Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

Again this was signed by 'Febus'.

The underlining had been added not by the pseudonymous writer or by me, but by Wheeler, and was quite a common feature in the many books of his I had now leafed through or even plundered, as were notes in the margin, which were very brief indeed and usually in some kind of code or so abbreviated as to be barely comprehensible to me or to anyone else who happened upon them. On this occasion, to the right of the half-column reproduced in red ink, he had written vertically (there was barely any space), in ink as always and in the unmistakable hand that I knew so well: 'Cf. From Russia with Love,' even in the margins he used Latin expressions, although the abbreviation 'Cf' is a common way in English of referring in one text to another work, the equivalent of the Spanish ' Vide' or ' Vease'. From Russia with Love, the second James Bond adventure or instalment if I remembered correctly, at most the third or fourth. And I went on to wonder if it referred to the film, which I had, of course, seen at the time (still with the great Sean Connery, of that I was sure), or to the novel by the ill-fated Ian Fleming on which it was based. Gratuitous or motiveless curiosity (which is what afflicts the erudite) turns us into puppets, shakes us up and hurls us about, weakens our will and, worse, divides and disperses us, makes us wish that we had four eyes and two heads or, rather, several existences, each of them with four eyes and two heads. Nevertheless, I managed to keep my mind trained for a while longer on that Doble Diario, but it had little to say about the vicissitudes of Nin and the POUM, which, on the other hand – I realised – didn't interest me much in themselves, or at least hadn't interested me until I had opened those books, Orwell and Thomas to begin with. (It was all Tupra's fault, he had drawn me in, from the very first moment.)

In the same Republican Abc from the following day, 19 June 1937. I found a whole page about the plenary meeting of the Communist Party Committee that had just opened in Valencia. In the first session, there had been a 'report' by Dolores Ibarruri, doubtless better known then and now and in the future by her alias, La Pasionaria, who, 'always addicted to Stalin' and possibly 'in an hysterical outburst', as Benet had murmured a short while before, dedicated a few furious, pitiless words to the purges taking place at the time: in the ceremony at the Monumental Cinema,' she said, 'we raise the flag of the Popular Front. The enemies of this union are certain left-wingers and Trotskyites. No measures taken to liquidate them can ever be too extreme.' I felt like underlining that last sentence, such an open invitation to the liquidations that did in fact follow, but I refrained from doing so, after all, the books belonged to Peter, and I was unlikely to consult them ever again, after that night of strange, unforeseen wakefulness.

I saw that, for its part, the pro-Franco Abc of Seville almost inaudibly echoed the Catalan purges in a succinct and dispassionate note written on 25 June, the indifferent tone of which hardly squared with the accusations that placed the POUM and its leaders at the service of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, his Gestapo and even the Moroccan Guard: 'Following the loss of Bilbao,' read the headline, 'the Red Government shoots several leaders of the POUM. The situation in Catalonia.' The article said:

Salamanca, 24th. French news reports state that following the loss of Bilbao, the Government of Valencia has gone on the offensive against the POUM and other dissident parties, in order to prevent the contrary happening.

(An almost unintelligible sentence, incidentally, the Right always was more stupid than the Left.)

According to these reports, Andrés Nin, Gorkin and a third leader whose name we do not know, have been taken to Valencia and executed. All the Trotskyist leaden have been arrested by order of the Soviet consul, Ossenko, who has received orders from his Government to carry out a purge in Catalonia similar to that carried out in Russia against Tukachewsky and his friends.

Obviously the information was entirely wrong, and not just as regards Nin, for more than a month later, on 29 July 1937, the Republican Abc in Madrid, in another article again signed by Febus, reproduced without comment the note published by the Ministry of Justice 'about those accused of High Treason'. 'Statements have been handed to the Tribunal of Espionage and High Treason' (which had, in fact, been specially created on 22 June, as proved by the fact that Summary No. 1 for that Special Court was the statement issued against the POUM) relating to eleven defendants, ten from the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and one from the Falange Espafiola (Spanish Falangist Movement), and among the first to be mentioned are Juan Andrade and 'Julián Gómez Gorkin'. These statements were compiled from 'abundant documentation found in the POUM offices: ciphers, telegraphic codes, papers referring to arms trafficking, the smuggling of money and valuable goods, various newspapers from various capital cities, mainly from Barcelona; communications from foreigners alluding to interviews held inside and outside loyalist territory, and to the participation of foreigners in the weeks prior to the espionage and subversive activity of last May'. The report ended with an eloquent warning to anyone who might intercede: 'Any steps other than those intended to bring about the strict and faithful application of the laws are, therefore, useless.' That bit about 'various newspapers from various capital cities' seemed to me the most indefensible and treacherous of all, and about them being 'mainly from Barcelona', the POUM offices being registered in precisely that city, an obvious aggravating factor and doubtless damning. The ten POUM defendants were all men and had Spanish names, so the various foreign women of singular beauty seem to have got off scot-free and to have vanished, as befitted women of their ilk.

As for 'the Soviet consul, Ossenko', according to the blue-grey ink – his name was in fact Antonov-Ovseenko – if the arrests had indeed been ordered by him, in response to orders from his own Russian government, it must have been in extremis, and his obedience certainly did not get him very far, since in June – in late June one assumes, so that he at least had time to issue the orders and to know that Nin had been executed – he was called back to Moscow to be appointed People's Commissar for Justice and to take up his post with immediate effect: 'a joke typical of Stalin', muttered Thomas in a footnote, for the old revolutionary Antonov-Ovseenko never reached his post and disappeared without trace, whether he died a slow death in some distant concentration camp or was promptly despatched underground as soon as he stepped out on to Russian soil is not known. His compatriot in Madrid, Orlov, clearly learned the fatal lesson taught him by the consul – a veteran of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and formerly a personal friend of Lenin – when, a little later on, he, in turn, received the call from Russia with love.

For its part, that note of Wheeler's continued to call to me: 'Cf. From Russia with Love'. What the devil did that novel or film about long-since cold spies have to do with Nin, or with the POUM, or with those beautiful foreign women? And although the Doble Diario still drew my attention for a thousand other reasons and, however late it was, I was certainly not going to abandon my readings just yet – everything aroused my gratuitous curiosity, from incomprehensible headlines like this one from 18 July 1937 which said and I quote: 'Brooklyn-born bullfighter Sidney Franklin exposes Franco's lies', to articles, which I kept stumbling across, written by my father when he was very young, in the Madrid Abc and therefore reproduced now in red ink, either signed with his own name, Juan Deza, or with the pseudonym he had sometimes used during the conflict – Isuddenly remembered something that made me put the large volumes to one side and get hesitantly to my feet. In a small room next to the guest room where I had stayed on other occasions and which would already be prepared for that night, I had noticed some detective novels and mystery novels, to which Wheeler, like all people of a speculative or philosophical bent, was quietly addicted (not secretly, but he would never keep that part of his vast library in one of his living-rooms or in the study, in full view of any snooping, slanderous colleague who might visit him). I had occasionally wondered if he didn't write them himself under a pseudonym, like so many other Oxbridge dons who, in principle, do not wish to have such plebeian activities mixed up with their real names as savants, scholars or sages, but they nearly always end up unmasking themselves, especially if high praise and good sales accompany those novels, minor works or mere diversions to which they never give any importance, but which prove far more lucrative than the books they do consider valuable and serious and which, nevertheless, almost no one reads. There are many such cases: the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Cecil Day-Lewis, was Nicholas Blake to fans of enigmas, the English scholar, J. I. M. Stewart, also at Oxford, was Michael Innes, and even one of my former colleagues, the Irishman Aidan Kavanagh, an expert on the Golden Age and head of the sub-faculty of Spanish where I taught, had published successful full-blown horror novels beneath the extravagant alias of Goliath Cherubim, no one would ever have a name like that.