Now he too lit his cigarette, his precious, saliva-sodden Rameses II. He probably couldn't stand to see me enjoying mine, or, rather, his, fifty pence going up in smoke in someone else's mouth, in, what's more, a continental mouth. He coughed a little after the first puff of that piquant Egyptian blend, perhaps he only smoked two or three a day and never quite got used to it.
'Yes, I realise you can't know anything for sure,' he said. 'Don't worry. I don't either, or not much more. But, tell me, why do you think that?'
I continued to improvise, or so I thought.
'Well, the man definitely looks the part of the Latin American military man, I'm afraid they're not much different from their Spanish counterparts twenty or twenty-five years ago, they all have moustaches and they never smile. His appearance just cried out for a uniform, a cap, and a superabundance of medals festooning his chest, as if they were cartridge belts. Yet there were some details that just didn't fit. They made me think that he wasn't a military man disguised as a civilian, as I at first thought, but a civilian disguised as a military man disguised as a civilian, if you see what I mean. They're really insignificant details,' I said apologetically. 'And it's not as if I've had many dealings with the military, I'm hardly an expert.' I broke off, my momentary boldness was fading.
'That doesn't matter. And I do see what you mean. Tell me, what details?'
'Well, they're really tiny things. He used, how can I put it, inappropriate language. Either soldiers nowadays aren't what they were and have been infected by the ridiculous pedantry of politicians and television presenters, or the man simply isn't a military man; or he was, but hasn't seen active service for a long time. And that gesture of tucking in his shirt was too spontaneous, like someone used to civilian clothes. I know it's silly, and soldiers do sometimes wear suit and tie, or a shirt if it's hot, and it is hot in Venezuela. I just felt that he wasn't a soldier, or else had been out of the army and hadn't worn an army jacket for some time, or had been removed from his post, I don't know. Or hadn't worn even a guayabera or a liki-liki or whatever they call them over there, they're always worn outside the trousers. And I felt, too, he was overly preoccupied with the crease in his trousers, and with creases in general, but then you get vain, dapper officers everywhere.'
'You can say that again,' said Tupra. 'Liki-liki,' he said, but didn't ask any more. 'Go on.'
'Well, perhaps you noticed his boots. Short boots. They may have looked black from a distance or in a bad light, but they were bottle-green in colour and looked like crocodile, or possibly alligator. I can't imagine any high-ranking officer wearing footwear like that, not even on his days of absolute leisure or total abandon. They seemed more suited to a drug-dealer or a ranch-hand on the loose in the big city or something.' I felt like a minor Sherlock or, rather, a fake Holmes. I leaned back my chair a little in the sudden hope of catching sight of Tupra's feet. I hadn't noticed what he was wearing, and it had suddenly occurred to me that he might be wearing similar boots and that I might be making a grave mistake. He was an Englishman: it was unlikely, but one never knows and he did have a strange surname. And he always wore a waistcoat, a bad sign that. As it turned out, I was unlucky, I couldn't get far enough back, the desk prevented me from seeing his feet. I went on — although if he was himself sporting some rather eccentric footwear, I was only making matters worse: 'Of course, in a country where the Commander-in-Chief appears in public dressed to look like the national flag and wearing a beret that's a shade of brothel red, as he did recently on television, it's not impossible that his generals and colonels do wear boots like that, or sabots or even ballet shoes, in these histrionic times and with a role model like him, anything's possible.'
'Sabots?' asked Tupra, perhaps more out of amusement than because he hadn't understood me. 'Sabots?' he said, since that was the term I had used: thanks to the translation classes I taught in Oxford and to my time spent toiling for various slave-drivers, I know the most absurd words in English.
'Yes, you know, those wooden shoes with pointed tips like onions. Nurses wear them and the Flemish, of course, at least they do in their paintings. I think geishas do as well, don't they, with socks?'
Tupra gave a short laugh, and so did I. Perhaps he had had a sudden image of the Venezuelan gentleman wearing clogs. Or perhaps Chavez himself, in thick-soled clogs and white socks. On a first meeting and at a party, Tupra struck one as a nice man. He did on a second meeting too and in his office, although there he let it be understood that he could never entirely forget the serious nature of his work, nor be entirely contained by it either.
'Did you say he dresses to look like the national flag? You presumably meant draped in the flag, did you?' he added.
'No,' I said. 'The print on his shirt or army jacket, I can't remember quite what he was wearing, was the flag itself, complete with stars.'
'Stars? I can't remember the Venezuelan flag at the moment. Stars?' To my relief, he did not appear to have taken my comments about the shoes personally.
'It's striped, I think. A red stripe and a yellow one, I seem to recall, and possibly a blue one too. And there's a sprinkling of stars on it somewhere. The President was definitely adorned with stars, of that I'm sure, and broad stripes, an army jacket or a shirt with horizontal stripes in those colours or similar. And stars. It was probably a liki-liki, which is a shirt they wear for special occasions, I think, well, they do in Colombia, I'm not sure about Venezuela.'
'Stars indeed,' he said. He gave another short laugh, and I did too. Laughter creates a kind of disinterested bond between men, and between women, and the bond it establishes between women and men can prove an even stronger, tighter link, a profounder, more complex, more dangerous and more lasting link, or one, at least, with more hope of enduring. Such lasting, disinterested bonds can become strained after a while, they can sometimes become ugly and difficult to bear, in the long term, someone has to be the debtor, that's the only way things can work, one person must always be slightly more indebted to the other, and commitment and abnegation and worthiness can provide a sure way of making off with the position of creditor. I've often laughed with Luisa like that, briefly and unexpectedly, both of us seeing the funny side of something quite independently, both us laughing briefly at the same time. With other women too, with my sister first of all; and with a few others. The quality of that laughter, its spontaneity (its simultaneity with mine perhaps) has led me, on occasions, to meet a woman and approach her or even to dismiss her at once, and with some women it's as if I've seen them in their entirety before even meeting them, without even talking, without them having looked at me and with me barely having looked at them. On the other hand, even a slight delay or the faintest suspicion of mimetism, of an indulgent response to my stimulus or my lead, the merest suggestion of a polite or sycophantic laugh — a laugh that is not entirely disinterested, but is egged on by the will, the laugh that does not laugh as much as it would like to or as much as it allows itself or yearns or even condescends to laugh — is enough for me promptly to remove myself from its presence or to relegate it immediately to second place, to that of mere accompaniment, or even, in times of weakness and a consequent slide in standards, to that of cortege. But the other kind of laughter — Luisa's, which almost anticipates our own laughter, my sister's, which wraps around us, young Pérez Nuix's, which fuses with our own and about which there is no hint of deliberation and in which we two are almost forgotten (although there is also detachment and arbitrariness and equality) — I have tended to give that a prime role which has subsequently turned out to be lasting or not, even dangerous at times, and, in the long run (when it has lasted that long), difficult to sustain without the appearance or intervention of some small debt, whether real or symbolic. However, the absence or diminution of that laughter is even harder to bear, and always brings with it the day when one of the two is obliged to get a little deeper into debt. Luisa had withdrawn her laughter from me some time ago, or else was rationing it out, I couldn't believe she
had lost it entirely, she would still, surely, offer it to others, but when someone withdraws their laughter from us, that is a sign that there is nothing more to be done. It is a disarming laugh. It disarms women and, in a different way, men too. I have desired women - intensely - for their laughter alone, and they have usually seen that this was so. And sometimes I have known who someone was simply by hearing their laugh or by never hearing it, the brief, unexpected laugh, and even what would happen between that person and me, whether friendship or conflict or irritation or nothing, and I haven't been far wrong either, it might have taken some time to happen, but it always has, and, besides, there's always time as long as you don't die or as long as neither that other person nor I should die. That was Tupra's laugh and mine too, and so I had to ask myself for a moment whether, in the future, he or I would be disarmed, or if, perhaps, both of us would. 'Liki-liki,' he said again. It's impossible not to repeat such a word, irresistible. 'Yes, but it's true, is it not, that one cannot judge the customs of another place from outside?' he added drily or only half-seriously.
'True, true,' I replied, knowing that what he had said was not (true, I mean) for either of us.
'Anything else?' he asked. He had given nothing away, not about the man's identity (I wasn't expecting him to), but not even about the supposed status or position of the Venezuelan to whom I had served as interpreter twice over. I had another go:
'Could you give the gentleman a name? Just in case we have to refer to him again.'
Tupra did not hesitate. As if he had an answer already prepared for any attempt at probing, rather than for my curiosity.
'That seems unlikely. As far as you're concerned, Mr Deza, his name is Bonanza,' he said, again mock-seriously.
'Bonanza?' He must have noticed my amazement, I couldn't help pronouncing the 'z' as it is pronounced in my own country, or at least in part of it and, of course, in Madrid. To his English ears it would sound something like 'Bonantha', just as Deza would sound something like 'Daytha'.
'Yes, isn't that a Spanish name? Like Ponderosa?' he said. 'Anyway, he'll be Bonanza to you and me. Did you notice anything else?'
'Only to confirm my initial impression, Mr Tupra: General Bonanza or Mr Bonanza, whoever he really is, would never make an attempt on Chavez's life. Of that you can be sure, whether it suits your interests or not. He admires him too much, even if he is his enemy, which I don't think he is.'
Tupra picked up the striking red packet with its pharaohs and gods and offered me a second Rameses II, an uncommon gesture in the British Isles, clearly no expense was being spared, Turkish tobacco, a piquant Egyptian blend, and I accepted. But it turned out to be one for the road, not to be smoked immediately, for at the same time as he was giving it to me, he stood up and walked around the desk to show me out, indicating the door with a slight gesture. I took the opportunity to glance down at his shoes, they were sober brown lace-ups, I needn't have worried. He noticed, he noticed almost everything, all the time.
'Is something wrong with my shoes?' he asked.
'No, no, they're very nice. And very clean too. Splendid, enviable,' I said. Unlike my black pair, also lace-ups. The truth was that, in London, I just didn't have the discipline to clean them every day. There are some things one gets lazy about when away from home and living abroad. Except that I was at home, that is, as I kept forgetting, I had no other home for the moment, sometimes force of habit insisted on my feeling the impossible, that I could still go back.
'I'll tell you where to buy them another day.' He was about to open the door for me, he had still not done so, he remained for a matter of seconds with a hand on each of the handles of the double door. He turned his head, looked at me out of the corner of his eye but did not see me, he couldn't, I was immediately behind him. It was the first time during the whole of that session that his active, friendly, unwittingly mocking eyes had not met mine. I could see only his long lashes, in profile. They would be even more the envy of the ladies in profile. 'Earlier on, if I remember rightly, you said something about "leaving aside principles". Or perhaps "leaving theory aside".'
'Yes, I think I did say something like that.'
'I was wondering.' He still had his hands on the door handles. 'Allow me to ask you a question: up to what point would you be capable of leaving aside your principles? I mean up to what point do you usually do so? That is, disregard it, theory I mean? It's something we all do now and then; we couldn't live otherwise, whether out of convenience, fear or need. Or out of a sense of sacrifice or generosity. Out of love, out of hate. To what extent do you?' he repeated. 'Do you understand?'
That was when I realised that not only did he notice everything all the time, he recorded and stored it away too. I didn't like the word 'sacrifice', it had a similar effect on me to the expression he had used in Wheeler's house, 'serving my country'. He had even added: 'one should if one can, don't you think?' Although he had immediately diluted this with: 'even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself. I too recorded and stored things away, more than is normal.
'It depends on the reason,' I replied, and then went on to use a plural since it was, as I understood it, only my principles he was asking me about. 'I can leave them aside almost entirely if it's just in the interests of conversation, less if I'm called on to make a judgement. Still less if I'm judging friends, because then I'm partial. When it comes to taking action, hardly at all.'
'Mr Deza, thank you for your co-operation. I hope to be in touch with you again.' He said this in an appreciative, almost affectionate tone. And this time he did open the door, both leaves at once. I saw his eyes again, more blue than grey in the morning light, but still pale, and always seemingly amused by whatever the dialogue or situation happened to be, attentive and always absorbing, as if they honoured what they were looking at, or at which they did not even need to be looking: whatever entered his field of vision. 'Please be quite clear, however, that here we have no interests,' he went on to say, even though he was referring to something from further back in the conversation. Most people would not have returned to it, they would not have retrieved that extremely marginal comment of mine ('whether it suits your interests or not'), it's incredible how quickly words, pronounced and written, frivolous and serious, all of them, insignificant or significant, get lost, become distant and are left behind. That's why it's necessary to repeat, eternally and absurdly to repeat, from the first human babble of sound and even from the first index finger silently pointing. Again and again and again and, vainly, again. Words did not slip quite so easily from our grasp, his and mine, but this was doubtless an anomaly, a curse. 'We merely give our opinion and only when asked, of course. As you so kindly did now, when I asked you.' And he again gave that brief laugh, revealing small, bright teeth. It sounded to me like a polite or possibly impatient laugh, and this time, mine did not accompany his.
I was never told directly whether or not I had been right in any way about Colonel Bonanza from Caracas or, should I say, from exile and abroad, I was never told the results, and certainly not directly: they were not my concern, or, possibly, anyone else's. Probably sometimes there were no results, and the statements or reports would simply be filed away, just in case. And if decisions had to be taken about something (the support and financial backing for a coup, for example), they would doubtless be taken by the various people in charge — by those who had commissioned each report or requested our opinions — with no possibility of verification or certainty and purely at their own risk, that is, trusting or not trusting, accepting or rejecting what Tupra and his people had seen and thought, or perhaps recommended.
At first, though, I innocently assumed that I must have got something right, because not many days after that morning of dual interpretation, of language and intentions — the latter imprecise, but let's call it interpretation anyway — it was suggested that I abandon my post with BBC Radio and work exclusively (or principally) for Tupra, alongside the devoted Mulryan, young Pérez Nuix
and the others, with, in theory, very flexible working hours and a considerably larger salary, I had no complaints on that score, on the contrary, I would be able to send more money home. The feeling of having successfully passed an exam was unavoidable, as was my joining whatever that organisation was, I didn't ask myself much about it then or later or now, because it was always very vague (and lack of definition was its essence), and because Sir Peter Wheeler had warned me about it in a way, or given me enough of a warning: 'You won't find anything about this in any books, none of them, not even the oldest or the most modern, not even the most exhaustive accounts being published now, Knightley, Cecil, Dorril, Davies, or Stafford, Miller, Bennett, I don't know, there are so many of them, but you won't find so much as a cryptic reference in the books that were, in their day, and which continue to be, the most cryptic of all, Rowan, Denham. Don't even bother consulting them. You won't find so much as an allusion. It'll be a waste of your time and your patience.' Throughout that Sunday in Oxford, he always spoke to me not exactly in half-truths, but in three-quarter-truths at most, never in whole truths. Perhaps he didn't know what they were, the whole truths, that is, perhaps no one did, not even Tupra, or Rylands when he was alive. Perhaps there were no truths.
The work got off to a gradual start, by which I mean that once the contract had been agreed, they began giving me or asking me to undertake various tasks, which then increased in number, at a brisk but steady rate, and, after only a month, possibly less, I was a full-time employee, or so it seemed to me. These tasks took various forms, although their essence varied little or not at all, since this consisted in listening and noticing and interpreting and reporting back, in deciphering behaviours, attitudes, characters and scruples, indifferences and beliefs, egotisms, ambitions, loyalties, weaknesses, strengths, truths and contradictions; indecisiveness. What I interpreted were — in just three words — stories, people, lives. Often stories that had not yet happened. People who did not know themselves and who could not have said about themselves even a tenth of what I saw in them, or was urged to see in them and to put into words, that was my job. Lives that could even come to an early end and not even last long enough to be called lives, unknown lives and lives still to be lived. Sometimes they asked me to be present and to help in asking questions, if any occurred to me, at interviews or meetings (or perhaps polite interrogations, with nothing intimidating about them), even though there was no problem of comprehension, no language to translate, and everything was in English and amongst fellow Britons. At other times, they did use me as an interpreter of language, Spanish and even Italian, but over the whole range of talks and supervisions (which is what my silent activities were called), that was what I did least of, and anyway now I never merely translated words, at the end, I was always asked for my opinion, almost, sometimes, for my prognosis, or, how can I put it, my wager. On other occasions, they preferred me to be an absent presence, and I would witness the conversations held by Tupra or Mulryan or young Nuix or Rendel with their visitors from a kind of booth next to Tupra's office, from which one could see and hear what was going on without being seen, just like in a police station. The elongated oval mirror in Tupra's office corresponded in the booth to a window of identical size and shape: clear glass from one side, from the other a mirrored surface that did not arouse the slightest suspicion amongst all those books and in what looked more like a club or a private drawing-room than an office. The booth was an older, home-made version of the invisible hiding-places from which the victims of a mugging or the witnesses of a crime view a line-up of suspects, or from which the superior officers secretly oversee the interrogations of detainees and make sure that the police don't overdo the slaps or the flicks with a wet towel. It must have been a pioneering booth, perhaps adapted or made in the 1940s or even the 1930s: it seemed to have been conceived as a small-scale imitation of a train compartment from that period or even earlier, all in wood, with two narrow benches facing each other and placed at right angles to the oval window, with a fixed table between the benches on which to take notes or lean one's elbows. One was thus obliged to supervise from a somewhat oblique angle, sideways on, with the inevitable feeling that one was looking out of a train window while travelling along, or, rather, while permanently stopped at a station, a strange station-studio, far more welcoming than any real station, where the landscape was an unvarying interior in which only the people changed, the visitors and the hosts, although the latter had only limited permutations, usually two or, at most, three, Tupra and Mulryan, or them plus me (as at the meeting with Comandante Bonanza), or Tupra and young Nuix and Rendel if they needed someone who spoke German or Russian or Dutch or Ukrainian (it was said that Rendel was originally from Austria, and that his surname had initially been Rendl or Randl or Redl or Reinl or even Handl, and that he had half-anglicised it, Randall or Rendell or Rendall or Randell would have been more usual, but not Haendel), or Mulryan and me and some other less assiduous assistant, or young Nuix, Tupra and me . . . He and Mulryan (or more likely one of the two) were always there. And given that I sometimes had to occupy the booth, I could only suppose that when I was on the other side, in the station-studio, one of those not present would be posted in the booth to watch us, although I wasn't entirely sure of this at first; and I could only imagine that on that first occasion with Captain Bonanza, Rendel and young Nuix ('I hope it was her,' I thought) would have been in the reserved carriage, eyes trained on the lieutenant, but almost certainly on me as well, and that afterwards they would have given their objective report on me as well as on the sergeant (he was gradually being demoted in my memory), the report of someone invisible is always more objective and dispassionate and reliable, that of someone who sits unseen and at ease, observing with impunity, is always more objective than that of someone who is looked at by his interlocutors and intervenes and speaks, and can never observe for very long in silence without creating enormous tensions, an embarrassing situation.