“Mysterious, disconcerting, brilliant, wise, strategist, romantic, writer, nonconformist, visionary, bold, deeply contradictory…” I read and reread like a feverish litany the words of the prologue of the biography of Richard Perceval Graves, the nephew of Robert Graves, under the vain illusion that they were referring to me, while I crossed the Retiro park in its sunniest part and with 35 degrees in the shade. “The Hidjaz sun does not burn, but it blackens and slowly consumes everything that submits to it, from men to stones,” I said to myself, putting myself in the shoes of TE Lawrence. It was like crossing the Nefuz desert and I didn’t have the slightest shame in taking out the bag I had brought from home to sign at the Madrid Book Fair (the initiative was very successful in Sant Jordi) and putting it on my back in order to protect myself from what was falling. “I won’t rest until they know I have Aqaba,” I whispered to cheer myself up. People looked at me as I passed by, as if asking for explanations or perhaps for me to leave my helmet, but I limited myself to a smile and uttered some heartfelt phrases from the David Lean film or from The seven pillars of wisdomwhich I also carried in case someone didn’t want me to sign my book, finished off with the inexcusable—if you wear a salacot—“Dr. Livingstone, I suppose.”
My participation, the first in my life, in the Retiro fair had begun under the best auspices. The Ave from Barcelona had taken a long time, of course, but this had allowed me to closely observe the stork nests on the catenary poles near Zaragoza, numerous birds of prey, a couple of roe deer and several rabbits and then, in the hotel room that the publisher had arranged for me, what seemed to me like nice welcome gifts worthy of Aurens’s arrival at the Feisal camp in the Wadi. Rum: a tray of pastries and the small volume of the aforementioned work by Richard Percival Graves (not to be confused with the wizard from Harry Potter) in a battered edition of Renfe and ABC from the Protagonists of the 20th Century collection. I looked in the corners to see if the tough Auda or the youngsters Farraj and Daud, the ill-fated Ageyl Bedouin servants of TE were there (both died; Farraj, dying, was shot dead so that the Turks would not take him alive and torture him; I prefer to remember them when he describes them as mischievous, painting colorfully a camel belonging to the governor Sheikh Yusuf). But there was no one, and the countless silences of the stars shamed us into insignificance.
In the same hotel I met friends who were also going to the Fair, among them Sergio del Molino and Santiago Posteguillo, who explained to me that he spends many hours with Cleopatra, preparing the new installment of his series of novels about Julius Caesar. I envied him, but anyway, I told myself, I travel with Lawrence of Arabia.
I arrived as best I could at the fairgrounds under the leaden sun, but not before stopping to see a beautiful real cock. (Green pic) that perhaps was a mirage, the first signing was from 12 to 2, an ideal time slot for Bedouins, at the Visor booth. They treated me very well, fanning me and bringing me back to life with long drinks of water and the gift of a beautiful anthology of Romanian poetry (Lucian Blaga: “My body falls at your feet / heavy as a dead bird”). They watched with some surprise as I displayed on the counter that the salacot had reserved for me, some talismans and some photos of my favorite heroes, explorers and adventurers, among them Count Almásy, who does not accompany me, but rather owns me, Custer, the hussar Lasalle, Colonel Proby of the Bengal Lancers and, of course, in the beautiful portrait painted by James McBey. I was ready to spend some time reading my biography of TE and the Romanians, when to my surprise people started showing up to get their signatures. All that was missing was the Bey of Deraa. Everyone was very kind and some even brought me gifts as if I were baby Jesus in the manger. I would have appreciated a lemon slushie or ice cream but a young man who stood before me handed me a small piece of rusty iron. I examined it so as not to appear ungrateful. Mmmm, wow, yes, how interesting. “It’s a piece of clip holding the rails of the Turkish railway from Medina to Damascus, which Lawrence attacked, on the Abu Na’am section,” the young man, Álvaro García Ruano, told me, while I rolled my eyes wide. “I found it myself,” he continued, explaining to me that he works on the Haramain, Mecca-Medina project, and that he sometimes goes to the dunes on the old, forgotten Turkish railway line to read fragments of The seven pillars of wisdom.
I had not yet recovered from the surprise when a visitor asked me to dedicate a copy to her husband, Enrique, who had not been able to come himself but sent me greetings and some photos he had taken in Antarctica, including one in February of a model of a sailboat (!) at the Spanish base in South Shetland and others of Whalers Bay and its cemetery on Deception Island, in addition to recommending that, if I had not already done so, I read the biography of Tom Crean’s Michael Smith, “the unsung hero”, who survived Scott, Shackleton and the First World War to open a pub in County Kerry and die in 1938 of appendicitis. I signed with a heartfelt reference to another Lawrence, this one of the ice, and inserted between the pages of the volume a photo of Scott and his attack party on the South Pole pulling the sleds.
Feeling refreshed, and after a break to eat and greet the friends of Desperta Ferro and Edhasa, who respectively gave me the wonderful monographic issue of their magazine dedicated to Odyssey, the first, and the very interesting book by Ignacio del Valle about Goering, the second, I went to the booth of the La lectora infiel bookstore, where a visitor gave me news from Formentera and told me that he had been a lifeguard for a season and had rescued two people on the Levante beach, apart from living intense evenings with Nacho Vidal at the Flipper. Then he appeared, bringing me two t-shirts, one from the SAS (Special Air Service), with the dagger and the wings, and another from the SOE (Special Operations Executive), with the knife and the parachute; Hardly anyone will dare to beat me at tennis with them. The author and archaeological travel guide from Pausanias also gave me an envelope with sand from Akhenaten’s tomb in Amarna and a small piece of stone that was not the bust of Nefertiti, although it moved me almost as much. But what especially touched my heart was a fragment of slate from the roof of Lawrence of Arabia’s birthplace in Tremadoc, Wales. It wasn’t that he climbed up to get it, he clarified, but that they were changing the cover and he took the opportunity to grab a piece.
It must be remembered that Lawrence was also a fetishist (among other things). When , Richard’s uncle and a good friend of TE, visited him in his rooms at a dormitory in Oxford where he had taken refuge in the 1920s, he noted that he had some good books, three Arabic prayer mats, the bell from the Tell el Shalim station and a little clay soldier he had taken from a child’s grave in Karkemish.
But with everything and so many visits and surprises (on Sunday in Sin Tarima a girl asked me to sign her The foreigner of Camus, confusing me with the author), the most emotional thing was the memory of her father that Teresa Jiménez Tostado left me. She arrived with her husband and, while she was signing for him, she asked me if by chance I had met Lieutenant Eduardo Jiménez Tostado. Of course! He was one of the two with whom Military Police Company Number 1 went to Congress. Tostado and his colleague Miguel Martínez García, known as the Smurfs because of their short height, were also dragged into that dark adventure without knowing where they were going. I remembered the lieutenant, with glasses and a tank cap, a man in whom the inherent severity of command was tempered by a certain bonhomie and even benevolence. Once, out of pity, he gave me an arrest that included losing a week of leave. The night of the coup he had a bad time: he was not at all an individual inclined to break the rules, let alone to revolt in a violent riot like that. Furthermore, he hit himself when his Land Rover collided with another unit vehicle on the way to the Cortes and between the blow and the Coup he walked as if stupefied, the poor thing. I found myself speaking well to her daughter, and even with affection, about the old soldier, in general a good person, although I always saw him dressed in khaki and carrying a gun. She explained to me that he had died a few years ago, that he had reached the rank of commander and that he always put his hands on his head when he remembered 23-F and what we experienced. That he was a soldier, of course, with his things, but a good father. His eyes moistened and we shared a strange moment of intimacy, both of us devoted to the nostalgia of our memories.
I left back to Barcelona loaded with experiences and various objects, like an old merchant from the Hariz clan. Settled in the train and while with one eye I watched our progress and that there were no Arabs with gelignite crouching next to the tracks, I randomly opened The seven pillars and I read, dozing off, with my duty fulfilled: “it was vast, resonant and almost divine, and the unfathomable silence of Azrak was soaked in the knowledge of wandering poets, of champions, of lost kingdoms, and of all the crime, chivalry and lost magnificence of Hira and Ghassan.”
