Laurence Sterne may have been right in Tristram Shandy which I translated into my language twenty years ago, when he had one of the characters recall that King William was of the opinion that everything was predestined for us in this world, and the King would often say to his soldiers that “every ball had its billet.” (Diderot later copied the phrase.) Perhaps that spent or cold bullet was predestined to be billeted in Wilfrid Ewart, and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and envenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or to prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs its negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty, and everything is told figuratively.
They buried him two days later, on January 3. Graham and Hollands, the postal employee, identified the body at the desolate Hospital Juárez, which was also a prison; according to Graham, the expression on the dead face was “puzzled and annoyed.” An autopsy was performed, and Ewart was found, in hindsight, to have been in perfect health. Twenty-four people attended his burial in the British Cemetery, not far from the weeping cypress known as the Tree of the Sad Night — which was the night of July 1, 1520, and it was sad for Hernán Cortés — near the Tlacopán Causeway: the president and some members of the British Club, R.J. Fowler, the vice-consul, the Reverend Dean H. Dobson Peacock who officiated over the liturgy, the presidents of the Ex-Service Men’s Association and the British Society, Hollands, Graham and his wife. She was carrying white roses and dropped them onto the long coffin as it began its descent, this is almost the only time her husband mentions her in the entire book. Lilies grow in that place, or used to grow, because the cemetery “no longer exists,” as Rafael M.S. tells me in a recent letter. “It was razed almost twenty years ago to make way for a highway called the Circuito Interior. A very small chapel was put up, in memory of those who were buried there. Called the Capilla Británica, it stands at the corner of San Cosme and Melchor Ocampo and still has an inscription in English. When the bodies were exhumed, they were moved to the Nuevo Cementerio Británico on Calzada México Tacuba, which was built in 1926. A few were buried in individual, clearly marked graves (when it was still possible to locate their kinsmen). The others were buried in a common grave surrounding a chapel with stained glass windows. If his remains weren’t taken to England it’s very likely that Ewart’s bones are there (but it’s impossible to know for sure because the names have worn away). Both cemeteries are quite close to the Tree of the Sad Night, but neither can be said to be beside it. Not much is left of the Tree, and around it are only houses.”
Muñoz Saldaña also sent me a few other curious pieces of information, such as the list of belongings that Ewart “had with him”: “a gold watch and a chain of that same metal, eighty pesos in cash, a Bank of Montreal checkbook that showed a deposit of six hundred-odd pesos, and a few other objects.” There is no mention of any clothing or luggage, which seems to indicate that the list refers only to what he had on his person when his corpse was discovered, and not to the things that were scattered around the room. There’s no need to note that he couldn’t have been carrying all this in his pyjamas.
Ewart was not the only person in Mexico City to die that New Year’s Eve: nineteen other people also lost their lives violently over the course of those wild revels.
Neither Muñoz Saldaña nor González Rodríguez has been able to locate the photograph of Ewart’s corpse that some sources say was published by a Mexican newspaper (Hugh Cecil mentions it repeatedly in The Flower of Battle). Perhaps some mistake was made, by the sources or the newspapers. Muñoz Saldaña comments that in the first couple of weeks of 1923 the Mexican press did publish a photograph of a British subject killed by a bullet wound to the head. “The man is seen lying down, with a bandaged head, but it is not Ewart since the caption lists another name.” I wonder if the name might not be George W. Steabben, or that of a third party. Or perhaps the caption was mistaken, since it appears that there was indeed a photograph: on seeing it posted in the English Club, a member realized that the supposed “businessman” whom the press initially referred to as “Mr. Gore” was in fact none other than the famous and promising novelist Wilfrid Herbert Gore Ewart. In so incoherent a matter, it’s perfectly coherent that this photograph should be phantasmal.
In London, Ewart’s father learned of the death in the worst possible way, that is, from a journalist’s tactless phone call. The family had a requiem mass celebrated for him at St. Mary’s Bourne Street, and later put up an altar with a memorial by Goodhard-Rendel. What the family does not appear to have done, however, was move his remains from the British Cemetary on Calzada de la Verónica, and so it is possible that they now lie in a common grave whose names have worn off on Calzada México Tacuba.
The trail of tumbling foam he left in his wake was short-lived, though it churned a while longer in the thirties thanks to the efforts of John Gawsworth under one of his signatures, “G,” the tersest one; but I’ll speak of that later, perhaps.
In a 1989 letter Sergio G. R. pointed out that Stephen Graham, in his autobiography, apparently his last book, titled Part of the Wonderful Scene and published in 1964 when he was eighty years old, again devotes an entire chapter to Ewart’s death, which varied little from what he had written in the heat of the moment, four decades earlier. Nevertheless, he does add “some disconcerting lines”—in the words of my first Mexican correspondent: “He tells how, after the burial of his friend Wilfrid, he goes to his room at the Hotel Iturbide and feels Wilfrid’s spirit all around him. In his unsettled state, Graham speaks to the spirit and begs his pardon ‘for all that has happened,’ opens the window, and lets the spirit fly away home.”
In his article published the same year, González Rodríguez also described the way Ewart’s tragedy was, for a period, used as an enticement to tourists, so much so that other Mexico City hotels claimed it for their own. He cites Ronald G. Walker, author of Infernal Paradise, Mexico and the Modern English Novel, who relates the following episode: “[The Canadian poet Witter] Bynner and his friend [Willard] Johnson followed the Lawrences” (the David Herbert Lawrences, that is: the famous author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his wife) “to Mexico City in March 1923 to find that Lawrence had secured lodging for them in the Hotel Monte Carlo. They were shocked to discover that by a strange coincidence their room had previously been tenanted by a friend of the foursome, an Englishman named Wilfred Ewart; shocked, because it was on that same balcony to which the bellboy pointed with the pride of an eyewitness, that Ewart had been killed by a stray bullet during a wild fiesta in the street below. News of Ewart’s fortuitous death a few months before had, in fact, elicited from Lawrence — before he had set foot in Mexico — the conviction that ‘it’s an evil country down there.’ ” “The bellboy,” the article adds, “was indulging in the Mexican pastime of frightening and deceiving foreigners: the Hotel Monte Carlo is around the corner from the Hotel Isabel, to one side of the Convento de San Agustín on calle de Uruguay, and in his tall tale he was mixing up Ewart’s case with that of George W. Steabben.” It was certainly neither risky nor implausible to lay claim to tragedies caused by firearms in the Mexican capital at that time: the article also recounts that in a newspaper dated that same New Year’s Day, a company named Balines Americanos (American Ball Bearings) placed an advertisement with the following jaunty slogan: “With gunfire, we salute you all with gunfire.” Pity Ewart’s family and friends didn’t get to see it.