Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

is and always has been, believe me, I know from my own experience and from that of others, you, as far as I know, have so far escaped, you have no idea how wise you have been not to be tempted by writing. For that is the illusory idea of all novelists, who publish their various immense tomes full of adventures and endless reflections, like Cervantes in Spain, like Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, and the author of that tedious quartet about Alexandria that was once all the rage, or Oxford's own Tolkien (who really was born in South Africa), the number of times I passed him in Merton College or saw him with Clive Lewis, enjoying a drink of an evening at The Eagle and Child, and not one of us had an inkling of the fate that awaited his three eccentric volumes, he even less than us, his highly sceptical colleagues; it's an illusion shared by poets too, who pack so much into those deceptively short lines, like Rilke and Eliot, or before them, Whitman and Milton, and, before them, your own great poet, Manrique; it's shared by playwrights who aim to keep an audience in their seats for four or more hours, as Shakespeare himself did in Hamlet and Henry IV: of course, at the time, a lot of the audience would have been standing and would have quite happily strolled in and out of the theatre as many times as they wished; it's shared by all those chroniclers and diarists and memorialists like Saint- Simon, Casanova, El Inca Garcilaso and Bernal Diaz or our own illustrious Pepys, who never tire of furiously filling up those sheets with ink; it's shared by such essayists as the incomparable Montaigne or me (not, I can assure you, that I'm comparing myself with him), who ingenuously imagine, while we write, that someone will have the miraculous degree of patience required to swallow everything we want to tell them about Henry the Navigator, it's madness, isn't it, I mean, my latest book about him is nearly five hundred pages long, it's rank discourtesy, an abuse really. Have you read it yet, by the way?'

'No, Peter, I haven't, you must forgive me, I'm truly sorry. I find it very hard to concentrate on reading at the moment,' I replied, and I wasn't lying. 'But when I do read it, don't worry, I'll be sure to read the whole thing from start to finish, holding my breath and barely pausing,' I added, smiling, and in a tone of gentle, affectionate fun, and he reciprocated with a slight smile, with that rapid glance of his, with those eyes so much younger than the rest of him. And then I asked: 'Anyway, what temptation? I mean the one that the campaign against careless talk brought with it. You were telling me about that, weren't you, or were about to?'

'Ah, yes. Good, I like it when you do as you're told and keep me on a tight rein.' And there was a mocking quality about his reply too. 'No one realised at first, but the temptation was very simple and hardly surprising really: you see, this same population who normally never had anything of vital interest to tell anyone were suddenly informed that their tongue, their chatter and their natural verbosity could constitute a danger, they were urged to watch what they talked about and to keep an eye on where, when and with whom they talked; they were warned that almost anyone could be either a Nazi spy or someone in their pay listening in to what they said, as illustrated by the cartoon of the two housewives travelling on the Underground or the men playing darts. And this was tantamount to saying to the people: 'You probably won't notice, but important, crucial information could occasionally emerge from your lips, and it would be best, therefore, if it was never uttered at all, in any circumstance. You probably won't recognise it, but amongst the rubbish that pours daily from your mouths, there could be something of value, of immense value to the enemy. Contrary to the normal state of affairs, that is, other people's general lack of interest in whatever you insist on telling them or explaining to them, it is likely that, amongst you now, there could be ears that would be more than happy to pay you all the attention in the world, and even to draw you out. In fact, there definitely are: a lot of German parachutists have been landing in Britain lately, and they are all well prepared, specially trained to deceive us, they know our language as well as if they were natives of Manchester, Cardiff or Edinburgh, and they know our customs too, because quite a few of them have lived here in the past or are half-English, on their mother's or their father's side, although now they have opted for the worse of their two bloods. They land or disembark bereft of all scruples, but amply provided with arms and perfectly forged documents, or, if not, their accomplices here will soon obtain them for them, many of these accomplices are our genuine compatriots, as British as our grandparents, and these traitors are hanging on your every word, to see what they can pick up and transmit to their butchering bosses, to see if we let something slip. So be very careful: the fate of our air force, our navy, our army, our prisoners and our spies could depend on your irresponsible chitchat or on your loyal silence. The fate of this war, which has already cost us so much blood, toil, tears and sweat'' (and Wheeler quoted the words in their correct order, without forgetting 'toil', as people always do) ''may lie not perhaps in your hands, but definitely in your tongue. And it would be unforgivable if we were to lose the war because of a slip on your part, because of an entirely avoidable act of imprudence, because one of us was incapable of biting or holding his tongue.' That is how people saw the situation, the country plagued with Nazi agents all with ears cocked, ready to eavesdrop' (a rather difficult word to translate into Spanish) 'not just in London and in the big cities but in the smaller ones too and in villages, not to mention on the coast and even in the fields. The few anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians who had sought refuge here years before, after the rise to power of Hitler, had a pretty awful time of it, I knew Wittgenstein, for example, who had spent half his life in Cambridge, I met the great actor Anton Walbrook and the writer Pressburger and those magnificent scholars at the Warburg Institute of Art: Wind, Wittkower, Gombrich, Saxl, and Pevsner too, some of whose oldest neighbours suddenly began to distrust them, poor things, they were British citizens and probably had a keener interest than anyone in seeing Nazism defeated. It was at this time that they first brought in an official identity card, against our tradition and our preference, to make things a little more difficult for any would-be German infiltrators. But people weren't used to carrying such a document and kept losing it, and there was such generalised hostility to it that, around 1951 or 1952, the card in question was suppressed in order to quell the discontent provoked by its obligatory nature. According to Tupra, there is talk in government circles of imposing something similar, along with other inquisitorial measures, these mediocrities who rule over us in such a totalitarian spirit and who have more or less been given carte blanche to do so by the Twin Towers massacre. I hope they don't get their way. They can insist all they want, but we are not truly at war now, not a war of constant uncertainty and pain. And although there are only a few of us left who played an active part in the Second World War, for us it's insulting, an out-and-out mockery, what these pusillanimous, authoritarian fools want to do and impose on us in the name of security, that prehistoric pretext. We didn't fight those who wanted to control each and every aspect of our lives only to see our grandchildren come along and slyly but very precisely fulfil the crazed fantasies of the very enemies we vanquished. Oh, I don't know… but then, whatever happens, I won't be here much longer to see it, fortunately.' And Wheeler looked down at the grass again while he muttered these superfluous phrases, or perhaps he was looking at the various cigarette ends I had been scattering on the ground and stubbing out with my shoe. This time, however, he immediately took up the thread on his own: 'So what was the effect of telling all this to the citizens of the time? They found themselves in a strange, almost paradoxical situation: they might possibly be in possession of valuable information, but most of them had no idea whether or not it really was or, if it was, what the devil that information could be; they had no idea either who in their world would find it of value, which close friends or acquaintances or, indeed, anyone else, which meant that no one could ever be discounted as a potential danger; they knew, lastly, that if these two eternally unverifiable factors or elements should occur – that is, their unconscious possession of some piece of valuable information and the proximity of a concealed enemy who might extract it from them or happen to overhear it' (here he used another verb in the same semantic area -'overhear' – which, again, has no exact equivalent in my language), 'that conjunction could be of enormous significance and could have calamitous results. The idea that what one says, speaks, comments upon, mentions or recounts could be of importance and cause harm and be coveted by others, even if only by the Devil and all his hosts, is irresistible to most people; and, consequently, two opposing, contradictory and conflicting tendencies came together and coexisted in them: the first meant keeping silent about everything all the time, even the most anodyne and innocuous of facts, in order to ward off any threat as well as any feeling of guilt, or any sense of having fallen into some horrific error; the second entailed telling and talking about absolutely everything in front of everyone everywhere (whatever one knew or had heard, most of it trivia, froth, nothing), in order to have a taste of adventure, or its ghost, to feel a frisson of danger, as well as the new and unfamiliar thrill of one's own importance. What's the point of having something valuable if you don't parade and exhibit and rub it in people's faces, or of having something covetable if you can't feel other people's covetousness or at least the possibility and the risk that they might snatch it from you, or of having a secret if, at some point, you don't reveal or betray it. Only then can you get the true measure of its enormity and its prestige. Sooner or later, you get tired of thinking to yourself: 'Ah, if they only knew, ah, if he ever found out, oh, if she knew what I know.' And sooner or later, the moment comes to produce it, to get rid of it, to surrender it, even if it's only once and to only one person, it happens to us all sooner or later. But since the citizens (with some exceptions) were incapable of distinguishing gold from mere trinkets, many would, with a pleasurable shudder of excitement, place everything they had on the