Wheeler fell silent then and glanced at his watch, and this time he did register the position of the hands; then he looked back at the house, Mrs Berry's piano-playing was still providing us with an accompaniment.
'Shall I go and see how lunch is coming on, Peter?' I suggested. 'We might be running a bit late. My fault.'
'No, the music is reaching the end now, there's just a very brief minuetto to come. She'll call us at five minutes to, it's only twelve minutes to at the moment. I know this piece.'
I was tempted to ask him what the piece was, but I wanted him to answer another question, and opportunities vanish so quickly:
'Am I to understand, Peter, that what you call "the group" is still active, and that Mr Tupra is in charge?'
'We'll talk more about that in a minute, because I want you to do me a favour in that regard. It would be a good thing for you too, I think; in fact, I phoned Tupra this morning, while you were still asleep, to tell him that you had shown great perspicacity in the test, about him and Beryl I mean. But, yes, I suppose you could say that; although it's changed so much I barely recognise it. It's difficult to be sure that anything or, for that matter, anyone, has remained unchanged. As far as I can tell, these anonymous duties and activities have evolved a lot, and are required for very different purposes. I imagine they've gone downhill, like everything else: that's just a realistic supposition, I don't say that in order to criticise or blame anyone. I simply don't know. Look at me: am I the same as I was then? Can I, for example, be the man who was married to a very young girl who has stayed forever young and who has not accompanied me on one single day of my long old age? Doesn't that possibility, that idea, that apparent truth, doesn't it seem totally incongruous, for example, with the man I've been since? Or with the acts I committed later, when she was no longer there to witness them? Or even, simply, with the way I look now? She was so very young, you see, how can I possibly be the same man?'
Wheeler again raised one hand to his forehead, but not this time out of sudden exhaustion or fright, his gesture was a thoughtful one, as if he were intrigued by his own questions. And then I tried to get him to answer another question, although it was perhaps absurd to do so at that precise moment, when lunch with Mrs Berry was only a matter of minutes away. Although, had he chosen to respond, he probably wouldn't have minded answering the question in her presence, for she would know the whole story.
'How did your wife die, Peter? I've never known. I've never asked you. You've never told me.'
Wheeler removed his hand from his forehead and looked at me, red-faced, not from surprise or annoyance, but with his eyes alert.
'Why do you ask me that now?' he said.
'Well,' I replied, smiling, 'perhaps so that you won't one day reproach me for never having shown any interest, for never having asked you about it before, as you did last night when I finally found out about your part in our War. That's why I'm asking now.'
Wheeler suppressed a smile, immediately erasing the temptation. He raised his hand to his chin and made the same sound that Toby Rylands used to make when he was considering how best to answer:
'H'm,' that was the sound. 'H'm', the sound of Oxford. Then he spoke: 'It's not because you're worried about Luisa, is it, and that you suddenly thought the worst and saw yourself reflected in me? Is that it? You're not afraid you might end up widowed rather than divorced, are you? Be careful with such apprehensions. Distance invokes many ghosts. Loneliness does too. And ignorance even more.'
This disconcerted me slightly, it could be a cunning ploy on Wheeler's part to avoid the question, a swift change of direction. But I wasn't going to let him go. I nevertheless paused to think. He was, unwittingly, quite right, at least in part, and I didn't see why he shouldn't know that, for he so enjoyed his own perspicacity:
'Yes, I am a bit worried. And about the children, too, of course. I haven't really had much news of them since I've been here, and even less of Luisa. There's a kind of opacity, even though we talk to each other fairly frequently. I don't know who she's seeing, or not seeing, who comes in and who goes out, it's a kind of process of creeping ignorance, of her and her replacement world, or perhaps that world is still in flux. The truth is I no longer know what's going on in my own house, I have no images any more. It's as if the old images had grown dimmer and get darker every day. But that isn't why I asked you, Peter, it was because you mentioned her — Valerie, I mean.' And I dared to pronounce that name, so private that I had never even heard it until that morning. I had a sense of sacrilege on my lips. 'What did she die of?'
Then Wheeler stopped playing. I saw him tense his jaw, I noticed him clenching his teeth, lining up top teeth with bottom teeth, like someone summoning up enough composure so that his voice won't break when he speaks again.
Ah . . .'he said. 'Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' He seemed to be asking me a favour, every word was painful.
I did not insist. It occurred to me to whistle the melody I had just heard on the piano, a particularly catchy tune, to see if I could dissipate the mists that had suddenly wrapped about him. But I still had to answer him, silence here was not a reply.
'Of course,' I said. 'Tell me about it when you want to, and if you don't want to tell me, don't.'
Then I began my whistling. I know how infectious whistling is, and so it turned out: Wheeler immediately joined in, probably without even thinking about it; no wonder he knew the piece by heart, he probably played it too. Then he suddenly stopped short and said:
'One shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything.'
Wheeler said this standing up, as soon as he got to his feet, and I immediately followed suit. He grasped my elbow, held on to me to recover his strength. Mrs Berry was waving to us from the window. The music had stopped, and now all that could be heard was our whistling, thin and out of time, as we turned our backs on the river and walked up to the house.
, It was still raining and I had not yet grown tired of watching it from my window overlooking the square, it was a steady, comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that it alone seemed to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears, it was as if it were driving out the night forever and discounting the possibility of any other weather ever appearing in the sky, or even the possibility of its own absence, just like peace when there is peace and like war when war is all that exists. My dancing neighbour opposite had performed a few ridiculous square dances with his partner, such anodyne moves and measured steps after the machine-gun fire of those Gaelic feet, and both had put on cowboy hats for this disappointing end-of-party dance, the mad or very fortunate fools. They had just turned out the lights and, given the rain, the mulatto woman would surely be staying the night, but before I could sit thinking warmly of her for a while, I had to be sure, and so for a few minutes, I looked down, beyond the trees and the statue, I watched the square in the unlikely event that she would emerge and leave. And it was then that I saw the two figures coming towards my front door, the woman and the dog, she with her umbrella covering her, and the dog, uncovered, wandering here and there — tis tis tis. As they approached the front of the building, they almost entirely disappeared from my field of vision, by the time they stopped at the door, they were immediately below me, and I could see only a fragment of the cupola of the open umbrella. The bell rang, the downstairs bell. I again looked vainly out for a second, with the window open, leaning out, bending over (my neck and back got wet), before going to pick up the entry-phone: everything except that fragment of curved cloth remained outside my perpendicular line of sight. I picked up the phone. 'Yes?' I said in English, a literal translation from my own language in which I had been thinking, and it was in Spanish that the other person spoke to me: Jaime, soy yo,' — 'Jaime, it's me' — said a female voice. 'Can you open the door, please? I know it's a bit late, but I must talk to you. It'll only take a moment.'
The kind of people who, on the phone or at the door, say simply 'It's
me' and don't even bother to give their name are those who forget that 'me' is never anyone, but they are also those who are quite sure of occupying a great deal or a fair part of the thoughts of the person they're looking for. Or else they have no doubt that they will be recognised with no need to say more — who else would it be — from the first word and the first moment. And the woman with the dog was right about this, even if only unconsciously and without having stopped to think about it. Because I did recognise her voice, and I opened the front door for her from upstairs without wondering why she was entering my house that night and coming upstairs to speak to me.
Javier Marías, Fever and Spear
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