'There are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material for some detailed report,' I had said to Tupra when interpreting Dick Dearlove for him, 'they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, let's say, as if there were always spectators of or permanent witnesses to their activities and passivities, even their most futile steps and during the dullest of times. Perhaps this narcissistic daydream prevalent among so many of our contemporaries, and sometimes known as "consciousness", is nothing more than a substitute for the old idea or vague perception of the omnipresence of God, who was always watching and saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, and a relief, despite the inconveniences, that is, the implicit element of threat and punishment and the terrifying belief that nothing could ever be concealed from everyone and for ever; in any case, three or four generations of predominant doubt and incredulity are not enough for Man to accept that his gruelling and unasked-for existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching or even taking an interest in it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it.'
Perhaps even the most atheistic of men would find that hard to accept, without doing himself rational violence. And perhaps the narrative horror or disgust I had mentioned to Tupra - maybe all of us feel it to some extent, not just the Dearloves of this world - also came from the old days of steadfast faith, when a whole life of virtue and doing good and abiding by the rules could be destroyed by a single grave sin committed at the last moment — a mortal sin they called it, the record didn't mince its words - with no room for repentance or forgiveness, any proposed mending of ways being barely credible given the brief amount of time remaining to the sinner, the old must have felt in their final years as if they were walking on hot bricks, trying not to succumb to untimely 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 of a posteriori justification, a false validation, an anachronistic motive for his action,' my father had told me when I asked him about his false friend. 'Bear in mind that when you look at your life as a whole the chronological aspect gradually diminishes in importance, you make less of a distinction between what happened before and what happened afterwards, between actions and their consequences, between decisions and what they unleash. He might have thought that I had, in fact, done him some harm, it didn't matter when, and then he would have gone to his grave feeling more at peace with himself. And that wasn't and hasn't been the case. I never wronged him in any way, I didn't harm him and I never have, either before or afterwards or, needless to say, at the time ...'
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 rotte
n 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 avant la lettre and, of course, give it a different name in the midst of that great dance, so that its benefits or disadvantages would not, in any case, have spread beyond the living (although, on that day, I realised, there would be no one living, and everything would be apres la lettre). Wheeler might have kept silent and thus saved the Judge a drink or two, or half a pipe of opium, leaving him, instead, the task of ordering and recounting, after all, he had seen everything and heard everything, why bother telling him your story and enduring the inevitable shame and effort, it would be a waste of time even though there would be no time or only a kind of absurd time that would have a beginning but no end. And had he been questioned, or if the Judge had urged him to defend himself or make some kind of allegation - 'What have you got to say to that, Peter Rylands and Peter Wheeler of Christchurch in New Zealand?' - he would not even have answered 'Nothing', but would have remained silent, avoiding until the very end any careless talk, even his own and even when surrounded by it, because that would be the supreme day of careless talk and imprudent conversation, of loquacity and verbiage and full-scale confessions, a day made for reproaches and total justifications, of accusations and defences, excuses, appeals, furious denials and biased testimonies, for the odd bit of naive perjury and much telling of tales ('I didn't want to, I had nothing to do with it', 'You can search me if you like', 'It wasn't me', 'I only did it under duress', 'They put a gun to my head, I had to do it', 'It was his fault, her fault, their fault, everybody's fault but mine'); the ideal day to offload all those infinite deaths and to blame them on someone else. Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have refused to participate in that worldwide wittering, and decided not to play any trump card in that unequal game: 'Keep quiet and don't say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself.'
That is what Sir Peter Wheeler had done, kept silent from the start, when I finally asked him and Mrs Berry, over Sunday lunch or, rather, afterwards, just before I got up from the table and left for the station to catch the train back to London, about the bloodstain at the top of his stairs.
'Before I forget,' I had said, taking advantage of a pause, the kind that heralds or brings about farewells, 'last night I cleaned up a bloodstain on the stairs, at the top of the first flight, when I went up to my room.' And I pointed backwards with my thumb at the first few stairs. In fact, it had happened when I was coming downstairs, carrying From Russia with Love as if it were a treasure, the copy dedicated to Wheeler by the former Commander Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division (". . . who may know better. Salud!"), but that didn't matter and I didn't want Peter to take me for a tattletale, or a chafardero, as they say in the Castilian spoken in Catalonia. 'I don't know where it came from, but it wasn't a small drop. Do either of you have any idea?' It was Mrs Berry who answered, the odder the question is, the more immediately a reply is required, although this one consisted only in repeating a word: 'A bloodstain?' she said, and her eyebrows arched of their own accord and not apparently in response to any previous command. And then she added, slightly annoyed: 'How could I possibly not have seen it on my way up to my room, especially if it was a large stain,' and thus she appeared to deflect the matter and turn it into a possible act of negligence on her part. 'At the top of the stairs, you say, Jack? How odd.' And she eyed with disgust the lower steps I had pointed to, as if the thing I had told her about were still visible - although I had also told her that I had cleaned it up - and in such an unfortunate place too. 'I'm so sorry to have put you to all that trouble, Jack.'
I glanced at Wheeler, who had opened his eyes very wide and his mouth just a little, a look of sufficient surprise to warrant the expression 'left speechless'. Or was it merely a look of partial incomprehension, as if the occasional slowness of his years were processing my question or news with bewilderment and even difficulty; as if he were thinking: 'Did I hear correctly, did he say blood? Did he mispronounce it, or did he actually say bloodstain? He may be foreign, but his pronunciation rarely lets him down, except in the case of strange or unusual words that he has perhaps never heard and only seen written down, but then he is conscious of his own uncertainty, and he hesitates and asks before saying them. Or was it me, perhaps I wasn't concentrating and didn't understand.' Those, at least, seemed to be his thoughts, but they couldn't have been because Mrs Berry had immediately repeated 'A bloodstain?' and there could be no doubts about her pronunciation.
'Don't worry, Mrs Berry, it was no trouble at all, besides, I wasn't tired,' I replied. 'It's just that I can't understand where it could have come from. I thought it must have come from me, that I had inadvertently cut myself, but I felt myself all over and I hadn't. So you've no idea either?' I insisted somewhat hesitantly.
Mrs Berry looked at Wheeler in perplexity, as if asking him a question with her eyes, or, it occurred to me, that glance might merely have been one of consultation or even of concern for me, because there I was claiming to have cleaned up some peculiar and highly improbable stain in the middle of the night. Peter, however, remained silent, with his metallic or mineral eyes very wide (in the daylight, they were like chalcedony) and his lips still parted (but not so much as to merit the description 'open-mouthed').
'Not really,' she replied. 'Perhaps a guest cut himself when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor, I saw several people go up there during the evening . . . Where was it exactly?' I stood up and so did she ('I'll show you'), I led her to the stairs, went up the first flight two steps at a time, and she followed more sedately behind.