Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (44 page)

'How do I look?' I said, theatrically displaying my two profiles.

You'll pass,' he said, after casting a condescending eye over me, like a superior officer making a cursory inspection of a soldier's head. And then he returned to where he had been just before the aerial attack, he never lost the thread unless he wanted to. Despite the many detours, meanderings, diversions, he always concluded his trajectories. 'So what happened with that campaign?' he asked rhetorically. 'Well, overall, naturally enough, it failed. A failure to which it was irremissibly condemned from the start. Well, it served some purpose, obviously, quite a good purpose really: people became aware of the dangers of talking too much, something that had never even occurred to most of them. It doubtless had an effect on many in the armed forces and that was the main thing, since they would be the best-informed and the most vulnerable to the consequences of verbal excess or carelessness. And the leaders, both political and military, were, of course, very careful indeed. There was an increased tendency to communicate in code, or else through
doubles entendres
and semantic transpositions, using improvised or rough-and-ready synecdoches and metalepses, and this happened spontaneously throughout the population, depending on the individual's talents and abilities. The idea that someone, anyone, could be listening with hostile intent was created and implanted. You could say (and this, in itself, was both unusual and admirable) that people became fully and collectively aware, however temporarily, of what was depicted in that sequence of scenes that begins with the sailor talking to the young woman: the fact that our words, once uttered, are beyond our control. They, more than anything, cease to belong to us, far more so than our actions which, in a way, good or bad, stay inside ourselves, and cannot be appropriated by anyone else, except in flagrant cases of usurpation or imposture, which, however tardily, can always be denounced, aborted, undone or unmasked.' Wheeler used the Spanish verb 
'desfacer'  
for 'undone'. He had also used the Spanish
'como estaba mandado'
and
'de andar por casa'
for 'naturally enough' and 'rough-and-ready' — he liked to show off both his colloquial and his bookish Spanish, as he did with his Portuguese and French, I suppose, those were the three languages he knew best, and possibly others, he certainly, to my knowledge, had a smattering of Hindi, German and Russian. 'Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word. One pronounces words and immediately lets them go and gives possession, or, rather, usufruct, to the person who hears them. That person may agree with them, to start with, which is not necessarily pleasing because in a sense, by doing so, he or she takes them over; the person may refute them, which is equally unpleasing; more than that, he or she can, in turn, transmit them limitlessly, acknowledging their source or making them theirs depending on their mood, depending on how decent they are or on whether or not they want to ruin or betray us, depending on the circumstances; not only that, they can elaborate on them, improve on them or mar them, distort them, slant them, quote them out of context, change their tone, alter their emphasis and thus easily give them a different and even a contrary meaning to the one they had on our lips, or when we conceived them. And they can, of course, repeat them exactly, verbatim. This was what people most feared during the war, which is why many people tried to speak obliquely, metaphorically or nebulously, with deliberate vagueness or even resorting to secret languages. Many learned to say things without really saying them, and became accustomed to that.'

'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.'

'What are you talking about, Peter? I don't understand.'

'The citizens of any nation, Jacobo, the vast majority, normally have nothing of any real value to tell anyone. If you stop each night to think about what has been told or recounted to you during the day by the many or few people with whom you have spoken (their degree of culture and knowledge is irrelevant), you will see how rare it is ever to hear anything of real value or interest or discernment, leaving to one side details and matters of a merely practical nature, but including, of course, on the other hand, everything that has reached you via the newspaper, the television or the radio (it's different if you've read it in a book, although that depends on the book). Almost everything that everyone says and communicates is humbug or padding, superfluous, commonplace, dull, interchangeable and trite, however much we feel it to be "ours" and however much people "feel the need to express themselves", to use the appallingly
"cursi"
phrase of the day. It would have made not a jot of difference if the millions of opinions, feelings, ideas, facts and news that are expressed and recounted in the world had never been expressed at all.' (Needless to say, Wheeler resorted to my language for that word
'cursi',
which has no exact equivalent in any other, but which here would mean something like 'corny'.)
'"Hablando se entiende lagente",
you often say in Spanish. "Talk things over and sort things out". "It's good to talk," people say in various situations and contexts. All it needed was for psychologists and the like to put that absurd notion into the heads of talkers for the latter to give even freer rein to what has always been their natural tendency. Talking is not in itself either good or bad, and as for people sorting things out by talking to each other, well, talking is just as much a source of conflict and misunderstanding as it is of harmony and understanding, of injustice and reparation, of war and armistice, as much a source of crimes and betrayals as it is of loyalties and loves, of condemnations and salvations, of insults and rages as it is of consolations and mollifications. Talking is probably the biggest waste of time amongst the population as a whole, regardless of age, sex, class, wealth or knowledge, it is wastage
par excellence.
Almost no one has anything to say that their potential listeners might consider to be of any real value, worth listening to, let alone bought, I mean no one pays for something that is normally free, apart from in a few very exceptional cases, and yet sometimes you're obliged to. Strangely, though, and despite everything, the majority continues to talk endlessly and every day. It's astonishing, Jacobo, when you stop to think: men and women are constantly explaining and recounting, as well as explaining themselves to themselves
ad nauseam,
looking for someone to listen to them or imposing their diatribes on others if they can, fathers on children, teachers on pupils, parish priests on parishioners, husbands on wives and wives on husbands, commanding officers on troops and bosses on subalterns, politicians on their supporters and even on the nation as a whole, television on its viewers, writers on their readers and even singers on their adolescent fans, who pay them the still greater tribute of chanting the choruses of their songs. Patients impose their diatribes on their psychiatrists too, except that here the nature of the relationship is revealing, it's a very clear transaction: the listener charges, the speaker pays. He who talks most pays most.' (These last words were again in Spanish:
'Desembolsa quien raja, se retrata quien larga —
I thought of a woman friend of mine in Madrid, Dr Garcia Mallo, a very wise psychiatrist: I would advise her to increase her fees without the slightest twinge of conscience.) 'That is an exemplary relationship, and it would, in fact, be the most appropriate relationship for all occasions. For there's a real shortage of people willing to listen, there are never many, mainly because there are infinitely more who aspire to be in the other man's trench, that is, to be the ones doing the talking and, therefore, being listened to. In fact, if you think about it, a permanent and universal struggle is being waged to grab the floor: in any crowded place, private or public, there are dozens if not hundreds of irrepressible voices fighting to prevail or to cut in, and the desideratum of each voice would be to rise above all the others and silence them: and that, within tolerable limits, is what they try to do. It could be a street or a market or Parliament, the only difference is that, in the end, they agree to take turns and those waiting are forced to pretend to be listening; it could be in a pub or at a tea-party in a stately home, only the intensity and the tempo vary, in the latter one moves very slowly, one dissembles a little in order to gain confidence before holding forth as if in a tavern, albeit with the volume turned down. Gather four people round a table and very soon at least two of them will be competing to call the tune. I did well to become a teacher: for many years I enjoyed, unimpeded, the enormous privilege of not being interrupted by anyone, or, at least, not without my prior consent. And I still enjoy that privilege in my books and articles. That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing. It is and always has been, believe me, I know from my own experience and from that of others, you, as far as I know, have so far escaped, you have no idea how wise you have been not to be tempted by writing. For that is the illusory idea of all novelists, who publish their various immense tomes full of adventures and endless reflections, like Cervantes in Spain, like Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, and the author of that tedious quartet about Alexandria that was once all the rage, or Oxford's own Tolkien (who really
was
born in South Africa), the number of times I passed him in Merton College or saw him with Clive Lewis, enjoying a drink of an evening at The Eagle and Child, and not one of us had an inkling of the fate that awaited his three eccentric volumes, he even less than us, his highly sceptical colleagues; it's an illusion shared by poets too, who pack so much into those deceptively short lines, like Rilke and Eliot, or before them, Whitman and Milton, and, before them, your own great poet, Manrique; it's shared by playwrights who aim to keep an audience in their seats for four or more hours, as Shakespeare himself did in
Hamlet
and
Henry IV:
of course, at the time, a lot of the audience would have been standing and would have quite happily strolled in and out of the theatre as many times as they wished; it's shared by all those chroniclers and diarists and memorialists like Saint-Simon, Casanova, El Inca Garcilaso and Bernal Diaz or our own illustrious Pepys, who never tire of furiously filling up those sheets with ink; it's shared by such essayists as the incomparable Montaigne or me (not, I can assure you, that I'm comparing myself with him), who ingenuously imagine, while we write, that someone will have the miraculous degree of patience required to swallow everything we want to tell them about Henry the Navigator, it's madness, isn't it, I mean, my latest book about him is nearly five hundred pages long, it's rank discourtesy, an abuse really. Have you read it yet, by the way?'