that contains both you and me today, or is perhaps merely dragging us along with it. Atrocities make men into unbelievers, at least in their innermost consciousness and feelings, even if, out of some superstitious reflex reaction, or some other reaction based on a mixture of tradition and surrender, they decide to pretend the opposite and gather together in churches to sing hymns in order to feel closer and to instil themselves not so much with courage as with integrity and resignation, just as soldiers used to sing as they advanced, almost defenceless, bayonets fixed, mostly in order to anaesthetise themselves a little with their cries before the impact or the blow or being hurled into the air, in order to numb thoughts that had been wounded long before the flesh ever was, and to silence the various sounds made by death as it prowled around on the look-out for easy prey. I know this, I've seen it in the field. But it isn't only the acts of savagery, the cruelties, those one has suffered and those one has oneself committed, all in the cause of survival, which is as just as it is unjust. It is also the stubbornness of the facts: the fact that no one has ever come to talk to us after they have died, despite all the efforts of spiritualists, visionaries, phantasmophiles, miraculists and even our present-day unbelieving believers, who, even though their belief is only residual and habitual, can be counted in their millions; long experience has forced us to recognise over the centuries, perhaps only in our heart of hearts and possibly without ever actually admitting as much to ourselves, that the only people who have no language and never speak or tell or say anything are the dead.' Peter stopped and looked down again, and added at once, without looking up: 'And that includes us, of course, when we join their ranks. But only then and not before.'
He remained like that, staring at the grass. He seemed to be waiting for me to make some comment or to ask some question. But I didn't know which, which of those two things he wanted and for which one he was silently asking me, or if he really needed either. And so the only thing that occurred to me was to whisper in my own language, a language in which the words had not originally been written, but the only one in which I knew them:
'It is strange to inhabit the earth no longer. Strange no longer to be what one was…and to abandon even one's own name. Strange no longer to desire one's desires. And being dead is such hard work.'
Fortunately, I suppose, Wheeler ignored this too.
'Yes, they only talk to us in our dreams,' he went on, as if my unattended half-verses had, none the less, triggered some reaction. 'And we hear them so clearly, and their presence is so vivid, that, as long as sleep lasts, these people with whom we can never exchange a word or a look when awake, or make any contact, seem to be the very people who are, in fact, telling us things and listening to us and even cheering our spirits with their longed-for laughter, identical to the laughter we knew when they were alive on this earth: it's exactly the same, that laughter; we recognise it unhesitatingly. It really is very strange; if pressed, I would say inexplicable, it is one of the few intact mysteries left to us. One thing is certain, though, at least for rationalists like you and like me, and as Toby was and Tupra still is, those voices and their new voices are inside us, not somewhere outside. They are in our imagination and in our memory. Let's put it like this: it is our memory imagining, and not, for once, only remembering, or, rather, doing so in impure, motley fashion. They are in our dreams, the dead; we are the ones dreaming them, our sleeping consciousness brings them to us and no one else can hear them. It is more like an impersonation' (a word that translates into Spanish as a mixture of encarnacion, suplantacion and personificacion) 'than a supposed visitation or warning from beyond the grave. Such a mechanism is not unknown to us, when we're awake I mean. Sometimes you love someone so much that it's very easy to see the world through their eyes and to feel what that other person feels, in so far as it's possible to understand another person's feelings. To foresee that person, to anticipate them. Literally, to put yourself in their place. That's why the expression exists, very few expressions in a language exist in vain. And if we do that when we're awake, then it's hardly surprising that these fusions or conversions or juxtapositions, metamorphoses almost, should occur while we're asleep. Do you know that sonnet by Milton? Milton had been blind for some time when he wrote it, but he dreamed one night of his dead wife Catherine, and he saw and heard her perfectly in that dimension, that of the dream, which so welcomes and withstands the poetic narrative. And in that dimension he recovered his vision threefold: his own, as faculty and sense; the impossible image of his wife, for neither he nor anyone else could still see her in the present, she had been erased from the earth; and, above all, her face and figure, which, in him, were not even remembered but imagined, new and never seen before, because he had never seen her in life other than with his mind and with his touch, she was his second wife and he was already blind when they married. And as he leaned forwards to embrace her in the dream, 'I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night', that's how it ends. With the dead you always return to night and to hearing only their silence and to never receiving a reply. No, they never talk, they are the only ones; and they are also the majority, if we count all those who have passed through the world and left it behind. Although they all doubtless talked when they were here.' Wheeler touched the drawings again, tapped them with his index finger, pointing at them vehemently as if they were more than they were. 'Do you realise what this meant, Jacobo? They were asking people to be silent, to sew up their lips, to keep their mouths tight shut, to abstain from all careless talk and even from talk that might not seem careless. They filled everyone with fear, even children. Fear of themselves and of betraying themselves, and, of course, fear of other people, even the person one most loved, the person who was closest and most trusted. So, when you think about it, what they were asking with these slogans was not just that people should renounce the air, but that by doing so, they should become assimilated with the dead. And this at a time when each day brought us news of so many new dead, those on the infinite fronts scattered around half the globe, or those you could see in your own neighbourhood, in your own street, victims of the night-time bombing raids, when anyone might be the next. Weren't those deaths enough? Wasn't it enough, that definitive and irreversible silence imposed on so many without those of us still alive having to imitate them and fall silent before our time? How could they ask that of a whole country or of anyone, even of an isolated individual? If you look at these posters (and there were more), you'll see that no one, however insignificant, was excluded. What interesting or dangerous information, for example, could those two ladies travelling on the Underground be harbouring, they're probably talking about their hats or about the most innocuous details of their daily lives. Ah, but their husband or brother or son might have been called up, that was the norm, and although their men, already forewarned, would not have told them much, they might know something of importance that could be used, how can I put it, without their even knowing that they knew it or unaware of its importance. Everyone could know something, even the most misanthropic beggar to whom nobody speaks, not just in time of war but never, and even though the majority aren't aware of the precious nature of what they know. And the less conscious one is, the more dangerous one becomes. It may seem like an exaggeration, but everyone is capable of unleashing calamities, disasters, crimes, tragic misunderstandings and acts of revenge merely by speaking, innocently and freely. It is always possible and even easy to let the cat out of the bag or, as you say in Spanish, irse de la lengua, what a lovely expression, at once so broad and so precise, covering both the intentional and the involuntary nature of the action.' And Wheeler, of course, said that lovely expression, irse de la lengua, in Spanish. 'Whatever the era or the circumstances, no one is safe from that. And never forget: everything has its moment to be believed, however unlikely or anodyne, however incredible or stupid.'
Wheeler looked up again, as if he had heard before I did what I heard immediately afterwards, but only after a few seconds, the noise of an engine in the air and that of a propeller too, perhaps he had got used to picking up the slightest sound or aerial vibration during the war or during his wars, before it was even audible, I suppose it's also possible to learn to have a presentiment of a presentiment. Then a helicopter appeared, flying low over the trees, an odd sight in the Oxford sky, still more so at a weekend, on one of those Sundays in exile from the infinite, perhaps some academic ceremony was being held that required the presence of the Prime Minister or some other high-ranking official or someone else from the crowded monarchical ladder (the Duke and Duchess of Kent seem to be in a dozen places at once, with, it's said, supernatural help) and about which we knew nothing, Wheeler had been retired for so long now that, with each year that passed, the university authorities were more and more inclined to forget to invite him to their solemn feasts. British premiers have traditionally shown a kind of homing instinct for our university, although, during my time as a teacher there, I still remember how we members of the congregation denied a doctorate honoris causa, by a majority vote, to the modest Mrs Thatcher (the rancorous Margaret Hilda) when she was still only Mrs and not Baroness or Lady. She was an Oxford graduate and was in power at the time, but that didn't help her much. I had a temporary right to vote and it was with great excitement and pleasure that I gave my vote to the nay-saying majority. The woman took the snub badly, and later appeared to exact her revenge by imposing restrictions and laws prejudicial to Oxford University and to others too, but she was the first Prime Minister to whom such a degree had been denied, for it had been awarded to all or almost all her predecessors, with barely any opposition, a mere formality, or, shall we say,
