I paused, realising that Tomás had become suddenly more alert, slightly on guard, as soon as he heard me pronounce that word which I might, perhaps, have kept back for a little longer. ‘He’s obviously taken the word “infiltrator”,’ I thought, ‘as a reference to him. He may know or sense where I’m going with this, why I mentioned that particular scene and what I’m trying to say, to make him reconsider what he’s just said, namely, that the soldier is blameless and the King unjust if he chooses to condemn him; that the consequences of what is said and done, even their gravity, also depend on what fair or unfair means are used to find them out, what good or bad offices are deployed.’ He didn’t respond, not immediately, but asked again about how the dilemma was resolved:
‘Don’t make me go and look it up, Berta, Act so-and-so, Scene so-and-so. Just tell me what the King does. Like I say, I don’t remember this episode at all, it’s as if I’ve never read the play. I imagine he has him hanged. No, he probably lets him go, because he fought so bravely in the battle. The King can’t be seen to be meting out harsh punishments to those who fought for him and gave him a victory so unexpected that it will go down in the annals of history.’
I determined to make him wait a little longer, so that he would once again lower his guard. I went over and took Elisa from him: ‘Give her to me, she’ll be better off in her cot,’ and carried her to her room, where I also made sure that Guillermo hadn’t woken up, and that Elisa hadn’t been disturbed by the move from her father’s arms to bed; then I returned to the living room, sat down, took a sip of my drink and put him out of his misery:
‘Yes, you’re right, Henry ignores Captain Fluellen. He orders the Duke of Exeter, his uncle, to fill with crowns the glove that Williams has held on to all through one very long night and day. “Keep it, fellow,” he says, “and wear it like an honour in your cap till I do challenge it.” Which is a bit odd, but that’s what he says. Your English is infinitely better than mine, as you’ve just proved. You can look it up later, if you like.’ I was sure that now, with his curiosity aroused, he was bound to consult the play when he was alone.
‘And how does the captain react to that? After all, Henry has discredited his opinion before witnesses.’
‘Oh, he turns like a weathercock. He acknowledges the soldier’s valour and adds another twelve pence from his own pocket, advising him in fatherly fashion to serve God and, in future, avoid quarrels and dissensions, since that way he’ll get on much better in life. But Williams rejects the money. “I will none of your money,” he says.’
‘A proud man, that Williams fellow – honourable.’
‘Yes, but Shakespeare, with his usual skill, doesn’t allow him to have the final word, that would have been too easy. The captain insists, assuring him that he acted out of goodwill, but yet again manages to offend him: “It will serve you to mend your shoes. Your shoes are not so good.” Looking at someone’s shoes and then making some rude comment about them, well, it’s just not on. There are no stage directions to help us, but one imagines that Williams does finally take the shilling: alms from someone who, only a minute before, had wanted to send him to the gallows. Williams’s shoes were presumably in a very sorry state indeed.’
Tomás stroked my chin and gazed into my eyes, for thirty or possibly sixty seconds, without saying a word, but with a smile in his eyes whose meaning escaped me, assuming it had a meaning. Perhaps he was amused by my last remark, I don’t know. Or perhaps he knew what was coming next, what I would say. Then he looked away and over at the balcony window and beyond, at the tops of the tall trees in the Plaza de Oriente; we often sat like that, together or separately, by night or by day, I more than he, because I was almost always in Madrid and he wasn’t, he went far away, never knowing when he would come back, or if he would come back. He became lost in thought for a moment (‘In the disfigured street he left me, with a kind of valediction’) and murmured as if to himself:
‘Imagine what shoes in 1415 would have been like. And the troops had marched all the way to France as well. A fair old way. I don’t know how armies survived over the centuries, given how burdened down they were. For most centuries, really. And people nowadays have the nerve to complain about their lot, for God’s sake.’
He certainly didn’t complain about his lot, or perhaps he wasn’t authorised to do that either, because he might let slip some vital fact or detail. And he doubtless belonged to a kind of army too, ‘Military Intelligence’ it was called, although he would never have fought in open combat like Williams and Fluellen or other soldiers from six centuries or so before. I wondered what rank he was now, since he was sure to have been promoted over time; he was probably an officer. Since telling me what he was allowed to tell me, several years ago, even his silent complaints or unexpressed anxieties had diminished. (Not that he’d ever put his complaints into words.) You can get used to anything, people say, and however banal the cliché, it’s very true. He must have agreed to carry out his missions, and may even have embraced them with something resembling intermittent excitement or enthusiasm. When you choose a path, full of doubts or unwillingly, it’s likely that, in the end, that path will seem to you to be the correct one; more than that, you may discover that you can’t diverge from that path and don’t even want to, and if you were relieved of your duties or asked to retire, that would be like taking away the very air you breathe (‘If this is my life, then I must make it, and must believe it to be, fruitful and good, and even irreplaceable’). After all those years, five or six or however long it had been, Tomás must have felt committed to his tasks, perhaps convinced of his cause. If he hadn’t felt like that from the start – for he’d never really explained, and I’d never managed to understand it myself, why he’d become involved when he was so young and why he hadn’t declined the offer, when he wasn’t subject to military discipline or any other kind of discipline – why had he chosen that life of duplicity and secrecy, at best troublesome and at worst mortifying? I certainly found it mortifying. The otherness, the lurking in the shadows, the murk, the mist. The moral ambiguity of it, to put it politely. Betrayal as principle, guide and method.
‘You disapprove of Henry acting as infiltrator, passing himself off as someone else and making use of that deceit,’ I said. ‘Or, rather, you would disapprove of him taking advantage of that trick and punishing his unwary prey. How does that fit with what you do, Tomás? How do you justify it?’
He stood up and strode angrily over to the balcony, as if, after what I’d just said, he found it repugnant to remain sitting so close by my side. He opened the window and stepped outside, lit a cigarette and, before speaking, took two long drags.
‘You’re making odious, unfair comparisons again, Berta. It’s wrong that the King should become an infiltrator among his own men precisely because they are his own men. You shouldn’t mistrust those who are risking their lives for you, and you don’t lay traps for the faithful. The King knows this, which is why he doesn’t punish Williams for those scornful remarks. How could he not know that? I mean, in the same play, he gives his famous speech before the battle, addressing his troops, so few in number as “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.’
‘Yes,’ I broke in. ‘On St Crispin’s Day. And he adds: “For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.” How many people have thought of you as their brother only to find out, that same night, or the following day or a month later, that they’ve been with a Judas. From their point of view, of course.’
His voice rose in volume, but he didn’t sound so much angry now as desperate, the desperation of someone who feels himself to be misunderstood and obliged to explain the obvious:
‘What has that got to do with what it is you imagine I do? Because it is just pure imagination on your part, speculation.’
‘No, of course I don’t know for certain. You’ve always made it quite clear that you couldn’t tell me and I couldn’t ask, and we’ve both followed that instruction to the letter. But left in the
dark, what else can I do but make suppositions? Or would you prefer me not even to ask myself questions? Not to wonder where you are and what you’re doing, what risks you’re running and what harm you’ll be doing and to whom, when you spend half your life away from me? I don’t like it, I don’t like what I imagine, not one bit, but if you won’t tell me anything, then I have only my imaginings to turn to. I don’t choose them, I assure you. The thoughts that come simply come. As do my fears and apprehensions. My feelings of jealousy too, although I do know that, in theory, jealousy shouldn’t enter into it and it doesn’t, it’s what the job requires and so on …’ I wasn’t actually sure how to continue and didn’t finish my sentence, but abandoned or postponed it for another occasion, another day. ‘My imaginings are what they are, what more can I say. Tell me they should be different, give me something else to fill them with, and then, who knows, I might succeed in changing them, but I can’t do that if all I have to look forward to are more years of mysteries and the void.’
‘Always supposing that I do work as an infiltrator, as you put it,’ he said, with deliberate slowness now, trying to appear patient, almost didactic. ‘Always supposing that I do infiltrate groups in the spy-story way you imagine, that wouldn’t conflict with my views on the King and Williams, because it would involve infiltrating the enemy camp, not our own side, our brothers. That would be like reprimanding a soldier who, in combat, kills an adversary who’s doing his best to kill him.’
‘No, it isn’t the same thing at all. A spy, an infiltrator, establishes a relationship with that enemy, gains his confidence and pretends to be his friend, and then, if he can, stabs him in the back. That isn’t what a soldier does, he meets the enemy face to face and doesn’t conceal his intentions. He doesn’t coax or seduce or betray. He isn’t underhand.’
Tomás gave a defensively sarcastic and very unspontaneous laugh.
‘But what is it you’re criticising, Berta? Espionage? What is it that you don’t like about that? That we try to anticipate the movements of those who want to harm or destroy us? That we uncover and foil their plots and their attacks, their premeditated murders? That we stop them committing murder? That’s all part of the defence …’
‘What defence? The defence of the Realm?’ He may have forgotten having used that expression with me before. The Realms that never attack, but only defend themselves.
‘Yes, the defence.’ He didn’t repeat the whole phrase, perhaps because it suddenly sounded too pompous. ‘Just as happens in land battles and naval battles and bombardments that no one foresees or expects. Do you really imagine that they involve no deceit, no treachery? There’s something called “strategy” and another thing called “tactics”, and what’s fundamental to both is the surprise factor, the ambush, the diversionary manoeuvre, camouflage, pretence, concealment, the perfidy you find so reprehensible. Why do you think there are submarines, for heaven’s sake? They’re invisible, right? And there must be some reason for that, don’t you think? Even at Thermopylae there was an infiltrator, or a traitor, if you prefer. And how do you think the Trojan War was won? What else was that horse but a stratagem, a poisoned chalice, a deceit? The people who left it on the beach were not to blame, but those who dragged it into the city. The tricked are to blame, not the tricksters, because the latter are just doing their duty. Both sides know this and both sides are to blame. You have to be duplicitous in war, that’s how wars are fought.’
For a moment, I felt very naïve. He was quite right, but I still didn’t like it, and found what he did or what I imagined he did utterly despicable. More despicable than war.
‘I still say it’s not the same. The crew of a submarine don’t establish a personal relationship,’ and I emphasised the word ‘personal’, ‘with the crew of the ship they sink, and that hasn’t even detected them. They don’t speak, they don’t see each other’s faces, they don’t become deeply attached, they don’t think they’re colleagues or brothers. Perhaps in a proper war everything is more justifiable, I don’t know, but then for those who come afterwards, it’s not, those who didn’t live through it, but benefitted from it and from the fact that victory was achieved using any means necessary … And there aren’t any land battles now or naval attacks or bombardments, not in the wars England’s involved in. You’re talking as if the Second World War was still going on. It ended nearly forty years ago. Before, you said that what the disguised King heard his soldiers say, or the rude remarks they made to his face when his face was not his (if you see what I mean), shouldn’t count or be punished, however offensive or subversive. Or even treasonous, you said.’
‘I stand by what I said,’ he replied, and yet it seemed to me that he wished he’d been less categorical. ‘Those poor, frightened soldiers, caught off guard, on the eve of a battle, the possible eve of their deaths, aren’t remotely like the individuals we spy on, who are spied on nowadays. War may not have been declared, but we still have enemies. Bitter enemies. And, besides, there’s always some kind of war going on, even though people don’t see it or know about it and so can carry on with their lives in peace. It’s our job to keep war out of sight. You don’t realise how much good we do.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. He no longer smoked his old favourites, Marcovitch, I don’t think they’re even made any more. He stood looking out from the balcony and added: ‘They’re complete and utter bastards.’
I was surprised by this trenchant language, which was, again, unlike Tomás. He had suddenly introduced a personal, subjective note. He did, after all, know them. He knew them well, however often he took refuge in various absurd hypotheses, as if he still thought there could be any doubt about his activities.
‘They’ll think exactly the same about you and your colleagues. The sociales would have thought the same about the people they detained and tortured or threw out of windows. In short, you’re all bastards.’
‘Wrong again. I can promise you that I’ve never threatened to set fire to a baby in front of its mother. There are always lines you don’t cross, there are degrees.’
A shudder ran through me whenever I remembered that sinister couple, the Kindeláns. Fortunately, they hadn’t reappeared for years, not since that phone call from Mary Kate, supposedly from Rome. After that long-distance call (assuming it was), I still never picked up the phone without a feeling of trepidation, holding my breath for a second until I heard the caller’s voice.
‘Did you ever find out who they were? Were they from the IRA?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly. I’ve never been told. It’s better like that, it’s easier for someone to forget you if you forget them and don’t seek them out or pester them. I can promise you that they will have completely forgotten about us.’
This wasn’t the first time he’d spoken so emphatically. On one occasion, he’d told me: ‘Nothing like that will ever happen again.’ It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but I wondered now if perhaps Miguel and Mary Kate had been killed, had been identified, tracked down and eliminated. Not by Tomás himself, I hoped, of course (although, who knows, during one of those long absences about which he never told me anything, he could easily have nipped over to Rome), but by one of those people he included in that ‘we’, a fellow averter of tragedies. It was inexplicable really that the Kindeláns or someone similar had never reappeared, given how she had ended that conversation, which, to me, still felt like it had happened only days ago: ‘When he does come back, be sure to talk to him,’ Mary Kate had ordered in a semi-frivolous, but imperative tone. ‘Just because we’re far away doesn’t mean the matter is resolved. And it has to be resolved satisfactorily.’ Satisfactorily for them, needless to say. And she’d then had the nerve to send her love to Guillermo, as an unpleasant memento. And since I didn’t believe that Tomás or his superiors had taken fright and stopped whatever it was they were doing in Northern Ireland (if they were doing anything), it occurred to me that Miguel and Mary Kate had dropped out of the game because they were dead, ‘sheer murder�
�, just like in the good old days. That’s why Tomás was so sure they would ‘have completely forgotten about us’.
I was surprised not so much by this idea, which had never once occurred to me in all those years, as by my own reaction to it. I discovered that I didn’t care if that couple had been wiped from the face of the Earth, violently and before their time. I actually rather approved, it was a relief. They had gained my trust, they had deceived me and used me and cold-bloodedly placed the life of my defenceless son in danger, the very worst thing you could do to a mother and the one thing guaranteed to make her equally heartless. And the possibility that Tomás himself might have done the deed didn’t arouse the feelings of horror or nausea I would have felt had I found out that he’d killed anyone else in cold blood, even if it was one of those anonymous enemy bastards. If it was the Kindeláns, that was acceptable and possibly fair; perhaps even praiseworthy. They had deserved it, they had earned it on that one eternal morning in my house; yes, there really are lines that cannot be crossed, and they had crossed them, and, to add insult to injury, they had done so with a hypocritical smile on their faces. Besides, any action is a step to the block, to the fire, and simply being in the world puts us at risk of stepping towards both, so there can be no complaints. How many steps would Miguel and Mary Kate – or whatever their real names were – have taken in their life of crime? ‘Perhaps Tomás is contaminating me with his vision of things, just as others have contaminated him. You only have to listen to be exposed to that contamination,’ I thought. However, I didn’t want to mention my idea, or not yet. I still had something more to say about Henry V:
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