Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

7 Farewell

Sometimes we know what we want to do or have to do or even what we're thinking of doing or are almost certain we will do, but we also need it to be spoken about or confirmed or discussed or approved, a maneuver which is, after a fashion, a way of shuffling off a little of the responsibility, of diffusing or sharing it, even if only fictitiously, because what we do we do alone, regardless of who convinces or persuades or encourages or gives us the green light, or even orders or commissions the deed. On occasion, we disguise this maneuver as doubt or perplexity, we go to someone and play a trick on them by asking their opinion or advice-by asking or requesting something of them-and thus, at the very least, we ensure that the next time we speak, that person will enquire about the matter, ask what happened, how it all turned out, what we finally decided to do, whether their advice had been of any help, whether we took notice of their words. That person is then involved, entangled, drawn in. We have forced them to become a participant, even if only as a listener, and to consider the situation and to ask how it ended; we have foisted our story on them and they will never be able to forget or erase it; we have also given them a certain right, or perhaps duty, to question us about it later: 'So what did you do in the end, how did you resolve the problem?' they will ask us next time we meet, and it would seem odd, would show a lack of interest or politeness, not to refer to the case we'd laid out before them and to which we've obliged them to contribute with words or, if they declined to offer a view or to say anything, to listen to our doubts, I have no idea, I can't and shouldn't give an opinion, in fact, I really don't want to know about it,' they might well say, and yet they have still said something; with that response they have told us that they find the whole thing distasteful, poisonous or murky, that they want no part in it, even as a passive witness, that they would prefer to remain in the dark, and that they like none of the possible options, that it would be best if we did nothing and simply let it go or removed ourselves from the situation; and that we should certainly spare them the details. Even if you say 'I don't know' or 'I don't want to hear about it,' you've already said too much, and when you're asked that question, there's no easy way out, not even holding back or keeping silent is safe, because silence is in itself reproving or discouraging, and does not, as the saying goes, mean consent. Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, or even inquires, not for advice or a favor or a loan, not even for the loan of our attention. But that never happens, it's an entirely vain wish. There's always one almost final question, some laggardly request. Now it was my turn to do the asking, now I was going to make a request, one that would have proved compromising to anyone, except perhaps to the person who was about to hear it. I still had much to learn from him, a fact I found most troubling and that would perhaps bring me misfortune.

That evening, I phoned Tupra from my hotel room, for only he could advise me and, I hoped, give me instructions, make recommendations and serve as my guide, indeed, he was the ideal man to ask about matters in which talk was not enough; he was also the most suitable person, that is, the one I could rely on to confirm that I should do what I thought I should do or who would at least not dissuade me. I guessed that he would be at home at that hour, even though England was one hour behind, unless it was one of his convivial, festive days and he had recruited everyone, including Branshaw and Jane Treves, to go out together en masse. I dialed his home number and a woman answered, doubtless she of the attractive, old-fashioned silhouette (with her almost hourglass figure), whom I had seen at the end of that night of videos, outlined against the light of a corridor, at the door of his small study; if it was his wife or exwife, if it was Beryl, he would be able to understand my plight even better.

'How are you, Jack? How nice of you to call and keep me posted. Or were you calling to inquire about me and the others? That would be even nicer of you, especially in the middle of your holiday'

There was a touch of irony in his voice, of course, but I noticed too a certain pleasure to hear from me, or was it amusement, for he still found me amusing. After the initial exchange of greetings, I preferred not to pretend or to deceive him.

'I have a matter to resolve here, Bertie. I'd like to know what you think or what, in your view, you think I should do.' I called him Bertie to please him, to put him in a good mood, even though he was sure to see through this, and then, without further ado, I summarized the situation: 'There's a guy here in Madrid,' I said. 'I think he's beating up my wife, or my ex-wife-or whatever-given that we're still not divorced-anyway, they've been going out for a while, I don't know how long, probably a few months. She denies it, but right now she has a black eye, and this isn't the first time she's accidentally-according to her, of course-banged into something. Her sister told me this, and she, quite independently, has reached the same conclusion. I really don't like the idea of my children running the slightest risk of losing their mother, because you never know how these things will end, so you have to nip them in the bud, don't you agree? Anyway, I haven't got many more days in which to sort it out. I'd like to have it all settled before I come back, anxiety is unbearable at a distance and very distracting if you're working. But neither would I want her to find out about my intervention, whatever form it takes. Mind you, she's bound to suspect something if-as I hope-the whole scene changes and that change coincides with my stay in Madrid. There would be no point in just talking to him about it, he would simply deny it. Besides, he doesn't seem the timid pusillanimous type, not at all; he's certainly no De la Garza. It would be equally pointless my trying to make her admit it, I know how stubborn she is. And even if I did get her to admit it, the situation wouldn't, in essence, be any different; after all, she's still with him despite what's happened.' I stopped. What I had to say next was more difficult: 'She must be really crazy about him, although they haven't been together long enough for that, I mean for her to be really crazy about the guy. That doesn't happen in a few months, feelings like that need time to take root. I suppose it's the novelty, the excitement of being with someone else, the first man she's been with since we split up, and the feeling won't last. But while it lasts it lasts, if you know what I mean. And it's lasting now.'

Tupra remained silent for a few seconds. Then he said, without irony this time, but not very seriously either, for he still spoke in a slightly frivolous tone of voice, as if my problem didn't seem that serious or as if he didn't see it as particularly hard to resolve.

'And you're asking me what you should do? Or what is it you're asking? What I would do in your place? Well, you know perfectly well by now, Jack, what I would do. I imagine the question is purely rhetorical and that you merely want me to reassure you. Fine, consider yourself reassured. If you want to get rid of the problem, do so.'

'I'm not sure I understand you, Bertie. I've already said that talking to him would get me nowhere-' But he didn't let me finish my sentence. Perhaps he was in a hurry or irritated by my slowness (he could have said to me as he did once before: 'Don't linger or delay, just do it'). Perhaps I had caught him in bed with Beryl, or whoever the woman was by his side, which is why she had answered the phone, because she was nearer, above or below, on her front or her back, I had probably interrupted them while they were screwing, we never know what is going on at the other end, or rather, what was going on just before the phone rang. I wondered how many times when I'd called Luisa from London she would have just got back from seeing Custardoy in his studio or how many times he would have been there in her bedroom, in my home, watching as she sat, half-undressed, talking to me, waiting impatiently for us to finish our conversation. If, that is, he visited her. It might be that he didn't or only at night because of the children. I hadn't asked them, but neither had they mentioned it spontaneously, in fact, they hadn't mentioned anyone new or anyone I didn't know.

'Look, Jack, just deal with him,' Tupra said. 'Just make sure he's out of the picture.' Those were his exact words in English, and I deeply regretted then that it wasn't my first language, because I don't know how they would strike a native English speaker, but to me they seemed too ambiguous, I couldn't grasp their meaning as clearly as I would have wanted; if he had said to me 'Just get rid of him' or 'Dispose of him,' that would have been clearer although, again, not entirely; there are a lot of ways of getting rid of someone, not all of which involve killing; or perhaps it would have been clearer to me if he had said 'Just make sure you get him off her back' or 'off your backs,' but I would still not have felt able to translate that expression into concrete unequivocal action, because there are also lots of ways of getting someone off your back. If only he had said 'Just scare him away, scare him to death,' then I would have understood that he was telling me to do what he'd done with De la Garza, nothing more, and to transform myself into Sir Punishment and Sir Thrashing, but not into Sir Death or Sir Cruelty. However, the words that emerged from his lips were: 'Just deal with him. Just make sure he's out of the picture,' and that word 'picture' could mean many things: a painting or a portrait, a panorama or a scene or even a photo or a film, although it was the first meaning of painting that I opted for, I had to remove Custardoy from the picture, to erase or exclude him, just like the Count of San Secondo in the Prado, who was cut off from his family, isolated, and would never ever be close to his wife or his children again. If I had heard that advice as a brief bit of dialogue in an episode of The Sopranos or in The Godfather, I would have understood perfectly that he was urging me to bump him off. But perhaps the mafiosi use pre-established codes, just in case they're being bugged, allowing them to be very laconic in the orders they issue and yet still be sure that their orders will be interpreted correctly and at once. Besides, this wasn't a dialogue in a film and we weren't mafiosi, nor was I receiving an order, as I had on previous occasions from Tupra or Reresby or Ure or Dundas, I was merely being given a little guidance, the advice I'd asked him for. Language, though, is difficult when you're uncertain as to what to do and need to know exactly what is meant, because language is almost always metaphorical or figurative. There can't be many people in the world who would say openly 'Kill him,' or in Spanish 'Mátalo.'

I decided to press him a little, even though this might annoy him. Or rather, I got my question in quickly before he could put the phone down, because those last two utterances of his had sounded distinctly conclusive, dismissive almost, as if, after that, he had nothing more to add. Or as if he were bored with my inquiry, my little story.

'Could you tell me how, Bertie?' I said. 'I'm not as used as you are to frightening people.'

First, I heard his paternalistic laughter, brief and slightly scornful, it wasn't the sort of laughter we could have shared, it wasn't the kind that creates a disinterested bond between men or between women or the kind that establishes a bond between women and men that can prove an even stronger, tighter link, a profounder, more complex, more dangerous and more lasting link, or one, at least, with more hope of enduring, perhaps Luisa and Custardoy were joined by the bond of spontaneous, unexpected, simultaneous laughter, given that he seemed to be able to make people laugh so easily. Tupra's laugh, as I myself had occasion to notice, always sounded slightly disappointed and impatient and revealed small bright teeth. Then he said: 'If you really don't know how, Jack, that means you can't do it. Best not to try and just let events take their course-leave it be, don't try to change things, let your wife sort things out, it's her business, after all. But I think you do know how. We all know, even if we're not used to the idea or can't imagine ourselves doing it. It's a question of imagination. But I have to leave you now. Good luck.' And with that he brought to a close a conversation that I had managed to prolong only very slightly.

I didn't dare phone him back, I would have to make do with what I had. 'Let your wife sort things out, it's her business, after all,' those words had sounded like a reproach or a veiled criticism, as if what he'd really said was: 'You're going to abandon her to her fate, perhaps allow her to be killed one day and leave your children orphans.' Some other words of his had hit home too: it's a question of imagination.' What he probably meant by this was that the only way of imagining yourself doing something you have never imagined yourself doing is to do it, and then you have no trouble at all imagining it.

Next I called an old friend, well, a Madrid-style friend, namely, a fellow madrileño whom I had known superficially years ago and hadn't seen since: if there has been no friction or quarrel or dispute between you and such a friend, then, nominally, he can still be considered a friend, even though you might never have had a conversation alone with him, outside of the broad and ever-changing group of people that brought you together in that increasingly remote past. This friend was a bullfighter with a fanatical following, the sort of torero who retires, then returns to the ring every few years only to retire again-it wouldn't be long now before he would have to cut off his pigtail for good-and whom I had known slightly during one particular period of my life, with Comendador (who moved in all kinds of circles and had introduced me to him) and later on again, too, at the late-night card games that went on into the small hours and which the Maestro held at his house for members of his team, the odd colleague and all kinds of hangers-on like me; some bullfighters never spend a minute alone and will welcome anyone, as long as they come recommended by some trustworthy person, even at third hand: the friend of a friend of the person who really is a friend and not just a Madrid-style friend. He was a very amiable, affectionate fellow, and sentimental about anything to do with his past life, and when I asked if I could come and see him, he not only raised no objections or sounded remotely suspicious after that decade or more of silence between us, he even urged me to visit as soon as possible:

'Come today. There's a game tonight.'

'Would tomorrow morning suit you?' I asked. 'I'm only here for a few days. I live in London now, and I'd arranged to go and see my father today. He's getting on a bit and hasn't been too well.'

'Of course, say no more. Tomorrow it is then. But make it around one o'clock, for a drink before lunch. Tonight's game is sure to run late.'

'I want to ask you a favor,' I said, preferring to give him due warning. 'I need a loan, but not of money, don't worry. I have no problems in that department.'

'"Don't worry," he says,' he replied, laughing. 'You would never give me cause to worry, Jacobito.' He was one of the people who called me Jacobo, I can't remember why. 'Ask me for anything you like. As long as it's not my suit of lights.' I didn't really follow the bullfighting scene, certainly not from London, but I assumed from his comment that he was currently active. I had better find out before going to visit him, so as not to seem rude.

'You're getting warm,' I said. 'I'll explain tomorrow.'

'Just have a look around when you get here and take whatever you want.' These weren't mere empty words, he really was a very generous man. His name was Miguel Yanes Troyano, nicknamed 'Miquelin,' and he was the son of a banderillero.

The following morning, up to date now on his latest triumphs, thanks to the Internet, and bearing a gift, I arrived at his vast apartment in the area which, in my childhood, was known as 'Costa Fleming,' rather closer to Real Madrid's Chamartin stadium-which I prefer to call by its old name-than to Las Ventas, the bull ring through whose gates he had often been borne shoulder high. I would have preferred to speak to him alone, but that was impossible since he always had company. However, having been forewarned that I was going to ask him for a favor or a loan, he had been considerate enough not to embarrass me with too many witnesses, apart, that is, from his lifelong manager, who was always there, a discreet taciturn man of about the same age, and whom I scarcely knew at all even though I had known him since forever.

'I hope Señor Cazorla won't find our conversation too boring, Maestro,' I said tentatively, just in case.

'Not at all,' replied Miquelin, making a gesture with his hand as if sweeping aside such an idea. He had greeted me with a warm embrace and a kiss on the cheek, as if I were his nephew. 'Eulogio never gets bored, but if he does, he simply thinks, isn't that so, Eulogio? You can say whatever you like in front of him, because he'll neither tell on you nor judge you. Anyway, how can I help?'

I found it hard to begin, because I felt slightly ashamed of what I was about to ask. However, the best way to overcome this was to say what I wanted and get it over with. Everything seems more embarrassing before than it does afterwards and even during.

'I wondered if you could lend me one of your swords. I'd only need it for a couple of days.'

I saw that my request took them both by surprise and that Cazorla started slightly and tugged at one sleeve. He was wearing a suit, complete with a waistcoat, in rather too pale a shade of grey; he had a handkerchief in his top jacket pocket and wore a flower in his buttonhole; he was, in short, old school. But he would not speak unless Miquelin invited him to do so, and Miquelin managed to conceal his surprise very well and replied at once:

'As many as you want, Jacobo. We'll go and have a look at them right now and you can choose the one you like best, although they're all pretty much the same. But forgive me, if you'd wanted to borrow some money, it would never even have occurred to me to ask what you wanted it for, but borrowing a sword is a bit more unusual. Is it for a costume party?'

I could have lied to him, although a sword on its own wouldn't be much of a disguise. I could have invented some absurd excuse and said, for example, that I had been invited to a private bullfight, but it didn't seem right to deceive such a kindly man, and I don't think I would have succeeded. I felt, too, that he would understand my reasons for borrowing it and wouldn't judge me either.

'No, Miquelin. I want to give someone a fright. It's to do with my wife, well, my ex-wife, we've been separated for a while now, although we're not yet divorced.' I always made a point of saying that, I realized, as if it were important. 'That's why I moved to London, so that I wouldn't be hanging around here while we gradually drifted apart. Given what I've found out, though, I'm not sure it was a good idea. We have two kids, a boy and a girl, and I don't want them to come to any harm. The guy's no good for anyone, least of all her.'

Miquelin understood, I didn't need to say any more, I could see this from the way he listened to me, as if he were in agreement. He didn't ask any questions, friends were friends and you didn't poke your nose into their business. Then he gave an affectionate amused chuckle, he was a man much given to laughter, and age had not changed that or made his laughter less frequent.

'And what are you going to do with a sword?' he said. 'Did you hear what he wants it for, Eulogio? Are you actually going to use it, Jacobo? Are you going to stick the whole blade in or just the point? Or do you simply want to wave it around a bit and scare the living daylights out of him?'

'I was hoping not to have to use it,' I replied. I had no idea what I was going to do with it; having heard Tupra on the subject, I had thought only of the effect it would have when I produced the weapon.

'You have to bear in mind two things, my friend. Firstly, the estoque only wounds with the point, by sticking it in, and that's why you need considerable momentum to drive it in really deep; the bullfighter's sword has almost no blade at all, so it won't be any use if you just want to cut someone up a bit. Secondly, if this sword can kill a bull weighing over 1,300 pounds when you stick it in up to the hilt-always assuming you don't hit a bone of course-just imagine what it could do to a man, one false move on your part and he'd be stone dead. Do you want to take that risk? No, Jacobo, the best way to frighten someone is to pull a gun on them. Preferably a clean one, because you never know.'

I hadn't made the connection until I heard Miquelin talking about what a sword could do to a man, but when I did, I felt a shudder of disgust run through me, although, oddly, strangely, not self-disgust; I must still have seen myself as quite separate from what I was planning to do, or felt that my plan was still empty of content, or was it just that one never experiences genuine self-disgust, and it's that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything as we grow accustomed to the ideas that rise up in us or take root, little by little, or as we come to terms with the fact that we're really going to do what we're going to do. 'I would be like that vicious malagueño, that nasty piece of work, that bastard,' I thought, 'the one who killed Emilio Mares on the outskirts of Ronda some seventy years ago, helped and urged on by his comrades, the one who went in for the kill and cut off Mares' ears and his tail, held them up in one hand and with the other doffed his red beret as if it were a bullfighter's hat, there in those sweet lands. The one who brutally murdered my father's old university friend, who, as my father told me, was rather vain, but in a funny self-consciously frivolous way, a really lovely man, always in a good mood, whom he had very much liked and who had refused to dig his own grave before being shot, thus allowing his executioners to bait him like a bull as well as to kill him. And then they had, literally, baited him with banderillas and pikes and swords. It's fortunate that Miquelin, all unknowing, has alerted me to that connection.'

'Clean?' I asked. I didn't understand the term.

'Yes, a gun that no one knows about, that hasn't been registered, and, above all, that hasn't been used in any crime. As I say, you never know' Miquelin, like all bullfighters I suppose, was all too aware that one never could know what might happen.

'What do you mean "you never know," Miquelin?'

'What do you think I mean, child? Listen to him, Eulogio!' And he chuckled again, he must have considered me a complete novice, which I was in such matters. 'Because if you put a gun in your pocket, there's always a chance you might end up firing it. You just want to give someone a fright, fair enough, but you never know how the other fellow's going to react. He might not be frightened, and then what will you do?'

'Fine, but where am I going to get a gun like that?' I knew that the Maestro owned various weapons, which he used when he went hunting on his estate in Caceres, where he'd spend longish periods of time. And perhaps other kinds of weapons too, the shorter variety that are of no use for hunting. However, it was likely that he had licences for them all, and therefore no entirely 'clean' ones.

'I'll lend you one, man, just as I would have lent you the sword or whatever else you might want. But where were you going to put a sword, my friend, I mean, really, what an idea! A gun, on the other hand, fits in your pocket.' This hadn't occurred to me either, that I didn't own an overcoat with a sheath in the lining at the back or even a raincoat. And it wasn't the weather for overcoats. Miquelin added: 'I'll get you one now. Eulogio, would you mind fetching me my father's Llama. And the other one as well, the revolver.'

'Where do you keep them now?' asked Cazorla.

'They're in the library, behind The Thousand and One Nights and a little to the left, behind several books with brown bindings. Go and get them for me, will you?'

The manager left the room (I wondered what kind of library the Maestro would have-I had certainly never seen it during those nights spent playing cards; but he was, like other bullfighters, quite well-read) and returned shortly afterwards carrying two boxes or packages wrapped in cloth which he placed before Miquelin on the coffee table.

Would you be so kind as to bring some gloves for Jacobo, Eulogio?' he said. Then turning to me: 'If you're going to use one of them, it's best you don't touch them. Not being used to handling guns, you might forget to clean it afterwards.'

Cazorla was as helpful as ever, his admiration for the Maestro being infinite, bordering on devotion. He again left the room and came back with a pair of white gloves, like those a head-waiter might wear, or a magician. They were made of very fine cloth; I put them on, and then Miquelin unwrapped the boxes carefully, almost solemnly, less perhaps because they were guns than because they had belonged to his father. Many fathers who had lived through the Civil War still had a gun or two, standard-issue and otherwise, indeed my own father had a Star or an Astra, of the sort that used to be made in Eibar. I had never seen it myself, however, and I wasn't going to ask him about it now or start rummaging through his apartment. 'He must have taken a risk after the War,' I thought, 'by keeping it and not surrendering it. Given that he was on the losing side and had been in prison.' Miquelin's father, who would, of course, have been older than mine, might well have been on the winning side, but we had never spoken about this, after all, it didn't matter any more. In fact, we had never talked about anything serious or personal. These Madrid-style friendships really are most unusual, often inexplicable.

'Is it all right to pick them up now?' I asked. They were very handsome objects, the revolver with its striated wooden grip, and the pistol forming almost a right angle.

'Wait just a moment,' he said. 'They both belonged to my father, and so those thieving bureaucrats have never got their paws on them. If they ever did, they'd probably sell them. The revolver dates from before the War, I think; it's English, an Enfield. It was a present from an English writer who was interested in bullfighting for a time, and my father persuaded one of the matadors in his group to let him travel around with them. He wanted first-hand experience for something he was going to write; his main character was called Biggies, a pilot I think, it was a series, and in one of the books the author thought he might send his hero off to have some adventures in Spain. My father was very proud of this, because apparently this Biggies fellow was very famous in his country' There it was again, that word 'patria'; perhaps it wasn't such a loaded word, Miquelin hadn't laid any special emphasis on it, maybe because he wasn't talking about his own patria, our country. 'The pistol dates from later on, a Llama, which is Spanish, an automatic. The revolver takes six bullets, the Llama ten. Not that this will matter to you if you don't foresee having to shoot. But if push comes to shove, you'll have more than enough with either gun: if not, it will be because you're dead. One magazine should be enough for the pistol. Here's your ammunition. Well-preserved and well-oiled, and all in working order, as my father taught me. The pistol can jam, of course, like all pistols. But on the other hand, look how big the revolver is, with the drum and the long barrel. I think you'd be better off with the Llama. Don't you agree, Eulogio, that a pistol is better for giving someone a fright?' Miquelin handled both weapons with ease.

'If you say so, Miguel. You know more about it than I do,' Cazorla replied with a shrug.

'Do you know how to use it?' Miquelin asked me. 'Do you know how it works? Have you ever held one before?'

'When I did my military service,' I said. 'But not since.' And I thought how odd that was, and how new, for there must have been many periods when it would have been unusual for a middle-class male not to have a weapon in his house, always close to hand.

'The first thing to remember, Jacobo, is never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot. Always keep it resting on the guard, OK? Even if the pistol isn't cocked. Even if it's not loaded.'

He used what was to me an unfamiliar, seemingly old-fashioned word for 'guard,' 'guardamonte,' but then Miquelin was himself in the process of becoming old-fashioned too, a relic, like his generosity. I didn't need to ask any questions, though, because he showed me what to do and I could see where he placed his forefinger. Then he handed the pistol to me, so that I could do the same, or copy him. I had forgotten what a heavy thing a pistol is; in the movies, they hold them as if they were as light as daggers. It takes an effort to lift one, and still more of an effort to hold it steady enough to aim.

And then the Maestro taught me how to use it.

I don't know, but I think perhaps by then I had absorbed Wheeler's dictum about how we all carry our probabilities in our veins and so on, and I was more or less convinced that I knew how to apply this to myself; I had, or so I thought, a pretty good idea of what my probabilities were, although not as clear an idea as Wheeler would have of his, given that he could draw on far greater experience: he'd had more time than me, more temptations and more varied circumstances in which to guide those probabilities to their fulfilment; he'd lived through and been involved in wars, and in wartime one can be more persuasive and make oneself more dangerous and more despicable even than one's enemies; one can take advantage of the majority of people, who were, according to Wheeler, silly and frivolous and credulous and on whom it was easy to strike a match and start a fire; one can more easily and with impunity cause others to fall into the most appalling and destructive misfortunes from which they will never emerge, and thereby transform those thus condemned into casualties, into non-persons, into felled trees from which the rotten wood can be chopped away; it's also the best time to spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague and, often, to set in motion the process of total denial, of who you are and who you were, of what you do and what you did, of what you expect and what you expected, of your aims and your intentions, of your professions of faith, your ideas, your greatest loyalties, your motives…

No, you are never what you are-not entirely, not exactly- when you're alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your mother tongue; but nor are you what you are in your own country when there's a war on or when that country is dominated by rage or obstinacy or fear: to some degree you feel no responsibility for what you do or see, as if it all belonged to a provisional existence, parallel, alien, or borrowed, fictitious or almost dreamed-or, perhaps, merely theoretical, like my whole life, according to the anonymous report about me that I'd found among some old files; as if everything could be relegated to the sphere of the purely imaginary or of what never happened, and, of course, to the sphere of the involuntary; everything tossed into the bag of imaginings and suspicions and hypotheses and, even, of mere foolish dreams, about which, when you awake, all you can say is: 'I didn't want that anomalous desire or that murderous hatred or that baseless resentment to surface, or that temptation or that sense of panic or that desire to punish, that unknown threat or that surprising curse, that aversion or that longing which now lie like lead upon my soul each night, or the feeling of disgust or embarrassment which I myself provoke, or those dead faces, forever fixed, that made a pact with me that there would be no more tomorrows (yes, that is the pact we make with all those who fall silent and are expelled: that they neither do nor say anything more, that they disappear and cease changing) and which now come and whisper dreadful unexpected words to me, words that are perhaps unbecoming to them, or perhaps not, while I'm asleep and have dropped my guard: I have laid down my shield and my spear on the grass.' What's more you can repeat over and over Iago's disquieting words, not only after taking action, but during it too: 'I am not what I am.' A similar warning is issued by anyone asking another person to commit a crime or threatening to commit one himself, or confessing to vile deeds and thus exposing himself to blackmail, or buying something on the black market-keep your collar turned up, your face always in the shadows, never light a cigarette-telling the hired assassin or the person under threat or the potential blackmailer or one of many interchangeable women, once desired and already forgotten, but still a source of shame to us: 'You know the score, you've never seen me, from now on you don't know me, I've never spoken to you or said anything, as far as you're concerned I have no face, no voice, no breath, no name, no back. This conversation and this meeting never took place, what's happening now before your eyes didn't happen, isn't happening, you haven't even heard these words because I didn't say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I'm not saying them'; just as you can tell yourself: 'I am not what I am nor what I can see myself doing. More than that, I'm not even doing it.'

What I had absorbed less well, or simply didn't know, was that what one does or does not do depends not just on time, temptation and circumstance, but on silly ridiculous things, on random superfluous thoughts, on doubt or caprice or some stupid fit of feeling, on untimely associations and on one-eyed oblivion or fickle memories, on the words that condemn you or the gesture that saves you.

And so there I was the following morning-the day was threatening rain-with my borrowed pistol in my raincoat pocket, ready to take some definitive action, but without really knowing what exactly, although I had a rough idea and knew what I was hoping to make clear: I had to get rid of Custardoy, get him off our backs, make sure he stayed out of the picture; not so much out of my picture, which was little more than a daub at the time or perhaps a mere doodle-'You're very alone in London,' as Wheeler used to tell me-but out of Luisa and the children's picture, into which that unwholesome individual was trying to worm his way and where he was perhaps about to take up long-term residence, or at least long-term enough to become an affliction and a danger. Indeed, he already was both those things, for he had already spent far too much time prowling round and circling the frame and making incursions into the picture or canvas, and he had already laid a hand on Luisa and given her a black eye and left her with a cut or a gash-I had been told about the second and had myself seen the first- and nothing would stop him closing his large hands around her throat-those pianist's fingers, or, rather, those fingers like piano keys-one rainy night, when they were stuck at home, when he judged he had subjugated and isolated her enough and little by little fed her his demands and prohibitions disguised as infatuation and weakness and jealousy and flattery and supplication, a poisonous, despotic, devious type of man. I was quite clear now that I didn't want to have the luck or the misfortune (luck as long as it remained in the imagination, misfortune were it to become reality) of Luisa dying or being killed, that I couldn't allow this to happen because once a real misfortune has occurred there's no going back and it cannot be undone, or, contrary to what most people believe, even compensated (and there is, of course, no way of compensating the person who has died or even the living left behind, and yet nowadays the living often do ask for money, thus putting a price on the people who have ceased to tread the earth or traverse the world).

As I walked along, I couldn't help touching and even grasping the pistol, as if I were drawn to it or needed to get used to its weight and to feel and hold it in my hand, sometimes lifting it up slightly, still inside my pocket, and whenever I did grip it properly, I always took great care to keep my finger resting on the guard and not on the trigger, as Miquelin had recommended me to do even when the pistol wasn't cocked. 'How easy it must be to use it,' I was thinking, 'once you've got one. Or, rather, how difficult not to use it, even if only to point it at someone and threaten them and just to be seen with it. Firing the thing would be harder, of course, but, on the other hand, it cries out to be brandished about and it would seem impossible not to satisfy that plea. Perhaps women would find it easier to resist, but for a man it's like having a tempting toy, guns should never be given to men, and yet most of those that are made or inherited or that exist will end up in our hands and not in the more cautious hands of women.' I also had a proud feeling of invulnerability, as if, as I walked past other people in the street, I were thinking: 'I'm more dangerous than they are right now and they don't know it, and if someone got cocky with me or tried to mug me he'd get a nasty fright; if I got out the pistol, he'd probably back off or throw down his knife or run away' and I remembered the momentary feeling of pride that had assailed me on seeing the fear I unwittingly inspired in De la Garza when I went into his office ('You should feel very pleased with yourself: you had him scared shitless,' Professor Rico had said to me afterwords, neither mincing his words nor resorting to onomatopoeia). And I recalled, too, that immediately afterwards it had filled me with disgust that I could possibly feel flattered by such a thing, I had judged it unworthy of me, of the person I was or had been, of my face past and present, and which were both perhaps changing with the tomorrow that had now arrived. 'Presume not that I am the thing I was,' I quoted to myself as I walked. 'I have turn'd away my former self. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast. Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, not to come near our person by ten mile…' These were the words of King Henry V immediately after being crowned and many years before the night when he disguised himself to go among his soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, with everything pitched against him and at great risk of being misjudged, or, as one of his soldiers says to him, not realizing it's the King he's talking to, if the cause be not good, the king himself will have a heavy reckoning to make. Such words were unexpected coming from the man who, until only a short time before, had been Prince Hal, dissolute, reveler and bad son, especially when addressed to his still recent companion in revels, the now old Falstaff whom he was denying: I know thee not, old man,' for all it takes is a few words to abjure everything one has experienced, the excesses and the lack of scruples, the outrageous behavior and the arguments, the whorehouses and the taverns and the inseparable friends, even if those same friends say pleadingly to you, 'My sweet boy,' as Falstaff does to his beloved Prince Hal when the latter has just abandoned that name to become forever, with no possible way back, the rigid King Henry. Such words serve not only to mend one's ways and to leave behind the life of a debauchee or a roué avant la lettre, of a rake and an idler, but to announce that one is setting off along new paths, in new directions, or to announce a metamorphosis: I, too, could say mentally to Luisa and to Custardoy and to myself as I walked along: 'Presume not that I am the thing I was. I have turn'd away my former self. I am carrying a pistol and I am dangerous, I am no longer the man who never knowingly frightened anyone; like Iago, I am not what I am, at least I am beginning not to be.'

And so I stationed myself exactly where I had waited two days before, at the top of the short double flight of steps leading up to the monstrous cathedral, behind the papal statue that seemed always about to join the dance, and once there I paced back and forth between that point and a point nearby, behind the railings and to the left of that shop incomprehensibly selling souvenirs of the monstrosity; it was only a few steps between those two points and from both I could see the four corners formed by Calle Mayor and Calle de Bailen, as well as the ornate wooden door that was immediately opposite the shop, albeit lower down, and so whichever direction he came from I would be sure to see Custardoy arrive, although I was convinced he would take the same route as when I had followed him, if, that is, he had gone back to the Prado, though it was quite possible that he hadn't yet finished his note-taking or his sketches of the four faces painted by Parmigianino, each of them looking in a different direction, or that, on another occasion, he would have to study the portrait of the husband and father, in which the Count stands alone and isolated, like me, or that he would have to study other paintings for some other commission or project. And if he hadn't gone out that morning, it was likely that, just before lunch, he would stroll over to El Anciano Rey de los Vinos to enjoy his usual couple of beers and some patatas bravas (it was hardly surprising that, despite being thin, he had a bit of a belly on him), so I would be able to observe him there too if he went and took his usual seat. I would, at any rate, see him enter or leave his house, whenever he did that, and I would have time to go down the steps, cross the road-there wasn't much traffic along that stretch-and meet him at the front door as he was opening it. At first, I was surprised to see that, for the first time, the door stood open, and I deduced that there must be a doorman, but that could present me with a problem, a witness. However, after a few minutes, I saw the man come out and shut the door (he obviously lunched early) and this reassured me, because the seconds it would take Custardoy to put his key in and turn it and push or pull the door open and then give it a shove from inside or a tug from outside could prove vital, my idea being that he would complete neither action. I was trusting that he would not arrive or leave with anyone else, certainly not with Luisa. 'You'll never see her again,' I thought, 'unless she happens to be with you today,' it's odd how we address our thoughts to anyone we have it in for or whom we're preparing to harm in some way, addressing them familiarly as 'tu', as if what we were about to do to them were incompatible with any form of respect or as if any show of respect would, in view of our plans for them, seem utterly cynical.

I waited and waited and waited. I paced from one side to the other and back again, between steps and railings, looking down on each of the four corners and the eight stretches of sidewalk, Custardoy might come from the direction of the viaduct or pass beneath my eyes, staying close to the Cathedral or to the wall, or he might come from the direction of the Istituto Italiano or walk up Cuesta de la Vega from the Parque de Atenas; I kept a tight grip on the pistol hidden in my pocket and sometimes felt overwhelmed by nerves, I had a clear view of the whole scene, but there were too many fronts to keep watch over simultaneously and I constantly had to change my vantage point, I noticed that a few devotees were starting to eye me with interest-they didn't look Spanish, they were perhaps Lithuanians or possibly Poles, like their former boss-and, even worse, they were starting to copy me in my pacing back and forth as if they feared they might be missing out if they didn't do the same-people's tendency to imitate others' behavior is becoming an international plague-I felt slightly beleaguered and longed to be able to leave. And that was when I saw him in the distance, the unmistakable figure of Custardoy walking along Calle Mayor, on the same side as the Capitania General and the Consejo de Estado, that is, on the same side as his apartment or workshop or studio. I stayed where I was, I didn't move, I waited until he had reached the traffic light, just in case he crossed over to take his usual seat outside the bar, but it was a cloudy day and not really warm enough for that. He was wearing a raincoat too, a good quality one, black and very long, almost like a dustcoat, and that, together with the hat he had chosen to wear that day, a kind of Stetson, but broader brimmed and cream or white in color like the hat Tom Mix used to wear in those ancient silent movies (the man really was a fool), gave him the appearance of a character out of the Wild West; he and his friend, the female Daniel Boone or Jim Bowie, would have made a fine pair. Fortunately, though, he was alone, striding along, the tails of his coat, and doubtless his ponytail too, beating the air (he was still a follower of fashion even at his age, with enough energy to try and keep up), walking as resolutely as I had done a short while before, but then I'd had a pistol in my pocket. 'He won't be easy to bring to heel,' I thought, 'he won't be easy to intimidate or even kill. Besides, he has the kind of strength that comes from pure energy and impatience and a desire to be many, this man accustomed to spending hours alone with his brushes, focused and still, concentrating on tiny details and staring at one canvas in order to make an exact copy of it on another canvas, and when he stops and finally gets up and opens the door and goes out into the street, he'll be filled by a vast amount of accumulated tension and be ready to explode. No, he won't be the kind to beg, he'll put up a fight, he isn't timid or easily scared, so one thing is sure, I have to instill him with fear, more fear than he might try to instill in me, he's not going to freeze and draw in his neck and close his eyes as De la Garza did, nor am I Tupra, who seems to instill fear whenever he wants to, quite naturally, nor am I the two Kray brothers Tupra told me about and who taught him the value of the sword, and to whom a cellmate had, according to Reresby, given a very condensed lesson in how to get what you want: "Now these people, they don't like getting hurt. Not them or their property. Now these people out there who don't like to be hurt, pay other people not to hurt them. You know what I'm saying. Course you do. When you get out, you keep your eyes open. Watch out for the people who don't want to be hurt. Because you scare the shit out of me, boys. Wonderful," that's what Tupra had said,' I thought and remembered, 'in a fake accent which was perhaps his real accent, as he sat to the right of me in his swift silent car, in the lunar light of the streetlamps, with his hands still resting on the motionless steering wheel, squeezing or strangling it, he wasn't wearing gloves by then, but I've been wearing mine since I left the hotel and won't take them off until I return, having removed Custardoy from the picture, having done the deed.' 'That's the thing, Jack. Fear,' Tupra had added before urging me to go to his house to watch those videos that weren't just for anyone's eyes, and, after showing them to me, had asked again: 'Tell me now, why, according to you, one can't go around beating people up and killing them? You've seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can't.' And it had taken me a long time to give him an answer, one that turned out to be no answer at all.

I hurried down the steps and very nearly collided with or, rather, almost flattened a devotee, Custardoy wasn't going to the bar, but to his studio, he had kept straight on and stopped at the traffic light on Calle de Bailen, and I knew that when the light turned green, it was only forty-nine steps from there to the door of his house, which was where we had to meet, not before he arrived and definitely not after, because afterwards the door would be closed again, with him inside and me outside. I decided to cross the road, taking advantage of the fact that the stoplight was in my favor; now we were on the same side of the street, I saw him set off when the cars stopped, one, two, three, four, five, I lurked for a few seconds behind a tree, not a very wide tree, hoping that he wouldn't see me before putting his key in the door, a matter of only a few moments, it would be best if he didn't notice me while he was putting the key in the door either, it would be best if I remained behind him for as long as possible and for him to feel as frightened as possible because he wouldn't know who it was threatening him, because he wouldn't be able to see his assailant's face, my face, and would wonder whether this was going to be a quick doorstep mugging or a slow ransacking of his whole apartment or a swift and then eternal kidnapping Mexican-style, or whether I was alone or there were several of us, whether we were white, copper-colored or black (although our blacks don't go in much for mugging), or an unexpected settling of accounts, a tardy act of revenge on behalf of someone he didn't even recall, which, in a way, was the case with me, he probably didn't even remember that Luisa had, or once had, a husband, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight and forty-nine, and just as he put the key in the lock and the door opened, I stuck the pistol in his back without taking it out of my pocket (that way he wouldn't know if it was cocked or not, even if he spun round, which he wouldn't, not that it was cocked of course, and my finger was resting on the guard, I was very careful about that), but pressing the barrel of the gun hard against his spine, so that he would haven't any doubt that it was a gun and would feel it.

'Get inside, and don't say a word,' I whispered into the back of his neck with its stupid affected ponytail hanging there and which, at such close quarters, I found quite disgusting.

The door was half-open and he went in, we both went in, our bodies glued together, I slammed it shut with my free hand. Now he knew that there was only one of me.

'What bullshit is this?' he asked. 'Is this some kind of joke?' He still wasn't frightened, perhaps he hadn't had time to feel frightened or perhaps it wasn't in his nature. He sounded slightly cocky or at most uppity, but certainly not alarmed. 'It's going to be difficult to make him take me seriously, he's not the sort to lose his cool,' I thought at once. 'A bad beginning.'

'No, it's no joke, so be quiet. Let's go up to your apartment. We'll take the stairs. If we meet one of your neighbors, we're together. Take off your hat and hold it with your two hands. And don't drop your keys, you've got hands enough for both.' He didn't have his briefcase with him that day, so perhaps he hadn't been to the Prado. I was still talking into the back of his neck, perhaps Luisa had kissed that neck, I could smell his hair, it smelled of something, but nothing bad, he obviously washed it every day. He obeyed and took off his ridiculous hat. He would know now that I was a local, and not from Eastern Europe or the Maghreb or from South America, that mv accent wasn't Albanian or Ukrainian or Arab or Colombian or Ecuadorian, it hadn't even occurred to me to put on a different accent or to disguise my own and I had said enough to make it clear that I was unequivocally Spanish, so he would know, too, that I was white, things remain hidden for such a short time, nor had I thought of addressing him in English, for example, a language I was used to speaking. 'You don't want a bullet lodged in your spine, do you? Well, get moving then.' Now he would know that I was a reasonably educated person too, because 'lodged' wasn't a word that would spring to everyone's lips.

'Look, if it's cash you want, we can talk and come to some agreement. We don't have to go upstairs and you don't have to keep that gun stuck in my back all the time. And there's no need to take that tone with me.'

He sounded less uppity now, but not afraid. He was addressing me as 'usted,' not out of respect, but as a way of maintaining a distance. I was addressing him as 'tu,' and his not doing the same to me was an attempt to appear superior despite his evidently inferior position, I was holding the pistol, I was holding the hourglass, like Death in the painting. I wasn't tugging at him, like the semi-skeleton of Sir Death, linking arms with the old woman, instead I was behind him and pushing him, which came to the same thing, I was the master of time and was propelling him up the stairs, he was trying to stop the flow of sand or water by talking, as have so many others, hoping to postpone events and save themselves, rather than remaining silent. He hadn't entirely lost his haughty manner, as indicated by the last words he spoke before I interrupted him. It was as if he had said to me: 'Don't you raise your voice to me,' except that wouldn't have made any sense because I was speaking in a whisper.

Then I took the gun out of my pocket for a moment and struck him hard on his right side with the barrel, as if I were slapping him except that I was striking him in the ribs and with the pistol, not across the face and with my hand, it made much less noise because he was, of course, wearing a raincoat. He staggered a little, but didn't fall. He didn't drop his hat either, but he did drop his keys.

i've told you already, be quiet. Pick up your keys and get going.' I said this in the same calm whisper, which was, I thought, more frightening than a shout. I was surprised how easy it had been for me to deal him that blow and that it hadn't worried me to do so with a loaded weapon; usually, people who aren't used to carrying a gun are always afraid it will go off, however careful they are. My main concern was to frighten him, I suppose, or perhaps his last words had bothered me, either that or his use of the word 'bullshit' before, or perhaps I had remembered Luisa's black eye with its thousand slowly changing colors, an image I summoned up every now and then because I needed to, it filled me with reason and cold fury and strengthened my resolve. It seemed quite right that Custardoy should experience pain, some pain, he instinctively raised his hand to his side and rubbed it, but I told him at once: 'Keep your hands on your hat.' I realized, too, that everyone likes to give orders that must be obeyed. One part of my mind didn't like the fact that I liked that, but I wasn't in the mood to listen to it then, the rest of my mind was fully occupied, I had more than enough to occupy me, it wasn't possible now to leave half-done what I had already started.

We set off briskly, one step at a time, with me right behind him, holding onto his ponytail at each turn in the stairs so that he wouldn't take advantage of the one second when I stopped pointing at him full on to run up the stairs and shut himself in his apartment if, that is, he was quick enough putting the key in the lock (there was no way he would manage that, but I preferred him not to try), it must have been humiliating for him to have me touch his hair, I abstained from giving it a good tug, although I could have. We were lucky, that is I was and he wasn't, because we made it up to the third floor without meeting anyone; his was one of the apartments with a balcony looking onto the street.

'Here we are,' he said, standing outside his door. 'Now what?'

'Open the door.' He did so, a long key for the bolt and a smaller one for the lock. 'Let's go into the sitting room. You lead the way. But no funny business. I'm pointing at your spine, remember.' I could still feel the barrel of the gun against his bones, nice and central, if a bullet entered there it would take out his atlas vertebra.

We went down a short corridor and emerged into a spacious sitting room or studio with plenty of light despite the cloudy sky outside. ('Luisa has been here,' I thought at once, 'she'll know this room'). Then I saw the paintings lined up against the wall, in groups of three or four, their faces turned away, some might have been blank canvases, as yet untouched. Either he received a lot of commissions or he made numerous drafts before creating a final version; he was clearly in great demand and had no problem selling his work, for the room was comfortable, well-furnished and even luxurious, albeit slightly untidy; I particularly liked the fireplace. There were some paintings on the walls too, face out, of course, probably not his, although if he really was such a good copyist, who knows; I noticed a small Meissonier of a gentleman smoking a pipe and a larger portrait by Mane-Katz or someone like that, some Russian or Ukrainian who had spent time in Paris (if they were originals, they certainly wouldn't be cheap, although they weren't as expensive as the paintings I'd seen in Tupra's house). I noticed an easel, and the canvas resting on it was also face down, perhaps Custardoy always removed from his sight the thing he was working on as soon as he took a break, so as not to have to look at it while he was resting, perhaps it was the portrait of the Countess and her children on which he had already started work. Since I was the master of time and everything else, I could have looked at it. I didn't, though; I was otherwise occupied.

It was the moment for him to turn round and, therefore, to see my face. I didn't know whether he would recognize me from somewhere, from the Prado or from our shared walk or from photos that Luisa might have shown him; people are very keen on showing old photos, as if they wanted you to know them before the time when you actually met, it's something that happens especially between lovers, 'This is what I was like,' they seem to be saying to each other, 'would you have loved me then, as well? And if so, why weren't you there?' Before allowing him to turn round and before ordering him to sit down, I suffered a moment of confusion: 'What am I doing here with a pistol in my hand?' I thought or said to myself, and I immediately responded: 'There's absolutely no reason to feel surprised. There is a good reason for me to be here and even perhaps a real need: I'm going to rescue Luisa from anxiety and menace and from an unhappy future life, I'm going to ensure that she breathes easily again and can sleep at night without fear, I'm going to make certain my children don't suffer and come to no harm and that no wounds are inflicted on her, or, rather, no more harm, and that no one kills her'; and as I gave myself this answer, another quote came into my head, the words spoken by the ghost of a woman, Lady Anne, who slept so uneasily between the sheets of her second husband's 'sorrow-haunted bed,' cruel Richard III, who had stabbed her first husband at Tewkesbury, 'in my angry mood,' as he, the murderer, once put it; and so she, after death, cursed him on Bosworth Field at dawn, when it was already far too late to flee the battle, and in his dreams she whispered this: 'Richard, thy wife, that wretched Anne thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee, now fills thy sleep with perturbations: Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword: despair and die!' I couldn't allow the same thing to happen to Luisa and for her never to sleep a quiet hour with Custardoy if, one day, he occupied my pillow and my still-warm or already cold place in her bed, I was the first husband, but no one in their angry mood was going to stab me or dig my grave still deeper than the one I was already buried in, my memory reduced to the first terror and the first plea and the first order, all of me changed into a poisoned shadow that little by little bids farewell while I languish and am transformed in London, expelled from her time and from that of my children (foolish me, insubstantial me, foolish and frivolous and credulous). 'No, she is not yet a widow and I am not yet a dead person who deserves to be mourned,' I thought, 'and since I'm not, I cannot so easily be replaced, just as bloodstains will not come out at the first attempt, you have to rub hard and diligently to remove them, and even then it seems as if the rim will never go, that's the most difficult part to remove, the part that resists-a whisper, a fever, a scratch. She probably has no wish and no intention of doing so, but she will find herself obliged to say to this present or future lover, or to herself: "Not yet, my love, wait, wait, your hour has not yet come, don't spoil it for me, give me time and give him time too, the dead man whose time no longer advances, give him time to fade, let him change into a ghost before you take his place and dismiss his flesh, let him be changed into nothing, wait until there is no trace of his smell on the sheets or on my body, let it be as if what was never happened." But I'm still here, and so I must have been before, and no one can yet say of me: "No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened." Indeed, I am the person who could kill this second husband right now, with my gloves on and in my angry mood. I have a pistol in my hand and it's loaded, all I would have to do is cock it and squeeze the trigger, this man still has his back to me, he wouldn't even see my face, today or tomorrow or ever, not until the Final Judgment, if there is one.'

In fact, it didn't really matter whether he saw my face or not; after all, I was going to talk to him about Luisa and as soon as I did, he would know without a shadow of a doubt who I was, and she would probably have told him about my sudden return to the city after so many months away, indeed, it was highly likely that he had already guessed it was her wretched imbecile of a husband who was pointing the gun at him, what a pain, what a cretin, what a madman, why hadn't he just stayed put where he was? 'Unless I'm the one who would rather not see his face and his eyes, his gaze,' I thought, 'nor say any more to him than I said at the front door, those were mere indifferent words, impersonal orders, not an exchange between two individuals. It's always said that killers avoid looking their victim in the eye, that to do so would be the only thing that might sow a seed of doubt or stop them slitting their victim's throat or firing a bullet or at least delay them long enough for the victim to say something or to try and defend himself, that's the only thing that can sabotage their mission or make them miss their target, so perhaps it would be best to finish the thing here and now, in keeping with Tupra's motto not to linger or delay, without giving any explanations or showing any curiosity, just as Reresby gave no explanations and showed no curiosity about De la Garza-without Custardoy even turning around, a bullet in the back of the neck and that would be that, goodbye Custardoy, out of the picture, guaranteed, and as with any deed once done, no going back, but if I speak to him and look him in the face, I'll find it harder and I'll start to get to know him and he'll become "someone" for me just as he is for Luisa, because he's important to her, someone for whom she probably feels a mixture of fear and devotion, so perhaps I should see him and hear him in order to imagine that, which is all I can aspire to, because I never will know how she looks at him, that's my eternal curse…'

The truth is I didn't know what I should do to be certain, to 'just deal with him and make sure he was out of the picture' as a scornful Tupra had told me with a paternalistic laugh; if only he had been more explicit or if only I were bilingual and had understood him with total exactitude, or perhaps such insoluble ambiguities exist in all languages. 'If you really don't know how, Jack, that means you can't do it,' he had said. I didn't know how, but I was in too deep by then. I couldn't just shoot Custardoy in the back and leave him for dead, not without first getting into my angry mood, not without being absolutely certain: Luisa had denied to me and to her sister that he'd hurt her, and I hadn't seen the act only the results, which, in a trial, wouldn't have helped me prove anything against him. 'But this isn't a trial,' I thought, 'or anything like it, men like Tupra, like Incompara, like Manoia and so many others, like the people I saw in those videos, like the woman who appeared in one of them, with her skirt hitched up and wielding a hammer with which she was smashing a man's skull, and who knows, perhaps like Pérez Nuix and like Wheeler and Rylands, they don't hold trials or gather evidence, they simply solve problems or root them out or stop them ever happening or just deal with them, it's enough that they know what they know because they've seen it from the start thanks to their gift or their curse, they've had the courage to look hard and to translate and to keep thinking beyond the necessary ("What else? You haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking," my father used to say to me and my siblings when we were children, when we were young), and to guess what will happen if they don't intervene; they don't hate knowledge as do most of the pusillanimous people in this modern age, they confront it and anticipate it and absorb it and are, therefore, the sort who issue no warning, at least not always, the sort who take remote decisions for reasons that are barely identifiable to the one who suffers the consequences or is a chance witness, or without waiting for a link of cause and effect to establish itself between actions and motives, still less for any proof that such actions have been committed. Such men and women need no proof, on those arbitrary or well-founded occasions when, without the slightest warning or indication, they lash out with a saber; indeed, on such occasions, they don't even require the actions or events or deeds to have occurred. Perhaps for them it's enough that they know precisely what would happen in the world if no pressure or brake were imposed on what they perceive to be people's certain capabilities, and they know, too, that if they don't act with their full force, it's only because someone-me, for example-prevents or impedes them, rather than because they lacked the desire or the guts; they take all that for granted. Perhaps for them to adopt the punitive measures they deem to be necessary, they simply have to convince themselves of what would happen in each case if they or other sentinels-the authorities or the law, instinct, crime, the moon, fear, the invisible watchers-did not put a stop to it. They are the sort who know and adopt and make theirs-like a second skin-the unreflecting, resolute stance (or one based perhaps on a single thought, the first) that also forms part of the way of the world and which remains unchanged throughout time and regardless of space, and so there is no reason to question it, just as there is no need to question wakefulness and sleep, or hearing and sight, or breathing and speech, or any of the other things about which one knows: "that's how it is and always will be."

It was assumed that I was like them, one of them, that I possessed the same capacity to penetrate and interpret people, to know what their face would be like tomorrow and to describe what had not yet occurred, and as far as Custardoy was concerned I knew him inside out, I had no proof of anything, but I knew I was right: he was the dangerous, seductive, all-enveloping, violent type, capable of making someone dependent on the horrors he perpetrated and on his lack of scruples, his despotism and his scorn, and I mustn't give him an opening, I mustn't give him an opportunity to explain himself, to deny or refute or argue or persuade, not even to talk to me. Tupra was right: 'I think you do know how,' he had said to me before hanging up. 'We all know, even if we're not used to the idea or can't imagine ourselves doing it. It's a question of imagination.' Perhaps it was just a question of me imagining myself as Sir Death for the first time, after all, I had the pistol in my hand and that was my hourglass or clepsydra, and I had my gloves on, and now all I needed was to cock the gun, move my forefinger from the guard to the trigger and then squeeze, it was all just a step away and there was so little physical difference between one thing and the other, between doing and not doing, so little spatial difference… I didn't need certainties or proofs if I could convince myself that I was entirely, at least for that day, a member of Tupra's school which was the way of many and perhaps of the world, because his attitude was not preventative, not exactly or exclusively, but, rather, and depending on the case and the person, punitive or compensatory, for Tupra saw and judged when dry, with no need to get himself wet-to use Don Quixote's words when he announced to Sancho Panza the mad feats he would perform for Dulcinea's sake even before being provoked into them by grief or jealousy, so just imagine what he would do if provoked. Or perhaps Tupra understood them-the various cases-even though they were pages as yet unwritten, and perhaps, for that very reason, forever blank. 'But if I fire this pistol, my page will no longer be blank,' I thought, 'and if I don't, it won't be either, not entirely, after all the build-up and having thought about it and pointed the gun at him. We can never free ourselves from telling something, not even when we believe we have left our page blank. And even if there are things of which no one speaks, even if they do not in fact happen, they never stay still. It's terrible,' I said to myself. 'There's no escape. Even if no one speaks of them. And even if they never actually happen.' I studied the old Llama pistol at the end of my arm much as Death looked at his hourglass in that painting by Baldung Grien, the only thing by which he was guided, not by the living people beside him, after all, why would he be guided by them when he can already see their faces tomorrow? 'What does it matter then if things do happen? "You and I will be the kind who leave no mark," Tupra had said to me once, "so it won't matter what we've done, no one will bother to recount or even to investigate it." And besides,' I went on, still talking to myself, 'the day will come when everything is levelled out and life will be definitively untenable, and no one will care about anything.' But that day had not yet arrived, and I felt both curious and afraid-'And in short, I was afraid'-and had, above all, time to wonder as those familiar lines assured me I would: And indeed there will be time to wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair…' Even time to ask the whole question that comes later in the poem-'Do I dare disturb the universe?'-the question no one asks before acting or even before speaking because everyone dares to do just that, to disturb the universe and to trouble it, with their small quick tongues and their ill-intentioned steps, 'So how should I presume?' And that's what kept my finger on the guard and my hand from cocking the gun, that is what happened, and besides I knew there would still be time to place my finger on the trigger and fire, having first cocked it with one simple gesture, as Miquelin had showed me.

'Turn around and sit down over there,' I said to Custardoy, pointing with my free hand at the sofa, a sofa on which he would probably often have sat or perhaps lain with Luisa. 'Put your hands on the table where I can see them.' In front of the sofa was a coffee table, as there is in most of the world's living rooms. 'Spread your fingers wide and don't move a muscle.'

Custardoy turned around as ordered and I finally saw his face full on and unimpeded, just as he did mine. He had a faint smile on his lips, which irritated me, and that long-toothed smile lit up his sharp-featured face and lent it a look almost of cordiality. He seemed quite calm, even amused in a way, despite that blow to his ribs, which must have hurt and frightened him. But, by then, he probably knew who I was, even if only by intuition or by a process of elimination, and relying perhaps on his own interpretative capacities, which were good enough for him to be sure that Luisa's husband wasn't going to shoot him, at least not yet, that is, without first speaking to him. (But then no one is ever totally convinced that someone is going to shoot him, not even with the gun barrel there before him.) His huge, dark, wide-set, almost lashless eyes really were most unpleasant and I immediately felt that grasping quality, how they quickly looked me over, with, how I can I put it, a kind of intimidatory intent, which, in the circumstances, was both strange and inappropriate. His half-smile, on the other hand, was perfectly affable, as if he were able to be two people at once. I couldn't understand how Luisa could possibly like him, even if there was something cocky and common about him-crude and rough and cold-a quality which, as I've seen and know, a lot of women find attractive. Before sitting down, he stroked his mustache, repositioned his ponytail with a gesture that was unavoidably feminine, threw his hat down on the sofa and said:

'May I light a cigarette? If I'm smoking, you'll still be able to see my two hands.' And then he sat down, taking care not to crease the tails of his raincoat. He had begun addressing me as 'tú' now, and that confirmed me in my suspicion that he had identified me.

'Have one of mine,' I replied, not wanting him to put his hand in his pocket. I offered him a Karelias and took another for myself. I lit both from the same flame and we inhaled the smoke at the same time, and for a moment we resembled old friends, taking that first puff in silence. We had both suffered a fright, and a cigarette was just what we needed. But the fright was not yet over, and his must have been far greater than mine, after all, I had merely frightened myself when I saw what I was doing, and that always supposes a lesser, more controlled fear, one you can bring to an end yourself. The conversation that followed moved very quickly.

'What the fuck's up with you?' said Custardoy. 'You're Jaime, aren't you?' The use of a swearword denoted aplomb and a certain lack of respect, unless, of course, he always talked like that (after all, he had no reason to respect me and more than enough reason to be angry with me); regardless of whether such aplomb was feigned or real, it was clear, I thought, that I had not yet frightened him enough, and how was I to do that? I sat sideways on the arm of a chair, which meant that not only was I facing him, I was higher up as well.

'Who said you could talk? I didn't. I only said you could smoke. So smoke your cigarette and shut the fuck up.' I flung the swearword back at him so as to place us on an equal footing and I waved the pistol about a bit. I hoped he wasn't used to handling firearms or wouldn't notice that I wasn't. It's not easy to frighten someone if you're not in the habit of doing so. I knew I could do it (I had done so before on occasion), just as I knew or imagined that I would be capable, or at least not incapable, of killing; but to do both those things, I would-perhaps-need to be completely crazy, agitated or furious or gripped by a long-lasting thirst for revenge, and at that moment, I wasn't, not sufficiently; perhaps I had relaxed once the first phase of my unplanned plan had passed without mishap, intercepting Custardoy, going to his apartment and shutting myself up with him there. I had too little hatred. I had too little knowledge. I was too lukewarm. I lacked the necessary heat. And, unlike Tupra, I wasn't cold enough either.

'OK, talk. I haven't got all fucking day to waste over this kind of crazy nonsense. Why are you pointing that gun at me? Just what are you up to, pal?' And he attempted another of those smiles that revealed long shiny teeth and which made him look almost pleasant and his profile less aggressive. He still reminded me of someone, but I didn't have time just then to think who it might be.

Custardoy was either brave or overconfident. Or perhaps he didn't want to appear daunted despite the weapon pointed at his chest by this madman, or maybe he was convinced I wouldn't use it. He had spoken scornfully, as if he wanted to diminish us, me and my gun. He had gone so far as to address me as 'pal' (and I hate people who use such terms), trying to belittle me and make me feel like some ridiculous child with my antiquated pistol in my hand. If he was over-confident, I wondered what more I would have to do to puncture his arrogance: I had already hit him and hurt him, and he must have registered that if I was capable of that, I was capable of worse things. If he continued in that vein, he ran the risk of getting me seriously riled or, as Custardoy might have put it, of getting on my tits. So it suited me that he should continue in that vein. Or perhaps not, he might just make me see myself in that situation as grotesque and puerile.

'Listen,' I said. 'From today on, you're going to stop seeing Luisa Juarez. It's over. No more beatings or cuts or black eyes. You never touch her again, right?'

I thought he would immediately deny ever laying a finger on her and declare: 'I don't know what you're talking about' or some such thing. But he didn't, that wasn't what upset him:

'Oh, really? What? On your say-so? He's got some nerve.' The way he said this irritated me, as if he were not addressing me, but some invisible third party, some imaginary witness with whom he felt at liberty to mock me. 'That's up to her and me, don't you think?'

Yes, that was precisely what I thought. I had no right to involve myself in her affairs, she was free, she was an adult, she might even be very happy with him, she hadn't asked me for my opinion or my protection, she hadn't even deigned to tell me about her day-to-day life, that life no longer concerned me; of course I agreed. None of that, though, was relevant now-I had decided to involve myself and to use force and fear, and at that point you have to leave aside all arguments and principles, all respect and moral reservations and scruples because you have decided to do what you want to do and to impose that decision on others, to achieve your ends without further delay, and then, as with any war once it has begun, being right or wrong should neither intervene nor count. Once that line has been crossed, right or wrong no longer matter, it's simply a matter of getting your own way, of winning and subjugating and prevailing. He had hit her and must be made to stop, that was all. 'Just make sure he's out of the picture,' I repeated to myself. I had to leave that apartment with Custardoy suppressed and erased like a bloodstain, that was all. And my determination grew.

'Yes,' I agreed, 'it should be up to the two of you to make decision, but that isn't how it's going to be. You're going to decide on your own. You're going to give her up today. Which would you rather give up-her or the world. Be quite clear about one thing though: either way you're going to give her up.'

For the first time, I saw him hesitate, perhaps I even caught a glimmer of fear. I thought: 'He's realized that it's not at all difficult to shoot someone, it's just a question of not being yourself for two seconds or perhaps of being yourself-one moment you're not a murderer and then suddenly you are and will be for all eternity-that anyone with a weapon in his hand might suddenly up and shoot you, all it takes is for him to forget for an instant the magnitude of the gesture, of a single simple gesture, or rather two, cocking the gun and squeezing the trigger, which might be almost simultaneous as it is in Westerns, cocking the hammer and pulling the trigger, put this finger here and that finger there, first one and then the other, up and back and there you are, it can happen to anyone, a slip of the hand or the finger, the hand that, in just one movement, puts the bullet into the barrel or the chamber and then the forefinger drawing back- this is a heavy pistol, quite hard to hold, but hand and finger act on their own as if no one were moving them, no consciousness or will, they caress and stroke and glide almost, you don't even have to make the effort that a sword inevitably requires, with a sword you have to raise it up and then bring it down and both movements require the whole strength of one arm or even both, which is why neither children nor many women nor feeble old men can wield one, but on the other hand, the pistol can be used by the weakest, most fearful, most stupid and most worthless of people-the pistol democratizes killing far more than the dishonorable crossbow-and anyone can cause irreparable damage with one, you just have to let things happen. And if I were to cock the pistol now, Custardoy would be terrified.'

And as soon as I thought this, and despite Miquelin's warning, I cocked the pistol. It was only a test and only for an instant, just to see a spark of panic in those strange dark eyes, it was only a spark, but I saw it. And then I immediately put my thumb on the hammer and lowered it and removed the projectile that had passed into the barrel or chamber or whatever it's called and put it away in my pocket; I uncocked the Llama. But he had seen how quick the pistol was to cock and how, once cocked, the bullets could fly out-a single gesture, then another and another-towards his head or his chest, towards an arm or a leg, towards his codpiece which would be reduced to a few fine hairs like the vanished codpiece of Death in the painting, or towards whatever part I chose to point it at. 'What a very odd feeling,' I thought, 'having a man at your mercy. Deciding if he should live or die, although it's not even really a matter of deciding.'

Custardoy, however, put on a brave face, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to be right, or, given that he had no weapon with which to defend himself, that he was trying to dissuade or terrify or destroy me, or to dig my grave still deeper with his ugly words and with his voice. His voice did not emerge cleanly, it was slightly hoarse, as if there were tiny pins in his throat similar to those on the revolving metallic disc or cylinder in a music box, which strike the tuned teeth of the comb and determine or mark the one repetitive melody. What he said emerged slowly, as if the spikes slowed down his speech. At any rate, he kept his hands on the table. He had finished his cigarette, but hadn't forgotten my earlier order, which was a good sign.

'Look, Jaime.' And it bothered me unutterably that he should call me by my first name, the name that Luisa used and which he had doubtless heard her say (how embarrassing) when she spoke to him about me. 'This is all total bullshit, and in a while, when you've left here, you'll be the first to see that. What is it that bothers you so much? Is it the fact that I screw her now and then? It's a bit late for you to be complaining about that. You probably do the same in London with whoever takes your fancy, and you're going to have to get used to it, if you aren't already, for Chrissake, there was whatever there was between you two and now there isn't. It happens all the time. But this I really can't believe.' He stopped and gave a short laugh, the laughter that made him almost pleasant and more attractive, he was still not fully aware of the danger, of the danger I represented. 'I mean, it's funny really, this is the last thing I would have expected. It's like a scene straight out of an opera, dammit!' Again he said this as if he were talking to a third party, to a ghost present in the room and not to me, and that drove me wild. He was probably looking forward to telling the story later on to a friend ('You won't believe what happened to me today? Christ, it was weird') or perhaps to Luisa herself ('I bet you can't guess who came to see me today, and toting a gun as well. Fucking hell! You married a really nasty piece of work there, he's nothing like you said, he's a complete headcase'). But he wouldn't be seeing Luisa again, he didn't know that, but I did. I doubted that he would talk quite like that to her, although he did when she wasn't there, of course; foul language came naturally to him, much more than it does to me: I have no problem using swearwords when the situation calls for it, but I lacked his fluency in that particular register, with which I was as familiar as almost everyone else, but which I didn't often use.

'You know exactly what bothers me. You know precisely what I find unacceptable, you bastard. Like I said, from today on, you'll never touch her again.'

He was still unbowed. He was playing a dangerous game. As he must have noticed, he risked heating up my lukewarm blood and provoking hand and finger into action. Perhaps this was a useful stratagem: perhaps he was trying not only to show that he was right, but also to show me that I was not, to open my eyes, to rid himself of this stupid unexpected problem and get on with his life by making me give in.

'What? Oh. The bruises,' he said, and each rasping word was dragged out like the music from a music box, each one emerged slowly as if it kept snagging on something, there was also perhaps a little madrileño bravado in his way of speaking. Then he added a trite remark, which, nonetheless, wounded me when I realized what he was saying; it took me a few seconds because I found it hard to grasp or preferred not to grasp what he meant, or maybe it took me that amount of time to absorb the meaning. 'Look, pal,' again that hateful belittling term, 'everyone has their own sexuality, and with some partners it comes out naturally and with others it doesn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either. It just happened and you have to give people what they want. Or don't you think so? Look, I didn't do anything to her she didn't want me to. Is that clear? So don't damn well go blaming me for something I'm not guilty of, all right?'

Yes, it took me a few seconds. 'What is this guy saying?' I thought. 'He's telling me that Luisa enjoys being knocked around, he's telling me that? That's impossible. It's a lie,' I thought, 'I've known her intimately for years, although less so lately, and I've never seen the slightest suggestion of that, I'd have noticed it, however slight, a hint, a question mark, a glimpse, this guy's trying to slither out of it, trying to justify himself, to escape, he knows why I'm here and that my reason is a grave one and he's been thinking up this false explanation for a while now, he knows for certain that I'm not going to ask Luisa about it and he's taking advantage of that to tell me he only hurts women who want to be hurt, or something of the sort, but Cristina told me how frightened the women were who had slept with him, some at any rate, and their subsequent silence about or concealment of what went on, why wouldn't they speak, if he was a violent brute, they'd report him, they'd alert other women, they'd forewarn them, for example those prostitutes he goes with, sometimes two at a time. No, it can't be true, it's not,' I thought, shrugging off the idea. It's dreadful to be told anything, anything at all, it's dreadful to have ideas put in your head, however unlikely or ridiculous and however unsustainable and improbable (but everything has its time to be believed), any scrap of information registered by the brain stays there until it achieves oblivion, that eternally one-eyed oblivion, any story or fact and even the remotest possibility is recorded, and however much you clean and scrub and erase, that rim is the kind that will never come out; it's understandable really that people should hate knowledge and deny what is there before their eyes and prefer to know nothing and to repudiate the facts, that they should avoid the inoculation and the poison and push it away as soon as they see or feel it near, it's best not to take risks; it's understandable, too, that we almost all ignore what we see and divine and anticipate and smell, and that we toss into the bag of imaginings anything that we see clearly-for however short a time-before it can take root in our mind and leave it forever troubled, and so it's hardly strange that we should be reluctant to know anyone's face, today, tomorrow or yesterday 'What face am I wearing now?' I wondered. 'And what about Luisa's face, one I thought I had plumbed and deciphered and knew, to all intents and purposes, from top to bottom, from past to future and from tomorrow to yesterday, and then along comes this son-of-a-bitch talking about her sexuality and telling me she likes him to get rough with her in bed, it's a joke, I mustn't believe him or think about it, but people do change and, above all, make discoveries, the kind of wretched discovery that takes those people from us and carries them far away, as with young Pérez Nuix when I discovered the pleasure of pretending that I wasn't doing what I was doing or of making believe that what was happening wasn't happening, which is not, I think, quite the same thing, that had been political, a tacit game, but that's what this bastard would say, damn him, that it's all a game, an erotic game, anything is possible, but it can't be true. Luisa's black eye wasn't the result of some game, like hell it was, and yet Custardoy said: "What? Oh. The bruises," why did he use the plural when I've only seen one bruise, perhaps there are more underneath her clothes, on her body, I haven't seen Luisa naked on this visit nor will I, I'll probably never see her naked again, but this bastard will unless I stop him and make sure he's out of the picture now and for good, with no going back and no further delay, don't ever linger or delay, just cock the gun again and squeeze the trigger, it's a simple matter of running my hand over the slide to release it and moving a finger, this and then this, forward and back and a bullet in the head and that will be that, I am, after all, wearing gloves, he'll be out of the picture forever and no more bruises, no more bed, no more wit or charm, it's in my hands to do all of that and I don't even have to listen to him or speak to him again.'

And so I did cock the pistol, and for the first time I moved my index finger from the guard to the trigger, remembering Miquelin's warning and believing that I was following his advice, 'Never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot.' And for a few seconds-one, two, three, four, five; and six-I did know, but not afterwards. I have no idea what saved him that time, it wasn't his silence, perhaps there were several things-thoughts, memories, and a recognition- all crowded together into six or possibly seven seconds, or perhaps other things came to me later and so had more time to be thought or remembered once I was back in my hotel room. 'What face am I wearing now?' I thought again. 'It's the face of all those men and rather fewer women who have held someone else's life in their hands and it could, from one moment to the next, come to resemble the face of those who chose to take that life. Not Reresby's face, who did not, in the end, snatch away De la Garza's life, and who, if he has killed other people, did not do so in my presence, like Wheeler with his outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague. But it would join the face of that vicious malagueño who baited and killed Mares, the face of that Madrid woman who boasted on the tram of having killed a child by smashing its head against a wall, of those militiamen who finished off my young Uncle Alfonso and left him dead in the gutter, even the faces of Orlov and Bielov and Carlos Contreras, who tortured Andreu Nin in Alcala and possibly flayed him alive; of Vizconde de La Barthe, who ordered Torrijos and, according to the painting, seventeen of his followers to be shot on the beach as soon as they disembarked, but in reality and in history there may have been many more; the faces of the Czech resistance fighters or students who made an attempt on the life of the Nazi Protector Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and the face of Spooner, the director of the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, who planned it all; the faces of the German occupiers who, in reprisal and with their hatred of place, destroyed the village of Lidice and killed either instantly or slowly one hundred and ninety-nine men and one hundred and eighty-four women on June 10, 1942; the faces of the thugs who machine-gunned those four unfortunates on another hidden beach, in Calabria this time, not far from Crotone, on the Golfo de Taranto, three men and a woman, a killing I myself watched; and the face of the man who screamed at another man in a garage, his mouth so close to the other's face that he sprayed him with saliva, and then shot him at point-blank range beneath the earlobe, as I could do now to Custardoy with no one here to cry out 'Don't!' as I did to Reresby and probably stopped him, I could put the barrel right there and that would be it, blood spurting out and tiny bits of bone; the face of the woman in green, her skirt all rucked up and wearing a sweater and a pearl necklace and high heels but with no stockings, who crushed the skull of a man with a hammer and sat astride him to strike his forehead over and over; the face of the European officer or mercenary who ordered the massacre of twenty Africans who fell in swift succession, like dominoes; the face of Manoia, yes him too, who scooped out the eyes of his prisoner as if they were peach stones and then, according to Tupra, slit his throat; and all those centuries before, the face of Ingram Frizer, who stabbed to death the poet Marlowe in a tavern in Deptford, even though his face is unknown and his name, too, remains uncertain; and, of course, the face of King Richard, who ordered his two little nephews in the Tower to be strangled, and had many others killed too, whether in his angry mood or not, including poor Clarence, drowned by two henchmen in a butt of disgusting wine and held by the legs, which remained outside the barrel and flailed ridiculously about in the air he would never breathe again… My face will resemble and be assimilated into that of all those men and rather fewer women who were once masters of time and who held in their hand the hourglass-in the form of a weapon, in the form of an order-and decided suddenly, without lingering or delaying, to stop time, thus obliging others no longer to desire their own desires and to leave even their own first name behind. I don't like being linked to those faces. On the other hand, I must remove Luisa from all danger and suffering and torment, so that her ghost will not one day say to this man what Lady Anne's ghost said to her husband on the eve of battle, nor hurl at him the curse that I am failing to carry out despite being in a position to do so: "Thy wife, that wretched Luisa thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee… Let me sit heavy on thy soul, and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die!" Yes, it would be best to kill him while I still have time,' I thought, 'I might not have another opportunity in the future, perhaps there is no other way of removing him from the picture forever and this is the only way to make us safe.' That 'us' surprised me. And it gave me strength and encouragement to discover that I still thought of us as 'us.'

And although I was no longer at all sure that I would shoot him, I kept my finger on the trigger, and still more seconds passed. And as they passed and the risk remained that I might accidentally fire the gun, I was conscious that Custardoy was looking paler and less kempt, it was as if his immaculate appearance had somehow suffered a breakdown, his tie was crooked and he made the mechanical gesture of straightening it, reminding me of that other-unavoidably feminine-gesture he had made when repositioning his ponytail, then he obediently returned his hand to the table; his raincoat was creased now, the cloth seemed of poorer quality, and what I could see of his shirt looked grubby with sweat. As for his hair, it gave the impression of being plastered to his head and even his sideburns had lost their curl; he was trying hard to maintain his smile-obviously aware of its affable nature-but it no longer lit up his face; his nose had grown sharper, or perhaps it was simply that I had shifted position and the angle had changed; his eyes, I thought, were clouded and closer together, as if his whole being were striving to shrink and thus offer less of a target, a purely unconscious reaction, since, given the short distance separating us, it made no sense at all, for I certainly couldn't miss.

'Have you ever met my children?' I asked suddenly.

'No, I've never even seen them. I don't like getting kids involved.'

'How long have you been going out with her? How long have you known each other? And don't lie to me. I know her better than you do.'

The fact that I spoke to him and asked him civilized questions with no insults thrown in calmed him slightly, although he still kept glancing at the barrel of the primed pistol-'primed,' as I understand it, being another term for 'cocked'-with his large dark eyes, still cold and crude despite the fear in them, any roughness being attributable now only to his mustache and his nose.

'About six months.' And he allowed himself to add: Although longer isn't necessarily better. Look, why don't you just leave us alone? I've never liked a woman as much as I like her. You're out of the frame, we thought that was clear.'-'Ah, so I'm the one who's out of the picture now,' I thought. 'He's right. But that's going to change. He talks about "us" as well, meaning Luisa and him.'-'Anyway, that's clear to Luisa, and she assumed it was to you as well.'

'I don't know why you use the past tense. She's going to continue assuming that because you're not going to tell her anything about what's happened here.'

With a pistol in my hand, this sounded like a serious threat, although it wasn't, at least I didn't say it with that intention, but simply because I was sure they wouldn't be seeing each other again after that day. Custardoy was less mouthy now, I noticed, and was growing increasingly apprehensive. And then another thought or memory came into my mind, one that should have condemned him and yet, strangely, helped to save him: 'Good God, this man is my ġe-bryd-guma, Luisa has made of him and me unwitting co-fornicators or co-fuckers, just as Tupra and I probably are as well through the intermediary or link of Pérez Nuix, and as I, all unawares, must be of many other men through other women; we never think about that the first time we have sex with someone, about who we're bringing together and who we're joining forces with, and nowadays, these phantasmagorical relationships, undesired and unsought, would be a story without end. But according to that dead language, this man and I are related, indeed, according to any language, we have an affinity, and perhaps for that very reason I should not kill him, yes, for that reason too, because we have something very important in common, I've never liked another woman as much as I like Luisa either, so what it comes down to is that we love the same person, and I can't blame him for that, or perhaps he simply has sex with her, it's impossible to gauge what his feelings are.' I could have tried to find out and ask him if he loved her, but the question struck me as absurd, and besides, with a pistol cocked and pointing at him, I knew what he would answer but not if that answer would be true. At that moment, the truth would be the last thing he would tell me, if he really thought the truth might kill him.

'I don't want anyone to disappear,' was my next thought. 'I don't believe in the Final Judgment or in a great final dance of sorrow and contentment, nor in some kind of rowdy get-together at which the murdered will rise up before their murderers and present their accusations to a bored and horrified Judge. I don't believe in that because I don't belong to the age of steadfast faith, and because it's not necessary: that scene takes place here, on earth, in a fragmented individual form, at least it does when the dead person knows or sees who is killing him and can then say with his farewell glance: "You're taking my life more for reasons of jealousy than justice, I haven't killed anyone, not as far as you know, you're putting a bullet in my forehead or beneath my ear lobe not because you think I'm beating up the woman who is no longer your wife, as if I were some vulgar wife-beater, although you can't and don't want to avoid that suspicion and at least part-believe it for your own momentary justification which will be of no use to you tomorrow, but because you're afraid of me and are going to fight for what is yours, as do all those who commit crimes and have to convince themselves that their crimes were necessary: for your God, for your King, for your country, for your culture or your race; for your flag, your legend, your language, your class or your space; for your honor, your religion, for your family, for your strongbox, for your purse and your socks; or for your wife. And in short, you are afraid. I died in my apartment on a cloudy day, among my paintings and without even taking off my raincoat, when I least expected it and at the hands of a stranger who intercepted me at the front door and gave me a last cigarette which I did not enjoy. I will no longer go to the Prado to look at the paintings, I will no longer study them or copy them or even forge them, I will no longer walk through Madrid with my ponytail bobbing and my fine hat on or drink another beer or eat another portion of patatas bravas, I won't go into the bookshop or greet my female friends or stop to look at statues or the legs of some passing woman, nor will I ever make anyone laugh again. You're putting an end to all of that. It may not be much, but it's what I have, it's my life and it's unique, and no one else will ever have it again. Let me sit heavy on your soul each night and fill your sleep with perturbations, may you feel my knee upon your chest, while you sleep with one eye open, an eye you will never be able to close." No, I don't want anyone to disappear,' I thought again, 'not even this man. I do not dare, and there will still be time to turn back and descend the stair, I do not dare disturb the universe, still less destroy anything in it, in my angry mood. There will be room for Custardoy in these streets for a while yet, they are already awash with blood and no one should tremble as they leave them, and they are perhaps already too full of men brimming with rage and with thunderless lightning that strikes in silence, I should not be one more such man. "We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine," Tupra said to me once. My face would become one with that of Santa Olalla and, even worse, that of Del Real, two names that have always been for me the names of treachery; because when they betrayed my father at the end of the Civil War, what they wanted was his execution and his death, that was the usual fate of any detainee, for they were the masters of time, they held the hourglass in their hand and ordered it to stop, except that it didn't stop and didn't obey them and, thanks to that, I am here, and my father did not have to say as he died: "Strange to see meanings that clung together once floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…" No, I will not be the one to impose that task on this unpleasant man for whom I feel a strange blend of sympathy and loathing, he is part of this landscape and of the universe, he still treads the earth and traverses the world and it is not up to me to change that; at the end of time there are only vestiges or remnants or rims and in each can be traced, at most, the shadow of an incomplete story, full of lacunae, as ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary as pieces of tombstones or the broken inscriptions on ruined tympana, "past matter, dumb matter," and then you might doubt that it ever existed at all. Why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, and all those doubts, all that torment.'

I took out the second bullet and put it away, I uncocked the pistol, removed my finger from the trigger and rested it once more on the guard, as Miquelin had advised me to do unless I was sure I was going to fire. I saw on Custardoy's face a look of contained or repressed relief, he didn't dare feel entirely relieved, how could he, when he still had the barrel of a gun pointing at his face and when the man holding the gun was wearing gloves and had just done something very worrying: he had picked up the two ashtrays with the two cigarette butts in them and their corresponding ash, his own and Custardoy's, the ash from the burned-out Karelias cigarettes, and emptied them into his other raincoat pocket to keep them separate from the bullets, just as, in the handicapped toilet, Tupra had put away his sodden gloves, wrung out and wrapped up in toilet paper, although he had done so only once his task was complete, while mine still lay before me. 'Now I do have his coldness, Reresby's coldness that is, now that I've recognized my similarity or affinity with this man, which is why he's going to emerge from this alive,' I thought, 'and now that I've thoroughly frightened him, even though he has barely shown it and put on a brave face, anything else I do to him will seem all right and of no account, he'll think himself lucky and find it perfectly reasonable. I will not be Sergeant Death or Sir Death or Sir Cruelty or even Sir Thrashing, I will be Sir Blow or Sir Wound or Sir Punishment, because something has to be done to keep him out of the picture, just as Tupra did with De la Garza.'

And while I was thinking (and much of this I thought later on), I realized who it was that Custardoy reminded me of; what, to use Wheeler's word, his affinity was; or his relationship, although in this case there was even a resemblance. And it was probably that very frivolous fact that saved him, truly and definitively, a nonsense, a mere nothing, a chance superfluous flash, an opportune association or a fickle memory that might or might not have surfaced; sometimes what we do or don't do depends on that, just as we decide to give alms to one beggar among many, whose appearance, for some reason, moves us: we suddenly see the person, see beyond his condition and function and needs, we individualize him, and he no longer seems to us indistinguishable or interchangeable as an object of compassion, of which there are hundreds; that's what happened to Luisa with the young Romanian or Hungarian or Bosnian woman and her sentinel son at the entrance to the supermarket, and about whom I had occasionally thought while I was far away in London, having first known of their existence through a story told to me. I associated Custardoy with my dancing neighbor opposite, with whom I had never exchanged a word, but who had so often cheered or soothed me with his improvised dances beyond the trees and the statue, on the other side of the square, alone or accompanied by his friends or partenaires or lovers. Yes, they had quite a lot in common: my dancer is a thin fellow with bony features-jaw and nose and forehead-but a strong athletic build, just as Custardoy is all sinew; he has a thick but well-groomed mustache, like that of a boxer from the early days, except that it's cut straight with no nineteenth-century curlicues, and he wears his hair combed back with a middle parting as if he had a ponytail, although I've never seen it, perhaps one day he'll reveal that he has one just like Custardoy, he also sometimes wears a tie as Custardoy always does, even when he's running and leaping about his empty living room, the guy's mad, but so happy, so contented, so oblivious to everything that wears the rest of us down and consumes us, immersed in his dances danced for no one, it's fun and even rather cheering to watch, and mysterious too, I can't imagine who he is or what he does, he eludes-and this doesn't happen very often-my interpretative or deductive faculties, which may or may not be right, but which never hold back, springing immediately into action to compose a brief, improvised portrait, a stereotype, a flash, a plausible supposition, a sketch or snippet of life however imaginary and basic or arbitrary these might be, it's my alert, detective mind, the idiotic mind that Clare Bayes criticized and reproached me for years ago now, before I met Luisa, and which I had to suppress with Luisa so as not to irritate her or fill her with fear, the superstitious fear that always does the most damage and yet serves so little purpose, for there's nothing to be done to protect ourselves from what we already know and dread (perhaps because we are fatalistically drawn to it and seek it out so as to avoid disappointment), and we usually know how things will end, how they will evolve and what awaits us, where things are going and what their conclusion will be; everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest straightforward stories, you only have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history-one grave pregnant moment-and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to decipher their meanings, if you are prepared to do so-but it's very difficult and can prove catastrophic…

I had interpreted or deduced Custardoy and even had proof, and both those things had been enough to condemn him. But what bad or good luck-how I regret it, how I celebrate it- that he should remind me of my contented dancer to whom I was grateful from afar, which was doubtless why I felt for Custardoy that inexplicable sympathy mingled with profound loathing. Perhaps they were alike in other ways too, perhaps there were other affinities apart from the pleasant smile and the superficial physical likeness: when Custardoy was sketching and taking notes as he stood before that painting by Parmigianino he was, perhaps, as focused on that as my neighbor was on his dancing, as happy and contented, and when he painted at home, when he made his copies or forgeries, he may have been even more abstracted and oblivious to all that wears us down and consumes us. And the dancer was often accompanied by two women, just as Custardoy sometimes took two women to bed with him in his need to be many or to live more than one life. And it was that, above all, that made me give up the idea of killing him: a nonsense, a mere nothing, a chance, superfluous flash of thought, a doubt or caprice or some stupid fit of feeling, an untimely association of fickle memories, or was it, rather, one-eyed oblivion.

Without saying anything, I went over to his enviable fireplace and thereafter I acted very swiftly, as if I were distracted or, rather, busy, yes, my attitude was as businesslike as Reresby's had been when he walked into that immaculate handicapped toilet. 'Now I have his coldness,' I thought again, 'now I know how to frighten Custardoy, now I can imagine myself, because it is just a question of imagining yourself and only then can you rid yourself of problems; now I can calculate how hard the blow should be, can bring down my sword without severing anything, lift it up and then bring it down again but still cut nothing and nevertheless give him the fright of his life that will ensure he never comes near us again, near me or, above all, Luisa.' I picked up the poker and without giving Custardoy time to prepare himself or even to foresee what I was about to do, I struck him as hard as I could on the left hand that he had placed, along with his right hand, on the table. I heard the crunch of broken bones, I heard it clearly despite the simultaneous howl he let out, his face, no longer rough or crude or cold, twisted in pain and he instinctively clasped his broken hand with his other hand.

'Fuck! You've broken my hand, you bastard!' It was a perfectly normal reaction, he didn't really know what he was saying, the pain had made him forget for a moment that I still had a gun aimed at him and that my last words to him had been: 'you're not going to tell her anything about what's happened here.'

I raised the poker again and this time, applying less pressure- yes, now I could calculate how hard the blow should be-I slashed his cheek, gave him uno sfregio or a cut much longer and much deeper than the one Flavia Manoia suffered, although it barely touched bone. He raised his good hand to his jaw, his cheek, it was the right one, and stared at me with a look of panic, of fear, which was not so much visceral as atavistic, the fear of someone who does not know whether more blows will follow nor how many because that is the nature of swords, that is the nature of weapons that are not loosed or thrown, those that kill at close quarters and when face to face with the person killed, without the murderer or the avenger or the avenged detaching or separating themselves from the sword while they wreak havoc and plunge the weapon in and cut and slice, all with the same blade which they never discard, but hold onto and grip even harder while they pierce, mutilate, skewer and even dismember. I did none of those things, it was hardly the appropriate weapon for that, indeed, it wasn't a weapon at all, but a tool.

'Keep your hands on the table, I said,' and again I cocked the pistol, but this time I didn't place my index finger on the trigger.

He looked at me with stupefaction and renewed alarm, or perhaps a different kind of alarm, his eyes, having grown momentarily closer together, were once more wide apart. I know what was going through his head at that moment, he must have been thinking: 'Oh, no. This madman's going to break my other hand too, the hand I paint with.'

'No,' he said. 'Why? No, don't do it.'

And so I had no option but to press the barrel of the gun to his forehead, so that he would take me seriously, to his broad forehead, where his hair was beginning to recede, although I knew now that I wouldn't shoot him. He, however, couldn't know that, he had no idea, and that was my great advantage, that he could not interpret me, no one can in such circumstances, not even the best of interpreters. Not even Wheeler or Pérez Nuix or Tupra would have been able to, as the report on me said: 'Sometimes he seems to me to be a complete enigma. And sometimes I think he's an enigma to himself. Then I go back to the idea that he doesn't know himself very well. And that he doesn't pay much attention to himself because he's given up understanding himself. He considers himself a lost cause upon whom it would be pointless squandering thought. He knows he doesn't understand himself and that he never will. And so he doesn't waste his time trying to do so. I don't think he's dangerous. But he is to be feared.' Custardoy didn't know at that point that I wasn't dangerous, but he knew I was to be feared.

'Put your hands on the table.' I said this calmly, it seemed to me unnecessary to raise my voice or to swear. 'Or would you prefer me to put a bullet in your head so that then there'll be nothing at all? It wouldn't be hard, it would only take a moment.' Yes, how strange that someone should obey our every order and be at our mercy and do whatever we want.

He squeezed his eyes tight shut when he felt the cold metal of the pistol on his skin, this skin of ours that resists nothing, which offers no protection and is so easily wounded that even a fingernail can scratch it, and a knife can cut it and a spear rip it open, and a sword can tear it even as it slices through the air, and a bullet destroy it. (Blood was seeping from the wound to his cheek, but it wasn't running down his cheek, it was just coagulating along the wound itself.) I saw the look on his face, the look of someone who thinks or knows he is dead; but since he was still alive, the image was one of infinite fear and struggle, mental struggle, of desire perhaps; his face turned deathly pale, just as if someone had given it a quick lick of grey or off-white or off-color paint, or had thrown flour over him or perhaps talcum powder, it was rather like when swift clouds cast a shadow over the fields and a shudder runs through the flocks below, or like the hand that spreads the plague or closes the eyes of the deceased, because one is always instantly aware of any real danger of death and one believes in it and awaits the moment. Like De la Garza, he preferred to wait with eyes tight shut, they were trembling or pulsating-perhaps his pupils were racing about madly beneath the lids. And he put his hands on the table, you bet he did, the injured and the sound hand, the former he had difficulty placing flat. And again I acted quickly, I neither lingered nor delayed, I was sick of his company and wanted to get out of there fast; I was sick of his face too, despite its benign appearance, I used the poker to strike the same hand a second and a third time and just as hard, I think I broke the lower part of his fingers or some of them, between hand and knuckle, that's what it sounded like. He let out another two howls and clutched his left hand with his still intact right hand, he couldn't help but console the one with the other, his left was a terrible mess, but I tried not to look, I didn't want to see it or to contemplate my work as I had contemplated the broken hands of Pérez Nuix's father in that video as he tried in vain to protect himself as he lay sprawled on a billiards table, I didn't want to know exactly what damage I had done to him, if I didn't look, it would be easier for me to believe-later on, in years to come and, shortly too, when I went back to my hotel-that it had merely been one of those dreams one has abroad (I had a return ticket and abroad for me, at least in part, was Spain, and I was leaving). Despite the awful pain, Custardoy must have thought this nothing, a piece of good luck, when he had feared for his good hand and feared receiving a bullet in the brain at point-blank range. However, he still had sufficient courage to complain. Despite his panic, he remained unshaken, not at all like that dickhead De la Garza.

'What the fuck do you want,' he said, 'to cripple me?'

And then I told him what it was I wanted:

'I haven't touched your right hand, but I could give it the same treatment as your left hand or worse. And I can come looking for you whenever I want. I could hurt your right hand so badly that you'd never pick up a paintbrush again in your life.' And once more I couldn't help remembering Reresby again, when he gave me his instructions for De la Garza and I translated them to my compatriot where he lay on the floor. Tupra had issued a fluent list of orders as if he had thought it all out before, I must give the same impression of determination and wisdom and prescience, telling him what my pre-prepared plans for him were, telling him exactly what was going to happen and what he was going to do.

Custardoy had half-opened his eyes to gauge the damage done and I had not placed the barrel of the gun against his head again since dealing the second and third blow to his hand. His gaze was dull, stunned, almost oblique, but there was also a hint of vengefulness. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that any desire for revenge was muted and purely hypothetical, as if he understood that he would have to give it up however much he wanted it, or could see it only as a distant hope or postponed reward or deferred justice, rather as, during many centuries, people of steadfast faith would imagine and nurture the idea of the Final Judgment as something that would be given to them during their long death and which they could never have in life. I had removed the gun from his head when I struck him with the poker, and now it occurred to me that I didn't even need it, the threat of destroying his right hand had cowed him completely, overwhelmed him, especially as he didn't know if that was going to happen right there and then, and because he already had before him the vision of his left hand, and could feel it-the pain must have been terrible. In the state he was in, his ponytail looked even more ridiculous, as did his tie, his sparse mustache, his aspiration to elegance; at that moment he was an angry man, but fearful, too, almost imploring, his rage curbed indefinitely. However, I still didn't put the pistol away. And he did plead with me, although his tone of voice masked the fact. His words sounded more like a reproach than a plea, but they said what they said:

'For Christ's sake, don't do that. I earn my living with my right hand. Stop playing fucking games with me. What the fuck do you want?' Swearwords are good at masking feelings, of course, which is why almost everyone uses them in Spain-the most puerile, blustering country I know-in order to appear big and brave. But Custardoy had asked a favor of me ('Don't do that') and I did not, on that occasion, feel involved or enmeshed or entangled; on the contrary, I would happily have used a razor or a knife to cut the disagreeable bond joining us, him, Luisa and me, although she had created that bond of her own accord. All I had to say to the guy was: 'I want this in exchange.'

'I'm going to leave now and you're going to stay here quite still for thirty minutes from the time I leave, without moving and without phoning anyone, however much your hand hurts; you'll have to put up with it. Then call a doctor, go to a hospital, do what you like. It will take time for that hand to heal, if it ever does completely heal. Always remember that it could have been worse, and that we can always do the same to the other hand, or cut it off with a sword, I have a very clever friend in London who loves swords. While it's healing, leave Madrid, I know you've got enough money to be able to spend some time at a hotel, in a place that you like, somewhere with museums, and have a real rest. And if none of these ideas appeal, then do something else. I don't want Luisa to see you in this state; she must never ever associate what has happened to you with my stay in Madrid. You phone her and tell her that you've had to go away unexpectedly. Some important, urgent commission, copying or restoring some painting, or several, in Berlin, Bordeaux, Vienna or St. Petersburg, I don't care. Or better still, Boston, Baltimore, or Malibu, with an ocean between you, after all, there are famous museums aplenty over there with no shortage of cash to pay you for your work; anyway, I'll leave you to invent something. Call her from a cell phone or some number that can't be traced, just so that she can't find out where you really are. You can go and convalesce in Pamplona for all I care, but you must tell her that you're far away and very busy and that you'll phone her when you can, just in case, because if she thinks you're somewhere near, she might try and leave the kids with someone for a few days and come and join you.'

'She won't just let me go off like that without saying goodbye, especially if I'm going to be away for a while,' said Custardoy, interrupting me. I didn't mind because this meant he was accepting my plan and was prepared to obey it, and that I wouldn't have to damage his other hand or even consider doing so, because I would then have no other hold over him and would have to shoot him and that now seemed to me impossible. I had lost all my heat, what little I'd had. I had taken on Tupra's coldness only momentarily and half-heartedly. Perhaps not even Tupra was so very cold: after all, he hadn't, in the end, cut off De la Garza's head.

'Don't you understand? She won't be able to say goodbye to you, however much she wants to, because when you phone her, you'll already have left, you'll call her from somewhere else, do you see?'

'She'll think that very odd.'

'Try to make it seem perfectly normal. Emergencies do happen, as do unforeseen events. Besides, you don't see each other every day, do you? Or phone each other on a daily basis?' I wasn't expecting an answer, and I preferred him not to give one. 'While you're away, only call her now and then, and make those calls less and less frequent, until, in two weeks or so, you'll have stopped phoning altogether. After two weeks, you give no sign of life at all, none, and if she does manage to locate you, be evasive with her, impatient. And when your hand has healed and you come back (if that wretched hand of yours ever does heal after what I've done to it), you won't call her then either. Sooner or later, she'll hear from someone that you're back, and if she's still interested, she'll be the one to seek you out or phone you or demand an explanation. And you can tell her then, bluntly and arrogantly, it should come easily enough to you, you've probably done it hundreds of time. As far as you're concerned, you'll say, she's history, you never even give her a thought. Tell her that on the beaches of Malibu you've met the new Bo Derek or a lady security guard or Getty's daughter or whoever. Or an heiress from Boston whom you're about to marry. You make it clear to her that it's all over, that she should leave you alone, that you don't want to see her. And you won't see her. As of today, you've said your farewells, do you understand? And if you utter one word to her about what has happened here, about this visit, if you lead her to suspect or, however remotely, imagine what went on, now or later, even if it's in ten years' time, you can say farewell to your right hand as well.' The words of the 'Streets of Laredo' came into my mind: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'

Custardoy opened his coarse eyes a little wider, he looked suddenly older, as if the weariness that follows immediately on relief had put ten years on him. He was cautiously stroking his crippled hand, he must have been impatient for this to be over, to be rid of me once and for all, so that he could go to a doctor or a hospital, where they could do something to take away the pain.

'I'm not the marrying kind, I'm not like you,' he said with a tiny, barely perceptible remnant of scorn, which I nonetheless noticed. It didn't matter, it afforded him some small compensation. He didn't know that I was like him, even though I had gotten married, contrary to my father's expectations. 'Anything else?'

'Like I said, you stay here for half an hour without moving and without phoning anyone. You never lay a hand on her again. You never see her again. I'll know if you don't do as I say, and London is only two hours away. It would be easy enough for me to fly over and cut off your hand.'

I flung the poker into the fireplace, it had a little blood on it, but I'd leave him to clean it off. I removed the third unused bullet, put the pistol in my raincoat pocket and headed for the door without taking my eyes off him, until he disappeared from my field of vision. There he was sitting on his sofa, with his clothes all rumpled, his hand shattered and a mark on his face. He held my gaze, despite his sudden tiredness, his abrupt senescence. No one has ever looked at me with such hatred. Nevertheless, I wasn't afraid that he would try anything, that he would grab the poker and hit me on the back of the head. The terror and humiliation he had experienced might have made him risk doing something like that. His hatred, however, was impotent, frustrated and without consequences, it was tinged with fear and shock; or it was like the hatred of a child condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumes him, but which he will no longer remember when he does finally grow up. He was looking at me in the knowledge that I was no longer within his grasp and would not be for a long time, possibly never: like a furious adolescent looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he's not yet allowed to enter; or like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he's not there, and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him, and that he can do nothing about it; it's a common experience among the dying too, only far more tragic.

When I left the living room, he disappeared from my view. His eyes, dark with hatred, had followed me right until then, and he may have kept his gaze fixed for a few seconds more on the door through which my gloved figure had departed. It would take him a while to get used to the idea of what he had to do. And then he would find it hard to believe that what had happened to him had really happened, but he had a useful reminder, or two; now he would feel on his hand and cheek what Luisa had felt with her black eye and its thousand colors and perhaps before that, according to her sister, the cut, also on her face. He would have many days ahead of him to observe the evolution of his scar, and to hope that the small bones in his hand were knitting together under the cast or whatever it is they use now, although an operation might also prove necessary. He would look at his good hand and think perhaps: 'I've been lucky. At least this hand is still intact.' And he would remember the metal barrel against his forehead and then he would think: 'I've been lucky. He could have shot me, I thought he was going to. But we would always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies, every man for himself. I was saved and here I am.'

I hurried down the stairs ('"Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair…'), anxious to leave the building and get away from there, to take a taxi and return Miquelin's old pistol to him as soon as possible, having first replaced the three bullets I had removed from the magazine, and to say to him: A thousand thanks, Maestro, I'll never forget this. Don't worry, here it is, there's not a bullet missing. It hasn't even got my fingerprints on it. It's as if you had never lent it to me, as if it had never left your apartment.'

None of the taxis passing by were free, the sky was still cloudy, full of thunderless lightning about to strike but never doing so, and so I set off, walking briskly, following the same straight route back, along Calle Mayor to my hotel, still with my gloves on, I wanted to get away from that place. I felt the lightness one feels on getting what one wants and a little of the conceit I had experienced when I discovered that Rafita was afraid of me, that, quite unwittingly, I filled him with fear. Seeing yourself as dangerous had its good side. It made you feel more confident, more optimistic, stronger. It made you feel important and-how can I put it-in charge. And, this time, that small rush of vanity did not immediately repel me. However, I also had a sudden feeling of heaviness, a feeling that can be triggered by various combinations: alarm and haste, the sense of tedium experienced at the prospect of having to carry out some cold-blooded act of reprisal, or the invincible meekness one feels in a threatening situation. I did feel something of that tedium, as well as haste, but my act of reprisal was over and done with. Only when I reached Plaza de la Villa and saw again the statue of the Marques de Santa Cruz ('I was the scourge of the Turk at Lepanto, the Frenchman at Terceira, the Englishman o'er all the seas…' 'And in short, they were afraid') did I begin to think repeatedly, over and over: 'You can't go around beating people up, you can't go around killing them. Why can't you? You can't go around beating people up… Why can't one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them? Why not? According to you.' And I remembered, too, what Tupra had said when we were at his house, after our session watching his store of videos: 'You've seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can't.' And I gave myself the answer that I managed to give him just before we were interrupted by Beryl or whoever that woman was, the person at his side, his weak point just as Luisa was mine: 'Because then it would be impossible for anyone to live.' I had received no response to those words of mine, but by the time I reached Puerta del Sol, my thoughts had changed, and this was all they were repeating: 'What a lot of one-eyed, one-handed people there are in these old streets, but at least he's out of the picture. What a lot of cripples and what a lot of dead people there are in these old streets, but at least he's out of the picture. Yes, at least he's out of the picture and he'd better not try and climb back in.'

I didn't in fact think much about anything until I was in the plane on my way back to London, by which I mean that I postponed any form of ordered thought and, during the few days that remained of my stay in Madrid, restricted myself to feelings, sensations and intuitions. I devoted those days to the children and to taking them out and about (they were as insatiable as all children are nowadays, I suppose they've lost the habit of being at home, which feels to them like imprisonment, and require constant distractions in the exhausting outside world) and to visiting my father, who was getting very slowly, but perceptibly, worse.

The last time I went to see him, on the eve of my departure, he was, as he almost always was, sitting in his armchair, fingers interlaced, like someone who waits patiently without knowing what exactly it is he's waiting for-perhaps for night to fall and for day to come again-and now and then he would unconsciously raise his fingers to his eyebrows and smooth them, or use thumb and forefinger to rub or stroke the skin beneath his lower lip, a characteristic gesture of his, a meditative gesture. But I found it quite distressing to see him like that, in that strange waiting state, barely speaking to me, with me having to do all the talking and trying to draw from him the occasional word, racking my brain for questions and topics of conversation that might make him react and come to life-and without him putting into words or spontaneously offering me the results of his meditations, as he normally would; he had suddenly become as impenetrable as a baby, for babies must think about their surroundings, since they're equipped to do so, but it's utterly impossible to know what those thoughts are. At last, after various failed attempts to interest him in recent news and events, I asked:

'What are you thinking about?'

'About the cousins.'

'What cousins?'

'Whose do you think? Mine.'

'But you don't have any cousins, you never have,' I said, feeling slightly alarmed.

He looked somewhat taken aback, as if he were making a mental correction, then immediately adjusted his expression and did not insist, but answered again as if for the first time.

'About my Uncle Victor,' he said. Ask him to please tell my father that I'm coming home.'

There had been an Uncle Victor, but both he and my grandfather had been dead a long time, so long that I'd never even known them, either of them. This was the first time his mind had strayed like that, at least when I'd been with him. Although, perhaps that isn't the right way to put it-what had strayed was time itself, which, contrary to what we tend to believe, never entirely passes, just as we never entirely cease to be what we once were, and it's not that odd to slip back into the past so vividly that it becomes juxtaposed with the present, especially if it's the present of an old man, which offers him so little and is so unvaried, its days indistinguishable. Anyone who waits patiently or without knowing what exactly it is he's waiting for is perfectly justified in deciding to install himself in a more pleasing or more appropriate time; after all, if today chooses to ignore him, he's perfectly within his rights to ignore today-there's no room for complaint on either side.

'But your father's dead,' I said, correcting him again, 'he's been dead for years, as has your Uncle Victor.'

Again he did not insist, but replied:

'I know they're dead. You're hardly telling me anything new, Jacobo.' And he gave an indulgent laugh as if I were the person whose mind was rambling.

Perhaps my father now came and went in time with great facility and speed. Perhaps he was now the master of time and held in his hand the hourglass or clock, of himself or of his existence, and while he calmly watched time advance he was traveling wherever he pleased. Maybe that's the only thing left to the very old, especially if they're not astute old men, as Wheeler is, and no longer struggle to fill the vacancies, to seek out substitutes or replacements for the many people they have lost throughout their life; and are no longer part of the universal, continual, substitutional mechanism or movement-which, being everyone's lot, is also ours-and they stop accumulating and surrounding themselves with poor imitations, choosing instead to rediscover the originals in all their plenitude. They have no further need of flabby, pale, elusive life, only of thought, which becomes in them ever more potent and clear and all-embracing, since it only occasionally has to live alongside reality.

'You've got a pistol, haven't you?' it occurred to me to ask him then. It would turn up when he died, and I feared that his death would not be long in coming; and one of us, my brothers, my sister or myself, would inherit it as Miquelín had inherited from his father the Llama I had just held in my hands. Perhaps it would, in the future, be useful for me to know where to find another 'clean' pistol, without having to borrow it from someone.

A little surprised, he looked at me with those clear eyes of his that now saw only dimly.

'Yes. Why do you ask?' And this topic seemed to rouse him or return him to today.

Where did it come from? Why have you got it?' I asked, not answering his question.

He raised one hand to his eyebrows, not this time in order to smooth them abstractedly, but in order to think or remember.

'Well, my father was very keen on guns. He wasn't just a hunter, he was a marksman. He loved that and was very good at it. He was a member of the National Shooting Club and owned a lot of weapons. A Mauser carbine; a Baker rifle; a very ornate Le Page target pistol; and even a Monkey Tail, although I can't recall now why they called it that; pistols and revolvers, some of them very old, from the Wild West era; there was an American LeMat and an English Beaumont-Adams and a couple of Derringers, one of them with a double barrel, and pistols from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and I can remember him having a heavily gilded Blunderbuss, a Miquelet dueling pistol, and a silver-inlaid "Queen Anne," a really fine collection. And then there were knives and swords as well from exotic countries: gumias and yatagans, bolos from the Philippines, a Malay kris… As well as rapiers of course.' He paused and then remembered two more. 'Oh, and a Nepalese kukri and even an Indian bhuj, which was very rare, half-knife, half-axe, it was also known as an "elephant head," because it had a brass likeness of an elephant's head between blade and haft, which was long and narrow…' He was seeing it, I realized that he was actually seeing that bhuj from his childhood as well as all the other weapons, with that gaze so frequent in the old even when they're in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It's not an absent look, but a focused one, focused on something a very long way away. And after a brief moment's absorption in thought, he went on: 'He passed on that enthusiasm to both my brother and me, but especially to me. He used to show them to us and explain all about them, and we got used to handling them with scrupulous care.'

'But what did he want with knives and swords? You can't shoot with them, can you? In the National Shooting Club, they don't let you fling a Malay kris at someone, do they?'

Now he was genuinely interested in the conversation, or at least in that remote reminiscence, and so he reacted quickly to my joke, amused but pretending not to be:

'Honestly, you are a silly lot, you never miss a chance to make some foolish remark.' He used the plural 'you' to encompass all four of his children, as he often did even when only one of us was present. 'Of course he couldn't use them to shoot with, he just liked them, I suppose. He was born in 1870, and people then had a liking for weapons in general. It was quite normal. And they were rarely put to criminal use as they are now'

'Hm,' I said, 'although it doesn't seem very sensible to let children handle them. You and your brother could have blown each other's heads off or cut each other's throats. You say he owned rapiers as well. I know how sharp they can be. Nowadays, the authorities, no, what am I saying, the neighbors would have hit the roof over something like that. They'd have had your father locked up.'

The expression 'locked up' applied to his father must have annoyed him, even though I was the one using it and only jokingly.

'People do a lot of stupid things nowadays,' he replied reproachfully, as if I were one of those authorities or neighbors. 'Nowadays, everyone's afraid of everything, and people have very little freedom in their personal lives and less and less freedom in how they bring up their children. Before, we used to teach children all kinds of things as soon as they reached the age of reason, which is why it's called that, things that could be useful when they grew up, because in those days you never forgot that a child would one day be an adult. Not like now, it seems that adults are supposed to continue being children into old age, and idiotic cowardly children at that. That's why there's so much silliness everywhere.' He raised his fingers to his lips again and murmured: 'It's sad watching an era in decline, when one has known other far more intelligent eras. Where's it going to end? It will be one of the reasons I won't overly regret my departure, which, I believe, is quite close.'

'No, not that close, besides, who knows,' I answered, 'you'll probably outlive us all. No one knows who will die when, do they?' And when he didn't reply, I asked again: 'Do they?'

'No,' he agreed, 'but there is something called the calculation of probabilities, which works with some degree of accuracy. It would be an act of gratuitous cruelty if, at this point in my life, one of you were to die before me. It would be for all of you, but most of all for me. God forbid.' In his place, I would have touched wood. Not because I believe in wood, but simply as a gesture.

The conversation had taken a melancholy turn, which was precisely what we tried to avoid with any topic or subject that might serve to distract him while he waited for the night and for the day, and for all the subsequent nights and days, until there were no more. This was my last visit before going back to London, and I would not be back in Madrid for a while. 'Perhaps I'll never see him again,' I thought with dismay. (And I realized as I did so, that I was thinking the Spanish word 'desmayol meaning 'fainting fit,' but meaning the English word 'dismay.') And so I placed one hand on his shoulder, a gesture he liked and that calmed him, but this time I did so to calm myself, to feel his bones and to accompany his breathing.

'Anyway, what were you saying?' I went back to what had roused and entertained him a little. 'That your pistol is from your father's collection?'

'No, of course not. The whole collection disappeared years ago, when the lean times came. My father would make a few big business deals and in the ensuing euphoria spend all the profits and, as you know, invest them in foolish things. Then, when common sense returned, he'd more or less recover those losses, but there came a point when recovery was impossible. The few remaining pieces were sold at the start of the Civil War, and his collection of clocks and watches suffered the same fate. Some may even have been confiscated.'

'So where does the pistol come from?'

'I've had it since the War, it's a 7.65 caliber Astra De Luxe. It's quite nice for a Spanish pistol, rather ornate, with the barrel etched in silver and a mother-of-pearl handle. Why do you ask?'

'Oh, nothing, just curious. May I see it? I've never seen you handling it. Where is it?'

'I don't know,' he said at once, and it didn't sound like an excuse not to have to show it to me. 'The last time I had it in my hands, years ago now, I decided to hide it away somewhere, so that the grandchildren wouldn't ever stumble across it when they come here and start rummaging around in everything. You had your mother to keep a check on you, but she's not here any more. And I must have hidden it so well that I now have no idea where I put it. I've forgotten. It was complete with bullets, well-preserved and well-oiled. What do you want it for?' It's odd, it was as if he knew that I wanted it for myself. This wasn't quite true, I had done what I had to do with another borrowed weapon, and so I no longer needed it, but carrying a gun in one's pocket certainly gave a sense of security.

'No. I don't want it," I said. 'I was just curious. Why did you take the risk of keeping it after the Civil War? If they'd caught you with it during the Franco regime, if they'd searched the apartment, you'd have had it, especially with your record. Why did you keep it? Why do you still keep it, even though you can't remember where it is?'

My father remained silent for a moment, as if, perhaps, it was hard for him to give an answer or as if he needed to ponder his reply, I'm not sure. Then he said succinctly:

'You never know'

'You never know what?'

What you might need.'

He had always told me that, during the War, he'd been lucky- in one respect-to be able to stay in Madrid, consigned to administrative duties because of his short sight. And although he wore the uniform of the Republican Army, he had never been sent to the front and never fired a single shot. And he used to say how happy he was about that, because he could also be absolutely certain that he had never killed anyone, that he had never been in a position to kill anyone. I reminded him of this:

'You've always said how glad you were that you could be certain that, in the War, you'd never killed anyone, that you never had the chance. That doesn't quite tally with hanging on to a pistol afterwards, when things weren't so bad. I mean when life was less exposed and less chaotic, although during a dictatorship, of course, no one is safe. Why didn't you hand it in or get rid of it?'

'Because after you've lived through a war, you never know,' he said again. And then he fell silent, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, as if he were gathering the momentum to say something more, and so I waited. And he did say something more: 'Yes, I'm very glad that I never killed anyone. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't have if there'd been no other option. If any of you or your mother had been under threat of death and I could have prevented that, I'm sure I would have done so. When you were small, I mean, because now it's different, you can look after yourselves. I don't imagine I would kill for you now. Apart from the fact that I'm hardly in a position to do so-I mean, look at me-you're perfectly capable of doing whatever might be necessary. You don't need me for that any more. Besides, I wouldn't know if you deserved saving now, you lead your own lives and I don't know what you get up to. Before, it was different, I knew everything about you, when you were little and living at home. I had all the facts in hand, but not now. It's odd how your children become semi-strangers, there are lots of parents who won't accept that and stand staunchly by their children whatever the situation, even against all the evidence. I know the person you were and I think I can still recognize that person in you now. But I don't really know you as I knew that child, not at all; and it's the same with your brothers and your sister. Your mother, on the other hand, I knew until the end, and I would have killed for her until the end.' Now both mind and time were working perfectly, and after the briefest of pauses to mark the parenthesis, he returned to what we had been talking about before. 'You never know, never, and it may be that one day you might have to use a pistol. Look what happened in Europe during the Second World War. For a long time, we had no way of knowing if it would spread to Spain, despite Franco's promises, as if we could trust those, and the endless evasions and delaying tactics he used with Hitler. I don't know if you realize it, but during that War they had to use every resource they had, whatever it was, no one could keep back so much as a cartridge, whether legally or illegally acquired. It was much worse than our war in one sense. In another way, of course, it wasn't so bad. In a qualitative sense, the war here was worse.' Again he stopped and looked at me hard, although I had the feeling then that he wasn't seeing me at all, that he was looking as the blind do, without calculating distances. I noticed that he was excited by what he was about to say. 'But the thing I feel happiest about, Jacobo, is that no one ever died because of something I said or reported. Shooting someone, during a war or in self-defense, is bad, but at least you can go on living and not lose your decency or humanity, not necessarily. However, if someone dies because of something you said or, worse still, invented; if someone dies needlessly because of you; if you could have remained silent and allowed that person to go on living; if you spoke out when you should or could have said nothing and by doing so brought about a death, or several… I don't believe that's something you could live with, although many do, or seem to.'-'That was perhaps how it was before,' I had time to think or thought later on when I was flying back to London and remembering our conversation, 'my father still imagines he's living in a world in which deeds left some trace and in which conscience had a voice-not always, of course, but for the majority of people. Now, on the other hand, it's the other way round: it's easy to silence or gag the majority, sometimes it's not even necessary: it's even easier to persuade them that there's no reason to speak out. The tendency nowadays is to believe that one is innocent, to find some immediate justification for everything, and not to feel one has to answer for one's actions or, as we say in Spanish, "cargarse de razón," I don't know how exactly one would say that in English, but it doesn't matter, I've lost the habit of speaking that other language all the time, although tomorrow I'll have to. Of course, people nowadays can live with that and with far worse things. People whose consciences torment them are the exception, as are old-fashioned people who think: "Spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep and dreams," and other similarly pointless thoughts.'-My father went on: 'And in our War there was so much of that, so much treachery and so much poison, so many slanderers, defamers and professional rabble-rousers, all tirelessly dedicated to sowing and fomenting hatred and viciousness, envy, and a desire to exterminate, on both sides, especially on the winning side, but on both sides… it wasn't easy to be entirely clean in that respect, perhaps in that respect least of all. And it was even more difficult for anyone who wrote for a newspaper or spoke on the radio, as I did during the War. You can't imagine the things that were read or heard, not just during those three years, but for many years afterwards. One sentence was all it took to send someone to the firing squad or the gutter. And yet I'm sure that I never said or wrote one word that could have proved seriously prejudicial to anyone. Nor later either, in the strictly personal sphere of my life after that. I never gave away a secret or a confidence, however small, I never told anyone about what I knew from having seen or heard something if that might do harm and if I didn't need to tell it in order to save or exonerate someone. And that, Jacobo, is what pleases me most.' My father was, I thought, drawing up a balance sheet of his life before he died. And for a second I wondered if it really was as he said or if he was deceiving himself like a man of my time rather than a man of his, and that he might perhaps have let something slip which, later, had terrible consequences. It was impossible to know. Even he couldn't know that, it's simply not possible to remember everything, as if you were the Judge of that old and steadfast faith. And sometimes we never find out about the consequences. I thought of those 'careless talk' cartoons that Wheeler had shown me: how could a sailor possibly imagine that something he had told his girlfriend could result in the sinking of a ship full of his compatriots? There's never any way of knowing this, that one is saying farewell with no weight on one's conscience. Then I remembered something else and it occurred to me that it was a memory that would help him to convince himself.

'You never wanted to tell me the name of that writer who took part in the baiting of your friend Mares, for example,' I said. And there was no reason why you shouldn't tell me or anyone.'

He looked slightly surprised, as if he had completely forgotten about that conversation we'd had a long time ago, when I was still living in Madrid. And from what he went on to say, it did seem that he'd forgotten I even knew about that episode.

'You know about that.' And this was a mixture of statement and question.

'Yes. You told me once.'

'And I didn't want to tell you, eh?' This was clearly a question. 'I didn't want to tell you the name, eh?'

'No. Because of his wife and his daughters. You said you didn't want to risk being the indirect cause of someone later dragging the whole business up and rubbing their noses in it. Even though, if I remember rightly, his wife is dead now too.'

'Yes, they're both dead. But that doesn't change anything.' And he said in a murmur intended more for him than for me: 'I didn't want to tell you, you say. Good, yes, very good…'

He sat there thinking, and his blue eyes took on the fixed intense gaze that did not, in a way, see me. And a few seconds later, I had the impression that the act of recalling those people had again transported him back to a distant time when my mother was alive, and the kindly cheerful wife of that infamous man was being so very very good to us and, in particular, to her. I let two or three minutes pass in silence. He was not speaking now and he looked tired. Perhaps I should leave, even if that might be the last time we would see each other.

'I'm going, Papa,' I said, and I got up and kissed him on the forehead.

'Where?' he asked in astonishment, as if he thought it utterly absurd that I or any of his children should go anywhere.

'To my hotel and then tomorrow I'll catch the plane back to London.'

'Oh, you're off on a trip. Well, have a good journey, son.'

'I live in London now, Papa. Have you forgotten?'

'Ah, so you live in exile,' he said, without giving that last word any solemnity at all. 'Like the Greek gods.'

'The Greek gods?' I didn't know what he was referring to or what that remark had to do with anything. But he never lost the thread, at least I never saw him do so. He might abstract himself from time and people and circumstances, but his mind and his memory were always working, albeit, at the end, very much after their own fashion. Then again, all minds and memories do that.

'Don't you remember that Heine poem?' he said, and immediately began to recite the lines in German, from memory. He had learned the language as a boy, at school, which was possible in the 1920s, but unimaginable now, and he had always prided himself on being able to recite whole poems, by Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, the giants of German literature.

'No, Papa,' I said, interrupting him, 'I can't possibly remember something I've never known, and, besides, I don't understand what you're saying. I never learned German, remember?'

'Honestly. You never learned German,' he replied with slight paternal scorn, as if not knowing German were an oddity, almost a defect. 'What kind of education did you have?' And he went on to explain, out of sympathy for my ignorance and out of enthusiasm for this poem from his youth: 'The poet sees a bank of white clouds in the middle of the night and these seem to him, as he puts it, like "colossal statues of the gods made out of luminous marble." Then he realizes that they are the gods, Chronos, Zeus, Hera, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Phoebus Apollo, Hephaestus and Hebe, grown old and at the mercy of the elements, cast down and numb with cold in their exile. "No," exclaims the poet, "these are no clouds!'" And my father began translating the poem for me, drawing it slowly out of his memory. 'They are the gods of Hellas, the very gods who once so blithely ruled the world, but who now, supplanted and deceased, ride like giant specters the clouds of midnight…' But the words insisted on coming to him in the German of his childhood, or perhaps he found it wearisome having to translate, and so he lapsed back into German, and, at the time, I understood nothing more.

Later on, after his death, I tried to identify the words I had listened to without understanding them. I searched out a bilingual edition of 'The Greek Gods,' in German and English (I couldn't find one in Spanish), and it was doubtless this verse that he had translated into my language in tentative extempore fashion: 'Nein, nimmermehr, das sind keine Wolken! Das sind sie selber, die Götter von Hellas, die einst sofreudig die Welt beherrschten, dock jetzt, verdrangt und verstorben, als ungeheure Gespenster dahinziehn am mitternachtlichen Himmel …' I assume he had a good accent. And I also noticed two other brief passages that he must have recited in German that day. In one, the poet addressed Zeus and said to him, more or less: 'Not even the gods rule eternally, the old gods are driven out and supplanted by the youngjust as you yourself once deposed your grey-haired father…' The other was an image applied to that troop of disoriented deities adrift in the dark, whom he describes as: 'Dead shadows who wander the night, fragile as the mist that the wind drives away.' Those words must have come from his lips when I was there with him, even though, at the time, I couldn't understand them. And I wondered what he would have thought then, as he spoke them.

While he sat, absorbed in his own recitation, I bent down and kissed him again before leaving, this time on the cheek, as if we were bullfighters, and I placed my hand once more on his shoulder for a moment, like a silent farewell, while he was walking into the mist that the wind drives away, or into that exile in which one has to leave even one's own first name behind.

I had also managed not to think too much about Luisa until I was on the plane, in business class, an Iberia flight, which was, characteristically and infuriatingly, an hour late in leaving. My not thinking about Luisa had been helped by the fact that she didn't once suggest we have lunch or supper together, and I didn't insist or protest or express regret; after what I had done, I preferred to avoid such a meeting-I didn't feel I deserved it, and although I very much wanted to see her, I found it easy enough to resist and to pretend. And so we only met briefly and occasionally at the apartment when I went to pick up or return the children or stayed with them for a while until they went to bed. And once they were in bed, she never offered me a drink or invited me to sit down for a moment to chat. She didn't eject me with excuses or with words, but by her attitude: she was constantly doing things, going back and forth, cleaning, washing dishes and glasses, answering the phone, tidying, picking up toys and clothes and notebooks and pencils-children always leave everything in a mess and never cease creating chaos-and it wasn't as it used to be when we lived together, when I would follow her from room to room, talking about something or other or telling or asking her something, as husbands often do trail through the house or apartment after their wives, who are more active physically and tend not to sit still in one place for very long, especially if they are mothers. I no longer felt I had that right, I mean, to go into just any room, not even into the kitchen, even accompanied by her or, rather, following in her footsteps. And so we would simply exchange a few words about the children or about my father's health, for she always asked after him, adding with feeling, 'I really must go and see him, I'll go this week without fail, be sure to give him my love,' and I would leave, having given her a discreetly affectionate, that is almost friendly, kiss on each cheek, to which she responded passively and rather mechanically, hardly noticing.

Her mind was elsewhere and I knew where. She seemed rather subdued on the last few occasions I saw her. I thought: 'She's heard that she won't be seeing Custardoy for a while, a great disappointment that's caught her unawares and which she's still trying to absorb, so there's one less incentive now, probably the biggest incentive, the one that helped her to get through the day, to wake up filled with hope and go to bed contented, but that incentive will be missing from her life for good-that's something she doesn't yet know, nor that she will never see the man again or only if they happen to meet by chance; that knowledge will come later, gradually, whole weeks will pass, or possibly even more, before she fully understands that it's all over, that this isn't just an extended absence, but a final separation, like the one she has been inflicting on me for a long time now. And then she will look out the window as I sometimes look out of mine at the lazy London night and across the square, its pale darkness barely lit by those white streetlights that imitate the always thrifty light of the moon, and a little further off, at the lights of the elegant hotel and of the houses that shelter families or men and women on their own, each enclosed behind a protective yellow rectangle, as Luisa and I would seem to be to anyone watching us; and beyond the trees and the statue at my carefree, dancing neighbor, who, from now on, will always remind me of Custardoy, because these resemblances and affinities work reciprocally, and no one is immune to them: I will no longer like that happy dancing individual quite so much: he may unwittingly have saved a life, but, in doing so, has become contaminated by that same life. And neither Luisa nor I will dare to think, when alone: "I'll be more myself," not now that we've seen each other again and brought each other a new sadness, although she doesn't know that her current sadness comes from me.'

Strangely, given that I was the cause of the newly begun solitude that would gradually grow, I allowed myself to feel slightly sorry, seeing her like that, in such low spirits, lethargic, apathetic, possibly in the early stages of a lasting period of languor and decline, the loss of someone we love marks us very deeply, much more than that of someone who loved us, and I was sure now that for Luisa, Custardoy belonged in the first category. At least I was not so cynical as to tell myself it was for her own good, although it certainly would be in the long term: I knew now that it was, above all, for my good, for my relative tranquility, my peace of mind while I was far away, so that I wouldn't have to worry too much about her or about my children, and so that I need not give up the fanciful hopes I still clung on to, despite all the time that had elapsed. And that was something I did think about in the plane with a clarity I had so far avoided: that I had been selfish and abusive and inconsiderate, that I had meddled in her life in the worst possible way, behind her back, without her knowledge, not just without consulting her on what could or should be done, but without her even having spoken to me about a problem that she didn't see as a problem, but possibly as a solution. I had acted like some nineteenth-century father with regard to his daughter, I had gone over her head as if she were a minor, not by approaching the lowlife in question and paying him to disappear, as had perhaps been the tradition of wealthy authoritarian fathers in that century, but by threatening him with death and by injuring him. I began to find the whole thing unbelievable, that I should have behaved like that, without a flicker of conscience, like a savage or as if I were a believer in the pragmatic idea that if something needs to be done then it's best just to do it, so that regardless of what happens next, the deed is done and there's no going back ('I have done the deed'). Officially, I knew nothing about Custardoy, at least not as far as Luisa knew, or indeed anyone else, apart from her sister Cristina, whom I would have to warn, by phone again from London, as soon as she was back from her few days away-I couldn't remember if she'd said it would be a week or longer, I had already tried phoning each day during what remained of my stay in Madrid, just in case, but without success-I hadn't even been able to speak to her husband; and I kept calling during the first few days after my return, trying different times until I finally found her in.

'Cristina, it's Jacques, your brother-in-law, Jaime,' I said when she answered the phone, on my twentieth attempt. 'I'm back in London, but I wanted to bring you up to date on an important matter. Have you spoken to Luisa?'

'No, not yet, I've only just gotten home, my trip lasted longer than expected. Why? Has something happened?'

'Nothing bad, no. During my stay in Madrid I sorted out that business between Custardoy and her, at least I think I did, we'll probably have to wait a bit to be sure.'

'Really?' she replied, and there was curiosity and undoubted approval in her voice. 'How? What did you do? Did you speak to him? Or to her? Tell me.'

'That's what I wanted to say, that it's best if you don't know and absolutely essential that Luisa doesn't. I mean she must never even find out that I knew anything, or that you told me anything. That story's over now, or very nearly. What I absolutely don't want is for her ever to suspect that I had anything to do with it. As far as she's concerned I don't even know of Custardoy's existence, she never once mentioned him to me, and I want her to continue believing that. Now and always. If, one day, you were to mention our conversation, even if it's in ten years' time, she might still put two and two together and never speak to me again, despite the kids. She might never speak to you again either. I may have been the one who did the deed, but she would probably think that you were part of it too, that you had provoked or prompted me to act. You understand, don't you? If you betray me, I'd have no qualms about betraying you too.'

Cristina clearly did understand, but she was still curious.

'You are keeping your cards close to your chest. Whatever did you do to him? You needn't worry, if you've managed to get rid of him, I'll be the first to celebrate and safeguard your achievement. But surely if we're both going to keep quiet about it, it hardly matters if I know everything. What did you say to the guy? What did you do to him? Come on, tell me, given that it was all done at my instigation.'

'As I said, it's best not to talk about it. I prefer him to be the only one who knows, so that if by some stroke of bad luck they should meet later on and she should corner him, he'd be the only one who could tell Luisa what happened, not that I think he would, it wouldn't be worth his while and it would merely be his word against mine, with no way of corroborating the facts. It's not that I don't trust you, now, I mean. But you never know. One day, you might be angry with me for some reason and want to harm me. If something is best not known, then it's best that no one knows about it, not even your accomplice. Why else do you think criminals are always bumping people off?'

Cristina took this well, she laughed and didn't press me further. She said only:

'Don't worry, I won't say anything to Luisa. I hope you're right and that this story is over. I'll act surprised if she mentions it, the break-up I mean. She might be having a rough time and want to get it off her chest or just talk to someone. And if something has happened to Custardoy, I'll be bound to find out somehow, you know how people gossip.'

'No, I don't think you will find out. He's not in Madrid at the moment and he won't be around for several weeks at least. And when he does come back, he'll invent some tale, if, that is, he still bears the marks of our encounter. A garage door perhaps, or a bollard.' I realized that I had already said too much, it's so easy to let your tongue run away with you, especially when you're boasting, and I was boasting a little, even though several days had passed: I did feel slightly proud of my exploit, pistol in hand, and had no problem forgetting that the word 'exploit' is entirely misplaced when the other party was unarmed. I knew perfectly well that such private bragging was unforgivable, especially after what I discovered on my arrival in London, or just before. And yet that's how it was, and I couldn't help myself; I imagine it must happen to any otherwise nonviolent person who, when forced to use violence, meets with success. And so I added: 'Not that I'm saying I did anything to him, or that anything happened to him. Anything bad, I mean.' (In that brief conversation I had trotted out some of the classic lines recommending denial, ignorance and silence, appropriate to espionage and conspiracies and criminality, to the clandestine and the underhand: 'It's best if you know nothing; then, if they interrogate you, you'll be telling the truth when you say you know nothing, the truth is easy, it has more force, it's more believable, the truth persuades.' And: 'If you know only about your part of the job, even if they catch you or you fail, the plan can still go ahead.' Not to mention: 'Your ignorance will be your protection, so don't ask any more questions, don't ask, it will be your salvation and your guarantee of safety.' And even: 'You know the score, I've never spoken to you or said anything. This conversation and this phone call never took place, you haven't even heard these words because I didn't say them. And even though you can hear the words now, I'm not saying them.')

Cristina laughed again, perhaps because she was glad to think that her sister was now out of danger.

'You sound very mysterious and a touch threatening,' she said, half-serious and half-joking. 'This isn't the Jaime I know. It would seem that London and being alone there suits you. Just one thing, whatever you've done, I'm not your accomplice. So there's no need to bump me off.'

All this happened days later, when I was back in London again, and feeling more anxious and that the situation had changed for the worse. What I was thinking about on that return flight was that Luisa had still said nothing about herself right up until the last moment. On the final day, on the eve of my departure, I had gone to the hotel to change after visiting my father and then to Luisa's apartment to say goodbye to the children and, in passing, to her.

'So, when will you be back again?' Guillermo had demanded in accusing tones, even as Marina was insisting that I take her with me, up in the air.

'This time,' I had lied, unaware then that I wasn't lying, 'I'll be back soon, I promise.' And I had likewise promised Marina that, on my next trip, I would take her with me to that large island, knowing full well that small children barely remember what's said to them from one day to the next, one of their many privileges.

That was the sole occasion when Luisa seemed about to invite me to sit down in the living room for a while, as if she had suddenly realized that we wouldn't see each other again for some time and that we hadn't had a single proper conversation; that she hadn't asked me about my life in London or about my work, my habits, my prospects or my general state of mind or about my friendships or possible lovers (on that last point I could have declined to answer, just as she had done), not even about the slovenly, dirty, drunken or crazy-and definitely pantyless-women who had possibly dripped blood in my house or in Wheeler's house and who had caused her such amusement. Her lack of curiosity, her lack of interest in me, had been very marked during my brief stay, and were it not for what I had done behind her back, for my brutal interference in her life-in a way I had ruined or torn down the life she was trying to rebuild-and for my consequent feeling that I was in her debt, such indifference would have been more than enough reason for me to feel offended and to mutter darkly to myself about it. She, however, was so distracted and doubtless so immersed in her own story that she didn't even find it odd, my apparent resignation to the situation or my excessively discreet behavior. She knew me well, probably better than anyone. She knew I was respectful and certainly not inclined to make a nuisance of myself, that I accepted what was given willingly and did not fight for what was denied to me, that my pride kept me from pestering anyone and that I acted in a roundabout way to achieve my ends, lingering and delaying for however long it took. Whichever way you looked at it, though, it was very strange that with time to spare I hadn't made more of an effort to see her alone, that I'd left all the initiative to her and taken a back seat, that I'd let the days pass without making myself a more obvious or visible presence and without demanding that we meet alone. All of these things should have made her suspicious, and yet they didn't. Her mind was otherwise occupied, doubtless with Custardoy, first with the incomprehensible excitement he aroused in her, and perhaps, too, with the tension she felt between desire and distrust-she must have seen that choosing a man like him would always, at least in part, be inadvisable-then with her disquiet at his abrupt and unexpected departure with barely a word of explanation, with her growing unease over his delay in phoning her, for he had perhaps not yet, as I had ordered, given any sign of life since his disappearance. ('While you're away, only call her now and then, and make those calls less and less frequent'), and when you wait in vain for something it does take on a degree of urgency and occupies all your time and fills up every space: you expect the doorbell to ring at any moment and each moment becomes intensely long and oppressive, like a knee digging into your chest, like lead upon the soul, until exhaustion overwhelms you and gives you a slight respite.

Perhaps it was precisely that kind of truce brought on by weariness that allowed her to look around for an instant and to see me, to remember who I was and to realize that I'd be gone the next day, and that she would have allowed me to pass through without-so to speak-making the most of me; that I was still there that night and could serve as a way of killing time and diverting her for a few minutes-with my stories about London, with comments or anecdotes about a world of which she knew nothing-from her obsessive thoughts that continued unabated. She would probably only have listened to me with half an ear, not even a whole one, like someone vaguely aware of the murmur of a steady comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that, when he does finally look up, it alone seems to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears; or like someone sleeping with one eye open who thinks he can hear and connect with the languid murmur of the river that speaks calmly or indifferently, or perhaps the indifference comes from his own weariness and his own sleeplessness and his dreams that are just beginning, even if he believes himself to be wide awake; or like someone who allows himself to be infected and drawn in by an insignificant humming that reaches him from afar, across a courtyard or a square, or when he happens to go into a public toilet and hears a happy man humming as he carefully parts his hair with a wet comb ('Nanna naranniaro nannara nanniaro,' and then he can't help but add meaning and words to that catchy tune, if he knows it: 'For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong.')

That is how Luisa would have listened to me, inattentively, if we had ever had the brief conversation she was on the point of proposing. I had already said goodbye to the kids in their respective beds, and left them, not sleeping, but about to fall asleep. I had closed their bedroom doors and said to Luisa, who was waiting in the corridor:

'Right, I'm off. I'm leaving tomorrow' Then I had gently touched her chin so as to study her profile and added: 'Your black eye's nearly gone. Be a bit more careful in future.' The bruise was barely visible now, apart from one small area that was still slightly yellow, but only someone who had seen how it looked before would have noticed it.

'Oh, of course, you're leaving.' And judging from the slightly wistful tone in which she said this, it seemed to me that she would probably miss me in a vague kind of way, now that she would be spending more time with the children and have fewer distractions. 'We haven't really seen much of each other, you've hardly told me anything about yourself-you caught me at a bad time, with a lot of previous commitments and a lot of work, things I couldn't cancel or change, if you'd given me a bit of advance warning that you were coming…'

It was an apology of sorts, she was the one feeling slightly in my debt, but only slightly, because one does usually try to accommodate someone who's only going to be around for a few days, and she hadn't. She seemed sad and distracted, as if filled with bad presentiments or, worse, a prescience of bad things to come. She was quite serene in her despondency, like someone who has thrown in the towel before receiving a single punch, like someone who knows what's about to happen. She must have been convinced that something strange was going on with Custardoy, whom she would probably call Esteban; true, he did occasionally travel and spend days or weeks observing and studying paintings in various places, but such a sudden departure wasn't normal-without saying goodbye or seeing each other-nor was the ensuing long silence. I imagined with satisfaction that he must be following my instructions to the letter, or had perhaps gone even further: yes, it was quite possible that he hadn't phoned her again since that first time, after his supposed arrival in wherever it was he had told her he had gone. He might even had told her he was in Baltimore, when he hadn't, in fact, stirred from Madrid. I really didn't care, just as long as he did as he was told and disappeared for good.

'How are you?' I asked. 'You seem a bit down. Has something happened in the last few days?'

'No, nothing,' she replied, shaking her head slightly. 'A minor disappointment, nothing important. I'll get over it soon enough.'

'Can I do anything about it? Is it about anyone I know?'

'No, not at all. It's someone you don't know, someone new. And anyway, it's not his fault either, it was unavoidable.' She paused for a second, then added: 'It's odd; now there'll be more and more of my people whom you don't know, not even by name, and so there'll be no point in my telling you about them or mentioning them. The same thing will happen with your people. And that hasn't happened for years, or only rarely. It's strange, when you live with someone, you keep up to date without any difficulty at all, without making any special effort, and then suddenly, or, rather, gradually, you know nothing about the people who come after. I know nothing about your friends in London, for example, or about the colleagues you work with every day. You said it was quite a small group, didn't you? And that one of them was a young woman, half-Spanish, is that right? How do you get along with them? I'm not even entirely sure what it is you do.' And as she said this, she waved her arm in the direction of the living room, not in order to show me the door so that I could leave, but as if she were suggesting we go in there for a moment before I left so that I could tell her about my work, or maybe simply so that she could listen to me talking. Perhaps she had realized that I could help her get through a few minutes of her waiting or lift the lead that weighed ceaselessly upon her soul. I thought of asking about the young gypsy mother and her children, who were, in a sense, her people and whom I knew about from when she and I were still living together and sharing a daily life, and whom I'd thought about while in that other country.

We started walking in that direction, with her leading. We were about to sit down at home and talk, and, while it lasted, this would seem the most natural thing in the world, with none of the artificiality that would have surrounded an arrangement to meet at a restaurant or anywhere else. Then her cell phone rang, the phone whose number other people knew and I did not, and she hurried on into the living room, almost ran, she had left it there, in her handbag, and I had left my raincoat and gloves in the room too, draped on the back of an armchair. I let her go ahead, of course, I didn't hurry, but since we had been walking along together, I didn't stop or hold back either, my discretion being limited to not actually going into the room, to lingering on the threshold, looking at the books on a shelf, my books, which I might, on one not too distant day, have to take away with me, although where I didn't yet know.

'Hello?' I heard her say, her spirits suddenly buoyant, as if the voice at the other end had managed to drive away her melancholy (or was it sorrow?) with just a word or two. I was sure it was Custardoy, calling for the penultimate or antepenultimate time. 'Yes. Are you OK?' A pause. 'Yes, I understand. Although, to be honest, your leaving like that, so suddenly, did throw me a bit… And you've no idea how long you're going to be away? That's a bit odd, isn't it? Them not giving you a fixed deadline, I mean.' She instinctively moved away from me and lowered her voice, so that I would hear as little as possible. However, since she didn't want to be rude and close the door on me or go into another room, her murmured comments were still audible. I missed a few words, but not her tone of voice. She wasn't saying much, Custardoy was the one doing most of the talking, and the conversation was rather brief, as if he were in a hurry (he was obeying my instructions to be distant and abrupt and concise). 'But that just leaves me completely in the dark. And what am I supposed to do if I can't even call you?' said Luisa almost pleadingly and raising her voice, only to lower it at once and add by way of explanation: 'Look, Jaime's here at the moment, he came to say goodbye, he's flying out tomorrow, he was just about to leave, why don't you call me back in five minutes?' Another longer pause. 'No, I don't understand. You mean you've got to go out right now, this very minute?' For a few moments I couldn't hear what she was saying, only intermittent words and odd phrases. 'No, I don't understand the situation; first of all, that rushed departure and now all these difficulties. I'm perfectly aware that we haven't known each other very long, and I don't presume to think that I know you inside out or anything, but I'm not used to this kind of behavior from you, it's never happened before. And you sound strange, different.' She fell silent again, then spoke almost in a whisper, before raising her voice to say: 'Look, I don't know what's going on with you, it's as if I were talking to someone else entirely. It's as if you were suddenly afraid of me, and I'd hate to be any kind of burden to you.'-'It isn't you he's afraid of, my love,' I thought. 'It's me.'-'Fine. If that's how you feel. It's up to you. You're the only one who can know how you feel. I'm not a mind-reader.' And her last words, which followed immediately after, were spoken coldly. 'Fine. If that's what you want. Goodbye.'

In other circumstances I wouldn't have enjoyed hearing that conversation at all, hearing Luisa pleading with that other man, very nearly begging him, before reacting with wounded dignity to his evasiveness or indifference. But I had prepared that scene, almost set it up and dictated it, as if I were Wheeler, who doubtless devoted no small part of his time to the preparation or composition of prized moments, or, so to speak, to guiding his numerous empty or dead moments towards a few pre-planned and carefully considered dialogues in which he had, of course, memorized his own part. Except that I hadn't intervened in that conversation, or, rather, Custardoy had spoken for me, for he was, after all, not using his own words, but those which I, like an Iago, had led him to say or obliged him to pronounce. Knowing that I was there, close by, must have increased his fear as well as his hatred of me. My presence had been a complete coincidence, but he would not have experienced it like that, he would have thought I was watching over the whole process, keeping an eye on things. So much the better for me.

Luisa came over to where I was standing, the cell phone still in her hand, and the look on her face was a mixture of puzzlement, resignation and annoyance. 'You've still got a long way to go,' I thought, 'you'll know worse despair yet. And then you'll seek me out, because I'm the person you know best and the one who will always be here.'

'Right, I'd better be going,' I said, picking up my raincoat and gloves. She had initially asked the caller to phone back in five minutes, ready, at a moment's notice, to sacrifice our conversation, the one we had unexpectedly been about to have. Missing that conversation, having it or not, was only of secondary importance to her. And at that point, it was to me as well. My chance would not come on that trip, I would have to wait quite a while longer.

'I'm sorry,' she murmured. 'Problems at work. People behave in the strangest way. They say they'll do one thing, then forget all about it and disappear.' She didn't need to give me any false explanations. The conversation had clearly been of a personal nature, and nothing to do with work. I knew what was going on, and she as yet did not. I didn't mind being so far ahead of her, I didn't mind deceiving her. 'This isn't the Jaime I know,' Cristina would say to me later on, and I had already thought the same thing: 'No, I'm not. I am more myself.'

Luisa accompanied me to the door. We kissed each other on the cheek, but this time she embraced me too. I sensed that she did so more out of a feeling of vulnerability, or a sudden sense of abandonment and loss, than out of genuine affection. Nevertheless, I returned her embrace warmly and enthusiastically. I certainly didn't mind embracing her, I never had.

'Come, come back to me, I'll be patient, I'll wait; but don't delay very much longer,' I thought when I was on the plane, remembering that farewell. And then I quoted to myself a line from a recent poem in English that I'd read during one of my trips with Tupra, on a train: 'Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.'

That was the last thing that happened before everything changed. I asked the stewardess for an English newspaper; I needed to get used to that other country again. I hadn't even looked at a Spanish newspaper that morning, I was still too involved in my own thoughts to bother with the outside world, although a copy of El País lay unopened on my lap. The stewardess offered me The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, and I chose the first two because I can't stand the dreadful decadence into which the third one has fallen under its present Antipodean regime. I glanced at the front page of The Guardian, and my gaze fixed instantly-familiar names always call to us, immediately attract our attention-on a report that must have made my eyes start from their sockets and which sent me straight to the front page of The Independent for reassurance and confirmation that this wasn't some absurd sick joke or a figment of someone's imagination. Both papers carried the story, so it must be true, and although it wasn't a headline or a long item, the report was given due prominence in both: 'Dick Dearlove Arrested Following Boy's Violent Death.' Obviously neither headline said 'Dick Dearlove'; Dearlove is just the name I have taken to calling him by.

I turned immediately to the relevant pages and read them fearfully, eagerly, then with a sense of horror and growing repugnance towards Tupra and myself-in fact, a feeling of self-disgust swept over me at once. The information was incomplete and the facts confused and did little to clarify the succinct, not to say hermetic statements made by Dearlove's spokesman and his lawyers, who were the people who had reported the incident to New Scotland Yard on the morning after the night of the murder, which made one think that they must have had a few hours to weigh up the situation and prepare and agree the best line of defense, about which, on the other hand, they gave little or no detail. In England, as I understand it, unlike in Spain, where there's an irresponsible clamor of voices right from the start, or even a verbal lynching, they take the confidentiality of legal proceedings very seriously indeed and never release any evidence or testimony that will form part of a trial, and no one who might be called on to testify is allowed to give his or her version of events to the press prior to that trial. Lawyers and journalists were thus limited to making veiled hints and prudent, rather discreet speculations as to what actually happened. They suggested a possible kidnapping attempt, a possible burglary, or even a settling of accounts between lovers. The victim was seventeen and apparently either Bulgarian or Russian (no one knew for sure, nor if he had a British passport, although this seemed unlikely) and he was referred to only by his initials, which, curiously enough, were the same as those of his killer, let's say R.D. Whatever the truth of the matter-and I saw at once what must have happened-one thing was sure: two nights ago the singer had stuck a spear, one of several he had hanging in a room next to the dining room, into the chest and throat of that very young young man. This doubtless meant that televisions around the world, especially those in Britain, but in my own country too, not to mention the millions of anonymous or pseudonymous voices on the Internet, would already have had a whole day to dissect the affair. But I had seen neither television nor Internet.

I briefly regretted that the plane had no low, sensationalist rag like The Sun on board, The Sun belonging, of course, to the same Antipodean empire as The Times and being therefore more given to scandal, moralizing and rumor: such newspapers would be rubbing their hands with glee and prepared to risk breaking any law if it meant selling more copies. I had a glance at El País, just in case, but its treatment of the matter was sober and concise and revealed nothing more than its London colleagues claimed to know. My regret was short-lived or was, I should say, merely a moment of naiveté, because I didn't need to know the details or the circumstances or the background or the motives, or even the psychological explanations being pondered by journalists or whoever. It was clear to me that Tupra had projected onto that idol the maximum biographical horror, had plunged him into narrative disgust as if into a butt of disgusting wine, had lit a torch for him and inscribed him in letters of fire on the list of those afflicted by the K-M or Killing-Murdering or Kennedy-Mansfield curse, as it was known in our little group with no name and who knows, by a process of mimesis, in some other loftier place; that Reresby or Ure or Dundas had condemned Dearlove not just to a few years in prison, which, for someone as famous as Dearlove, with such a sordid crime behind him, would be a slow incessant hell-I mean slower and more incessant than for other people-unless, and this was the best-case scenario, those years were interrupted by a swift death at the hands of other prisoners; he had condemned him also to seeing his entire life story and achievements lost beneath a quick lick of grey or off-white or off-color paint, its whole trajectory and construction plunged into immediate oblivion, condemned him to knowing that whenever anyone mentioned or read or heard his name, he or she would always instantly associate it with that final crime. Mothers would even use his name to warn their unwary offspring and, even worse, the message they gave would become distorted and exaggerated over time: 'Be careful who you mix with and who you go around with, you can't trust anyone. Remember what Dickie Dearlove did to that young Russian lad-he took him to his house and slit him open.' And I was as sure of this as I was that Tupra would already have in his possession a recording, a film of these events about which the press were now hypothesizing and which were known to almost no one else; it would doubtless show the whole sequence, from the point where the young Bulgarian, R.D, arrived at Dearlove's house up to the furious, fearsome moment when the latter stuck a spear in him, causing his instant death, although it must have taken two blows-one in the throat and the other in the chest, or possibly the other way round-to silence him completely and put an end to him; and then, perhaps, still blinded by rage and gripped by a childish sense of triumph (a very shortlived emotion and one that he would deplore for the rest of his days), searching the young man's body for the cell phone or tiny camera with which he would have taken his compromising photos and which Dearlove had failed to find when he playfully frisked him on arrival, perhaps because Tupra had told the boy he wouldn't need to carry a phone or camera because a camera would have been hidden somewhere in the house prior to that amorous or commercial assignation, like the gun that was famously waiting for Al Pacino in a restaurant restroom in the first episode of that great masterpiece in three parts, each part better than the last.

Tupra wouldn't need to make use of that tape or DVD (he hadn't, on that occasion, recorded and kept it for future use) in order to persuade Dearlove later on to do or not do something; the important thing had been to make Dearlove aware of just one of the deceptions of which he was the victim and of the irreparable act he had committed in response, so irreparable and unconcealable that his punishment would not be long in coming. Tupra would keep that video simply in order to have it and to watch it when he was alone or to revel in the perfect execution of his plan, the prize item in his collection. It wouldn't be of any further use to him, given that the main deed had been revealed as soon as it was done: Dearlove had done the deed, and the whole world knew about it. He had killed a young man with a spear.

In the final analysis, though, the person who had instigated that killing was me. Or perhaps not exactly: I had invented, conceived, described or dictated it, imagined the mise-en-scene. I had given Tupra the idea-no one is ever fully aware of how dangerous it is to give other people ideas, and it happens all the time, at all hours and in all places-and I couldn't help wondering how many more of my interpretations or translations might have had consequences of which I knew nothing, how many and which ones. I had spent a long time passing judgment on a daily basis and with ever greater ease and unconcern, listening to voices and looking at faces, in the flesh or hidden in the station-studio or on video, saying who could be trusted and who could not, who would kill and who would allow himself to be killed and why, who would betray and who would remain loyal, who would lie and who would meet with failure or with only average success in life, who irritated me and who aroused my pity, who was a poseur and who I warmed to, and what probabilities each individual carried in his veins, just like a novelist who knows that whatever his characters say or tell, whatever is attributed to them or whatever they are made to do, will go no further than his novel and will harm no one, because, however real they may seem, they will continue to be a fiction and will never interfere with anyone real (with anyone in his right mind, that is). But that was not my case: I wasn't using pen and paper to write about those who have never existed or trod the earth or traversed the world, I was describing and deciphering flesh-and-blood people and pontificating and making predictions about them, and I saw now that regardless of whether I was right or wrong, what I said could have disastrous consequences and determine their fate if placed in the hands of someone like Tupra, who, on this occasion, had not restricted himself to being only Sir Punishment or Sir Thrashing, but Sir Death and Sir Cruelty and, possibly, Sir Vengeance. And I had not been his instrument, but something less common and perhaps worse, his inspiration, an innocent whisper in his ear, an imprudent and unwitting Iago. I didn't care nor was I particularly interested in what grudge he bore Dearlove or if he had laid that trap for him-my trap-on his own initiative or as part of some outlandish State mission or on the well-paid orders of some private private individual. That was the least of it. What troubled me most was the thought that he had put into practice my plan, which wasn't a plan at all, and that in order to ensure its success, he had shown no qualms about sacrificing the life of a young man: 'Strange to leave even one's own first name behind,' indeed, and the victim didn't even have a name, only the initials R.D Worryingly or improbably, I hadn't until then noticed the most serious implication of all and-as I realized at once, with the three newspapers unfolded on my lap in that plane-the one that would torment me for the rest of my life. And however tenuous I tried to make and succeeded in making that link later on, and however tenuous it did in fact become-for that is what would happen, it would seem to me remote and accidental, on my part at least, and my feelings of responsibility would diminish, and it would all seem like a dream, and with luck I would deceive myself entirely and make it disappear, especially when the last stubborn rim was finally erased and I was able to say to myself one day: 'But that was in another country'-that young Russian man who did not even know of my existence, just as I had known nothing of his while it lasted, had died because of my prediction or hypothesis or fantasy, because of what I had said and reported, and now, in my head, I would always have the words: 'For I am myself my own fever and pain.'

The first thing I did when I walked through the front door of the apartment, which, for a while, came to be my home, ingenuously furnished by an Englishwoman I never met, was to dial Tupra's home number. It was the weekend and no one would be at the building with no name, at least in theory, for I knew I wasn't the only one who went there out of office hours, to finish off some task or report or to rummage around or investigate. As had happened when I phoned him from Madrid, a woman's voice answered. I uttered the name I found repellent to use, Bertie, in order to show my familiarity with him-not that I needed to; my knowing his home number was indication enough.

'He's out of London at the moment,' the voice said. 'May I ask who's calling?' I didn't have his cell phone number, which Tupra guarded jealously, and, besides, he was of the opinion that everything could wait 'as used to happen in the old days.'

'Jack Deza,' I said, and I unintentionally pronounced the 'z' as a Spaniard would, having got used to doing so again while in Spain, it would have sounded like 'Daetha' or 'Deatha' to an English ear. 'I work with him, and it's very important. Would you mind giving me his cell phone number? I've just got back from Madrid and I have something urgent and of great interest to tell him.'

'No, I'm sorry, I don't think I can. He's the only one who can do that,' replied the woman. And she added slightly impertinently, which made me suspect that she was Beryl, although I hadn't spoken to her for long enough at Wheeler's supper to be able to recognize her voice, which wasn't particularly young, although not old either: 'If you don't have it, it must be because he didn't consider it necessary.'

'Are you Beryl?' I asked, at the risk of causing my boss some domestic or conjugal upset if she wasn't. Not that I cared any more; he would soon cease to be my boss-I had made my decision. Or almost, nothing is sure until it's over and done with.

'Why do you ask?' was her reply. And in a tone of voice that seemed half-stern and half-mocking, she said: 'You don't need to know who I am.'

'Perhaps Tupra has forbidden Beryl, if she is Beryl and she must be,' I thought, 'from telling anyone that they're an item again, still less that they're living together, or perhaps they prefer to think of themselves like that, rather than as married, enjoying the clandestine nature of their situation.' I remembered her long legs and her unusual smell, pleasant and very sexual, which were perhaps the things that drew Tupra back to her again and again; sometimes our weaknesses are for the simplest of things, the things we cannot give up. I was about to say: 'If you are Beryl, we've met before. I'm a friend of Sir Peter Wheeler's. We were introduced at his house some time ago now' I resisted, however, thinking that if I said any more, it would only make matters worse.

'I apologize, I didn't mean to be impertinent,' I said. 'Could you perhaps tell me when Bertie will be back?'

'I don't know exactly, but I imagine that if you work with him, you'll see him in the office on Monday. I assume he'll be there.'

This was a way of telling me not to phone him again at home on a weekend. I thanked her and hung up; I would have to wait. I opened the window to air the apartment after so many days away, quickly unpacked my bag, did a little dusting, examined the accumulated mail, and then, when evening was coming on and I didn't really know what else to do-when you've just arrived home, life lacks its normal rhythm-I went over to the window and saw my neighbor opposite dancing, beyond the trees whose tops filled the center of that square: nothing had changed-why should it, time deceives us when we go off traveling, it always seems longer than it was. His usual two women friends were with him, the white woman and the black or mulatto woman, a well-matched trio, the women must be each other's ġe-bryd-guma, with him as their link, another similarity with Custardoy, who enjoyed taking two women to bed with him at the same time, although not, I think, with Luisa-where would Custardoy have gone with his shattered hand, where would he really have gone, it was no affair of mine and I didn't care, just as long as he met my conditions and kept away from her and, most important of all, never told her of my intervention. The three dancers were performing some very fast steps, a kind of flamenco-style stamping or perhaps it was tap-I couldn't guess what loud music he would be playing in his living room on a Saturday-because they each had their right arm raised to hold something in place on their respective shoulders, some small and apparently living moving object, and this time I couldn't resist picking up my binoculars and when I managed to focus, I saw to my amazement that each of them did, in fact, have a very tiny dog draped around their shoulders, now I don't know anything about the different brands or, rather, breeds of dog, but the man's dog was snub-nosed and hairy, and the women's were more like rats, with pointed snouts, one of those scrawny dogs with a crest or bun or fringe or toupee on their heads, disgusting creatures whatever they were. The dogs certainly didn't look as if they belonged to them and I wondered where they would have got them from, perhaps they'd hired them especially in order to perform their eccentric dance, but whatever the truth of the matter, the poor creatures must have been feeling horribly dizzy, or indeed positively upset and desperate; the dancers' tapping would feel to them like a permanent earthquake or something similar. It was to be hoped that no member of an animal protection society, which are so fierce and so active in England, spotted what my neighbors were up to, because they'd doubtless be reported for the torture, harassment and bewilderment of small defenseless beasts. 'They must be mad,' I thought, 'they must think there's some special merit in being able to dance and, at the same time, balance a living being on their shoulders; one false move, and a dog could go flying off, hurled against a wall or a window.' I stood watching them for a few minutes until they all stopped abruptly amid urgent gestures of displeasure and alarm: the white woman's little dog had peed on her, spraying her face and hair, and because this had happened in the middle of some particularly frenetic stamping, it had sprayed the other two as well. Finding itself the object of such frenzied movements, the poor dog had doubtless judged that incontinence was its last line of defense. They released all three mutts-who tottered off-and began quickly and disgustedly taking off their soiled clothes, and just as the man was about to remove his elegant polo shirt, he looked straight across at my window and saw me. I immediately hid my binoculars and took two steps back, ashamed to be caught spying. However, they didn't seem angry at all, even though the two women had by then stripped down to their bras, a situation made worse-or better-by the fact that the mulatta wasn't wearing one. As on the previous occasion when they had spotted me, they waved cheerfully, beckoning me to come over. I had felt ashamed on that occasion too, but had managed to see an advantage in that reciprocal visual contact and thought that if one particular night or day proved truly desolate: I at least had the possibility of going in search of company and dancing on the other side of the square, in that happy carefree household whose occupant resisted all my deductions and conjectures, and inhibited or eluded my interpretative faculties, something that happened so infrequently that it bestowed on him a slight air of mystery. And the prospect of that hypothetical visit, that possible future contact, had made me feel lighter and less vulnerable, as if it provided a kind of safety net. That day could not have been more desolate, a whole empty Sunday stretched ahead of me until I could speak to Tupra, one of those desolate Sundays 'exiled from the infinite' or 'banni de l'infini,' as I believe Baudelaire once wrote and as English Sundays tend to be; I knew them well from many years before, from the first time I had lived there, in Oxford, and I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know. So perhaps the moment had arrived to take advantage of the safety net offered by that jovial trio; what's more, the women had no compunction about showing themselves to me, especially the one I had always preferred and who had the most to show. I hesitated for a moment about whether to go downstairs, across the square and up to that other apartment, but instantly dismissed the idea. 'No, now it makes even less sense than ever,' I thought, 'in a few weeks or a month, at most two, I probably won't be living here or looking out on this square any more, and they will become merely a pleasant memory that will gradually fade. And now, alas, I can't help but interpret my dancer, because I can't help associating him with Custardoy and seeing an affinity between the two.' And so, smiling, I went back over to the window and wagged my forefinger at them to tell them 'No.' Then I opened my hand and raised it slightly in a friendly gesture, my way of saying 'Thank you' and perhaps also 'Goodbye.'

I shut the window and came back into the room. I decided to go out to a nearby grocery store and buy a few basic things to fill up the nearly empty fridge; the store also sold magazines and newspapers, but I no longer wanted to buy a copy of The Sun or any other paper of that ilk; and when I returned, I chose not to turn on the TV, sure that some program, if not most, would be discussing the horrible crime of Dr. Dearlove, former odontologist, now transformed into the new Hyde who could never go back to being plain Dr. Jekyll: he would be a lascivious murderer from now until the Final Judgment, at which, in other times-the times of steadfast faith-people would have expected a Bulgarian or Russian boy called Danev or Deyanov, Dimitrov or Dondukov to confront him and accuse him with the bitter words of someone who died too young. Or perhaps he would address Tupra or even me. I preferred not to know too much, about him or about Dearlove, mainly because I didn't need to and because it would only increase my sense of sadness. I already knew enough, and the press would be full of ghoulish, misleading speculations. What no one would know was that there was someone behind it all, an expert on narrative disgust or horror and on the Kennedy-Mansfield complex and its all too effective curse, and that the murder had nothing to do with chance or a bad night or a moment of mental derangement. Danev or Dondukov could no longer tell who had hired him or how, nor what he had been hired to do, and I was in no position to prove anything. Nor, indeed, was I even considering the possibility.

I phoned young Pérez Nuix, who was at home, told her I had just got back and asked if we could meet that evening or the following day ('It's urgent, important; but it'll only take a moment,' I said, as she had once said to me, and on that occasion, 'it' had lasted until morning; an experience that had not been repeated). She said that would be fine, made no attempt to find out in advance what it was about and was happy to come over to my part of town ('It'll do me good to get a bit of fresh air, I've hardly been out all day, and besides I need to walk the dog'), we shared a kind of unconfessed loyalty. We arranged to meet in the bar of the luxury hotel I could see from my window ('Give me an hour and a half, no more, long enough for me to take the dog out and then come over'), and when she was installed there, with a drink before her, I told her about Dick Dearlove and the interpretations Tupra had elicited from me after the celebrity supper in London and, later, in Edinburgh. I laid out to her my arrogant reports, my hypotheses, my theories, my mise-en-scenes, and my predictions. As things had turned out, they appeared to indicate a high degree of prescience on my part.

'It's too much of a coincidence, don't you think?' I added, and I did not for a moment imagine she would contradict me.

I noticed that she seemed slightly uncomfortable, as if for some reason she felt impatient with or displeased by my anxieties, and she took a slow sip of her drink as you do when you need to think a little longer about what you're going to say. Finally, she said:

'Coincidences do happen, Jaime, as you well know. In fact, I think they're part of normal life. But not, I guess, where Bertie is concerned. Where Tupra is concerned,' she corrected herself, 'you're right, it's unlikely. With him almost nothing is coincidental.' She fell silent for a few seconds, giving me, I thought, almost a commiserative look, then she went on: 'But what is it that you find so troubling? Giving him the idea to lay a trap that you don't like? That someone else was harmed, rather than the person who should have been hurt by that trap? That someone, an instrumental victim, died? Yes, of course, what else do you want me to say, of course I understand your unease. But we've talked about this before,' she reminded me. And seeing my bewildered expression, she added: 'Yes, I told you that what Tupra did or decided was not our responsibility. Everyone, regardless of who they work for, occasionally provides their boss with the occasional idea, and if he thinks it's any good, that boss then takes up the idea and, a mere two minutes after hearing it, believes he was the one who thought of it in the first place. Sure it's irritating, they don't even give you a pat on the back, but it also means that we're absolved of all responsibility. At the time, I said that worrying about what happened with our reports was like a novelist worrying about what potential buyers and readers of his book would understand and take away from it.'

I remembered that, and I also remembered saying that I didn't think the comparison worked. She had made further comparisons, none of which had convinced me. Again, she seemed to me more experienced and, in a way, older than me. She was looking at me as if she were idly witnessing the end of time, something that she had already experienced and left behind. Perhaps that was the origin of her impatience, displeasure or discomfort: it's disheartening having to explain to someone else what it took blood, sweat and tears to learn and with no help from anyone. Or perhaps she had been able to count on Tupra's help, who was no mean arguer.

'I didn't think the comparison worked,' I said. 'Besides, a novelist should take care what he puts in his book, don't you think?'

'I doubt that any writers do,' she said firmly. 'If that were the case, no one would ever write anything. It's just not possible to live that cautiously, it's too paralyzing. As you say in Spain, son ganas de cogérsela con papel de fumar. You just can't be that persnickety. And anyway, keep things in proportion. What do you expect, there are people in our field who do far worse things and get their hands dirty too. Or, depending how you look at it, perhaps they do better things because they're being of service to the country' Since we were speaking in Spanish, I was grateful that she didn't use the word 'patria but 'país' but it nonetheless sounded horribly like one of the first things Tupra had said to me at Wheeler's buffet supper. Perhaps those who stayed longest by his side, of whom I would not be one, ended up adopting his ideas. Pérez Nuix, however, said the phrase in such a neutral tone that I couldn't tell if she was serious or quoting our boss or being sarcastic.

'Don't tell me that by arresting Dearlove, putting him inside for several years-if, that is, he doesn't get bumped off during his first few days there-has been of some service to this country. Or, for that matter, the death of that Russian boy; he'd probably only just arrived in England and was here illegally, thus ensuring that no one will dig too deep or kick up much of a fuss. What did you call him, "an instrumental victim"? I thought the usual term was "collateral victim," although in Spanish it should be "lateral" rather than "collateral" I couldn't resist adding this pedantic clarification.

'They're different things, Jaime,' she pointed out. 'Victimas co-laterales or laterales aren't usually instrumental, they occur more by chance or by mistake or by mere inevitability. Instrumental victims, on the other hand, always perform a function. They're necessary for something to succeed.' She paused again, took another sip of her drink, and remained silent. It occurred to me that perhaps she had often been through what I was going through now. When she did speak again, she did so hesitantly: 'Look, I don't know, I simply don't know; Tupra doesn't confide in me anymore and hasn't for a long time now, and he didn't ever tell me much even when we were on better terms, I mean when he trusted me more or had more of a soft spot for me; he always keeps pretty much to himself. It seems unlikely that the State or the Crown or them,' and she pointed upwards, by which I assumed she meant the bigwigs in the SIS or Secret Intelligence Service, who, at least in the past, embraced both MI5 and MI6, 'would have ordered such a trap to be laid, such an operation, for a rock singer, a celebrity. But you never know: in America, declassification has uncovered the most ridiculous things-reports on people like Elvis Presley or John Lennon who were being kept under surveillance by the CIA or the FBI-so anything is possible. We don't know what Dearlove was doing, what he might have been getting up to, who he was involved with and who he might have blackmailed, who he could frighten with threats which, coming from him, would seem quite credible (insofar as someone like him can have any credibility, of course) or on whom he bestowed his favors. Insignificant, inoffensive and apparently purely ornamental people can prove to be full of surprises. Singers and actors often turn out to be real nutcases, they join weird sects or convert to Islam, which nowadays is no joke, as you know. One of the first lessons you learn in this job (although it's better still if you know it before you start) is that no one is insignificant, inoffensive and purely ornamental.'

'The time I talked to Dearlove longest was in Edinburgh,' I said, 'or, rather, I overheard him talking to an old friend of his, Genevieve Seabrook, which makes it more likely that he was telling the truth because, with her, there would be no reason for him to put on an act; anyway, it seemed to me that he wasn't involved with anyone, still less anyone desirable, that it wasn't even a possibility. He was complaining that in England he had no option now but to pay for sex. I doubt he could have been a serious threat to anyone, certainly not to anyone requiring the protection of the Secret Service. I had the impression that he was a man in decline, but eager to disguise that decline. In fact, he could already see himself disappearing, not so much from the world, but from people's memories. That worried him a lot, made him feel embittered and anxious.'

'As I said, it's highly unlikely that the State would have acted against him in this way. I'm more inclined to think it was a personal act of revenge by Tupra, some unfinished business-after all, they used to see each other socially quite a lot-unless Tupra did it as a favor to someone else. Or maybe it wasn't a favor at all, we shouldn't dismiss the idea of a contract.'

'You mean somebody paid to have it done?'

'Yes, why not, like I said before, this man Dearlove might to all intents and purposes be on the way out, but from what one hears, during his lifetime, he must have been with dozens of minors of both sexes, doubtless with some who were, in their day, desirable, to use your expression, either physically or socially or because of their family connections. Many of them will be adults now, some might be in possession of their own fortunes and would therefore have more than enough money to pay for such a contract killing. Then there are fathers and brothers too. I don't know, maybe Dick Dearlove ruined the life of Tupra's younger brother or sister. Perhaps he corrupted Tupra himself And she laughed at the idea.

'Is that possible, do you think? Tupra can't be many years his junior. And does Tupra have brothers and sisters?'

Young Pérez Nuix laughed again, this time at my naivete or my literal-mindedness.

'No, of course not, I'm sure no one could ever have corrupted Bertie or done anything to him that he didn't want done. To be perfectly honest, I find it hard to believe that he was ever innocent and malleable. Besides, as I'm sure you realize, I was being ironic. I've no idea if Tupra has siblings or not, I've never heard him say a word about his family or his origins, I don't even know where his name comes from.'-'Peter didn't know either,' I thought, 'although he made fun of it.'-'No one knows much about him. It's as if he'd sprung into being by spontaneous generation.' Pérez Nuix had gone back to calling him Bertie and, in doing so, had adopted a slightly evocative tone, without realizing, without intending to; I wondered just what had gone on between them. However, she immediately returned to the matter in hand. 'What I'm trying to say is that the possibilities are at once limitless and secondary, so there's no point delving into it.' Again I noticed that faintly commiserative look and again I felt that it perhaps saddened her to see me going through a process she had already been through herself. It might also be that the subject bored her, even annoyed her. 'Who cares anyway, Jaime. It's none of your business. Even what happened is none of your business, although at the moment you think it is. Well, it isn't. You've got to get used to that fact. It won't happen often, but I suppose it's the first time it has since you joined. It might never happen again. But you have to get used to it, just in case, simply because of those possible exceptions. If not, you won't be able to continue in the job.'

'I don't think I am going to continue,' I said.

Young Pérez Nuix looked surprised, but my feeling was that she was only pretending, as if she thought that not affecting surprise would be rude and show a certain disdain for me. According to Tupra, she was the best, she would know me well, perhaps better than I did, especially since I wasn't interested and had given up trying understand myself-what was the point? ('No one can know you better than you do yourself, and yet no one can know himself so well that he can be sure how he will behave tomorrow,' that, I thought or remembered, is what St. Augustine had said.) Yes, she was pretending, a little:

'Really? When did you decide that, while you were in Madrid or since you got back? Are you sure?'

'I'm almost sure,' I said. 'But I want to talk to Tupra first. He's not in London today'

'And all because of this Dearlove business? And what are you going to say to Tupra? What are you going to ask him: why it happened? That's his affair or possibly someone else's, but he'll never tell you. Sometimes even he doesn't know why; he gets an order, carries it out unquestioningly and that's that.' She looked at her glass. I raised a cigarette to my lips in the hope that she would continue talking, I would pretend ignorance of the hotel's no-smoking rule until someone protested. 'It's your decision,

Jaime, but it does seem a little over the top to me. As Bertie always says, it's the way of the world. Let things settle in your mind. Wait until it's sunk in that you have nothing to do with what happened to Dearlove and the Bulgarian boy. Ideas float, nothing is so easily transmitted. As soon as you put it into words, that idea was no longer yours, it was simply out there. And all ideas have the potential to infect others. Just wait a little, and one day you'll see I was right.'

'That isn't the only reason,' I told her. 'But it's definitely a contributing factor. I don't think I decided here or in Madrid, but in full flight, on the plane.'

'A man of firm principles, eh?' And her voice took on a slightly sarcastic edge, then immediately became more serious. 'They're not really so very firm, Jaime. No one who works in this field can afford to be that principled. You may be valiantly buckling on your principles now, but that's a different matter.' She sometimes used rather literary turns of phrase-'con denuedo,' 'valiantly'-due to her inevitably bookish rather than real-life knowledge of Spanish. 'I'm not criticizing you; it helps, it has its merits, we should all do it more often. But what you put on can always be taken off again.'

I remembered what Tupra had asked me the first time I was called on to interpret someone (the day when he had first urged me: 'Say anything, whatever comes into your head, go on'), when he asked me to stay behind in his office for a moment so that I could give him my opinion on General or Colonel or Corporal Bonanza or whatever he was, from Venezuela: 'Allow me to ask you a question: up to what point would you be capable of leaving aside your principles? I mean up to what point do you usually do so? That is, disregard it, the theory I mean?' he had asked me. And he had added: 'It's something we all do now and then; we couldn't live otherwise, whether out of convenience, fear or need. Or out of a sense of sacrifice or generosity. Out of love, out of hate. To what extent do you?' And I had responded: 'It depends on the reason. I can leave them aside almost entirely if it's in the interests of conversation, less so if I'm called on to make a judgment. Still less if I'm judging friends, because then I'm partial. When it comes to taking action, hardly at all.' I had answered almost without thinking. When it came down to it, what did I know and what do I know? Perhaps Pérez Nuix was right in a way, and I was merely buckling on my principles or deciding not to set them to one side. However, she was not right about the last thing she had said: not everything that one puts on can be taken off.

'Not everything and not always either,' I said. 'You can't just take off a tattoo, for example. And there are some obligations that can't simply be unbuckled and discarded. That's why some are so difficult to buckle on in the first place and why others must be very firmly buckled on, so that there can be no turning back.'

There was not much more to say. I should have guessed that she would know nothing. Perhaps I had only phoned her as a way of stilling my impatience and sharing my astonishment with someone, giving vent to my feelings, possibly to convince myself, or at least to argue it through or to rehearse that argument. I stubbed out my barely smoked cigarette before anyone could call me to order. I paid for the drinks and we left. I offered to accompany her in a taxi to her house, but since we were just across the road from my apartment, she declined. And so I walked with her to Baker Street tube where we said goodbye. I thanked her and she said: 'Whatever for?'

'How's your father doing?' I asked. We hadn't mentioned him since that night in my apartment. She had told me nothing and I hadn't asked. I suppose I did so then because it felt to me as if we were saying farewell to each other. Even though we would see each other on Monday in the building with no name and perhaps on other days too.

'Not too bad. He doesn't gamble any more,' she said.

We exchanged kisses and I watched her disappear down into the underground, which is so very deep in London. Perhaps she envied my decision not to continue with the group, and that it was still possible for me to break away from it, having been part of it for far less time than her. There was, in principle, nothing preventing her from doing the same. But Tupra would certainly want to keep her at all costs, as he would the others, and me. He took whatever steps he deemed necessary and presumably hoped not to frighten us off in the process, and perhaps with that in mind he rationed and measured out the steps to be taken, gauging when we would be hardened enough to withstand certain major upsets. According to Wheeler, there were very few people with our curse or gift, and we were getting fewer and fewer, and he had lived long enough to notice this unequivocally. 'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo,' he had told me. 'There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror.' And on another occasion, in another context, he had warned me: 'You have to bear in mind that most people are stupid. Stupid and frivolous and credulous, you have no idea just how stupid, frivolous and credulous they are, they're a permanently blank sheet without a mark on it, without the least resistance.'

No, Tupra would not be prepared to lose us so easily, the people who served him. I didn't consider that I as yet owed him any large debts or loyalties, nor had I established any very strong links, I had not become involved, enmeshed or entangled, I would not have to use a razor to cut one of those bonds when it ultimately grew too tight. I had tried to deceive him regarding Incompara, but now, with this Dearlove business, even if it wasn't quite the same thing, we were more or less quits. It was likely, on the other hand, that he had young Pérez Nuix caught from various angles, and that for her there could be no easy separation, no possibility of desertion. I remembered Reresby's comment when he froze the video image of her beaten father, the poor man lying motionless on the table, a swollen wounded heap, bleeding from his nose and eyebrows, possibly from his cheekbones and from other cuts, the broken hands with which he had tried in vain to protect himself-I, too, had broken a hand and slashed a cheekbone with apparent coldness or perhaps with genuine coldness, how could I have done that? Tupra had said: 'As I told you, nothing here gets thrown away or given to someone else or destroyed, and that beating is perfectly safe here, it's not to be shown to anyone. Well, who knows, it might be necessary to show it to Pat one day, to convince her of something, perhaps to stay and not to leave us, one never knows.' Perhaps he would show it to her, saying: 'You wouldn't want this to happen to your father again, would you?' 'How fortunate,' I thought, 'that my family is far away and that I'm all alone here in London.' But maybe he wouldn't need to go that far to convince Pat: after all, she may have been half-Spanish, but she was still serving her country. And I was not.

I slept badly that night, having resolved to get up early the next day. I had no intention of spending Sunday in London doing nothing but ruminate, with barely anything to occupy me (I'd dealt with any work pending before I left for Madrid), and with the television watching me while I waited for Monday to arrive so that I could talk to Tupra. I hadn't been to see Wheeler for a long time and, besides, there was the heavy present that I'd bought for him in a second-hand bookshop in Madrid and carted with me all the way to London: a boxed, two-volume set of propaganda posters printed during our Civil War, some of which-not only the Spanish ones and not all of them cartoons-used the same message as the 'careless talk' campaign or something very similar. And when you've taken the trouble to carry something with you, you feel impatient to hand it over, especially if you're sure the recipient of the gift will be pleased. It was a little late to call him on Saturday night when I returned from Baker Street, and so I decided to go to Oxford in the morning and tell him of my arrival there and then; it wouldn't be a problem, he hardly ever went out and would be delighted to have me visit him in his house by the River Cherwell and stay to lunch and spend the whole day in his company.

And so I went to Paddington, a station from which I had so often set off in my distant Oxford days, and caught a train before eight o'clock, not noticing that it was one of the slowest, involving a change and a wait at Didcot. During what was still more or less my youth, I had, altogether, waited many minutes at that semi-derelict station, and I'd been convinced on one such occasion that I'd lost something important because I'd failed- almost-to speak to a woman who was, like me, waiting for the delayed train that would take us to Oxford, and while we passed the time smoking, the hesitant pool of light surrounding us had illuminated only the butts of the cigarettes she threw on the ground alongside mine (those were more tolerant times), her English shoes, like those of an adolescent or an ingénue dancer, low-heeled with a buckle and rounded toes, and her ankles made perfect by the penumbra. Then, when we boarded the delayed train and I could see her face clearly, I knew and know now that during the whole of my youth she was the woman who made the greatest and most immediate impact on me, although I also know that, traditionally, in both literature and real life, such a remark can only be made of women whom young men never actually meet. I had not yet met Luisa then, and my lover at the time was Clare Bayes; I didn't even know my own face and yet nevertheless there I was interpreting that young woman on the platform of Didcot station.

The train stopped at the usual places, Slough and Reading, as well as Maidenhead and Twyford and Tilehurst and Pangbourne, and after more than an hour, I got off there, in Didcot, where I had to wait several minutes-on that so-familiar platform-for another weary and reluctant train to appear. And it was there, while I was vaguely recalling that young nocturnal woman whose face I soon forgot but not her colors (yellow, blue, pink, white, red; and around her neck a pearl necklace), that I understood what had made me get up so early in order to catch a train and visit Wheeler in Oxford without delay; it wasn't simply a desire to see him again nor mere impatience to watch his eyes when they alighted with surprise on those 'careless talk' posters from Spain, it was, secondarily, a need to tell him what had happened and to demand an explanation. I don't mean tell him about what had happened to me in Madrid, for which he wasn't remotely to blame (to be accurate, nothing had happened to me, I had done something to someone else), but about what had occurred with Dearlove; after all, Peter was the person who had got me into that group to which he had once belonged, the person who had recommended me; he had made use of my encounter with Tupra and submitted me to a small test that now seemed to me innocent and idiotic-and which in no way prepared me for the possible risks of joining the group-and then reported to them on the result. Perhaps he himself had written the report on me in those old files: 'It's as if he didn't know himself very well. He doesn't think much about himself, although he believes that he does (albeit without great conviction)…' He it was, in any case, who had revealed to me my supposed abilities and who had, to use the classic term, enlisted me.

Once in Oxford, I walked from the station to the Randolph Hotel and phoned him from there (now that I knew Luisa used a cell phone, perhaps I ought to get one too, they may be instruments of surveillance but they have their uses). Mrs. Berry answered and didn't even think it necessary to hand me over to Peter. She would ask him, she said, but she was sure my visit would make his day. A few seconds later, she was back: 'He says you should come at once, Jack, as soon as you like. Will you be staying for lunch? I'm sure the Professor won't let you leave before then.'

When I went into the living room, I experienced a moment of alarm-but not quite panic-because Peter's face had taken on the gaunt look of those whom death is pursuing although without as yet too much haste, not yet holding the hourglass in his hand, but keeping a close eye on it. That impression soon diminished, and I decided it must have been a false one, but it may also have been due to a rapid adjustment, as when we meet a friend who is much fatter or thinner or older than the last time we saw him and we are thus obliged to carry out a kind of rectification process, until our retina gets used to our friend's new size or new age and we can again fully recognize him. He was sitting in his armchair, like my father in his, with his feet on an ottoman and the Sunday papers scattered on a low table beside him. His stick was hooked over the back of his chair. He made as if to get up to greet me, but I stopped him. Judging from the way he was settled in his armchair, it seemed to me unlikely that he would find it as easy to sit down on the stairs as he had done very late on the night of his buffet supper. I placed one hand on his shoulder and squeezed it with gentle or restrained affection-that was the most I dared to do, for in England people rarely touch each other. He was impeccably dressed, with tie and lace-up shoes and a cardigan, as was, I believe, customary among men of his generation, at least I had noticed the same tendency in my father, who, when he was at home, always looked as if he were about to go out at any moment. Then, impatient to begin, I sat down on a nearby stool and the first thing I did, after exchanging a few words of welcome and greeting, was to remove from my bag the package containing La Guerra Civil en dos mil carteles-The Civil War in Two Thousand Posters-the next time I went to Madrid I would have to track down another copy for myself; it really was a marvelous book, and I was sure that Wheeler would appreciate and enjoy it greatly, as would Mrs. Berry, whom I urged to stay and leaf through it with us. However, she preferred not to ('Thank you, Jack, I'll look at it properly when I have more time'). And she left us on the excuse that she had things to do, although throughout the morning, she came back into the room several times, came and went, always near, always on hand.

'Look, Peter,' I said, opening the first volume, 'the book also reproduces various foreign posters too, and I've stuck post-its on any pages that have posters connected to the "careless talk" campaign. It seems that, as a recommendation, it was pretty much a constant in all kinds of places. The British campaign was imitated by the Americans when they finally entered the War, but theirs sometimes verged on the kitsch and the melodramatic 'And I showed him a drawing depicting a dog grieving for its dead sailor master '…because somebody talked!' or as we would say in Spanish: '¡... porque alguien se fue de la lengua!'; another in which appeared a large hairy hand wearing a Nazi ring and holding a Nazi medal and the words: 'Award for careless talk. Don't discuss troop movements, ship sailings, war equipment'; and a third more somber one, in which a pair of intense narrow eyes peer out from beneath a German helmet: 'He's watching you.' And there are two English posters that I

don't think you showed me, but that you're bound to remember.' And I turned to a page displaying a very succinct poster bearing only the words 'Talk kills,' the lower half of which showed a sailor drowning as an indirect or possibly direct result of someone talking; and another signed by Bruce Bairnsfather, which revived his famous soldier from the First World War, 'Old Bill,' alongside his son who has been called up for the Second.

At the top are the words: 'Even the walls…' next to a swastika and above a huge ear; and underneath are written the young man's words: 'S'long Dad! We're shiftin' to… Blimey. I nearly said it!' And I pointed out to him a French poster, signed by

Paul Colin: 'Silence. The enemy is listening in to your secrets' and a Finnish one, although the words were in Swedish, that showed a woman's full red lips sealed shut by an enormous padlock, and the text of which apparently said: 'Support our soldiers from the rearguard. Don't spread rumors!'; and a Russian poster in which one half of the listener's face and shoulders was much darker and had acquired a monocle, a mustache and a military epaulette (had taken on, in short, a very sinister appearance). And here are the Spanish posters,' I added, leafing through the second volume where most of them were to be found, although they were scattered throughout both. 'You see, these must have predated the British ones and the others too.'

Wheeler studied them closely and with evident interest, even fascination, and after a moment's silence, said:

'They're different. There's more hate in them.'

'In the Spanish ones?'

'Yes, if you look at ours and even those from the other countries, they were warning people above all of the danger and urging them to keep silent,

to maximize discretion and caution, but they didn't demonize the hidden enemy or stress the need to hunt him down, to pursue and destroy him. It's odd, they hardly condemn him at all. Perhaps because we were conscious that whenever possible, we were doing exactly the same thing, spying in Germany and in occupied Europe and were aware that in wartime, it's only to be expected (and so, propaganda apart, one can't really be too reproachful) that each side will do whatever

it can to win that war, with no limits, or only those demanded by public opinion, which doesn't, of course, mean that the limits we're told, officially, that governments won't cross are never crossed, only that they cross them furtively, in secret, without acknowledging the fact and even denying it, if that's what's required. But look at this: "Find him out and denounce him," and they depict the spy as a monster with elephantine powers of sight and hearing as well as smell, and they associate him with Italian fascism, and I'm not sure, but he may even be wearing a priest's biretta on his bald head, what do you think that is? Not to mention this other one: "Find and ruthlessly crush the Fifth Column" whose members are shown as a handful of plundering, bloodthirsty rats caught in the light of a torch, with the sole of a giant shoe about to flatten them and a spiked bludgeon about to batter them. The poster was obviously published by the Communist Party, which was dominated by Soviet Stalinists, and they called for both the enemy and the halfhearted to be mercilessly hunted down and unceremoniously killed, just as the Francoists on the other side did.

And look at this next one: they refer to the eavesdropper as "The beast": "The beast is listening. Watch what you say!" and the beast is wearing a crown on his head and a cross dangling from a necklace, which makes him look rather effeminate, don't you think? It's describing the ambushee, it's saying who he is and what he's like, it's pointing him out. The other posters, though,

the ones by the celebrated artist Renau with the eye and the ear and the one published by the Direccion General de Bellas Artes addressed to militiamen, are more like ours, less aggressive, more to do with defense and prevention, more neutral perhaps.

They are simply a warning against spies. The text of the latter could easily have appeared on one of the later British posters: "Don't give away any details about the situation at the front. Not to your comrades. Not to your brothers or sisters. Not to your girlfriends." Those wretched girlfriends again.

One tended to confide in them and they, in turn, confided in you, too much really, at a time when no one could trust anyone. It really is a most fascinating book, Jacobo, thank you so much for thinking of me and bringing it all the way from Spain, especially given that it weighs a ton.' He thought for a few seconds, then added: 'Yes, that hatred is very striking. Quite different. I'm not sure we experienced it in the same way here.'

'Perhaps in our War it was necessary to describe and characterize the spy like that,' I said, 'because they had fewer distinguishing marks and it was easier for them to pretend and to hide. Don't forget, for example, that we all spoke the same language, not like here, where you were fighting the Nazis.'

Wheeler shot me one of those occasional looks of fleeting annoyance and displeasure-those mineral eyes, like two marbles almost violet in color, or like amethysts or chalcedony or, when narrowed, like the seeds of pomegranates-that made you feel you had said something stupid. That was when he most resembled Toby Rylands.

'I can assure you that most of those who spied here could speak English as well as you or I. In fact, probably better than you.

They were Germans who had lived here since they were children, or who had an English father or mother. Some were renegade purebred Englishmen, and there was quite a large number of fanatical Irishmen too. It was the same with those who spied for us in Germany or Austria. They all spoke excellent German.

My wife Valerie's German, for example, was impeccable, without a trace of accent. No, that wasn't the reason, Jacobo. I may have had only a very brief experience of your War, but I felt that hatred when I was in Spain. It was a kind of all-embracing hatred that surfaced at the slightest provocation and wasn't prepared to consider any mitigating factor or information or nuance.

An enemy could be a perfectly decent person who had behaved generously towards his political opponents or shown pity, or perhaps even someone completely inoffensive, like all those schoolteachers who were shot by the beasts on one side and the many humble nuns killed by the beasts on the other. They didn't care. An enemy was simply that, an enemy; he or she couldn't be pardoned, no extenuating circumstances could be taken into consideration; it was as if they saw no difference between having killed or betrayed someone and holding certain beliefs or ideas or even preferences, do you see what I mean? Well, you'll know all this from your father. They tried to infect us foreigners with the same hatred, but, needless to say, it wasn't something that could be passed on, not to that degree. It was a strange thing your War, I don't think there's ever been another war like it, not even other civil wars in other places. People lived in such close proximity in Spain then, although it's not like that now'-'Yes, it is,' I thought, 'up to a point.' 'There were no really big cities and everyone was always out in the street, in the cafes or the bars. It was impossible to avoid, how can I put it, that epidermal closeness, which is what engenders affection but also anger and hatred. To our population, on the other hand, the Germans seemed distant, almost abstract beings.'

That mention of his wife, Val or Valerie, hadn't escaped me, but I was even more interested in the fact that, for the first time, he should refer openly to his presence in my country during the War; it wasn't that long since I had first found out about his participation, of which he had never spoken to me before. I looked at his suddenly gaunt face. 'Yes, his features have grown sharper and he has the same look in his eyes as my father,' I thought or regretfully acknowledged, 'that same unfathomable gaze'; and it occurred to me that he probably knew he did not have much more time, and when you know that, you have to make definitive decisions about the episodes or deeds which, if you tell no one, will never be known. ('It's not just that I will grow old and disappear,' poor, doomed Dearlove had said in Edinburgh, 'it's that everyone who might talk about me will gradually disappear too, as if they were all under some kind of curse'; and who could say any different?) It is, inevitably, a delicate moment, in which you have to distinguish once and for all between what you want to remain forever unknown-uncounted, undiscovered, erased, nonexistent-and what you might like to be known and recovered, so that whatever once was will be able one day to whisper: 'I existed' and prevent others from saying 'No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened.' (Or not even that, because in order to deny something you have to have a witness.) If you say absolutely nothing, you will be impeding another's curiosity and, therefore, some remote possible future investigation. Wheeler must, after all, have remembered that on the night of his buffet supper I had asked him by what name he had been known in Spain, and that, had he told me, I would have immediately gone to look up that name in the indexes of all his books, in his War library, on his west shelves, and later on in other books as well. In fact, he was the one who had put the idea in my head, it hadn't even occurred to me until then: perhaps he had done so out of mere congenital pride and vanity, or perhaps, more deliberately, so that having once inoculated me with the thought, I would not be satisfied and would not let go of my prey, something which, as he knew perfectly well, I, like himself and Tupra, never did. Perhaps now he was ready to give me a few more facts and to feed my imagination before it was too late and before he would cease to be able to feed or direct or plot or manipulate or shape anything. Before he was left entirely at the mercy of the living, who are rarely kind to the recent dead. 'That's asking an awful lot, Jacobo,' he had said then in reply to my direct question. 'Tonight anyway. Perhaps another time.' Maybe that 'other time' had come.

'What did you do in Spain during the Civil War, Peter?' I asked straight out. 'How long were you there? Not long, I imagine. Before, you told me that you were just passing through. Who were you working with? Where were you?'

Wheeler gave an amused smile as he had on that earlier night, when he had played with my newly aroused curiosity and said things like: 'If you'd ever asked me about it…But you've never shown the slightest interest in the subject. You've shown no curiosity at all about my peninsular adventures. You should have made the most of past opportunities, you see. You have to plan ahead, to anticipate.' He raised his hand to the back of his armchair and felt around without success. He wanted his walking stick and couldn't find it without turning round. I stood up, grabbed the stick and handed it to him, thinking he was going to use it to help him get to his feet. Instead, he placed it across his lap or, rather, rested the ends on the arms of his chair and gripped the stick with both hands, as if it were a pole or a javelin.

'Well, I went twice, but on both occasions I was there only briefly,' he said, very slowly at first, as if he did not entirely want to release the information or the words; as if he were forcing his tongue to anticipate his actual decision, the not entirely definite decision to tell me all: he might want to tell me, but, as he had explained with some embarrassment, he might not yet be authorized to do so. 'The first time was in March of 1937, in the company of Dr. Hewlett Johnson, whose name will mean nothing to you. However, you might be familiar with his nickname, "the Red Dean," by which he was known then and later.' We were speaking in English. Of course I knew the name, of course I had heard of it. In fact, I could scarcely believe it.

'El bandido Deán de Canterbury!' I exclaimed in Spanish. 'Don't tell me you knew him.'

'I beg your pardon!' he said, momentarily disconcerted by that sudden intrusion in Spanish and by that strange way of referring to the Dean as 'the bandit Dean of Canterbury'

'As you may well remember from what I've told you before, my father was arrested shortly after the end of the Civil War. And several false accusations were made against him, one of them, as I've often heard him say, was that he had been "the willing companion in Spain of the bandit Dean of Canterbury." Imagine! That strange cleric was very nearly responsible-albeit indirectly, unwittingly and involuntarily-for my not being born, nor any of my siblings either. I mean that in the normal course of events my father would have been summarily condemned and shot; they came for him in May, 1939, only a month and a half after the Francoists entered Madrid, and in those days if you denounced someone, even if you did so as a mere private individual, you didn't have to prove their guilt, they had to prove their innocence, and how could my father possibly have proved that he had never in his life seen that Canterburian Dean' (I was speaking in English again and so didn't need to resort to the strange Spanish equivalent 'cantuariense') 'or the falsity of the other charges, which were far graver. He was immensely lucky, and after a few months in prison was acquitted and released, although he suffered reprisals for many years afterwards. But imagine…'

'It's certainly a striking coincidence,' Wheeler said, interrupting me. 'Very striking. But let me continue my story, otherwise I'll lose the thread.' It was as if he thought the coincidence to be of no importance, as if he felt coincidences to be the most natural thing in the world, as did Pérez Nuix and I myself. Or perhaps, I thought, he had been planning his next encounter with me for a while, hoping that it would happen, and that I would deign to go and see him, and so knew exactly what he was going to tell me, what partial information he was going to give me, and did not want to be forced to depart from his script by impromptu remarks or distractions or interruptions (he never lost the thread). He may not have wanted any interruptions, but he would have to put up with at least one, when I told him what had happened to Dearlove and demanded, if not an explanation, at least some pronouncement on Tupra's behavior. And so he set my father aside and continued, still slowly, rather like someone reciting something they have previously memorized. 'We were the first to break the naval blockade set up by the Nationalists (I always thought it scandalous that they should call themselves that) in the Bay of Biscay. We set sail from Bermeo, near Bilbao, in a French torpedo boat, and reached Saint Jean de Luz without mishap, despite the widespread and widely believed rumors that the whole area had been mined. That was a Francoist lie, and a very effective one, because it kept boats away and stopped provisions reaching the Basque Country. The Dean described the crossing in The Manchester Guardian and a few days later, a merchant vessel, the Seven Seas Spray, tried its luck in the other direction, leaving Saint Jean de Luz after dark. And the following morning, when it sailed up the river to the dock in Bilbao, having encountered neither mines nor warships en route, the people of Bilbao massed on the quay and cheered the Captain, who was standing on the bridge with his daughter, and cried: "Long live the British sailors! Long live Liberty!" It was terribly moving apparently. And we paved the way. It's just a shame we were going in the other direction. The Captain was called Roberts.' Wheeler, eyes very wide, paused for a moment, deep in thought, as if he were reliving what he had not actually lived through, but of which he felt himself, in part, the artificer. Then he went on: 'Before that, we'd witnessed the bombing of Durango. We missed being caught in it ourselves by about ten minutes, it happened when we were approaching by road. We saw it from a hillside, in the distance. We saw the planes approaching, they were Junkers 52s, German. Then we heard a great roar and a vast black cloud rose up from the town. By the time we finally drove into the town after nightfall, the place had been almost completely destroyed. According to the first estimates, there had been some 200 civilian deaths and about 800 wounded, among them two priests and thirteen nuns. That same night, Franco's general headquarters announced to the world by radio that the Reds had blown up churches and killed nuns in Durango, in the devoutly Catholic Basque Country, as well as two priests while they were saying mass, one when he was giving communion to the faithful and the other while elevating the Host. All of this was true: the nuns had died in the chapel of Santa Susana, one priest in the Jesuit church and the other in the church of Santa Maria, but they had been bombed, as had the Convento de los Augustinos. I remember the names or those were the names I was given. It wasn't the Reds who had done it, though, it was those Junkers 52s. That was on March 31".'-He fell silent for a moment, a look of anger on his face, as if he were feeling the anger he had felt then, some seventy years before. 'That was what your War was like. One lie after another, every day and everywhere, like a great flood, something that devastates and drowns. You try to take one apart only to find there are ten new lies to deal with the next day. You can't cope. You let things go, give up. There are so many people devoted to creating those lies that they become a tremendous force impossible to stop. That was my first experience of war, I wasn't used to it, but all wars are full of lies, they're a fundamental part of them, if not their principal ingredient. And the worst thing is that none are ever completely refuted. However many years pass, there are always people prepared to keep an old lie alive, and any lie will do, even the most improbable and most insane. No lie is ever entirely extinguished.'

'That's why one shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything, isn't that right, Peter?' I said, quoting his words. It was what he had said to me just before lunch, on the Sunday of that now far-off weekend, while Mrs. Berry was waving to us from the window.

He didn't remember or didn't realize I was quoting him, or else he simply ignored it. He stroked the long deep scar on the left side of his chin, a gesture I had never seen him make before: he didn't usually touch or mention that scar, and so I had never asked him about it. If it did not exist as far as he was concerned, I had to respect that. I assumed it was from the war.

'Oh, I learned to lie as well, later on. Telling the truth isn't necessarily better, you know. The consequences are sometimes identical.' However, he didn't linger over that remark, but continued talking in this rather schematic manner, as if he had already drawn up a narrative plan for that day, that is, for the next time I went to see him. 'We were briefly in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, and then I came back to England. My second visit took place a year later, in the summer of 1938. On that occasion, my guide, or rather my driving force, was Alan Hillgarth, the head of our Naval Intelligence in Spain. Although he spent most of his time in Mallorca (in fact, his son Jocelyn, the historian, was born there, you've heard of him I expect), he gave me the task of watching and monitoring the movements of Francoist warships in the ports around the Bay of Biscay, on the assumption that I had acquired some knowledge of the area. Most, of course, were German and Italian ships, which had been harassing and attacking the British merchant fleet in 1936, both there in the Bay of Biscay and in the Mediterranean, and so the Admiralty was keen to gather as much information as possible about what kind of ships they were and their positions. I was traveling in the guise of a university researcher, on the pretext of delving into and rummaging around in Spain's old and highly disorganized archives, and I did exactly that-indeed some of the discoveries I made as a specialist in the history of Spain and Portugal date from that period: in fact it was in Portugal, when I was eventually deported there, that I started preparing my thesis on the sources used by Fernão Lopes, the great chronicler of the fourteenth century whom I'm sure you know' The truth is I'd never heard of him. 'But that's by the by. I was arrested by the Guardia Civil when I was on the Islas Cies, taking photographs of the cruiser Canarias, one of the few ships in the Spanish navy that had gone over to the rebels, as the Republicans called the Nationalists. They searched me, of course, and found compromising material, mainly photographs. Normally, as you can imagine, they would have executed me. We were, after all, in the middle of a war.' Wheeler paused. He may have been telling his story in that rather mechanical way, almost as if it had happened to someone else, but he nevertheless knew when to prolong the uncertainty.

'So how did you escape?' I asked, just to please him.

'I was lucky. Like your father. Like any survivor of any war. They took me in a launch to the Hotel Atlantico in the port of Vigo, and there I was interrogated by two SS officers.'-'It's always hotels they choose to convert into police stations or prisons,' I thought, 'like the one in Alcala de Henares where they tortured Nin and possibly flayed him alive.'-'In 1935, I had spent part of the summer in Bavaria, at a Hitler Youth camp, for, shall we say, biographical reasons that are irrelevant here. When they found out and checked that I was telling the truth, they invited me out to supper with them. That saved my life. They consulted the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos and, as I understand it, Franco himself gave the order not to have me killed but simply to expel me. After a few minor hitches getting hold of an exit permit, I was taken to the international bridge at Tui where I crossed into Portugal. That was the slowest stretch of my journey, I mean the longest walk of my life, on foot and carrying a suitcase full of books. Two German machine-gunners had their guns trained on my back so that I didn't deviate from the path and ahead of me stood some armed Portuguese guards. And beneath me lay the River Mino. It seemed very wide, and perhaps it was. So, as you see, however disastrous Franco proved to be for the history of your country and for many, many people, he played a crucial role in my personal history. A paradox, eh?

And rather an unfortunate one for me, I must admit. Owing one's life to the clemency of someone who showed clemency to almost no one else is oddly unflattering. Being an ignorant provincial, he was, I suppose, impressed by educated foreigners like me.' He laughed briefly at his own mildly malicious remark, and I laughed too out of politeness. Then he went on. 'As I told you before, I merely passed through your War: I still use words precisely. I didn't stay there long on either occasion, and there would be no reason for either of my names to appear in the index of any of the books written about the conflict. What I did there is hardly worth telling and seems almost ridiculous now. As would my subsequent activities during our War, although some of the things I did were more spectacular or more damaging and, objectively speaking, more important. Toby was quite right when he told you years ago that in times of relative peace, wartime events seem puerile and, inevitably, resemble lies, conceits and fabulations. As I think I've mentioned before, even things I've experienced myself seem fictitious or almost fanciful. I find it hard to believe, for example, that I acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1940. That was one of my first "special employments" to adapt the term used in my Who's Who entry, if you remember. It seems like a dream now. And the fact that it happened abroad doubtless contributes to that feeling.'

I remembered the expression clearly, as I did every word I had read, urged on by Wheeler, in his entry in Who's Who. And I understood that dream-like feeling too: 'But that was in another country…'

'The Duke and Duchess of Windsor?' I asked. 'Do you mean the former King, Edward VIII, and the divorced woman he abdicated the throne for, that ugly American, Wallis Simpson?' Like almost everyone else, I had read about the couple who were, supposedly, deeply in love, and seen photos of both of them in magazines and books. She, if I remember rightly, was extremely thin, had a hairstyle like that of the housekeeper in Hitchcock's Rebecca and very thin red lips, like a scar. The exact opposite of Jayne Mansfield. 'And what do you mean: sword of Damocles?'

'Oh, she wasn't that ugly' Wheeler said. 'Well, she was, but there was something troubling about her too.' He hesitated for an instant. 'I suppose I can tell you about it; it was a very harmless mission.' The word he used in English-'harmless'-means literally 'sin perjuicio' or 'sin daño' 'without harm or hurt.' 'Although it, too, sounds like a lie. I was charged with escorting them from Madrid to Lisbon, and, once there, to make sure that they embarked for the Bahamas. You may remember that he spent the War years there, as Governor of those islands-it was a way of keeping them far from the conflict, as far away as decorum allowed. Both of them had been through an embarrassing, shall we say, Germanophile stage, and had, it was rumored, visited Hitler incognito, before 1939 of course. There was no basis to the rumor, but the government feared like the plague the possibility that they might fall into the hands of the Nazis, that the Gestapo might kidnap them and take them to Germany, of course, but also that they might desert. That they might, in a word, go over to the other side. Churchill didn't trust them at all, and didn't dismiss the idea that if, one day, the Germans invaded us as they had the rest of Europe, the Germans would reinstate the former Edward VIII as a puppet king. Anyway, I and a naval officer from the NID (a very small escort, when I think about it, unimaginable now)'-I knew those initials, the Naval Intelligence Division-'were given a pistol each and told, albeit not in so many words, that we should make use of them if there was the slightest risk of losing the Duke and Duchess in unfortunate circumstances, and regardless of the couple's own wishes.'

'Use them against the Duke and Duchess?' I asked, interrupting him. Against an ex-King? Or against the Gestapo?' The whole business really did sound like a lie, although it obviously wasn't.

'It went without saying that we should use them against the Gestapo, although I don't think we would have stood much of a chance. No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler's hands.'

'We understood? Not in so many words?' I was surprised by such expressions. 'Do you mean that they didn't give you clear orders?'

'MI6 was obsessed with never saying quite what it meant. But you soon learned to decode their orders, especially if you'd been at Oxford. I don't know if they still keep up the custom now. What they said to us, more or less, was: "Under no circumstances must they fall into enemy hands. It would be preferable to have to mourn them." The truth is that I would have interpreted this exactly as did he and the officer from the NID with whom he had shared responsibilities. And he went on to speak about the latter in an amused, almost jocular, gossipy tone: 'I bet you can't guess the name of the naval commander accompanying me.'

'No, I can't,' I said. 'How could I?'

'In fact, almost no one knows about this, not even his biographers.' Then he called out: 'Estelle!'And he automatically corrected himself: there was, after all, a witness present, even though I was a trusted friend and had occasionally heard him call her by her first name before. 'Mrs. Berry!' Mrs. Berry appeared at once, she was always close by, ready to be of service to him. 'Could you please bring me the Chocolate Sailor's passport? You know where I keep it. I want to show it to Jacobo.' That was what he said-'Chocolate Sailor.' 'Now you'll see, it will amuse you no end.' And when, after a few minutes, Mrs. Berry reappeared and handed him a document (I heard her go up the stairs to the top floor and then come back down again), he showed it to me with an almost childlike expression of shy pride on his face: 'Look.'

It was a safe-conduct pass or Courier's Passport as it said at the top, issued by the British ambassador in the city where I was born and valid only for a journey to Gibraltar and back, dated February 16,1941, right in the middle of the Second World War, and then renewed ten days later and made valid for a journey to London via Lisbon. 'These are to request and require, in the Name of His Majesty,' it read, 'all those whom it may concern to allow Mr. Ian Lancaster Fleming charged with despatches to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him every assistance and protection of which he may stand in need.'

'Oh, I see,' I said, unmoved. 'Ian Fleming.' Wheeler seemed a little disappointed by my lack of surprise. He didn't know that I had already stumbled on the dedications that the creator of James Bond had written in copies of his novels (To Peter Wheeler who may know better. Salud!), which was why the fact that they were friends or acquaintances did not catch me entirely unawares. 'So they shared an adventure,' I thought, then said, in order to cheer him up: 'So the two of you shared an adventure in Spain, before he became a writer. How amazing.'

'This passport is from the following year. He gave it to me later on, when he was already famous, as a souvenir of our time in Portugal more than of our time in Spain. We were stuck there with that frivolous pair from June to August. Mrs. Simpson, I mean the Duchess, was not prepared to go into exile, which is how they saw it, without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bedlinen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service, all of which was supposed to arrive from Paris, via Madrid, in eight Hispano-Suizas hired by the multimillionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, a risky journey in those days. (Oddly enough, that was the same year in which Gulbenkian, who was Armenian in origin, was declared "Enemy under the Act" and thus lost his British nationality and became Persian instead; so when he helped the Duke and Duchess, I don't know if he was still a friend or an enemy.) Anyway, we had to wait in Estoril and accompany them each night to the casino, either Ian Fleming or myself or, more often, to be on the safe side, both of us. It's hardly surprising that there are so many casinos in the Bond novels: since the 1920s he had been a frequent visitor to the casinos in Deauville, Le Touquet, and later Biarritz; he loved to play, especially baccarat, which was a real stroke of luck because it meant the Duchess was kept entertained when he was around. (He never won very much and even lost, he was a fairly conservative player, placing low bets, not like the fictional character he created.) As for the Duke, at least he was a reasonable conversationalist. We had a somewhat bland but cordial relationship: he had studied here, at Magdalen, and so when I couldn't think how else to entertain him, I could always resort to telling him the latest Oxford gossip. He would listen in amazement, and with a touch of possibly feigned innocence, especially to news of any sexual shenanigans. But he didn't know how to laugh. A dull man and possibly not very bright, but worldly in a pleasant way and, of course, with impeccable manners: after all, there's no denying that he came from a good family.' And Peter laughed again at his little joke. 'Finally, we managed to send the royal couple off safe and sound, along with all the silver and porcelain and bedlinen, in a British destroyer that had been anchored in the Tagus, and it was with great relief that we saw them head off across the Atlantic, bound for the Bahamas. We parted company then, Ian Fleming and I, and didn't meet again until some time later. He was a personal assistant to Rear Admiral Godfrey and had a lot of contact with Hillgarth and with Sefton Delmer, I think he and the latter had been together in Moscow and they collaborated on the PWE's black game…'-'Black game,' he said. I had heard young Pérez Nuix use the term 'black gamblers' once, or was it 'wet gamblers'; it had made me think of cardsharps anyway. I didn't know what those initials, PWE, meant, but I didn't want to interrupt Wheeler.-'We lost track of each other, well, that was normal during the War, we were sent here, there and everywhere, wherever they chose to post us, and you always said goodbye to someone knowing full well that you probably wouldn't see them again. Not because it simply wouldn't happen, but because they or you or both of you might easily die. It happened every time I had to leave and say goodbye to Valerie… Every time…' His voice had been growing fainter and fainter until, when he spoke those last words, his voice was barely a murmur; he had probably worn himself out with speaking. He did not go on. He placed his two arms on the stick that lay across the arms of the chair, as if he had just engaged in some physical exertion and needed to rest. He looked tired, I thought, and his gaze was slightly abstracted. 'Yes, Sefton Delmer's black propaganda, that's what it was,' he added thoughtfully, then fell silent again. Perhaps he had remembered too much, mechanically at first and with great animation subsequently, but all memories lead to more memories and there is always a moment, sooner or later, when one comes upon a sad one, a loss, a nostalgia, an unhappiness that was not an invention. People then sit with eyes lowered or gaze abstracted and stop talking, fall silent.

'I don't know who Sefton Delmer was, Peter,' I said. 'Nor what PWE means.'

He raised his eyes and fixed them on me, wearily and with a certain bewilderment too. He said:

'Why are we talking about this? I don't know how it came up, I've forgotten.' The truth was I had forgotten too. 'Why don't you tell me something? You must have a reason for coming here today, without warning. I'm delighted to see you, but tell me, why have you come today?'

He was right. Wheeler still missed very little, even if his mind wasn't what it was and even though he now paid less attention to the outside world and was developing a form of loquacious introspection (or, I suppose, just introspection plain and simple when he was alone). Yes, I did have a reason for going to Oxford on that Sunday exiled from the infinite, to his house by the River Cherwell, whose quiet or languid murmur was just audible from where we were sitting, very faint, but still audible, and I recalled the words that my thoughts had attributed to it as they finally fell asleep, very late, on the night I had met Tupra there during a buffet supper: 'I am the river, I am the river and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.' I had gone there to tell Wheeler what had happened to me or rather what I had done-after all, nothing had happened to me: other people had been the losers-and to ask him if he could have foreseen something like that happening when he first introduced me to the group to which he, too, had belonged; that is, in his role as intermediary, how far had he been aware of what he was getting me involved in and the risks he was laying me open to. He must have known about the possible consequences of our reports and about the uses to which they were sometimes put, to immediate and practical use or, in my case, to ruthless and criminal use. If, in times of relative peace, the result of one such report was a homicide and a scandalous arrest, the death of an innocent person and the ruin of another, tricked into being the guilty party, then, presumably, during the War, when the group had been created, and there would have been little margin for checking facts and when hasty decisions would sometimes have been made, the interpretation of people and the translation of lives or the anticipation of stories would inevitably have led to people being eliminated, to disasters and calamities. Although they would also have contributed to avoiding those things-I was sure of that. Wheeler would perhaps have found himself in a situation similar to mine now; he was not an unscrupulous person, and even though he might, in his day, have spread outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague, that wasn't the man I knew. Perhaps his words had killed not one man, but many, some perhaps who should not have died. However, had that happened, he would always have had the consolation, the justification, the excuse that a war was on. I did not.

'Yes, I do have a reason for coming here today, Peter,' I said. And I put him in the picture and explained what had happened, just as I had with Pérez Nuix the night before.

Wheeler heard me out in silence, without interrupting me once, with his walking stick upright now, the tip resting on the floor, and the palm of one hand cradling his cheek in the gesture of one listening attentively. I told him about that first encounter with Dearlove and about Edinburgh, thus affording his weary tongue a rest. I spoke to him of my suspicions-or, rather, certainties-regarding the crime that had caused a frenzy of press speculation in the last few days and about which I assumed he would know.

'Yes, I read about it in the newspapers.' And he brushed the papers beside him with the tips of his fingers, as if he feared dirtying his hands. 'The contemptible Sunday papers are full of it, and Mrs. Berry, who watches television more than I do, told me how shocked and horrified she was. And very disappointed too: apparently, she enjoys this Dearlove fellow's music. I'm clearly not au fait with all her interests.' He paused and added, as if issuing a statement: 'It would never have occurred to me that you and your colleagues had anything to do with it. It's surprising really that the group can still surprise me. Although, naturally, things must have changed beyond belief.' He thought a little more, then said: 'I don't know. Jacobo. I don't know what Tupra is up to, he rarely calls me and confides in me still less. The older one gets, the more distant people become, not that I'm reproaching any of you for that.' But there was reproach, towards me as well, in those words. And of course it's very much Tupra's style when he doesn't act impulsively and takes his time; insofar as I know him, that is, which isn't very well. Toby knew him better. At least he knew the Tupra who was his student, the person he used to be. I find it hard to imagine what possible danger that singer could represent, to necessitate laying a trap for him and getting rid of him. But one shouldn't discount anything; in time one learns that, in theory, as people in our line of work come to realize, anyone can be dangerous. And our line of work, don't forget, is about protecting other people. And about protecting ourselves, because if we don't safeguard ourselves, we won't be able to protect anyone. It would seem, though, that you're quite right, given that they've carried out your predictions to the letter. The man was clearly a real danger, a madman. A murderer. You mustn't torment yourself overmuch on his account.'

'You don't mind if I smoke, do you?' He shook his head. I offered him the pack of cigarettes, he shook his head again, and I lit a Karelias. 'I'm afraid that they fulfilled those predictions only because I made them, Peter,' I said. 'It's not that easy. The thing didn't just happen naturally and spontaneously. Calculation and artifice played their part, as did machination and scheming; there was the interested party to whom I gave the idea, as if I were an Iago. Without my prognostications nothing would have happened, I'm sure, and Dearlove would not be a murderer. And a young man who had nothing whatsoever to do with it wouldn't have died. He may not even have received his payment for the job. I doubt that Tupra would have paid him in advance. I don't know how I'm going to be able to live with that.' Wheeler said nothing. He sat looking at me, his hand on his chin, attentive, thoughtful, rather as if I were new to him, or as if he were wondering what to do with me in a situation that was not so much unforeseen as insoluble. He didn't even say 'Hm,' but just sat there, looking at me. 'When I first got involved in this,' I went on, 'did you know that something like this might happen? That what you called my gift or my talent might be used for such things, with one person killed and another sent to prison? That it could lead to such drastic measures being taken, measures that could change lives so radically, and even put an end to one person's life? I don't think I can continue in this job. And I'd like you to know that before anyone else does, before Tupra knows. After all, you were the one who encouraged me, the one who first spoke to me about the group.'

Then I realized that he had got stuck again, that his voice or his words would not come out, that he had been assailed once more by that momentary aphasia, which, according to him was not physiological, but like a sudden withdrawal of his will: this was the third time I had witnessed this, so it obviously wasn't as infrequent as he had told me. As on the two previous occasions, it didn't happen in the middle of a sentence that I could then help him to conclude with conjectures, the way one does with people who stutter, but before he had actually spoken. This time, he was not pointing to anything that would help me orient myself (a cushion in the first instance, a cutting of an Eric Fraser cartoon in the second, when the helicopter flew over). He merely made a gesture with one hand asking me to be patient, to wait, as if he knew that it would soon pass and that it was best to leave him be and not add any more questions to those I had already asked him, best not to pressure him. His lips were pressed tight shut, as if they had suddenly become glued together and he could not open them. His face, however, remained unchanged, it was still attentive and thoughtful, as if he were preparing himself to tell me whatever it was he was going to tell me as soon as he could, once he had recovered the power of speech or liberated the word that had got stuck. This finally happened after about two minutes. He made no reference to his difficulty and answered me as if that silent hiatus had not existed:

'The problem isn't the group, Jacobo,' he said. 'You'll find this out for yourself, but leaving it won't necessarily prevent what you feel has happened to you happening again. It hasn't, in fact, happened to you. It has simply happened, and that kind of thing can occur anywhere. You can't control what use other people might make of your ideas or words, nor entirely foresee the ultimate consequences of what you say. In life in general. Never. It doesn't make sense for you to ask me if I knew or didn't know: no one can ever know, in any circumstance, what they might be unleashing, and everything can be put to use, for one purpose or for its complete opposite. The risk that you might trigger misfortunes was no greater here than if you had never moved from your home, from Madrid, from Luisa's side.' I thought of Custardoy for a moment, of my hand holding the pistol and of his shattered hand. Wheeler, with his now recovered voice, was still looking at me hard, as if he were analyzing me. I couldn't help but feel observed or more than that: spied on, decoded, laid bare. Then he added, as if, having examined me, he had decided to risk a diagnosis. 'Of course you can live with it. I can assure you that, unlike Valerie, you can live with what's happened to you or with what you think of as having happened to you. Strange though it may seem, in some respects I know you better than I knew her. We've studied you, but in her case, we were too late.'

I didn't know what to ask him about first, whether about the study that had been made of me or about Valerie, his wife, whom he had already mentioned; on that particular Sunday her name was haunting his tongue. I felt that if I showed too much curiosity about her fate, he might withdraw and say again: Ah… Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' It was possible that there wouldn't be another day. It was best if that story arrived of its own accord, if it ever did.

'I know you've studied me,' I repeated. 'I've seen a report about me in some old files at the office. Who wrote that? Was it you?'

'Oh, no, it wasn't me, I've never written reports, I've only ever given them orally, you know, keeping to the bare essentials; writing reports would be too bureaucratic, too boring. No, that must have been Toby, during the time when you taught at Oxford. He was the one who discovered you, if I may use that expression. The first to speak of you to me and, I imagine, to the others.

The one who discovered your good gifts, as I think I told you, what, fifteen years ago? Twenty? No, it can't be that long.'

It didn't seem very likely to me. It was possible, but in that case, who were the 'you' and the 'her' alluded to in the report? '… It's almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows,' it said. 'About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do. About our characters I mean. Or, more than that, about what shaped us. With a knowledge to which we are not a party …' Perhaps 'you' was Cromer-Blake, my other Oxford friend from that time and who was also a great friend of Rylands; and then 'her' had to be Clare Bayes, my former lover, from my youth, and whom I had never seen again. But that would mean that Cromer-Blake had belonged to the group as well, and that didn't fit at all; although, who knows, in Oxford everyone pretends all the time… I didn't believe Wheeler in that respect. I assumed that he didn't want to tell me who had written that report and it was easy to attribute it to someone who was dead. Or else he preferred not to confess it had been him, that was more likely. He was always reserved, except when he dropped his guard a little, as on that Sunday.

'What happened to your wife, what happened to Valerie?' And again I had that sense of abuse or sacrilege on my lips when I pronounced her name.

This time he raised his hand to his forehead, the same hand on which he had been resting his cheek and chin, while his other hand was holding, no, gripping his walking stick. He narrowed his eyes as we short-sighted people do in order to see into the distance and no longer directed them at me, but further off, at some point in the garden or the river, through the windows.

'We miscalculated, or, rather, it never even occurred to me that a calculation needed to be made. Had the group been formed earlier, if whoever had come up with the idea had done so a few months before (Vivian, Menzies, Cowgill or Crossman, or it might have been Delmer or even Churchill himself), she might not have been allowed to go so far. Or else I wouldn't have let her. They would of course: they would stop at nothing.' And here he used the Spanish expression pararse en barras. 'But I wasn't around much during the War, I was away on those "special employments." I only came back occasionally and then only briefly, and so I probably wouldn't have been able to prevent it anyway' He stopped. He must have been thinking that he had started, but that he could still stop. But I think he decided not to make a dilemma out of it and simply to carry on. 'Valerie, like almost everyone then, wanted to make an active contribution, to help in some way. As I said, she spoke excellent German, because she had spent many summers in her childhood and adolescence with an Austrian family who were old friends of her parents, and the couple's youngest daughter was about her age; there were three other children, the eldest of whom was ten years older than her. She used to spend the summers in Melk, on the banks of the Danube, in Lower Austria, near the famous Benedictine abbey, you know, the Baroque monastery' He saw my blank look, and added, as a parenthesis: '(It doesn't matter, there's no reason why you should know it.) And the girl who was the same age as her used to spend Christmas with her here in England. When war broke out, Val thought of volunteering as an infiltrator and being sent to Germany. However, she knew she wasn't very brave and would easily have lost heart and been discovered at once. She was very willing and intelligent, but she just didn't have the right temperament for a job like that. She lacked the necessary aplomb and the ability to pretend or, indeed, to deceive. She would never have made a good spy. Contrary to popular belief, most people wouldn't or couldn't spy. Besides, she was very young, only nineteen when the War began; I was seven years older than her at the time, but now the gap in our ages is much greater, and I oughtn't to let that gap get any bigger.' As if to confirm this, he looked down resignedly at his own veined, wrinkled, freckled hand. 'She worked as a translator and interpreter for the Foreign Office until, in August 1941, all the propaganda, both black and white, was handed over to the PWE, and they recruited as many people with a good knowledge of German as they could. The Political Warfare Executive,' he explained at last, and I immediately tentatively translated this to myself: "'El Ejecutivo de la Guerra Political I thought; or "El Ejecutivo Politico de la Guerra" or perhaps "del Guerrear" would be closer.' 'I thought this would suit her well. It was quite safe. I didn't want her running any risks, excessive risks, I mean, I didn't want her to be too exposed, because obviously everyone was running risks, as you know, at the front and in the rearguard. The PWE was a secret department and purely temporary, lasting only as long as the War, and began to be dismantled as soon as Germany signed the unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Its name or its acronym didn't become public knowledge until much later. A lot of the people who worked there didn't even know they were working for it and thought they were just part of the Foreign Office's PID, Political Intelligence Department, supposedly a small, non-secret section of the Ministry. The people who wrote the white propaganda (the BBC broadcasts intended for Germany and occupied Europe, for example, or the pamphlets that the RAF threw out of their planes on their raids, bearing the imprint of His Majesty's Government and all that) tended to know absolutely nothing about the existence of the black propaganda, or even the grey propaganda, which was being created by their colleagues, who were working in separate divisions and in utmost secrecy. The great advantage of the black propaganda was that no one ever acknowledged that it was British in origin, and we, of course, always denied authorship. As a consequence, the people involved had a completely free hand, with almost no restraints. Remember that officially we weren't doing certain things, even though we were doing them undercover. We never admitted it, because, among other reasons, hardly anyone knew that such things were being done. When Richard Crossman talked about the PWE in the 1970s, in a newspaper article about Watergate that had a lot of repercussions at the time (I remember that Lord Ritchie-Calder and others intervened), he admitted that during the War there had been what he called "an inner Government" with rules and codes of conduct that were completely at odds with those of the visible public Government, and he added that during total warfare, this was a necessary mechanism. Crossman was one of the key figures in the PWE, although not as important as Sefton Delmer, who was the genius responsible for creating a whole new concept of psychological warfare as purely destructive. Crossman had been a member of Harold Wilson's Cabinet in the 1960s and so his views were respected and what he said couldn't easily be contradicted…'

Wheeler stopped. I thought he must have grown tired again or that his mouth was dry from so much talking. It was incredible how fluently he spoke when his words did not get stuck, even if he had perhaps lapsed again into that strangely introspective loquacity. I wondered when we would return to the young Valerie, forever young and growing daily ever younger than him. I asked him if he would like something to drink, and he said, yes, a glass of water and told me to help myself to whatever I wanted, that I should ask Mrs. Berry to bring it, and he apologized for not having offered me anything before. I replied that I would go to the kitchen myself, preferring not to bother her. I brought him his water and, after opening a cold beer for myself, took the opportunity to satisfy a minor curiosity:

'Was black propaganda also called "the black game"? Are they the same thing? You used that expression earlier.'

'Yes,' he said. 'Well, it doesn't only refer to propaganda, but to all black operations. It may have been Crossman and Delmer who invented the term, I'm not sure. According to them, the Americans-who, in part, copied us when it came to subversion techniques and who have reveled in using them ever since (rather clumsily, it must be said)-never learned to apply them as we did, to play it as a game despite the gravity of the situation. Far worse, they didn't give it up in peacetime. There was a book published about twenty or twenty-five years ago entitled The Black Game. I read it, it's written by someone called Howe.'

'Was it also known as "the wet game"?' I was almost certain now that 'wet gamblers' had been the term used by Pérez Nuix on the night she visited me unannounced.

'It's not a term I've heard very often, but possibly, yes. Perhaps because black operations often involved blood being spilled. White operations, on the other hand, rarely did; they were dry. But where were we?' he added, slightly irritated. 'Why am I telling you all this? Oh dear me, I've forgotten again.' The Spanish equivalent of 'Oh dear me' would be 'Ay Dios,' but in English there was no mention of God. Perhaps his memory could no longer stretch as far as it once could, from the beginning of a story to its end. Perhaps that was the one area in which his recent decline had become noticeable. He lost sight of the initial thread, although it took only the slightest of nudges for him to recover it.

'You were telling me about your wife,' I said to help him out. 'About what she did during the War.'

'Ah, yes, I was going to tell you how Valerie died, since you ask, and not for the first time either,' he replied. 'But it's important that you understand what the PWE was and how it worked, that you grasp precisely what she was involved in and what she became used to. In a sense, Sefton Delmer was the PWE's equivalent of Bomber Harris, except that he didn't have planes or troops at his command, just experts in deceit and forgery.' And when he saw that the name of Harris rang only a faint bell with me, he added: Arthur Harris, the Air Marshal, was the one who ordered the burning of fifty thousand Hamburg citizens and one hundred and fifty thousand Dresden citizens towards the end of the War on the cynical pretense that he was attacking military targets; he also flattened Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Mannheim; he was an implacable man with too much power, almost a psychopath really, willing to use any means at his disposal to crush the enemy and win.' Then I remembered him mentioning Harris before: 'A few months ago I read in a book by Knightley,' he had said, 'that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, dubbed the members of the SOE amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious,' the same men who had been behind the assassination of Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and behind many other acts of sabotage, destruction and terror. 'Harris and Delmer were, according to Crossman, possibly the only ones who were allowed, in their respective fields, to wage total war-the total war that Goring and Goebbels had threatened but never carried out. Indeed, Delmer was allowed to outdo the Nazis themselves (that is, he plumbed still lower depths than they did) in lies and calumnies, in the manipulation and invention of news and information and in deceiving the enemy population. Black propaganda, like strategic bombing, was nihilist in its aims and purely destructive in its effects, as Crossman himself acknowledged. And it turned out to be an enormously effective weapon, which is why everyone uses it now and with no qualms at all. Sefton Delmer was a real genius, as no one would deny. He was born in Berlin of an Australian father.'-'Yet another bogus Englishman,' I thought, 'how many more?'-'He had studied there and later here in Oxford; before the War, as The Daily Express correspondent in Berlin, he had met Ernst Rohm and, through him, Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and Himmler. He had a perfect understanding of the German character and psychology; in fact, his background meant that, when War first broke out, he was initially eyed with great suspicion here and wasn't allowed to occupy any responsible post until the security services had observed him and given him the green light-imagine that. From the people who worked with him he demanded absolute secrecy, discipline and determination, in other words, a complete lack of scruples. He gradually began recruiting Germans to his team: former members of the International Brigades, émigrés, refugees, then a few prisoners of war willing to collaborate, an important deserter who had escaped to London after the failed attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, and even a former member of the SS. He said the same thing to all of them as soon as they arrived in Woburn, where the department was based: "We are waging against Hitler a kind of total war of wits. Anything goes, so long as it serves to bring nearer the end of the war and the complete defeat of the Reich. If you are at all squeamish about what you may be called upon to do against your own countrymen you must say so now. I'll understand that. However, you will be no good to us in that case, and no doubt some other job will be found for you. But if you feel like joining me, I must warn you that in my unit we are up to all the dirty tricks we can devise. The dirtier the better. No holds barred. Lies, phone-tapping, embezzlement, treachery, forgery, defamation, disinformation, spreading dissension, making false statements and accusations, you name it. Even, don't forget, sheer murder.'"-'Sheer murder' was the expression he used.-'Valerie heard him say this more than once. She became quite close to him.'

Wheeler paused for thought, perhaps remembering Valerie being close to Sefton Delmer. Now he raised his hand to his lips and gently stroked them. Then he again ran his thumb down the scar on his chin, it was odd that I'd never seen him make that gesture until then. I wondered if he was inviting me to ask him about that too. However, as long as he did not mention it himself, I would abstain.

'And what were these dirty tricks? What exactly did the black game involve?' I asked.

'Well, most of their activities we only found out about after the War was over. Needless to say, they forged everything. That was one of the things we really excelled at: radio broadcasts, every kind of document, including orders from Reich bigwigs like General von Falkenhorst who was in command of the troops in Norway; soldier's leave permits, entry passes into vital installations and buildings, circulars, satirical posters, postage stamps, rubber stamps, envelopes and letterheads, even packs of cigarettes, I remember seeing some called Efka-"Pyramiden," and everything had to be able to pass as genuinely German, or at least, when that proved impossible, as having been made in Germany or in Austria, which would create the uneasy sense that we had more infiltrators there than we really did, that we had far more people hidden in their territory, equipped with the infrastructure and the means and a tremendous operating capacity, which not only worried them, it made them waste a lot of time and effort pursuing and hunting down ghosts. We could reach everywhere with the radio, even submarines, whose crews had the demoralizing feeling that they were being watched by us and could not conceal their positions from us. But the most important thing was to stir up enmity among the Germans themselves and to work to their detriment, both at the collective and the individual level, so as to foment distrust among them and make them fear each other. And of course, when feasible, to eliminate or bring about the downfall of high-ranking officials both civil and military. The black section of the PWE printed wanted posters of SS officers who were accused of being traitors, deserters, impostors or criminals wanted by the authorities: they urged people to shoot these men on sight and offered rewards of ten thousand marks or more, and assured them that even the Iron Crosses the officers might be wearing were mere forgeries. It was all very calculated. Some of those posters, supported by a radio campaign, showed the Reichkommissar Ley, a Nazi Party heavyweight with a somewhat dissolute lifestyle, and accused him of hoarding ration coupons, and Dr. Ley was obliged to deny this indignantly: "I am a perfectly normal consumer!" he roared over the radio.' And Wheeler couldn't help chuckling, remembering something that Valerie herself might have laughingly told him, breaking the Official Secrets Act to which she would have been subject. 'They issued stamps bearing the image not of Hitler, but of that ambitious man Himmler, with the intention of setting them at each other's throats, giving more credence to the persistent rumors that the latter was hoping to replace the former as Führer and thus putting Himmler on the spot. But there were more serious things, too, much wetter things. A common practice of Delmer's was to have fake letters sent to the family members of German soldiers who had died of their wounds in military hospitals in Italy. They would intercept the uncoded cablegrams sent by the directors of those hospitals to the Party authorities in Germany and which contained all the information about the deceased and the address of his next of kin. The letters forged by Delmer's team, written in perfect German and on the hospital's headed paper, were supposedly penned by a distressed comrade or nurse who had remained by the dead man's side until the last, and what they usually said, in horrified tones, was that the soldier had, in fact, been killed by lethal injection on the orders of his superiors, when they were informed that he would no longer be available for active service. The Nazi doctors needed the beds for those soldiers who would soon be able to be sent back to the front, and so they got rid of the badly injured men without compassion or gratitude, cruelly and expeditiously, as if they were so much detritus. Delmer and his unit were perfectly aware that they were the ones who were practising real and extreme cruelty by making a grief-stricken widow or someone's aged parents or orphaned children believe such a falsehood (which was, on the other hand, quite believable). However, if this served to feed discontent and rancor among the population, to lower the morale of the combatants, spread disunity among the troops and encourage desertions, that was what mattered. Don't forget, Jacobo, the Second World War felt like a battle for survival. And it was, it really was. And in wars like that the limits on what one can acceptably do are constantly broadening out, almost without one realizing it. Times of peace judge times of war very harshly, and I'm not sure how far it's possible to make such a judgment. They are mutually exclusive: in time of war, for example, peace is inconceivable-and vice versa, a fact that tends to be overlooked. Nevertheless, there are still things that do seem reprehensible even while they're happening or being perpetrated in the most permissive of times, and you see, all those… yes, vile deeds, I suppose… were kept hidden at the time as well, when the War was being waged and no one knew how it would end. Sefton Delmer's unit didn't officially exist, and all its members were told to deny its existence (and, therefore, their own existence) both to the world as a whole and to other organizations that were almost (but not quite) as secret, like the SOE, or like us later on, silent and silenced for rather different reasons but mainly to do with secrecy and discretion. And do you know, after the War, not only was the PWE dissolved immediately, its black members were given more or less the following instructions: "For years we have abstained from talking about our work to anyone not in our unit, and therefore little is known about us or our techniques. People may have their suspicions, but they don't know anything for certain. And to keep it that way, we want you to continue as you have up until now. Don't allow anything or anyone to provoke you into boasting about the work we've done, about the tricks and traps we laid for the enemy. If we start to show off to people about the ingenious things we got up to, who knows where it will end. So, mum's the word.'" And I remembered having seen that last expression on one of the 'careless talk' posters. '"Propaganda should, by its nature, be a subject one doesn't talk about." This was doubtless out of prudence,' Wheeler went on, 'but also, I think, because the work was such that they couldn't feel entirely proud of it, and less so in the final stages of the War than at any other time. Valerie, a fe mía, certainly wasn't proud of it.' And he used that rather literary Spanish of his, a fe mía, the equivalent of the English 'forsooth.' 'When the German civilians were at their most desperate and confused, our phony radio stations heaped still more confusion and desperation on them. We warned, for example, that an enormous number of counterfeit German marks were circulating in the country, which meant that people could trust neither their own money nor what other people gave them. The worst, however, came after the brutal bombings by Harris and the Americans, and again when troops were already invading Germany, ours from the west and the Russians from the east. During air raids, the German stations stopped transmitting so as not to serve as beacons for the RAF and USAF planes. But in a matter of seconds, don't ask me how, Delmer and his colleagues managed to take over their frequencies, pretending, in their immaculate German, that normal transmissions had been resumed, and sending out bewildering, disorienting, counterproductive or contradictory messages that wreaked the maximum amount of havoc and spread chaos. Initially, survivors in the devastated cities (Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig and so many others) were advised not to move, not to leave their respective cities and to wait for help to arrive. Delmer, apparently at Churchill's behest, ordered them to do exactly the opposite, via a communiqué that he passed off, of course, as an official statement from the Reich. His team informed the people that seven bomb-free zones had been set up in the center and south of Germany, to which refugees could go and where they would be safe from aerial attacks by the enemy. They were assured that neutral representatives of the Red Cross in Berlin had told the authorities of the Reich that Eisenhower himself was going to declare those seven areas to be safe, and that the banks were moving their securities there. This information was, of course, entirely false, but it had a tremendous effect. The roads were inundated with whole families fleeing towards those imaginary zones, with their ragged children, their wounded and their few household goods piled into carts, in dilapidated buses that ran out of gas, even in hearses, in whatever they could find to carry them away from their infernos. It was total chaos. Many roads were blocked by such large numbers of people that it hampered the defensive work of the German army, who didn't know how to avoid these hordes, nor where to put them or how to get them out of the way, or what to do with them. And it's likely that still more bombs fell on many of those terrified displaced persons who set off en masse in search of those phantom safe zones, and who would perhaps have survived among the ruins of their cities, if they'd sat tight, because there were no safe zones anywhere in Germany, or only in those places that had already been destroyed.'

Wheeler stopped speaking and eagerly drank some water, finishing the whole glass in one gulp or, rather, in several slow prolonged gulps, the way children drink when they're very thirsty, but, who, unable to cope with too much liquid at once, have to pause now and then to recover their breath, although without for a moment removing their lips from the cup, as if they feared that someone might snatch the glass from them. Then he summoned Mrs. Berry, asked her to bring him more water and a few olives as an accompaniment to my beer. 'That's how you still drink in Spain, isn't it, with something to nibble on so that the alcohol doesn't go to your head,' he said. 'I've got some Spanish ones, crushed olives with lemon, from Andalusia, I believe. They're very good. I understand you can buy them in Taylor's, almost opposite where you used to live.' I remembered that delicatessen well. It was a fairly expensive shop, but during my Oxford years, I had largely subsisted on its many frivolous products (I've never been much of a cook). I told Mrs. Berry not to go to any trouble on my behalf, there was no need, but Wheeler had asked her for them and she wanted to please him. When she had left the room and I had my olives before me-although she never really left the room entirely, she continued to come and go, always silent and busy-I asked Wheeler:

'And is that what your wife became used to, Peter? To what you called "those vile deeds"? At the time, I suppose, they weren't seen like that. And it might be that they are vile deeds now, but that they weren't then. Just part of the struggle.' I paused, slightly perplexed because I wasn't sure that I myself quite understood what I had just said, which is why I added: 'If, that is, it's possible for something to be fine when you do it, or at least justifiable, but not when you've done it, since the two things are one and the same. I mean, I don't know if it's possible for the same thing to be different when it's present and when it's past, when it's an ongoing action and when it's just a memory. Oh, ignore me.'

Wheeler looked at me as if he really had become lost in my confused thoughts, and didn't answer me at once; indeed, he seemed to be taking me at my word and ignoring me.

'In one of his volumes of autobiography,' he said, 'I can't recall whether it was Trail Sinister or Black Boomerang (I read them when they were published in the sixties, partly to see if Valerie was mentioned or alluded to at any point; she wasn't, nor was the affair in which she played the largest part, the leading role), Sefton Delmer described traveling to Germany towards the end of March 1945 and seeing the spectacle with his own eyes, the same spectacle he had seen before in Spain during the final days of your War (he had been there too, as a correspondent) as well as in Poland and in France: people aimlessly fleeing, trudging through a series of ruined landscapes, dragging with them all that remained of their possessions or that they had been able to pile into their broken-down vehicles, or walking along roads and across fields with very young children on their backs, their eyes empty or terrified, sometimes with dead children whom they couldn't bring themselves to bury at the roadside or whom they didn't dare to abandon, but continued pointlessly to carry as if they were effigies… And Sefton Delmer said that he didn't stop to ask anyone if, by any chance, what had first impelled them to set off along the roads and begin their aimless wanderings had been the messages broadcast on Radio Cologne or Radio Frankfurt, whose frequencies he had taken over. I remember that he wrote: "I didn't want to know. I feared the answer might be 'yes.'" So he did know. But he had done those things and would have done them again, just as almost everyone else was driven to do such things, just as almost everyone else does in time of war. During a war, very few ideas, even the most unlikely, fail to be put into practice. Almost anything that occurs to anyone as a way of harming the enemy finds an outlet, although it might not be publicly acknowledged afterwards. The trick we played with those radio broadcasts was so effective and had such grave consequences that the Nazi authorities were obliged to abandon the airwaves altogether as a way of issuing orders or instructions to the population. They had to fall back on the Drahtfunk, a wired diffusion network on which we could not intrude but which was much more problematic and restricted in scope. Yes, Delmer and his black game made a huge contribution. I don't know if he won the War for us, but he certainly contributed to our winning it more quickly.'

Wheeler really did seem weary now. At any moment, he might abandon his story, leave the rest for another day, fall silent or perhaps bring it to a definitive end. He might even regret having started, something I didn't want to risk, because I might never again find him in the same talkative mood, given that he normally kept himself to himself. 'Who knows, I might never find him again in any kind of mood,' I thought, 'if I'm going to leave here soon and go back to Spain. It's quite likely that I'll never see him again.' And so I decided to insist and even hurry him along.

'So what happened to Valerie?' I didn't mind pronouncing her name now. 'What was this affair in which she played the largest part? The leading role you said.'

Wheeler leaned forward slightly, rested both hands on the handle of his walking stick, which he had positioned upright between his legs, with his chin resting on his two hands, and I had the feeling that this was a way of gathering momentum or of preparing himself to make a major effort. His eyes shone and his voice sounded stronger, for it had grown weaker as he talked. It occurred to me that he might never have told, or only a long time ago and to very few people, what he was probably about to tell me. For I was still not certain that he would.

'Well,' he said, 'I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Nazi racial laws.'

'Not very,' I answered at once; I didn't want there to be any more pauses. 'Like everyone else, I have a vague general idea.'

'They were very precise, almost complex and, more than that, from 1933 onwards, they kept changing. Their application also varied depending on the people and organizations who interpreted them. The Ministry of the Interior was less strict in applying them than Dr. Adolf Wagner, the Nazi Party's chief authority on the subject, and he, in turn, was less rigorous than, for example, the SS. However, the relevant point here is this: you were considered to be a Jew if at least three of your grandparents were Jewish, regardless of any other factors; a person with two Jewish grandparents and who either belonged to the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew at the time the Race Laws came into effect was also legally Jewish (and, apart from a few very rare exceptions, "half-Jews" ended up being treated as Jews); then there were Mischlinge of the first degree, crossbreeds, who had two Jewish grandparents, but who neither professed the Jewish religion nor had a Jewish spouse; lastly, there were Mischlinge of the second degree who had only one "contaminating" Jewish grandparent and three grandparents who were "gentiles," that is, "Aryans" or what the Nazis termed "Germans." The difference was crucial, because, generally speaking, Mischlinge of the second degree were left in peace, and some were even able to obtain a German Blood Certificate, once the application had been studied by Hitler himself, who apparently judged the matter to be of sufficient importance to merit his spending time poring over each and every file and deciding whether or not the applicant should be "reclassified," as several thousand were. He did so at his own pace, of course, and I imagine that, unlike the applicants, he was in no particular hurry to make those judgements: some were "Jews" asking to be promoted to first-degree Mischlinge, or first-degree Mischlinge wanting to be recategorized as second-degree Mischlinge, with those in the second degree aspiring to "Aryani-sation" and the Certificate. Not a few committed suicide when they were relegated to "Jewry." People deemed to be doubtful cases were so panic-stricken that they often attempted, sometimes successfully, to forge, substitute, conceal or destroy their grandparents' birth certificates, especially between 1933 and 1939, after which this became virtually impossible. Many officials in town halls and registry offices, or wherever the documents were kept, removed compromising documents in exchange for outrageous sums of money or even property, sometimes even making use of convenient fires that broke out in certain parts of their archives or of plagues of highly selective mice. Or, if the forgery brought to them was perfect, written on old paper and everything, they would agree to do a swap and convert a Jewish grandfather or grandmother into a Catholic or a Protestant, with a change of surname included. This was a frequent occurrence in smaller towns and cities, where it was much easier. Of course, these officials almost never actually destroyed the document that had been replaced or removed, unless the payer demanded that it be handed over so that he or she could take personal charge of its disappearance. This wasn't usually the case, Jews not being in a position to lay down many conditions, and so the official would then keep the document just in case things changed in the future. The evidence, then, only vanished temporarily. Pour me a glass of sherry, will you,' added Wheeler, as if telling me all this had cheered him up. Talking about history often does have a cheering effect on the old.

"Do you have any preference?' I asked, pointing to a high shelf to my right, full of bottles.

'Any of those will do,' he said. I got up, poured him a glass and handed it to him; he took two sips and continued (and now I had no fear that he might stop): 'When, in time, a "quarter-Jew" was revealed to be a "Jew" or a "half-Jew" in disguise or else a second-degree crossbreed, or when an "Aryan" was shown to be a first-degree Mischling in disguise, it mattered little what the Laws said: their fate depended, above all, on who found them out and on what those people decided to do with the information and to whom they chose to give it. Taking the story to the local police or mayor wasn't at all the same thing as going to the SS or the Gestapo. It might be that nothing happened, the officials involved might turn a blind eye, or the guilty party, as punishment for his deceit, might be despatched to a concentration camp along with all his family. Apparently Goring or Goebbels-I can't remember which now-said: "I will decide who is a Jew." And when he said this, it wasn't in order to "judaize" someone, but because, on that occasion, it suited him to declare a particular person to be a non-Jew. Contrary to popular belief, and contrary to Nazi propaganda, there were many Mischlinge and even "half-Jews" who served the Reich loyally, even in the army and in positions of responsibility, both administrative and within the Party. A few years ago, a book came out entitled Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, by someone called Bryan Rigg-have you read it?-which gave an account of some of the more remarkable cases. The photo of a blond, blue-eyed "half-Jew" called Goldberg was used in the propaganda press as an example of "The Ideal German Soldier." Can you imagine? There were colonels, generals and admirals who were "half-" or "quarter-Jews," although Hitler conveniently declared them to be "Aryans." However, a Major General, Ernst Bloch by name, like the philosopher, and a veteran of the First World War, had to be discharged after Himmler made a personal protest. I don't know or can't remember what happened to him after that: perhaps he went from commanding troops to wasting away in a concentration camp, perhaps he fell from grace entirely. Much depended on chance, or on having the friendship or favor of someone high up. Field Marshal Milch, for example, was a "half-Jew," and his friend Goring provided him with false (forged) evidence that he was not, in fact, the son of his official "fully Jewish" father, but of his mother's "Aryan" lover; nobody knows, of course, what his mother, if she was alive at the time, would have made of this extraordinary revelation, or if she actually had such a lover. Milch was reclassified as "Aryan" and awarded the Ritterkreuz for his actions during the campaign in Norway. As you see, in the Germany of the time, it was a blessing to be a bastard." And Wheeler laughed again, in the mocking tone that always reminded me of his brother Toby's very characteristic laugh. "But how did we get on to this, Jacobo? I'm sorry about these memory lapses, it only happens with the immediate present. What with them and my moments of aphasia, pretty soon, I won't be able to tell anyone anything.'

'He's not so bad yet that he doesn't realize it,' I thought, 'which is some consolation, but he wouldn't have suffered such blanks a year or even a few months ago. It's as if he and my father were marching to the same drummer, at the same speed, although Peter is in better shape. Despite being a year older, he'll probably last longer. How sad when neither of them is here anymore. How sad.'

'You'll know better than I,' I said, 'but I think it had to do with your wife, with her death. At least I believe so.'

'Ah, yes,' he said, 'it has a great deal, indeed, everything to do with my wife. Yes, yes.' And as he repeated that word, he seemed once more to pick up the thread. 'As I said, in the black section of the PWE, there were people who didn't even know they were working for it, who didn't even know of its existence. Valerie, of course, had no idea. However, there was a fellow who probably knew very well just who and what he was working for; he only turned up at Woburn or Milton Bryan occasionally, with a whole battery of ideas and, it would seem, enjoyed complete autonomy, even from Delmer. His name was Jefferys, almost certainly an alias, and he had a truly diabolical mind, or so Valerie told me when I returned from Jamaica or the Gold Coast or from Ceylon or wherever I'd been posted, and we were able to spend a couple of weeks or a few days together. Jefferys' mission was to create disruption, to invent problems which, however secondary or outlandish, couldn't be ignored by the Germans, who would be obliged to try and find a remedy. And he got the staff all fired up too, something he excelled at apparently'

'To spread outbreaks of cholera?' I couldn't help asking. But he didn't pick this up as an allusion to himself, perhaps because he no longer remembered saying it.

'Exactly. Or even chicken pox. We were all convinced, in all the divisions, sections, units and groups, in the SIS in general, in the SOE, in the PWE, in the OIC, as well as in the NID, the PWB and, of course, the SHAEF, that any setback that might distract the Germans from what was really important, anything that hampered their war-time activities or took them away from or made them neglect their tasks, that even minimally diminished their efficiency, would be hugely to our advantage, and would help us to gain time while we waited for the Americans to make up their mind to enter the War (how tedious and hesitant they were; and then they have the nerve to boast about their contribution). It was a matter of keeping the largest possible number of men occupied with bothersome or seemingly dangerous minutiae. Each time the Nazis had to send a soldier or a member of the Gestapo to tackle some unexpected task that had nothing to do with the War proper, it helped a little and gave us some advantage, or that was our feeling, which, up until December 1941, after more than two years of resisting on our own, was one of absolute desperation. Anyway, this Jefferys fellow would arrive-a whirlwind of energy-and stay for a week, issuing all kinds of instructions and urging the people there to come up with their own tricks and dodges, all intended to cause the maximum amount of damage. He was an enthusiastic, hyperactive, febrile, infectious kind of man, who raised spirits simply because he treated everything as if it were really important. According to him, the smallest obstacle could prove useful, anything to make them trip or stumble. A city in Germany or occupied Europe, for example, might be plagued with murders or burglaries, with fires in buildings and hotels, or else an epidemic, even if it was only flu, might be declared, or the supplies of electricity, gas, coal or water were cut off; there might be a shortage of medicines in hospitals or foodstuffs left to rot; all those things could help. The accumulation of problems and calamities and crimes breeds insecurity, distrust and anxiety, and having to worry about many things at once is what most exasperates and wears people down. The more off-balance the Nazis were, the more burdened with nonessential tasks, the more chance we had of landing them a blow in the solar plexus.'

'You're not telling me that ordinary murders were committed that weren't ordinary at all? You're not telling me that you and your group planned and committed random murders of civilians?'

Wheeler made an ambiguous gesture with his open hand at forehead height, as if he were raising the brim of an imaginary hat.

'No, I don't believe so. Sefton Delmer may have been a bon vivant and a pragmatist, with few scruples about the subversive techniques used to undermine and destroy the enemy, a man who, in the middle of all this, was seen blithely eating, drinking and laughing as if entirely unaffected, but he did have a remnant of conscience. According to Hemingway, who met up with him in Madrid during our War, when both men were correspondents, he looked like 'a ruddy English bishop.' Others thought they saw a resemblance to Henry VIII, because he was a big man verging on the obese, with rather bulging eyes and a florid complexion. And since razors were in short supply during the War, he had let his beard grow too. Jefferys, on the other hand, did advocate encouraging or even actually carrying out non-political murders: nowadays, this would be termed terrorism. I'm sure they took no notice of him in that respect, and besides, the SOE, with its local collaborators in every country, had quite enough objectives of its own, in particular, military ones. When it came to acts of sabotage and torpedoings, most of his exuberant ideas were well received. And Valerie gave him an idea of her own. Yes, Valerie had an idea.' And Wheeler's tone, as he spoke those last two sentences, grew suddenly much more somber. He took another couple of sips of sherry, again rested his walking stick on the arms of his chair, gripped it with one hand, as if it were a bar to hold on to, and continued without further hesitation: he had decided to tell me this story and he was going to. 'Everyone wanted to help in those days, Jacobo. It was incredible how the whole country rallied round, first to endure, and then to destroy the Nazis. For those of us who lived through those times, what happened later on, in the Thatcher era, with the ridiculous Falklands War, when people got so fired up and cocky, was utterly shameful, a fake, a farce, a grotesque imitation of that other War. During the real War there was no cockiness and no vaudeville patriotism.' Wheeler pronounced 'vaudeville' with a French accent, as my father would have done. 'People simply resisted, but never bragged or boasted about anything. Everyone did what they could and, with a few rare exceptions, no one gave themselves a medal for it. They were real times, not phony, not sham. Jefferys was a stimulus, a spur during the days he spent in Woburn, or, rather, Milton Bryan, and Valerie wanted to help as much as she could, to make a real contribution. She worked hard. Anyway, her Austrian friend's older sister, the one who was some ten years older, Ilse by name, had had a boyfriend in the days when Valerie still used to spend her holidays in Melk with the Mauthner family, and so she got to know him over several summers. The boyfriend was already a convinced Nazi by then-I'm talking about the period from 1929 or '30 to 1934 or '35, which was when Valerie stopped going to stay with them and her friend stopped visiting her at Christmas, when they were both fourteen or fifteen. The older sister and the boyfriend finally got married in 1932 or '33 and moved to Germany, and the younger sister, Maria, with whom Valerie corresponded during the rest of the year and up until shortly before the War, had told her how worried the family were about that entirely expected marriage. The Mauthners always hoped it would never happen, that Ilse would break up with her boyfriend, as often happens with couples who meet very young. The man, whose name was Rendl-'

Here I couldn't help but interrupt him.

'Rendel? R-e-n-d-e-l?' I immediately spelled it out for him.

'No. In Austria, it was written without the second "e,"' he replied. 'But, yes, the Rendel you know and who works for Tupra is the grandson of that older sister and her husband. Not that I've ever met him and I only know his father slightly. I helped his father, Ilse's son, financially, so that he could come to England when he was still a child; afterwards, I preferred not to stay in touch. That's another story though. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The husband, Rendl, and this was known by his in-laws, had a Jewish grandmother, who had died before he was born, and so he was a "quarter-Jew," a second-degree Mischling. As I said before, nothing tended to happen to such people because they were considered to be "German" and were assimilated, although they couldn't, in theory, aspire to holding any important post. However, that quarter of Jewishness worried the whole Mauthner family, the father, the mother and the other sisters. Not because they were Nazis-they were, it seems, apolitical, passive people, who did, later on, I imagine, become Nazified-what worried them was a fear of any "contamination," which was a very widespread fear at the time. Bear in mind that the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, but in reality all they did was regulate many of the measures that had already been taken against the Jews unofficially (the whole business went back a long way) and to make official and legal an already existing situation, namely the intense social dislike of Jews and the discrimination against them. Now if Rendl hadn't been such a fervent Nazi, he could have lived a reasonably quiet life. However, he wanted to join the SS and achieved that ambition shortly after he got married. In order to do so, he first had to get rid of that Jewish grandmother, I assume by doing what so many others had done: offering a large bribe to the authorities in the place where she was born. And as a consequence of that concealment, that falsification, that imposture, the "stain" became a secret to be jealously guarded, and the Mauthner daughters were told as much as soon as the "cleansing" of the records had taken place. For one of them, however, it was too late.

'She had told Valerie, I mean, your wife, Peter.' This time I corrected myself at once.

Wheeler noticed my uncertainty. Very few things escaped him even now.

'It's all right, you can call her Valerie. And she wasn't my wife at the time. She was called Valerie Harwood then and could have imagined very little of what was to come. She couldn't even have imagined me because we hadn't yet met. But, yes, Maria Mauthner had told a friend who, a few years later, would turn into an enemy. Not a personal enemy, of course, but… how could you best describe it? National, political, patriotic? I don't know what kind of enemy one becomes in time of war. You hate complete strangers and old friends, you hate all-embracingly, hate a whole country or even several. It's very odd when you think about it. It makes no sense at all, and it's such a waste. Maria had not only told her about it just once, she continued to mention it in the years that followed, by letter. They had been friends since childhood, they trusted each other, they talked openly, they gave each other their news. Valerie learned that Ilse had three children, a boy and two girls, she even met the oldest, when he was just a baby, during her last visit to Melk, in 1934 or '35. She also learned that Rendl, whom she had always considered an imbecile when she'd met him during her summer visits, a kind of pre-fanatic, was rising fast in the SS; and when the two friends stopped corresponding in 1939, she knew that he had reached the rank of Major, or perhaps Captain, in one of the Cavalry Divisions of the SS. One of those divisions, by the way, the 33rd, met a sad (for us joyous) fate when it was wiped out at the Battle of Budapest in 1945, but I don't know if that was his division. Not that it matters, because, by then, Rendl wasn't in the Cavalry or in the SS, but, quite likely, in a concentration camp, in a mass grave or else incinerated.'

'What happened?' I asked so that he didn't get distracted recalling facts about the War.

Wheeler finished his sherry and hesitated as to whether or not he should have another. I encouraged him, got up to fill his glass, and he glanced across to where Mrs. Berry had been coming and going, but then we heard her begin to play upstairs, in the empty room where there was nothing else to do but sit down before the piano: perhaps it was her practice time, before lunch, at least on those Sundays exiled from the infinite. Wheeler pointed with one finger up at the ceiling and then at the bottle.

'You know already, don't you, Jacobo? You can imagine what happened. Valerie told me that she had doubts about the plan and would have liked to ask me my opinion. But I was away most of the time, and communications were difficult and brief, there wasn't time to discuss problems. When she told Jefferys about it, she hadn't had any contact with Maria for three or four years, and didn't even know if she was still alive. Besides, everything in the past fades and seems less intense, and childhood friendships are the quickest to blur, mainly because children cease to be children and they change, they cast off and deny their childhood until it's far far away, and only then do they miss it. Jefferys appealed to the inventiveness and to the remote, oblique, improbable heroism of his black gamblers, both those who knew what they were involved in and those who thought they were white gamblers; he'd say to them: "Don't keep anything back, however trivial and silly it may seem to you, tell us about it: it could prove vital, could save English lives and win this War." He demanded incessant activity, initiatives, plots, schemes, and always more ideas, and Valerie gave him hers, or he created one out of what she told him: "Hartmut Rendl, SS officer, with the rank of Major or at least Captain-if he's been promoted in the last few years-is a Mischling on his Jewish grandmother's side, and has, moreover, destroyed or falsified documents in order to expunge that information and be admitted to the SS, the most racially pure institution in the Reich and the principal perpetrator of atrocities." Rendl was a member of the SS, a criminal and an imbecile, so why have any doubts or scruples? It isn't hard to imagine the excitement that such a case would arouse in Jefferys and in Delmer himself when he was told about it. They couldn't wait to get the machinery up and running: they not only ensured that the information about Rendl reached the ears of the SS high command, and, if possible, the ears of his boss, the irascible and purgative Himmler, they saw in this a new opportunity for black propaganda. They began forging birth certificates and pages from the register of births, marriages and death, which accused other army officers, high-up government officials and even members of the Nazi Party of being "Jews," "half-Jews" or "first-degree Mischlinge." Not many, of course, they didn't want to overdo this "plague," they spaced out those reports, issuing just a few at a time, those that seemed most believable and had most basis in fact. It was no easy job, but the PWE was brilliant at forgery: thanks to a collector, they had German types and moulds (or matrices or whatever they're called, I know nothing about printing) of what are called Fraktur or Gothic print, dating from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. And even if sooner or later those forgeries were discovered (although not all of them were), while the Nazis were carrying out their investigations and checking each of those suddenly suspect files… well, it was worth keeping them busy over nonsense like that which had nothing to do with the War and making them waste time rummaging through the old archives of town halls and parishes (in the nineteenth century, many German and Austrian Jews had converted to Christianity, especially to Catholicism), and thus fomenting distrust towards their own kind, for as I mentioned before, one of Delmer's priorities was to bring the Germans into conflict with each other. And when the trick worked and brought with it the removal or fall from grace of a Colonel, a General, an Admiral, or a Party leader, that saved us a job and spread panic and lowered morale among the rank and file. It may seem idiotic to us now, but it was a real blow to them, the idea that there were infiltrators in their most select units, that the Wehrmacht was infested with "rats," and that no one, however loyal and whatever their merits, was safe from such "revisions." It was a pretty dirty trick. It was of course "black" in more than one sense, because what they did was to take advantage of the cruellest and most repellent aspect of the Reich and, by exploiting it, brought about the persecution of more Jews, whether real or imaginary. However, these "half-" or "quarter-Jews" were not your average Jew, they weren't poor innocents; they were, above all, convinced and active Nazis, who were either fighting us or hunting down "full Jews" or both, and so no one at Milton Bryan worried overmuch about the possible injustice of that tactic, based on false accusations or, worse still, on actual fact, as was the case with Rendl. No one lost much sleep over it. Nevertheless, Delmer, as I recall, chose not to mention it in his autobiography. I wouldn't have lost any sleep over it either, just as I lost no sleep over many of the other things I had to do and did. On the other hand, I did lose sleep over some of the things I saw, but that's different, it's easier to deal with what one has done oneself." He paused briefly, as if he were starting a new paragraph or opening a long parenthesis, and he turned to look outside, at the river. "I only disobeyed an order once, on a crossing from Colombo to Singapore. I was a Lieutenant Colonel at the time. I was accompanying an Indian agent who had first been recruited by the Japanese and who then, under threat of immediate execution, became a double agent for our side, a man whom I myself had interrogated and trained in Colombo. With the War nearing its end, I was told to dispose of him during the journey, since he was no longer of any use to us.' In that context, the words 'dispose of him' could, I understood, mean only one thing. 'It was suggested that I find him a watery grave.' And the expression 'watery grave' confirmed my first impression. 'His code name was "Carbuncle" and I'm sure that he, too, was expecting to meet his end on the crossing. Perhaps it was his conviction that he was going to die, and his apparent acceptance of the fact, that prevented me from finding the right moment. He had toyed with the Japanese and with us, as all double agents do, but then again, he had told a lie to the Japanese that had helped us intercept and sink the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro off Penang, in May 1945. He had, after all, been instrumental in our laying that trap. I don't know why I did it, why I disobeyed. I didn't really see what reason there was to get rid of him, and, besides, the Secret Service was full of idiots. If he was no longer of any use to us, he would be of still less use to the Japanese: if he fell into their hands, they would soon find a grave for him, either watery or dry, or would leave him out in the elements to rot and be eaten by the pigs. I had seen what they had done in the Andaman Islands: part of the indigenous population piled into barges and shelled from the garrison, as target practice, when they were already far out in deep water; decapitations, terrible rapes, breasts not lopped off with a machete or a sword but crushed by repeated blows, a parade of soldiers in full array obeying the orders of a Commander whose years of atrocities, during the long Japanese occupation, I had to investigate when the Islands were liberated. I had had enough… Nowadays you hear or read that violence is addictive, or that once you've inflicted violence or seen it, it loses its impact, that you get used to it. In my experience this is totally false, a fools' tale told to fools. You can stand a certain amount, and possibly more than you imagined you could, but ultimately, it's not so much that you grow tired of it, more that it exhausts and destroys you. And it keeps coming back and you can't forget it… When we reached Singapore, I disembarked with "Carbuncle" still handcuffed to me, wrist to wrist, which is incredibly uncomfortable. Have you ever tried it? I shot a sideways glance at him from my great height, because he was much shorter than me. He seemed genuinely surprised to have reached his destination and to be on dry land again. Then I took out the key, unlocked the handcuffs while he stared at me in amazement, and then I said "Fuck off!" He took to his heels and I watched him disappear into the crowd filling the port. Yes, I'd had enough… But it wasn't over yet…'

He fell silent, looking out at the placid river that I had come to know years before in the house of his brother Toby Rylands, as if he could still see his prisoner 'Carbuncle' vanishing into the crowds filling that distant port. I had seen that look in my father's eyes more than once, and in Wheeler's eyes too when he had slowly followed Mrs. Berry and me to the foot of the stairs and I had pointed out to them the place at the top of the first flight, where, during a feverish night spent at his house and after sitting up alone consulting books, I had found the bloodstain; it was a wide-eyed look that gave him a contradictory expression, almost like that of a child who discovers or sees something for the first time, something that does not frighten or repel or attract him, but which produces in him a sense of shock, or else some flash of intuitive knowledge, or even a kind of enchantment.

Wheeler took another long drink of water, almost unconsciously; it was hardly surprising that he was thirsty, he had been talking for a long time and, towards the end, had drifted into that strangely introspective loquacity of his. Apart from just one moment, I had been afraid all the time that he would decide to stop, because of fatigue or a more prolonged attack of aphasia or because he suddenly regretted telling me so much. He had never before spoken in such detail about his former life, or indeed about anything. 'Why is he doing this now?' I wondered. 'It's not as if I had insisted or even cajoled or flattered him into it, nor have I been trying to draw him out. I must ask him before I leave, if there's time.' I found everything he was telling me fascinating, but if I allowed him to wander off to the Southeast Asia of the special missions he had undertaken, there was a risk he wouldn't come back or only when it was too late, when Mrs. Berry was already calling us in to lunch, as a mother calls her children. Not that I thought Wheeler would keep quiet in her presence or that he would have many secrets from her, certainly not regarding Valerie's death, which is what I most wanted to know about just then, perhaps because I had recently seen my own wife and had felt her to be in danger; but one has to be careful with stories, sometimes they don't allow witnesses, not even silent ones, and if there are any witnesses, they stop. I could still hear Mrs. Berry at the piano, again she was playing some rather cheerful music-this time, I thought, pieces by the Italian Clementi, another exile, who had also lived in London for a long time, something from his popular piano exercises Gradus ad Parnassum or perhaps a sonata; he was another musician sidelined by Mozart (never, it seems, a good colleague), who had dismissed him as a mere mechanicus or automaton and with that remark had ruined him, perhaps because Clementi had dared to take part in a musical duel with him in Vienna before the Emperor, two virtuosi pitted against each other.

'What happened to Rendl?' I decided to get Peter back on track, but I didn't dare redirect him immediately to Valerie, although whatever I did, I might still end up losing her.

'Oh, yes, I'm sorry. That's why I don't like telling stories any more, especially in my current state. As you say in Spanish, I often go clambering about the branches-voy por las ramas-and I'm not sure how interesting those branches are. Ideally, they should be as relevant as the roots and the trunk, don't you think?'

'Oh, they're fascinating, Peter. The "Carbuncle" branch, for example, which, obviously, I've never heard before. It's just that I'm curious to know what happened to Rendl.'

'No one has heard this story before, not you or anyone. Until today,' he replied, and it seemed to me from the way he said this that he wanted to place due emphasis on the importance of this fact. 'Not even Mrs. Berry, not even Toby. Not even Tupra, who is always rummaging around in people's past lives. As I believe I told you once before, in theory, I'm not yet authorized to say what my "special missions" were between 1936 and 1946, and the same applies to some I carried out afterwards, and I've kept my word. Until today. Of course for me to say "not yet" about anything is rather ironic and even in bad taste, since permission to speak will arrive too late. There's another reason to keep quiet about the "Carbuncle" affair: my superiors never found out that I'd let him go. Not that anything very bad would have happened to me just because I'd disobeyed an order: we weren't like the Germans or the Russians, and I didn't put anyone's life at risk by doing so. However, I preferred to tell them that, as recommended, I had found him a watery grave during the crossing. After all, the fellow was as untraceable and as unfindable as if he were lying at the bottom of the Strait of Malacca with a ridiculous golf bag tied around his neck, a bag I had, in fact, forced him to carry throughout the voyage, and which I allowed someone to steal from me in that same port. (Oh, yes, there were some real idiots in the Secret Service, like the ones who lumbered me with the golf clubs.) Having played that trick on the Japanese, it was in his best interests to be presumed dead, and there wasn't the slightest danger of him going and presenting himself to some other British person, ni en pintura! And he used the Spanish expression-meaning literally 'not even in the form of a painting,' but here meaning something like 'no chance' or 'no way'-perhaps because there is no exact equivalent in English, at least nothing quite as graphic. He'd had recourse to my language earlier when he'd referred to the expression 'me voy por las ramas and had then elaborated on the metaphor in English; such linguistic mixtures were commonplace between us, as they had been between Cromer-Blake and me in my Oxford phase. 'In Rendl's case, well, it wasn't just a matter of everything having its time to be believed, we were unfortunate in that the accusation wasn't false and that he wasn't in the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, let's say, where he might have received nothing more than a reprimand, a period of detention or a demotion, or all three. Even if he had been a Party leader, his deception, with luck-and depending on what friends he had and what influence-might well have been simply brushed under the carpet.' I noticed his use of the first person plural, 'we were unfortunate.' 'It was said that the SS, on the other hand, demanded that its members should be able to prove purity of blood as far back as 1750, at least in theory and in principle. Himmler must have realized that this was an impossibilty for most applicants and that the number of men in his unit would rapidly diminish once they started to suffer any war losses. And so from 1940 on, the SS depended in large measure on volunteers from countries considered "Germanic," this being especially true of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm, which filled up with Dutchmen, Flemings, Norwegians and Danes. And later on still, towards the end, they also admitted "non-Germanic" volunteers, Frenchmen, Italians, Walloons, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Estonians, as well as Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Albanians. There was even an Indian Legion and Muslim divisions, I recall a Skanderbeg and a Kama division (and there was a third one, too, whose name I can't now recall); so much for Aryan purity. And there was even a tiny British Free Corps, which really only served for propaganda purposes. But the initial severity of the 1920s and '30s gives you an idea of how unacceptable it would have been for a veteran officer to have a not particularly remote Jewish ancestor, a grandmother to be precise, and for him to have lied about it and paid for incriminating documents to be removed in order to conceal the truth and so "contaminate" the corps. While the War was on, we didn't know exactly what had happened to Rendl after we'd unmasked him, although we did know that it must have worked, because his name disappeared from the lists of officers that periodically fell into the hands of MI6 or the PWE. Jefferys, or Delmer, or the East Germans, used to pass the accusations on to the Nazi authorities through our infiltrators, and the Nazis, I assume, then carried out their own investigations. It was relatively easy to pass such information on, especially in the occupied countries, where we could count on local collaborators. It wasn't quite so easy afterwards to find out what the results had been, to know which of our false reports had "taken" and what had been the fate of those affected, which forgeries had been accepted as authentic and which not, or only by checking which counterfeit "Jew" or "half-Jew" remained in his post, and was not removed or demoted or anything. At least we knew that Rendl, without having been declared or presumed dead, in action or in the rearguard, had ceased to be a Major or a Captain, or whatever he was at the time. He no longer appeared on the list.'

'And did that please Valerie? I mean, did it satisfy her?' I asked, spotting an opportunity to remind him of the person I was most interested in. This was pure naivete on my part, however, because she was also the person Wheeler was most interested in and he hadn't forgotten her for a moment. He never, in my presence, entirely lost the thread.

He raised one arm to his forehead-or it may have been his wrist to his temple-as if he were in pain or checking to see if he had a fever, or perhaps it was a gesture of horror. Whatever its intention, it was the same gesture he had made when he finally opened his eyes and uncovered his ears after the capricious passes of the helicopter that made a sound like a giant rattle or like an old Sikorsky H-5, 'the noise alone used to be enough to provoke panic,' on that other now distant Sunday in his garden by the river, as we sat on chairs with canvas covers the color of pale gabardine, on those chairs disguised as mammoths or tethered ghosts, when I wasn't yet working for the group and he recruited me and suggested that I join and become part of it. He took a while to respond, and I feared that he might have got stuck on some word again. However, it wasn't that, but rather-I thought a little later-because he preferred not to let me see all of his face while he was telling me what he had not yet told me, or that he needed to keep his arm or wrist near his eyes, so as to be able to cover them at once, just as I had been tempted to do several times-and as I had done, I seemed to remember, on more than one occasion-when Tupra was showing me those videos in his house. As if he wanted to be ready to hide or to put his head under his wing.

'Yes, it did satisfy her,' he said. 'I suppose you could say that. It had been her idea, and it was her first personal, individual, distinctive contribution to the development of the War or to the search for victory. She was congratulated by Jefferys on one of his subsequent visits. As I said, he would come for a week, leave a trail of ideas and then vanish, and not reappear again for a month or more. I've never heard him mentioned since or seen his name in any book, which is why I'm sure it was an alias. Sefton Delmer doesn't mention him, so who knows who he really was. But it also left her feeling unsatisfied, uneasy. She wondered what had happened to Ilse, Rendl's wife, what Ilse's situation would have been after her husband's downfall. He was our enemy and not just any enemy, not some poor recruit, but a Nazi volunteer, determined to join the SS. More than that, he was a complete imbecile; but he was also the brother-in-law of her old friend, and the husband of the older sister who had always been so kind and patient with her. The War, though, allowed little time for doubts or regrets. For that reason, some people remember times of war as the most vital of their entire existence, the most euphoric, and in a way they even miss them afterwards. War is the most terrible thing, but when you live through a war, you live with extraordinary intensity; the good thing about them is that they stop people worrying about silly things or getting depressed or pestering those around them. There's no time for any of that, you move ceaselessly from one thing to another, from anxiety to fear, from terror to an explosion of joy, and every day is the last day, no, more than that, the only day. You walk, you exist, shoulder to shoulder, everyone is busy trying to survive, to defeat the beast, to save themselves and to save others, and as long as panic doesn't spread, there's great camaraderie. Panic didn't spread here. You'll have heard your father and others talk about this, and your War was the same.'

'Yes, I have heard people talk about it, not so much my father, but mainly people who were still children at the time, because my father, although very young, was already an adult when the War began. I imagine, though, that you can only miss such times when your side wins, don't you think, Peter? It can't be the same for my father as it was for you.'

'Yes, you're right. I can't conceive what it would have been like if we'd lost, but if we had, I would probably only remember the horror, or have done everything I could to forget it, and perhaps, with great effort, would have succeeded. It's hard to imagine. I don't know, I can't know.' And Wheeler moved his arm away from his forehead and instead rested his cheek on his hand and sat pondering, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

'And what happened? What else?' That was what Tupra always used to say to me during our sessions together: 'What else, tell me more.' He would not do so again nor would there be any more sessions, that much was sure.

'The worst came after the end of the War, when the whole country raised its head to look around, and some, not many, started thinking about what had happened, what they had seen and how they had lived, and what they had been obliged to do. A few months after the surrender, Valerie received a letter from her friend Maria. They hadn't had any contact since 1939, since before war broke out. Maria didn't even know that Valerie was married and that her surname was now Wheeler. Val and I met in 1940 and got married in 1941, shortly before I turned twenty-eight and when she was twenty-one. The truth is that neither of them knew if the other was still alive. Maria sent the letter to Val's parents' address, and her mother forwarded it to Oxford, where we had moved after I'd been elected Fellow of The Queen's College in 1946. Val's father had died in one of the air raids on London. Valerie was overjoyed at first, but that feeling only lasted as long as it took her to open the envelope. That letter was our death sentence. Or rather, hers.' And when Peter added these words, some words Tupra had said came back to me, like a premonition, like an echo: 'While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies, whether on a mission or in battle, in an air squadron or under bombardment or in the trenches when there were trenches, in a mugging or a raid on a shop or when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.'

'I wasn't there when she received and read it, but she showed it to me afterwards, or, rather, translated it for me: although Maria spoke English, Val's German was better, and that was the language in which they wrote to each other. It was a long letter, but not that long, I mean not enough for Maria to be able to explain all that had happened to her during the War years; she summarized the most important facts. She, too, had married and her name was now Hafenrichter; however, her husband had died at the Russian front, leaving her a widow. She was managing to scrape a living in the international zone of Vienna (as you know, Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four occupation zones: American, British, Russian and French, and the center was international, that is, it was controlled and patrolled by the four powers simultaneously). She spoke about her current hardships, the same dire situation as in German towns and cities, although Vienna had suffered less devastation, and she asked for help, although without specifying what form that help might take, money, medicine, clothes, provisions… Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mauthner, had died, as had one of the four sisters, the third, and it was presumed that the oldest, Ilse, was also dead, for she had vanished along with her two small daughters. The only surviving Rendl was the boy, whom she had taken in and whom she now wished to send to England, and she was asking Valerie's help in that regard too, if possible: the child had had a terrible time, and in Austria he faced a bleak, poverty-stricken future, and she could barely manage to support herself. But the worst thing was…' Wheeler's voice faltered and he hesitated for a moment, then recovered. 'The worst thing was that she explained to Val what had happened: "I don't know how," she said, and those were the words that tormented Valerie from the moment she read them until her death, the words that killed her: "I don't know how," she said, but the SS had somehow found out that Rendl had a Jewish grandmother and had bribed officials to have her name removed from the records. The records in question, though, hadn't been destroyed, only moved elsewhere and replaced with false documents: the originals turned up and the accusation was found to be true. The SS were very strict on the matter of racial ancestry, Maria told Valerie (imagining that there would be no reason why Valerie would know about that), and it seems that the case reached the ears of Himmler himself, who was enraged by such deceit and determined to make an example of Rendl, mostly in order to wring confessions from any other SS officers who were in the same or a similar situation, promising them that if they did confess, he would treat them more leniently, or at least less severely, than their impostor colleague. The discovery, along with the rumors that followed Heydrich's death, that even he had been "half-Jewish"'-'Heydrich,' I thought, 'who died slowly and in great pain, from those bullets impregnated with poison'-'led him to believe, as I found out later, that his purer-than-pure body of men had, in fact, been transformed, since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, into a refuge for Mischlinge and even for "half-Jews," reasoning, as was proper to a mind as sick as his, that there could be no better disguise for the prey than to camouflage themselves as hunters. Well, perhaps his mind wasn't so very sick when you think of Delmer or, even more so, of Jefferys, who were both capable of dreaming up the most complicated plans and machinations. Or when you think of mine, perhaps, for we all had war minds, there are no healthy minds in wartime and some never recover. But returning to the letter: Maria had managed to learn what Rendl's exemplary punishment had been: to be sent to a concentration camp as a prisoner, even though he was only a "quarter-Jewish"; and not just that, but one day, the Gestapo turned up at his house in Munich, where he and his family were living at the time, and took the girls away. They didn't take the boy because he wasn't there when this happened, he was staying in Melk with his grandparents, and once the Gestapo had got over their initial rage, they didn't bother overmuch to seek him out. When Ilse, horrified, asked why they were doing this, all they would say was that the girls were Jewish, but that they had no proof against her; if she wanted to go with the girls, that was her business. Properly speaking, those girls were only one-eighth Jewish and would normally have been considered to be "German." But that was the reprisal, the punishment: making "full Jews" of the descendants of the man who had deceived and tricked them. After all, as Goring said, or Goebbels, or perhaps it was Himmler himself: "I decide who's Jewish." None of this became public, of course, it would have made a terrible impression, it was made known only to the officers of the SS, as a warning to them to tread carefully, and that is why the PWE heard almost nothing about it. The SS were very keen on secrecy and childish rituals. According to neighbors who witnessed the scene, Ilse got into the car that was about to carry her girls away and no more was heard of any of them. It was supposed that, once in a concentration camp, all trace of them would have been lost and their "origin," which was the reason they were there, quite forgotten, and they would have become, in effect, Jews or, at best, "dissidents"; no, there was no "best" about it: their fate would have been the same. Maria didn't want to deceive herself with fantasies, she had no hope that they were alive. She assumed they were dead, with no room for speculation or doubt, especially once information was published about the gas chambers and the mass exterminations. So that was what the letter said, Jacobo. Maria ended by saying that she didn't know if Valerie was still alive or if she would ever read those lines, but she begged her, if she was alive, to send her news and help as well, especially for Ilse's son, young Rendl. He would have been about eleven or twelve at the time.' Wheeler paused, took a breath and added: 'If only those lines had never reached her eyes. If only no one had ever told her. I wouldn't have seen her kill herself. I wouldn't have been left alone and sad.'

Wheeler remained silent and thoughtful and again raised the back of his wrist to his brow, as if to wipe away some sudden beads of sweat or as if he were again taking his temperature. 'Give me your hand and let us walk,' I quoted to myself. 'Through the fields of this land of mine, edged with dusty olive groves, I walk alone, sad, tired, pensive and old.' I had known this poem since I was a child, they were the words addressed by Antonio Machado to his already dead child wife, Leonor, who died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Valerie hadn't died, she had killed herself when she was only slightly older, looking at her own hourglass and holding it in her hand. But she, too, had left Peter alone, sad, tired, pensive and old. Regardless of all the things he went on to do afterwards.

I should have expected this revelation after what Wheeler had been telling me, but I was so taken aback that, for a moment, I didn't know what to say. And when he did not immediately go on, I gave voice to a thought that slipped unavoidably into my mind, even at the risk of diverting his thoughts elsewhere and missing the end of the story:

'That's what Toby said had happened to him. I told you, don't you remember?' And I recalled, too, the look of irritated surprise on Wheeler's face when he had heard the story. 'Is that what he said: "I watched the suicide…"' he had repeated, taken aback, without completing the sentence. 'That he had watched the suicide of the person he loved.'

Wheeler responded at once, but this time he was more sympathetic than annoyed:

'Yes. It disappointed and angered me a little when you told me that. After all, how were you to know? Nothing like that ever happened to him, but he enjoyed playing the man of mystery and hinting at a more turbulent or more tragic past than he actually had; not that his past didn't have its moments, but that's true of almost anyone who lives through a long war. He must have stolen my story when he told you that, to make his own more interesting. That's the trouble with telling anything-most people forget how or from whom they found out what they know, and there are people who even believe they lived or gave birth to it, whatever it is, a story, an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, a joke, an aphorism, a history, a style, sometimes even a whole text, which they proudly appropriate-or perhaps they know they're stealing, but push the thought to the back of their mind and thus hide it away. It's very much a phenomenon of the times we live in, which has no respect for priorities. Perhaps I shouldn't have got angry with poor Toby like that, retrospectively' Wheeler stopped, took a couple of sips of sherry and then murmured almost reluctantly, almost with distaste: 'Fortunately for him, he didn't ever have to see that. It's not a scene that is easy to bear, I can assure you. It's best to avoid tragedies. Nothing can ever make up for them. Certainly not talking about them.'

'What happened?' And out of politeness I added as I had on another occasion, although this time I had to force myself to do what I had been taught as a child, never to put the screws on anyone. 'If you don't want to tell me, Peter, don't.'

I was afraid that, at any moment, Mrs. Berry might close the piano and come downstairs and, so to speak, break the spell, although we could still hear her music; she seemed to have moved on to Scarlatti; she always played cheerful pieces, which that afternoon just happened to be by people who had changed countries, Scarlatti having spent half his life in Spain, although no one knows how or where he died or even if he had a grave, just like Boccherini: they probably both died in Madrid and both now lie in unmarked graves. A country indifferent to merit and to services rendered. A country indifferent to everything, especially to anything that no longer exists, or to matter in the past.

'It's not pleasant to remember, Jacobo, nor to hear either. But I think, nevertheless, that I can tell you. I suppose there comes a point when one has to tell things, after a lot of time has passed, so that it doesn't seem as if they simply never happened or were just a bad dream,' Peter answered. '"I don't know how," Maria had said in her letter, and Valerie, from the moment she read those words, kept repeating, even in German sometimes as if she were talking to Maria: "I know how, oh, I know how, I know very well, in fact, I was the one who told the SS." And she repeated over and over: "The children. How could I have forgotten about Ilse and the children? I should have thought of them, why didn't I? I didn't take them into account at all." She spent the last days of her life in torment, in hell, and at no point did she consider answering her friend's letter. "I'd rather she believed me dead," she said. "I couldn't possibly tell her what happened." "And what if you didn't tell her, but just helped her," I said, trying to convince her: "Perhaps we can do something for the boy, get him some kind of permit to enter the country and a scholarship, I don't know, I could talk to people about it and give him a hand financially." I've always had family money. My maternal grandfather, Thomas Wheeler, sold the newspaper companies he owned in New Zealand and Australia for a large profit, and Toby and I, when we were still very young, each received a large legacy when he died. I even suggested adopting young Rendl, even though I hated the idea myself. But Val was paralyzed with horror and grief, she didn't want to hear any of those ideas, and she didn't respond. She lay awake at night, and even if, for a moment, she did drop off out of sheer exhaustion, she would soon start awake, crying and drenched in sweat, and would say to me in distraught tones: "Those girls. If I had just found out what happened on my own, I might have had some right, possibly, although I don't believe so. But I found out through Maria, and I betrayed her without a thought; how could I have done that, why didn't I realize? And those girls, who died because of me in a concentration camp, they wouldn't have understood anything, and their mother who got into the car with them, what else could the poor woman do, oh, dear God…"' Wheeler stopped for a moment and bit his forefinger, thoughtful, tense. ('Sorrow haunted thy bed,' I quoted to myself.) Then he said: 'Treachery just wasn't in her nature, still less betrayal. More than that, those were the very last things she would have been capable of in normal circumstances. She was a fine person, someone you could trust absolutely. She was the antithesis of bad faith, of deceit; she was, how can I put, a clean person. But war turns everything upside down or creates irreconcilable loyalties. It wasn't in her nature either to spare any effort in helping her country when its very survival was at stake. She was still smarting because she had lacked the courage to infiltrate enemy territory, and so it would have been impossible for her to hold back that information about Hartmut Rendl once she was convinced that revealing it was important and could save English lives. Now, though, her perspective had changed, as always happens in peacetime, except for those of us who know that war is always on the prowl, always just around the corner, even though no one else believes it, and that what seems to us reprehensible, horrific and extreme in peacetime could happen again tomorrow with the consent of the entire nation. "War crimes" is the term they apply nowadays to almost anything, as if war did not consist precisely in the commission of crimes, which have, for the most part, received prior absolution. Now, though, Val couldn't see in what way the information she had given, the idea she had put forward, could possibly have contributed to victory. Or, rather, she was sure that if she had kept quiet the result would have been the same. And she was probably right in thinking that, as, with very few exceptions, would all the other Britons who had added their grain of sand. That's another thing that happens in time of war, Jacobo. You do everything that's necessary, and that includes the unnecessary. But who is capable of distinguishing one from the other? When it comes to destroying the enemy, or even merely vanquishing him, it's impossible to gauge what really is doing harm and what is merely a matter of shooting his horse from under him, or, as you say, lancing dead Moors or making firewood from a fallen tree.' And he said these last two expressions in my language: 'alancear moros muertos' and 'hacer leña del árbol caído'. 'I tried every means I could to make her see this: "Valerie," I would say, "it was wartime and in a war, soldiers sometimes even kill their comrades, you've heard of friendly fire, haven't you? Or those in command sacrifice their own troops, send them to be slaughtered, and that doesn't always serve any useful purpose either: think of Gallipoli, Chunuk Bair, Suvla, and you can be quite sure that in years to come we'll find out about similar and equally bloody cases in this recently won War of ours. In every war innocent people are killed, there are mistakes and frivolous, foolish acts, there are imbecilic or cynical politicians and military leaders. In every war there is waste. Do you imagine that I haven't committed repugnant acts, things which, if I think about them now or in the future, could perhaps have been avoided? I committed them in Kingston, and even more in Accra and in Colombo. They're repugnant to me now and will seem more so as time passes, the farther off they get, but they weren't then. And that's what you mustn't do, view these things out of context and coldly. You can't look back after a war, don't you see? Not if you want to go on living.'"

Wheeler stopped again, this time, more than anything, in order to catch his breath. He clearly needed to. He had a slightly faraway gaze, which was directed at the stairs, although without actually seeing them. He seemed to me simultaneously very tired and very agitated, as if he had relived the words he had spoken to Valerie rather too intensely, words spoken perhaps in their haunted bed, perhaps when she woke him with her crying and with her nightmares that corresponded all too closely to reality, and those are the ones no one can bear, when reality only echoes the dream. 'Let me be lead within thy bosom, may you feel the pin prick in your chest. Despair and die.' I waited and waited and waited. Finally, I said: 'I assume it was no use.'

'No, it wasn't, and the worst thing is that, by then, I knew nothing would be of any use, that her life had been twisted out of shape forever and could never be made straight again. I was already part of the group, which was created too late to save her life. Not that my gift, my capacity for interpretation was any less before I joined, of course, but you adapt your vision to the task in hand and you hone that vision; you grow used to deciphering and looking deeper into what tomorrow will bring. You must have noticed the same thing, that increase in perspicacity, since you've been with Tupra, or am I wrong?'

'No, you're right. I am more alert now. And I tend to interpret everything, even when I'm not working and no one wants me to report on what I've seen.' And I took the opportunity to ask him something that I couldn't quite understand, even at the risk of losing precious time and of Mrs. Berry interrupting us: 'If I remember correctly, Peter, the first time you talked to me about the group, you told me that Valerie was already dead when the idea was first mooted by Menzies or Vivian or whoever. I don't understand, given that the group was formed during the War.'

Wheeler looked bemused, perplexed. He sat thinking for a few moments and then his face lit up like someone who has found the solution to a minor enigma (right to the end, he enjoyed linguistic curiosities) and he said in Spanish:

'Ah, I see. It's a problem of ambiguity, or a misunderstanding on your part, Jacobo. If I said it as you said it now, "she was already dead," that would translate in your language as "estaba ya muerta," but in the figurative sense, I meant that she was already doomed, not that she had literally died.' And he moved back into English again, because by then, it was clear that speaking a foreign language tired him more. 'What I probably meant was that by then it was too late, that she had already done the thing that would later lead her to kill herself, that her fate was sealed. And that was the thing, you see; if the group had been formed before, someone might have decided, doubtless I myself with my watchful, trained, alert eye, that just as Valerie wouldn't have gotten very far as a spy, as she herself knew, neither was she equipped for black propaganda, which was too dirty for her scruples and for her dislike of deceit. Still less was she equipped to put at risk or sacrifice the lives of innocent people, however German they might be. As you know, step by step, you start doing things for which you have no stomach or aren't suited, and war stretches people a lot, or they themselves, without noticing, stretch themselves beyond their capabilities and only snap when it's all over. If someone had spotted her limitations in time, they would perhaps have withdrawn her from Milton Bryan. She would have been sent back to the Foreign Office maybe, or been restricted to working on white propaganda.' Wheeler ran his hand over his forehead, almost squeezing it this time. 'Sometimes I tell myself that I should have known anyway. But it's easy to be wise after the event or a tor pasado as you say-once the bull has passed-when you know all the facts. I wasn't altogether sure what kind of work Valerie was doing in the PWE, and we were thousands of miles apart most of the time. And she never even mentioned the term "black propaganda," so she may well have been engaged in it without knowing of its existence, or, rather, without even knowing the concept. She may also have been following orders and divulging nothing, not even to me. I don't know. If Delmer was diabolical, then Jefferys was Lucifer in person.' He paused very briefly, then added: 'I'll never know who he was, who was hiding behind that name. I have very little time left, Jacobo. Almost none.'

The music stopped, and after a few seconds, I heard Mrs. Berry coming down the stairs. 'That's it, it's over,' I thought. 'I'll never find out how Valerie killed herself and why Peter saw her do it, even though, in principle, I have more time than him, and not almost none. And why, if he saw her kill herself, he couldn't have stopped her.' And I added to myself: 'But I can't complain. I've found out a lot today, and that isn't even why I came.' However, Mrs. Berry didn't come into the living room or call us in to lunch, but went straight to the kitchen, where I could hear her bustling about. Perhaps we would still have time if she was putting the finishing touches to lunch and if I hurried.

'How did Valerie kill herself, Peter?' I asked, this time with no show of tact. 'And how come you saw her do it?'

Wheeler shifted in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position, and then he hooked one thumb under his armpit as if it were a tiny riding crop and he seemed to rest the whole weight of his chest on that thumb, at least that was my impression. It was as if he needed to lean on something, even something symbolic: a poor thumb, although he did have long fingers.

'We were living then in a house rather like this, but much smaller,' he said, 'with two or three floors, depending on how you looked at it, because the top floor was very small indeed, with only a chambre de bonne I suppose you'd call it, which we used now and then when we had visitors. It was and still is in Plantation Road, near where you lived. It cost a lot more than my salary could stretch to then, of course, but the money I had inherited allowed me such privileges, as it always has. Anyway, after four agitated nights during which she barely slept'-'Yes,' I repeated to myself, 'sorrow did indeed haunt thy bed'-'Valerie persuaded me to go and sleep in the little room on the top floor, so that I could get some rest until she calmed down; she hoped it wouldn't last very much longer, that vicious circle of nightmares and insomnia, of loathing herself when awake and being filled with panic whenever she fell asleep, of being unable to tolerate herself either awake or asleep. It worried me to leave her unaccompanied during those night hours, because they were doubtless the worst and the most difficult to get through, but I thought, too, that perhaps she needed to spend them alone in order to begin to recover, that it might be good for her not to have me by her side to talk to her and try to console her and ask her questions, to reason and argue with her, because this had served no useful purpose in the four days and nights she had spent awake, none at all. I don't know, when a situation doesn't change, you think all kinds of things. I remember feeling very uneasy as I got into bed, leaving the door open so that I could hear her if she called me, so that I could go to her at once-we were only separated by one floor, two brief flights of stairs. But such was my accumulated exhaustion that I soon fell asleep. Sleep must have proved utterly irresistible because I didn't even turn out the bedside light or close the little book I was reading and which lay on the counterpane. I only woke at dawn and I must have been lying very still because it was only then, and not before, that the book fell to the floor, with hardly any noise: it was Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, the paperback edition published by Faber. I remember that clearly; it had only recently come out and I hadn't been able to read it during the War; books like that didn't reach Ceylon or the Gold Coast.' And he murmured what were doubtless lines or parts of lines: '"Ash on an old man's sleeve… This is the death of air… the constitution of silence… What we call the beginning is often the end…" etc' Then he went on: 'So it wasn't the book falling that woke me. I don't know what it was. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was in the chambre de bonne alone and to remember why. I picked up the book and placed it on the bedside table, glanced at the clock-it was almost four-and automatically turned out the light, although not with the intention of going straight back to sleep, because that sense of unease had returned. I preferred or decided to look in at our room first, to see, without going in, if Valerie was sleeping or not, and, if she wasn't, to ask if she needed anything; or if she perhaps wanted me by her side. I put on my dressing gown and went very quietly down the stairs, so as not to wake her if she was asleep, and then I saw her sitting where she shouldn't have been sitting at all, at the top of the first flight of stairs, with her back to me.' Wheeler pointed upwards to his left, towards the top of the first flight of stairs in his current house beside the River Cherwell and not in Plantation Road. 'Just there, where you say you saw a drop of blood. It's odd, isn't it? She was still fully clothed, not in her nightdress or her dressing gown, as if she hadn't been to bed at all or was getting ready to go out, and that was what surprised me most of all, in the very brief instant during which I could feel surprise. But I didn't feel alarmed, the fact is that never, never, not during one of those fleeting moments or beforehand, did I ever suspect, did it even occur to me to fear that she was going to do what she did, not once. And there I failed. My gift or my faculty or my ability, whatever you want to call it, the gift that Tupra and you and that young half-Spanish woman have, the gift that Toby had and I have had regarding matters that were of no importance to me, failed me completely on that occasion. How could I not have guessed, how could I not have seen it, how is it that I had not the slightest glimmer? I've been asking myself that since 1946. How could I have been so stupidly optimistic, so trusting, so unaware, how is it that I saw no warning signs? That's a long time, isn't it? When it comes to the things that touch you most deeply, you never want to hear the warnings, but they're always there. In everything. One is never willing to think the worst.' Now Wheeler covered his eyes with one hand, placed it like a pulled-down visor, perhaps as I had done at some point while I was watching and not watching Tupra's horrific videos on that night when he was Reresby. 'I could understand her concern, her bad conscience, even her horror,' Wheeler continued to speak with his eyes covered, 'but I thought that sooner or later she would get over it or it would abate, just as almost everyone else got over what they had seen or done in the War, what they had lost or suffered. Up to a point, of course, enough to be able to live. It's one of the things that peacetime brings to people who are no longer at war, although it falls to some of us to continue and to watch. It brings forgetting, at least a superficial form of forgetting, or the sense that it was all a dream. Even if that dream is repeated every night and lies in wait during the day: just a bad dream. A terrible dream. But we had, after all, won the war. "Valerie," I said, and that was all I had time to say. She had her hair caught up. She didn't turn round, but I saw the back of her neck and her shoulders shudder and saw her fall violently backwards, and at the same time I heard the explosion. And only then, in the midst of my despair and my incredulity, I realized that she had been sitting there, for who knows how long, with the hunting rifle in her hands, pointing at her heart. Perhaps she had been hesitating or waiting until she felt brave enough, she who wasn't brave at all. I was probably the signal, my presence, my voice, hearing her own name.'-'Strange to leave one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…'-'She probably thought I would snatch the weapon from her and that there would be no more time later, I don't know'-'And indeed there won't be time to wonder, "Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?" Do I dare disturb the universe? Time to turn back and descend the stair… And in short, I am afraid…' And so it would be best not to wait.-'She lay there.' And Wheeler again pointed up to the top of the first flight of stairs of his current house, where I had found the drop of blood and cleaned it up with such diligence and difficulty. 'It was very hard to get rid of that blood. It poured out, flowed out, even though I immediately staunched the wound with towels. I knew she was already dead, but nevertheless I covered the wound. She had gotten dressed and put on her make-up, she had put her hair up and put on lipstick to say goodbye to me, it was a matter of politeness, the age we lived in, her now very antiquated politeness, she never received a guest or went out into the street without her make-up… And even when there was no trace of blood, I could still see it.'-'The last thing to go would be the rim,' I thought; 'Although there would have been several, because there must have been more than one stain, and perhaps it made a trail.'-'And then I moved house, I couldn't stay there.'

'But you didn't come to this house, did you, Peter?' I asked.

'No, I went to my rooms in college and lived there for three years, I preferred to have people around me. But you see, the one night, the one and only night, that I failed to watch over her sleep or non-sleep, Valerie went and killed herself. She couldn't live with what she had done. And I didn't foresee it. It never crossed my mind, not even when she sent me upstairs to the chambre de bonne. It was a perfectly reasonable excuse, and I wasn't prepared: it was the first time she had ever deceived me. You can't imagine the times I've wondered if I would have gotten there in time had I only been quicker to realize where she was when I woke up'-'Don't linger or delay,' I thought-'if I hadn't picked up the book or turned out the light or put on my dressing gown or if I'd gone down those two flights of stairs more quickly or gone down them just as quietly but without opening my mouth, without saying her name, without letting her know I was there. All nonsense of course. But you think those things over and over.'-'Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake,' I remembered.-'Some time afterwards, I wrote to Maria Mauthner and introduced myself, because she knew nothing about me. I told her that Valerie had died, but not how or why. The War, I said, and that was enough. I helped her nephew come to England, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with him, it would have been like looking at Valerie's rifle. And I've helped his son, too, the Rendel that you know: apparently he's pretty good, but not as gifted as Tupra or you, he lacks vision. At least he has a good job, though. My vision, I can assure you, has improved greatly since then. I promised myself that such a thing would never happen to anyone again simply because I couldn't or didn't dare to see. Not that anyone was ever as important to me again, of course: most of the people I observed and interpreted subsequently, on whom I reported, of whom I said whether or not they might be useful and for what, haven't mattered to me one jot in comparison. But now at least I can say to you, with no fear that I might be wrong, that you can live with what has happened to you, with what you came here to talk to me about, because, unlike her, you find it hard to believe that you were responsible.'-'Yes,' I thought, 'I will always be able to say to myself tomorrow: "Oh, I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, in the tortuous smokescreens of fever and shadow and dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, of my vague parallel existence that doesn't really count, it only half-happened and without my full consent, in short, as it said in the report I found among those old files and which was headed "Deza, Jacques," I don't see myself or know myself, I don't delve into or investigate myself, I don't pay much attention to myself and I've given up trying to understand myself. And besides, that was in another country." And then the judge would say: "Overruled, case dismissed.'"-'And anyway, you're made of very different stuff and you belong to a different age, Jacobo, a much more frivolous age. No, don't worry, you're not like Valerie. In fact, no one ever has been, during all these years without her. Or only occasionally, in my dreams.'-'Give me your hand and let us walk. Through the fields of this land of mine…'-Wheeler removed his hand from his eyes and looked at me with surprise, or fright, as if he had just emerged from a long dream. Or perhaps it was more that he opened his eyes very wide, as if seeing the world for the first time, with a gaze as inscrutable as that of a newborn child, born only weeks or days before, and who, I imagine, observes this new place into which he has been hurled and tries perhaps to decipher our customs and to work out which of those customs will be his. He looked very tired and very pale, and I suddenly feared for his health. I felt like putting my hand on his shoulder, as I had with my father a few days earlier. He noticed the olives, picked up two and ate them both. Then he drank a little more sherry, and the color returned to his cheeks, maybe he had suffered a brief drop in blood pressure. When he spoke again and I heard a different tone in his voice, I felt completely reassured, realizing that the evocation, the story, was at an end: 'Go and ask Mrs. Berry if it's time for lunch yet,' he said. 'I don't know why she hasn't called us, she stopped playing a while ago now'

I still live alone, not in another country, but back in Madrid. Or perhaps I live half-alone, if one can say such a thing. I think I've been back now for almost as much time as I spent in London, during my second English sojourn, which had been more bewildering than the first but less transforming, because I was of an age when it's harder to change, when almost all you can do is ascertain and confirm just what it is you carry in your veins. Now I am a little older. Both my father and Sir Peter Wheeler have died, the former only a week after that last Sunday in Oxford, not so much in exile from the infinite as from the past. It was his death, in fact, that precipitated my return to my home city, to be with his grandchildren, my brothers and my sister, and to attend the funeral. There was a space for him in my mother's grave. No one else will fit in there now. It was my sister who told me, she phoned me in London and said: 'Papa has died. His heart stopped half an hour ago. We knew his heart was weak, but it was still very unexpected. I was talking to him only yesterday. He asked after you, as usual, although he was convinced that you were in Oxford, teaching. You'll come, won't you?' I said that I would, that I'd come immediately. And so I went, I consoled and was consoled, I only saw Luisa at the funeral and there she embraced me in order to console me too and then I returned to London, to sort out that ingenuously furnished apartment and leave everything in order before my definitive departure, which it would now be best to hasten; a great many things required my attention in Madrid: house, furniture, books, a few paintings-that copy of the 'Annunciation'-my own bereft children, a modest or possibly not so modest inheritance; and the task of remembering. Both alone and in the company of the others.

There were no matters pending with Tupra, everything had been pretty much resolved and, indeed, settled the day after the Sunday I spent with Wheeler, in Tupra's office in the building with no name (and which, I assume, remains nameless). As predicted by Beryl or by the person who refused to tell me if she was Beryl or not, Tupra, having returned from his trip or weekend absence, was already in his office when I arrived on Monday. Our conversation was very brief, partly because it turned out to be a repetition, I mean that we'd had that identical conversation before, in the distant days when I still called him Mr. Tupra. I went straight to his door as soon as I arrived, saying a quick good morning to Rendel and young Pérez Nuix as I passed; I didn't see Mulryan, perhaps he was with Tupra. I knocked.

'Yes, who is it?' asked Tupra from inside.

And I replied absurdly:

'It's me,' omitting to give him my name, as if I were one of those people who forget that 'me' is never anyone, who are quite sure of occupying a great deal or a fair part of the thoughts of the person they're looking for, who have no doubt that they will be recognized with no need to say more-who else would it be-from the first word and the first moment. I suppose I confused my point of view with his, for we sometimes erroneously believe our own sense of urgency to be universal: I had spent many hours impatient to see him, to demand an explanation and even to confront him. But Tupra wouldn't be the least impatient, I was probably just another matter or another person to deal with, a subordinate returning to work after two weeks' leave in his country of origin, I think he often forgot that I wasn't yet English. When I didn't receive an immediate response, and suddenly aware of my own naiveté or presumption, I added: 'It's me, Bertram. It's Jack.' I accepted calling myself by a name that wasn't mine right until the end; it was the least important of the compromises I made while I was earning my living listening and noticing and interpreting and telling. But at least I didn't call him Bertie on that occasion.

'Come in, Jack,' he said.

And so I opened the door and peered in. He was sitting behind his desk, making notes or writing something on some papers. He didn't actually look up when I went in.

'Bertram,' I said, but he interrupted me.

'One moment, Jack, let me finish this first.' I waited for a minute or perhaps two or three, enough, in any case, to foresee that what did happen would happen. I sat down in an armchair opposite him, took out a cigarette and then lit it. He automatically picked up his Rameses II cigarettes, which were in their lavish red pack on the desk. In theory, smoking was forbidden in any of the offices, but I couldn't imagine anyone stopping Tupra inhaling and exhaling smoke, nor complaining about it. There had to be some advantage in the fact that neither the building nor our group had a name, and that we barely existed at all, more or less like the black propaganda group run by the PWE and Delmer and Jefferys during the War. When he finished his note-making, he took out and lit one of those exquisite cigarettes. 'So, Jack, how did it go?' There was nothing unusual in the way he said this, it wasn't even a question, more as if he were taking a routine interest in a simple little errand he had sent me on the day before. 'They told me at home that you phoned on Saturday about an urgent matter. Problems with your problem in Madrid?'

But I didn't answer his question, I got straight down to my own business-without delay:

'What happened to Dearlove and that Russian boy? What have you done?' I said. 'You really dropped me in it, I mean, it was me who gave you the idea, joder! That 'joder'-that 'damn it'-came out in Spanish because it was what my anger required me to say, even if I was speaking in English.

He sat looking at me for a few seconds with his blue or grey eyes-they were grey in that light-through his long eyelashes, dense enough to be the envy of any woman and to be considered highly suspect by any man, with those pale eyes that had a mocking quality, even if this was not their intention, eyes that were, therefore, expressive even when-as then-no expression was required, warm or should I say appreciative eyes that were never indifferent to what was there before them. And he responded in the same tone of voice, identical, with which he had said: 'Yes, I have,' when I had asked him in that same office, on another morning many months before, if he had heard about the failed coup d'état in Venezuela, and it had occurred to me that perhaps it had fallen through because we hadn't seen-because I hadn't sensed-sufficient determination on the part of General or Corporal Bonanza, who was the first person for whom I acted as translator with Tupra and on whom I improvised a report and offered my interpretation.

'What happened is in all the papers.' Perhaps he took advantage of that extemporaneous Spanish expletive, incomprehensible to him, to pretend that he had only heard my first sentence and to ignore the rest. No, he wasn't pretending, it was a way of telling me that the rest of what I had said seemed to him inadmissible and that he wasn't going to tolerate it. 'You must have read about it. Even in the Spanish press, I expect, didn't you tell me once how famous he was there? Especially… where was it now? In the Basque Country?' His memory never failed him. 'And you yourself warned me in Edinburgh that Dearlove was so concerned for his posterity that he might commit some barbarous act simply in order to be remembered. That having so little faith that his music would last, he might very well blot his own life and thus deliberately enter the ranks of the Kennedy-Mansfield clan, isn't that right? So you see, you were very sharp, it was clear he might come to a bad end. And on purpose too.' I had forgotten about that additional report of mine; he, on the other hand, had not and was now using it as an alibi. I realized that he was not willing to discuss the matter, that he wasn't even going to take part in the conversation, I was still just an employee who did my job and was paid well for it, but I had no right to ask about objectives or motivations, still less to demand explanations or make reproaches, at least that was how he saw it. Perhaps because he held me in a certain regard, because of his temporary fondness for me, he was putting me in my place only indirectly, almost tacitly, surreptitiously. And I understood this even more clearly when he added: Anything else, Jack?' It's what he had said on that other far-off occasion, after replying succinctly: 'Yes, I have.' No, he didn't usually comment on my successes and failures, or on his aims or motives, or on his pacts or transactions or commissions. He had said enough with the words 'you were very sharp.' In fact, I think that was the only time he complimented me.

'Yes, there is something else,' I said. 'I have to leave, I have to go back to Madrid. Things have got a little complicated there, I won't bore you with an explanation, it would take too long. But I can't stay here in London. I have no alternative but to resign. That's why I phoned you at home on Saturday, to let you know as soon as possible, in case you wanted to start looking for a replacement, although, obviously I can't help you with that.'

I played his same game, I resorted to an acceptable alibi, I preferred not to confront him, not to insist, after all, he would soon be merely the past for me, dumb matter, or perhaps a dream, as I would be for him. But I'm sure he understood the real reason for my leaving. It must have seemed ridiculous to him, but he didn't show it.

'As you wish,' he said coldly. 'It's your decision.'

'If you like, I can still come in occasionally, until I actually leave,' I added.

'Fine,' he said. 'That way some things won't be left half-finished. But it's not really necessary. You do as you like. Really.' There wasn't any spite in the tone in which he said this, but, rather, curtness or indifference, whether feigned or recently acquired, I don't know. It was, at any rate, new. He didn't care whether I came in or not.

'I'll see you around, then. If, that is, I do manage to come in on the odd day. Although I will have an awful lot of things to sort out.'

'Fine. Anything else, Jack?' he said again and picked up his pen as if intending to resume writing his notes as soon as I left his office.

And this time I gave the same answer as I had on that previous occasion:

'No, nothing else, Mr. Tupra.' That is how I addressed him.

I got up and went over to the door, and just as I was about to open it, his voice stopped me:

'Just out of curiosity, Mr. Deza.' When he addressed me in the same formal way, I realized that it amused him that I should have chosen such an odd moment to do so with him, just when we were saying goodbye. I turned round and thought I saw the tail end, just the shadow of a smile on that soft fleshy mouth, on those lips that were rather African or perhaps Hindu or Slavic, or even Sioux. 'Did you sort out that business in Madrid? Did you take care of that guy who's been bothering your wife? Did you make sure he's out of the picture?'

I stood still for an instant. I thought.

'Yes, I think so,' I replied.

And then he smiled broadly, waving his pen at me as if he were telling me off:

'Be careful, Jack. If you only think you did, that means you didn't.'

I didn't go back to the building, so that was the last time I saw him. But here in Madrid, I think of him more than I imagined I would. Despite that rather abrupt ending, despite the possible disappointment I must have caused him and the very real disappointment he caused me, I still feel that he is someone on whom I could always count. In a time of difficulty or confusion or trouble or even danger. Someone I could call one day and ask for advice or guidance, especially with the kind of situation I don't deal with very well. And now that Wheeler is dead, it's as if Tupra, strangely enough-possibly because of his link with Rylands, the brother whose student he was-were all that remained to me of him, even if only in my memory and imagination: his unexpected substitute or successor, his legacy almost, part of that permanent process of replacing the people we lose in our lives, of the shocking and persistent efforts we make to fill any vacancies, of our inability to resign ourselves to any reduction in the cast of characters without whom we can barely go on or survive, part of that continuous universal mechanism of substitution, which affects everyone and therefore us too, and so we accept our role as poor imitations and find ourselves surrounded by more and more of them.

Peter died six months after my father, although he was about eight months older than him. Mrs. Berry phoned me in Madrid; she was very succinct, belonging, as she did, to the thrifty generation and doubtless mindful that she was phoning abroad. Or perhaps that was just her style, one of extreme discretion. 'Sir Peter passed away last night, Jack,' she said, employing the usual euphemism. That was all, or, rather, she added: 'I just wanted you to know. I didn't think it fair that you should carry on believing he's still alive when he's not.' And when I tried to find out what had happened and the cause, she merely said: 'Oh, it wasn't unexpected. I had been expecting it for weeks,' and informing me that she would write to me later on. I couldn't even ask her to whom it would have been 'unfair,' to Peter or to me. (But presumably to both of us.) A few days later, I recalled that in England, in comparison with Spain, they take a long time to bury their dead and that I might still be in time to travel to Oxford and attend the funeral. So I phoned her several times and at different hours of the day, but no one answered. Perhaps Mrs. Berry had gone to stay with a relative, had left the house as soon as her employer died, and I realized that there was almost no one I could ask now to find out more information. There was Tupra, but I didn't turn to him: it was hardly a moment of difficulty, confusion, trouble or danger, and he hadn't himself deigned to inform me of Peter's death. I was assailed by the feeling-or perhaps it was a superstition-that I didn't want to waste a cartridge unnecessarily, as if with him I only had a certain number that would last as long as our respective lives. Young Pérez Nuix didn't bother to tell me either: she may not have known Peter personally, but she would have heard. I could have phoned one of my former colleagues, Kavanagh or Dewar or Lord Rymer the Flask or even Clare Bayes-the very idea!-but I had long ago lost touch with them. I could have tried The Queen's or Exeter, the colleges with which Peter had been connected, but their bureacracy would almost certainly have passed me fruitlessly from office to office. And the truth is I couldn't be bothered; memory and grief don't always chime with social duty. I was very busy in Madrid. I would have had to dust off my cap and gown. So I just let it go.

Mrs. Berry's promised letter took more than two months to arrive. She apologized for the delay, but she'd had to take care of almost everything, even the recent memorial service, a ceremony which, in England, tends to take place sometime after the death. She was kind enough to send me a copy of the order of service, listing the hymns and readings. Wheeler hadn't been a religious man, she explained, but she had preferred to fall back on the rites of the Anglican church, because 'he always hated the improvised ceremonies people hold these days, the secular parodies that are so popular now' The service had taken place in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, a church I remembered well; it was where Cardinal Newman had preached before his conversion. Bach had been played and Gilles, as well as Michel Corrette's gentle, ironic Carillon des morts; hymns had been sung; passages from Ecclesiasticus had been read ('… He will keep the sayings of the renowned men: and where subtil parables are, he will be there also. He will seek out the secrets of grave sentences… he will travel through strange countries; for he hath tried the good and the evil among men. Many shall commend his understanding; and so long as the world endureth, it shall not be blotted out; his memorial shall not depart away, and his name shall live from generation to generation. If he die, he shall leave a greater name than a thousand: and if he live, he shall increase it'), as well as the Prologue from La Celestina in James Mabbe's 1605 translation and an extract from a book by a contemporary novelist of whom he was particularly fond; and his praises had been sung by some of his former university colleagues, among them Dewar the Inquisitor or the Hammer or the Butcher, whose eulogy had been particularly acute and moving. And this had all been arranged according to the very precise written instructions left by Wheeler himself.

Mrs. Berry also enclosed a color photo of Peter taken some years before ('I thought you would like it as a keepsake,' she said). Now I have it framed in my study and I often look at it, so that the passing of time does not cause my memory of his face to grow dim and so that others might still see it. There he is, wearing the gown of a Doctor of Letters. 'It's made from

scarlet cloth with grey silk edging or facing, and the same on the sleeves,' Mrs. Berry explained. 'Sir Peter's gown had belonged to Dr. Dacre Balsdon, and the grey had faded somewhat, so that it looked more like a dirty blue or a greyish pink: it had probably been left out in the rain. I took the photo in Radcliffe Square on the day he received that degree. It's a shame he took off his mortarboard to pose for the picture.' There is, of course, no word in Spanish for the untranslatable 'mortarboard.' Underneath his gown Peter is wearing a dark suit and a white bow tie, an outfit which is referred to as 'subfusc' and is compulsory at certain ceremonies. And there he is now in my study, fixed forever on that far-off day, in a photo taken when I did not yet know him. The truth is that he changed very little from then until the end. I can recognize him perfectly when he looks at me with those slightly narrowed eyes, and you can clearly see the scar on the left-hand side of his chin. I never did ask how he got it. I remember that I hesitated over whether to ask him on that last Sunday, after lunch, when I was about to go to the station and get the train back to London and he accompanied me to the front door, leaning more heavily than ever on his stick. I noticed then that his legs were weaker than they had been on any other occasion, but they were doubtless capable of carrying him about the house and the garden and even up to his bedroom on the second floor. But he looked very tired, I thought, and I didn't want to make him talk much more, and so I chose to ask him something else, just one more thing before we said goodbye:

'Why did you tell me all this today, Peter? Believe me, I found it fascinating, and I'd love to know more, but I find it odd that, after years of knowing each other, you should tell me about all these things you've never said a word about before. And once you said to me: "One should never tell anyone anything," do you remember?'

Wheeler smiled at me with a mixture of slight, almost imperceptible melancholy and mischief. He placed both hands on his walking stick and said:

'It's true, Jacobo, you should never tell anyone anything…until you yourself are the past, until you reach the end. My end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door. You need to begin to come to terms with weakness because there will come a day when it will catch up with you. And when that moment arrives, you have to decide whether something should be erased forever, as if it had never happened and never even had a place in the world, or whether you're going to give it a chance to…' He hesitated for a moment, looking for the right word and, not finding it, he made do with an approximation: '… to float. To allow someone else to investigate or recount or tell it. So that it won't necessarily be lost entirely. I'm not asking you to do anything, I assure you, to tell or not to tell. I'm not even sure I've done the right thing, that I've done what I wanted. At this late stage, I don't know what my desires are any more, or if I have any. It's odd, towards the end, one's will seems to become inhibited, to withdraw. As soon as you go through that door and walk away, I shall probably regret having told you. But I can be sure that Mrs. Berry, who knows most of what happened, will never say a word to anyone when I'm gone. With you I'm not so sure, though, and so I leave that up to you. I might prefer it if you kept silent, but, at the same time, it consoles me to think that with you my story might even…' He again sought some better word, but again could not find it: '… yes, that it might still float. And that's really all it comes down to, Jacobo, to floating.'

And I thought and continued to think on the train back to Paddington: 'He's chosen me to be his rim, the part that resists being removed and erased, that resists disappearing, the part that clings to the porcelain or the floor and is the hardest bit to get rid of. He doesn't even know if he wants me to take charge of cleaning it up-"the constitution of silence"-or would rather I didn't rub too hard, but left a shadow of a trace, an echo of an echo, a fragment of a circumference, a tiny curve, a vestige, an ashy remnant that can say: "I was here," or "I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before: you saw me then and you can see me now," and that will prevent others from saying: "No, that never occurred, never happened, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it never existed, never was.'"

Mrs. Berry also spoke in her letter about the drop of blood on the stairs. She couldn't have helped hearing part of our conversation as she bustled around in the kitchen and came and went, on that last Sunday when I visited them (the verb she used was 'overhear,' which implies that it was involuntary), and how Wheeler referred in passing to the stain as if it had been a figment of my imagination ('Just there, where you say you saw…'). She felt bad about having lied to me at the time, she said, to have pretended to know nothing, perhaps to have made me doubt what I had seen. She asked me to forgive her. 'Sir Peter died of lung cancer,' she wrote. 'He knew deep down that he had it, but he preferred not to. There was no way he would go to the doctor and so I brought one, a friend of mine, to the house when it was already too late, when there was nothing to be done, and that doctor kept the diagnosis from him-after all, what was the point in telling him then?-but he confirmed it to me. Fortunately, he died very suddenly, from a massive pulmonary embolism, according to what the doctor told me afterwards. He didn't have to endure a long illness and he enjoyed a reasonable life right up until the end.' And when I read this, I remembered that the first time Wheeler had suffered one of his aphasic attacks in my presence-when he had been unable to come out with the silly word 'cushion'-I had asked him then if he'd consulted a doctor and he'd replied casually: 'No, no, it's not a physiological thing, I know that. It only lasts a moment, it's like a sudden withdrawal of my will. It's like a warning, a kind of prescience…' And when he didn't finish the sentence and I asked him what kind of prescience, he had both told me and not told me: 'Don't ask a question to which you already know the answer, Jacobo, it's not your style.'

'In fact, the only symptom, during almost the whole time he was ill,' Mrs. Berry went on, using a term doubtless learned from her medical friend, 'was the occasional hemoptoic expectoration, that is, coughing up blood.'-And I thought when I read that paragraph: 'So much of what affects and determines us is hidden.'-'This used to be quite involuntary and only happened when he coughed particularly hard, and sometimes he didn't even realize; remember, although he may not have seemed it, Sir Peter was very old. So although it's impossible to be sure, that might be what you found that night at the top of the first flight of stairs and that you took such pains to clean up. I'm very grateful to you, because that, of course, was my job. On a normal day, it would have been most unusual for me to miss something like that, but I was so busy that Saturday getting ready for the buffet supper, with all those people, and, if I remember rightly, you pointed to the wood, not the carpet, where it would have been much more visible. Anyway, on your last visit, when I heard Sir Peter telling you about his wife's blood at the top of that first flight of stairs, sixty years before and in another house, well, I was afraid you might think you'd had a supernatural experience, a vision, and I had to let you know about this other real possibility. I do hope you'll forgive my pretense at incredulity, but I couldn't, at the time, mention something that Sir Peter preferred not to acknowledge. Well, the truth is he chose not to do so right up until the last. Indeed, he died without knowing he was dying, he died without believing that he was. Lucky him.' And then I recalled two things I had heard Wheeler say in different contexts and on different occasions: 'Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenseless, lost.' And he had also stated or asserted: 'And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were infected with the plague. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'

Yes, now I'm living in Madrid again, and here, too, everything points towards that, or so I believe. I've gone back to working with a former colleague, the financier Estevez, with whom I worked for a few years after my Oxford days, when I married Luisa. He no longer refers to himself as 'a go-getter' as when we first met, he's grown too important for such nominal vanities, he doesn't need them. I contacted him from London, to sound him out regarding job opportunities, given my imminent return: I had saved quite a lot, but could foresee a lot of expenses on my return to Madrid. And when I told him briefly over the phone what I had been up to, I noticed that he was impressed when I said I'd worked for MI6, even though I'd been employed by a strange unknown group in a building with no name, which never gets a mention in any book-so ethereal and so ghostly that it didn't even require its members to have British nationality or to swear an oath-and even though I couldn't give him any proof, but only tell him what I knew. Not that I wanted to give him too many details, and those I did were invented. Anyway, he took me on at once to help with his various projects and he trusts my judgment, especially about people. And so I do still interpret people, just for him, now and then, and given my previous experience-given my record-he always listens to me as if I were the oracle. Thanks to him I earn enough money to be able to pay for Luisa to have some botox treatment, if one day she should ever want to, or indeed anything else that might improve her appearance, if she ever starts to get obsessed, although I don't think she will, it's not in her nature. To me it looks as good as before I left, before I left my home for England, her appearance I mean. And what I didn't see for a long time-but which was seen by another in my absence-that, too, seems just as good. And when I say I don't live alone but half-alone, that's because I either take the children out or visit them almost daily, and on some afternoons Luisa comes to my apartment, leaving the kids with another babysitter, not the stern Polish Mercedes, who has married and set up on her own-she's apparently opened her own business.

This is how Luisa wants it, with each of us in our own apartment, which is perhaps why she has never said what I wanted her to say or write to me during my solitary and, subsequently, troubling time in London: 'Come, come, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me, here's your pillow which now bears not a trace, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come here. Come with me. There's no one else here, come back, my ghost has gone, you can take his place and dismiss his flesh. He has been changed into nothing and his time no longer advances. What was never happened. You can, I suppose, stay here forever.' No, she hasn't said that or anything like it, but she does say other occasionally disconcerting things; during our best or most passionate or happiest moments, when she comes to see me at home as she must have gone to see Custardoy over a period of many months, she says: 'Promise me that we'll always be like this, the way we are now, that we'll never again live together.' Perhaps she's right, perhaps that's the only way we can remain properly attentive and not take each other or our presence in each other's lives for granted.

I haven't forgotten what Custardoy told me, not a single word; any information that the mind registers stays in it until oblivion catches up with it, and oblivion is always one-eyed; I haven't forgotten his insinuations or more than insinuations ('Everyone has their own sexuality,' he said with madrileño bravado, each rasping word dragged out like the music from a music box, 'with some people it's straightforward and with others it isn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either'), and on occasions I've been tempted to try hurting Luisa, just a little, as if unintentionally, distractedly, accidentally, to see how she would react, to see if she would accept it without protest, holding her breath, just to know how she would respond. But I've always stopped myself and always will, I'm sure, because that would be like accepting that Custardoy had been right and exposing myself to a new poison, and I'd had quite enough poison on that night with Tupra or, rather, Reresby. Also, it implied a danger, albeit remote: that of putting myself in the place of the man I had so feared, the devious fellow of my imagination, who might turn up one rainy night, when they're stuck at home, close his large hands around Luisa's throat-his fingers like piano keys-while the children- my children-watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. ('While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies,' Reresby had said that night. '… even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.') No, one mustn't slip or skate too close, one mustn't toy with the time, temptations and circumstances that might lead to the fulfilment of some probability carried in the veins, our veins, and my probability was that I could kill, I know that now, well, I knew it before, but I know it even better now. Best to shy away from it all and keep oneself at a distance, better to avoid it and not to touch it even in dreams ('Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death'), so that not even in dreams could someone say: 'Your wife, that wretched Luisa your wife, Jacques or Jacobo or Jack, Iago or Jaime, that never slept a quiet hour with you because the names don't change who you are… Let me be lead within thy bosom and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die.' No, that won't happen, it doesn't happen. Best to keep away.

One day, I went over to his part of town, Custardoy's; normally I try to avoid it as much as I can, which isn't easy, given that it's so central. I don't avoid it for any real reason, it's just that places become marked by what you did in them, far more than by what they did to you, and then something happens which bears a very faint resemblance-a mere shadow, a poor imitation, nonsense, no comparison-to the grudge against place, the spatial hatred, that the Nazis felt for the village of Lidice which they reduced to rubble, razed to the ground and wiped from the map, and for so many other towns in Europe, and the spatial hatred that Valerie Harwood felt perhaps for Milton Bryant and Woburn, and Peter Wheeler for Plantation Road, that pretty leafy street in Oxford, and I myself for the building with no name near Vauxhall Cross and the indiscreet headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service by the Thames with its look of a lighthouse or a ziggurat, where I never venture if I go to London now, whether with Luisa or without her; I have a little money in bank accounts there-well, you never know when you might have to leave Spain in a hurry. But I did feel a kind of spatial hatred for Calle de Bailen and Calle Mayor, quite unconscious, because I like the area, despite the fact that various oafish mayors have done their best to ruin it. I was passing by the Palacio Real, where I sometimes go to see an exhibition, and, which is another building that can no longer be seen from any other angle but from the front-one of the many views that those same idiotic mayors and their town planners and venal architects have inconsiderately and idiotically stolen from both the inhabitants of Madrid and the people who visit it. I was returning from some errands on the other side of Plaza de España when I came across two policewomen on horseback-they regularly patrol there now that all the traffic has been sent underground in this, the capital of tunnels-one white horse and one black, and I passed so close to the white one that I almost touched him and felt his breath-you only realize how tall they are when you're next to them. I hadn't gone five steps beyond the crossroads when I noticed at my back the horse's agitation or anxiety: the dog belonging to a woman who happened to be passing had started barking at the horses and harassing them, and the white horse took fright, reared up and was about to bolt, and did indeed try to make a run for it, although it only got a few yards, while the dog-tis tis tis, aerial footsteps, it was a pointer like Pérez Nuix's, except that this one had a spotted coat and a brown head-got even more excited by all that reined-in skittering and the almost galloping clatter of hooves and barked more loudly. The policewoman regained control of the horse at once, although not without some alarm and some effort: she had to turn it in circles in order to to rein it in and calm it down, and the owner of the dog finally dragged her pet off and put an end to its incursions-the tis tis tis sounded much sadder now-and stopped its barking. The other horse, the black one, wasn't in the least perturbed, either by the pointer's threats or by its companion's attempted escape, he was clearly less delicate. The sound of clattering hooves soon slowed, and when the momentary commotion had subsided, the policewoman and her horse stood quietly for a while, silhouetted against the royal facade, while she soothingly stroked his neck, under the gaze of two guards in nineteenth-century costume, inscrutable and motionless in their sentry boxes by the Palace gates. We weren't far from the monument to Captain Melgar, with its disproportionately small legionnaire, a kind of dwarf Beau Geste trying to scramble up to the Captain's beard or mustaches.

Then, from among the people who had stopped to watch this minor incident (of whom I was one) I noticed a man step forward, the kind of spectator who is prone to jump into the ring at bullfights, who always seems to be around eager to take center stage, whenever there's an altercation, a bit of trouble, and whose whole posture seems to be saying: I'll have this fixed in no time' or 'I'll knock some sense into these madmen and restore peace and amaze the onlookers.' His intervention was entirely unnecessary because the policewoman had by now managed to pacify her mount, yet the man strode over to them and, as if he were a wrangler or something, was patting the horse's neck and stroking its muzzle and whispering mysterious or trivial words. The first thing that alerted me was the glove, the black leather glove that stood out against the horse's white coat; it was a spring day, overcast but not cold, and covering your hands seemed odd, and even odder to have just one hand covered, because when he reached out his other hand and placed it on the horse's back, I saw that it, the right one, was bare, and that made me think: 'What a lot of one-handed people… Perhaps his left hand never healed properly and that's why he wears the glove, to hide a deformity or scars, who knows, perhaps he never shows it to anyone.' Then he turned to face me just as I was thinking this, it was simultaneous-he didn't turn to look at anyone else, but at me, as if he had seen me before the incident with the horse and knew where I was, or perhaps he'd been following me-and he gazed straight at me with those unmistakable eyes, crude and rough and cold, two enormous, very dark eyes, rather wide-set and lashless, and both those factors, the lack of lashes and the wide-apartness, that make his obscene gaze unbearable or possibly irresistible when turned on the women he seduces or buys and possibly also when turned on the men with whom he competes, and we were not just rivals, he hated me with the same fierce intensity as when we had seen each other for the last time on the sole occasion that I visited his apartment, with an old Llama pistol and a poker in my hand and wearing gloves like the ones Reresby had worn in the handicapped toilet and like the single glove he was wearing now. But it wasn't the same hatred, not identical: there, in front of the Palacio Real, it wasn't old or impotent, frustrated and without consequences, it wasn't tinged with fear and shock; nor was it like the hatred of a child imprisoned in a childish body, nor like a furious adolescent who watches whirling past him the world he is still not allowed to climb aboard; nor like the prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or abstaining from anything because he is not there; and his gaze was no longer murky, but unequivocal and clear.

It had taken me a few seconds to recognize him because Custardoy wasn't wearing a hat now or a ponytail or even a mustache, or only the merest shadow of one, as if he were starting to let it grow again after a period of shaving it off. He was stroking the horse with his gloved left hand and murmuring short sentences, but I didn't know now whether he was addressing these to the animal or to the policewoman-who happily let him carry on, perhaps she was already won over, with her high leather boots like those of a distant English gypsy girl in Oxford-or to me, knowing that I wouldn't be able to hear what he was saying. And when I saw the way he was looking at me, with utter loathing, I saw that there was insolence in that gaze too, and a threat, not one that was in any hurry to be carried out, but one that was prepared to linger and delay for as long as he chose or needed to; my expression must have changed and I thought: 'Damn. I didn't remove him from the picture, not entirely, I didn't make absolutely sure. This man might come after me one day or after us both, after me and Luisa, or all four of us, perhaps the children too. I humiliated him, I hurt him, and I took from him the person he loved. I should have removed or erased him from the picture for good, as if he were a drop of blood.' And suddenly an image flashed into my mind-like lightning in its brevity but not its brilliance, for it was terrifying, nauseating and sordid; or like thunderless lightning that strikes in silence-an image I had seen in one of Tupra's videos, a tethered horse, a defenseless woman, and I couldn't help but associate Custardoy with those well-dressed men sitting beneath white, red and green awnings, sporting thick mustaches and Texan hats most of them, although Custardoy no longer had a hat or much of a mustache, but I had seen them and the marks left by his abuse. That's the trouble once you've been inoculated with any kind of poison, whether through the eyes or the ears, there's no way of getting rid of it, it installs itself inside you and there's nothing to be done and it comes back to penetrate and contaminate any thing or person, saying each time, repeating, insisting: 'Let this sit heavy on your soul.'

I stood there for a few seconds, before turning and continuing on my way. I don't know if I looked at him with equal hatred, but I might have, it's very likely, more than anything because what I saw him do next troubled me greatly, I didn't like it at all: with his right hand, his bare uninjured hand, his painting hand, he took from his trouser pocket a watch and chain and checked the time with strange intensity. At first, I thought this was just some new eccentricity; having given up his ponytail, he had to find some other way to underline the fact that he was an arty type, as my sister had described him before I had even seen him; and from his stupidly archaic bohemian point of view, carrying such a watch in the twenty-first century was doubtless in keeping with that. Then I thought of another possibility: 'Perhaps he doesn't wear a wristwatch for the same reason that he wears a glove,' I thought, 'because he would have to lift up his hand whenever he wanted to know the time. Perhaps his hand really is irrecoverable, ruined, although there's no sign of the gash I made on his cheek. Whatever the truth of the matter, I don't like the image of him holding that old-fashioned watch in his hand and studying it; he may be measuring out my time.' I didn't want to look at him any longer, and when I was already a few paces away, I thought again, perhaps to exorcise him from my mind or perhaps to raise my spirits: 'But now I know that in my angry mood, I, too, am capable of measuring out his time; I counted it once and stopped the count, and he knows that; he was lucky, but I very nearly counted him out. That will dissuade him from coming near. And if he ever does, we'll see then who will be the first to leave his own first name behind.'

You can live with a threat hanging over you because there is always the possibility that it will never be carried out, and that's what you have to think. Sometimes we see what is approaching and nevertheless we pay no attention, and perhaps not only for the reason Wheeler gave: because we hate certainty, because no one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there; and because no one wants to know, and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror; because we all prefer to be utter necios in the strict Latin sense of the word that still appears in our dictionaries: 'Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known,' that is, a person who deliberately and willingly chooses not to know, a person who shies away from finding things out and who abhors learning. 'Un satisfecho insipiente, a nincompoop,' as Wheeler had said with a pedantry I now often miss. No, perhaps it's also because we fear wasting our life on our precautions and suspicions and our visions and alarms, and because it is clear to us that everything will have its end, and then, when we say goodbye, when we are already the past or our end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, it will all seem to us vain and naive: why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, our poison, the shadow, and all those doubts, all that torment?

I had arranged to see Luisa that afternoon: we see each other two or three times a week in this long truce we are enjoying. Indeed, she has the keys to my apartment and, on occasion, arrives before I do and then she waits for me, exactly as Tupra believed someone was waiting for me in London on that night of poison and dance, when no one was ever waiting for me, when there was no one to turn off any lights in my absence, the lights I left on all the time so as not to be entirely in the dark. No one had my keys and no one was ever waiting for me there. The doorman said: 'Your wife, I mean, your girlfriend has gone up already. I gave her a package that arrived for you earlier.' The man senses something marital about us, but is uncertain quite what our relationship is, and so hovers between wife and girlfriend. I've told him that Luisa is my wife, but he still doesn't quite believe it, or perhaps he doesn't understand why, in that case, she comes and goes.

Before opening the door, I could hear her humming to herself inside, she often does that now and she laughs a lot too, with me and without me, I suppose; she no longer rations out her laughter, and I trust this will remain so, if possible forever, or so I think. Her return is nothing like Beryl's return to Tupra, according to my distant interpretations and always assuming they did, in fact, get back together, which was something I never found out: there's no self-interest, not a spurious self-interest, and there's nothing clandestine about it either. It's clear that Luisa benefits from and enjoys us seeing each other like this, just now and then, and not living together, although she might grow tired of that one day; she has already started leaving clothes here. And it suits me too. After all, in London, I got used to being very alone, as Wheeler paternally said to me early on, and sometimes I need to continue to be alone because I don't think I could bear someone's company all the time and never be able to look out at the world from my window on my own, the living world that knows where it's going and to which I imagine I still belong. I opened the door and saw on the coffee table in the living room the package that the porter had given to Luisa, who was in the kitchen, still humming and not aware that I had come in. I saw that it came from Berlin, shoes by VonTruschinsky, from whom, since they have all my measurements, I still occasionally order a pair, even though they are very expensive. I always think of Tupra when I receive them, but then he's always vaguely in my thoughts, as if he were a friend on whom I continue to count-which is odd-and to whom I could turn for help. I haven't done so yet.

That afternoon, he was even more in my thoughts after my silent encounter with Custardoy, with two or three animals as indifferent witnesses. On the way home, something else had occurred to me, I had thought: 'I didn't want to frighten De la Garza when I went to see him at the Embassy, and I was horrified to see the panic my mere presence instilled in him, but, on the other hand, I would have liked to see that same fear on Custardoy's face and in the way he behaved. He's completely recovered from his fright now or if a little remains-as it must- he doesn't show it. Nothing ever works out as we want or as we think, or perhaps I'm still too hesitant; such a thing would never have happened to Tupra, he would have removed him from the picture when he had him in the frame, and now I'll have to watch every corner, just in case he slips back in again, this time with sword or spear, although that might take some time, because once you've experienced fear, you never entirely lose it.' These thoughts continued to preoccupy me. Luisa noticed that I was quiet and was perhaps even a little worried because I wasn't responding much to her jokes, for she's gone back to poking gentle fun at me.

'What's wrong?' she asked. 'Has something happened?'

'What do you mean?' I replied, half-suspicious, half-distracted. 'What sort of thing?'

'I mean, something bad.'

Yes, something bad had happened to me, and no, nothing bad had happened to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Someone hurts you and you become an enemy. Or you hurt someone and create an enemy It's as easy as breathing, both things happen much more frequently than we imagine, often by chance and without our realizing, it pays to stay alert and watch people's faces, but even then we don't always notice. I had noticed that afternoon, which is an advantage. But I couldn't say anything to Luisa, I couldn't talk to her about it, I couldn't tell her about that meeting. We have barely asked each other anything about our time of absolute separation, best not to. She has never spoken to me about Custardoy, nor have I to her, and I will never know how much she loved or feared him. That is perhaps the only thing about which I will never be able to say anything to her, not even when I am already the past or my end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door, because I think I know her face and I stake everything on that, even the way she will remember me. Perhaps because of that, and also because I am usually perfectly content, I sometimes sing or hum to myself at times, as she does, and I have a tendency to sing or whistle that song of many titles, from Ireland or the Wild West ('Nanna naranniario nannara nanniaro,' that's how the melody goes), 'The Bard of Armagh' who forecast: And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me'; or 'Doc Holliday' who first justified himself by saying: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today'; or 'The Streets of Laredo,' which is the version whose words I know best and which is therefore the one I sometimes sing out loud or to myself, perhaps, who knows, as a reminder, especially the last verse that ends by asking: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'

'No,' I said, 'nothing bad.'

May 2007