Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

'gratia', a tedious fixture in all the offices of the world, regardless of latitude or climate, even in the offices of interpreters and spies…'

Wheeler stopped for a moment, more than anything – it seemed to me – to catch his breath. He had said the words 'donaire and 'gracia' in Spanish, possibly paraphrasing Cervantes's words taken from somewhere other than Don Quixote, an unusual occurrence, but perfectly possible in his case. I could not resist trying to find out, and so I took advantage of his pause to quote slowly, little by little, almost syllable by syllable, as if casually or as if not quite daring to say it, murmuring:

'Adios, gracias; adios, donaires; adios, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo…'

Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying…

I could not complete the quotation. Perhaps Wheeler did not like to be reminded of that last phrase out loud, often the old do not even want to hear so much as a mention of such things, of their death, perhaps because they are beginning to see it as something likely or plausible and not dreamed or fictitious. No, I don't believe it, I can't be sure, but no one sees their own end like that, not even the very old or the very ill or those under threat and in constant danger. We, the others, are the ones who begin to see it in them. He ignored me and went on. He pretended not to notice what I had recited in my own language, and so I never knew if it had been a coincidence or if he had, in fact, been alluding to Cervantes's joyful farewell.

'Sometimes people say of someone that he lacks conversation. That's ridiculous. A cultivated person, the Prime Minister (well, all right, let's call him mentally adroit) might say it of someone who is not at all cultivated, for example, his barber. What the former is actually saying is that he doesn't care about and is hugely bored by anything the latter has to say. Doubtless almost as bored as the barber is by everything the Premier comes out with while he's having his hair cut, it's always a difficult chunk of time to fill, like journeys in lifts, especially if the scant head of hair requires all manner of primping if it's to look half-way presentable and not too much like an uprooted carrot. But the barber will certainly not lack conversation, he may have even more to say than the rather obtuse minister, who is more concerned with the progress of his country in the abstract and, more concretely, with the progress of his career. It seems to me that people who know absolutely nothing, people who have never consciously paused to think for a moment about anything, who do not have a single idea of their own or anyone else's really, nevertheless talk untiringly, unceasingly, without the slightest inhibition or self-consciousness. This is not just the case with people without training or education; there are far more astonishing cases than that of these rustics: you have only to see a group of Hooray Henries or idiotic snobs, most of them with PhDs from Cambridge or from us, and you wonder what the devil they can find to talk about amongst themselves after the first hour of exchanging greetings and telling each other the four miserable scraps of news that everyone knows about anyway because it's common gossip, or bringing each other up to date on their usual two bits of twaddle and three pieces of villainy (I've always wondered what such people can find to talk about at those lavish receptions, which are cram-packed with them). One imagines that they must often have to resort to saying nothing and to loudly clearing their throats, that they must have to suffer embarrassingly long pauses and endure witty comments about the rain and the clouds as well as the awkward silences characteristic of dead time at its most defunct and even stillborn, given their absolute lack of ideas, amusing remarks, knowledge and the necessary inspiration to recount anything, of ingenuity and dialogue and even monologue: of intelligence and substance. And yet that isn't the case. One doesn't know why or how or about what, but the fact is that they spend the hours and the days chatting endlessly, brutishly, spend whole evenings engaged in chit-chat, without once closing their mouths, even snatching the word from each other's lips, all intent on monopolising it. It's both a mystery and not a mystery. Speaking, far more than thinking, is something that everyone has within his or her grasp (I'm talking, of course, about things volitive, not merely organic or physiological); it's something which is shared and has always been shared by the bad and the good, by victims and their executioners, by the cruel and the compassionate, the sincere and the mendacious, by the not very bright and the extremely stupid, by slaves and their masters, by the gods and mankind. They all have it, imbeciles, brutes, merciless sadists, murderers, tyrants, savages, simpletons, and even the mad. And precisely because it is the one thing that makes us all equal we have spent centuries creating for ourselves all kinds of tiny differences, in pronunciation, diction, intonation, vocabulary, phonetics and semantics, all in order to feel that our group alone is in possession of a mode of speech unknown to others, of a password for initiates only. It is not only a matter for what used to be called the upper classes, eager to distinguish themselves from and scornful of everyone else; those known as the lower classes have done the same, they have proved no less scornful, and thus have forged their own jargons, their own ciphers, the secret or encrypted languages that allowed them to recognise each other and to exclude the enemy, that is, the learned and the powerful and the refined, and to prevent them from understanding, at least in part, what their members were saying, just as criminals invent their own argot and the persecuted their codes. Within the confines of the same language, their entirely artificial aim is not to be understood or at least only partially; it's an attempt to obscure, to conceal, and, with this end in mind, they seek out strange derivations and fanciful variants, defective and highly arbitrary metaphors, tangential or oblique meanings that can be separated off from the common norm, they even coin new and unnecessary substitute words, to undo what was said and to mask what was communicated. The reason being that what makes language intelligible is the habitual and the given. Moreover, that language, or tongue, is almost all that some people have and give and receive: the poorest, the most humble, the disinherited, the illiterate, the captive, the unhappy, the subjugated; the marginalised and the deformed, like that Shakespearean king of ours, Richard III, who did so well out of his persuasive gift of the gab. That's the one thing you can't take away from them, speech or language, perhaps the one thing they have learned and know, they use it to address their children or their lovers, to joke, to love, to defend themselves, to suffer, console and pray, to unburden themselves, to implore, persuade, save and convince; with it they also poison, instigate, hate, perjure, insult, curse and betray, corrupt, condemn and avenge themselves. Almost everyone has it, both the king and his vassals, the priest and his congregation, the marshal and his soldiers. That is why sacred language exists, a language that does not belong to everyone, a language intended not for men, but for the gods. People forget, however, that, according to our old and possibly now moribund beliefs, both God and the gods talk and listen too (what are prayers but sentences, words, syllables), and, in the end, that sacred language is deciphered and learned too, all codes are susceptible to eventual decoding, sooner or later, no secret can be a secret eternally.' Wheeler stopped again, very briefly, again to catch his breath. He placed one hand on the pictures we had laid out on the table, an instinctive gesture, as if he wanted to prevent them being carried off by a nonexistent gust of wind, or perhaps merely to caress them. It wasn't cold, the sun was very high, pale, lazy; it was pleasantly cool. 'Language so binds and assimilates us that the powerful have always had to find non- verbal signs and insignia and symbols in order to be obeyed and in order to differentiate themselves. Do you remember that scene in Shakespeare when, on the eve of battle, the king wraps himself in a borrowed cloak and goes and sits down in the camp with three soldiers, pretending to be just another combatant, ready for battle, and unable to sleep through what's left of the night or through the few remaining hours before dawn? He speaks to them, he presents himself as a friend, he talks to them, and when he does, the four seem similar, he more logical and educated, they rougher and more intuitive, but they understand each other perfectly, they are on the same plane of comprehension and speech and nothing gets in the way of that exchange of opinions and impressions and even fears, two of them even quarrel and almost come to blows, the king who is not the king and a subject who is not, at that moment, a subject. They talk for quite a while, and the king knows that, as they speak, they become equal, that, at least for as long as the dialogue lasts, they are the same. Which is why, when he is left alone, thinking about what he has heard, he tells us what the difference is, he murmurs in his soliloquy what it is that really distinguishes him from them. Do you remember that scene, Jacobo?'

I too placed my hand on the drawings, as if I feared the breeze.

'No, Peter,' I said. 'What king is that?'

But Wheeler did not reply to my question, he went on, instead, to quote out loud, and this time I was in no doubt that he was quoting, for very few writers other than Shakespeare would ever have written 'great greatness' (and so many teachers and critics in my country now would have crucified him for doing so).

''What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?' That is what the king says when he's alone, and a little further on he reproaches ceremony for singling him out: 'Oh ceremony! Show me but thy worth!' And he goes on to challenge it: 'O! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!' What does it actually achieve, if it achieves anything? And later still, the king dares to envy the wretched slave who labours in the sun all day but then sleeps