Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  Tomás Nevinson arrived at Blackwell’s at a quarter past ten, went straight up to the top floor and prepared to wait. There weren’t many other customers, since most undergraduates and dons would be at lectures. He found the poetry section and saw that there were plenty of second-hand copies of Eliot, but he decided to wait until half past before actually choosing a book and starting to leaf through it. He wandered around the spacious area, browsed a few other shelves and looked about him. He had no idea what Mr Tupra looked like, nor how old he was. In the history section, he noticed a fat man who kept taking books off the shelf, holding the spine at arm’s length as if he were very long-sighted, then putting them back without opening any of them, and he did this with extraordinary rapidity, as if he were checking they were in the right order, whatever that was, chronological or alphabetical by author. He saw a lecturer from Somerville College whom he knew by sight, as did the whole town, a woman as distinguished as she was curvaceous, with a full, sensual mouth that piqued the male imagination, and the kind of attractive figure not commonly found among women in her profession; all her heterosexual colleagues were mad for her, not that heterosexuals were necessarily the overwhelming majority in that university; she was looking at books on botany, which was perhaps her subject. He saw a skinny near-adolescent with a large nose, who was wearing a shabby raincoat that was too long for him, and whom he had seen before in other second-hand bookshops – Thornton’s, Titles, Sanders, Swift’s and even Waterfield’s, where Janet used to work – searching the scant shelves of fantastic literature or books on the supernatural, about which he was clearly as enthusiastic as he was about his dog, his constant companion, polite, silent and meek. He saw, too, a man in his twenties, who arrived at exactly half past ten, wearing a pinstripe suit with a double-breasted jacket, a red silk tie on a pale blue shirt with a white collar, and, over his arm, a brand-new raincoat; he looked like a minor functionary at an embassy or a ministry, someone who has recently been promoted and wishes to appear elegant, but instead looks rather absurd, precisely because he’s trying so hard to look elegant, when he lacks the necessary experience and poise, and is, besides, too young and too lacking in aplomb to have acquired either experience or poise, and would, at best, have to wait a few more years before he did. The pinstripe was too wide, the very loud variety one finds only in England, shouting from the rooftops his impatience to rise up the social ladder. None of those present – certainly not the lecturer from Somerville or the near-adolescent and his dog – looked as if they had been sent by Wheeler, nor as if they could help him in his hour of need; the fat man was too fat and too distracted, and the functionary too young and carnivalesque, to be considered resourceful types.

  Finally, at two minutes after half past ten, Tom went over to the poetry section, picked up a slender volume entitled Little Gidding, opened it and immediately began reading the occasional line while he waited, one or two or three or four, even though he was in no mood to really take it in:

  ‘And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead,’ he read, and, not really understanding this, moved on:

  ‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve … Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended.’ Then he skipped a couple of pages:

  ‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.’ He glanced to either side of him, but there was no one near; he did glimpse out of the corner of his eye the shapes of two new customers, but preferred not to look up and observe them openly.

  ‘And the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse.’ No, no one came. But it was still not too late.

  ‘… indifference which resembles the others as death resembles life, being between two lives …’ And there he paused to wonder: ‘Does death resemble life? Yes, Janet dead will resemble Janet when alive and will still be recognisable, but for how many more hours? Time continues to pass for corpses, and takes its toll on them far more quickly too, and they can tell you nothing, whereas the night before last, Janet told me what might save me today. But who did they ask to identify her? Because they didn’t make me go and see her.’

  ‘What we call the beginning is often the end,’ said another of those lines; he didn’t want to read on, he found it all rather glib, not realising that it probably wasn’t glib in 1942, when it was first published, and in time of war.

  ‘And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat or to an illegible stone.’ He stopped again to check that his bilingualism wasn’t leading him astray and also because of a sudden sense of foreboding: ‘block’ must be what in Spanish is called ‘tajo’, that is, the block or piece of wood on which the condemned meekly place their head so that the executioner can chop it off; and perhaps that – the block, the fire, the sea’s throat, the illegible or now indecipherable text – was what awaited him if that Mr Tupra didn’t turn up and get him out of this mess. ‘Things look really bad for you,’ Mr Southworth had warned him, ‘you’re the one in danger now.’ And still they came, the bad omens from that long poem of which he was reading only a few scattered ashes:

  ‘We die with the dying: see, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them.’ And infected by those words written in 1942 or before, Tomás thought confusedly: ‘It’s true that we do go with them, at least initially. We want to accompany them, to follow them into their dimension and along their path, which is already the past; we feel they are abandoning us, that they have set off on another adventure, and we are the ones left alone to continue along the dark path that is no longer of any interest to them and which they have deserted; and since we cannot follow or do not dare, we are reborn as toddlers taking a few hesitant steps, we are born again each time we survive someone close to us, each time someone falls and tugs at us to follow, but without succeeding in dragging us into the sea’s throat that has swallowed him or her. And I couldn’t have been any closer than I was the night before last, when I was inside a living being who is now dead, now irreversibly a ghost and a gradually fading memory for the rest of my short or long days, and to think I even wanted to go back inside her, imposing my will and my instinct. Perhaps that would have prevented her murder, and the man coming up the stairs wouldn’t have found her alone.’

  ‘History is a pattern of timeless moments,’ he read three lines further on. There were only a few lines left to the end, he had made only a pretence of reading, merely skimming the pages, skipping over far more than he actually read, but then that is what happens when you leaf through a book.

  ‘Quick now, here, now, always …’

  That was one of the last lines, and then he emerged from his reverie, looked up and discovered that there was not one, but two men, each of them leafing through a book by Eliot: the pinstriped man was holding To Criticize the Critic; another, whose arrival he hadn’t even noticed, was reading Ash Wednesday. Not wanting to turn and look at this new arrival directly, he moved away slightly in order to observe him more discreetly, albeit partially: he was a burly individual, wide and tall, much taller than either him or the vain young man, and wearing a duffel coat and, on his head, a beret identical to that worn by Field Marshal Montgomery, who was still alive at the time, and, like Montgomery, he wore it pulled slightly down on one side, although minus the military badges. He must have been an imitator or a fan to want to copy Montgomery’s uniform so exactly. He also sported a fairish moustache similar to that of the war hero, but there the resemblance ended: Montgomery of Alamein, as he was called when he was made a viscount, was a gaunt, bony man with a lined face, while this fellow was a veritable tower, given his height and girth and solidity, and his plump, firm, rosy cheeks. He hadn’t had the good manners to remove his beret despite being indoors and he seemed improbably absorbed in that other poem, Ash Wednesday (‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve,’ that line had stayed with Tom, as had various others). He was standing to Tom’s right, and the arrogant f
unctionary to Tom’s left (the latter might also have been a rather inept City gent trying to out-dapper other veteran City types), and they didn’t appear to be together, and Tomás wondered which one could be Mr Tupra, because it would be most unfortunate if a third bibliophile should have chosen that precise moment to read some Eliot. He decided to wait until one of the two spoke, since the other man would have no need to, and Tom was the only one who was unmistakably an undergraduate. However, half a minute passed without either of them speaking or making any sign at all. Ever more convinced that what has happened is unimportant, only what one decides or infers to have happened, ever more aware of the abyss he was walking towards (‘Any action is a step to the block, to the fire’) and that this Mr Tupra was, right now, all he had to hold on to, he lost patience and chose to turn towards the military-looking gentleman; after all, the letters in the names of the most famous secret services, MI5 and MI6, did stand for ‘Military Intelligence’. He closed his book and, in a whisper, shyly asked the massive Montgomery lookalike:

  ‘Mr Tupra, I presume?’

  With his left hand, the tower indicated the other man, the eternal aspirant to an elegance he would never achieve, and said coldly:

  ‘He’s there beside you, Nevinson, and has been for some time.’

  Tomás may have been very young, but he rather resented that man omitting the ‘Mr’ before his surname, given that it was the first time they had spoken, so a little respect would not have been out of place. He was even less pleased when he held out his hand to greet Mr Tupra and the latter made a contemptuous gesture as if he were ordering him to wait or telling him off, saying: ‘Not now, boy, can’t you see I’m busy with something else?’ He didn’t even turn to face him, and the respective reactions of those two strangers only increased Tom’s sense of dependency on them: they were treating him like a mere nuisance, like someone who has come looking for a job or to ask a big favour; that’s how you address subalterns, pupils or apprentices, by their surname. Tupra, who hadn’t even deigned to look at him and had left him with his hand in mid-air, was swaying gently back and forth on his heels, his hands behind his back, while he contemplated the lecturer from Somerville, who was still rummaging through the shelves, not in the botany section now, but among the art books: she was crouching down to inspect the lower shelves, and since skirts were much shorter than now, she revealed a large part of her voluptuous thighs encased in glittery tights, and this was what Tupra was so brazenly admiring, more like a foreigner – a Spaniard for example – than an Englishman. When Tom noticed this, he looked at the woman too, infected by Tupra’s lascivious gaze, and it seemed to him that the lecturer was not only perfectly aware of this, but was joining in the game, picking up huge, unmanageable volumes that made her skirt ride up still higher when she rested them on her sturdy thighs; and she kept shooting rapid sideways glances at that shamelessly gawping man. This was rather surprising, for as far as Tomás knew, the unusually curvaceous teacher treated her legion of suitors with great contempt, and was famously unapproachable; and yet there she was happily submitting (submitting at a distance, that is; or perhaps hypothetically) to the salacious eyes of this vulgar individual who was, besides, much shorter than her.

  Tomás looked at him while Tupra was looking at her. Tupra’s bulbous cranium was mitigated by a thick, curly head of hair, so curly that, at the temples, the curls were almost ringlets. His eyes were either blue or grey and adorned by overly long, thick lashes, which were feminine to the point of seeming false or painted. His pale eyes had a mocking quality, even if this were not his intention, for they were also rather warm or should I say appreciative, eyes that were never indifferent to what was there before them and which made anyone on whom they fell feel deserving of curiosity, as if they had a history worthy of being unearthed. Tomás Nevinson thought that anyone capable of such a gaze must already have it made; anyone who can focus so clearly and at the right height, namely, a man’s height; anyone who entraps or captures or, rather, absorbs the image before him, will probably prove irresistible to many women, regardless of class, profession, experience, beauty, age or degree of vanity. Even though this acquaintance of Wheeler’s was not exactly handsome and possibly used his boldness as his main asset, Tom had to admit that the overall image was, nevertheless, attractive, and imposed itself on certain features that might otherwise prove displeasing or even repellent to the objective eye: his rather coarse nose which looked as if it had once been broken by a blow or by several more since, the nose of someone who has been involved in fights since he was a child and has perhaps even practised boxing or handed out a few beatings and occasionally been on the receiving end himself; his disturbingly lustrous skin, which was the lovely golden colour of beer, a rare sight in England and suggestive of origins in southern Europe; his eyebrows like black smudges and with a tendency to grow together, although he probably plucked them now and then; and especially his overly soft and fleshy mouth, as lacking in consistency as it was over-endowed in breadth – Slavic lips which, when kissed, would give and spread like pliable, well-kneaded plasticine, or at least that’s how they would feel, with a touch like a sucker, a touch of always renewed and inextinguishable moistness. But nothing is so short-lived as the objective eye, and once it’s gone, nothing seems repellent, and you don’t even notice what, at first glance, seemed so displeasing. Besides, there would be no shortage of women whom that mouth would immediately please and inflame, for there are men who arouse primitive impulses and use this to seduce women effortlessly, without even having to try or work hard at it, as if all they had to do was exude a sexuality whose direct and elemental nature oozes insalubrity. Mr Tupra was young in years, but his insolent, resolute attitude indicated that he was, in fact, ageless or had spent centuries installed in one unchanging age, one of those individuals who must have had to grow up very early or who, having been born grown up, instantly understands the way of the world, or that darkly sinister part of the world he happened to be born into, and decided to skip childhood, considering it a waste of time and an education in weakness. He was not much older than Tomás, and yet it was as if he were his senior by a whole lifetime or two.

  ‘So,’ thought Tom, ‘he’s the kind of man capable of postponing or abandoning his tasks to spend a while ogling someone picked up by his antennae, or simply for the pleasure of looking.’ He waited patiently – or was it submissively – for Tupra to conclude his visual flirtation, but that only happened when the gorgeous lecturer from Somerville (Tom felt that she seemed to grow more gorgeous by the minute; some people’s lust can be transmitted like a disease) finally stood up, gracefully smoothed her skirt (when she was standing her skirt came to just above her knee, so it had ridden up an awful lot when she was crouching down, too much to have been purely accidental) and, clutching a book, began going down the stairs, because the cash tills were all on the ground floor. Tupra swiftly plucked from the poetry section the same slender volume Tomás had been leafing through, Little Gidding, and, still without greeting him or shaking his hand or even looking at him, he beckoned to him and Montgomery to follow, as if they were part of an entourage. ‘It’s just not going to happen,’ Tom thought. ‘This guy is going to do his own thing, and for who knows how long, and my presence and my problem won’t affect or trouble him at all; he’s going to buy that book just so that he reaches the till at the same time she does and then he’ll doubtless chat her up; let’s just hope they make a date for later on and he doesn’t leave me stranded, otherwise my problem will remain unresolved for yet another day, and, with each hour that passes, things will only get worse for me, and that policeman Morse, with his honest, sympathetic eyes, will come and arrest me.’ The Montgomery lookalike placed one iron hand on his shoulder and propelled him gently towards the stairs.

  ‘Come on, Nevinson, we’re off. Get moving.’

  Again that use of his surname. The order issued by the intermediary. Again he felt diminished and did as he was told, what else could he do, since he ha
d no one else, no one else to turn to. Once they reached the queue at the till, he saw Tupra place himself immediately behind the lecturer, without keeping the usual polite distance. He was standing so close to her that she must have felt his breath on the back of her neck, or even the edge of his jacket touching the seat of her skirt, for she, like him, was carrying her coat over her arm. Far from taking a step forward and thus avoiding such close proximity, the lecturer from Somerville remained where she was, waiting for the customers ahead of her to finish their business. Tom was astonished by the man’s skill, for not only did Tupra not provoke the rejection or mistrust of his chosen prey, she even subtly and wordlessly encouraged him; presumably those grey or blue eyes gave off such warm, all-enveloping signals that they did not, at first, offend or even intimidate, but rather invited the woman to lower her shield and take off her helmet, the more easily to be captivated by his gaze. Then Tupra made some remark about the book she was about to buy (Tomb Sculpture by Erwin Panofsky, Tomás read on the cover of that hefty tome, and he wondered what on earth that man could possibly have to say about it, a man who had doubtless been educated in billiard halls, steamy, crowded basements, gambling dens, bowling alleys, dog tracks and other even worse places in unimaginable parts of town; the book’s subtitle was Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini). Then he must have made a joke, because she laughed with rather less restraint than one might expect in such an erudite person (she really was very sensual, either that or the contagion was growing, the all-absorbing eyes infecting the eyes transfixed by that undisguised absorption). Tom could hear very little, for Tupra was addressing the woman in confidential tones, but he did hear them introducing themselves: ‘Ted Reresby, at your service,’ he said. ‘Carolyn Beckwith,’ she said. ‘Reresby?’ Tomás jumped mentally, then remembered that the tower had told him that this was, indeed, Mr Tupra. He deduced, therefore, that Tupra preferred not always to give his name, if, that is, the name mentioned by Wheeler was the real one. Perhaps he didn’t want to frighten off a possible cracker of a conquest with such a scandalously foreign surname, something that still provoked suspicion in England or condescension in certain snobbish circles. His accent and his diction, though, seemed to Tom irreproachable, with just a slight Oxbridge edge to it, which led him to suspect one of two things: Tupra had either passed through Oxford University, despite his pretentious garb, or else he, too, was an artist when it came to mimicry, a genius at adopting whatever accent he fancied.