Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

When I grew up, I asked my father about this, although I never liked to press him. He had told the story to my siblings and myself when we were children and adolescents, but only the bare bones, the minimum, as if he and my mother did not want us to find out too much about what awaits everyone to a greater or lesser extent and which does, in fact, begin in childhood – betrayal, tale-telling, treachery, back-stabbing, denunciation, calumny, defamation, accusation – even though, at the time, we were – through various channels – inevitably exposed to the founding example or ultimate instance of this as recounted in the Gospels, because other older examples, those of Jacob and David, Absalom, Adonijah, those of Delilah and Judith and even of unloved Cain, had a goal and adduced a cause, which was why their treacheries were less pure and disinterested, more expected and understandable, less gratuitous and less grave (the famous thirty pieces of silver were never the motive, merely a facade and a tangible symbol with which to clothe and represent the act). Juan Deza, however, had never said much about the subject, perhaps because the mere memory of it hurt him, perhaps so that he would not be tempted into expressions of rancour, or perhaps so as not to give importance – not even by talking about him – to someone who had deserved only scorn ever since the feast day of San Isidro in 1939, or possibly even before.

'But didn't you ever suspect anything?' I had asked, taking advantage of some occasion when he was recalling other episodes from that period.

'Before my detention, you mean? Well, yes, naturally, I'd heard that there was a smear campaign against me. Only indirectly, though, from the Nationalist zone, into which he crossed over without saying a word to anyone, we never knew exactly when or how he went (getting out of Madrid wasn't easy, in fact, it was well nigh impossible without outside help); and we found out too late, of course, when he'd already defected. I don't know why he went, I suppose he could see defeat looming and was already getting into position. It's not that I didn't realise how dangerous that could be, or how far-reaching. Someone who has been your friend for many years speaks with an authority that can prove lethal if used against you. People assume he knows what he's talking about. But in those days, convincing or persuading someone of something was hardly indispensable. A little vigour and vehemence were all you needed, and sometimes not even that.'

'No, I meant before, before you knew about the malicious lies he was spreading. Didn't you ever suspect anything, didn't it ever occur to you that he might turn against you, that he had it in for you, that he was trying to destroy you?'

My father said nothing for a moment, but not like someone hesitating and pondering in order not to give an inexact response, it was more the silence of someone who wants to underline a truth or a certainty.

'No. I never imagined anything of the sort. When I found out, I didn't believe it at first, I thought it must be a mistake or a misunderstanding, or a lie being told by others, whose intention I couldn't quite grasp. Someone acting deceitfully, trying to spread discord. Then, when I had heard the same story from several sources and could no longer ignore it and had to resign myself to believing and accepting it, I simply found it incomprehensible, inexplicable.'

That was the word he always used, 'incomprehensible', I mean, on the few occasions when I had dared to try and get him to talk to me about it.

'But throughout all those years of knowing each other,' I had said, 'had you never had the slightest indication, the slightest moment of doubt, no inner warning, a pang, a presentiment, something?'

'No, nothing,' he had said, growing ever more laconic and more sombre, and so I changed the subject in order not to depress him further. I suppose it upset him to remember his own ingenuousness and good faith, not so much because he had had those feelings as because he had been unable to preserve them. Or so he must have thought. The truth is that he had preserved them, rather too well in my view (they brought him other heart-aches too, perhaps not so bitter and with the difference that now they only half surprised him), I have proved more cynical and sceptical, I think, although possibly not cynical or sceptical enough given the disloyal times in which we live. Perhaps it is simply that I've always kept my feet more firmly on the ground and have been more pessimistic, and sadder too.

My mother died when I was still too young to think deeply about these matters, and when I was properly grown-up (that is, fully aware that I was) I could no longer ask her: perhaps she, who'd had her feet more firmly on the ground, would at least have ventured some possible explanation – she had not been as close a friend of the traitor as my father, but she had, of course, known him. She had immediately taken action to try and get Juan Deza out of prison, even though they were not yet girlfriend and boyfriend, they had merely been inseparable companions since their university days. From what I know, she had also done a lot during the War to help and bring relief where she could. Some time before, in 1936, when the simultaneous military uprising and 'revolution' of 18 July transformed the days and weeks that followed into an absolute chaos of which both sides took full advantage (each in their respective territories) in order to carry out a rapid and irreversible settling of accounts and to kill whomever they chose, she, as the oldest of eight brothers and sisters, who ranged from adolescents to infants, had had to go in search of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old brother who failed to return home one night. When such a thing happened during the first few months after the outbreak of war, the thought that immediately entered the minds of every family – before any other thought, such was the degree of terror – was that the missing relative could have been detained arbitrarily by militiamen on patrol, transferred to a cheka, or detention centre, and then, at dusk or later at night, and with no further legal proceedings, taken out and executed in some street or road on the outskirts. In the mornings, members of the Red Cross would scour the streets, picking up corpses from the gutters and from the outlying areas, then photograph and bury them, having first, if possible, identified them in order to note down on an index card the end of their life and their death. It was the same in both zones, a kind of crazy, sinister symmetry. In Madrid, after a certain date, so-called Popular Tribunals were set up, but although magistrates did preside over these (subject, however, to the parties' 'political commissars' and therefore shorn of any independence), the extremely brief and hasty methods they employed were all too like those that had preceded their establishment and so proved fairly powerless to stop or channel all that ferocious spleen.

My mother had trudged round the various police stations and chekas in search of her lost younger brother, in the contradictory hope of not finding any trace of him, not in those fateful places which were, nevertheless, the first places one always had to go to after any disappearance. She was, alas, unlucky, and found him, or found, rather, the last photo of him, dead, a dead young man, a dead brother. Who knows why he was detained by those who took him to the cheka in Calle Fomento along with a female friend who was with him and who met with the same swift, dark, premature fate. Perhaps because he had put on some silly tie that morning, one that the militiamen deemed to be insufficiently revolutionary (the famous blue boiler suits – I'd read about these in Hugh Thomas, I'd heard my parents mention them, and had seen endless photos too – became the almost obligatory civilian uniform of any proud, armed citizen of Madrid) or because they had not given the clenched fist salute, or because she was wearing an imprudent cross or medallion around her neck, such crimes were reason enough to receive a shot in the head or a bullet in the chest in those days when intense suspicion was all that was needed as an alibi for an unnecessary murder, as, on the other side, was failing to give a fascist or Nazi salute or looking ostentatiously proletarian, or having been a reader of Republican newspapers and having acquired a reputation for walking straight past any of Spain's innumerable churches, those in the 'patriotic' zone, that is.