Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear Page 6

  This began to happen after our first bout together, which caught me unawares, and from which I escaped feeling alarmed and battered and during which he interrogated me about my duties and my influence at the BBC and went on to propose six or seven ideas for radio programmes which ranged from the imperial to the downright stupid, often both at once, and which would purportedly prove beneficial to his embassy and our country and doubtless to him and his prospects, for, he told me, he was an expert on the writers of our poor Generation of '27 (poor in the sense of over-exploited and stale), on those of our poor Golden Age (poor because hackneyed and over-exposed), and on our not at all poor fascist writers from the pre-Civil War, post-Civil War and intra-Civil War periods, who were, in any case, one and the same (they suffered few losses during the fighting unfortunately), and to whom he did not, of course, apply that epithet, for this band of out-and-out traitors and pimps seemed to him honourable, altruistic people.

  'I mean most of them were marvellous stylists, and who, confronted by such poetry and such prose, could be so mean-spirited as to mention their ideology? It's high time we separated politics and literature.' And to ram the point home: 'High bloody time.' He displayed that mixture of sentiment and coarseness, soppiness and vulgarity, mawkishness and brutality so common amongst my compatriots, a real plague and a grave threat (it's gaining support, with writers leading the way), foreigners will soon conclude that it is our main national characteristic. He had addressed me as 'tú' from the moment he saw me, on principle: he was one of those Spaniards who reserve what used to be the more formal 'usted' for subalterns and artisans.

  I was about to throw a gauntlet at his slick, gelled hair (it would have stuck fast, no problem), but I didn't have one to hand, only a napkin and, despite the general cheapening of the age, it would not have been the same, and so I merely answered him, more curtly than scornfully, so as to lessen the tension:

  'There is some prose and poetry whose very style is fascist, even though it's all about the sun and the moon and is signed by self-proclaimed left-wingers, our newspapers and bookshops are full of them. The same thing happens with people's minds or characters: some are, by their nature, fascist, even if they inhabit bodies that have a tendency to raise the clenched fist and do the right thing at marches and demonstrations with hordes of photographers pushing their way through and, of course, immortalising them. The last thing we need now is a rehabilitation of the mind and style of those who not only were fascists, but were proud to call themselves fascists, just in case you didn't recognise them by what they wrote, by every page they published and every person they denounced to the police. They've left enough of a mark on present-day writers without the need for that, although most keep quiet about it and look for rather less sullied antecedents, poor old Quevedo is usually the first in line, and some may not even be aware of their much more immediate legacy, which they carry in their blood and which boils inside them.'

  'Dammit, man, how can you say that?' De la Garza protested, more out of confusion than genuine disagreement, for I hadn't given him time for that. 'How can you possibly tell that someone's style is, in itself, fascist? Or someone's mind. You're just showing off.'

  I was tempted to reply by imitating his way of speaking: 'If you can't spot it four paragraphs into a book or after talking to someone for half an hour, then you know bugger-all about literature or people.' But I stood there thinking a little, thinking superficially. It really wasn't that easy to explain how, nor even in what that mind or style with all its many faces consisted, but I was able to recognise them at once, or so I thought then, or perhaps I was just showing off. I had been doing so, of course – although only to myself – when I spoke of four paragraphs and half an hour, I should have said or thought 'a few hours', and even that would have been pushing it. It takes perhaps days and weeks or months and years, sometimes you see something clearly in that first half-hour only to feel it fade, to lose sight of it and to recapture it, perhaps, a decade or half a lifetime later, if it ever comes back. Sometimes it's best not simply to let time pass, or to allow ourselves to become entangled in the time we grant to others or to become confused by the time we ourselves are granted. It's best not be dazzled, which is what time always tries to do, all the while slipping past. It isn't easy any more to define what fascist meant, it's becoming an old-fashioned adjective and is often used incorrectly or, of course, imprecisely, although I tend to use it in a colloquial and doubtless analogical sense, and in that sense and usage I know exactly what it means and know that I'm using it properly. But with De la Garza I had used it more than anything in order to annoy him and to put the dreadful fascist writers he so admired firmly in their place, I had taken an instant dislike to the man, I've seen so many of his sort from childhood on, and they never die, they just disguise themselves and adapt: they're snobbish and vain and extremely pleasant, they're cheerful and even, in form at least, affectionate, they're ambitious and rather false (no, they're not even entirely false), they try to appear refined and, at the same time, pretend to be one of the lads, even common (a very poor imitation, they don't fool anyone, their deep aversion to what they are imitating soon unmasks them), that's why they're so free with their language, thinking that this makes them seem more down-to-earth and will win round the reluctant, which is why they combine stiff refinement with the manners of the barracks and the vocabulary of the prison, military service served them perfectly to complete the picture; the final effect is that of a perfumed boor. De la Garza's mind did not strike me as fascist, even by analogy. He was merely a flatterer, the kind who cannot bear anyone to dislike them, not even people they detest, they aspire to be loved even by those they hurt. He was not the sort who would, on his own initiative, stick the knife in, or only if he needed to earn a few brownie points or to ingratiate himself or if he were given a special assignment, then he would have no scruples at all, because people like him are very adroit with their own consciences.

  But I postponed these thoughts for later, and merely cocked my head and raised my eyebrows in response, as if agreeing or saying: 'What more can I say?' and let the matter drop, and he didn't press it, indeed he took advantage of my silence to tell me that he also knew a hell of a lot – purely as an amateur, he explained, not this time as an expert – about literary fantasy, medieval stuff too (that's what he said, he said 'a hell of a lot' and 'medieval stuff too'). From the way he said this, it was clear that he considered literary fantasy to be chic. I thought he would one day be Minister of Culture, or at the very least

  Secretary of State of said branch, to use the old expression, although I've never known exactly what 'branch' meant in the bureaucratic rather than the botanical sense.

  Those few seconds of political-cum-literary tension proved no impediment, as I said, to the attaché who remained glued to my side or hard on my heels with scarcely a break once that initial encounter of ours was over and despite the fact that I overtly and frequently turned my back on him and talked to some of the other guests in the most obscure, affected and, for him, off-putting English I could muster. Thus, for example, the brief opportunity I had to speak to Tupra was marred by De la Garza's occasional and entirely inappropriate interpolations in Spanish. This was not until some time later, when the two of us were standing up drinking coffee by the sofas which, at that moment, were occupied by Wheeler, Beryl the girlfriend, the Dean of York's very buxom widow and two or three others, there is always a constant coming and going and changing of positions at these nomadic, informal buffet suppers.

  The fact is that Wheeler had done nothing to bring us together, Tupra and me, and I began to think that his telephonic lecture about this fellow or, rather, about his surname and his first name had been pure chance and without any hidden agenda, however difficult I found it to imagine Peter restricting himself to a plain and boringly open agenda, let alone to the absolute absence of any agenda at all. He had been equally attentive to almost all his guests, assisted by Mrs Berry (more smartly dressed than usual),
the housekeeper he had inherited from Toby Rylands when the latter had died years before, and by three waiters hired for the evening along with the viands and whose shift ended at midnight exactly, as Peter had slightly anxiously informed me (he was hoping that, by then, there wouldn't be many guests still hanging around). He and I had barely spoken, knowing that we would have time to talk the next day: I would stay the night at his house, as I sometimes did, so that I could spend the following morning with him and have Sunday lunch there. Studying him from afar, I hadn't noticed him paying particular attention to any one person, like the good host he was, nor bringing particular people together, at least not in my case, because I couldn't believe that he would deliberately have thrown me together with De la Garza, who had soured my soul and hampered my every conversation with his attempts at chit-chat and his comments that had nothing at all to do with what was being discussed; and although he understood English better than he spoke it, the large quantity of alcohol with which he had filled his unintended soliloquies – he wanted to be part of things and wasn't at all happy being his own audience – brought about a rapid deterioration in his intellectual faculties (if you can call them that) and coarsened the nature of his remarks.

  While I spoke briefly to Beryl, for example, fairly early on in the evening (she replied reluctantly and purely out of duty, I obviously didn't strike her as being sufficiently well-heeled), he prowled tirelessly around us, coming out with crass comments about her which, fortunately, no one else could understand ('Bloody hell, have you seen the legs on this woman? You could practically toboggan down them. What do you reckon, eh? Do you think we could steal her from that gypsy she arrived with? She doesn't take a blind bit of notice of him; but then again, he never takes his eyes off her and he could turn out to be the sort who would knife you, however British he might be.'). And while I was conducting a soporific conversation about terrorism with an Irish historian called Fahy, his wife and the Labour mayor of some unfortunate town in Oxfordshire, the attaché, when he heard a few Basque names fall from my lips, tried to butt in with a little folklore ('Hey, tell them that San Sebastian is only the city it is because of us madrileños, dammit, because us people from Madrid used to go and spend our summer holidays there and wrapped it all up for them with a nice pink ribbon, otherwise it would be a complete dump; go on, tell 'em, I mean they may have been to university this lot, but they don't know shit about anything.' By then he had mixed sherry and whisky and three different kinds of wine.) He liked the Dean of York's well-upholstered widow even more than he did Beryl the girlfriend, and while I chatted to her for a few minutes, De la Garza kept muttering to me: 'Cor, get a load of that, God, she's bloody gorgeous', apparently too bowled over to make a proper breakdown of the whole, to analyse in detail, to notice subtleties or, for that matter, anything else (by now he had drunk some port as well). His excitement was as puerile as the expression 'get a load of that', more suited to someone with little experience of women than to a natural and expert womaniser. It occurred to me that De la Garza would know many nights on which he would succumb to women whom a combination of over-eagerness and alcohol would make him think desirable, only to clutch his head in the morning on discovering that he had got into bed with some vast relative of Oliver Hardy's or with some flighty Bela Lugosi look-alike. This wasn't the case with the widowed deaness, with her placid pink face and her voluminous upper body set off by a vast necklace made of what appeared to me to be Ceylonese jacinths or zircons made to resemble orange segments, but she was nevertheless old enough to be the mother (albeit a young one) of her callow, foul-mouthed admirer.

  Tupra, with a cup of coffee in his hand, had asked me what my field was, following the Oxonian norm according to which it is taken for granted that everyone in that city has their specific field of teaching or research, or some field worthy of boasting about.

  'I've never been very constant in my professional interests,' I replied, 'and I've only been at the university here inter-mittently, almost by chance really. I taught for a couple of years a long time ago, contemporary Spanish literature and translation, that's when I first met Sir Peter, although I saw less of him at the time than I did of Professor Toby Rylands, under whom, I understand, you studied.' I could have stopped there; it was enough for a first reply, and I had even given him the opportunity to continue the conversation seamlessly by mentioning Toby, whom he could easily have started reminiscing about, and I would gladly have joined in. But Tupra allowed a second or two to pass without saying anything, and would probably have continued to say nothing for a third or fourth or fifth (one, two, three and four; and five), but I wasn't sure, he was one of those rare men who knows how to withstand silence, who can remain silent, but without making you feel nervous, rather, encouraging you and making it clear that he is ready to hear more, if you have more to say. That receptive manner combined with his courteous or affectionately mocking eyes invited one to talk. And so I did, perhaps also because my superfluous explanations would give me all the more right to ask him in turn about his field, his 'line of work' to use Wheeler's expression, it was high time I found out, and it was strange that the word 'right' should have crossed my mind in relation to something so innocuous and normal, we all ask other people what they do, it's almost our first question. Or perhaps it's because with Tupra one always felt under an obligation to speak even if he didn't open his mouth, as if he were our tacit creditor. And so I added: 'Then I spent some time in the United States, but I hardly did any teaching at all when I went back to my own country, I've had various occupations, I worked for a while on a very influential magazine, I've done a bit of translation, I've set up a couple of businesses, I even had my own tiny publishing house, then I got fed up and sold it.'

  'For a profit, I hope,' he said, smiling.

  'For a large and entirely unmerited profit, to tell you the truth.' And I too smiled. 'Now I'm working for BBC Radio in London, on the Spanish-language broadcasts, well, sometimes in English too, of course, when they touch on Spanish or Spanish-American matters. It's always the same old thing, there are so few Spanish topics that are of interest in England, just terrorism and tourism really, a lethal combination.' My tongue had wanted me to say not 'it's always the same old thing', but 'es siempre sota, caballo y rey', but I wasn't sure what the equivalent idiom in English might be, or even if there was one, and a straight translation – 'it's always knave, queen and king' – would have made no sense at all, and for a moment I understood De la Garza and his longing for his own language and his resistance to this other language, sometimes other languages overwhelm and weary us, even though we're accustomed to them and can speak them fluently, and at other times what we long for are precisely those other languages that we know and now almost never use. Sota, caballo y rey. It was literally only a moment, because I was infuriated suddenly to hear one of De la Garza's absurd, extemporaneous phrases addressed to me, belonging to who knows what arbitrary argument that he alone was following:

  'Las mujeres son todas putas, y las más guapas las españolas', reached my ears. 'Women are all slags, but for looks you can't beat the Spanish.' By then he was probably awash with port, for I had seen him making two or three toasts one after the other with Lord Rymer (bottoms up, cheerio) during the few minutes in which the latter claimed him as a drinking companion, thus keeping him entertained and giving me a breather. Lord Rymer, I remembered then, had been known in Oxford from time immemorial by a malicious nickname, The Flask, which, with semantic inexactitude but intentional, phonetic proximity, I would be inclined to translate simply as 'La Frasca', or The Carafe.

  'I see,' said Tupra pleasantly, when he had got over his surprise. Fortunately, as I found out later, he knew only a few words of Spanish, although amongst them, as might have been feared and as I also found out later, were 'mujeres', 'putas', 'españolas' and 'guapas', that careless brute De la Garza hadn't even had the decency to be obscure in his choice of vocabulary. 'So am I right in thinking that, at the moment, you would find almost a
ny other kind of work attractive? Not, of course, that there's anything wrong, objectively speaking, with the BBC, but it probably gets a bit repetitive. But, then, if you like variety and if you've had it up to here with the job already, who the hell cares about objectivity?' Tupra had a fairly deep, rather mournful voice (here my tongue might have chosen another word from the language I was speaking, 'ailing' perhaps), and had the same tonality as a string, by which I mean that it seemed to emerge from the movement of a bow over strings or to be caused by or to respond to that, if a viola da gamba or a cello can emit feeling (but perhaps I was wrong and it wasn't so much 'mournful' as 'affecting', and 'ailing' would not therefore be the right word: for the gentle, almost pleasant feeling, that eased all affliction, was felt not by him, but by the person listening to him). 'Tell me, Mr Deza, how many languages do you speak or understand? You said you had worked as a translator. I mean, apart from the obvious ones, your English, for example, is superb, if I hadn't known what nationality you were, I would never have thought you were Spanish. Canadian perhaps.'

  'Thank you, I take that as a compliment.' 'Oh, you should, believe me, that was my intention. I mean it. The cultivated Canadian accent is the one that most closely resembles ours, especially, as the name suggests, the English spoken in British Columbia. So what other languages do you know?' Tupra did not allow himself to be distracted by the to-ing and fro-ing that make conversations so erratic and undefined, until tiredness and time put an end to them, he always returned to where he wanted to be.