so they stuck their bayonets in the ground, points uppermost (this happened apparently in Villafranca del Bierzo, although I've no idea what they were doing there), and threw their Captain-General onto the spikes a few times, until some vital organ was finally pierced and there was no point in continuing, thus saving the mutineers the energy and effort involved in sticking their bayonets into him themselves and leaving the not-yet-dead Filanghieri to do all the work for them. This was not apparently the first example of such idleness, and was started perhaps by the Carthaginians who deployed spears in a similar way against the Roman general Atilius Regulus in the third century bc; and an English traveller in Spain remarked that murdering the unjust, despotic, incompetent and generally appalling generals and leaders who have, on the whole, ruled over our Peninsula throughout history (good vassals, but bad lords) was 'an inveterate Iberian trait'. He also remarked: 'Help from Spain comes either late or never' – the person who would succeed Filanghieri did eventually come to his aid, but only long after the latter had been tested to destruction as a fakir and been found wanting, as I remembered when I bent down over De la Garza to enquire vaguely and ineffectually about his battered state, there was little I could do then, the fatuous fellow lay there crushed and half conscious, he might perhaps be crippled for some time to come, not for ever I hoped, otherwise he would have to grow used to frequenting toilets like this one. And I wondered, too, if the surname Tupra did not perhaps have its remote origins among certain ancient, idle compatriots of mine.
'A comb?' I replied, somewhat annoyed. It reminded me of Wheeler's comment about Latins, in his garden by the river, after the helicopter had had its little joke. A reputation for being vain. 'What makes you think I'd have a comb on me?’
'You Latins usually have one, don't you? See if he's got one.' And he jerked his head in the direction of the fallen man.
It made me squirm inside, it seemed outrageous to me that Reresby should use the comb that De la Garza was bound to have on him, assuming he had not lost it in that one-sided scrimmage or during the furious dancing beforehand. I felt ashamed at the very idea of frisking the beaten man, that all too easily defeated man. And so I took mine out, even though this meant admitting that Tupra had been right.
'Very clever,' I said to Tupra and handed it to him. It was clearly a widespread idea on that large island, about us Latins and our combs.
Not that I cared particularly if I did corroborate his theory: I suddenly felt extraordinarily relieved, because it was over and De la Garza was still alive and I had already imagined him dead. Very dead indeed, sliced in two, transformed into head and trunk. The greatest danger was over, or so it seemed, however recently it had occurred, it was nonetheless over, it is amazing and also irritating how cessation brings with it a kind of false, momentary cancellation of what has happened. 'Now that he's not walloping the hell out of him any more, it's almost as if he hadn't done it at all,' we think in our excessive adoration of the present moment, which is madly and permanently on the increase. 'Now that it isn't burning any more, it's almost as if it had never burned. Now that they're not bombing us any more, it's almost as if they had never bombed us. Yes, there are the dead^ and the mutilated, and the charred houses reduced to rubble, but that's how it is now, it's happened, it's already past and there is no one who can change or undo it, and now, at least, they're not killing or mutilating or destroying, not while I'm here and breathing and with things still to do.' These thoughts pass through our heads whenever one of the present-day, more or less televised wars is going on – the Gulf War, the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the Iraq War based on dishonest motives and spurious interests and which was totally unnecessary except as a way of feeding the limitless arrogance of those who were the driving forces behind it – wars which are held in such scorn by older people, like my father or Wheeler, who had been involved in the non-frivolous variety. As long as there are battles and as long as there are bombs foiling on soldiers and civilians, we are gripped by a terrible anxiety, we watch the news every day with our hearts in our mouths; this phase doesn't usually last very long nowadays, sometimes only a matter of weeks or, at most, months, and so we don't have time to get used to it nor, therefore, to become sufficiently desensitised, to accept that this is the nature of any war, be it treacherous or righteous, and that it is something that can be lived with on a daily basis, without giving it too much importance or worrying about other people all the time, especially about distant people unknown to us; not even about ourselves and those close by, once the slaughter has begun, if your time is up, it's up. If a bullet has your name on it, as Diderot said – long before anyone else did, if I'm not mistaken. Nowadays, we don't have time to become accustomed to living in a state of war, a state which, as Wheeler remarked, makes peace inconceivable and vice versa ('People don't realise to what extent the one negates the other,' he had said, 'how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts'), and thus the sense of emergency remains intense for the brief duration of the horror seen on screen, and when that phase ends, we are filled by a strange conviction that it is all over and has, to some extent, disappeared. 'At least it's not happening now,' we think, sometimes even with a sigh; and that 'at least' implies a real injustice: what happened loses in gravity and impact simply because it is not happening now, and -then we almost lose interest in the wounded and the dead who so distressed and affected us while it was going on. They are the past now, someone is taking care of things, reconstructing, healing, burying, adopting, preferably the same people who caused the war, so that they can then be seen as righters of wrongs, the very height of absurdity and an out-and-out lie. It's yet another symptom of the infantilisation of the world, mothers used to soothe their children by saying: 'It's over now, it's all right, it's over,' after a nightmare or a fright or some unpleasant incident, trapped fingers or some such thing, almost as if they were saying: 'What no longer is never was,' even if the pain persisted and an itchy scab formed afterwards or the fingers became bruised and swollen and even if, sometimes, a scar was left behind so that, later, the adult could stroke it and continue to remember that injury and that day.
To experience a sense of relief after having watched as some cowed, unwitting, half-drunk person was roundly beaten and having myself lacked both the courage or the ability to stop it, after having believed that my colleague was about to slice someone's head off, was going to strangle him with a hairnet and drown him in the toilet bowl, was not at all reasonable nor, of course, noble. And yet that was how it was, Tupra had stopped, and I was pleased, he had removed a much greater weight than he had placed on me, and that was no small thing. De la Garza was no longer in danger, that was my main, grotesque thought, because danger had already taken a brutal toll on him. It had not, it's true, killed him, but it seemed ridiculous to be satisfied with that, with seeing him still alive, and even feeling glad, when the last thing I had imagined as I led him to the Disabled toilet was that he would leave it so badly injured, doubtless with, at the very least, several broken bones. If, that is, he did leave it, because while Reresby was readjusting his dress and trying to tame his dark hair, thicker and curlier than one normally finds in Britain (with the exception of Wales), and which was probably dyed, particularly at the temples where the curls were almost ringlets (he combed it through a few times and tidied it, although it didn't look much different afterwards), he again ordered me to translate the following: 'Translate this for him, Jack,' he said once more, 'I don't want there to be any misunderstandings, because he, not us, will suffer the consequences, make it quite clear, tell him, tell him what I've just told you.' And I did, I told De la Garza in my own language about those possible misunderstandings; his eyes were half closed and puffy, but he was doubtless able to hear me. 'Tell him that you and I are going to leave here quietly and that he is going to lie there, where he is, without moving, for another half an hour, no, make that forty minutes, that gives
