Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (42 page)

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:

'The very idea of a Final Judgement meant that, according to common expectations, that would be what people would mostly be doing after death: telling everyone's story, then talking, relating, describing, arguing, refuting, appealing and, in the end, hearing sentence. Besides, a trial on such a monumental scale, the trial on a single day of everyone who had ever lived on Earth, Egyptian pharaohs rubbing shoulders with modern-day business executives and taxi-drivers, Roman emperors with modern-day beggars and gangsters and astronauts and bullfighters. Imagine the noise, Peter, the entire history of the world with all its individual cases transformed into a madhouse. And the more remote and ancient dead would get fed up with waiting, with counting the uncountable time that would elapse before their Judgement, doubtless furious about the literally infinite delay. They who had remained silent and alone for millions of centuries, waiting for the last person to die and for no one else to be left alive. That belief condemned us all to a very long silence. There you have a true example of "the whips and scorns of time", "the law's delay",' and this time I was the one to quote from his poet. 'And according to that belief, the very first man ever to die would, right now, still be counting the hours of his silent solitude, those that had passed and those still to come; and if I were him, I would be selfishly longing for the world to end once and for all and for there finally to be nothing.'

Wheeler smiled. Something in what I had said, or perhaps more than one thing, had amused him.

'Exactly,' he replied. 'A silence
sine die:
that would be the best-case scenario, assuming one's faith was unshakeable. But there is, of course, the aggravating factor that, by then, during the Second World War, hardly anyone believed in that parliament or justification or final report by each individual at the end of time, and it was hard to think that the heads and limbs which, night after night, were being shattered by the bombs raining down on those cities could ever one day be reunited in order to cry out at some later date: "We died at such a place"; and it was little consolation that the causes were just, and it mattered still less if they were or weren't good, when the main cause of all the dying and killing became instead mere survival, one's own or that of those one loved. It probably hadn't been much believed before that either, perhaps not since the First World War, which was no less ghastly for the world that watched it and which is also my world, don't forget, as is this world that contains both you and me today, or is perhaps merely dragging us along with it. Atrocities make men into unbelievers, at least in their innermost consciousness and feelings, even if, out of some superstitious reflex reaction, or some other reaction based on a mixture of tradition and surrender, they decide to pretend the opposite and gather together in churches to sing hymns in order to feel closer and to instil themselves not so much with courage as with integrity and resignation, just as soldiers used to sing as they advanced, almost defenceless, bayonets fixed, mostly in order to anaesthetise themselves a little with their cries before the impact or the blow or being hurled into the air, in order to numb thoughts that had been wounded long before the flesh ever was, and to silence the various sounds made by death as it prowled around on the look-out for easy prey. I know this, I've seen it in the field. But it isn't only the acts of savagery, the cruelties, those one has suffered and those one has oneself committed, all in the cause of survival, which is as just as it is unjust. It is also the stubbornness of the facts: the fact that no one has ever come to talk to us after they have died, despite all the efforts of spiritualists, visionaries, phantasmophiles, miraculists and even our present-day unbelieving believers, who, even though their belief is only residual and habitual, can be counted in their millions; long experience has forced us to recognise over the centuries, perhaps only in our heart of hearts and possibly without ever actually admitting as much to ourselves, that the only people who have no language and never speak or tell or say anything are the dead.' Peter stopped and looked down again, and added at once, without looking up: 'And that includes us, of course, when we join their ranks. But only then and not before.'

He remained like that, staring at the grass. He seemed to be waiting for me to make some comment or to ask some question. But I didn't know which, which of those two things he wanted and for which one he was silently asking me, or if he really needed either. And so the only thing that occurred to me was to whisper in my own language, a language in which the words had not originally been written, but the only one in which I knew them:

'It is strange to inhabit the earth no longer. Strange no longer to be what one was . . .and to abandon even one's own name. Strange no longer to desire one's desires. And being dead is such hard work.'

Fortunately, I suppose, Wheeler ignored this too.

'Yes, they only talk to us in our dreams,' he went on, as if my unattended half-verses had, none the less, triggered some reaction. 'And we hear them so clearly, and their presence is so vivid, that, as long as sleep lasts, these people with whom we can never exchange a word or a look when awake, or make any contact, seem to be the very people who are, in fact, telling us things and listening to us and even cheering our spirits with their longed-for laughter, identical to the laughter we knew when they were alive on this earth: it's exactly the same, that laughter; we recognise it unhesitatingly. It really is very strange; if pressed, I would say inexplicable, it is one of the few intact mysteries left to us. One thing is certain, though, at least for rationalists like you and like me, and as Toby was and Tupra still is, those voices and their new voices are inside us, not somewhere outside. They are in our imagination and in our memory. Let's put it like this: it is our memory imagining, and not, for once, only remembering, or, rather, doing so in impure, motley fashion. They are in
our
dreams, the dead; we are the ones dreaming them, our sleeping consciousness brings them to us and no one else can hear them. It is more like an impersonation' (a word that translates into Spanish as a mixture of
encarnación, suplantación
and
personificación)
'than a supposed visitation or warning from beyond the grave. Such a mechanism is not unknown to us, when we're awake I mean. Sometimes you love someone so much that it's very easy to see the world through their eyes and to feel what that other person feels, in so far as it's possible to understand another person's feelings. To foresee that person, to anticipate them. Literally, to put yourself in their place. That's why the expression exists, very few expressions in a language exist in vain. And if we do that when we're awake, then it's hardly surprising that these fusions or conversions or juxtapositions, metamorphoses almost, should occur while we're asleep. Do you know that sonnet by Milton? Milton had been blind for some time when he wrote it, but he dreamed one night of his dead wife Catherine, and he saw and heard her perfectly in that dimension, that of the dream, which so welcomes and withstands the poetic narrative. And in that dimension he recovered his vision threefold: his own, as faculty and sense; the impossible image of his wife, for neither he nor anyone else could still see her in the present, she had been erased from the earth; and, above all, her face and figure, which, in him, were not even remembered but imagined, new and never seen before, because he had never seen her in life other than with his mind and with his touch, she was his second wife and he was already blind when they married. And as he leaned forwards to embrace her in the dream, "I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night", that's how it ends. With the dead you always return to night and to hearing only their silence and to never receiving a reply. No, they never talk, they are the only ones; and they are also the majority, if we count all those who have passed through the world and left it behind. Although they all doubtless talked when they were here.' Wheeler touched the drawings again, tapped them with his index finger, pointing at them vehemently as if they were more than they were. 'Do you realise what this meant, Jacobo? They were asking people to be silent, to sew up their lips, to keep their mouths tight shut, to abstain from all careless talk and even from talk that might not seem careless. They filled everyone with fear, even children. Fear of themselves and of betraying themselves, and, of course, fear of other people, even the person one most loved, the person who was closest and most trusted. So, when you think about it, what they were asking with these slogans was not just that people should renounce the air, but that by doing so, they should become assimilated with the dead. And this at a time when each day brought us news of so many new dead, those on the infinite fronts scattered around half the globe, or those you could see in your own neighbourhood, in your own street, victims of the night-time bombing raids, when anyone might be the next. Weren't those deaths enough? Wasn't it enough, that definitive and irreversible silence imposed on so many without those of us still alive having to imitate them and fall silent before our time? How could they ask that of a whole country or of anyone, even of an isolated individual? If you look at these posters (and there were more), you'll see that no one, however insignificant, was excluded. What interesting or dangerous information, for example, could those two ladies travelling on the Underground be harbouring, they're probably talking about their hats or about the most innocuous details of their daily lives. Ah, but their husband or brother or son might have been called up, that was the norm, and although their men, already forewarned, would not have told them much, they might know something of importance that could be used, how can I put it, without their even knowing that they knew it or unaware of its importance. Everyone could know something, even the most misanthropic beggar to whom nobody speaks, not just in time of war but never, and even though the majority aren't aware of the precious nature of what they know. And the less conscious one is, the more dangerous one becomes. It may seem like an exaggeration, but everyone is capable of unleashing calamities, disasters, crimes, tragic misunderstandings and acts of revenge merely by speaking, innocently and freely. It is always possible and even easy to let the cat out of the bag or, as you say in Spanish,
irse de la lengua,
what a lovely expression, at once so broad and so precise, covering both the intentional and the involuntary nature of the action.' And Wheeler, of course, said that lovely expression,
irse de la lengua,
in Spanish. 'Whatever the era or the circumstances, no one is safe from that. And never forget: everything has its moment to be believed, however unlikely or anodyne, however incredible or stupid.'