Edkins’ generous response is dated December 8. He sent me the requested photocopy of the letter. “As for Oloff de Wet, well …,” he wrote, “I could spend hours talking about him, though I was in contact with him for only a week; later I met two people who had known him: one, a very famous second-hand bookseller here in London, Bernard Stone (perhaps you know him), and the other, like Oloff himself, one of the first mercenary pilots, an American named Jim Tuck, who died a couple of years ago.… In 1951, De Wet was about thirty-eight; it was his first visit to Spain since the Civil War, when he had fought on the side of the Republic (having been rejected by Franco’s camp, probably because he had previously flown for Haile Selassie against Mussolini in the war of Abyssinia), with which, nevertheless, he was later in conflict; he only escaped being executed in Valencia through the personal intervention of Cisneros.” (Edkins was referring to Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, commander of the Republican air force.) “He later worked for the Deuxième Bureau and the Germans arrested him in Prague, so he spent the entire war in a cellblock for men condemned to death … He published two books (and some childrens’ books as well, I believe). The first, about his aerial escapades during the Spanish Civil War, entitled Cardboard Crucifix” (a horrible title if ever one existed), “was published by Blackwood in 1938 and in America by Doubleday as The Patrol Is Ended; I’ve never managed to get my hands on a copy of that book or read it; Bernard Stone promised to loan it to me but never kept his promise. It was from Stone that I learned Oloff had died, in the early 1970s, he thought. The second book is The Valley of the Shadow, Blackwood, 1949, with a paperback reprint in 1956, which is the version I have, about his German experience; the promotional copy on the cover indicates that he had appeared on the BBC television program This Is Your Life, so he couldn’t have been a complete unknown at that point! There was a time when I intended to write a comic novel, with Oloff as protagonist, but reading his book about the cell on death row put me off it.…” He then proposed that we see each other the next time he came to Madrid, which would probably be around Easter; he would tell me more then. He also suggested I ask Pombo for the manuscript of another unfinished novel of his which incorporated episodes from the abandoned project inspired by De Wet. He could be recognized beneath the name and mask of the character named Hugo van Renssaler.… But Pombo had almost certainly misplaced it, as he had done on other occasions.
My mind can sometimes be of a detectivish and therefore deductive bent, though never scholarly or journalistic, of course. I realize that I don’t even do much to track down or seek out the things that arouse my curiosity or interest me, but limit myself to registering them, taking them in; I keep still and wait as if I believed that only what comes to me anyway, without any effort on my part, will be worthwhile or deserved. At times I wonder if this might not be a way of protecting myself or defending my daily life and my few sustaining habits; if so many things, good and strange and bad, come to me anyway with almost no effort on my part, an active approach might deluge my life with good, strange, or bad things, and I’m disinclined to have that happen, even if they were all fantastic. (Or, more likely, then nothing would come to me.) If I were superstitious — I only pretend to be now and then, for fun — I would believe I possessed a strange magnetic force, tangential to my will, that attracts events and coincidences and fulfills many desires that even in thought are unexpressed; the salt and vinegar affair wouldn’t be so nonsensical if this ungoverned force were believed to have turned against the vinegar people. Unfortunately for them, the futility of their primitive saline solution has become obvious. Perhaps they should try other remedies, and several occur to me. But it’s not up to me to provide them with ideas.
The truth is that I did not call Pombo to ask him to rummage around for the manuscript, undoubtedly lost amid his overflowing morass of papers (so thankless a task would have annoyed him), nor did I shoot off to London to meet Bernard Stone (I already had my own Stones, and my Alabasters, too) or to interview Edkins of Deronda Street without waiting for Easter, and when he at last came to Madrid and we saw each other for a while in my house, it never occurred to me to take notes or record the conversation and the information he was able to give me on De Wet and Gawsworth (what nonsense I’m writing; I don’t even possess a tape recorder), most of it concerning De Wet, who, at least, had been his mentor for a week. So I no longer remember much of it, and I’m not writing him back now to put him to the trouble of again composing a few pages for my benefit (this book isn’t that important, not even to me). But maybe I don’t remember much because there wasn’t all that much more to what he finally told me in person, and that, too, is logicaclass="underline" however great an impression the former mercenary pilot had made on him when he was twenty-five, forty years had gone by since that brief encounter or tutelage in Madrid.
Edkins was more than seventy, a bit shy, very affable and discreet, with a guarded way of speaking, a reserved sense of humor, and the vague air of a man with a bohemian past. His eyes were confident and his nose and chin were sharp, which gave him a comical resemblance to his host and friend Pombo, both of them more reminiscent of Dickens’ Fagin than of Daniel Deronda, however Jewish Deronda was. He presented me with two booklets containing poems of his and some translations of Cernuda, and out of everything he told me about De Wet I remember only this: the self-assured, jovial De Wet was rather conspicuous in Madrid in 1951 because he sported an earring dangling from one ear, and for all I know he may also have had a blondish and piratical ponytail; he wore a black patch or smoked monocle over one eye, and his face was adorned with a moustache alone or perhaps with a moustache and beard, people’s features fade in our undulating visual memory. Though he was well-dressed and wore a tie, it was strange that he wasn’t arrested every night by Franco’s police, looking like that; being a foreigner must have protected him, or maybe he had some sort of safe-conduct, for of course he had no dearth of criminal and diplomatic contacts. The reason he had returned to Spain, where he had killed and had almost been put to death, was ludicrous, if it really was the reason and not simply a fantasy, a tall tale to entertain the boy while he ate his ham sandwiches washed down with Pernod. De Wet proposed to convince Franco to create and organize groups of partisan guerrillas, based in the Carpathian mountains, which would make raids on the Soviets (from quite a distance away, actually). The reasons he gave for this, however, weren’t exactly political, much less ideological; rather, he was convinced that once the Communist regimes had been overthrown, everything confiscated in Russia and the satellite countries after 1917 would be restored to its legitimate owners, among whom was his current wife — or perhaps she was his only wife — a Russian woman whose family had apparently lost, after the October Revolution, the best and most expensive hotel in Moscow: the Metropol, if memory does not fail. As director-general and proprietor-consort of the Metropol, he would often say, he could at last lead, without obstacles, the eventful and effervescent life that he was destined for — and from which, in any case, he was certainly not abstaining, hotel or no hotel. He must have promised himself a long youth and an even longer life if, to arrive at this goal, his first step was to persuade a numskull like Franco to finance a group of impromptu partisans who would then go cavorting around the Carpathians (and without knowing any of the languages, either, if most of them were to be Spaniards). And of course with that earring he wouldn’t have gotten very far with the puffy-cheeked, weak-jawed dictator, who would only have looked him up and down and then noted on the corner of a blank card, with petit bourgeois apprehension and preordained disgust: “Effeminate.”