Vidal Secanell fell silent for a few moments, staring down at the table, wide-eyed, at the ashtrays used by Professor Rico and by me, for we had been smoking as we drank. He had spoken almost without pausing for breath, as if he himself had once heard such a speech, but even though he came from a family that had suffered reprisals, this seemed unlikely. I had always thought of his father, Vidal Zapater, a friend of my aunt and uncle, as being very well-off and as having a certain Mexican arrogance (quickly acquired), a man with no financial problems and not easily intimidated either — quite the opposite. His grandfather was a different matter, although Vidal, who was born in 1950 or ’51, would probably not have witnessed a scene like the one he had just enacted: parents then concealed everything from their children, especially the truly shameful things. Those were very different times: no one confessed to a humiliation, even if they had been repeatedly, horribly humiliated. Now there’s nothing more profitable than declaring yourself to be a victim, subjugated and downtrodden, and to whinge on about your own misfortunes. It’s odd that pride should have disappeared so completely, when, during the post-War years, those on the losing side were very proud indeed, and didn’t even talk about their dead or those in prison, as if doing so — even in private — were a dishonour in itself, almost a recognition, an acknowledgement of the side that had humiliated them and of their continued power to do harm. They didn’t keep quiet purely out of fear and so as not to refresh the memories of those who still had the capacity to inflict fear, to increase and augment it, but so as not to give their enemies that pleasure and not to have to bow their heads still lower by complaining.
‘And what were those conditions?’ I asked, in order to draw him out of that lost stare. ‘Although I can well imagine.’
Vidal was by nature more pragmatic than meditative, and so he quickly returned from his momentary absence.
‘You imagine quite rightly. The condition was that they could screw their women.’ He used that crude verb as if it were the one Arranz and Van Vechten would have used themselves, as he immediately confirmed. ‘That’s what they proposed, apparently, with no beating about the bush, no circumlocutions, no attempt at delicacy. And with no hypocrisy either, although, in the circumstances, I’m not sure that was a virtue. They’d screw the wives or, later on, an older daughter. They converted them into objects, into money, which wasn’t really that unusual at the time, I suppose, especially when one part of the population was so vulnerable. And they screwed them as often as they wanted and until they got bored. Always assuming they fancied the women, of course, found them desirable. If they didn’t, then those families might well be left with no medical care for their children, because, as I said, these were people with nothing, with no other way of paying. They might have a valuable painting they’d managed to hold on to, a bargueño desk they’d inherited, a few jewels or antiquarian books they’d kept, although, after three years of siege, it was unlikely they’d have anything left, most people had sold all their valuable possessions. And then, on top of all that, they had to agree not just to say nothing about the transaction, the blackmail, but actively to boost the doctors’ reputations and spread the word that, despite being friends of the regime, the two paediatricians were altruistic and compassionate, conciliatory and civilized, and treated their children for free. I don’t know about Arranz, although I imagine the same applies to him, but that arrangement has really helped Van Vechten socially. Well, you know how it is. It’s the same with all those professors, historians, novelists and painters who supported Franco and served him during the cruellest decades of his regime, and who, with passing time, once it was no longer dangerous, have declared themselves, nominally at least, to be left-wingers. And now they claim to have been lifelong dissidents, to have lived in exile, to have been censored. I find that Catalan painter, whatever his name is, particularly infuriating. And that ugly, bald philosopher who preaches about ethics and whose name I can’t remember either. Naval knows all about it, about what really happened, what each one did and said and where they were. And don’t, whatever you do, consider denouncing Van Vechten publicly, because the left-wingers would be the first to leap like lions to his defence and throw it back in your face, accusing you of trying to discredit and tarnish the reputation of one of their own — one of their own since the day before yesterday. Can you believe it? People who have always known which side their bread was buttered on, both in the 1940s and now.’
At the time, I wasn’t much interested in what he said; later on, I was, when it was too late to unmask anyone and, besides, who really wants to take on that role, even now, all these years after the War, after so many falsified biographies, embellished legends and deliberate or collective forgetting. Hardly anyone cares about all that now — certainly no one who’s semi-young — or only in an artificial, dubiously idealistic way; and hardly anyone else who’s alive today. The dead stop telling their stories once they are just that, dead.
‘And the women went along with it?’ I was much more interested in that part of what Vidal was telling me. Van Vechten couldn’t have submitted Beatriz to that kind of blackmaiclass="underline" she had got married in 1961 or ’62, and Muriel was a child during the War, and his anti-Francoism had always been more intellectual than active. But I couldn’t help thinking about her. Why would she go and see Dr Arranz, Van Vechten’s old sidekick, because it was probably him she visited in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, not Mollá or Deverne or Gekoski or Kociejowski. Perhaps it was merely a matter of habit: perhaps the two men continued to share women, even though the sex was now free and not some form of payment. And maybe Beatriz really didn’t care, like certain vengeful women who have grown weary of their woeful bed, so long as she herself didn’t have to go looking for the instrument of revenge, which can be very depressing.
Vidal rolled his eyes with their large Paul McCartney eyelids. I could see him thinking: ‘God, you’re naive.’
‘Of course they did, Juan, don’t you see? They had no choice. On the one hand, their husband or father could go straight to prison — if they were lucky — on the other hand, what mother wouldn’t do whatever it took; what mother wouldn’t see it as a blessing being able to call out a paediatrician, knowing that he would come at once whenever their child was burning up with fever or at death’s door? I’m afraid many would have been willing to do as much even without the threats. Mothers are prepared to do anything, they’re hostages to fortune, although there are always notable exceptions. Some might even have felt grateful … in a mechanical, reflex-reaction way. Having sex with the person who cures your children isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman, not from her point of view.’ — ‘And I can assure you most of them do want to do it’, the few revelatory words the Doctor had let slip on one of our nocturnal sorties came back to me. — ‘I assume they also counted on that, Van Vechten and Arranz, on the inevitable gratitude, the relief of seeing a sick child out of danger, the slow realization that he was safe. And, as time passed, on familiarity and habit. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they had planted a child in one or two of those families, if they didn’t get bored too soon and if they weren’t careful. And too bad if the child was born very blond and the theoretical father was very dark.’