Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

So, all in all, I think my father was lucky after the War, when many of the victors thought only of taking revenge, as in my uncle's case and other still worse cases, revenge for fears experienced or frustrations suffered or weaknesses shown or compassion received, or often for something purely imaginary or for nothing at all – the climate was so conducive to vengeance, usurpation, retaliation, and for the incredible fulfilment of the most fantastic dreams of spite and envy and rage – and when others with more brainpower harboured another broader, wider-reaching idea, less passionate and more abstract, but with equally bloody results once put into practice: that of the total elimination of the enemy, of the defeated and, later, of anyone who seemed suspicious, neutral, ambiguous, insufficiently fanatical or enthusiastic, and, later, those who were moderate or reluctant or lukewarm, and always, of course, those they simply did not like.

So on other occasions, allowing some time to pass in between, I had asked my father again and had tried to tighten the net, though never very much, I didn't want to distress or sadden him. I don't remember how the subject came up, but each time it had arisen of its own accord, for I certainly had no wish to force the matter. And I said to him:

'But with the Del Real business, did you really never know or is it just that you didn't want to tell us about it?'

He looked at me with his blue eyes, which I have not inherited, and with his usual honesty, which has not passed to me either, or, at least, not to the same degree, he said:

'No, I didn't know. And when I left prison I was filled with such loathing for him that there seemed no point in finding out whether or not it was true, whether through third parties or directly.'

'But there was nothing stopping you going to see him, or picking up the phone and saying: "What's going on here, have you gone mad, why are you trying to get me killed?'"

'That would have meant giving him an importance he didn't deserve, regardless of what explanation he gave me, and the chances are he wouldn't have had one or even attempted one. I simply got on with my life and tried not to think about him, not even when I was on the receiving end of reprisals and rejections which were all down to him and his great initiative. I erased him from my existence. And that, I'm sure, was the best thing I could have done. Not just for my peace of mind, but on the practical front too. I never saw him again and never had any contact with him, and when, all those years later, I found out he'd died, it must have been in the '80s I think, I can't even remember when it was now, I didn't feel a thing and didn't give it a second thought. As far as I was concerned, he'd been dead for decades, ever since that feast day of San Isidro in 1939-Surely you can understand that.'

'Yes, I understand it perfectly,' I said. 'What I don't understand and have never understood is that you didn't suspect anything, that you didn't see it coming when you were so close all those years, I mean, something like that is bred in the bone. I don't understand why he did it, why anyone would do something like that, especially when there was absolutely no need. There must have been some cause for resentment between you, some petty argument, I don't know, perhaps you both went after the same woman, or perhaps there was some unconscious insult on your part, or which wasn't an insult at all, but which he might have taken as such. Surely you thought about it, went over it in your mind, pondered it. I can't believe you didn't, at least while you were in prison, with no idea what was going to happen to you. Afterwards… yes, afterwards, I can believe that you didn't give it any further thought. That I find quite easy to believe.'

'I don't know,' my father replied, and he sat looking at me with interest, almost with curiosity, as if deferentially reciprocating a little of the interest and curiosity I was showing in him. He used to look at me like that sometimes, as if he were trying to get a better understanding of the man I had become, so different from him, as if struggling to recognise himself in me despite the more obvious and perhaps rather superficial differences, and occasionally, it seemed to me that he managed to do so, to recognise me 'between the lines' so to speak. And after that pause, he added: 'Do you remember Lissarrague? Now what he did was extraordinary; I'm sure I've told you the story often enough.' And before I could say that, yes, I remembered perfectly, he refreshed my memory (this was one story he did like to recall and to recount): 'His intervention was absolutely crucial. His father, a soldier, had been murdered, and he had contacts with the Falange, and so, what with one thing and another, he was in the Francoists' good books at the time. My accusers asked him if he knew what I'd done during the War, and when he said that he did, they gave his name as a witness for the prosecution. But when he was questioned at the trial, he not only denied all the false accusations that had been made against me, he spoke very favourably of me. The captain in charge of the prosecution was getting more and more agitated and, astonished by Lissarrague's declarations, he finally blurted out: "You do know you were summoned as a witness for the prosecution, don't you?" To which Lissarrague replied: "I thought I'd been summoned to tell the truth." The judge, taken aback, asked why, if what he said was true, there were so many extremely grave accusations being levelled at me. And Lissarrague replied succinctly and without hesitation: "Envy." You see, he and other people saw it like that and thought no more about it. Myself, I'm not so sure that the explanation was quite that simple.'

'That just proves my point,' I put in. 'All the more reason why you should ask yourself the question, given that you weren't satisfied with the simpler explanation, the one that everyone but you found perfectly acceptable.'

'No, I wasn't satisfied,' my father replied with a hint of intellectual amour propre. 'But that doesn't mean that I ever came up with a more complicated explanation, or that trying to find one interested me enough for me to devote my time to it or to speak to the man again, to call him to account. There are some people whose motives don't deserve further investigation, even though these may have led them to commit the most terrible acts or precisely because they did. I know this goes completely against the current trend. Nowadays everyone wonders what leads a serial killer or mass murderer to kill or murder serially or en masse, or what makes a collector of rapes constantly add to his collection, what makes a terrorist, in the name of some primitive cause, despise all life and try to put an end to the lives of as many other people as possible, what makes a tyrant endlessly tyrannise or a torturer endlessly torture, be it in the name of bureaucracy or sadism. There's an obsession with understanding the loathsome, there's an unhealthy fascination with it, and it does the loathsome a huge favour. I don't share the modern world's infinite curiosity about something that can never be justified, however many different explanations you come up with, psychological, sociological, biographical, religious, historical, cultural, patriotic, political, idiosyncratic, economic, anthropological, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to waste my time on the bad and the pernicious, its interest, I can assure you, is minimal at best and usually nil, I've seen plenty of it. Evil tends to be simple, although not always that simple, if you know what I mean. But there are some investigations that sully the investigator, and even some that infect you without giving anything valuable back in return. There is a taste today for exposing oneself to the base and the vile, to the monstrous and the aberrant, for peering in at the infra-human and rubbing up against it as if it had some kind of prestige or charm and were more important than the hundred thousand other conflicts that besiege us without their ever plumbing quite those depths. There's an element of pride in all of this too: you plunge into the anomalous, the repugnant and the wretched as if the human norm were respect and generosity and rectitude, and we had to make a microscopic analysis of anything that deviated from that norm; as if bad faith and treachery, ill will and malice did not form part of that norm and were the exception, and therefore merited all our effort and attention. And that isn't true. It's all part of the norm, and there's no great mystery about it, no more than there is about good faith. This age, however, is devoted to the silly, the obvious and the superfluous, and that's the way it is. Things should be the other way around: there are actions so abominable and so despicable that their mere commission should cancel out any possible curiosity we might have in those who committed them, rather than creating curiosity and provoking it, as is the imbecilic way of things now. And that was the case with me, even though it was my case, my life. What that former friend had done to me was so unjustifiable, so inadmissible and so grave from the point of view of friendship, that everything about him instantly ceased to interest me: his present, his future and his past too, even though I existed in that past. I didn't need to know anything more, and I had no wish to delve deeper.'