And there was no other story, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, and, after a certain point, I stopped bothering Tupra, it was no use, and he, too, disappeared from my life, in his case very easily. The bureaucratic wheels moved at their usual leisurely pace, and, after the necessary time had passed, Tomás Nevinson was declared officially dead, in Spain and in England and, I assumed, in any other country too; and I became a widow and my children became fatherless, I mean our children, but he’d been so little present in their brief existences that I often forgot they were also his children. The children were always with me and belonged to me, just me.
I immediately began to receive the monthly, tax-free salary from the OMT that Tupra had proposed and arranged for me, so that I wouldn’t have to go without while I waited for the declaration of death in absentia and for the slow arrival of 1989 and 1990, along with the inheritance due to my children and myself. In England, I didn’t even have to wait for the obligatory seven years to pass, they allowed for exceptions – that is, a reduction in the term – depending on the circumstances and the probability of death, which, in Tomás’s case, was very high: officially, he’d disappeared in a war scenario, even though, over time, the Falklands conflict had come to be seen as only a miniature war; but wars large and small produce corpses, although those who die in the smaller wars are granted less importance and are less likely to be remembered. And so once he’d been declared legally dead, the British government assigned me a widow’s pension, as the widow of an employee of the embassy in Madrid, what they call a civil servant. Since I was already being paid that other undeserved salary plus what I earned at the university, where I was now a permanent member of staff, that additional sum helped me keep my resolution not to touch Tomás’s money, at least not the money he’d kept in his English account, which was doubtless from some unofficial or obscure source, perhaps given to him in person by Tupra himself once he’d completed a mission, a deception, an infiltration, an abomination.
There is, almost everywhere, an element of superstition about bodies: until they turn up, no one dares consider them to be cadavers, not entirely. Especially if there’s no oral or written evidence from whoever saw them die, and no one had seen Tomás die. I’d now read Colonel Chabert, after Tupra had mentioned it, and if Tomás did one day rise from the dead, I didn’t want the same thing to happen to him as happened to that poor colonel, whose survival was denied even by his own wife, who was horrified at his resurrection, having since married a count and had children by that second husband who was richer, higher up the social scale and promised her a far better future; that colonel with the huge scar on his head from a sword blow to the skull, who could make her a bigamist and her children bastards; whom she had stripped of his fortune, and now, necessarily and logically, of his identity too; whom she accused of being an impostor, and who would end up utterly disillusioned and mad in an asylum, or else having forgotten everything, the state that best befits the living (or the uninterrupted living), his stubborn persistence abandoned at last. As I say, that was pure superstition. The truth is that I didn’t really believe Tomás would come back, and, after all, Balzac’s novella was a fiction.
This was not the case with the subject matter of a French film I saw shortly afterwards and that enjoyed great popularity, The Return of Martin Guerre. It was made in 1981 or 1982, but I probably only saw it in 1984, when I finally overcame my reluctance and got up the courage to go; several people had spoken to me about it and its subject matter filled me with terror. It was based on a true story, which happened in the south of France, very close to the Spanish border, in the sixteenth century, and also – as I found out later – on an excellent novel published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre, written by Janet Lewis, an American writer I’d never heard of until then (despite my classes and my teaching specialism). The trials that ensued were so famous in their day that the then young Montaigne travelled to Rieux or Toulouse to attend the court sessions, to which he referred in one of his Essays. It told of the sudden disappearance of a well-off husband in the provinces, who left one day with no explanation, and then, after several years, came back – or, rather, a man returned who not only closely resembled him, but also had a detailed knowledge of Martin Guerre’s past, and so must have been him. He was accepted as such by his sisters, his uncle, now head of the family, and also by his wife, Bertrande de Rols, to use her maiden name, who went on to have a second child by him, having had her first child by Martin before his mysterious departure. I’m not sure now whether all this is in the film, the novel of forty years before or a later book of ‘microhistory’ by a professor at Princeton, which I also took the trouble to read once the threshold of fear had been crossed and my curiosity aroused. Probably all three did, for none of them departed from the fundamental facts, none of them departed from the truth. After her initial reaction of joy and welcome (a reaction that lasted a long time), doubt and remorse began gradually to eat away at Bertrande, and she ended up convinced that this second Martin was an impostor, who had led her to commit adultery (or, put in the ugliest of terms, had raped her by dint of deception), to conceive and give birth to an illegitimate child and to hand over her absent husband’s money to an adventurer, a swindler. Hence the denunciation and the trials, the first one in the small town of Rieux and the definitive one in Toulouse. The shocking, paradoxical aspect of the case was that the supposed impostor was kinder and more affectionate, more benevolent and harder-working than the surly, awkward, discontented young man who had abandoned her all those years before. And, yes, that story was real, it had actually happened, for alongside those artistic reconstructions or reworkings, there were chronicles from the period and even the proceedings from one of the trials; there was documentation. The sixteenth century, though, was so long ago that it was just as unreal as the story imagined by Balzac. People’s memories were doubtless vaguer then, and it would have been harder to recognise someone’s face, skin or smell.
And so the years passed and more years passed, and with each month that went by, I felt Tomás was even more dead, both before and after the certificates that condemned him to be dead in the eyes of the world, that confirmed his death. But you should never underestimate what you see and read and hear. We soon forget the twists and turns, let alone the details, of any story, whether real or fictional, which tend to become flattened out beneath the sheer weight of subsequent layers of time. And yet, whatever we’re told remains lurking in the nooks and crannies, on the edges and boundaries of our imagination. It forms part of our knowledge and, therefore, of what’s possible. And although I was sure Tomás wouldn’t reappear, either like Chabert or like Martin Guerre, I couldn’t help fantasising about that in a tenuous, timid way, especially when I was most alone. And I would again remember that line: ‘as death resembles life, being between two lives’, as I waited for my second life to begin. And I would also recite, softly or to myself, those lines so appropriate to dreams born of desperation: ‘We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them.’
I didn’t remain still during all those years, I didn’t fall into depression or remain paralysed. I occasionally flirted with despair, but never out of choice, only because it sometimes attacks without warning; I never immersed myself in it, though, nor did it occur to me to remain faithful to someone who was never going to come back. It didn’t take long for me to consider myself to all intents and purposes a widow; indeed, I felt like a widow. I drove away the mist, raised my eyes from the ground and looked around me, ready to remake my life, as people say of someone who wants to find a new partner after a loss or a bad experience, after an unhappy or imprisoning marriage, dull or tormenting or oppressive. This wasn’t the case with me. I’d been settled and contented from the start, but my husband had behaved like a ghost, or like Dr Jekyll, with too large a dose of gloom and anguish, of a strange poison accumulated when he was far from me, with farewells repeated over and over until the final farewell. I would not allow my bed to become ‘a
woeful bed’, or if it did occasionally become one, it was not of my choosing. A few men visited it, with Tupra being the first and earliest example on that one occasion, and he could have visited more often, had he not been so far away – and I’ve no idea if he deliberately chose to keep a distance or if it just happened – and had he not been so shrouded in what I sensed was secrecy and darkness. None of those men lasted very long, none of them, for one reason or another, stayed – who knows why – none of them replaced Tomás. A stupid colleague from university, a friend of a friend who proved too devoted and adoring, my children’s paediatrician, and an Englishman from the embassy where Tomás had worked; I fully intended each of them to last, but none of them did last very long, if by ‘long’ we mean a year or more. I never got that far, normally it was just a few months, and the months end and succeed each other with great rapidity, both the months spent alone and those that hurt and drag and seem as if they’ll never end – they, too, escape us and immediately become the past.
One of those men fled as soon as I became slightly affectionate and sentimental: he took fright, thinking I was needy and on the hunt, if I can put it like that; and he was terrified of my children, fearing he would have to take them on as well if he stayed too long by my side, even if only out of habit; and as soon as he had satisfied, or semisatisfied, his sexual desire, he went from greeting me with enthusiasm to merely nodding when we passed each other in the corridor at the university. Idiot. Another man quickly outstayed his welcome, he was one of those silent admirers who can’t believe his luck when someone suddenly takes an interest in him, and he finds himself in that longed-for, unattainable place. Such men become so afraid of losing this miracle that they grow oversensitive and possessive, expecting to be dumped at any moment, knowing how undeserving they are and living in a state of constant trepidation, seeing in everything signs that the other person has had enough and that the end is nigh. And thus, of course, they hasten it on, for no one can bear the faint-hearted, the overly insecure or the overly keen, those who have a sense of having gained access to a privileged position, to be living in a dream. I didn’t want to be a dream, nor to feel myself, at all times, the object of his devoted gaze, even in the most ordinary or – if I’d let him – banal situations. I let him go tactfully and kindly, he hadn’t done anything very serious, apart from being cloying and clinging and having sex with me nervously and ceremoniously, as if I were made of cut glass or, worse, were some kind of divinity.
My children’s paediatrician was a jolly, flattering man, who immediately inspired confidence: your children, you felt, were in good hands, and it was easy enough for me to transfer that feeling of confidence to myself, for there are times when one needs at least a semblance of protection. Unlike the idolater, he was easy-going and funny and, probably, a womaniser, because, more than once, I had the distinct impression that I was not the only mother of his patients with whom he’d established that cosy connection, with home visits lasting slightly longer than usual and concluding with a reward in kind, a swift, discreet reward (we never took off our clothes), swift enough for the children not to wonder where we were. They knew when he was leaving the house (I suppose he reckoned it was worth his while to make such home visits), because before he left, he always looked in again at whichever child was ill, to say goodbye with a joke or an improvised bit of doggerel (children love rhymes) and to offer reassurance. He was too elusive a man to stay anywhere for long. He had recently divorced and was keen to enjoy a period of absolute freedom. I was the one who decided to stop those brief encounters, because, as I said, I aspired to a little stability. In the end, I had to ask him to recommend a colleague, which was the only way of breaking that particular vicious circle, because whenever he visited, I would have found it hard to say ‘No’ to him, with his phonendoscope around his neck and his medical bag. He was disappointed, of course, but understood and accepted my decision. ‘If you change your mind,’ he said, ‘I’m at your disposal. At any time of day or night, with a sick child or without.’
As for the Englishman, he lasted longer than any of them, a whole eleven months. He was a quiet, rather self-contained type, respectful and solicitous, but not unbearably so; he wasn’t particularly interesting and not a great talker, and yet he had a strange capacity to communicate sexual passion and to make me forget, momentarily, what I’d been through, and almost to forget what had been, to make each time like the very first time. Not just with him, but in general, as if I’d gone back to the days before anyone had entered me. The problem is that, outside that terrain, he had precisely the opposite effect on me: his job was the same as Tomás’s job. In fact, he had taken over his post at the embassy, a post that, in Tomás’s case, had been purely nominal, because he had been away so much and had neglected his duties there in the interests of some higher service. This other Englishman did not combine both jobs, and I was sure he hadn’t replaced Tomás on that other front, presumably because he didn’t have the right personality or the necessary gifts, and so wouldn’t have been of great use (he even struggled to learn Spanish, another reason not to recruit him). Nevertheless, he was occasionally called on to travel to London and to other places, and each time he told me he was going on one of these trips, each time I said goodbye to him – even if it was only for a weekend – it revived in me memories of all my countless farewells to Tomás when he set off to some obscure destination and with no known return date, both equally swathed in mist before and in the silence of the non-existent afterwards. This didn’t help me to bury Tomás. There hadn’t been nor would there ever be a body, but I needed at least to bury him in my imagination. The only way of doing this was to stop remembering, to settle into a way of life so different that it would never be troubled by the inconclusive, the lost, the before. The paediatrician could possibly have served this purpose, if he hadn’t been like a strong gust of wind that slaps you in the face and then leaves. He did, however, inhabit an entirely different world. The Englishman was a constant reminder of my past life and would be of no help in shaking off the memory of Tomás. Much to my body’s chagrin, I gradually distanced myself from him, gradually let him go. And so I never saw the dust in the air suspended, which, according to the poem, marks the place where a story ended.
To my parents, had they known, this would have seemed like a lot of men, especially if I’d listed them as I just have, but there weren’t that many of them really, and I should know. They paraded past over the years, and there were infinitely more solitary days than days spent in company, and even more solitary nights, the paediatrician, for example, always left fairly abruptly, although the others did stay the night, or else I would go and sleep in their bed or in the bed of some hotel outside Madrid (in El Escorial, Ávila or Segovia, Aranjuez or Alcalá), but not that often, only when I could leave the kids with my or Tomás’s parents, saying I had a congress to attend or a symposium for specialists in my field. These were not jolly little escapes, they were tinged with a sense of the temporary, the exceptional, and the artificial, as if we were lovers who decide occasionally to play at being lovers, almost out of duty, and to leave the city, spend the day together with no real idea as to what we should do except wander about, eat and make the most of the hotel room, to sleep together, although with no real desire to rub sleepily up against that unaccustomed and possibly invasive and bothersome body, and really just waiting for the weekend to be over so that we could return to normality and to Madrid.
And each time an affair failed or dribbled away into nothing, or when it was clear that it was going nowhere, the phantom – or was it just my fantasy? – of Tomás gained or regained strength. There’s nothing strange about that, it’s normal: if someone in whom we’ve put our trust fails us, we tend to seek refuge in what can no longer fail us because its time for failing has passed. And it doesn’t even matter if, in its day, it failed disastrously, was perplexing and discouraging, brought us sorrow and frustration and incomprehension, and kept us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction
. What is lost and in the past is always more comfortable than the lukewarm present and the improbable future. Any damage it caused moves off into the distance and takes on an unreal quality. What happened is no longer a threat, no longer fills us with anxiety or with the worst kind of despair – the anticipated variety. It fills us with sadness, yes, but not with fear, and fears, once appeased, once they have been and gone, can provide refuge or shelter precisely because they will not come again.
And instinctively, or, if you like, irrationally (but who doesn’t sometimes resort to irrationality), after each failure, I would cling to that last doubt: no body had been found nor had I been given a definitive account of his death, and Tupra’s initial predictions had proved wrong: ‘You won’t be left to speculate about it for the rest of your life, I promise.’ The rest of my life might go on for a long time yet, but the years were passing, and I was still speculating. Not continually, but now and then, especially after some new disappointment in love. Then I would turn to his other words, the ones intended to save me from absolute pessimism and to soften the blow: ‘Tom could walk through that door tomorrow, I wouldn’t exclude that as a possibility either.’ One tomorrow is succeeded by another, and then another, which is both good and bad: good because it encourages us to wake up and get out of bed; bad because it paralyses us and tempts us to spend our time waiting for each day to end. I even thought about his self-serving words of advice and had to acknowledge that I had been preceded by millions of women, that my case was not exceptional: I thought about the wives of those sailors who took years to return home, about the wives of soldiers who had deserted and didn’t dare come back; the wives of prisoners and kidnap victims, the wives of men who were shipwrecked or the wives of lost explorers. History is full of women who sit and wait, who gaze out at the horizon every day at dusk, trying to make out a familiar figure, and who say precisely this: ‘Not today, no, not today, but perhaps tomorrow, tomorrow.’
Berta Isla Page 33
