'But people aren't all of a piece,' I said. 'It all depends on the circumstances, on what happens to turn up, people can change, they can get worse or better or stay the same. My father always says that if we hadn't gone through a war like our Civil War, most of the people who acted despicably during the War or afterwards, once it was over, would probably have led perfectly respectable lives, or lives, at least, that were relatively un-besmirched; and they would never have found out what they were capable of, fortunately for them and for their victims. My father, as you know, was one of the latter.'
'No, people aren't all of a piece, Jacobo, and your father is right. And no one is ever always this way or that, which of us hasn't seen some alarming or unexpected streak appear in someone we love (and then your whole world collapses); you must always remain alert and never imagine that anything is definitive; although there are some things on which there is no going back. And yet, and yet… it is also true that, right from the start, we see much more in others and in ourselves, much more than we think we do. As I said before, the biggest problem is that we don't usually want to see, we don't dare to. Almost no one really dares to look, still less to confess or tell themselves what they really see, because often it isn't very pleasant what one observes or glimpses with that undeluded gaze, with that profound gaze which, not content with penetrating every layer, keeps going beyond even the very last one. That, generally speaking, is how it is, both as regards others and oneself; and most people, in order to go on living with a degree of calm and confidence, need to delude themselves and to be slightly optimistic, and that's something I can understand, and something which, throughout the many days of my life, I have missed greatly, that calm and that confidence: it's harsh and unpleasant having to live in that knowledge and expecting nothing else. But that was precisely what the group suggested or proposed, finding out just what individuals, independent of their circumstances, would be capable of and thus being able to know today what face they would wear tomorrow, if I can put it like that: to know right now what their face would be like tomorrow; and, to use your or your father's words, to try and ascertain if a respectable life would have been respectable anyway or was only on loan to them because no opportunity to tarnish that life had yet presented itself, no serious threat of some indelible stain.' ('I still haven't asked him about the bloodstain,' I thought suddenly, 'the stain I cleaned up last night from the top of the stain'; but I immediately realised that this was not the moment, nor could I now see the stain so very clearly in my mind.) 'But that is knowable, because men carry their probabilities in their veins, and it's only a matter of time, temptation and circumstance before these, at last, lead those probabilities to their realisation. So it is knowable. You can get it wrong, of course, but more often than not you get it right. Besides, it still provides you with some sort of basis to work on, even though the main cornerstone is always something of a gamble.' ('He's right about that,' I thought, 'if another Civil War ever broke out in Spain, I have a pretty good idea who would come and shoot me – I cross my fingers and touch wood, or touch iron as the Italians say; I know who wouldn't think twice before putting a bullet in my brain, just as they did with my Uncle Alfonso. Too many friends have destroyed the trust I placed in them, and when someone is disloyal to you, they never forgive you for their having failed you; and – at least in my country – the greater the betrayal, the greater the offence committed by the betrayed, the greater the traitor's sense of grievance. When it comes to enemies, they are perhaps the one thing of which there has never been any shortage there, almost all us have a few.') 'What proved unexpectedly difficult was finding people who were able to see, interpret and apply that gaze with sufficient dispassion and serenity, without flailing blindly, or even half-blindly, about.' (Wheeler kept resorting more and more frequently to Spanish words and expressions, he doubtless enjoyed making these lightning visits to a language that he had few opportunities to speak any more.) 'Even then it was a rare gift, and it soon became clear that such people were far rarer than one might at first have thought, when the group was thrown together or created in that impromptu, ad hoc fashion, their initial, urgent mission (it later changed direction or broadened out) was to uncover, while the war still raged, not just spies and informers but also possible spies and informers of our own (I mean men and women who might be suitable for that purpose), as well as people who would prove easy or propitiatory prey for the former, the chatterboxes who could not resist temptation and who always showed an imprudent predisposition for talk; and that applied as much to our territory as to other places in the rearguard or places that were neutral, for there were spies and informers and dupes and blabbermouths everywhere, even, I can assure you, in Kingston, by which I mean Kingston, Jamaica, not Kingston-upon-Hull or Kingston-upon-Thames. And in Havana too, of course.' ('So the Caribbean meant Cuba and Jamaica,' I stopped to think for a moment, unable to avoid consciously registering the fact. 'What would they have sent Peter there to do?') 'At the time, an awful lot of British people had developed an inquisitorial spirit or a paranoid mentality or both, and their suspicious nature drove them to denounce almost anything that moved, to see Nazis in the mirror before realising they were looking at their own reflection, and so they were no use at all. Then there were the great distracted masses, who tend to see little and observe nothing and to distinguish still less, who seem to be permanently wearing tight earflaps over their ears and a blindfold over their eyes, or, at best, a mask with eye-slits that were very narrow or virtually stitched shut. Then there were the impetuous and the frivolous and the gung-ho, who were so eager to be involved in something useful and important (not all of them, poor things, were ill-intentioned), they would gaily come out with the first bit of nonsense that popped into their heads, so having them passing judgement was like throwing a dice, since their opinions lacked all validity and foundation. Then there were the many who, exactly as happens now, had a real aversion, no, more than that, a terror of the arbitrariness and possible unfairness of their own views: the sort who prefer never to declare themselves, hamstrung by the responsibility and by their invincible fear of making a mistake, the ones who anxiously asked themselves when confronted by a face: "And what if this man whom I believe to be honest and trustworthy turns out to be an enemy agent, and my incompetence leads to my own death and that of my compatriots?" "And what if this woman whom I consider to be suspicious and devious turns out to be entirely harmless and my hasty judgement leads to her ruin?" They couldn't even point us in the right direction. So, foolish though it may seem, it immediately became apparent that there wasn't much to choose from, not, at least, with any confidence. It was necessary to comb the country for recruits as quickly as possible, there were no more than twenty or twenty-five here in England, plus a few others where we happened to be, and we joined when we came back. Most were from the Secret Services, from the Army, a few from the former OIC, which you've probably never heard of Wheeler caught my blank look, 'the navy's Operational Intelligence Centre, there weren't many of them, but they were very good, possibly the best; and, of course, from our universities: they always turn to the studious and the sedentary when it comes to difficult, delicate tasks. It's almost unimaginable the debt they owe us
6ince the war, which is when they first began using us seriously, and they should have respected Blunt's immunity and their pact until the day he died, even until Judgement Day' ('We died at such a place,' I thought or quoted to myself), 'even if only out of gratitude and deference to the profession. Obviously we all had to get used to the job, and work to improve, refine and hone our gaze and attune our listening, practice is the only way to sharpen any sense, or gift, which comes to the same thing. We never had a name, they never called us anything, not during the war or afterwards. You can only convincingly deny or conceal the existence of something if it doesn't have a name; that's why you'll find nothing in books, not even in the really thoroughly researched ones, at most, hints, conjectures, intuitions, the odd isolated case, loose ends. It was better like that: we even wrote reports on the trustworthiness of the top brass, Guy Liddell, Sir David Petrie, Sir Stewart Menzies himself, and I think someone drew up a report on Churchill based on newsreels and which was, therefore, not entirely to be trusted. In a way, we placed ourselves above them all, it was an experiment in audacity. Of course, they never found out about our excesses, it was semi-clandestine. That's why it seems a grave mistake on Tupra's part, this tendency of his to speak in private (only amongst ourselves I trust, but that already constitutes a risk) of "interpreters of people" or "translators of lives" or "anticipators of histories" and suchlike; rather smugly too, given that he's in charge and is therefore including himself among them. Names, nicknames, sobriquets, aliases, euphemisms are quickly taken up and, before you know it, they've stuck, you find yourself always referring to things or people in the same way, and that soon becomes the name they're known by. And then there's no getting rid of it, or forgetting it.' ('And yet so many of us abandon even our own name.')