Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Read online

  'Do you get on well with her? Are you, would you say, comrades?' he asked me once. 'Contrary to what is generally believed, the best relationship you can have with the opposite sex is one of comradeship, it's the best way to make conquests and it lasts longer too.' On another occasion, he questioned me about her abilities: 'Do you find her talk interesting, her view of things, the details she picks up on? Is she as good as Tupra says she is? Do you have fun with her?' And on a third occasion, he was even more direct or more curious: 'Is the girl pretty? Apart from her youth, I mean. Do you find her attractive?'

  And I had answered every time, without alacrity but with due deference: 'Yes, the beginnings of comradeship, I mean it could happen. But it's early days for that, we haven't found ourselves yet in a situation where we could unequivocally help each other, get each other out of a difficulty or a dilemma, because those are the kinds of things that create comradeship. Or long habit, and the unremarked passage of time.' And then: 'Yes, she is good, she's sharp and perceptive; she's subtle too, but never overembellishes, she doesn't invent or show off; and she's certainly fun, I don't get irritated or bored when I have to interpret alongside her, I'm always glad and willing to listen to her.' And later: 'Yes, she is rather pretty, but not too pretty. And she's funny and physical and she laughs easily, which is so often the most attractive thing about women. I don't know that I find her so attractive that I'd go to the kind of bother I might have once or actually take a step in that direction, but I certainly wouldn't turn up my nose if the opportunity happened to arise.' I remember that I resorted to Spanish for the whole of that last sentence, well, there isn't any real equivalent in other languages for 'no hacer ascos,' although 'to turn up your nose at something' comes close, and I added: 'It's just a hypothesis: it's not something I think about, not something I'm considering doing. Besides, it would be inappropriate, she's much younger than me. In theory, she's not someone I could ever aspire to.'

  Wheeler responded with genuine bemusement:

  'Really? Since when have you set such limits on yourself? Or put obstacles in your way? I think I'm right in saying that you're younger than Tupra, and as far as I know, he doesn't set limits on himself or put obstacles in his way in that or any other field.'

  He could have been speaking in general or making a specific reference to the liaison between Tupra and Pérez Nuix about which I had so many suspicions. This was another piece of information to back up those suspicions.

  'We're not all alike, Peter,' I replied. And the older men get, the more unlike we become, don't you think? You should know. Tupra and I are very different. We probably always were, right from childhood.'

  He paid no attention to this remark, however, or else took it as a joke.

  'Oh, come now. You're not going to persuade me that you've suddenly gone all shy, Jacobo. Or that you've developed a complex about your age and with it all kinds of scruples. What do ten or twenty years matter? Once someone becomes an adult, that's it, and things even out very quickly from then on. It's a point from which there's no return, I'm pleased to say, although there are some people who never achieve adulthood, not in how they live their lives or intellectually—in fact, there are more and more such people, they're real pests, I can't abide them, and yet shops, hotels and offices, even hospitals and banks, are full of them. It's a deliberate ploy, fostered by the societies we live in. For reasons I can't understand, they choose to create irresponsible people. It's incomprehensible. It's as if they set out to create people with a handicap. How old is this bright young thing?'

  'Twenty-seven at most, I would say. Certainly not much less.'

  'She's a grown woman, then, she'll already have crossed Conrad's shadow line, or will be about to do so. It's the age at which life takes charge of you, if you haven't already taken charge of it yourself. The line that separates the closed from the open, the written from the blank page: it's when possibilities begin to run out, because the ones you discard become ever more irrecoverable, and more so with each day you live through. Each date a shadow, or a memory, which comes to the same thing.'

  'Yes, that would be so in Conrad's day, Peter. Now, at twenty-seven, most people feel as if they're only just starting, with the doors of life flung open and real life as yet unbegun and eternally waiting. People graduate from the school of irresponsibility at a much later age now. If, as you say, they ever do.'

  'Be that as it may, your age will be a matter of indifference to that girl, if you interest her or she takes a liking to you. And if she has such a keen eye as you and Tupra say, she won't have fallen asleep in puberty or childhood, she won't have dug herself in, but will be fully incorporated into the world, she'll have scrambled aboard as quickly as she could, perhaps obliged by circumstance. And if she's as acute as all that, she won't be the kind of girl who likes very young men. They'll seem too transparent, overly decipherable, she'll have read their whole story even with the book closed.' Wheeler paused for a long time, the kind of pause that announced he was weary of talking, he tired very quickly on the phone, in the hand of an old man even a phone weighs heavy, and his arm would find it tiring to hold. Before saying goodbye, he added: 'You and Tupra are not so very different, Jacobo. Well, you are different, but not as much as you think, or as you would like. And you ought not to spend so much time alone there in London, I've told you before, even though you have more to do now and are busier. It's not the same thing.'

  And there she was before me, that bright and not-too-pretty young woman, in my apartment, at night, on my sofa, with her dog, a run in her tights, and drinking too much wine, all in order to ask me a favor, and outside I could see the steady, comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that it alone seemed to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears, it was as if it were excluding clear skies for good and discounting the possibility of any other weather ever appearing in the sky—or even the idea of its own absence, just like embraces when they are given willingly and with feeling and just like repugnance when repugnance is the only thing that still exists between those same two people who once embraced; the one before and the other afterwards, things almost always happen in that order and not the other way round. There was young Pérez Nuix, probably the best of us—there was no need to allow any more time to pass before saying so—the one who saw most and the most gifted of our group in the building with no name, the one who took the biggest risks and saw most deeply, more than Tupra and more than me and much more than Mulryan and Rendel, I wondered if she would guess or know what my reactions and my response would be when she finally asked me straight out what she had come to ask me after her long walk, drenched despite her umbrella. And I thought she would doubtless have made her measurements, her calculations and her prognostications, and that she would probably know what I still did not know about myself—perhaps she had her own kind of prescience; I must tread very carefully and sidestep her predictions, or deliberately prove them wrong, but that would be difficult, because she was also capable of foreseeing when and how I would intentionally and far-sightedly sidestep the predictions I had foreseen. We could end up cancelling each other out and our conversation would then lack both truth and meaning, as was the case with everything we did. When two equal forces meet, that is the time to lay down one's weapons: when the spear is thrown to one side and the shield is lowered and laid on the grass, the sword is stuck into the ground and the helmet hung on its hilt. I should just relax and try not to get ahead of myself or act against my own best interests; I should try not to be artificial, but drink a little more of my wine calmly and unconcernedly, knowing that in the end I could answer either 'Yes' or 'No' and still direct the conversation.

  'Broccoli, Saltzman, Pevsner, they're all foreign names, I mean non-British. It's striking, isn't it, a little odd, that the producers of Bond should be German or Italian in origin.' That is what I in turn replied, taking a sip of my drink and at the same time giving in to my onomastic-geographical curiosity and not urging her
to get to the point. They must have been false Englishmen and women too, the members of those wealthy families. For one reason or another, there really were quite a lot of them. 'Even if they had British nationality or were born here, they still sound false.'

  'Well, it seems perfectly normal to me, I don't know what you mean by "false." People have the mistaken idea that there isn't much of a racial mix here or that any foreign presence is very recent, like that Abramovich man who's taken over Chelsea or Al Fayed or other millionaire Arabs. Great Britain has been full of non-English surnames for centuries. Look at Tupra, look at me, look at Rendel, look at you. The only one of us whose name doesn't come from elsewhere is Mulryan, and he, I bet, is really an Irishman.'

  'But I'm not English, I don't count,' I said. 'I'm to all intents and purposes a Spaniard, and I'm only here temporarily. At least I think I am, that's my feeling, although, who knows, I might end up staying. And you're only half-British, aren't you? Your father is Spanish. Nuix, I assume, is a Catalan name.' I pronounced it as it should be pronounced, not as a Castilian would, but as if it were written 'Nush.' I had noticed that the English, on the other hand, called her 'Niux,' as if her name were written 'Nukes.'

  'He was Spanish, yes, but he isn't any more,' replied young Nukes. Anyway, I'm not half anything, I'm English. As English as Michael Portillo, the politician, you know who I mean, at one point it looked as if he might be the next Tory Prime Minister, his father, though, was an exile from the Spanish Civil War. The next leader of the Tories was that fellow Howard, he may have changed his surname, but he's Romanian originally. And many years ago in Ireland, there was that President with the unequivocally Spanish name De Valera, as nationalistic as any O'Reilly, and who, incredibly enough, emerged out of Sinn Fein. Then you have the Korda brothers, who for decades dominated this country's film industry and the painter Freud, and the composer Finzi, and the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, and that director who made The Full Monty, Cattaneo or Cataldi, I can't quite remember. There's Cyril Tourneur, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and the poets Dante and Christina Rossetti, and Byron's lugubrious friend, Dr.John Polidori, and Conrad's real name was Korzeniowski. Gielgud is a Lithuanian or Polish name, and yet no one spoke better English on the stage; Bogarde was Dutch, and then there was that old actor Robert Donat, who played Mr. Chips, his name was an abbreviation of Donatello, I believe. There were prestigious publishers like Chatto and Victor Gollancz, and the bookseller Rota. Then you have Lord Mountbatten, who started off as Battenberg, and even the Rothschilds. Not to mention the Hanoverians, who have reigned here for centuries now, however they may conceal the fact by calling their dynasty Windsor, a name-change that only occurred thanks to George V. There have always been loads of such examples, and most are or were as British as Churchill or Blair or Thatcher. Or as Disraeli, for that matter, Prime Minister during Queen Victoria's reign, and there's very little that's English about his name.' She paused for a moment. She was better informed and more cultivated than I had thought, she had probably studied at Oxford, like so many civil servants; or perhaps because she herself had a foreign surname she had learned all these antecedents by heart and identified with them. She felt entirely English, which was interesting, she would never suffer any conflicts of loyalty; it seemed to me that her reaction betrayed even a certain patriotism, which was more worrying, as is anyone's patriotism. She finished off her third glass of wine, lit another of my Pelopon-nese cigarettes and took two puffs, one after the other, as if she had finally decided to come to grips with her subject and these were her final preparations, the equivalent to the little mental run-up she often took at work before she came over to talk to me, beyond I mean just greeting me or asking me some isolated question; taking a drink and smoking a cigarette marked a new paragraph. All this movement (she had been gesticulating during her proclamation of Britishness and her assurance that she was no compatriot of mine, contrary to my belief or, rather, feeling) had caused the run in her stockings to advance downwards and it was getting close to the top of her boot now; on its upward path it had already reached the edge of her skirt, and so I would not see it grow further in that direction unless her skirt inched up a little or she hitched it up herself, but why would she do that, though it wasn't impossible that she would do so distractedly, or perhaps that was just wishful thinking on my part. The paragraph, however, turned out to be a full stop: 'Oddly enough,' she said in another tone, 'the favor I want to ask you has to do with English people with foreign surnames, and with a daughter and a father, I'm the daughter, and the father is my own, which is why this is such a big favor. We're not as rich as the Broccoli family, of course, and that's part of the problem.' She stopped, as if unsure whether it was appropriate to slip in the odd joke, hesitating between solemnity and frivolity, almost everyone who ends up asking for something opts for the former, fearing that otherwise their plea will lack force. And exaggeration is obligatory, it's up to the person listening to water down the gravity of the request. Lying and fantasy are less obligatory, but it's still as well to assume their presence—absolute credulity when given an account of some drama or danger can prove disastrous to the person hearing it. And so while I did not prepare myself to suspend belief, I did prepare to combat or undermine it because I am, by nature, credulous until, that is, I hear a false note.

  'Tell me what it's about. Tell me and I'll see what I can do, if I can do anything. What's happened to Mr. Pérez Nuix, both names are his, are they not?' I couldn't help saying this in the patronizing tone of someone preparing to listen, consider, think it over, be a momentary enigma, keep the other person dangling and then concede or deny or be merely ambiguous. It always makes you feel rather important, knowing that you'll take equal pleasure in saying a 'Yes' and a 'No' and a 'Possibly' ('I'm being so good,' you say to yourself; or 'I'm so hard, so implacable, I wasn't born yesterday and no one's putting anything over on me'; or 'If I don't give a decision right now, I will be the lord of uncertainty'), and so you magnanimously, patiently draw the other person out: 'What is it?' or 'Tell me' or 'Explain what you mean'; or else speak threateningly and urgently: 'Come on, spit it out' or 'You've got two minutes, make the most of them and get straight to the point' (or 'Make it short')—I was giving that young woman all the time in the world that night, the rain outside removed all sense of haste.

  'Yes, my mother's maiden name was Waller. He hyphenates his two names,' she said, and she drew the hyphen in the air, 'but I don't. I'm like Conan Doyle.' She smiled, and that, I thought, would be the last smile for quite some time, for as long as it took her to present her case. 'My father's getting on a bit now, he had me quite late, from his second marriage, I've got a half-sister and half-brother somewhere who are much older than me, but I've never had much to do with them. Even though my mother was considerably younger than him, she died six years ago from galloping cancer. He was already retired by then; well, insofar as anyone can retire from doing far too many things, most of them unproductive and vague and never entirely abandoned. He was always a womanizer, and still is within his limitations, but he was quite lost or perhaps disconcerted when my mother died: he even lost interest in other women. Naturally, this didn't last very long, just a few months of playing the part of the suddenly aged widower, but he soon recovered his youth. He'd had a terrible time as a child in Spain, during the War and afterwards, until his father managed to get him out and bring him to England, my grandfather had left in 1939 and couldn't send for him until '45, when the war against Germany ended; my father was fifteen when he arrived and was always torn between the two countries, he'd left some older brothers behind in Barcelona, who, when they had the chance, chose not to change countries. And he didn't have an easy time in London at first either, until he started to make his own way. He married well, both times; not that it was hard for him, he was a charming man and very handsome. It was a great error and injustice, to use his words, that he'd had such a difficult start in life, but he, of course, forgot about the difficulties and soon made up for
them. And he'd laugh when he said this. He maintains, and always has, that we come into this world in order to have a good time, and anyone who doesn't see it like that is in the wrong place, that's what he says. He was a very good-humored man, and still is, he's one of those people who avoids sadness and is bored by suffering; even if he has real reason to suffer, he'll shake it off eventually it just seems to him like a stupid waste of time, like a period of involuntary, enforced tedium that interrupts the party and may even ruin it. He was terribly shaken by my mother's death, I could see that, his grief was very real, some days it bordered on despair, he was almost mad with it, shut up at home, which was unheard of for a man who has spent his entire life going to sociable places in search of diversion. However, he was incapable of remaining anchored in sorrow for more than a few months. He can only cope with pain, his own or other people's, as if it were a brief performance in need of encouragement and compliments, and he would have seen wallowing in grief as not making the most of life, as a waste.'

  That was the word both Wheeler and my father had used to refer to a very different thing, to the war dead, especially once the fighting's over and it becomes clear that everything has remained more or less the same, more or less as it probably would have been without all the bloodshed. That, with few exceptions, is how we all feel about wars, when we become distanced from them by passing time, and people don't even know about the crucial battles without which they might not have been born. According to young Pérez Nuix's father, time spent on heartbreak and mourning was also a waste. And it occurred to me that perhaps his idea was not so very different from that of my two old men, simply more categorical: not only were deaths a waste, whether in wartime or peacetime, it was just as much a waste to allow ourselves to be saddened or dragged down by them and not recover or be happy again. Like a knee pressing into our chest, like lead upon our soul.