I was barely listening to him. ‘While leaving open the possibility that Tomás might still be alive, this Tupra fellow is basically telling me that I should get used to the idea that Tomás is dead: he may only talk about the legal aspects and what I’m going to live on in the future, but he’s actually talking to me as if I were already a widow. A rather unusual widow, who needs to be recognised as such as quickly as possible, because I could find myself in difficulties if we don’t do things properly. So that I can remake my life and even remarry if I want, for he doubtless assumes I won’t lack for suitors at my age and with my looks, I’ve seen how he almost ogles me, trying hard to suppress any feelings of sexual attraction, but he doesn’t fool me; Tupra clearly likes women a lot and is accustomed to making conquests easily, you can sense it in his attitude, and he must be cursing the fact that he’s met me in such gloomy or pessimistic circumstances, as the bringer of news that strikes grief and despair into the heart, that overwhelms both mind and intellect, and precludes any advances he might make, which would be doomed to failure as inappropriate, disrespectful and completely out of order. That’s what constrains and impedes him, not the fact that I’m the wife of a close collaborator of his: such men are immune to scruples, they depend upon concealment and silence whenever things need to be concealed and silenced, that’s their natural medium, their natural element. Yes, he imagines I could get married again whenever I choose, and doesn’t even see as an impediment the burden I carry and will always carry, namely, two small children, so he’s being very generous in his assessment of my chances. Anyway, he’s prepared to help me even if Tomás is a deserter or has passed over to the enemy, become a defector, because that’s also a possibility. He must be pretty sure that Tomás has done neither of those things, which is why he’s given him up for dead, another outcast from the universe, although officially he’s obliged to leave me with a slender thread of hope, a chink of light. Nothing is definitive without a corpse, without some clear evidence, and Tomás has vanished with no witness to the how or when of his disappearance.’
I hadn’t moved away from the balcony, I was still standing with my back to him, still trying hard to contain the tears filling my eyes, and which I kept swallowing, so to speak, again and again. I finally managed to swallow them all, or so I thought. I heard Tupra light another cigarette taken from that ornate, Egyptian case. Several seconds later, and still without turning around, I said:
‘I can assure you that if Tomás does return one day, his money will have remained intact. I won’t touch it as long as there’s the slightest chance that he might be alive, even if he’s in the farthest-flung corner of the world,’ I said
‘I don’t doubt your intentions, Berta, but don’t be too naïve, intentions can only take you so far. You’ll still need to earn a living, 1989 is a long way off, and 1990 even further, which is when, according to English law, Tom could officially be declared dead, and when you could be eligible for a widow’s pension from the Foreign Office. It would be most unfair, however, if the possible widow of one of our men should suffer any hardship. We usually try our best not to let that happen, we don’t just abandon the family of someone who has fallen, we always provide them with the means to live.’
I interrupted him. That word ‘fallen’ fell like lead upon my soul, like a confirmation of a fact. But that isn’t what I asked him about.
‘1990?’ I repeated. ‘Does that mean that you still had contact with Tom this year, in 1983? So he didn’t disappear in 1982, and he didn’t take part in the Falklands War. Where did he go, then? At least tell me that, please.’
I had turned round now and moved a few steps closer to Tupra. He smiled as if amused by my rapid calculations, or perhaps by his own carelessness, something he realised he must avoid in future. Not that he was particularly bothered, he was an old hand and knew better than to answer my questions.
‘Later, Berta. When, as I explained earlier, we’ve reconstructed what happened.’ And he went on as if I hadn’t asked anything. ‘We’ve come up with the following plan for you: you will appear on the payroll as a translator, as is perfectly feasible, for one of the various international organisations that have their headquarters in Madrid, the COI or the OMT. People who work for them, as for the UN and the FAO and so on, are exempt from paying tax, so the salary they receive is paid gross, and it’s really not bad at all. A privilege, a reward if you like, extended to those functionaries who often have to live away from their country of origin. That won’t be the case with you, but you’ll still enjoy that privilege. Your name will appear on the payroll, but you won’t ever have to visit the organisation’s offices. You can carry on teaching, continue your normal life, and, according to our calculations, you won’t be any worse off, and will receive more or less the same as Tom brought in. Slightly less, of course, but you’ll hardly notice it. You see, if he carried out a particularly long, complex, difficult mission, one requiring special skills, he was sometimes paid bonuses in cash, which, to all intents and purposes, don’t exist, and, obviously, that won’t happen any more.’
‘I don’t know what the COI or the OMT are.’
‘In Spanish, they’re the Consejo Oleícola Internacional and the Organización Mundial del Turismo, respectively.’ He pronounced the two names in halting Spanish, especially the word ‘Oleícola’, putting the stress in the wrong place. ‘Both organisations have their headquarters in Madrid, as I say, and they don’t object at all; they’ve already given their consent. Lots of places are happy to help us, you see, which is a great advantage. They’re eager to oblige when we ask a favour.’
That vague ‘we’, again and again and again. Tomás had belonged to it, and still would after his death or disappearance, after his desertion or betrayal. They gave him the benefit of the doubt, or benefit of their genuine ignorance, and I suppose that was something to be grateful for. They could have washed their hands of him, left him to his fate, because an agent who has fallen can never be used again, he becomes useless or, worse, a nuisance. But perhaps, if he hadn’t fallen, he would be of enormous value when he returned.
‘You mean you’ll be paying me for a job I won’t do?’
‘That’s rather an unnecessary question, Berta. Don’t tell me you’d object to that. If you knew the number of people in the world who get paid for doing nothing, for being on a board of directors or a member of a trust, for attending a couple of meetings a year, for being an advisor who never advises. They’re really being paid for sitting still and keeping quiet. The State happily employs such parasites. Doing so frees it from all kinds of problems, calms any discontent, and can be considered an investment. Besides, in your case, it’s more than justified. It’s a question of fairness. It’s the least we can do when you’ve lost your husband, who served his country. Believe me, this is the simplest and best way to go about things.’
I once more turned my back on him and went over to the balcony. This time, I opened the balcony doors and looked out. A ghost with a statue erected to him, the soldier Luis Noval. ‘You’ve lost your husband,’ he’d said. And I had, even if he was still alive or long since dead. I would have to assume that he wouldn’t come back. I’d spent more than a year and a half without him, nineteen months, I thought. I’d long been used to his absences, or to his intermittent presence, but this was different. ‘I’ll probably, almost certainly, never see him again,’ I thought. ‘Never again.’ And then, unable to stop myself now, I began to weep silently, with no sobs or moans. My eyes brimmed with tears, and I immediately became aware of them wetting my cheeks, my chin and even my blouse. I couldn’t hold them back. (Yes, in the disfigured street he left me, with a kind of valediction.) Tupra noticed at once, he was the kind of man who noticed everything, and instead of staying where he was, waiting for me to compose myself, as any other Englishman would have done, I heard him stand up and approach slowly, quietly, doubtless counting the steps – one, two, three, four; and five. They were warning shots, as if allowing me the opportunity t
o stop him with a word or a gesture, the gesture meaning ‘Wait’ or ‘Leave me alone’ or ‘Stay where you are’. But I felt too helpless at that moment to reject any human companionship, regardless of who it was. I heard his light breathing on the back of my neck, then his hand on my shoulder, his right hand on my left shoulder, his arm around my neck like a false embrace from behind. I buried my face in that arm, seeking refuge or somewhere to rest, and his sleeve immediately became drenched with tears. I don’t think I ruined his suit though.
VI
* * *
The years passed and then more years passed. And the years continued to pass and pass, and, first, I grew less young, and then, slightly older, I may even have begun to age, although not that much it seems, for I’ve always looked younger than I am, I’m fortunate in that respect and have no complaints, people tend to think I’m at least ten years younger. Perhaps I resisted moving away from the age I was when Tomás disappeared, as if any change would be akin to abandoning or betraying him.
Accepting his probable and ever more certain death did not happen instantly. It never does, not even when you’ve seen someone die with your own eyes and have contemplated their still, silent corpse, watched over it and buried it with all due ceremony, step by step, and when there can be no room for doubt. You have a sense – a sometimes morbidly enduring sense – that the death of a loved one, who is as much a part of your life as the air you breathe, is a kind of false alarm, a joke or a fiction, a conjecture or a product of your most fearful imaginings, which is why dreams can often confuse us: we dream of the dead person, we see him move and perhaps touch us and penetrate us, we hear him speak and laugh, and, when we wake, we think he must be hiding and will soon reappear, that he can’t have disappeared for ever and that it’s our waking hours that are deceiving us. It might take a while, but he’s sure to come back. Our reason is not good at accepting the idea of extinction or the concept of ‘for ever’, a term we so blithely bandy about in ordinary conversation. We understand ‘for ever’ to refer to the future, but it also includes the past, and that never dies, is never entirely erased. What was will be and what existed will still exist. What happened will happen and be repeated. And if our reason has difficulty in admitting and coping with those concepts, imagine how hard it is for our emotions. Your hand instinctively slides over to the side of the bed your husband used to occupy when he was at home, and you think you can feel the body that’s no longer there, feel his leg brush against yours and hear on the pillow the restless breathing of someone who is no longer breathing anywhere now. It’s very hard for our emotions and our reason to understand that a being so close to us can, inexplicably, become an outcast from the universe.
But everything comes to those who wait, and insistence does finally bear fruit, and one day, absence finally loses its lingering feeling of provisionality and imposes itself as definitive and irreversible, and even dreams lose their ability to confuse us: they’re confined to their sphere of mirage and unreality, and when we wake they’re immediately placed between parentheses, as being an irrelevance that we can and do skip over; and the years pass for the image of the dead person too, distancing and dimming it; he grows simultaneously older and younger, older because his death grows older and is no longer a novelty or such a calamity, younger, because as we, the living, continue to mature, the dead person seems to us more ingenuous and more childish, even if that’s only because of the age at which he stopped or froze, an age that we left behind with unexpected speed; and also because he doesn’t know what happened afterwards. A day arrives when we start to wonder if he ever did exist, if he ever was present rather than merely past, if there was a time when we didn’t need to remember him because he was there within reach, he was here. (‘This is the death of air’, and then he truly is dead.)
I never knew for sure. Tupra never kept his promise. ‘You won’t be left to speculate about it for the rest of your life,’ he’d told me. ‘Sooner or later, we’ll hear one way or another. We won’t find out everything, but enough. Then we’ll tell you as much as we can about his disappearance, but not, alas, before. Not until we know for certain,’ and that didn’t happen.
He came to visit me once again before returning to London, having first phoned to check that I’d be alone, and on the phone he sounded exactly like that Reresby fellow I’d spoken to years before, but again I didn’t ponder the similarity; perhaps the Foreign Office or MI6 gave them all courses on how to deal with anxious family members. On that second visit, two days later, ‘I succumbed’, as they used to say of women in novels a couple of centuries ago, but never of men. This wasn’t so very strange, or unusual: I’d been alone for a year and a half, from the morning of 4 April 1982, and it was now November 1983, far too long a time to be without any human warmth, something that some of us really miss, while others don’t need it and can happily live without. I’d found him attractive right from the start, despite the pretentious suit he was wearing and that slightly repellent quality, but what at first repels can end up attracting, after a swift moment of adjustment or approval, once you’ve made up your mind. I had felt unconsciously tempted (that is, I’d postponed the temptation) even in the midst of my grief and my imprisoned, then liberated, tears, my shock; and the greater your grief or shock, the greater your state of desolation and numbness and abandonment, the lower your defences and the fewer your qualms; professional seducers know this well and are always on the lookout for misfortunes. Tomás’s absences had, over the years, had a cumulative effect, and each absence weighed more heavily on me and fed my resentment, and perhaps there was no need now to keep Tupra at bay. Tomás’s current absence bore all the signs of being definitive or, at least, sine die. And besides, he would never know. Tupra had put his arm about my neck the previous day, had placed his hand on my shoulder in a gesture of affection for which I was grateful, and I’d buried my face in his sleeve and smelled his smell, there had been physical contact, which is always the first step, even if it appears to be unimportant and asexual, merely a gesture of consolation and solace, somewhere to bury our face or simply keep us on our feet.
That one morning of intimacy gave me licence, if you like, not to wait passively and eternally, but to call him in London now and then and ask if there was any news of Tomás, if they’d found out anything, even if it wasn’t yet ‘enough’ for him to phone and tell me. When he could or when he was there (I wasn’t always put straight through to him, he was often away and I only had his work number), he would speak to me with a courtesy tinged with impatience, which I could sense in the ever wearier, ever more circumspect way he answered my questions. He treated me as you might treat someone with whom you happen to have incurred a moral debt, to whom you’re bound perhaps only by conscience: deferentially and solicitously, but warily, and, needless to say, showing no sign of wanting to see me again or to repeat that carnal experience. Had he suggested it, I might have travelled to London – might. He must be one of those men for whom once is enough (perhaps the kind who likes to mentally tick off each new conquest, and once that’s done, there’s no incentive to do it again), and although such men don’t regret or attempt to erase the experience, they do their best not to let it become a kind of safe-conduct pass to gain access to them or to any preferential treatment. In Madrid, I’d asked him if he was married, and he’d left the question hanging in the air without answering it, and I’d innocently taken this to mean ‘Yes’. Some men pretend to be married so as to avoid being hassled by any occasional lovers.
‘No, Berta, there’s no news, absolutely nothing. If there had been, I’d have phoned you. It’s as if the earth had swallowed him up, an earth that remains exasperatingly silent. We still don’t know what’s become of him.’
Then, invariably, I would ask further:
‘And what does that indicate? How would you interpret that? Does it increase the likelihood that he’s dead or that he’s still alive somewhere? And if he is dead, he would have been killed, wouldn’t he? Would his death h
ave been a violent one? Can’t you tell me where he was? Time has passed, and I’d like at least to know which piece of earth has swallowed him up. And if he suffered a lot or not at all.’
And he would answer, with variations:
‘I won’t lie to you, the more time passes, the more likely it is that he’s dead. But, given that we know nothing, he might have had an accident or a heart attack, anything is possible. And, no, I still can’t tell you where he was last seen, where he disappeared. Besides, we can’t be absolutely sure. Tomás moved around a lot, but we didn’t always know exactly when he did so, not beforehand. That depended on a number of factors. If many more months go by with no news, we’ll publish an official version with a view to having him declared officially dead. The internal version, ours, the one we’re using here, is that he disappeared in Buenos Aires in May 1982. Just for convenience’s sake. As I said, it’s easier to get the powers that be to issue a death certificate in absentia if someone disappeared during a war, in a shipwreck, a plane crash or some other disaster. On a spy mission in his case. When that version is made official, though, when his parents and so on have accepted it, you yourself mustn’t believe it. I’ll tell you the true version, if we ever find out.’ And the next time we spoke, that is, when I phoned him again at the risk of being a pest, he would patiently tell me the same thing, because there was never any news. But he added: ‘I’m more pessimistic now. I’m beginning to think that we’re always going to be left in the dark as to what happened. That’s why, contrary to what I’ve recommended before, it might help you to believe the official version too, if you want. At least then you’d have a story, however incomplete or vacuous, but a story you could tell other people and tell yourself. You’ll need to have some explanation to offer your children when they’re older.’ He paused. ‘Eventually, I mean. A story they can remember. There may never be another one, we may never know anything more.’
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