That's how it is and will always be, Tupra more or less said as much to me on one occasion, and Wheeler said so quite clearly the following morning and over lunch. And if Tupra said it less clearly it was doubtless because he would never talk about such things or use words like 'distrust', 'friendship', 'enmity' or 'trust', at least not seriously, not in relation to himself, as if none of those words could apply to him or touch him or have any place in his experiences. 'It's the way of the world,' he would say sometimes, as if that really was all one could say on the subject, and as if everything else were mere ornament and possibly unnecessary torment. I don't think he expected anything, either loyalty or treachery, and if he came across one or the other, he didn't seem particularly surprised, nor did he take any precautions other than sensible practical ones. He didn't expect admiration or affection, but neither did he expect ill will or malice, even though he knew full well that the earth is infested with both the former and the latter, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because these are the fuse and the fuel for their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they do not require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, neither gratitude nor insult, or at least not always, according to Wheeler, who was more explicit: 'they carry their probabilities in their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment'.
So I never knew if I ever did win Tupra's trust, nor if I lost it or when, perhaps there was no one moment for either of those two phases or changes of mind, or perhaps one could not have given it a name, or not those names, of winning or losing. He didn't talk about such things, in fact, there was almost nothing about which he did speak clearly and directly, and had it not been for Wheeler's preliminary explanations on that Sunday in Oxford, it is quite possible that I would have known nothing either precise or imprecise about my duties, and that I would not even have guessed at their sense or their object. Not, of course, that I ever knew or understood this entirely: what was done with my rulings or reports or impressions, for whom they were ultimately intended or what purpose they served exactly, what consequences they would bring or, indeed, if they had any consequences, or belonged, on the contrary, to that category of task and activity which certain organisations and institutions carry out simply because they always have, and because no one can remember why these things were done in the first place or cares to question why they should continue. Sometimes I thought perhaps they simply filed them away, just in case. A strange expression, but one which justifies everything: just in case. Even the most absurd things. I don't think it happens any more, but any traveller visiting the United States used to be asked whether he or she had any intention of making an attempt on the life of the American President. As you can imagine, no one ever replied in the affirmative – it was a declaration made under oath – unless they wanted to make a joke, which could prove very costly on that stern, uncompromising border – least of all the hypothetical assassin or jackal who had disembarked with precisely that aim or mission in mind. The thinking behind this absurd question was, it seems, that should a foreigner take it into his or her head to assassinate Eisenhower or Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Nixon, then perjury could be added to the main charge; in other words, they asked the question in order to catch people out – just in case. I never understood, however, the relevance or advantage of that extra aggravating factor when used against someone accused of bumping off or trying to bump off the highest-ranking person in the land, a crime which would, one imagines, be of a gravity difficult to surpass. But that is the way with things that are done just in case. They anticipate the most unlikely and improbable events and are drawn up on that basis, and almost always in vain, since those events almost never happen. They perform fruitless or superfluous tasks that probably never serve any purpose or are never even used, they are based on eventualities and imaginings and hypotheses, on nothing, on the non-existent, on what never happens and has never happened. Just in case.
Initially, I was summoned three times in the short space of about ten days to act as interpreter, although they doubtless could have used others paid by the hour or some semipermanent member of staff like Pérez Nuix, the young woman whom I met later on. On two of those occasions I barely had to do anything, for the two Chileans and the three Mexicans with whom Tupra and his subordinate Mulryan shared two rapid lunches – all five were dull men engaged on dull business, vaguely diplomatic, vaguely legislative and parliamentary – spoke reasonable, utilitarian English, and my presence in the restaurant was only necessary to clear up the occasional lexical doubt and so that the final terms of the draft agreements they apparently reached were clear to both parties and left no room for subsequent misunderstandings, voluntary or involuntary. In fact, all I had to do was to summarise. I didn't understand much of what they were talking about, as happens in any language when I'm not really interested in what my ears are hearing. I mean that while I did, of course, understand the words and the phrases and had no problem converting them and reproducing them and transmitting them too, I understood neither the subjects discussed nor their respective backgrounds, they simply didn't interest me.