Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  It made no sense to tell a complete stranger what had happened, over the phone and in my limited English. Plus I didn’t know who this Ted Reresby fellow was. Tomás had mentioned him a couple of times, but I don’t recall him explaining who he was or else I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t know if they were friends or merely colleagues, nor who was under orders from whom. Or his name may simply have cropped up in conversation with another person.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet. It’s something I need to speak to Tom about first.’

  ‘I do advise you, though, to talk to the embassy, Mrs Nevinson. It would be easier to help you from Madrid, if you need help, that is. Would you like me to get in touch with them? I can call them from here.’ I remained silent for a few seconds, somewhat bemused by such solicitude. ‘Please, tell me, are you all right? You have a little boy, don’t you? Is he all right?’

  The truth is that I was all right and so was Guillermo. We didn’t need immediate help, that wasn’t the problem; I had needed help that morning, but not now. That morning I’d needed a lot of help, I’d come within an inch of seeing my son set alight. ‘And any action is a step to the block, to the fire.’ I’d heard Tomás repeat that line sometimes, from a poem he knew by heart and which he murmured to himself in English. Perhaps it could wait, it would have to. There was no point now in speaking to that man Reresby about the Kindeláns and the way they’d wormed their way into my life, about the Zippo lighter and the lighter fuel, about their accusations, their suspicions about Tomás. If he was somewhere near Berlin, that meant he wasn’t in Ireland or in Northern Ireland, and so couldn’t be inflicting damage on that country. Always assuming this man was telling me the truth.

  ‘Yes, we’re both fine now, that’s not the problem.’

  ‘Now? But you weren’t before?’ I said nothing, it bothered me that he should be so alert to every word I uttered, and then he changed tack: ‘Will you allow me one question, or rather two? If, that is, I’m not being indiscreet. Is this a personal matter or to do with Tom’s work? The reason why you want to speak to him so urgently, I mean.’

  I found this question odd coming from a complete stranger, an Englishman to boot, because in those days, the English still tended to be rather reserved. My urgent need could have been a mere whim, I might simply have been missing Tomás, or suffered a long-distance attack of jealousy or uncertainty or felt an urgent desire to hear his voice.

  ‘I really don’t think that’s relevant, Mr Reresby,’ I answered, a polite way of telling him it was none of his business. ‘If I can’t speak to him, I can’t speak to him. I’ll do so when he returns. When he’s not incommunicado. When he’s not forbidden from knowing anything about his wife and child. It’s strange that he didn’t warn me he’d be out of contact, and for several days too.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, excusing himself and ignoring my last remarks, my near-reproaches. ‘I was only asking because, in the latter case, I might have been able to be of assistance.’

  I didn’t insist.

  ‘And your other question?’ I was tired of straining my ears to understand him. I was beginning to grow impatient and to think that the Kindeláns were perhaps right, that Tomás didn’t work for the Foreign Office and I wasn’t speaking to anyone from that ministry, but someone from MI6.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Mere curiosity. According to the telephonist, you asked for me first, then for Mr Dundas, Mr Ure, Mr Montgomery and Mr Gathorne. May I ask where you got those names from? As I say, it’s mere curiosity. Mr Gathorne and I do exist, but the others don’t. Not here, that is. Although I imagine they do in some other part of the United Kingdom.’ He intended this last remark as a joke, but I was in no mood to laugh at his jokes, even out of politeness.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘They’re names my husband has mentioned occasionally. The telephonist didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me where he was, and so I thought one of you might be able to inform me, as has proved to be the case. Mr Reresby, tell me, I am speaking to the Foreign Office, aren’t I?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Reresby. ‘Forgive me for not having made that clear when I introduced myself. I assumed you knew. Who did you think you were phoning?’

  ‘Why, the Foreign Office, of course. Anyway, many thanks for returning my call, Mr Reresby, you’ve been most kind. At least I know now where Tom is and that I’ll have to wait for a few more days.’

  ‘It might be longer than that, Mrs Nevinson, it might be longer.’

  ‘Fine. But do tell him that I need to speak with him as soon as possible. Tell him, please, if you have the chance.’

  And with that, I brought the conversation to a close. Yes, I would have to wait. I would have to wait for him to come back from those secret negotiations in Berlin. And then I realised that Reresby had said ‘near Berlin’, not ‘in Berlin’. Maybe I was ill-informed, but it occurred to me that near Berlin – that is, outside West Berlin – there was only Communist Germany, East Germany, the DDR. That is why, or so I thought, you could only reach West Berlin by air, or perhaps there was some kind of cross-border corridor, where cars couldn’t stop or leave. How then was it possible for Tomás to be ‘near Berlin’? Like the other so-called Iron Curtain countries, the German Democratic Republic was pretty much hermetically sealed, with barely any dealings with the West. But for all I knew there was contact at a diplomatic or governmental level. ‘Or some other kind of contact,’ I thought. ‘Some still more under-the-counter, secret contact.’ It seemed very strange to me that Tomás hadn’t warned me that he was going there, and that I wouldn’t be allowed to contact him.

  The following morning, I phoned the Irish embassy in Madrid and asked to speak to Don Miguel Ruiz Kindelán. I risked being put through to him, and the last thing I wanted was to hear his jokey and now odious voice, but I could always put the phone down without saying a word. Or give them a false name if they asked: ‘Who’s speaking?’ In the end, I didn’t need to, because a woman with an excellent Spanish accent told me that no one of that name worked there. I asked if he had perhaps worked there before, because I was under the impression that he was about to be transferred, which might be why he didn’t appear on the current list of personnel.

  ‘No, there’s never been anyone of that name here, señorita. Nor anyone with a name remotely like that.’ My voice and my tone must have sounded rather youthful to her, hence the ‘señorita’. Then I asked about Mary Kate O’Riada, and I pronounced the surname in both Spanish and Irish fashion, just in case. ‘No,’ came the response. ‘Who told you these people worked at the embassy?’

  ‘They did,’ I said, with a candour born of my bewilderment.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid they were having you on, señorita. We’ve never had anyone at the embassy called O’Riada or Ruiz Kindelán. Like General Kindelán, I suppose. They were obviously trying to impress you.’

  Then I phoned Jack Nevinson, my father-in-law. I didn’t usually tell him or his wife, Mercedes, about my friendships or what I got up to: a hangover from adolescence, for like other members of my generation, I preferred to keep quiet, keen to protect my own little world. I’d told them nothing about the Kindeláns, but now I asked if he’d heard of them, if he had any idea who they were.

  ‘No, I’ve never heard of them,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I just happened to meet them and was curious.’ The first person to know what had happened had to be Tomás, I didn’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily or put my foot in it: as far as they were concerned, I imagined, Tomás did what he did, and that was that.

  I even dared to approach Walter Starkie, despite his advanced age. He knew everyone in the diplomatic world and in various other worlds too; over the decades, he had met everyone, and, besides, had an extraordinary memory. His answer was the same though:

  ‘No, dear Berta, I’ve never heard those names before.’ And he didn’t even ask me why I wanted to know.

  ‘How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our
natural state,’ I thought in the days and weeks that followed, while I waited patiently for Tomás to give some sign of life, or to turn up in Madrid without warning. Whenever I heard footsteps on the stairs or the lift coming up, I was filled by the unjustified hope that it was him, that he had decided not to phone, but to come home straight away to see me, to see our son and me, once he’d returned from his mission, perhaps, who knows, alerted to my anxieties by Reresby and coming direct from Berlin. ‘We know nothing of what we’re not told, nor of what we’re told either. We have a tendency to accept the latter, to assume that people tell the truth, and we give it very little thought and don’t bother to doubt it; life would be unliveable if we did, if we questioned even the most trivial statements, why should anyone lie about their name, their job, their profession, where they come from, their tastes and habits, about the vast amount of information we all blithely exchange, often without being asked to, without anyone showing the slightest inclination to find out who we are or what we do or how we are, we nearly all tell more than we need to, or, worse, impose on others facts and stories they don’t care about in the least, and we assume a curiosity that doesn’t exist, why should anyone be curious about me, about you, about him, very few people would miss us were we to disappear, still less wonder about us. “No, I don’t know what happened to that woman,” they’ll say. “She had a little boy, she lived here for a while, and although her husband was only at home intermittently, but more often than not away, she was always around. She must have moved, on her own or the two of them together, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d separated, she always seemed rather solitary in a way, but always much happier when he came back. But the child is sure to have gone with her, that’s what usually happens.” Yes, we believe what we’re told, that’s the norm, and yet Tomás might not be what he told me he is and might not be where he tells me he is, and those names I remembered hearing him mention – although quite when, I don’t recall – don’t exist, Dundas, Ure and Montgomery don’t exist at the Foreign Office, whereas Reresby does, although who knows if what he told me is true, I have no idea if Tomás is in West Germany or East Germany or neither, if he’s in Belfast or some other place; the Kindeláns have never been seen at the Irish embassy and so they won’t be about to be transferred to Ankara or Rome or Turin, that’s all a fiction, and it’s more than likely that they’re not even called O’Riada or O’Reidy or Ruiz Kindelán, or Miguel or Mary Kate, they would have chosen those surnames because they were famous and sounded good, after that musician I’d never heard of and after that Francoist general and aviator.’ She probably was Irish or Northern Irish, possibly a member of the IRA; it’s odd, though, that she should speak Spanish so well, although that organisation must have collaborators and supporters in many places, certainly in fanatical Catholic countries, as mine still was at the time. But him? Perhaps he belonged to ETA or had close links to it, for, as we now know, the two groups were in contact and helped each other; a member of ETA who, at the same time, had perfect English, there can’t be many of those, if any; perhaps he really was bilingual, half-Basque and half-Irish. He was an educated, knowledgeable man, so perhaps he was a priest, the Church had a lot to do with the creation, protection, rise and impunity of those terrorist groups. Or perhaps he was half-American, because the States used to send a lot of money to the IRA.

  ‘How easy it is to know nothing, how easy simply to grope one’s way forward, how easy to be deceived, let alone to lie, an action entirely devoid of merit and available to any fool, it’s odd how liars believe themselves to be intelligent and skilful, when lying takes no skill at all. Anything we’re told could as easily prove to be utterly decisive or a matter of complete indifference, either innocuous or crucial, either something that affects our whole existence or barely impinges on it. We can live in continual error, believing that we have a comprehensible, stable, graspable life only to find that everything is uncertain, murky, unmanageable, with no firm foundations; or a complete façade, as if we found ourselves in the theatre convinced we were in the real world, not realising that the lights have gone down, the curtain has gone up and that we’re on stage, not in the audience, or on a cinema screen, unable to escape, trapped in a film and forced to repeat ourselves with each new showing, transformed into celluloid and incapable of changing the facts, the plot, the shots, the angle or the light, or the story that someone else has decided will always be the same. You realise in your own life that some things are as irreversible as a story already seen or read, already told; things that lead us down a path from which we cannot stray or on which we can, at best, allow ourselves to improvise, perhaps a gesture or a wink that goes unnoticed; a path we must follow even if we intend to escape, because although we may not have chosen it, we are on that path and it conditions our every move, our every poisoned step, regardless of whether we follow it faithfully or run away from it. The truth is, we walk that path against our beliefs and against our will, someone has placed us there and, in my case, that someone is my husband, the man I’ve loved for years and to whom I’ve bound my existence for ever – or so I thought – and that someone is Tomás.’

  During those days and weeks of waiting, I felt as if I were in the middle of a dense mist, constantly conjecturing, alternating between optimism and the deepest pessimism, thinking, in effect, that anything was possible: that Tomás was himself, whatever that meant, and the Kindeláns were wrong; or that Tomás had lied to me from the start and led a life that was so different and so secret that he even had to hide it from me. I felt so oppressed by this constant back and forth that I would repeat to myself another of those lines that Tomás would sometimes recite distractedly, for example when he was shaving, or else he would sing or murmur one of those lines he had by heart, and which were many and long, I wasn’t sure if they were all from the same poem or the same poet, but I knew that some were by Eliot, whom he often read, out loud sometimes and at top speed, I would have to ask him about this when I saw him again, although who knows when that would be. That line resonated in me now: ‘This is the death of air’. And it wasn’t as if I myself lacked air, it was something far worse; it was as if there were no air anywhere, as if there were no more air left in the universe and it had ceased to exist. And after a few more lines which I didn’t understand and so didn’t remember, Tomás would add: ‘This is the death of earth’. Then, a few lines later came the condemnation of the other two elements: ‘This is the death of water and fire’. If only the fire had been dead on the morning of the Zippo lighter and the lighter fuel. But the one line that kept going round and round in my head was that first one, ‘This is the death of air’.

  And yet I knew, despite all these speculations and uncertainties, despite the hope that I was wrong, despite the necessary doubts that allowed me to pass from one day to another and to live, what the Kindeláns had suggested and suspected explained far too many things for it not to be true. It explained the change in Tomás’s character and his volatile moods, ever since he’d finished his studies. And his difficulty in sleeping and his nervousness or the depression that only increased when it came nearer to the time for one of his sojourns in London. It explained why, in such a short time, he had become so much older than me, even though he was the same age, explained how he had aged mentally, explained his occasional silences; the way he made love to me during the night or in the small hours when he couldn’t sleep, as if I were a receptacle for his accumulated mental tensions or the wretched fate that had already been drawn up and deciphered and read, and which he hoped to slough off momentarily, agitating and emptying his body, thus for a few minutes – or seconds for a man – allowing body to prevail over mind, as usually only happens with illness and pain, and, of course – as in this case – with pleasure. It explained his lack of curiosity about the future, his indifference regarding tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or a year from now, his scepticism about the unexpected, as if the unexpected could no longer happen, not to him. It also explained in part
what he had said to me once, shortly before we married: ‘You’re one of the few things that isn’t obligatory, that I’ve been able to choose freely. In other respects, I have a sense that the die is cast, as if I hadn’t so much chosen as been chosen. You’re the one thing that is truly mine, the only thing I know I myself wanted.’ The years have passed and I still treasure those words, perhaps because there have been so few that were so explicit, so treasurable. I had stored away only their flattering aspect, as if they were exclusively a declaration of conviction, reaffirmation, exception and love. Now I realise that there was much more to them, there was, above all, a comparison. I had seen this at the time, it’s true, but had brushed it aside, we tend to preserve the meanings that favour us and to dismiss or tone down others, especially in our memory and in echo and repetition.

  If Tomás was subject to military discipline, he might, even then, have had the feeling that the die was cast, that in his future life there would be scant room for surprises, that he would always be obliged to obey orders and carry out whatever missions they charged him with, and that he wouldn’t have the freedom to choose. Whenever he returned to England he would be at the disposal of his superiors on the ground, with no possible postponement, no mediation, and that could easily make him depressed or get on his nerves, and keep him from sleeping. The worst imaginable thing is never being able to say no, or even to discuss or reason or argue, having to obey whatever someone of a higher rank orders you to do, even things you disapprove of or find repugnant, having to swallow down the disgusting wine another person gives you to drink. This, to a greater or lesser extent, is what happens to us all, whatever our role in life, from cradle to grave: there is almost always someone over us telling us what we have to do, someone we cannot contradict, but in a military organisation everything is more marked, the hierarchies are more visible and are the basis of everything. That diabolical couple were right, MI5 and MI6 weren’t dependent on the Foreign Office or the Home Office, but on the army, although its members probably – or, rather, certainly – never donned a uniform. But if the Kindeláns were right and Tomás was working for the Secret Service, there must have been agreement and acceptance on his part, and, I imagined, he could also withdraw, step aside. Of course, according to Kindelán: ‘They usually come out either mad or dead. And those who aren’t brought to justice and don’t go entirely mad, end up not knowing who they are.’ How had Tomás got involved in all that, assuming he was involved? And what was the meaning of the enigmatic phrase among those other words spoken long ago now and of which I was so fond: ‘I have a sense that I haven’t so much chosen as been chosen’?