‘I saw everything. Not exactly romantic, I must say.’ I added that last impertinent comment so that he would know I wasn’t bluffing. ‘It was pure chance. I just happened to look in. And there’s a particular corner …’ I wasn’t going to tell him the truth, nor that I had climbed a tree, although if I hadn’t done that, I doubt I would have seen his face. And then I returned to the important, revealing fact: ‘As I understand it, that place, the Sanctuary, is a branch office of Pinochet’s supporters. And you know who their allies are here in Madrid. I’m sure Muriel would like to know about those connections of yours, Doctor. And with good reason. So as to know where he stands.’
Van Vechten turned pale, finally understanding the intent behind my possible indiscretion. First, he came up with an excuse, then he got a grip on himself. First, he felt afraid, then he tried to make me afraid.
‘I’m just doing a favour for an old friend of mine, a priest, and he has absolutely nothing to do with politics. I’m not religious, but neither do I interfere with other people’s beliefs. Nor do I have to answer to a little squirt like you.’ That was when he recovered his sangfroid. He slithered over towards me, his great paw outstretched, doubtless intending to grab me again, though who knows where. However, before he could reach me, I leapt up and removed myself from the semicircle. The waiter shot us another glance. ‘I’m warning you, Juan, be careful what you say. There’s a good and a bad way of telling things and a good and a bad way of listening — and of understanding. So best not say anything, all right?’ And when I said nothing at all, but just stood there looking him up and down as if dumbstruck, he added: ‘Do you understand me, boy?’
I left no money on the table, he was much richer than me. That night’s odyssey was obviously not going to take place, unless he went alone.
‘Still doing people favours, eh, Doctor?’ I said as I was about to make for the bar’s revolving doors. ‘From 1939 until now. How very exhausting.’
X
When you’re impatient to see someone or to reveal what you’ve discovered, you also tend to put off the moment for as long as possible. Although only, of course, when you’re sure that sooner or later you’ll see the person and be able to tell them your story. If there’s any doubt about this, then haste takes over and things happen in a rush, usually with disappointing results, anticlimax and frustration. I could afford to postpone my encounter with Muriel, to prepare for it and savour it beforehand; to wait until that period of frenetic activity ended and he spent a little more time at home. Besides, during those febrile days, full of brief entrances and continual exits, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to force him to stop, to sit or lie down on the floor and then listen to me for a good long while, entirely against his will. (A prior period of boredom is vital to awakening curiosity and invention.) If, that is, he would agree to hear what I’d found out about Van Vechten, and I thought he would if I insisted and managed to intrigue him. I had to wait for him to calm down, for him to sort out the financing of this new, angrily urgent project or for him to give it up as impossible and resign himself to that for the moment and perhaps until after the summer. The delay suited me, since I was in no particular hurry, but was rather enjoying that pleasurably expectant, alert state of impatience when you feel absolutely certain that your impatience will finally be assuaged.
I had felt uncomfortable about not being upfront with the Doctor when I took him out with me at night in order to observe him and try to get him to open up about his past, and I felt equally ill at ease having to behave like an informer and denounce him and his now proven indecent behaviour to his friend, with all too foreseeable consequences. Many years had passed since his blackmailing activities, if that was true, of course: I had been very slightly persuaded by his explanation that these were slanders put about by his vengeful former franquista comrades, who felt betrayed by his clemency and lack of venom, because everything we are told leaves a faint mark and sows a tiny seed of doubt, which is why it’s not so very odd that sometimes, when we have already composed our own picture of events, we would prefer not to hear any more or to allow the accused to speak, so that he cannot gradually convince us of his innocence and the truth of his story. Yes, many years had passed and people do change and do repent, and they look at their past selves with a feeling of horror, but at the same time are unable to recognize that primitive self, as if they were gazing into a distorting mirror: ‘Was I that person? Did I do that? Was my former self so very bad? If so, there’s no way I can alter it. Guilt is stronger than my desire to make amends, guilt prevents me from even trying, and all I can hope for is that the guilt will pass or grow so old that its remnants will dissolve into the mists in which everything that has ever happened fades and vanishes, until its shape blurs and becomes indistinguishable: the good and the ambiguous, the contradictory and the bad, the crimes and the acts of heroism, the malevolence and the generosity, the honesty and the deceit, the never-ending rancour and the forgiveness finally wrested from the weary victim, the self-sacrifice, the promises made and the cunning acts of exploitation, all, in the end, will be greeted with an oblivious shrug of the shoulders by those who come afterwards and succeed us, preoccupied with their own passions, which are quite enough to cope with, indifferent to everything that happened before they trod the earth, where they will merely be superimposing their footprints on those of their infinite predecessors and peers, not knowing that they’re merely imitating them and that nothing is new under the sun, that everything is doomed to become confused and mingled and homogenized, to be forgotten and left to float on a repetitive magma of which, nevertheless, no one tires, or is it just that none of us has ever found the path that will lead us out?’ (That’s why history is full of Eduardo Muriels and Beatriz Nogueras, of Dr Van Vechtens and Professor Ricos, of Celias and Vidals and Juan de Veres and identical extras, determined, one after the other, to perform the same play and rewrite the same melodramatic plot. There’s nothing original about my character, nor, I suppose, about any of the others.) ‘But until that happens — and however brief a life, it will take a while — there is a terrible, hateful interlude that belongs to us alone, and during which we have no alternative but to cope with what we have done or omitted to do and to distract or placate our feelings of guilt, and sometimes the only way of achieving this is to increase that guilt, to heap up new guilt to cover the old, to overshadow or blur or minimize it, until finally all guilt has passed and there isn’t a soul in the world who can remember what we did, no quick, wicked tongue to talk about it, not even a tremulous finger to point us out as having been the cause of anything.’
I imagine there were various factors that overcame my natural and general reluctance to squeal on someone else. First, what I had learned was precisely what Muriel had asked me to find out and, as an unconditional admirer of his, I had wholeheartedly set about doing just that. Second, what Vidal had told me coincided all too closely with my boss’s suspicions: he had never been explicit about these, but had mentioned the possibility or rumour that Van Vechten had behaved indecently with a woman, or possibly more than one, as seemed to be the case (‘That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low’). Third, the Doctor’s actions had been so despicable that, once discovered, they deserved to be exposed. Not that anything would happen to him: there was no proof, it didn’t constitute a crime and, in Spain at the time, no one was in a mood to denounce anyone. The Amnesty Law had been passed, that is, an agreement had been reached according to which no one individual would begin an endless chain of accusations or bring out anyone else’s dirty linen, however filthy — murders, summary executions, betrayals provoked by envy or revenge, show trials, military tribunals condemning to life imprisonment or death civilians with little or no access to a lawyer (and that went on until the final, far milder years of the dictatorship): not even the crimes common to both sides during the War or those perpetrated afterwards by the winning side, which was free to continue soiling its own linen. It wasn’t just that there could be no judicial consequences for any abuse or crime, it was even frowned upon to talk about them in public or write about them in the press; as I mentioned, the few people who tried this were met with the instant disapproval not just of former Franco supporters who had a personal interest in the matter — in reality, there was nothing ‘former’ about them — but of anti-franquistas and committed democrats too: as Vidal had pointed out, it suited some people perfectly to have the slate wiped clean like that, so as to conceal their own remote pasts and polish up their less than immaculate biographies. It was decided rather too soon that all guilt was gone, that such ancient history should be left to dissolve into those blurring mists, as if a whole century had passed not just four or five years. I thought it likely that the Doctor’s misdemeanours would have been known by some in private, that they would at least have cost him one or, with luck, two precious friendships. Fourth, I was troubled now by that routine relationship between him and Beatriz Noguera, by those prosaic fucks at the Sanctuary; it wasn’t, I think, that I was jealous exactly — that would have been absurd when nothing between us had changed, certainly not on her part: the night spent in my cubbyhole must have been a mere caprice as far as she was concerned, or a remedy for insomnia, or perhaps a delirium she scarcely remembered or was unaware of the following day; she was, to use her own eloquent and simplified words, not always quite right in the head. But young men — or myself at the time — need to believe that every one of their experiences or actions is unique and all it takes is for something unthinkable — not to say impossible — to happen for them to embellish it in their memory and cleanse it of any ugly accretions, and Van Vechten was a vulgar and now very ugly accretion. And lastly, I had found his behaviour in Bar Chicote altogether disagreeable, unconvincing and evasive: he had begun by denying everything, then tried to make a joke of it, presenting himself as the victim of other people’s defamatory remarks, before becoming threatening and aggressive, planting one large hand on my shoulder, warning me that I could get hurt, calling me ‘boy’ and ‘little squirt’. As to his present-day links to and relationship with El Movimiento Apostólico de Darmstadt, he had not even attempted an explanation, indeed, had avoided doing so. In the light of all this, my desire to do him harm prevailed over my reluctance to squeal on him.