One of those idiotic and dispassionate challenges gave rise to a brief, memorable text he wrote me in a letter dating from my Oxford years, and this book will have been worth the trouble if only to make that text public (though I won’t cite all of it verbatim, to avoid ruffling any feathers). He had dared me to guess his new bête noire of the moment (November, 1984), and in my answer I got it right on the first try (“Has the same initials as Jaime Salinas,” I had said); I also fired off a volley of minor hieroglyphics — a further series of otherwise unidentified initials — and announced that I had an excellent little gift for him that he would find very useful, and that I would present him with on my next trip to Madrid: “an ingenious instrument,” I called it, as can be deduced from his answer. Benet had grown a moustache not long before, and though in time we grew so accustomed to it that it isn’t easy now to remember what he looked like clean-shaven, at that point his friends were still pondering the daring novelty on his upper lip and hesitating between approval, rejection, condemnation and a forced visit to the barbershop. Meanwhile, what I had bought for him, was a tiny, ridiculous comb glimpsed in a specialty shop in London, designed especially for the grooming and hygiene of such appurtenances, as they used to say in more indirect times.
“It was indeed J S,” he acknowledged in the second paragraph of his letter, “a perfect imbecile who mixes piety with arrogance, like Xirinachs. I haven’t deciphered a single one of your initials, but to stave off and give the lie to any avowed ‘blunting of my intellect,’ I’ve decided to predict that the ‘ingenious instrument’ you’re going to give me is neither more nor less than a small comb. Naturally, you’re in the perfect position to deny this and even to acquire a new little gift in order to prove that it wasn’t a small comb, but I shall remain persuaded all my life that originally it was a small comb (I give no further details because this alone should suffice to make you blush), and if you conduct yourself ignobly in this grave matter and pull a switch on me, I, for my part, will forever hide the reasons that have led me to unmask the comb. For if you put your mind to it a little, you’ll quickly conclude that it couldn’t have been anything but a small comb.”
Here I was forced to pay tribute to his divinatory gifts or perspicacity, though it irritated me enormously that he had spoiled the mystery of my small, specialized comb, which in due time I gave him, without making a switch, but in a rather peeved, grudging and even spiteful spirit. I often saw him use it in the years that followed, he would take it out during some gathering and, in my presence, delicately preen his moustache for a while with a distracted air, blatantly alluding to his brilliant deductive triumph. (Depending on my mood I either pretended not to notice or gratified him by taking the hint and saying: “Very well, Don Juan, that’s fine, yes, I remember, you hit the bull’s-eye, you can stop now, there’s not a hair out of place.”) Very typical of him, that recurrent retrospective delectation.
But let’s return to 1992. My self-esteem at stake, I immediately alerted my booksellers, G. Heywood Hill and Bell, Book & Radmall and Veronica Watts certainly, and a few others specializing in military matters, though I didn’t know that field very well; I also alerted Eric Southworth and Ian Michael in Oxford, on the unlikely chance that they might run across the damned Crucifix in some secondhand bookshop, and I suppose I also said something to Roger Dobson, who is a true, indefatigable bloodhound, but whose streaks of magnificent good fortune alternate with periods of total loss of nose (and consequent bibliographic famine), so everything depended on whether my mission found him in one phase or the other. I told them how much I was willing to spend, which was quite a lot in relation to the probable cost of an utterly forgotten 1938 book on the Spanish Civil War by an author who was known or of interest to almost no one and whose name, like Gawsworth’s (but more understandably), did not appear in any encyclopedia, dictionary or literary biography, even if some mention of it was made in certain studies of the Spanish Civil War, according to Benet’s information, though not in as many as might have been expected, given his singular, pioneering performance in the airways of the Iberian peninsula—lutos tras otros lutos y otros lutos, sorrow after sorrow and more sorrow — or in the wind that sweeps away the weeks, el viento que se lleva las semanas.
And it was Ben Bass, whereabouts now unknown but then of Greyne House in Avon, who, not much later, worked the miracle and sent me a note in his flowery handwriting to inquire as to whether I would be interested in one copy each of Crucifix and Valley (the other volume by Oloff de Wet, about his imprisonment by the Gestapo), available to me for thirty-five and thirteen pounds respectively, plus shipping and handling. The Crucifix was a little pricey, still I didn’t waste a second on the wretched mails but phoned him right away, wondering all the while why on earth he was asking me if I wanted them rather than sending them to me at once, and before the next dinner with Don Juan Benet and friends both titles were in my clutches and I arrived at the restaurant very pleased with myself, carrying them under my arm and ready to settle the score, many years later, for the humiliation endured by my minuscule, absurd and unmasked comb. I remember Benet’s feigned disappointment as I tossed the books on the table with a movement of the thumb and index finger as if they were cards (“Who knows what vile acts you’ve lowered yourself to in order to get your hands on these rarities so fast, young Marías,” he said, irked and suspicious), which was immediately replaced by an expression of avid curiosity as he expertly thumbed through the newly bagged specimens. Many months later the great bookhunter Ben Bass (who would have to be hunted down himself now) was able to find me a second copy of Cardboard Crucifix, subtitled The Story of a Pilot in Spain, which I could then offer as a gift to Don Juan for the enrichment of his collection and in belated thanks and reward for his generous research and his note for the young Bachelor of Arts. (I’m still waiting for someone to come up with a third copy that I can give to Edkins.) He read it, not long before his death — but we didn’t know that yet — and, like the excerpt cited by Robert Payne, it didn’t strike him as any great thing. I’ll never know if this was his true opinion or just an effort to detract literary merit from this figure I had discovered and thereby make light of my irritating prowess as a digger-up of books. In any case, whatever literary interest the work of Hugh Oloff de Wet might have had, it did not by any means match its author’s biographical and novelistic interest. But I’ll speak of the texts later, perhaps.
Neither of the two copies — mine or Benet’s — had kept its jacket, so the books bore no information on their author and no description of his work. But The Valley of the Shadow did have its jacket, in good condition, it was published eleven years after Cardboard Crucifix—the Civil War well over and the times thoroughly crushed underfoot, even the Second World War was over — and two years prior to the writer-pilot’s second strange stay in Madrid in 1951, when, of all possible spots, he frequented the Café Gijón, favored haunt of the leisured Spanish literati — or perhaps no one lacked for time back then, it hardly existed, not even Benet, who must have gone there occasionally at the age of twenty-four — and, of all governments in the world, he sought to persuade the predatory but ultra-tightfisted Franco to finance his partisan project in the Carpathians. On the jacket’s front flap were a photograph and a good number of facts, most already reported by Edkins, the protegé. Not all, however.