No, Tomás was very disciplined and barely said a word about his work, although I could see he wanted to; he doubtless had to remind himself of the oath he’d sworn and had to bite his tongue each time he came home, and then again every few days while he remained at my side. (How sad not to be able to tell anyone about what’s happened or what you’ve been through, the dangers survived, the plots hatched, the dilemmas faced and the decisions taken, for many vicissitudes are bearable only if you can tell someone about them later, and I imagine his work was full of such hazards.) And I certainly showed no signs of indifference or resignation. I would try to draw him out, in fact, talking to him about what I’d been reading and about the past exploits of his remote antecedents. I told him about the PWE during the Second World War and about MI6 and the SOE and their audacious raids, about the SIS and the SAS and the NID and the much smaller PID, about all the different acronyms I’d been learning (even about novels written by Ian Fleming and John le Carré, which were fictional and contemporary). There was nothing wrong with investigating the past, still less one of the most exciting periods in history, which was there for anyone to discover. My interest in that whole world had clearly arisen from my discovery of what he did, from his succinct, authorised confession; if I wasn’t allowed to know what he got up to, I could at least get some idea by studying what his predecessors had done during that more glorious, active period, three or four decades before. I also had an alibi that allowed me to pretend that my motives had nothing to do with him and the life he’d chosen and in which I played no part: during those years of resignation and impatience, I finished my doctorate, and immersed myself in the special subject I’d studied during my last three years at university, which also happened to coincide with the situation closest to home, biographically, I mean. I was appointed part-time lecturer in the English department at the Complutense University, and, as such, I found myself being used as a kind of jill of all trades: sometimes I would have to teach English literature, sometimes phonetics, sometimes English history, depending on the availability or not of the professors or senior lecturers, who were often lazy or passive or else on official sick leave – the lax behaviour of the Franco era continued unabated. I was able to fit in my studies and classes around bringing up the children, as so many women did in my pioneering generation. It’s true that, thanks to Tomás’s generous salary (it all came from the Foreign Office in theory, and was paid in pounds), I could manage far more easily than most people. My English came on in leaps and bounds, but could never compare with my husband’s innate bilingualism, or with his extraordinary gift for learning languages. And so I had to refresh and deepen my knowledge, and England’s long history certainly kept me busy.
‘Why do you focus so much on the Second World War?’ Tomás once asked me somewhat suspiciously, after hearing me going on about Vivian, Menzies, Cowgill, Crossman and Delmer, thus demonstrating that I knew my stuff; I even knew that Menzies was pronounced ‘Minguiss’, at least that’s how the name of that particular head of the Secret Service was pronounced. ‘Presumably you also need to tell your students about Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror, the Wars of the Roses and Cromwell. You won’t have time to cover everything in a year.’
‘Well, since no one cares what I do and no one checks up on me, I choose my favourite subjects,’ I said. ‘And it seems to me more important that they should know about relatively recent history, which has got us where we are now, and which is, in large measure, still relevant. After all, MI6, or whatever it was that replaced the Political Warfare Executive, is still active, isn’t it? Because I’m sure something must have replaced it. Indeed, it would surprise me if its black, super-secret practices hadn’t spread to other democratic countries. The non-democratic countries have them already.’ I meant what I was saying, but I was also trying to get him to talk, if not about concrete facts, then about more abstract things. And this was one area he was willing to discuss with me.
‘Why do you say that? What do you base your opinion on?’ He was clearly bothered by my remarks. ‘If you’ve done your research, you’ll know that the PWE was dismantled as soon as the war ended. It lasted for as long as was necessary, not a minute more, and it was something that was very much of its time, when it truly was a matter of life and death. If Germany wasn’t defeated, then England would have had to surrender. Sometimes you simply can’t act within the law or go around asking permission for everything you do. If the enemy has no scruples, then the side with scruples is doomed to defeat. That’s how it’s always been in time of war, for centuries. The modern concept of “war crimes” is ridiculous, stupid, because war consists of crimes being committed on all fronts from the first day to the last. It comes down to this: either you don’t embark on wars or, if you do, you have to be prepared from the outset to commit whatever crimes are necessary, whatever you need to do to achieve victory.’
‘Would that include “sheer murder”, which is what Delmer apparently demanded of his assistants and acolytes?’ I took every opportunity to show him how well informed I was about these things of the past; my readings in the British Institute library were haphazard and partial and erratic, but I just had to drop in a few names and the odd fact to seem positively erudite: I was boasting. And I didn’t know how much he knew; he would have been on courses, but he might have neither the necessary curiosity nor the time. ‘I mean in the rearguard and against civilians, just to demoralise them and sow panic and create a general atmosphere of insecurity, not carrying out combat missions or raids. You’re not telling me that kind of thing doesn’t still go on.’
‘Of course it doesn’t.’ And that emphatic ‘of course’ made me think he was lying. ‘We’re not at war now, not openly at war. Where did you get that idea?’
‘From a simple belief that one of mankind’s characteristics is that he never renounces something he’s already tried – if he’s done so with impunity or success, that’s all that matters. What has been done once will be done again, either by an individual or by a collective. Whatever has been invented is sure to be put into practice sooner or later, even if it’s not necessary, simply because it’s feasible and has been invented. What can be done will be done, science has no qualms about its discoveries and advances being put into practice; on the contrary, it can’t wait for that to happen. Everything accumulates and nothing is wasted. For all our obligatory horror at and rhetoric about the Nazis, their lessons have been learned and assimilated by their enemies too; it’s the same with the Soviets. And why wouldn’t you hang on to or make use of something that contributed to overcoming and beating the Nazis, no less? Not necessarily continuously, as then, but occasionally, sporadically, to eliminate someone quickly and efficiently or to ward off a major threat. Nothing is ever totally abandoned, everything is kept in reserve. Everything that has been tried and dismissed as excessive, criminal or unjust hasn’t really been dismissed, it’s there waiting, latent, dormant, call it what you will, and begging to come back, to be woken from its sleep, hoping for less considerate, more vicious times to return, as they always will. And I’m sure that, when necessary, those things will be taken up again. You yourself have told me that what you and your friends do hasn’t been done, hasn’t happened. The only way for someone like me to understand this is to think of it as something that goes unrecorded, unacknowledged, that must always remain hidden away, which is precisely the doctrine applied by the PWE to their existence and their activities.’
He didn’t like me referring to him and his friends and immediately made a face. Nor did he like such a direct comparison to the unit run by Delmer and Crossman or whoever. He seemed really upset, and made as if to bring his fist down hard on the coffee table, for we were in the living room, on the very sofa occupied by the Kindeláns on that day I will never forget and have never forgotten. However, he managed to contain himself, although he was visibly growing ever more agitated and eager for me to stop.
‘Look, just drop the subject, will you,’ and this soun
ded like an order, and Tomás was never one to give orders, he rarely did. ‘I’ve already told you, that kind of thing doesn’t happen now. It stopped happening in 1945. And I’m not having you telling me what my job involves. I mean, really, what do you know about it? I think I would have a slightly better idea, don’t you think?’
He spoke in an irritated, sarcastic tone, again unusual in him, and that should have acted as a warning, but I was on a roll and wasn’t going to stop just because he said so.
‘You’re right when you say that it was a matter of life and death then. It really was, and the world would have been an inferno if England had failed. I suppose we lived through a slightly less ferocious version of that here, less ferocious for us than for our parents. But every age exaggerates and needs to brag, and all ages feel that their conflicts are equally serious, a matter of life and death. They all consider that their circumstances justify extreme measures and they’re incapable of thinking they’re not important. Every age believes itself to be exposed to great dangers, and every age is prepared to break its own established rules and regulations, to feel constrained by its own restrictions and to find ways of ignoring them or getting round them. People like you live in fear, as you yourself said: “We avert tragedies”, you said, and anyone who spends his life doing that will see tragedies looming everywhere, every day, and will probably overstep the mark in his eagerness to prevent them. Every molehill will become a mountain, any strange activity will set alarm bells ringing, will put him on his guard, ready for action, to observe that activity and then crush it. It’s like that line from your beloved Eliot: “And in short, I was afraid”.’
He repeated it after me, as if it were a reflex reaction. How many lines by Eliot must he have memorised? And although that was all he said, his voice sounded hoarse and alien, as if it were not his voice and emerged from inside a helmet and not from his own chest:
‘And in short, I was afraid.’
I ignored him and went on:
‘If you continue in that job, if you don’t leave, that line will sum up your entire life. And fear doesn’t care about anything, it doesn’t stop to consider what’s good or bad, what’s proportionate and disproportionate, what constitutes a crime and what might be the consequences, and, needless to say, it doesn’t care about justice. I’m afraid of what you do out of fear, Tomás, afraid of all those things I know nothing about and will presumably never know. I can only imagine it, and from what I imagine, it seems to me that, apart from some evident differences, it’s not that different from what the sociales did here. They, too, lived in fear and saw enemies everywhere. They, too, devoted themselves to preventing what, for the Franco regime, would have been tragedies. They, too, passed themselves off as other people. They, too, infiltrated and betrayed. And actions can’t be erased.’
This time he did bring his fist down hard on the table, making the ashtrays and the other objects tremble – a magnifying glass, a small clock, a compass; a small lead figurine representing two duellists actually toppled over; while the ice in our whisky glasses clinked so loudly I was afraid it might wake the children, who had only just gone to bed as darkness fell. His usually amiable face – even when he was full of angst – became one of utter rage, his eyes darting wildly about. Again, though, the most unrecognisable thing was his voice, which sounded like that of an old man, a furious old man:
‘Don’t ever, ever compare me with the sociales. What the hell does a dictatorial regime that emerged from a horrific civil war and repressed its compatriots for decades have to do with what I do? What does that have to do with one of the oldest democracies in the world and its fight against the worst evil ever known in history, against Franco’s allies and protectors, in fact. The England we know comes out of that, out of that war against those people on the other side. Don’t you ever dare compare me to them. What do you know. What do you know about what we avoid or avert, about the good we do and how many people we help. What do you know about what’s being cooked up in some basement or tavern or farmhouse. What do you know about anything.’
I felt as if he were only a step away from turning violent, physically violent, which was something unknown in him. The idea leapt into my mind: ‘So he’s capable of violence, then. He must have learned that during one of his training sessions too.’ Now it was my turn to feel slightly afraid, but it was a different kind of fear, instantaneous, sudden, the fear of a shout or a blow or a harsh, angry tone; not his kind of fear: silent, constant, vigilant, ruthless, vengeful, the kind that’s always on guard, scanning the horizon for some threat to be crushed, a fear which he’d inhabited for years now and from which he would be unable to extricate himself. And it was, as I’ve said, the improbable voice that frightened me most, far more than his fist coming down on the thick glass tabletop and the proud look on his face: the voice of an old man, yet still vigorous, as befitted his actual age. However, now that he had advanced, I wasn’t going to fall meekly silent at the first assault. For years now, I had respected the conditions he’d laid down and had remained at his side, and that was my choice and because I still loved him, it’s not easy to stop loving someone you decided to love very early on, our most deep-seated feelings are all forged when we’re young; but perhaps also because it suited me, for it was, after all, a fairly comfortable life, even privileged; you can get used to anything, and we’d been accustomed to living apart right from the beginning, and impatience does gradually tend to wane rather than increase, so surely I could curb it now that I’d turned thirty. Besides, I wasn’t asking him concrete questions about his travels or his missions or his possible, officially approved crimes, the ones he wasn’t authorised to tell me about. I suppose I was just vaguely admonishing and dissuading him, which, admittedly, most people would find irritating. I did my best to continue gently and deliberately:
‘You’re right, Tomás, I don’t know, and I don’t pretend or aspire to know.’ This was a lie, because sometimes I really burned to know and to find out what he did, in detail: who he pretended to befriend only to betray them later, why his plans sometimes fell apart and who was responsible, and what were these terrible tragedies he averted; which women – widows, girls or spinsters – he cajoled into giving him information that would condemn their fathers or brothers, and whether any of them left an impression on him or left him with so much as a twinge of regret. ‘But one thing I do know, because it happens everywhere: you think you’re working for a democratic and supposedly irreproachable government and defending its security and its values – its debatable values. Fine, but you only ever see or hear the leaders of that government on television or in the press, never in private, and in that respect you’re no different from the most insignificant citizen. You deal with the lieutenants and sergeants, if you like, but never with the generals. And lieutenants and sergeants make whatever decisions they want, at least vis-à-vis their inferiors. And this suits the generals and government ministers too. It suits them not to have to give orders, but to let others interpret their wishes, so as not to be compromised and to be able to say one day, if necessary: “I knew nothing about that, it was done without my knowledge and, of course, without my consent.” You think you’re working for Mrs Thatcher, who is, by the way, a pretty nasty piece of work to have as your boss: she didn’t stage a coup d’état, start a civil war or impose a dictatorship, which is all to the good, but for the rest I’m not sure she’s so very different from Franco.’ I was exaggerating just to annoy him and to see how far his patriotism went. He didn’t react, though. ‘Just as, before, you would have thought you were working for Callaghan, Wilson or whoever. You know, you’ve never even told me when you actually started doing this work; it wasn’t when you were still a student, I hope.’
‘Heath,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Edward Heath preceded Wilson as prime minister.’ He said this in English (however bilingual he was and however much my English had improved, we never talked to each other in that language), and I thought I
heard a trace of an American accent, as if he were imitating someone. His voice was still that of an old man.
Berta Isla Page 24
