‘The other day, a friend mentioned you and your heroic work helping people who, for political reasons, were having a hard time after the War. Apparently, you often visited an aunt of his, or, rather, her children. Her husband had been an anarchist and, by some miracle, had survived the War, but he couldn’t find any work at all. My friend told me that, if it hadn’t been for you, one of his cousins might have died all those years ago, when he was only a baby.’
Van Vechten broadened his almost fake smile, but I saw no sign of pleasure on his face. He seemed to be gritting his teeth, and his jaw looked even squarer than usual, his chin more protuberant, as if it had grown in size, his whole face flushed as his muscles tensed. He sat looking at me hard with his pale, cold, somewhat defiant eyes, as though he could see where I was going and wasn’t about to fall into my trap. While others may have praised his past behaviour, he himself never mentioned it, or not at least in my presence. He, of course, knew what he had remained silent about and the price paid for each of those visits, and he knew that the families he had visited were the only ones who also knew that this was no rumour. It was only natural that he should be on his guard. Always assuming Vidal’s story was true.
‘Oh, please, let’s not talk about that,’ he said modestly, and gestured with his hand as if dismissing the importance of his past actions. His large hand. ‘And there was nothing heroic about it. Others did the same.’
‘Very few from what I’ve heard, and at the risk of losing your privileges too,’ I said, and there I saw my chance to slip in the first name. ‘My friend also praised a colleague of yours, with whom you took turns looking after his aunt, I mean, her children, a certain Dr Carlos Arranz. What became of him? You’re really well known as a paediatrician and for what you did after the War, but I’ve never heard of him. Did things go badly for him? Was he punished?’
‘Ah, yes, Arranz,’ Van Vechten replied, as if he were travelling far back in time, and without once taking his inquisitive gaze off me. I was sure now that he was beginning to feel genuinely suspicious, that he already was suspicious; at that point, I didn’t care since I had no intention of ever seeing him again on my own. ‘I don’t know, I lost touch with him years ago. But let’s drop the subject, shall we? I don’t care to remember those dark times. You weren’t there, but believe me, they were very dark days indeed.’
I had decided that once I was on that path, I would keep straight ahead, and I felt it was the right moment to mention the second name I was holding in reserve. Who knows, I might succeed in unnerving him, in jolting him back into the past, or alarming or angering him, and his response, whatever it was, would be sure to betray him. Haste is very much a part of being young — wretched speed, damned haste — as is a lack of planning.
‘The aunt’s name was Carmen Zapater. Do you remember her? A very sweet, very pretty woman he said.’ I added ‘pretty’ because I assumed she would have been: if Arranz had told Van Vechten about her and handed her over to him, there must have been a reason. Word spreads quickly among men. As if she had been another Mariella Novotny to those two doctors, but not of her own choosing, against her will. There must have been many such women over a period of many years, when women tended not to earn their own money or to have it, and when they only had themselves. Although, I don’t know why I’m talking in the past tense, because there are still thousands of women for whom the only way of paying their debts is to hire themselves out.
‘No, I can’t say that I do,’ said the Doctor. ‘The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t put a face to it. Besides, we tend to know only the husband’s surname, not the wife’s. And though I shouldn’t say it myself, during that period, I did visit a lot of families in very similar circumstances, in my role as paediatrician, and I continued to do so into the early 60s. A lot of people had a really tough time of it.’
‘Yes, I can imagine. People would have been prepared to do anything just to survive or at least for their children to survive.’
Van Vechten could have no doubt now as to what I was getting at. Perhaps I was showing my cards too quickly, but by then, I was sick to death of the whole business and didn’t care. I just wanted confirmation from him, or some unmistakable sign, some clear indication, so that I could legitimately go to Muriel with the story. The Doctor’s eyes were now almost colourless, glacial, yes, glacial, although they retained a certain southern intensity — a frightening and repellent combination. They must have looked like that, or worse, when he made his demands of the women he treated as mere objects. He had been in an intelligence unit during the War and had gone on to become an informer. He knew a lot, and he managed or used that information for his own blackmailing purposes, that was the sordid story. Perhaps he had looked at my girlfriends in that way too, certainly one of them, when the two of them were alone in the car after he had dropped off all the other partygoers.
‘What exactly are you insinuating, young De Vere? Don’t tell me someone has come to you with these ancient slanders.’
‘Slanders? I don’t know what you mean, Jorge?’ I chose to call him by his first name so as momentarily to calm the situation. Or to assuage his Robert J. Wilke eyes, which were hard to bear.
‘Yes, slanders spread by Franco’s real hard-line supporters, who disapproved of what I was doing, I mean, the consideration I showed for my patients and my gradual withdrawal from the regime. They claimed I was being paid in kind for the favours I did. My pound of Red flesh, at least that was the running joke. What surprises me is that you should have heard it in 1980. It seems that nothing in this country ever ends or disappears, especially anything negative or harmful. Not to mention false. I can’t understand why you gave it any credence. You young people are so impressionable.’
I tried to play the innocent and not give too much away. I hadn’t heard those stories from Franco supporters, but from people whose lives those same supporters had made impossible, sometimes forcing them into exile; or from ordinary people like Celia and a suspicious Muriel or, indirectly, from that sometime actress, the love of Muriel’s life. I didn’t want to expose Vidal, of course, or his mentor Dr Naval, who had fled first Spain and then Chile. Van Vechten and he knew each other and had worked at the same clinic, although at different times.
‘I’m not insinuating anything, Doctor, nor do I have anything to do with any hard-line Franco supporters. I don’t know a single one.’ I addressed him by his title this time, in a friendly fashion, but I wanted him also to feel a certain coldness on my part. ‘I’m just remembering something you said to me once and making a few connections.’
‘What did I say? I’ve never said anything of the sort.’
‘You were speaking about women and how to get them into bed, Maestro,’ I said. We forget more of what comes out of our mouths than what enters our ears, and so he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘You said: “There’s nothing more satisfying than when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No.” And then you spoke about the resentment they feel because “the very first time, they had no choice”. That, more or less, is what you said. “Obliged”, you said. “But can’t say No”, you said.’ I repeated what he had said, underlined it. ‘What other interpretation could I give those words?’
The Doctor hesitated for a few seconds. In the light of what I had been told and what he had guessed, in the light of the vengeful rumours spread, according to him, by former comrades, those words sounded very bad, even though they had been spoken at a different time and in another context. He must have realized that they sounded almost like a confession, an acknowledgement, he must have seen them as ugly and besmirching. He recovered at once, however, and laughed out loud, all congeniality and good nature, revealing his healthy, dazzling teeth in all their glory, his protuberant chin gleaming.