Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

'Something of the sort happened during Franco's dictatorship in Spain, to get around the censorship laws,' I said; Wheeler had, after all, invited me to interrupt him more often. 'Many people started talking and writing in a symbolic, allusive, parabolic or abstract way. You had to make yourself understood within the deliberate obscurity of what you were saying. A complete nonsense: camouflaging yourself, concealing yourself and yet, nevertheless, wanting to be recognised and wanting the most diffuse, cryptic and confused of messages to be picked up and understood. People have no patience for the hard work involved in deciphering codes. It lasted far too long, and at one point it looked as if it wasn't just a passing phase either, but was here to stay. Some people never managed to lose the habit afterwards, and that was when they fell silent.'

Wheeler listened to me, and it occurred to me that if he took me up on what I had said, he might get diverted once more from his trajectory. Now, however, he seemed resolved to continue along that path, albeit at his own measured pace:

'Many learned to say things without really saying them,' he repeated, 'but what almost no one learned to do was to say nothing, to keep silent, which is what was being asked of them and what was needed. It was normal, it's only natural: it's an impossible thing for most ordinary mortals, believe me, it's asking too much of them, it goes against their very essence, that's why the campaign was always doomed to more than partial failure. It was tantamount to saying to people: "Right, not only have you got to put up with all the shortages, the hardships and the rationing, endure enemy bombing raids – never knowing, despite the wailing sirens, who might not wake up tomorrow or tonight – see your homes set on fire or reduced in an instant to rubble after the explosion and the noise, and sit buried for hours in deep shelters so as not to be burned in streets that still seem just the same, and suffer the loss of husbands and sons or, at the very least, their absence and the constant torment of anxiety over their daily survival or death, to climb into planes and, while you do battle with the air, to be machine-gunned by the enemy, who do everything possible to bring you down, to be sunk and go under, in distant, flaming waters, in submarines and destroyers and warships, and suffocate or be burned alive inside a tank, and parachute out over occupied territory only to come under artillery fire or be set upon by dogs if you manage to land safely, and be blown to pieces if you have the bad but very possible luck to be hit by a shell or a grenade, and then face torture and the executioner if you're caught on your mission in forbidden territory wearing civilian clothes, or engage in hand-to-hand combat at the front with bayonets fixed, in fields, in woods, in jungles, in swamps, in arctic and in desert conditions, and blithely blow off the head of the boy who peers out at you wearing the hated helmet and uniform, and not know, day or night, whether or not you will lose this war, a war which may turn out, in the end, to have served only to make of you forgotten corpses or the perpetual prisoners or slaves of your conquerors, and put up with extreme cold and hunger and thirst and distress and, above all, fear, fear and more fear, a continual terror to which you will eventually become habituated even though you have already spent several years like this and that eventual state of habituation has not yet arrived…" Yes,' added Peter, coming to an abrupt halt, making a minimal pause and then taking a long breath, 'it was like saying to people: "As well as all this, you must keep silent too. You must not speak any more, or tell stories or jokes, or ask, still less answer questions, not of your wife, not of your husband, not of your children, not of your father and definitely not of your mother, your brother or your best friend. And as for your beloved… don't even whisper in your beloved's ear, not a word, no truths or sweet nothings or lies, don't say goodbye to her, don't even give her the consolation of voice and word, don't leave as a souvenir even the murmur of the last false promises we always make when we say goodbye."' Wheeler stopped and became suddenly abstracted, banging his knuckles on his chin, a few soft taps, as if he were remembering, I thought, as if he had experienced this too, withholding the truly important words from his beloved, the words that cry out to be heard and to be said, the words that are so easily forgotten afterwards and become confused with other words or are repeated to other people with identical lightness and with just the same joy, but which, at each last moment, seem so necessary, even though they may only be sweet nothings, extravagant and therefore somewhat insincere, that's the least important thing, at each last moment. 'That's how it was, or pretty much. Not put so crudely, not in those terms. But that's how it was understood by many, that's how it was understood and accepted by the most pessimistic and demoralised, by the very frightened and the very despondent and the already defeated, and in time of war they make up the majority. In time of uncertain wars, that is, those which, quite rightly, people fear might be lost at any moment and which are always hanging by a thread, day after day and night after night, over long, eternal years, wars that really are a matter of life and death, of total extermination or battered, besmirched survival. The most recent ones don't fall into that category, the wars in Afghanistan or Kosovo or the Gulf, or the Falklands War, what a joke. Or the Malvinas, if you prefer, oh, you should have seen how pathetically worked up people became, in front of their television sets I mean, I found it all very upsetting. In today's wars, the euphoric abound, smugly following the wars from their armchairs. Euphorically, of course. The great fools. The criminals. Oh, I don't know. But then, it was just too much to ask, don't you think? To expect people to put up with all that and then to keep silent about the very thing tormenting them, without letting up even for an hour. The innumerable dead had been quite silent enough.'

'And did you yourself keep silent?' I asked. 'Did the campaign affect you?'

'Of course. It affected me, as it did most people. In theory, you see, a lot of people took the recommendations absolutely literally. And not only in theory, but in the collective memory too. Overall, I'd say it was, inevitably, a failure, but if you ask other people who lived through that period or who've heard about it first hand, or if you look up references to "careless talk" in certain books, whether historical or sociological or that mixture of both which is now pretentiously known as microhistory, you'll find that the accepted version, and even genuine personal recollections of the time, all affirm and believe that the campaign was a great success. And it's not that they're consciously lying or have come to some common agreement on the subject or that they're all quite mistaken, it's just that the real impact of something like that is barely verifiable or measurable (how can we possibly know how many catastrophes were unleashed by careless talk or how many avoided by secrecy?), and when wars are won (particularly a war in which all the odds are stacked against you), it's easy, almost unavoidable really, to think, in retrospect, that every effort made was selfless and vital and heroic, and that each and every one contributed to the victory. We had such a bad time and were so consumed by uncertainty, let us at least tell ourselves the tale that most lightens our mourning and compensates us for our sufferings. Oh, I'm sure there were millions of well-intentioned British people who took the warnings and the slogans very seriously indeed, and believed themselves to be scrupulously applying them in practice: that's what they believed in their consciences, and some actually did comply, especially, as I said, the troops and the politicians and the civil servants and the diplomats. As, of course, did I, but this involved no particular merit on my part: bear in mind that between 1942 and 1946 I was only in England for very short periods of time, when I was home on leave or on some specific mission which rarely detained me here for very long, my main base was miles away, my postings far too variable. As you saw in Who's Who, I ended up in the most diverse places during those years, and in jobs that already entailed or required secrecy, discretion, caution, pretence, deceit, betrayal if necessary (in the line of duty), and, needless to say, silence. I had an advantage, it cost me nothing to observe that last stricture to the letter. More than that, perhaps because I was on a constant state of alert wherever I was posted, I was more aware of what was happening to people generally, here at home, in the rearguard. The campaign was also a tremendous temptation, in a way, for the entire population: as immense as it was disregarded, as irresistible as it was unconscious, as unforeseen as it was sybilline.'