There’s something a little incongruous and ironic — and perhaps much that is unjust — about the continued existence of this volume or of any of the objects that survive us, that surround and accompany and serve us, feigning insignificance. It is unsettling that today, November 8, 1997, the ink Wilfrid Ewart traced without much thought, or perhaps very solemnly, across an endpaper of the newly printed and bound book he gave his sister on November 15, 1921, is here in Madrid; and it is a bit grotesque and almost an affront that we can read what that ink says without hearing the voice of its master, the voice that hasn’t been heard anywhere for almost seventy-five years, not since he almost certainly wished the concierge on night duty at the Hotel Isabel “Buenas Noches” or “Feliz Año,” before going up to room 53 in Mexico City. Nor does it make much sense that I was able to carry off this book — like a spoil of war — last year for two hundred pounds, when in the ordinary course of things Angela Ewart Farmer Waddington would never have wanted to lose possession of it in her lifetime: “Dedicated by the author to his favorite sister,” so it was described in the catalogue of works on the Great War where I saw it, with this further information: “Angela, recently married for the second time but still weeping for her first husband, helped her brother correct the page proofs and took care of him while he worked on Way of Revelation.” When Hugh Cecil visited her in the course of his research for The Flower of Battle, she was already more than ninety years old and he was moved to hear her “ardent and beautifully enunciated pre-1914 voice,” so he says, still ardent in speaking of past and lost time. Yet even more incongruous is the fact that between Angela — who may have died by now — and me there was another owner, this B.D. Maurer whose ex libris is not of recent vintage; the volume must have been his already during Angela’s lifetime, and he may have been a veteran as well, perhaps of Neuve Chapelle and Ypres and Cambrai and Arras, perhaps she gave it to him herself and it was after the death of Maurer, the soldier, that the copy was placed on sale for me to buy. Objects live on after our deaths, they go on living without yearning for us, and belong to others who treasure them or disdain and sell them, taking up space on their shelves or gleaming on their lapels like the tiepin I acquired at auction not long ago, which belonged to the actor Robert Donat, protagonist of The 39 Steps and Countess Alexandra and Goodbye Mr. Chips, for which he won an Oscar; I got the long silver cigarette case engraved with his initials, too, and these usurpations or false legacies create ghostly linkages I hadn’t expected: I can no longer see Donat in the same casual way when he appears in his old movies that are sometimes shown on television — in fact, I stop to watch him as if I were now in his debt: two months ago it was The Adventures of Tartu, and the other day The Citadel, I saw him moving and speaking in his own voice and alive, despite his death in 1958 at the age of fifty-three, only seven years older than I am now. I watch him as if he had some kinship with me, and when he lights a cigarette on the screen I wonder if he made the identical gesture after taking one out of the silent object now at home in my hand, the same object, carefully preserved all this time in its original pale green box from Asprey in Bond Street, London — or not so silent: “R D” it says, I should give it to Roger Dobson — and whether that wasn’t extremely bad for his life-long asthma, which may have had something to do with his death; I also wonder if, after that day’s shoot, he wore the tiepin with its enamelled likeness of Shakespeare at dinner, the pin I sometimes wear in my lapel (I rarely wear a tie). Perhaps it’s for the best, or the lesser among evils, that I have these relics of the actor Robert Donat, since it is a simple fact that our intentions and traces and exhalations do not disappear at the same time we do; at least I know who he was, and am well provided with videos of his good films. And I can’t help knowing that these acquisitions, like all my other objects old and new, will pass on to someone else in the future and pursue their course or go on existing without missing me, and some things will be thrown out because they’re useful to no one, tempt no one, and have become encumbrances. The old table on which I’m writing will end up in some other house, and perhaps the pen with which I cross out and make corrections will go to another hand that won’t be a left hand or a hand of shadow; the table lamp from the 1920s and my silver match box from 1917, which once belonged to someone else named Muir; my little toy soldiers made of lead, my letter openers, one of which was carved by an anonymous soldier in the Great War who engraved on it “15 Yser 16,” the bloody river along which he must have fought and the years he waited, Ewart passed through there, too, and who knows if B.D. Maurer didn’t, as well; the books in my library will go back on the market, bearing my name on the first page, and the city and year when I bought them, so that any idiot with money can then buy them again, or a soulless bureaucrat from the Biblioteca Nacional if fortune frowns, and perhaps someone will want to preserve these scribblings of mine on blank pages, traces so remote they’ll become like the dedication of the forgotten Ewart and the bantering annotations of his still more forgotten rememberers, Gawsworth and Graham, who tried to rescue the dead young writer from oblivion and leave a record, mementos are fragile and tend to break, the thread of continuity is a slender one that is never pulled taut without some effort, and it must be taut in order to resist and persevere.
What meaning is there in the silent passage through the world of those who don’t even have the time to grow used to the air, even Ewart wrote and fought and lived for thirty years, and what would have become of him later? I doubt he would have gone right to the top. What would have become of my friend Aliocha Coil’s son, who died as a newborn a few years before Aliocha took his own life, and whom he and his wife Lysiane had given a name, he told me; and what about Juan Benet’s first daughter, who died at six months and whose yellowing photo I saw at his house many times, now that her parents have died there must no longer be anyone who remembers her, Eva. What would have become of my brother who died at the age of three and a half, Julianin was his name, or that was what my parents called him during his brief lifetime; it’s understandable that my first thought wasn’t to say “his parents” or “our parents” because I never knew him and his reality is not mine, I have only stories of him but no memory, and he never knew anything about me. I think of him at times, always as a child because he could never be anything else, he’s remained ensconced at the most advanced age granted him, as he’s painted in his portrait, yet he was six years older than me and would have just turned fifty-two now, almost the age that Donat was allotted. It’s strange to think that there was someone so close, a brother, whom I never met; if he had lived he would always have been with us during our childhood, he would have been the eldest of us and I wouldn’t have been third but fourth, and nothing would mediate my perception of him as nothing mediates between me and my other brothers, Miguel, Fernando and Alvaro, who are just that, Miguel, Fernando and Alvaro, I don’t have much opinion or consciousness of them, they are like the air, or were then. I can’t know what Julianin would have been like or how I would have gotten along with this unknown brother, prior to my birth, whether he would have protected me or bossed me around from the greater strength and skill of his six-year advantage, and I can’t even visualize him because the only image that remains is that of a very small boy who both was and never was older than me and who doesn’t appear capable of protecting or bossing around anyone. His portrait has always hung in my father’s house, and I realize that my first thought wasn’t to say “my parents’ house” because my mother, Lolita, died twenty years ago, and so my father, Julián, has lived there much longer, and still does. This portrait was looked upon with a certain reverence, at least by we children, who felt, in its presence, as if we were to some degree usurpers or intruders, and my mother sometimes gazed at the painting, not in pain but as if she were reliving it all and had something to say to him (she must have spoken to him many times in dreams, when both the living and the dead seem so present), it was a natural impulse, and I suppose she took refuge sometimes in that impulse and that memory when she was sad; she was at peace with that little boy who couldn’t misbehave or upset her. (Or perhaps she felt unreasonably indebted, because she hadn’t been able to save him.) Chin raised, she would look at the portrait for long moments and hum, my mother hummed quite a lot, distractedly, especially when she was preparing to go out. The women I know now dance a little in front of the mirror while they fix themselves up, if I put music on for them from another room. All women dance nowadays, at the least opportunity, as soon as they can, I’ve verified this.