The mere mention of Ulster made me feel even worse, I would almost have preferred it if they assigned him to HMS Conqueror, a nuclear submarine which, according to what I’d read, was possibly going to be sent to the Falklands. I had learned to fear the Irish conflict ever since that business with those wretches, the Kindeláns, whose memory I could never quite shake off. I had got into the habit of following the news from Northern Ireland, not obsessively, but if any reports appeared in a Spanish newspaper, I would make a point of reading them. Absurdly, I was far less concerned about Eastern Europe or about terrorists, and yet, who knows, Tomás might well have been actively engaged in the pursuit of that hyperactive terrorist ‘Carlos’, who was, apparently, a Spanish speaker, possibly from Venezuela. I fell silent, then took his hand, which he squeezed hard for a moment before releasing it so as to take out a cigarette and light it. My impression was, however, that he let go of my hand so quickly because he was excited more than anything, as if that contact distracted him from his thoughts. He was clearly absorbed in his own affairs, and it occurred to me that he knew exactly what his role was to be, what awaited him the following day or that very night, what he would have to do and where he would go; and, in his mind, he was already there, focused on what his next steps would be. Perhaps ‘excitement’ isn’t the word, but something close to that. He shared the British impatience to begin operations, for the British fleet to reach that far-flung corner of the globe and teach those insolent, dictatorial Argentinians a lesson; what were they thinking, that they could get away scot-free with defying the old Empire? Yes, England had suddenly, childishly, recovered its past and thought it was back in those distant centuries, a ghost of its lost Empire.
‘Bye, then, take care. As usual, stay in touch while you can, or when you get back, if they send you somewhere far away. I hope it won’t be for too long.’ Those were my last words before he set off. I ran my finger over his lips, I stroked his smooth chin, we embraced as we usually did – that is, with the immense affection we had always felt for each other – despite my discontent.
‘Of course I will,’ he said. ‘As usual, if I don’t get in touch that will be because I can’t, you know that. Don’t get impatient if it takes a while, however long that might be. Anyway, this war won’t last, you’ll see. It may not even affect me, it may pass me by.’
I followed that war of two and a half months on a daily basis, in detail, from 5 April, when the Task Force set off from Portsmouth, to 14 June, when the appointed governor of the Malvinas, General Menéndez, surrendered to Major General Moore, the commander of the British forces, an act that was greeted with protests and riots by one segment of the Buenos Aires population.
I used to buy two or three English newspapers and devour them all. I sometimes thought this a pointless task, since the conflict might well have passed Tomás by, as he had suggested, but, needless to say, with so much misleading information, secrecy and silence, I couldn’t be sure. My instinct told me that his sudden departure on 4 April was, in some way, related to the invasion, because he didn’t once phone me from the Foreign Office or from MI6 or wherever, as he surely would have done if he’d been waiting there to be told where he was to go next, even if he’d only been there for a few days. I assumed that they would have transferred him somewhere else as soon as he landed in London, and those far-flung islands were the newest and most urgent matter at hand, and were, presumably, the main preoccupation of Thatcher the Intransigent and her Cabinet, as well as the Army, the RAF, the Navy, the diplomatic service and the Secret Service. But it was also true that other things don’t just stop – there’s no reason why our enemies should slacken their efforts (they’re more likely to increase them) when their adversary is faced by an emergency, and I imagine that one shouldn’t neglect any front, however secondary or minor it might appear to be. Basically, I was, as usual, completely in the dark. I decided to follow the war step by step, as the whole world was doing; it was a strange enough situation to keep everyone watching and to attract all eyes, beginning with those of Reagan and that globetrotting Pope Wojtyla.
On 2 May, I experienced a mixture of great sorrow and great relief. The nuclear submarine Conqueror torpedoed and sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, causing the deaths of more than three hundred crew members. I found this enormous number of casualties deeply distressing, but then I thought how much worse it would have been had the casualties been British, for I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Tomás might be on board some kind of ship.
On 4 May, I felt no relief at all: Argentinian Navy planes, equipped with Exocet missiles, sank the destroyer Sheffield, and, this time, twenty English marines perished. Who knows, perhaps on board with them was a mediator, an interpreter, a spy posted to the area.
On 10 May, relief definitely outstripped sorrow when the frigate Alacrity sank the Isla de los Estados, causing the deaths of the captain and twenty-one sailors. More than that, I was beginning to hope that England would soon crush that sinister Argentina currently in the hands of the military, however many poor soldiers lost their lives, so that more lives were not lost and peace was restored. I paid more attention to the setbacks than to the advances, to any situations unfavourable to ‘our men’ rather than to any triumphs, because it was the former that alarmed me most.
I had some terrible frights on 20, 24 and 25 May, because, on the first of those days, the British saw their frigate Ardent sunk and three Harriers and two helicopters shot down, at which point, it occurred to me that they might be ferrying Tomás back and forth by helicopter; on the second day, the frigate Antelope went down somewhere or other, and, on the third day, Argentine planes sank the destroyer Coventry and the heavy merchant navy ship Atlantic Conveyor. The number of dead remained unclear, or perhaps Thatcher, who, as I read recently, disliked hearing ‘sad stories’– and didn’t like telling them either, I imagine – preferred to leave things vague for the moment.
The British were winning the war and would win it in the end, it was only a matter of time, but victory came at a high price. I became a fan of the Navy, from a distance, from what I saw on the television and read in the papers, but alongside this were my paradoxically growing feelings of antipathy for Thatcher and for that England, so gleefully combative and bullying, changed out of all recognition, all restraint gone. Every demonstration or celebration in the streets of Britain made me cringe on their behalf, and almost my own, perhaps because I’m a European (Americans tend to be more theatrical and excitable, and over-the-top behaviour is less surprising in them). This didn’t mean that, on 8 June, I didn’t curse the destruction of the troop ship Sir Galahad, or that, on 12 June, my heart wasn’t in my boots when I found out that a land-based Exocet missile had put the Glamorgan out of action, killing thirteen of its crew.
All these losses would, ultimately, be seen as occupational hazards, forgotten by everyone except the families of the dead, and although they were minor problems in the conflict as a whole, for as long as that conflict continued, I found any delay in its conclusion deeply disheartening, and anything that wasn’t a complete walkover made me despair. Pope John Paul II appeared in Buenos Aires on 11 June, to pray for peace before a crowd of the fervent faithful who had been belligerent and vengeful the day before and would be equally so after. On 28 May, he turned up in London, where people took rather less notice of him (although, in Argentina, any notice they’d taken was purely superficial). That day-to-day monitoring of the situation proved exhausting: two and a half months spent in a continuous state of alertness and alarm can seem interminable. The only relief came when I clung to Tomás’s deliberately ambiguous words, and I would think – poor consolation – that he was probably elsewhere, in one of the Baltic countries, or somewhere in the Arab world, in East Germany or the dreaded Northern Ireland. I drove that last possibility from my mind as quickly as I could, though, and not just for the usual reasons. Some time ago, I’m not sure when (perhaps it was after 1982, although I would place it earlier), one of the
most horrific pictures I’ve ever seen appeared on the front page of various newspapers. So horrific that I only glanced at it, then quickly turned the paper over, and later, threw it out unread; and yet, even though I only glimpsed that blurred image, the memory of it still haunted me, and often came back to me and still does. In Belfast or Derry or some village, I’m not sure, a mob had attacked an English soldier and flayed him, not while he was alive, I hope. I tried not to know too much about the circumstances, preferring not to read about it (or only the caption, I suppose), not to know the details. I have a vague idea that the soldier’s dead body was face down, with legs and arms splayed, like St Andrew on an X-shaped cross, presumably naked or almost so and propped against something, a wall, a pile of tyres, perhaps some beer barrels, I don’t know, and I certainly don’t want to search for the photo on the Internet, where everything comes back and nothing is erased. And there were people around him, he wasn’t alone, his body hadn’t been abandoned. Normal-looking people, such as you might find in Madrid or any other European city or in one of our villages, people who had gathered to look at him and had not perhaps taken part in the atrocity, or perhaps they had, had carried it out and were now contemplating their work with no feelings of regret – perhaps that came later, or perhaps never – perhaps with the astonishment that follows certain actions, once they’re over and done and cannot be undone. They were looking, looking at that body, which was darker than usual in a white man – a flayed body would, I suppose, be reddish in colour, no, best not think about it, besides, the image was in black and white – almost as you might contemplate an Ecce Homo painting in a museum, except that Christ is depicted as he would have been two thousand years ago and in a remote part of the world, and, besides, he’s permanently there, painted and two-dimensional, never real and recent like that young soldier.
We have all felt real or abstract hatred at some time in our lives; we feel it, but almost never see it, or only rarely; and any representation of its results is difficult to take in, to admit, to accept, it’s unbearable, even though in Europe we are, inevitably, accustomed to it, the inevitability of too many centuries past. It wasn’t unknown for British soldiers to occasionally behave like brutes, but that young man might have done nothing more than don a hated uniform, he might have only just arrived. Whatever the truth of the matter, what is most shocking (I’m speaking for myself, of course) is the furious, uncontrolled mob and discovering what it’s capable of. Years later, I saw another sequence (they showed it partially on television), which brought to mind that photo from Northern Ireland, although the scene from my own country was less grave and gruesome: some Basque nationalists were gleefully kicking a policeman in the head, while he lay, defenceless, on the ground, in the middle of the street, watched by a group of impassive spectators; no, not impassive, for they were actually egging the attackers on. He wasn’t even a policeman from outside the Basque country, but a local man, as Basque as his aggressors. The man didn’t die, fortunately, but I think he was in hospital for a long time, possibly having suffered irreparable harm. He will doubtless never forget that day, unlike the proud ‘patriots’, imitators of the Irish, but without the iota of reason the latter had. Something or someone interrupted them, otherwise they would simply have murdered the policeman, several of them gaily kicking him to death.
I drove that thought from my mind: it would be better if Tomás was in the South Atlantic, in a frigate, in a helicopter, in a hideout in Buenos Aires, rather than in Northern Ireland. Who knows what they would do to him if he was there and they found him out, an English infiltrator, a traitor, a spy. On him would fall all that real and abstract hatred, and the worst hatred of all, that of the deceived.
Yes, the War of the Malvinas, or the Falklands War, ended officially on 20 June with the return of the islands, and then everyone rapidly forgot about it. What has just occurred but is no longer occurring is of no interest, people’s attention is immediately drawn to what comes afterwards, to anything that is about to happen or might happen, anything that is still an unknown or has not yet reached a conclusion; basically, it comes down to a desire to live vicariously in a state of perpetual instability and under constant threat, or at least to know that, somewhere on the globe, there are others having a far worse time of it than we are, and who remind us just how much danger is out there watching and waiting. That’s how it was then, and as it continues to be now, only raised to the nth degree; we have become accustomed to the idea that some catastrophe is always looming, and that it’s sure to affect us directly or indirectly, the days are long gone (and they lasted for centuries and centuries, for almost all of history and even for part of my own life, so I myself have seen this change) when we really didn’t care about the problems of Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine, of Syria, Libya or Ethiopia or Somalia, or even of Mexico or the Philippines, which, after all, did once belong to us, to the Spanish, I mean.
Even the English newspapers gradually began to lose interest, after having milked to the full what they described as an heroic feat and praised, in toadying fashion, the national pride of those who had stayed safe at home, watching the BBC, without getting so much as a whiff of gunpowder or scorched or fragmented flesh, nor putting themselves at risk for a second. I, on the other hand, couldn’t lose interest. Day by day, I followed the slow repatriation of troops, their staggered returns that were met with increasingly lukewarm enthusiasm, the steps taken for the future defence of the Falklands, so that the same thing didn’t happen again, as well as the disgrace of the Argentinian military and the immediate resignation of Galtieri; the war did have benefits for the defeated country, namely the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. I even followed Galtieri’s subsequent trial in 1985 or 1986, when he was accused, among other things, of mishandling the war. Found guilty of having led so many men to their deaths and his country to disaster, he was sentenced to several years in prison. He was never forgiven for a war that many of his compatriots had cheered on and encouraged; in defeat, we always look for a scapegoat – and here was one ready-made for the role, who deserved to be the scapegoat – and no one else takes responsibility, and the people always emerge as entirely innocent. Politicians never dare to criticise the people, who are often base and cowardly and stupid, they never tell them off or condemn their behaviour, they invariably praise them to the skies, when there is usually very little reason to praise any people anywhere. They have become untouchable and have taken the place of once despotic, absolutist monarchs. Like them, they have the prerogative to be as fickle as they please and to go eternally unpunished, and they don’t have to answer for how they vote or who they elect or who they support, or what they remain silent about or consent to or impose or acclaim. Were they to blame for Francoism in Spain, for Fascism in Italy or Nazism in Germany and Austria, in Hungary and Croatia? Were they to blame for Stalinism in Russia or Maoism in China? No, never: they are always the victims and never called to account (well, they can hardly call themselves to account; indeed, they always feel sorry for and take pity on themselves). The people really are the true successors of those arbitrary, capricious kings, a hydra-headed variety, but essentially headless. Each of them looks smugly in the mirror and says with a shrug: ‘Oh, I had no idea. They manipulated me, forced me, deceived me and misled me. How was I to know, me, a poor woman of good faith, me, a poor innocent man.’ Their crimes are so scattered that they fade and grow blurred, and the anonymous authors of those crimes are then poised to commit their next crimes – after a few years have passed and once everyone has forgotten about the earlier ones.
August came, and I left for San Sebastián with my family, and with my children, of course, for where I went, they went too. My parents tactfully took me in whenever they noticed I had been too alone for too long. They were used to Tomás’s absences and barely asked me about them. At the time, moreover, there was an easy explanation for his delayed return: after a war that no one had foreseen, the Foreign Office needed to reorganise itself, there was much d
elicate work still to be done; heads would roll, and Tomás might find himself obliged to take the place of one of those fallen heads; I added this off my own bat, thus suggesting that he was doing well, and that his long absences were justified by our present comfortable standard of living and by an even better future.
With them, with friends and acquaintances, with my university colleagues, I pretended to have more contact with Tomás than I actually did during his periods abroad. When he was away from London (or when I assumed he was), I usually had no contact at all, not at least since, years before, he’d told me his fragment of truth, the authorised fragment. That fragment – the essence of what he did, and which was, by definition, small – had been enough to make me an accomplice to his secret and to his double life, and now I, too, would lie in order not to arouse suspicions or betray him involuntarily, so that no one in Madrid found his absences odd or saw our anomalous situation as too anomalous. I wasn’t even sure the British embassy knew what he really did, with the possible exception of the ambassador, as the man in charge, or maybe he didn’t know either: if London asked him to send them one of his staff, he would simply obey orders and wouldn’t object or ask questions.
And so it was this time – again: on my return, in September, I still hadn’t received a phone call, a letter or a postcard or a telegram, nor any indirect news from Mr Reresby or from any other of Tom’s bosses or colleagues. ‘He really must be somewhere else,’ I thought, ‘and to think I wasted all that time worrying about the Falklands, two and a half months spent watching that conflict and its consequences. He did warn me the war might pass him by. So where the hell is he, then, where can they have sent him? The world is a big place and there could be war fronts everywhere, in countries I’ve never even heard of.’ This is what I told myself, but I couldn’t be sure, and the fact that there had been a visible war with visible casualties changed everything; I needed to make sure nothing had happened to him, that he wasn’t among the shameful losses, those that aren’t reported officially or made public, that don’t appear in the files and are never garlanded with honours because of the base, clandestine nature of their missions, whose existence would have to be denied until the end of time by all who had participated in them, known about them or ordered them (I thought Margaret Thatcher would be perfectly capable of denying any glaring fact, or omitting or ignoring any ‘sad story’), as in the time of the PWE, which probably still continued under a different acronym, and nothing has really changed since; those casualties whose names will never appear on the endless lists on those war memorials so popular in England – or at most with some mysterious initials – because of the treacherous deaths they caused and the contemptible nature of their work.
Berta Isla Page 28
