Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  I hated to think about Ruiz Kindelán, but he had drawn a vivid picture of what lay ahead for retired agents, a fate perhaps not so very different from that of retired terrorists, which is why he knew about it first-hand, as if he assumed that this would also be his fate and that of Mary Kate. He’d said that most leave the service ‘either mad or dead’. ‘And those who survive end up not knowing who they are. It makes no difference what age they are. If they’re no good any more or are burned out, they’re sent home or left to vegetate in an office, and some individuals don’t even reach thirty before feeling that their time has passed. They remain attached to their murky past, and are sometimes overwhelmed by remorse. The cruelty of the acts they committed sullies their present, and what was important for them is of no importance to anyone else.’ This didn’t sound like a very attractive or consoling prospect either, welcoming home a thirty-two-year-old man longing for what was, a man who feels more like a seventy-year-old, someone aware that the best years of his life are over, someone perhaps unhappy and permanently embittered, aggrieved because he’s no longer useful. No, there was no good solution, nothing could restore to me the Tomás I’d fallen in love with when I was very young (I’d always wanted to be Berta Isla de Nevinson, when it was the custom for women to add their husband’s surname to theirs with that proprietorial ‘de’), the Tomás who never went in for soul-searching and never had any interest in understanding himself. If they retired him, though, he would be continually looking back at himself, and everything he experienced with me would seem monotonous and insipid, insipid and disappointing, a perpetual decline and motive for dissatisfaction. ‘So it’s better to keep waiting,’ I told myself, although not in so many words, ‘it will be bad if he comes back, or if one day I find a letter from him in the postbox; and it will be bad if I learn that he’s not coming back, that he can’t, that he died in some remote place and all that remains for me is the process of loss and forgetting. It’s better for things to continue as they are: unresolved and indefinite and utterly vague.’

  That’s why I responded with such dread to that ring on the doorbell in November 1983, the damp, rainy month that finds uneasy, melancholy souls such easy prey, snatching them up in its claws and plunging them into folly so as to avoid them committing the greatest and most tempting folly of all; and thus it urges them to find a ‘substitute for pistol and ball’, as Melville and his narrator say at the beginning of Moby-Dick, which I’d also had to teach on more than one occasion. By then, I could no longer keep my agitation at bay, or not always, and my eyes all too often filled with tears. I still preferred nothing to happen, for nothing to change my waiting state and for every day to be the same as the previous day, but that feeling alternated with moments of unbalance, even of lurking exasperation, when I longed to close the long chapter of my thirty-two years and bid him farewell, saying enough is enough; when I wished something would shake me out of my inertia and oblige me to leave without a backward glance, to move, to get in the car and drive off who knows where or lose myself in some unknown provincial city, to disappear like Tomás, so that, if he did come back, he would be as bewildered and alarmed as I was, and would go about asking everyone: ‘Where’s Berta? How is it no one knows where she’s gone, how is it no one has reported her missing to the police, how is it that we don’t even know whether she’s alive and in hiding at her own choosing or hidden and dead at the choosing of others, how could she have left no clue, no farewell note, no words of warning, no strange remarks even hinting at her decision?’

  Most women, however, are prevented from doing so by their children, which is why we say nothing to them about it, but we often wish that they didn’t exist and would leave us free and in peace, that they’d never been born or were self-sufficient from the start, that they weren’t constantly wanting or asking things, that they didn’t depend on us for everything, even getting dressed in the morning, let alone going anywhere or being fed, always having to dispel their fears and make them happy, which is their natural inclination. (What we never wish is for them to die, never.) I was bound to Guillermo and Elisa and that was that, and sometimes I rebelled against that commitment. They were as much mine as Tomás’s (no, in practice, they were more mine, only mine), but he contributed more money to the household and was providing a vital service to his country, and that was alibi enough, neglect justified by duty. At least we didn’t lack for money: during those nineteen months, his variable salary (he must have been paid bonuses depending on the merit, length, difficulty and danger of his missions) had been paid punctually into our joint account, as it had for years, whether he was in Madrid, London or some secret location unknown to me. I knew that this wasn’t the whole of his salary, that part of it – perhaps certain extras not subject to tax, back-pocket payments – never left England and was transferred directly into an account over there, an account to which I had no access and about which I knew nothing except that it existed, but with no idea how much was in there, I mean, how much he had stashed away. ‘It’s always best to have some savings abroad,’ Tomás assured me, ‘and best to have it in sterling too, because you never know when you might have to leave Spain or how quickly. You might just get fed up or else be kicked out, because Spain is a country with suicidal tendencies, and, for centuries, has forced some of its best people into exile, the people who could have improved or saved it; the ones it didn’t murder, of course; in that respect, there’s no other country quite like it.’

  It was a fairly loud ring, at eleven o’clock in the morning, on a day when I didn’t have classes and the children weren’t at home: Guillermo was at the school I’d attended from when I was a toddler and Tomás from when he was an adolescent; and Elisa was at nursery school. As it happened, I was in the middle of preparing a lesson on Moby-Dick for the American Literature course I’d been given to teach that year (I’d just come across Melville’s strange way of describing the ocean: ‘the watery part of the world’), and I looked up like a startled animal, because I wasn’t expecting anyone. I tiptoed over to the door so that my high heels wouldn’t betray my presence at home (I was always wary of visitors, ever since the Kindeláns), and peered through the spyhole where I saw a man with a bulbous cranium which he did his best to mitigate with a thick, curly head of hair, a man I’d never seen before. The tiny convex glass of the spyhole distorted the image, and so his head might not have been quite as bulbous as it seemed. At first glance, he looked English to me, not so much because of his features, but because I could see that he was wearing a dark grey suit with a double-breasted jacket, which was unmistakably English; and he wore his overcoat draped over his shoulders as if he were a gangster from Soho or the East End or wherever, or a posh denizen of Madrid. His appearance was mildly offensive, but, if he was an Englishman, then he might be able to give me news of Tomás, I thought. Still without opening the door, I asked:

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mrs Nevinson? Mrs Berta Nevinson?’ He was definitely English. ‘My name is Bertram Tupra and I’d like to talk to you, if I may. I’m a colleague of your husband’s and I just happened to be in Madrid. If you wouldn’t mind opening the door …’ He said all this in his language, of course; he obviously didn’t know a word of Spanish.

  When I heard that name, the name Jack Nevinson had mentioned, I hesitated no longer and opened the door, gripped by a mixture of panic – or was it horror – and curiosity. I just had time for this fleeting thought: ‘If Tomás’s boss has come in person, it must be to give me the worst possible news,’ and I tried to accustom myself to the improbable idea that my husband had died. ‘Tomás is dead,’ I thought, and, at the same time, I didn’t believe it. ‘And now what? Now what?’ And still I didn’t believe it, as if it must be a lie or a mistake.

  The man smiled when he saw me, which made me briefly correct my assumption: you don’t smile when you’ve come to report some terrible misfortune, when you’re about to tell a married woman that she’s now a widow and her children are orphans, and so young
too. Behind that slightly mocking smile and the blue or pale grey eyes, I caught a kind of appreciative male gaze, quite out of place if this was a sad occasion and he was about to present me with his condolences. But I know that some men simply can’t help it, even if they’re looking at the victim of a road accident lying in the street and they’ve hurried to help her; if, for example, her skirt has ridden up or the buttons of her blouse have been wrenched off in the impact. Bertram Tupra might be one of those men. There aren’t many in England, it’s true, but he did have unusually dark, lustrous skin, a broad nose that looked as if it had been broken by one blow or by several, a Russian mouth, and the long eyelashes of a southerner. Yes, he was definitely that kind of man: some women, myself included, can spot them a mile off, and we’re not immune to that swift appraising glance, and such men, in turn, immediately pick up on that. I reckoned he was in his late thirties, possibly about five years older than me, but his physical appearance was so disquieting and so elusive that he could have been or claimed to be almost any age.

  ‘Please, Mr Tupra, come in. I think I know who you are. Do you have any news of Tom? Is he all right? He is alive, isn’t he?’

  He raised one hand to stop my questions, as if saying: ‘Patience, patience. It’s not the moment to talk about that just yet. All in good time.’ There was nothing else I wanted to talk about, but his gesture was so imperative that I immediately recomposed myself, postponed my eagerness to know, and did as he ordered. I suppose his air of calm provisionally calmed me down too, but the effect didn’t last.

  ‘Really?’ he said, as if he hadn’t even heard what I’d said. ‘Has Tom spoken to you about me?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. My father-in-law, Jack Nevinson, mentioned that he’d met you once.’

  ‘Yes, indeed he did. Tom’s father,’ he said, as he slipped off his overcoat with almost bullfighterly grace and held it out to me as if I were the cloakroom attendant at a discotheque. He seemed very sure of himself and not in the least inclined to beating about the bush. ‘Where shall we sit?’

  I showed him into the living room, and he sat where Miguel Kindelán had sat on that nightmare morning, while I sat in the armchair to his left, as I had on that other occasion too, but now there was no cradle between us. I asked if he wanted anything, a drink or a coffee. He shook his head and wagged one finger in an almost dismissive fashion, as if he were telling me off and saying: ‘Please, this isn’t a social visit.’

  My anxiety immediately returned, at least partially, but I managed to keep it under control. ‘Yes, let’s cut to the chase,’ I thought. I still felt slightly calmer, like someone who has assumed that all is lost and expects the worst. Expecting the worse and hearing the worst are two very different things, and I hadn’t heard it yet.

  ‘Is there any news of Tom? I haven’t had any news from him since 4 April last year. You can imagine how worried I’ve been. Tell me the truth, please. Is he alive?’

  He looked straight at me with his warm or, rather, all-absorbing eyes. It was not the serious gaze of someone about to announce a death, but nor was it reassuring. There was a certain insolence in that gaze, possibly unintentional, possibly unwitting, as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes. He took out a strange, ornate cigarette case, and asked if he could smoke, I said he could, and he offered me a cigarette, which I accepted and then he took one too, and while he was lighting mine (while I was intent on watching the flame from his lighter), he began to speak:

  ‘I very much hope he’s alive, but I don’t know.’ That was how long the flame lasted; when he spoke again (and he didn’t even pause), I’d already moved away from him and was conscious of the piquant taste of that tobacco (I had leaned a little closer to light my cigarette, and Tupra smelled good, of mint and a fresh herbal-scented cologne). ‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you, we’ve done everything we could before deciding, finally, to get in touch with you, and we’re very grateful for your discretion and patience. Some wives would have moved heaven and earth in the face of such a long silence, they would have been ringing up every day, obstructing our work. Anyway, what I want to tell you is that we’ve had no news from him either. Not for quite as long as you, of course, but for a few months now we’ve heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s vanished without trace. He didn’t come back when he was supposed to, insofar as we can ever know when anyone’s supposed to come back; that varies a lot and is never very clear, subject as it is to unforeseen events, delays, complications and setbacks. He hasn’t been in touch with the people he should have been in touch with. He hasn’t asked for help or to be relieved, he hasn’t advised us of any difficulties or warned of any imminent danger. That’s why I think he’s still alive, an agent usually knows in advance when it would be best to get out and abandon the field. And, obviously, he hasn’t turned up dead anywhere, which is another fundamental reason for not getting too alarmed or assuming the worst, because dead bodies are much easier to find than living ones. After all, they don’t run away or move, they stay put, which means that sooner or later, with a few exceptions, we do find them. But anything is possible. I don’t want to ruin your hopes or get your hopes up either. Anything is still possible. He may have deserted, to use a military term; he may have grown tired of us and decided to disappear from a life that certainly wears a man down, he may feel he doesn’t want to collaborate any more. It wouldn’t be the first time. The easiest way of detaching yourself from something is to leave without saying goodbye, telling no one and simply not answering any calls. When it happens, that’s what we call “playing dead”. There are people who vanish completely and then reappear years later, and we discover that they’ve spent all that time hiding away somewhere, living under a false identity and working in a completely unexpected profession that has nothing to do with their aptitudes or their training – you’ll learn to do anything if it will help you escape: herding sheep, milking cows, whatever is least likely to get you noticed. After all, we make use of that ability sometimes too, when we have to remove an agent from circulation and keep him safe from reprisals, so there’s no reason why an agent shouldn’t plan and organise his own exile. He may also have been captured. If that were the case, it would perhaps take us a while to find out, and we might not know anything until the other side wants to negotiate a prisoner swap. It’s not uncommon, years later, for them suddenly to produce a name out of nowhere and put it on the table, a name we’d given up as having disappeared for good, as lost or even dead. Lastly, he might, for some reason, be trapped, hidden and submerged, waiting to resurface. He may have had no option but to become a sleeper, with no prospect in the short term of waking up. So it’s still possible that he might yet reappear. Here or in London, or anywhere that will give him some guarantee of safety. Anyway, Mrs Nevinson, my advice to you is not to wait for Tom, not for the moment, not in the long term. I’m not saying you should lose all hope either, of course not, but you need to get used to the idea,’ he paused for a moment to allow me to get used to the idea of what idea it was I should get used to; it was that rather than a hesitation, ‘that he might not come back at all.’

  Then into my head came one of the lines Tomás had been reciting for years and had, all unwittingly, transmitted to me; and suddenly I understood it fully: ‘as death resembles life’, for example, described the situation Tupra had just laid out before me. There was not much difference now between Tomás’s possible death and his possible life. He might never return anyway, even if he was still alive and breathing in some far-distant place. I could choose to stop waiting for him or to continue waiting, I could ‘declare’ him to all intents and purposes dead or ‘decide’ that he still trod the Earth and traversed the world; I thought all this in a very inward way, to myself, for my own governance, so to speak. And what about externally?