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Even though I didn’t leap for the telephone to call the untidy Mr. Pombo or race off immediately to Barajas airport to jump on the next flight to London, and failed, as well, to take the precaution of acquiring a device with which to record Edkins’ words when I had him in front of me, I wasn’t entirely inactive: I did put several British antiquarian or second-hand book dealers (Bertram Rota and Bernard Kaye, the Stones of Titles in Oxford, Ben Bass, who has since disappeared) on the alert so they would keep me in mind if they ever ran across a copy of either of the two rare and inaccessible books De Wet had written.
And in fitting recompense for the many bookish errands Don Juan Benet had sent me on over the years (all of them a mite tricky, as if he were forever putting me to the test), I took the liberty of asking him to hunt down references to the pirate-pilot in his magnificent library on the Spanish Civil War, which was one of his specialties. After a week, no doubt piqued by curiosity and the bibliographic challenge (I had put it to him in the most woundingly effective terms, “So, Don Juan, you who spend your life boasting about your great knowledge of the war: let’s see what you can show us”), Benet sent me from his country house in Zarzalejo, where he kept the literature on the war he was so proud of, the following handwritten report, under the mocking title, “Note for Mr. Javier Marías, B.A.”:
As regards Oloff de Wet, I’ve found some references in the bibliography on the Civil War. Jesús Salas Larrazábal mentions him in two of his books, La guerra de España desde el aire (The Spanish Civil War from the Air), Barcelona: Ariel, 1972, and Intervención extranjera en la guerra de España (Foreign Intervention in the Spanish Civil War), Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1974. In the first of these, De Wet is mentioned in relation to the creation, by the new Undersecretary of the Air, of at least fifteen pursuit and bombardment units using imported equipment that went into operation in September, 1936. According to Salas, De Wet was piloting a Nieuport 52 at that time. There are also isolated references to De Wet in Alcofar Nassaes, La aviación legionaria en la guerra española (Legionnaire Aviation in the Spanish Civil War), Barcelona: Euros, 1975. However, I’ve found no mention of him in Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty, which claims to provide a very extensive list of the British volunteers, almost all of them posted to the British Battalion in which the author served. Nor does he appear in the documents and memoirs of members of the brigades and British fellow travellers.
In general, these references are due to the publication by Oloff de Wet of Cardboard Crucifix, London: Blackwood, 1938, which I’ve not succeeded in finding and don’t believe has been translated or published in Spanish. An excellent angle for further recherches: let’s see what you can do this time: give us a further display of your skills. From what I can deduce, it’s an autobiographical story of his experience as a fighter pilot in Spain, and a well-placed eyewitness account of the birth of the Republican Air Force. A quite extensive excerpt (fourteen pages) from Cardboard Crucifix is included in The Civil War in Spain by Robert Payne, London: Secker & Warburg, 1962, who is not to be confused with Stanley G. Payne, the historian of Spanish fascism. The fragment isn’t much: a journalistic impression of Madrid in the revolutionary autumn of ’36, some impressions of flying in the Nieuport and a few quick sketches of leading figures in the International Brigades.
— Zarzalejo, January 1992
January 1992, only a year before his death. No one could have imagined it then, he himself least of all, no one ever knows the order of these things.
I believe I remember that the next time we saw each other I had the nerve and the ingratitude to belittle his findings and throw back in his face the skimpy, insipid pickings he had served up to me, much of it useless because already known to me (but that was always the style with Benet, those of us who were his friends tended to take our mutual competence for granted and not acknowledge any merit in each other except on very rare occasions, which made it all the more exceptional and unforgettable: my family is of the same school, a prickly, jesting school — a little grace and good humor are required — which I’ve noticed most other writers won’t tolerate, forced as they all too often are into reciprocal cloying adulation and even reverence, constantly addressing each other as Maestro This and Maestro That, as some of them do both in public and in print, to help each other over their complexes, inferiority complexes, that is). In fact, with an eye to my own impending display of prowess, I took care not to applaud him openly, for in his report he had seized the opportunity to issue a challenge, which he then repeated in person and in the presence of witnesses, as I had issued mine: “Look here you great bloodhound of the Baskervilles, you Arsène Lupin of literature, look here, young Marías: is it not your boast that no book, however unattainable, can elude you? I want you back here with that Oloff de Wet, which sounds like the name of a perfume; let’s see if you can deliver us a copy of this Cardboard Crucifix that you tell us you’re so very much in the know about.” Thus had Don Juan turned the tables and the investigative challenge on me. “I’ve done my part. It’s your turn now,” he said, “and I hope you won’t have the shamelessness to appear at the next dinner without that book under your arm.” We were always like that, like kids daring each other to do harmless, trivial things (or some things that weren’t so harmless), for the fun and excitement of it, and above all for the continuity and deferral, there was always something pending and we’d have to see each other again. Of course I was far from being the only one, he used the same tactic on everyone, Azúa, Molina Foix, Hortelano, Daniella and her famous episteme, Mercedes, the engineers, Peche, any friend who had earned the affection embodied in his irony.