Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  After a couple of weeks of absolute silence and no sign of Tomás, I decided to call Ted Reresby, supposedly of the Foreign Office, again. I asked for him directly, and not for Tomás. He didn’t answer and could not be found, but he returned my call half an hour later, more or less as he had before. His voice had become my one link with my husband.

  ‘Mr Reresby,’ I said, ‘I’ve had no news of Tom since you and I last spoke. Is he still away? Is he still in Germany? Did you manage to get my message to him? Does he know that I need to talk to him or does he still not have the faintest idea that I’ve been expecting him and hoping to hear from him for two weeks now?’ And I added, perhaps unwisely: ‘There’s one thing I’m not quite clear about. Is he in West Germany or East Germany? If you can tell me, that is.’

  Reresby was far less considerate and attentive this time, as if my questions bothered him and as if he found this second phone call entirely unacceptable. It seemed to me that he had lost all respect for me, or perhaps he had lost all respect for Tomás for not being able to keep his wife meekly silent and waiting. Or was it perhaps that Tomás had let him down and was no longer so important to him. Reresby sounded vaguely disappointed.

  ‘Mrs Nevinson,’ he said, without answering any of my questions, ‘you are being far too impatient and that is of no help to your husband. As I said before, the matter could drag on for much longer. If Tom hasn’t been in contact, that’s because he hasn’t yet been able to. So why insist? Let him finish the job in hand. He will come back.’

  This time, I decided to tell him everything, so that he could gauge the importance of what had happened, but also to alarm him a little and provoke his curiosity.

  ‘Mr Reresby, our son’s life was put at risk. Please understand, this is not a trivial matter. Please understand, too, that I need to speak to Tom urgently. He has to do something, he has to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I don’t know what’s going on or what Tom’s job actually involves. I only know that his job is the reason why our son could have been burned alive. Someone told me that Tom works for MI6. You must know. Is that true?’

  But Reresby was not a man to speak out of turn nor to give in to a sudden angry impulse, and he may have noticed that my own apparent impulse was calculated, artificial, for it would have been far more natural to have given in to it during our first conversation, when the events had just taken place, not two weeks later. Nor was he the kind to take the bait and, in doing so, allow himself to be drawn out, nor to respond to a question he didn’t wish to respond to. He didn’t ask me what had happened, nor who had threatened the life of my child, nor what I meant about him being burned to death, nor who had spoken to me about MI6. Entirely unperturbed, he merely said:

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs Nevinson, but perhaps Tom shouldn’t have allowed himself to have a child at this stage in his life, when his career is just beginning. I can’t say any more. As far as I know, Tom works for the Foreign Office and in our embassy in Madrid, and he does so most efficiently too; believe me, he has a very promising future. And if he had been recruited by the Secret Service, I can assure you that I wouldn’t know. As is only normal, and as I’m sure you must be aware, no one knows who works for the Secret Service. Otherwise, what sense would there be in the word “secret”? When he returns to Madrid, talk to him, ask him what you’re asking me. I can’t give you an answer to something I have no way of knowing.’

  ‘How easy it is to believe that you know something and yet know nothing at all,’ I thought. ‘How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our natural state. Tomás will also be in the dark, not just me, no, not just me. He, too, must be in the dark in that murky, anxious world, and in the dark, too, as regards me.’

  Tomás took four weeks to reappear after that episode or incident, after the terrible fright from which I’ve never quite recovered, I still dream about it sometimes and wake up panting and bathed in sweat as if I were still there on that same morning, and that the years hadn’t passed. He phoned the day before, but put off having a proper conversation until his arrival in Madrid.

  ‘There’s no point telling me anything now, in haste, I mean. There’s no point arguing either. And now is not the time for reproaches. We’ll have supper together tomorrow night when I’m back.’

  ‘But I can’t wait any longer,’ I said. ‘What happened is really serious, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what you’re up to, but things can’t go on like this. Why haven’t you been more open with me? Why haven’t you told me the truth? What are you playing at, Tomás? You put our baby’s life at risk, don’t you realise that? They threatened him.’

  ‘Someone did mention something about that here in London when I got back. I’m sorry. I only arrived yesterday, so at least give me a day’s breathing space.’

  ‘Arrived back from where? You knew you were going to be away all that time and you didn’t even warn me. How could you do that?’

  ‘Oh, here and there,’ he said in answer to my first question, as if he were an adolescent responding to his parents’ demands to know where’s he’s been until that late hour, which suggested to me that he was in no mood to be told off or to issue a mea culpa. He did, however, add, less as an excuse than as a simple explanation: ‘It was all very rushed and unplanned. That’s what the job’s like. I couldn’t have warned you.’

  ‘Where have you just arrived back from?’ I asked again. ‘Germany, as your friend Reresby told me, or have you been in Belfast?’ And I pronounced that name as Miguel had pronounced it, when he was still ‘Miguel’.

  ‘Like I said, here and there,’ he repeated, and it sounded exactly as if he’d just said: ‘That’s none of your business, Berta, and however hard you try, you’re never going to find out.’ ‘We’ll talk tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll explain as much as I’m allowed to explain. I don’t yet know how much that will be, I’ve asked, and the people here are looking into it, they’ll let me know today. And of course you can wait. It’s only one more day. Anyway, don’t worry, whatever may have happened won’t happen again, I promise.’ People always promise things they’re in no position to promise.

  Luckily for me, during all that endless waiting, the Kindeláns didn’t make another appearance. And some days after the incident, I plucked up the courage to go out alone with Guillermo again, even taking a stroll in the Jardines de Sabatini, although I did keep a sharp eye out for the couple and jumped whenever I spotted another human being, and even, absurdly enough, when a statue loomed into view, but I didn’t see the couple again either there or in the neighbourhood. I tried to steer well clear of the Paseo del Pintor Rosales, where they lived, although who knows if that was true, that or anything else they told me during the month I knew them. No, much to my relief, I didn’t see them, but one afternoon, to my horror, a few days before Tomás resurfaced, Mary Kate phoned me. As soon as I heard her voice, I could see those troubling blue squinting eyes, those painted lips, like a smear of blood on her face.

  ‘Don’t hang up, dear Berta,’ she said in a pleading and, at the same time, authoritative tone of voice. ‘I’m calling you from Rome, where we’ve more or less settled in, insofar as one ever can in Italy, of course. You’ve no idea how badly organised the Italians are. Anyway, in the end they sent us here, which is the lesser of various evils.’ I was astonished that she should still try to maintain these fictions, when she could not possibly presume to be my friend and had probably never worked at an embassy in her life. Of course, those who gave them their orders and sent them to terrorise me may well have posted them there, to be near the Pope and the papal Curia. She, doubtless out of necessity, wanted me to believe that she really was making a long-distance call, that she was far away and I was safely out of reach.

  ‘How dare you, Mary Kate, always assuming that is your real name, because no one at the Irish embassy has ever heard of you.’

  She ignored this remark and went on:

  ‘I couldn’t bear to spend another day without knowing how you both
were, the little cherub and you. I often think of you and really miss you. Are you all right?’

  I was tempted to hang up. Perhaps I should arrange to have our number changed and make sure the new one was registered in the name of Isla, not Nevinson; that way, undesirable people wouldn’t be able to find us so easily, there are quite a few Islas in the phone book. However, I didn’t immediately give in to that temptation, I thought it best to find out what she wanted, because she certainly wasn’t interested in our health.

  ‘We’re fine. Infinitely better now that the two of you are far away.’

  ‘So you’re still blaming us for that inconsequential little accident. It was just Miguel being clumsy, he gets more and more distracted and clumsy as time goes on, you’ve no idea the number of blunders he’s made here already,’ she replied, unperturbed. ‘But as you saw, Berta, nothing happened. Guillermo is still his beautiful, bouncing self, isn’t he? Tell me, have you spoken to Thomas yet? Has he come back? According to our calculations, he should have come back or be about to. You know how much we disapprove of him leaving you so alone.’

  ‘Calculations? What calculations? Do you know something about him, where he is?’ Tomás’s prolonged silence and his inaccessibility, as well as my own desperation, made me take the bait.

  ‘Oh, so he’s not back?’ Mary Kate said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t come back, and he hasn’t phoned me either since the two of you were here, Mary Kate. I’ve had no news from him at all.’ I was prudent enough not to mention my conversations with Mr Reresby. ‘I wish I could have spoken to him and told him what you did to his child, what you were about to do. I don’t think he’s as easily frightened as me.’

  She barely reacted to this either, or only with her first words, once again dismissing the incident as unimportant:

  ‘You do exaggerate, Berta. Like all mothers.’ And then, what had merely been a hint in her voice rose shamelessly to the surface, and her tone became one of authority, warning, recommendation or instruction: ‘When he does come back, be sure to talk to him. Just because we’re far away doesn’t mean the matter is resolved. And it has to be resolved satisfactorily. Give my love to the little one, please. And Miguel sends his own clumsy kisses to you both as well. Can you believe it, he’s got even fatter.’

  I didn’t go to meet Tomás at the airport. His plane came in rather late, and I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone in our respective families by asking them to stay with Guillermo. I could have hired a babysitter, but I thought it best for Tomás not to be confronted by my anxious face as soon as he got off the plane, nor to see how I bit my tongue when I couldn’t ask him any questions in the presence of witnesses, instead, I would allow him a little more time alone, without being interrogated, once he’d landed in Madrid and taken the taxi from Barajas to our house in Calle Pavía, right next to the Teatro Real, with all those tall trees to look at; we were so lucky in that respect, I sometimes spent hours watching them, fascinated, listening to them rustling in the breeze. To allow him time to get used to the idea of being home, to familiarise himself with the landscape again, to see the Torres Blancas building on Avenida de América announcing that he was finally entering Madrid, heading along the Castellana via the curved slope of Hermanos Bécquer, then straight into the very heart of the capital; to allow him to realise that what must have seemed to him so far away, perhaps a dream from a remote past impossible to recover, was once again there before his eyes, regardless of where he had been and what he had been involved in. I decided to wait for him at home, with a cold supper ready, to listen for his key or the bell if he had lost his key, it’s so easy to lose or forget a key that you don’t use regularly or that you don’t need to use for a couple of months or more, I couldn’t now remember the exact date when he had left, his absence had seemed endless, given the circumstances, given my fear, given my increasingly well-founded suspicions, because now I was almost sure that the Kindeláns had been telling the truth, or part of the truth. I decided to give him extra time to firm up and put in order, even rehearse mentally, what he was going to confess to me, because he would have to confess something. He’d consulted his superiors, whoever they were, and they were considering the matter; he’d said ‘They’ll let me know today’, which meant yesterday, so he would be telling me whatever he could tell me with their consent, or perhaps he wouldn’t, perhaps he’d tell me nothing and say only: ‘Don’t ask, Berta, don’t ever ask me again. If you still want to stay by my side, you’ll have to remain in the dark as regards the Tomás who leaves and isn’t here. Now, if you can’t accept the one who comes back and is here, then that’s your choice and I wouldn’t blame you. It will break my heart, and I’ll have nowhere then I can call my own, and my whole life will be in jeopardy, but that won’t be your fault and I’ll understand completely, and I won’t protest either.’

  However, as the evening wore on, I couldn’t simply sit and wait. Already, before the time I’d calculated for his arrival (my own optimistic calculation, assuming there had been no delays), I began going out onto the balcony and looking down into the street, it was likely that the taxi would drop him next to the church, and so, whenever I stepped out, I would look to the right, but also over towards Plaza de Oriente and Lepanto and Bailén, taking full advantage of our ample view. I don’t know how often I did this, I only know that not even the storm that broke when there was still just a sliver of light (it was one of those interminable days in June, July or August in Spain) dissuaded me from going out onto one of our three balconies and leaning out of first one, then the other and the other. These were only brief sorties (I came in as soon as the rain became too heavy), but my hair and face were drenched, as were my blouse and skirt, and my high-heeled shoes, which would be ruined, not that I cared. I didn’t bother getting changed, because, if I did, my dry clothes would only get soaked when I was seized by another attack of impatience; I just couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t phone him, I couldn’t try to lure him in by my irrational presence out there on the balcony, after all, how would he know? After so much time apart, I wanted to be wearing a short skirt and heels when he first saw me: that’s how he liked me to dress, although not only like that, and I realised that, as well as my disquiet and my fear and my general bewilderment after gaining those brief insights into his life, as well as the panic that had returned in spades since Mary Kate’s recent phone call, I still needed him to desire me, to see in his appreciative eyes an immediate renewal of that most elemental of feelings. After his long absence and what I imagined to be his many vicissitudes, of which I knew nothing, that gaze would have been lost, or become vitrified or grown indifferent or lethargic, he might not be capable of or even interested in recovering it, and so it had to be revived at once, without delay; after a long period without seeing one another, so much depends on that first encounter. The face we initially take such pains to remember is very clear and omnipresent, but as time passes – probably precisely because of that effort of memory, which wears away that person’s face, distorts and deforms – it begins to fade, and it becomes almost impossible for the mind’s eye to summon it up and show it to us in faithful form. We suddenly find ourselves studying a photograph in order to recall their face, and even then, the still photograph gradually supplants the real face with its gestures and movements, the features freeze, and only those in the snapshot remain, and we spend so much time looking at the photo that, eventually, it replaces the person and erases or exiles or drives them out, which is why it’s so hard truly to remember the dead as they move away from us in time. And if that had been my experience, what would it be like for Tomás with regard to me, for he had been busy in far-off places, possibly on missions that would have demanded all his attention and required him systematically to forget his former self.

  I had no delusions about this: it was also perfectly possible that he would have been with other women, out of desire or weariness or a need to rest or out of obligation. Perhaps he would have had to gain t
he confidence of a woman by going to bed with her or making phoney declarations of love; or he might have had no alternative but to give in to the whims of some other woman, possibly ugly or horribly fat or a spinster getting on in years or an easily seduced old maid, in order to achieve his goals or glean a little information, one fact or two. But, as we all know, what we begin with reluctance or even with a sense of repulsion, can end up drawing us in by sheer force of habit or an unexpected taste for repetition. Contrary to all predictions and to your own initial feelings, you can find yourself being captivated by a person who didn’t attract you at all to begin with. Just as when we dream of having sex with someone unimaginable, the next time we meet, we can’t help looking at them with a vague, reticent, even guilty lasciviousness, as if we’d been infected with a virus while we were innocently sleeping; however much we might reject that person when awake, in our consciousness they have taken on a dimension they previously lacked and which, with our waking senses, they were doomed never to have. A dimension that is so much more easily acquired by someone who has tested and seduced us, who has been able to arouse us despite our own lack of desire, our resistance and passivity, who has made us feel shame and regret for our consensual pleasure, against all the odds and à contrecoeur. Who hasn’t experienced this at some point in their lives?