Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

'What do you mean "like us"? What do you mean? What did he mean?'

Wheeler did not reply directly. The truth is he rarely did.

'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo. There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth, it's no cliché or exaggeration to describe us now as an endangered species. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence, it smacks of lese-humanite, an attack on the dignity of the prejudged, of the prejudger, of everyone. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror. They require proof and verification of everything; the benefit of the doubt, as they call it, has invaded everything, leaving not a single sphere uncolonised, and it has ended up paralysing us, making us, formally speaking, impartial, scrupulous and ingenuous, but, in practice, making fools of us all, utter necios.' That last word he said in Spanish, doubtless because there is no English word that resembles it phonetically or etymologically: 'utter necios,' he said, mixing the two languages. 'Necios in the strict sense of the word, in the Latin sense of nescius, one who knows nothing, who lacks knowledge, or as the dictionary of the Real Academia Espanola puts it, do you know the definition it gives? "Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known." Isn't that extraordinary? That is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning. Un satisfecho insipiente.' He resorted to Spanish for both the quote and for the last few words, which mean, more or less, 'nincompoop'; in other languages one always remembers terms that are no longer in use or are unknown to native speakers. 'And that's how it is in our pusillanimous countries, people are educated from childhood on to be necios, fools. It isn't a natural evolution or degeneration, it doesn't happen by chance, it's conscious, calculated, institutional. It's a programme for the formation of minds, or for their annihilation (the annihilation of character, ça va sans dire!). People hate certainty; and that hatred began as a fashion, it was deemed trendy to reject certainties, simpletons put them in the same bag as dogmas and doctrines, the dolts (and there were a few intellectuals amongst them too), as if they were synonymous. But the idea has proved a tremendous success, it's taken root with a vengeance. Now people hate anything definite or sure, and, consequently, anything that is fixed in time; and that is partly why people detest the past, unless they can manage to contaminate it with their own hesitancy, or infect it with the present's lack of definition, which they try to do all the time. Nowadays people cannot bear to know that something existed; that it existed and in a particular way. What they cannot bear is not so much knowing that, as the mere fact of its existence. Just that: that it did exist. Without our intervention, without our considered opinion, how can I put it, without our infinite indecision or our scrupulous acquiescence. Without our much-loved uncertainty as impartial witness. This era is so proud, Jacobo, far prouder than any other, certainly since I've been in the world or before that either, I should think (it makes Hitler look tame). Bear in mind that when I get up each morning, I have to make a real effort and to resort to the help of much younger friends like you in order to forget that I can actually remember the First World War, or what you young people call, to my great disgust and displeasure, the 14-18 War. Bear in mind that one of the first words I learned and retained, from hearing it so often, was "Gallipoli", it seems incredible that I was already alive when that massacre took place. The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present's resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without our gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all is that this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendours that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even the shadow or mist or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it's just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us. It has escaped our control and our manoeuvrings and our decisions, despite all these leaders going around apologising for the outrages committed by their ancestors, even seeking to make amends by offering offensive gifts of money to the descendants of the aggrieved, regardless of how gladly those descendants may pocket those gifts and even demand them, for they, too, are opportunists, chancers. Have you ever seen anything more stupid or farcical: cynicism on the part of those who give, cynicism on the part of those who receive. It's just another act of pride: how can a pope, a king or a prime minister assume the right to attribute to his Church, to his Crown or to his country, to those who are alive now, the crimes of their predecessors, crimes which those same predecessors did not see or recognise as such all those centuries ago? Who do our representatives and our governments think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? If it was purely symbolic, it would be mere oafish affectation or propaganda. However, symbolism is out of the question as long as there are offers of "compensation", grotesquely retrospective and monetary ones to boot. A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life: they are lost forever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are now formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, of their broken bones and slit throats. Of the real and unknown names of which they were stripped or which they renounced.

A mockery of the past. No, the past is simply not to be borne; we cannot bear not being able to do anything about it, not being able to influence it, to direct it; to avoid it. And so, if possible, it is twisted or tampered with or altered, or falsified, or else made into a liturgy, a ceremony, an emblem and, finally, a spectacle, or simply shuffled around and changed so that, despite everything, it at least looks as if we were intervening, even though the past is utterly fixed, a fact we choose to ignore. And if it isn't, if that proves impossible, then it's erased, suppressed, exiled or expelled, or else buried. And it happens, Jacobo, one or other of those things happens all too often because the past doesn't defend itself, it can't. And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were contagious diseases. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'