Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

He said all this quite casually, but I couldn't help but feel a twinge of excitement and another of pride, I had always thought that I amused him and that he liked me, and that perhaps I flattered him a little, that he found me easy to be with, but never more than that. He always had a lot to say and to discuss, although he was very sparing with the former; his conversation taught me, instructed me and provided me with new ideas or else renewed ideas that I already had; in short, he captivated me. I don't think I offered him much in return, apart from company and an attentive ear, the look of interest on my face was real not fake. Rylands had bequeathed him to me and, more than that, had turned out to be his brother. Perhaps Peter regarded me with benevolent, affectionate eyes because he, too, saw me partly as a bequest from Toby, although I could never be a substitute for him, as Wheeler was for me. I wasn't old enough, I lacked the shared past, the acuteness, the knowledge, the mystery. I felt slightly embarrassed, I didn't know what to say, so I removed from my inside jacket pocket the Latin comb he had asked me for.

'Here you are, Peter,' I said. 'One small comb.' He looked at it for a second, disconcerted, he had forgotten that he still needed it. Then he gingerly took it from me, held it up to the light (it was clean) and recomposed his hair as best he could, it's not easy without a mirror and with only a small comb. He tamed the top, but not the sides, the aeronautical wind had blown them forward and they were rebelliously invading his temples, giving him a still more Roman air. 'Allow me,' I said. He trustingly handed me the comb, and with three or four rapid movements I smoothed the sides of his hair too. I hoped Mrs Berry wasn't watching us, she would have taken me for a mad, frustrated barber.

'You'd better comb your hair too,' said Wheeler, regarding my head critically, almost with distaste, as if I had a parrot perched on top of it. 'I don't know how you managed it, but you've got grass stains all over you. And you hadn't even noticed.' He indicated the front of my pale shirt, revealing that he didn't make the connection between the two or three smudges of green and my rescue of his drawings. What with the party the night before, my subsequent studies and the glasses of wine, the lack of sleep, the very rapid shave I had given myself and my recent vicissitudes al fresco, I must have looked like a beggar down to his last penny or a disgraced criminal fallen on very hard times. My jacket and trousers were crumpled from rolling around on the grass. 'Honestly,' said Wheeler, 'you're just like a child.' He was probably pulling my leg, and that cheered him up too. I ran my fingers over the small comb (a mechanical gesture) and then disentangled my hair, by touch alone. When I had finished, I turned to him for his opinion:

'How do I look?' I said, theatrically displaying my two profiles.

You'll pass,' he said, after casting a condescending eye over me, like a superior officer making a cursory inspection of a soldier's head. And then he returned to where he had been just before the aerial attack, he never lost the thread unless he wanted to. Despite the many detours, meanderings, diversions, he always concluded his trajectories. 'So what happened with that campaign?' he asked rhetorically. 'Well, overall, naturally enough, it failed. A failure to which it was irremissibly condemned from the start. Well, it served some purpose, obviously, quite a good purpose really: people became aware of the dangers of talking too much, something that had never even occurred to most of them. It doubtless had an effect on many in the armed forces and that was the main thing, since they would be the best-informed and the most vulnerable to the consequences of verbal excess or carelessness. And the leaders, both political and military, were, of course, very careful indeed. There was an increased tendency to communicate in code, or else through doubles entendres and semantic transpositions, using improvised or rough-and-ready synecdoches and metalepses, and this happened spontaneously throughout the population, depending on the individual's talents and abilities. The idea that someone, anyone, could be listening with hostile intent was created and implanted. You could say (and this, in itself, was both unusual and admirable) that people became fully and collectively aware, however temporarily, of what was depicted in that sequence of scenes that begins with the sailor talking to the young woman: the fact that our words, once uttered, are beyond our control. They, more than anything, cease to belong to us, far more so than our actions which, in a way, good or bad, stay inside ourselves, and cannot be appropriated by anyone else, except in flagrant cases of usurpation or imposture, which, however tardily, can always be denounced, aborted, undone or unmasked.' Wheeler used the Spanish verb 'desfacer' for 'undone'. He had also used the Spanish 'como estaba mandado' and 'de andar por casa' for 'naturally enough' and 'rough-and-ready' – he liked to show off both his colloquial and his bookish Spanish, as he did with his Portuguese and French, I suppose, those were the three languages he knew best, and possibly others, he certainly, to my knowledge, had a smattering of Hindi, German and Russian. 'Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word. One pronounces words and immediately lets them go and gives possession, or, rather, usufruct, to the person who hears them. That person may agree with them, to start with, which is not necessarily pleasing because in a sense, by doing so, he or she takes them over; the person may refute them, which is equally unpleasing; more than that, he or she can, in turn, transmit them limitlessly, acknowledging their source or making them theirs depending on their mood, depending on how decent they are or on whether or not they want to ruin or betray us, depending on the circumstances; not only that, they can elaborate on them, improve on them or mar them, distort them, slant them, quote them out of context, change their tone, alter their emphasis and thus easily give them a different and even a contrary meaning to the one they had on our lips, or when we conceived them. And they can, of course, repeat them exactly, verbatim. This was what people most feared during the war, which is why many people tried to speak obliquely, metaphorically or nebulously, with deliberate vagueness or even resorting to secret languages. Many learned to say things without really saying them, and became accustomed to that.'

'Something of the sort happened during Franco's dictatorship in Spain, to get around the censorship laws,' I said; Wheeler had, after all, invited me to interrupt him more often. 'Many people started talking and writing in a symbolic, allusive, parabolic or abstract way. You had to make yourself understood within the deliberate obscurity of what you were saying. A complete nonsense: camouflaging yourself, concealing yourself and yet, nevertheless, wanting to be recognised and wanting the most diffuse, cryptic and confused of messages to be picked up and understood. People have no patience for the hard work involved in deciphering codes. It lasted far too long, and at one point it looked as if it wasn't just a passing phase either, but was here to stay. Some people never managed to lose the habit afterwards, and that was when they fell silent.'

Wheeler listened to me, and it occurred to me that if he took me up on what I had said, he might get diverted once more from his trajectory. Now, however, he seemed resolved to continue along that path, albeit at his own measured pace:

'Many learned to say things without really saying them,' he repeated, 'but what almost no one learned to do was to say nothing, to keep silent, which is what was being asked of them and what was needed. It was normal, it's only natural: it's an impossible thing for most ordinary mortals, believe me, it's asking too much of them, it goes against their very essence, that's why the campaign was always doomed to more than partial failure. It was tantamount to saying to people: 'Right, not only have you got to put up with all the shortages, the hardships and the rationing, endure enemy bombing raids – never knowing, despite the wailing sirens, who might not wake up tomorrow or tonight – see your homes set on fire or reduced in an instant to rubble after the explosion and the noise, and sit buried for hours in deep shelters so as not to be burned in streets that still seem just the same, and suffer the loss of husbands and sons or, at the very least, their absence and the constant torment of anxiety over their daily survival or death, to climb into planes and, while you do battle with the air, to be machine-gunned by the enemy, who do everything possible to bring you down, to be sunk and go under, in distant, flaming waters, in submarines and destroyers and warships, and suffocate or be burned alive inside a tank, and parachute out over occupied territory only to come under artillery fire or be set upon by dogs if you manage to land safely, and be blown to pieces if you have the bad but very possible luck to be hit by a shell or a grenade, and then face torture and the executioner if you're caught on your mission in forbidden territory wearing civilian clothes, or engage in hand-to-hand combat at the front with bayonets fixed, in fields, in woods, in jungles, in swamps, in arctic and in desert conditions, and blithely blow off the head of the boy who peers out at you wearing the hated helmet and uniform, and not know, day or night, whether or not you will lose this war, a war which may turn out, in the end, to have served only to make of you forgotten corpses or the perpetual prisoners or slaves of your conquerors, and put up with extreme cold and hunger and thirst and distress and, above all, fear, fear and more fear, a continual terror to which you will eventually become habituated even though you have already spent several years like this and that eventual state of habituation has not yet arrived…' Yes,' added Peter, coming to an abrupt halt, making a minimal pause and then taking a long breath, 'it was like saying to people: 'As well as all this, you must keep silent too. You must not speak any more, or tell stories or jokes, or ask, still less answer questions, not of your wife, not of your husband, not of your children, not of your father and definitely not of your mother, your brother or your best friend.