a longer period of time too, for posterity lasts infinitely longer than the few, evil days of any one man. Even then, when they were still in the world, few could undo misunderstandings or refute calumnies, often they didn't have time, or didn't even have the chance to try because they knew nothing about them, because such things always happened behind their backs. 'Everything has its moment to be believed, even the craziest, most unlikely things,' Tupra had said casually. 'Sometimes that moment lasts only a matter of days, but sometimes it lasts forever.'

Andres Nin certainly didn't have time to deny the slanders or to see them refuted by others later on, according to Hugh Thomas's summary, in which, with its index of names, it was easy to find the references, unlike in Orwell's book, it was astonishing that Wheeler should remember such a detail, or perhaps he had deduced it from the fact that Homage to Catalonia was published in 1938, while the war was still on, no one then would have been concerned about mere names. First, though, just in case, I looked up Wheeler's name in Hugh Thomas's book, Peter could so easily have lied to me about that to make sure I wouldn't find it, always assuming I believed him, of course, and didn't even bother to look. But it was true, he wasn't there, nor was Rylands – I checked for checking's sake, it wasn't hard. What name could Wheeler possibly have used in Spain, for he had now managed to prick my curiosity. Perhaps some exploit of his was recorded in that book or in Orwell's, or in one of the many other books about the Civil War on the west bookshelf in Peter's study (and over which I lingered far too long), and, if that were the case, I found it extremely irritating to be unable to find out about it even though the exploit was public knowledge. What wasn't public knowledge was his name, or alias, a lot of people used them during the War. I remembered who Nin was, but not the details of his tragic end, to which Tupra had presumably been referring. He had worked as Trotsky's secretary in Russia, where he had lived for most of the 1920s, until 1930; he had translated quite a bit from Russian into Catalan, and a certain amount into Spanish, from The Lessons of October and The Permanent Revolution, written by his protector and employer, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Chekhov's The Shooting Party and The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea by Boris Pilniak, as well as some Dostoyevsky.

When the War began, he was political secretary of the POUM or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (the Workers' Marxist Unification Party), of which Moscow always took a dim view. That I did remember, as well as the 'shooting party' to which the Stalinists submitted POUM members in the spring of 1937, especially in Catalonia, where the party was more established. That was why Orwell left Spain in such a hurry, in order not to be imprisoned or, possibly, executed, for he had been very close to the POUM and may even have been a member – I was reading snippets here and there, skipping and dipping and passing from one volume to another (I'd made quite a pile of them on Peter's immaculate desk), looking in particular for that business about the German members of the International Brigade that had so impressed Tupra – and Orwell had, at any rate, fought with the Twenty-ninth Division, which was formed by the POUM militia, on the Aragon front, where he had been wounded. As with so many individuals, movements, organisations and even whole peoples, the party was more famous and most remembered for its brutal dissolution and persecution rather than for its constitution or its deeds, some endings leave a deep mark. In June 1937, as Orwell describes in great detail and (very much) at first hand, with Thomas and others providing a briefer and more distanced account, the POUM was declared illegal by the Republican government at the request of the Communists, not so much the Spanish Communists – although they were involved too – as the Russians, and, it seems, on the decision or personal insistence of Orlov, the head in Spain of the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Service or Security Service. To justify this measure and the detention of its main leaders (not just Nin, but also Julián Gorkin, Juan Andrade, Major José Rovira and others) as well as activists, sympathisers and militiamen, however loyally the latter had fought on the front, they trumped up false and somewhat grotesque bits of evidence, everything from a letter supposedly signed by Nin and addressed to Franco no less, to the incriminating contents of a suitcase (various secret documents bearing the stamp of the POUM military committee, in which the latter revealed themselves to be fifth columnists, traitors and spies in the service of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, paid by the Gestapo itself) which was found, conveniently enough, in a bookshop in Gerona, where it had been left for safekeeping shortly before by a well-dressed individual. The owner of the bookshop, a certain Roca, was a Falangist recently unmasked by the Catalan Communists, as was the probable writer of the forged letter, a certain Castilla, who had been picked up in Madrid along with other conspirators. Both were converted into agents provocateurs and forced to collaborate in the farce so as to give some shabby verisimilitude to the connection between the POUM and the fascists. It is possible that this saved their lives.

None of this interested me particularly, but it was mentioned by everyone, with a greater or lesser degree of attention and knowledge, with either sympathy or antipathy towards those who had been purged: Orwell, Thomas, Salas Larrazabal, Riesenfeld, Payne, Alcofar Nassaes, Tinker, Benet, Preston, Jackson, Tello-Trapp, Koestler, Jellinek, Lucas Phillips, Howson, Walsh, Wheeler's table was now heaped with open books, I didn't have enough fingers to keep all those places and hold a cigarette, luckily, though, most books had an index of names, Nin being referred to as Andreu or Andres depending on the writer. Nin was arrested in Barcelona on 16 June and disappeared immediately (or, rather, was kidnapped), and as he was the best-known of the leaders, both in Spain and, above all, abroad, the fact that his whereabouts remained unknown became a brief scandal and, later, a long, possibly eternal, mystery which remains unsolved to this day, and which now, I imagine, not many people will be particularly bothered about resolving, although some foolish, dishonest novelist may yet turn up (unless he already has, and I don't know about it) and take it upon himself to reveal the answer: according to the bibliographies there has already been a film, half-English, half-Spanish, about those months and those events, I haven't seen it, but it appears, fortunately, not to be entirely foolish, unlike all those clichéd Spanish films made about our War, bland and fallacious, vaguely rural or provincial and very sentimental, and which are always applauded in my country by right-thinking people, the professionally compassionate and the career demagogues, who get a very good return on them.