much apprehension as fatalism or defeat or resignation, in short, surrender.
'Don't be so sure, Peter. He did and he didn't. He may have dropped his guard sometimes, but he never entirely lost his will, I don't think, nor did he say more than he was aware he wanted to say. Even if that awareness was distant or hidden, or muffled. Just like you.'
'What else did he tell and not tell you, then?' He ignored my last comment, or kept it for later on.
'He didn't really tell me anything, he just talked. He said: 'I shouldn't be telling you any of this now, but the fact is that in my lifetime I've run mortal risks and betrayed men whom I had nothing against personally. I've saved a few people's lives too, but sent others to the firing squad or the gallows. I've lived in Africa, in the most unlikely places, in other times, and was even a witness to the suicide of the person I loved.''
'He said that, 'I was even a witness to the suicide…'' Wheeler didn't complete the phrase. He was astonished, or possibly annoyed. 'And was that all? Did he say who or what happened?'
'No. I remember that he stopped short then, as if his will or his conscious mind had sent a warning to his memory, to stop him overstepping the mark; then he added: 'Oh, and battles, I've been a witness to those too,' I remember it clearly. Then he went on talking, but about the present. He said no more about his past, or only in very general terms. Even more general, that is.'
'May I ask what those terms were?' Wheeler's question sounded not forceful, but timid, as if he were asking my permission; it was almost a plea.
'Of course, Peter,' I replied, and there was no reserve or insincerity in my voice. 'He said that his head was full of bright, shining memories, frightening and thrilling, and that anyone seeing all of them together, as he could, would think they were more than enough, that the simple remembering of so many fascinating facts and people would fill one's old age more intensely than most people's present.' I paused for a moment to give him time to listen to the words inside him. 'Those, pretty much, were the terms he used or what he said. And he added that it wasn't, in fact, like that. That it wasn't like that for him. He did still want more, he said. He still wanted everything, he said.'
Wheeler now seemed at once relieved and saddened and uneasy, or perhaps he was none of those things, perhaps he was simply moved. It probably wasn't like that for him either, however many bright, shining memories he had. Probably nothing was enough to fill the days of his old age, despite all his efforts and his machinations.
'And you believed all that,' he said.
'I had no reason not to,' I replied. 'Besides, he was telling me the truth, sometimes you just know, without a shadow of a doubt, that someone is telling you the truth. Not often, it's true,' I added. 'But there are occasions when you have not the slightest doubt about it.'
'Do you remember when this took place, this conversation?'
'Yes, it was in Hilary term during my second year here, towards the end of March.'
'So a couple of years before he died, is that right?'
'More or less, or perhaps a bit more. I think he may not have even introduced us yet, you and me. You and I must have met for the first time in Trinity term of that year, shortly before I returned to Madrid for good.'
'We were already quite old then, Toby and I, well into our emeritus years both of us. I never thought I would be so much older, I don't know how he would have coped with all the additional time that I've had and he hasn't. Badly I suspect, worse than me. He complained more because he was more optimistic than me, and therefore more passive too, don't you agree, Estelle?'
I was surprised that he should suddenly address Mrs Berry by her first name, I had never heard him do so before, and yet he and I had often been alone together, but he had always addressed her as 'Mrs Berry'. I wondered if the nature of the conversation had something to do with it. As if he were opening up for me one door or several (I didn't yet know which one or how many), amongst them that of his unseen daily life. She always called him 'Professor', which in Oxford does not mean 'lecturer' or 'teacher' as it does in Spanish, but chair or head of department, and there is only one professor in each sub-faculty, the others being merely 'dons'. And this time Mrs Berry responded by calling him 'Peter'. That's what they must call each other when they're alone, Peter and Estelle, I thought. It was, however, impossible to know if they addressed each other as 'tu', since in present-day English only 'you' exists, and there is no distinction made between 'tu' and 'usted'.
'Yes, Peter, you're right.' I decided to imagine that had they been speaking in Spanish, they would have used 'usted'', as I always did mentally when speaking to Wheeler in his language. 'He always assumed that people would come to him and that things would happen of their own accord, and so he tended perhaps to feel more let down. I don't know quite whether he was more optimistic or simply prouder. But he never went after people and things himself. He didn't seek them out the way you do.' Mrs Berry spoke in her usual calm, discreet tone, I could not detect the slightest variation.
'Pride and optimism are not necessarily mutually exclusive characteristics, Estelle,' replied Wheeler in slightly professorial mode. 'He was the one who told me about you,' he went on to say, looking at me, and then I did notice a distinct change from the tone of voice he had used before: the fog had lifted (the apprehension or irritation or sense of doom), as if, after a few moments of alarm, he had been reassured to learn that I did not know too much about Rylands, despite the latter's unexpected confidences to me that day in Hilary term during my second year in Oxford. That his reminiscences had not entailed a complete surrender of his will when I was present, and perhaps, therefore, not while anyone else was present either. That I knew about his past as a spy and a few imprecise facts without date or place or names, but nothing more. He felt once more in control of the situation after a brief moment of disequilibrium, I could see it in his eyes, I could hear it in the slight hint of didacticism in his voice. It doubtless made him feel uneasy to discover that he was not in possession of all the facts, always assuming he had believed he was, and he once more took it for granted that he had them all, those he needed or that afforded him a sense of ease and comfort. In the now rather late morning light his eyes looked very transparent, less mineral than they usually did and much more liquid, like Toby Rylands's eyes, or like his right eye at least, the one that was the colour of sherry or the colour of olive oil depending on how the sun caught it, and which predominated and assimilated his other eye when seen from a distance: or perhaps it is simply that one dares to see more similarities between people when you know there is a blood relationship to back you up. Wheeler had still not explained to me about their hitherto unknown kinship, but it had taken barely any effort on my part to apply that correction to my thought and to see them no longer as friends, but as brothers. Or as brothers as well as friends, for that is what they must have been. Wheeler's eyes seemed to me now more like two large drops of rose wine, it was Toby who suggested to me that you might perhaps be like us,' he added.
'What do you mean 'like us'? What do you mean? What did he mean?'
Wheeler did not reply directly. The truth is he rarely did.
'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo. 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, it's no cliche or exaggeration to describe us now as an endangered species. 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, it smacks of lese-humanite, an attack on the dignity of the prejudged, of the prejudger, of everyone. 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. They require proof and verification of everything; the benefit of the doubt, as they call it, has invaded everything, leaving not a single sphere uncolonised, and it has ended up paralysing us, making us, formally speaking, impartial, scrupulous and ingenuous, but, in practice, making fools of us all, utter necios.' That last word he said in Spanish, doubtless because there is no English word that resembles it phonetically or etymologically: 'utter necios,' he said, mixing the two languages. 'Necios in the strict sense of the word, in the Latin sense of nescius, one who knows nothing, who lacks knowledge, or as the dictionary of the Real Academia Espanola puts it, do you know the definition it gives? 'Ignorant and knowing neither what could or should be known.' Isn't that extraordinary? 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.' He resorted to Spanish for both the quote and for the last few words, which mean, more or less, 'nincompoop'; in other languages one always remembers terms that are no longer in use or are unknown to native speakers. 'And that's how it is in our pusillanimous countries, people are educated from childhood on to be necios, fools. It isn't a natural evolution or degeneration, it doesn't happen by chance, it's conscious, calculated, institutional. It's a programme for the formation of minds, or for their annihilation (the annihilation of character, ca va sans dire!). People hate
