Improv 2

Something very different: a portrait of a very nasty man. I was thinking in a vague way about the Argentine and Chilean colonels, but really I was just putting together everything that makes me shiver.


The interesting and, it has in retrospective to be admitted, the problematic thing about him was his hat. The rest of him, boots to shaven lip, bore the stamp of a good old-fashioned military education  - an appropriate metaphor, since he was very much to factory standards. His cheeks were pink, his hair was sleek. Many of the young women he seduced, as officers at his prestigious academy did in those days, swore when I interviewed them that he had singularly memorable eyes; but no two of them agreed exactly why. Were they frank and clear, or clouded and brooding? The photographs, of course, have no conclusive answer: he's always looking boldly at something outside the frame, never quite at the camera. All careful staged, of course, except the last few. And they're gruesome.

But yes, his hat. It was as neat and shiny as the rest of the ensemble, but there was something subtly off about the proportion. Where everything else was precisely to regulations, the high naval cap was a bit too high; the gold braid was rather too gold - blindingly so, when the southern sun was over the parade-ground. If he actually had it modified or done to commission - and there was nothing illegal about that, many officers did, mostly from wealthier families than his, of course  - he was very fastidious in destroying the evidence later on. Perhaps it simply began to stretch and shine when it was placed on his head - but such metaphysical speculation is not the job of the historian. The hat, in short, smacked of a wealthy industrialist's daughter who intends to end a duchess if she has to strangle somebody. It was a hat that thought itself born to be a crown.

Later, of course, he was officially entitled to a great many hats. But I talked to a man, the nearest thing he had to a confidante - who frankly deserves to be strung up slowly, but I won't deny that his testimony was very fascinating - who attests that his academy uniform was always his favourite. He wore it when seducing people - well, I suppose we can put that down to nostalgic sentiment - and, more significantly, when he rehearsed his speeches. He seems to have loved to cultivate an image of youth: a reverse side of his neurotic obsession with mortality.

He was a very eloquent speaker, there's no doubt about it: look at the films. They don't lose anything in recording: the whole thing was theatre, very carefully constructed, his language most of all. He approached his native language like a keen student of biology approached a frog, and no doubt he ended up quite an expert on it.