He coughed, a nervous cough I thought, impotent, uneasy. He sat up and leaned slightly to one side, one elbow resting on the floor, to feel for the matches in his trouser pocket so as to relight his pipe. He also took out an antique silver pillbox with a tiny compass on the lid; he used to study that compass imprisoned behind glass whenever he was plunged in thought, whenever he didn’t know how to continue or if he should continue, whenever he was filled by doubts and more doubts, as if he were hoping that the compass needle would guide him, would perhaps stop pointing north. I had the feeling that not only was he uncertain as to whether or not to reveal to me his friend’s supposed crime or vile deed or mean act (I knew for the moment that it wasn’t a betrayal), but also whether or not he should charge me with some related task, some mission, a bit of espionage, an investigation, whether he should ask me to intervene, though who knows how, for it would be hard for me to help without knowing the facts or, indeed, even if I did know them. And yet that was the feeling I had, that the hardest thing for him was deciding whether or not to involve me in something grubby, disagreeable, foul, knowing that if he did succumb to the temptation of involving me, I would cease to be a mere listener or even confidant and instead become party to certain facts or, rather, to a suspicion and a rumour. It was as if he knew that, once he explained the situation to me, he would also have to direct or guide me, to give me an order or ask me a favour.
‘And yet what?’ I didn’t know how else to encourage him to speak, apart from showing that I was interested and prepared to listen. I realize now that this was a sign of my youth, because what could be easier than drawing someone out when almost everyone is bursting to talk?
At last, Muriel got nimbly and effortlessly to his feet and began pacing up and down before me, taking long strides around the living room and the study, skirting the desk, and I had to keep craning my neck so as not to lose sight of him, his pipe in one hand and, in the other, the pillbox, which he kept rubbing against his chin, as if smoothing a fortunately non-existent goatee beard — ‘fortunately’ because men who wear such beards are not usually to be trusted. He would also occasionally study the compass on the box. It amused me to see his one eye scrutinizing that diminutive object, and he did so, I think, partly for comic effect, perhaps to mitigate the waves of vacillation and anxiety given off by his endless circumvolutions.
‘And yet, and yet,’ he repeated, or replied, ‘I have no option but to try and get closer, to dispel the mist or remove the veil, to waste a little of my life on it. Sometimes, in order to justify making a decision, to, as you put it, decide what the truth is and to stick fast to that truth from then on and for ever, all it takes is the removal of a single layer, even if you only pretend to remove it. After that one attempt — however sceptical and superficial — you can, as you suggested, ignore what you’ve been told or else believe it wholeheartedly and allow a friendship to languish, put it on hold or end it once and for all, but not immediately. You need either to have in your possession or to acquire some clue to serve as a guide, however false or erroneous. We have to find by our own means some way of orienting ourselves’ — and he tapped with the stem of his pipe on the glass cover — ‘some intuition that will allow us to say: “That’s a downright lie” or “Oh dear, it must be true.” ’ He suddenly stopped pacing and looked at me, a look of infinite sorrow, but I couldn’t tell who he was feeling sorry for, himself or me, because I had so much still to discover, so far to go. I find myself looking at young people like that now, when I see them worried and bewildered or discouraged, and also when I see them excited and full of plans, and I cross my fingers to wish them luck, a pointless, superstitious gesture, a gesture of resignation. It’s a paternalistic look that ignores the fact that we are all different and that some generations are more worldly-wise than others; I think my generation was tougher than Muriel’s and, beneath our motley idealistic disguises, we certainly had fewer scruples. ‘My first impulse was to believe what I was being told,’ he went on, still wearing the same sorrowful expression. ‘I had an initial doubt, but dismissed it out of hand because I thought no one would lie about something so important. Not important for other people, because it would be a matter of indifference to most, but important for the person telling me that lie or that truth. You assume that no one would willingly harm himself, at least you probably still do at your age. How old are you now? Twenty-three? It certainly took me a long time to learn that this was a false assumption, that one should assume nothing. People make wild calculations and are often prepared to take a risk. Most suffer from a strange overdose of optimism, convinced they’ll get their own way, that they’ll change things or that luck will smile on them; that any harm inflicted will be compensated for in the long term by some greater benefit and that no one will ever find out what they said or did in order to gain their objective: to hold on to someone, to ruin another, to send someone else to prison or to the wall, to profit from something and grow rich, or to get into bed with some woman. And perhaps they’re right, we probably never will know very much about what really happened, most of which will never see the light of day. And so on that occasion, I didn’t test out what I was told, I just accepted it and acted accordingly and held to my decision and thus ruined one life or perhaps two or even three, depending on your point of view, perhaps more if you count any descendants, individuals who should never really have been born and others who were prevented from being born in their place.’ After this excursus, he resumed his pacing, still with his pipe in one hand and the compass in the other, then added: ‘Yes, I’m going to have to waste a little of my life over this friend of mine.’
I didn’t understand much of what he was saying. He was circling around another story now, a story from the past, possibly the remote past, but, again, he wasn’t really telling me that story either. Finally, I thought of a question that might encourage him to be more explicit. He had mentioned the possibility of bringing his friendship to a drastic end, were this justified by his tentative future inquiries or explorations or intuitions. But if what he had been told did not affect or involve him personally, almost only one thing, at that time and in our country, would be deemed so objectionable as to merit ending a friendship that had lasted half a lifetime. In those days, in those years, certain distant events were just beginning to be discussed in private, things that many Spaniards had been obliged to keep quiet about in public for decades and which had only very occasionally been talked about in whispers within the family and with ever-longer intervening silences, as if, quite apart from the forbidden nature of the subject matter, there was a desire to confine such events to the realm of nightmares, to relegate them to the bearable fog of what may or may not have happened. Such is the fate of things deemed shameful, the fate of all humiliations and impositions. None of us likes to dwell on past defeats or on the times when we or our families were the victims of injustices or acts of cruelty or were forced to surrender or to pander to the other side in order to survive, to betray our comrades in order to ingratiate ourselves with the vicious new powers that be — who are also tireless persecutors of the defeated — or to crouch in a corner so as not to attract attention, leading a cowardly, submissive life spent kowtowing to the crazy demands of the victorious regime; and — despite the damage inflicted by that regime, of which you and your parents or siblings all had personal experience — to try to embrace it, praise it, become part of it and thus prosper under its aegis. Nowadays, people tell many a tall tale of unbowed resistance fighters, whether passive or active, but the truth is that most real-life resistance fighters — of whom there were few and all of them short-lived — were shot or imprisoned during the years after the War or else went into exile or were purged and suffered reprisals and were prevented from freely exercising their professions: some were elderly or mature men who spent the rest of their days watching their widows and daughters going out to work so they could afford to buy food — because it was as if their wives were already widows — while they, ill-shaven pre-cadavers — engineers, doctors, lawyers, architects, professors, scientists, even the occasional loyal soldier who had somehow survived — gazed out of the window and tried hard not to think too much. After a while, most of the population were enthusiastically pro-Franco, or were timidly so, out of fear. Many of those who had loathed him and suffered under him gradually became convinced that things were, in fact, better, that they had been mistaken and had lived and even fought in error. Never have there been so many turncoats, such a mass display of turncoatery. The Civil War ended in 1939, and whatever people may say now, no one was eager to give their version of events, I mean those who could not have done so safely, either in the 1940s or 50s, nor, of course, in the somewhat more relaxed 60s or even in the 70s, right up until the death of the dictator in 1975. The winning side had initially repeated their version ad nauseam and continued to do so, but they larded it with so many lies, so much grandiloquence, so many obfuscations, calumnies and prejudices, that, ultimately, their version of events no longer satisfied them and wore so thin with repetition that it reached a point where, on the assumption that everyone must know the story by heart, they, too, fell almost silent and stopped harping on about it and applied themselves instead to forgetting the darker aspects of their deeds, their more superfluous crimes. In the long run, there’s little to be gained by imposing your story on other people, it’s almost like telling a story to yourself, which is no fun at alclass="underline" if your views are only ever endorsed by your co-religionists or by mere acolytes and fearful servants, it’s a bit like playing yourself at chess. And those who had lost preferred to forget the atrocities committed, either by them or the still worse ones committed by the other side — more enduring, more brutal, more gratuitous — and they certainly didn’t tell their children (after all, no one would choose to describe episodes or scenes in which they appear in such a poor light), for whom their one wish was that nothing similar would ever happen to them and that they would be blessed with a boring, uneventful life, albeit a life lived with head bowed and with no real freedom, because one can live without freedom. Indeed, freedom is the first thing that fearful citizens are prepared to give up. So much so that they often ask to lose it, ask for it to be taken away, banished from their sight, which is why they not only applaud the very person intending to take it from them, they even vote for him.