temptations, or, which comes to the same thing, trying to avoid any narrative error or blot that might mar their end and see them condemned when the Day of Judgement came. It seemed an unfair system, whether or not it was divine, I don't know, but it was certainly not very human, relying too much on the succession or order of words, deeds, omissions and thoughts, I could not help recalling one of the reasons my father had given me for never having done anything to get back at his betrayer Del Real, no settling of accounts or belated seeking of compensation, when he could have done so after the death of the tyrant, the now remote Franco for whom the traitor performed an early service and was subsequently rewarded with university posts and, as regards that early service rendered, with the assured protection of the former's barbarous laws for thirty-six and a half years. Thirty- six years of immunity, from May 1939 to November 1975: a few more years than Marlowe enjoyed, twice the number lived by my uncle Alfonso… 'It would have given him a sort
12
Yes, my father and Wheeler were both very old now, and perhaps in their last years they, too, had the feeling that they were walking on hot bricks, not out of any sense of religious fear, but out of biographical dread; or perhaps not, perhaps they merely feared becoming besmirched. My father seemed quite contented and serene in his present, with a few surviving female friends and with his children and grandchildren who visited him and made him talk about the past, both personal and collective, and that is always a great solace (I had not been there much lately, what with my new departure for England and the deliberate daze in which I lived in order not to think too much about my own present, which was not, as yet, a source of solace; he never said as much to me, but when we spoke on the phone or wrote – the latter to please him: 'I hate it when the postbox is always empty, or full of nothing but advertising flyers and other rubbish' -I realised that he missed me, at least a little); he would surely not foresee any dramatic changes, or some harmful episode that would end up ruining a story whose essence had been set down in far more difficult times than the present day, and which he had already told to himself, if not with pride, at least without any feelings of disgust and with few embellishments, or so I imagined; nor was it likely that it would become besmirched in the eyes of others, even in the demanding eyes of a son, nor was it likely, therefore, that he would betray my trust, unless, one day, I were to make some unfortunate discovery, and something that was hidden ceased to be hidden. (I, on the other hand, was in a position to betray his trust and that of anyone else, this was the disadvantage of having lived only half one's life; and I would doubtless already have betrayed the trust of a few other people too, certainly that of Luisa and of my children.) As regards Wheeler, maybe he was more at risk, because he was only the simulacrum of an old man and because behind his meek and venerable appearance he still concealed energetic, almost acrobatic machinations, and behind his absent-minded digressions an observant mind, analytical, anticipatory, interpretative, and one that was ceaselessly judging; he seemed disposed not only to intervene in the diminishing time that remained to him, dictating as far as possible its final contents, rather than leaving it in the hands of chance, but ready also to participate in and to influence the odd minor worldly matter, even if it was only through friends, through me or through Tupra, or someone else unknown to myself or to Tupra, who knows how many others went to visit him in his house by the river, or simply phoned him or spoke to him with Mrs Berry as intermediary, or even perhaps wrote him letters. He had, for a start, put me in touch with Tupra and with everything that flowed from that, this would have been a spontaneous move on his part, an intervention in my life and a helping hand to Bertram, at the very least an offer, for only he could have offered me to the group and to the building with no name to which I now belonged, almost without realising it, although at the end of that night, I realised more clearly that I did belong. Wheeler had not given up plotting, manoeuvring, manipulating and directing, and in that sense he risked not only becoming besmirched with ashes or coals, but getting burned too. He did not seem to feel he was being in any way reckless, nor, of course, did my father, each had his own distinct and even opposing brand of recklessness: but it might be that Juan Deza considered himself prepared, ready and with everything in order, while Peter Wheeler, on the other hand, felt hopeless and unfinished, even his own name had been substituted, cancelled out, at least that was how I saw it with my imperfect perception; it would have been risky, excessive, unjust to say that the former felt himself to be saved and the latter damned, even if only in narrative terms, and not at all in moral ones. I don't know, perhaps Wheeler was able to apply to himself his own conviction that individuals carry their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment; and he knew his own probabilities well, possibly he always had, but now he knew from experience too; and he knew that he had enjoyed all three of those things in abundance, especially time, in order to be persuasive and to make himself more dangerous and more despicable even than his enemies, and to develop superior and more deadly powers of invention; to take advantage of the mass of people, who are silly and frivolous and credulous, on whom it is easy to strike a match and start a fire, and for that fire to spread like the worst of epidemics; to have others fall into the most appalling and destructive of misfortunes from which they never emerge, and thereby transform those thus condemned into casualties, into non-persons, into felled trees from which the rotten wood could be chopped away; time to spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague, and, often, to set in motion the process of total denial, of who you are and who you were, of what you do and what you did, of what you expect and what you expected, of your aims and your intentions, of your professions of faith, your ideas, your greatest loyalties, your motives… He knew that everything could be distorted, twisted, annulled, erased. And he was aware that at the end of any reasonably long life, however monotonous it might have been, however anodyne and grey and uneventful, there would always be too many memories and too many contradictions, too many sacrifices and omissions and changes, a lot of retreats, a lot of flags lowered, and a lot of acts of disloyalty, or perhaps they were all just white flags of surrender. 'And it's not easy to put all that in order,' he had said, 'even to recount it to yourself. Too much accumulation… My memory is so full that sometimes I can't bear it. I'd like to lose more of it, I'd like to empty it a little. No, that's not true… I only wish it wasn't quite so full.' And then he had added some words which I remembered well (ever since then they have kept coming back to me like an occasional echo, or perhaps not that occasional): 'Life is not recountable, and it seems extraordinary that men have spent all the centuries we know anything about devoted to doing just that… Sometimes I think it would be best to abandon the custom altogether and simply allow things to happen. And then just leave them be.’
Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have declined to speak on that famous last day: he would have scorned setting out his case and overwhelming the weary Judge with his carefully honed arguments and a list of his most notable deeds or with his entire history since birth, he would have scorned asking for or expecting justice or a mercy that he would doubtless find offensive, had he lived and died in a time when the majority of people still believed in such a day. Perhaps he would have preferred to avail himself of the Miranda law applied to anyone arrested in America (it was once recited to me, albeit imperfectly), I mean to create it
