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“There is nothing cooler in this life than mixing fiction with reality. Or the other way around, heh, heh, heh”: Esteban Carlos Mejía
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto – William Perugini
Everyone in London looks like spies from Babel. All and all, indeed. For example, you get on the second floor of a bus on line 88 or 24 and at the same time you hear people speaking in English, Arabic, Italian, French, Spanish, Vietnamese or Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese. A sensational hodgepodge. And people understand each other. And he laughs. And experience the beginning of autumn as if it were the end of the already distant spring. As in Manhattan Transferthe novel by John Dos Passos from a hundred years ago, oh, distance, oh, present.
It makes you want to go for a walk, even if the thermometer reads 12 degrees Celsius or a cacreca drizzle makes your jacket wet. There are thousands of maple leaves on platforms and sidewalks, on streets or bridges, not thousands, millions, ocher and brown on the ground, ragged greens on the trees with strict shade. In Westminster almost everything is majestic, imperial, solemn: the buildings, the abbeys, the clocks, the parks, the drunks, the statues, from Churchill to Admiral Horatio Nelson in Trafalgar Square. As you move towards the suburbs, majesty gives way to mediocrity, equally solid, beautiful or electrifying.
Wanting to know myself, I searched on Google Maps for the route to go to the SIS building, Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, sometimes confused with a non-existent M16, headquarters of James Bond, George Smiley and other Crown spies. British: a gigantic mass of glass, concrete and marble on the banks of the River Thames. It is supposed to be the headquarters of UK espionage and counter-espionage. It has about 24,000 square meters, seventy rooftops, numerous underground floors, tunnels and bunkers. Getting in is not easy; go out, much less.
That’s why I got caught up in other news. The Tate Britain gallery, a monumental riot of artistic splendor, The British Museum, Regent St. with its hustling pedestrians and its dozens of fantasy stores and its cafes and its splendid bicentennial architecture. The Imperial War Museum, where, among devices of death and war, stands out Gassedfrom 1919, the portentous, shocking and sorrowful painting by John Singer Sargent, a painter’s painter, in my opinion, anticipated pictorial expression of a fable1954, William Faulkner’s first novel.
Since I did not go to the MI6 headquarters, I was left without knowing if in any of their basements are the plans for the electric vacuum cleaner that Jim Wormold, Our man in Havanarecruited by Her Majesty Elizabeth II’s secret service under the number 59200/5, sold a map of an alleged Soviet military installation in Cuba to Henry Hawthorne, a clueless British spy, in the hilarious and citrusy novel by Graham Greene, published in 1958, long before the missile crisis.
And I also couldn’t find out if some ancient showcase kept the enigmas of George Smiley, John Le Carré’s brilliant spy, who among other feats managed to unmask in The mole (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), 1974to the Soviet infiltrator at the top of the Circus, a very nice joke for the SIS of that time, a novel based on the “Cambridge Five Traitors”, who under the command of Kim Philby, bloody bastarddirected Military Intelligence, Section 6 for more than thirteen years until their escape to Moscow in 1963.
Rabito: Nothing more cool in this life than mixing fiction with reality. Or the other way around, hee hee hee.
tail: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to see the world” The honorable schoolboy. John Le Carré.1977.
