pure fantasy; but at least you're one step ahead, and, more importantly, you're not quite so terrified or so surprised, or, rather, you're surprised to find yourself in this predicament because you never thought such a thing could possibly happen to you, that you weren't even in the running, our optimism is infinite when, confronted by someone else's misfortune, even that of someone close, you can still say to yourself after all the words of condolence and lamentation: 'It's not me, it didn't happen to me.' Nowadays, there are gangs, you'll have read about them in the press, most of them from Eastern Europe, Albanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovans, Poles, who, without warning, burst into people's houses carrying machine guns, they kick the door down and make everyone lie on the floor and start beating them with their machine-gun butts, all very brutal, and sometimes they go too far and kill someone. The old KGB techniques, or those of the even older NKVD, and not so very different from the Gestapo's techniques.' – 'Because they knew nothing of the machinations of Orlov and his boys at the NKVD': this quote surfaced in my memory, I had read it in Wheeler's house, during my long night of research into the mysterious disappearance of Nin. – 'That already creates more fear because it's so unexpected, and the violence is seen at once as being totally out of proportion to that required to subdue and rob an ordinary, peace-loving family, who are not going to put up any resistance; and so they start to fear that something even more disproportionate might happen. I believe that in Spain, as well as these ungrateful Slavs, there are Colombians and Peruvians who do the same, the fact that they speak the same language helps enormously, well, it's what tempts them over there in the first place, and since language isn't a problem for them in your country, they're unlikely to move elsewhere. So at least here we're pretty safe from them for the moment. We get Arabs, Chinese, Rastas and Pakistanis, but that's another matter. But the fear provoked by a machine gun is still not that terrible, not what I would call terrible, the kind of fear that cancels out and overwhelms everything, leaving no room to think about anything but that, about the fear filling your whole being. Because a machine gun is difficult to use, and they won't use it if they can avoid it. It's noisy and flamboyant, there's a lot of vibration and the recoil is so powerful that it shakes you and tires you, and the gun's very hard to conceal if you have to run away. Its function, then, is more to intimidate than anything else, and the victim knows or senses this from the very first moment and he takes comfort in that, and consoles himself thinking that his assailants will only fire if things start to go badly wrong for them.' Tupra paused again, only very briefly this time, as if to start a new paragraph, but not a new chapter. – 'A sword, on the other hand,' he went on. 'Oh, you can laugh now and say it's theatrical or anachronistic or even rusty, but you didn't see the look on your face when you saw that sword in my hands. You saw the look on the monkey's face, though, and that should give you an idea.' – He used the word 'monkey' to describe De la Garza, and I translated this to myself as
And it was true that I had wondered about it when I saw it in his hand – or perhaps that was later on, when I finally got home (not then, not during that car journey or while sitting in the car) and it took me so long to get to sleep (therefore, he may have formulated it for me, may have put it into words for me in the car and my thought might have been a mere echo of those words) – and I had done so in these terms: 'Where did that come from, a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out- of-keeping with these times, more even than an arrow and more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just intense fear, but an atavistic fear, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that has caused the most deaths throughout most centuries; that it has killed at close quarters and face to face.' Earlier, Tupra had alluded to Homer and now he was talking about the second Plantagenet king and the first of the Richards, born in Oxford of all places, although it is highly unlikely that he knew any English, even broken English, and during the ten years of his reign, he spent, altogether, no more than six months in the country of that language, the rest of the time being taken up with the Third Crusade or with familial wars in France, where he was killed as he was besieging Chalus in 1199 by – to add insult to injury – an arrow from a crossbow, as I was able to confirm later on in a couple of history books: another British foreigner, yet another bogus Englishman and another one who had his aliases: not just the famous 'Lionheart', but also 'Yea and Nay', which, understandably enough, tends to be forgotten; well, Richard Yea and Nay sounds rather comical, even if he was called that because of his sudden and continual changes of mind and plan, even in the midst of battle (he must have been infuriating, that cruel king). I inevitably found these cultural references coming from Tupra rather surprising, in normal conversation he didn't usually make such references, either historical or literary, although perhaps it was because there was no need for them at work: we were always talking about other people, most of whom were present and none of whom was fictitious, although the majority of them were strangers to me. Perhaps, for professional motives, he knew the entire history of weapons. Or, more likely, it was because he had studied at Oxford and been a disciple of Toby Rylands, eminent emeritus professor of English Language and Literature, and was more educated than he seemed. But sometimes I wondered whether Rylands's tutorship had taken place more within the group with no name, which provided a more practical training, rather than at the renowned university to which we had all belonged. Even I had belonged to it during those two now distant years of which barely a trace remained, as I had confidently predicted when I still lived there, conscious that I was just passing through and would leave no mark. Now, in this other London time, I thought the same sometimes, only more so, despite never being very clear as to where I would go if I left or whether I would return: 'When I leave here, when I return to Spain, my life during these real days – and some pass very slowly – will become a 'Yea and Nay' or like a banal dream, and none of it will be of any importance, not even the gravest events, not even that temptation or that sense of panic, not even the feelings of disgust or embarrassment that I myself provoke, not even the sense of something sitting heavy upon my soul. A day will have arrived when I will have said a farewell to these days perhaps similar to that written by Cervantes and of which I tried to remind Wheeler, although without entirely daring to, in his garden by the river. Doubtless a less cheerful farewell, but definitely more relieved. For example: 'Farewell, laughter and farewell, insults. I will not see you again, nor will you see me. And farewell, passion; farewell, memories.''
27
'What did you study at Oxford, Bertram?' I suddenly asked him, although it was probably not the best moment, especially when there had been (and would be) so many other moments, during our sessions and dialogues and pauses to ponder or consider, and idle moments too, in order to find this out. The fact is that I didn't know because I had never got as far as asking him, and in England that is always one of the first things one asks in order to break the ice between strangers and even between colleagues. That was how it was whenever I met some Oxford don outside of our teaching or administrative activities, having a coffee in the Senior Common Room at the Taylorian, between classes, or in between lectures or seminars; or at one of the hellish high tables held by one of the thirty- nine colleges (elevated and eternal tables), in which one might find oneself seated and immobile for several hours beside a young economist whose sole topic of conversation was a peculiar cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767 and on which he had written his thesis (this is a true example from my previous Oxford experience, the name of this glorious individual was Halliwell), as I found out by politely asking the simultaneously fetal and inaugural phrase: 'What's your field?', literally, in Spanish,
