‘What do you mean “in kind”, given that those families had little or nothing?’
‘They had a past. They had secrets and they had women, Juan. That was quite enough,’ said Vidal, and when he said this, a mist seemed to wrap about him, a mist of distaste, bitterness and long-postponed resentment, a resentment that would have to continue to be postponed, possibly for ever; he was exhaling that mist now, in private and almost in a whisper, as happens with very personal stories, which are the vast majority, and it’s quite something to hear them at all, even in a whisper: very little is made public, little of what is of any interest, little of what people would like to know, we being so focused on our own lives, our own affairs, without much thought for others. Sometimes we do listen distractedly and with superficial curiosity or out of deference, but the affairs of others are never comparable to our own. Even if what is happening to them is desperate, sheer torment and what is happening to us is a passing petty triviality.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, but that wasn’t really true. I was beginning to understand quite a lot or to piece things together and to imagine. Not only based on what Muriel had said to me before he changed his mind, but also on what Van Vechten himself had let slip on our nocturnal sorties, and the way he had behaved with my girlfriends (I suddenly wondered what he could have used to blackmail them), and on what I’d been told by the high-up civil servant with the glossy legs, Celia, about the time she went to him as a patient.
‘Well, Van Vechten enlisted in Franco’s army and stayed there throughout the War. He was very young at the time, he was born in 1918 or 1919, if I’m not mistaken. Apparently, when war broke out, he was at his parents’ summer place in Ávila.’ — Van Vechten’s once-Flemish family, I recalled, came from Arévalo. — ‘When the university was closed, he had already completed the first two years of a medical degree. As a university student, he was rapidly promoted to Acting Second Lieutenant. But I don’t think he ever actually fought in the War. He was very young and thanks to the influence of his family, who were extremely right wing and well connected, he was immediately assigned to an intelligence unit, so he wouldn’t have to risk his skin at the front. I’m not sure if he met Arranz there or later, it doesn’t matter, perhaps they met at the so-called “Patriotic Exams” in 1940.’ He made that awful gesture imported from America that people use to indicate quotation marks. I had no idea what those exams were, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. ‘He began collecting and filing away all the information he was given, some of which was passed to him by fifth columnists in Madrid when they could, or by others taking refuge in embassies and who received news from the outside world, and while some of this information was reliable, some of it was complete fantasy or a distortion of the facts. Much of that information was useless as long as Madrid remained in Republican hands, but would prove invaluable when the capital finally fell. He was one of the people in charge of storing, selecting and ordering this information, and as soon as the city surrendered, he was able to do this unimpeded, all obstacles removed, and there was no shortage of the stuff either, because here, as everywhere, volunteers came crawling out of the woodwork to tell what had happened during the nearly three years of the War, both the true and the false, the population being eager to ingratiate itself and make amends. That’s how he came to find out what numerous individuals had done and said; some had committed atrocities, others were merely sympathetic to the Republic or readers of a certain newspaper. The usual story of indiscriminate accusations. In short, when the War ended, Van Vechten was a man who knew a lot about a lot of people and, besides, it was easy enough to invent facts if you wanted to harm someone. If you could prove your loyalty to the regime, there was no need to provide proof of someone’s misdemeanours; with very rare exceptions, an accusation was all it took. He collaborated with the police as necessary, giving them enough useful tip-offs for them to respect and believe him. Once the most urgent cleansing was done, I suppose he realized he could make use of his knowledge, long-term and for his own benefit, if he rationed it out. He went back to university and decided to specialize in paediatrics, and from then on it was plain sailing. In those “Patriotic or State Exams” in 1940’ — Vidal again made the quotation-mark gesture presumably acquired during his time in Houston — ‘after the university reopened in the autumn of 1939, those who had fought on the winning side and had, therefore, supported the Glorious Nationalist Movement, were given the “Patriotic Pass” for any exams they attended wearing their army uniform, some complete with cartridge belt and pistol. I learned all this from Dr Naval, who’s about the same age as Van Vechten, maybe a couple of years younger, and who sat it out in Spain for a while until he was offered a post abroad and could leave thanks to a relative of his in the diplomatic service, who got him a passport. That’s apparently how things worked, although nowadays it sounds like a bad melodrama or a caricature. Naval laughed a bit when he told me, imagining Van Vechten all got up in his second lieutenant’s uniform for the exam, but, he thought, probably without his pistol, Van Vechten was canny enough even then to avoid such swaggering behaviour. Anyway, they gave him his degree, deeming him to have completed his studies.’
Vidal stopped speaking and took a long drink of his new and as yet untouched beer, and to give him more breathing space, rather than because I had anything to say that he didn’t already know, or so I assumed, I said: