Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

I too placed my hand on the drawings, as if I feared the breeze.

'No, Peter,' I said. 'What king is that?'

But Wheeler did not reply to my question, he went on, instead, to quote out loud, and this time I was in no doubt that he was quoting, for very few writers other than Shakespeare would ever have written 'great greatness' (and so many teachers and critics in my country now would have crucified him for doing so).

'"What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?" That is what the king says when he's alone, and a little further on he reproaches ceremony for singling him out: "Oh ceremony! Show me but thy worth!" And he goes on to challenge it: "O! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!" What does it actually achieve, if it achieves anything? And later still, the king dares to envy the wretched slave who labours in the sun all day but then sleeps deeply "with a body fill'd and vacant mind" and "never sees horrid night, the child of hell" and who "follows so the ever-running year with profitable labour to his grave". And the king concludes with the obligatory exaggeration of all those monologues that no one else hears on the stage and which are heard only off-stage, in the auditorium: "And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.'" That is more or less what Wheeler said and quoted, then he added: 'Kings of old were shameless creatures, but at least Shakespeare's kings did not entirely deceive themselves: they knew their hands were stained with blood and they did not forget how they came to wear the crown, apart from murders and betrayals and plots (perhaps they were too human). Ceremony, Jacobo, that's all. Changing, limitless, general ceremony. As well as secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence. But never speaking, never talking, never using words, however exquisite or captivating they might be. Because that, deep down, is within the grasp of any beggar, any outcast, any poor wretch, any one of the dispossessed. In that regard, they only differ from the king in the insignificant and ameliorable matter of perfection and degree.'

'What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy!' were the words quoted by Sir Peter Wheeler, as I found out later, when I located and recognised the texts. And he recited word for word the whole of the rest of the soliloquy, for that kind of memory he preserved intact.

'But it's not within the reach of the very young,' I commented, 'or the dumb or those whose tongues have been cut out or to whom the word is simply not given or permitted, there's been a lot of that in history, and, as I understand it, there are Islamic countries in which women still do not have that right. As far as I understand it, and if my memory serves me right, that was the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan.'

'No, Jacobo, you're wrong: the young are merely waiting, their inability is purely transitory; I imagine they are preparing themselves from that very first yell when they're born, and they make themselves understood very early on: they use other means, but they are still saying things. As for the dumb and those with no tongue, and those denied voice and word, they are exceptions, anomalies, punishments, coercions, outrages, but never the norm, and, as such, they do not count. Besides, that is not enough in itself to render that norm null and void or even to contradict it. Those thus afflicted resort to other sign systems, to non-verbal codes which they quickly establish, and you may rest assured that what they are doing is neither more nor less than talking. They are soon telling and transmitting again, like everyone else; even if it's in writing or through signs and without uttering a sound; they are still saying even if they are doing so silently.' Wheeler stopped talking and looked up at the sky, as if, having spoken of silence, he wanted to immerse himself for a moment in the eloquent silence he had evoked. The whitish, indifferent sun lit up his eyes, and to me they looked like glass marbles flecked with colour in which the dominant shade was dark red. 'Earlier, I said that speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods, you have only to read the Bible and Homer or, of course, in Spanish, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. But some people cease to share it, how can I put it, they do not possess it, and they are neither dumb nor very young.' He looked down for a second, and still had his eyes fixed on the grass, or perhaps beyond that, on the earth beneath the grass, or beyond that, on the invisible earth beneath the earth, then added after a brief pause: 'The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.'

'It seems to me that time is the only dimension they share and in which they can communicate, the only dimension they have in common and that unites them.' That quotation, or perhaps paraphrase, came into my mind, and I felt I had to say it out loud at once, or at least mumble it to myself.

But Wheeler was, I thought, gradually coming to the end of his digression. In fact, he always knew precisely where he was, and what seemed in him random or involuntary, a consequence of distraction or of age or of a somewhat confused perception of time, of his digressive and discursive tendencies, was always calculated, measured and controlled, and formed part of his machinations and of trajectories he had already drawn up and planned. I told myself that it would not be long now before he returned to the subject of 'careless talk' and the posters, indeed, he was once more looking at them intently, where they lay on the waterproof canvas cover as if they were cards in a game of patience, we, too, were sitting on the protective covers, and their folds gave to that simulacrum of an old man and to me, too, I suppose, a slightly Roman look, made us look, perhaps, vaguely like senators taking the air, our feet almost engulfed by the skirts of some very long, exaggerated tunics. Anyway, he either didn't hear me or preferred to ignore me, or simply didn't notice the words I had said, which were not mine but another's, the words of a dead man when he was still alive.

'But it wasn't always so,' he continued with his own thoughts. 'Throughout the centuries, they too shared speech and language, at least in the imaginations of the living, that is, of the future dead. Not just the talkative ghosts and loquacious phantoms, the chatty spirits and garrulous spectres present in almost all traditions. It was also assumed that they would, quite naturally, talk and speak and tell tales in the other world. In that same scene from Shakespeare, for example, before the king gives his soliloquy, one of the soldiers with whom he speaks says that the king will have a hard time of it should the cause of the war prove to have been a bad one: "When all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle," he says, "shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, 'We died at such a place.'" You see, that was what they believed, not only that the dead would speak and even protest, but that their scattered, separated heads and limbs would protest as well, once reunited to present themselves for judgement with due decorum.'

'We died at such a place.' That was what Wheeler had said in his language, and in my own language I completed the Cervantes quotation to myself, the one he had not allowed me to finish and which also bore witness to that same belief: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying, and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.' That was what Cervantes hoped for, I thought, no complaints and no accusations, no reproaches, no settling of accounts or demands for compensation for all his earthly troubles and grievances, of which he had known not a few. Not even a final judgement, which is what the unbeliever most misses. Instead a renewed encounter with wit and charm, with his dear, delightful friends, who would also find contentment in the next life. That is the only thing from which he takes his leave, the only thing he would wish to preserve in the eternity for which he is bound. I had often heard my father speak of that written farewell, which is not as famous as it deserves to be, it can be found in a book which almost no one reads and which may, nevertheless, be greater than all the others, greater even than Don Quixote. I would have liked to remind Wheeler of the whole quotation, but I did not dare to insist or to cause him to deviate from his path. Instead, I accompanied him along the way, saying: