Now and then, I couldn’t resist going out onto one of the balconies, especially at dusk, as it was growing dark, and looking out across the square – the part visible to me – hoping to spot, to discern his figure, his familiar figure, walking towards me, or getting out of a taxi next to the Iglesia de la Encarnación; and if I saw someone carrying a suitcase or a travelling bag (which was fairly common given the number of tourists in the area), I would rush to fetch the binoculars I’d used to spy on Esteban Yanes and would, absurdly, focus them on the individual in question, always thinking that if Tomás did return after all that time, he’d be sure to have some luggage with him. And like an irrational fool, I forgot that his figure – if he wasn’t already under the earth or under the sea – could well be far from familiar; that he could have become as unrecognisable as the patient, accepting, loyal banderillero.
I was acting purely out of superstition, a superstition to which Jack Nevinson also contributed one morning, or towards lunchtime, for he had come to have lunch with us as he had every Sunday since his wife died. Guillermo and Elisa (Guillermo was already thirteen) had gone out to play in the Jardines de Sabatini or in Campo del Moro, and always left it to the last minute to come home. Neither of us knew it then, but Jack didn’t have long to live: two months after that Sunday, he had a heart attack in the night and died. When I made my usual morning phone call to check up on him, he didn’t answer. I left a message on his answering machine, and when he failed to return my call, I caught a taxi and went anxiously over to his apartment in Calle Jenner, already fearing the worst, convinced that this would be the day he would not wake up. I let myself in with the spare key, and found him lying on the floor next to his bed, in his pale pyjamas and with one hand clutching the dark silk dressing gown he hadn’t managed to put on, as if he’d fallen while trying to reach it or perhaps while trying to pick up the phone on his bedside table, doubtless to warn me. The attack had been so sudden, so devastating, that he hadn’t been able to get to the phone and had fallen over as he reached out. Or perhaps he was seeking the cold of the floor before dying, because coolness does offer some relief when we feel ill. Or perhaps he wanted to escape the accumulated warmth of the sheets and didn’t even try to call for help, or to save himself. Some people, when the time comes, do accept it and think with their final thought that it’s fine, not so bad after all, that it’s enough, that there’s no point resisting or struggling on for a number of weeks or months. Few people are quite so self-possessed, but they do exist, and sometimes I hoped I would be one of them, or at least I did then, when Jack died. With Jack’s death, with Miss Mercedes having died some years before, and with Tomás’s siblings living so far away, it was as if my long connection with the Nevinsons had finally ended, although my children bear that name and will always be Guillermo and Elisa Nevinson. On my business cards, though, I’m no longer ‘Berta Isla de Nevinson’, because it had long ceased to be the norm in Spain for married women to add their husband’s surname to theirs in that possessive way. On my cards I went back to being ‘Berta Isla’. Not, however, in my memory or my imagination.
That Sunday, Jack was fine, with no worrying symptoms. He had asked for a glass of white wine and was sitting where he usually sat; in fact, where most visitors tended to sit (not that there were many), that is, in the same place where Miguel Ruiz Kindelán had given me the fright of my life many years before. Jack was resting one hand on his latest purchase, a light walking stick with a metal handle. He proudly gave me a demonstration: the handle could be unscrewed to reveal a slender, very sharp dagger, thus transforming the cane into a kind of mini-lance or harpoon, which did actually look as if it could be thrown, in which case, of course, it could prove deadly.
‘Given how dangerous the streets are these days,’ he said, ‘you never know when you might need some deterrent. I’m too old to defend myself with blows or to run away. They’d hunt me down like a rabbit. No, what am I saying? Like a snail.’
‘But it seems to take so long to unscrew,’ I said, ‘that by the time you’d done that, they’d have overpowered you. Or, worse, grabbed the stick and turned it on you.’
‘Oh well,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It could still be useful if I saw the danger coming, and I do always keep my eyes peeled. Then there would be time to unscrew the handle and show them the knife! It’s quite frightening, isn’t it? You could certainly inflict some damage with it.’
It took so many turns of the handle that I couldn’t really see that it would ever be of much use, but if it gave him a feeling, however illusory, of being safe, then it would have served its purpose.
‘Do you remember, ages ago now, how Tomás got mugged when he was in London? The muggers cut his face really badly and left him with a deep scar. And then the scar just vanished completely, as if it had never been there. Very mysterious. If I remember rightly, he said he’d had plastic surgery, courtesy of the Foreign Office. That’s what he said, anyway, although who knows what really happened.’
Jack rested both hands on the metal knob of that death-dealing walking stick, then rested his dimpled chin on his hands; the cleft in his chin had grown deeper with age. He thought for a moment, then answered:
‘Everything about Tom has always been very mysterious.’ I noticed at once the tense he used: not ‘was’, which would correspond to a completed action (or, indeed, person), but ‘has been’. ‘At least ever since he went to Oxford or left Oxford. I sometimes wonder if I was wrong to insist on him doing his degree there. Something happened. Something happened to him and changed him, I don’t know what. Has he ever told you what it was?’ He was still not using the simple past, which you would normally use when speaking of someone who was dead. Jack Nevinson’s Spanish was far from perfect, of course, despite having spent most of his life here. We alternated between the two languages, sometimes speaking in one and sometimes in the other, depending on how he felt. ‘But how could I possibly have known that whatever it was that happened to him there would happen? Don’t you know?’ He repeated the question, as if he found it hard to believe that I wouldn’t know.
‘No, I don’t, Jack,’ I said. ‘Tomás was always very secretive. His perennial excuse was that he wasn’t authorised to reveal what he did or where he went, or anything. That if he told me anything, he’d be committing a crime, violating the Official Secrets Act or whatever it’s called, to which he was subject, and apparently no one can do that without suffering grave consequences. Even once they’ve retired, they must remain silent unto death. I suppose anyone who breaks that silence could be accused of high treason, even today. Of course, he only told me this after confessing to me who it was he was working for, but, before that, he didn’t tell me much either, and, to be honest, I didn’t take much interest in those diplomatic matters.’ I fell silent for a few seconds, thinking, then added: ‘But, yes, something definitely happened to him at Oxford, towards the end. I noticed that change in him too. Even before we got married. They must have recruited him then. He took on responsibilities that would have been unimaginable when he first left. He started leading a double life, and both lives involved pretence and concealment. That would be enough to change anyone’s character, don’t you think?’
‘Indeed, and yet, and yet … I’ve always thought there was something else. Tom is too mysterious,’ he said again, and this time he didn’t say ‘has been’ but ‘is’.
‘Why do you say “is”?’
Surprised, Jack looked up, but kept his hands still resting on the handle; he clearly enjoyed that posture.
‘Did I say “is”?’
‘Yes, you said “Tom is too mysterious”.’
He looked out of the window at the trees, with his innocent, absorbed, blue eyes.
‘Yes, perhaps I did. I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘I suppose you never get used to the idea that a son, whom you saw when he was still so tiny and yet so filled with vital energy, should have ceased to be. You’re convinced, from the day he’s born, that your child will survive you, that you won�
��t see him die. And bear in mind, too, I haven’t seen him die, I haven’t seen his dead body or buried him.’ Then he added: ‘That’s the easy answer, but it isn’t only that, Berta, I won’t lie to you. I’m all for you remaking your life and forgetting about him. With another man, I mean. I don’t want the slightest hint of uncertainty to bind you to him, nor for his memory to be a burden to you. But Tom really is so mysterious, so elusive and chameleon-like, so hard to pin down – he was even as a child – that I can’t bring myself to believe he really is dead. Call it what you like, fatherly intuition, a hunch, suspicion, scepticism about the official version, wishful thinking (I never know how to say that in Spanish). Perhaps a desire to deny reality. But I’d be perfectly within my rights to do so, that’s one of the advantages of getting old. We don’t have much time left and reality tends to leave us alone, it washes its hands of us and passes us by. Almost all the cards have been dealt and very few surprises await us. And if reality turns its back on us, we can do the same and deny it if we want to. Within limits, of course, it’s not an excuse for talking utter nonsense. I’m certainly not going to deny that Mercedes is dead, how could I? But I do have a feeling that Tom is still alive somewhere. A fugitive, in hiding, living under another identity. Perhaps even having undergone plastic surgery again. I don’t know and I don’t know why I think that. And I probably couldn’t prove it, unless his body was found and then, yes, I would have to accept it. I don’t think he’ll turn up again before I die. If he’s been in hiding for getting on for ten years, then there’s no reason why he shouldn’t stay hidden for fifteen or twenty years, until whatever there is to be forgotten is forgotten. Ultimately, of course, everything is forgotten, or is a matter of indifference to those who come after, those who succeed us. Obviously, I’ll die without ever knowing anything for certain. On the one hand, that’s a shame, but, on the other hand, it’s an advantage, because that way no one can persuade me that I’m wrong, and I can still believe I’m right.’
I was both moved and startled. ‘So he’s been making his own conjectures too,’ I thought. ‘And for how many years has he been doing that?’
‘Do you really believe he’s alive?’ I asked.
Jack looked away from the trees and at me, with his usual limpid gaze.
‘Do I really, really believe that?’ He paused for a moment, as if hesitating. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, Berta, because I have no evidence. And don’t think I know something you don’t, because I don’t. I have something more than that, I have conviction.’
He was probably right, not just about the old, but about the living in general, we are all entitled to reject those bits of reality that cannot be proved, that leave us embittered and distressed or simply vexed, that deprive us of all hope. We can always say ‘I can’t be certain’ about something of which we’re not certain, and the truth is that there’s very little we can be certain of; I mean, almost everything we know is what we’ve been told by other people, or by books, newspapers and encyclopaedias, or by History with its chronicles and archives and annals, which we believe because they’re old and established, as if, in their day, these hadn’t also distorted and lied about the facts, leaving legend to prevail. We’ve barely witnessed anything, barely seen anything for ourselves, we are almost incapable of affirming anything to be true, even though we do so all the time. Therefore, it’s not that difficult to deny a fact or the existence of something when we choose to: a combination of the opaque nature of the world and our own shaky memory (ephemeral, uncertain, changing) usually makes that easy for us. If someone we admire or love commits a misdemeanour, we nearly always say: ‘No, it wasn’t him – or indeed her – he’d never do such a thing. I thought it was him, but I must have been mistaken. I couldn’t quite see, it was dark and I was rather upset at the time, I was standing at an odd angle to him and wasn’t wearing my glasses. I mistook him for another person who resembled him, yes, that’s what must have happened.’ Why, then, not believe that your disappeared son, your youngest son, is still alive somewhere. Priam saw his firstborn child, Hector, die before his eyes, slain by Achilles, which is why he went to plead with Achilles to give him Hector’s poor, battered body so that he could bury him; if he chose to humble himself like that it was because he knew his son was dead. But if he hadn’t seen him die, if they had merely come to tell him that Hector had fallen in single combat in some remote place, he could have waited for his return, he could have hoped the witnesses were wrong, and attributed their opinion to poor eyesight or overhasty conclusions, and nothing would have prevented him then from awaiting his own death in a state of uncertainty. That’s why all those words exist: confirm, prove, verify; ratify, corroborate, substantiate and ascertain. They’re not superfluous or merely ornamental, they answer to a need.
I couldn’t confirm anything to Jack Nevinson nor disprove anything either, you can’t disprove feelings, still less convictions. However, I refrained from telling him what my own feelings and convictions were or had been, especially in 1988, after which they had abated. I would have had to tell him that old story about the Kindeláns, which I’d always kept from him and his wife, so as not to alarm or worry them. That incident, more than any other, had often made me suspect that Tomás had been deployed on dirty missions to Northern Ireland; and I imagined the people there to be irascible and hate-filled and more frightening than any other. Not just the members of the IRA and the armed Unionists, but the population as a whole; I imagined they were as gripped by savagery and a desire for revenge as we Spaniards were in the 1930s, in the last century, which I can’t get used to calling ‘last’ because it’s my century and I’m still here. (Or like the Basques in the 1980s, those dominated by ETA.) The Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany – to mention other places where, in my ignorance, I would sometimes place Tomás – did not, perhaps absurdly, provoke in me the same feelings of panic. They might be more dangerous countries, but at least their populations were, I thought, too much under the thumb of their governments to intervene.
On 19 March 1988, what became known as the Corporals Killings took place. Three days before, during the funeral in Belfast of three members of the IRA who had been caught preparing a bomb attack and were shot and killed by British troops, a member of the Ulster Defence Association, Michael Stone by name, had attacked the funeral cortège with pistols and hand grenades, killing three people, among them another member of the IRA, Caoimhín Mac Brádaigh, or Kevin Brady. Understandably, his funeral on the 19th took place in an atmosphere charged with tension, rage, fear and suspicion. In order not to inflame matters further, the police decided to stay away and leave the funeral unguarded. A large number of IRA and Provisional IRA members acted as stewards, and quite a lot of journalists were present, including a TV crew. It’s believed that, either by accident or because they didn’t know about or were ignoring general orders to stay away from the area, two British army corporals, in civilian clothes and driving a silver Volkswagen Passat, drove straight into the cortège, which was headed by several black cabs. The crowd assumed this was another attack and that the occupants of the car were, again, paramilitaries in the Ulster Defence Association, like that man Stone who had killed Brady three days before. Left with barely any room for manoeuvre, the corporals made various attempts to withdraw, and on one such attempt, their car mounted the pavement, provoking more fear and even more anger and scattering the mourners. Finally, the two men found themselves trapped, blocked in by the black cabs, and then the crowd hurled themselves on the car, broke the windows and tried to drag the two corporals out. One of them, twenty-four-year-old Derek Wood, produced a handgun – a pistol or a revolver – and fired a shot into the air, which briefly dispersed the crowd. However, the crowd, even angrier now, then surged back and managed to pull the two soldiers out of the car – Wood and David Howes, a year younger than his colleague – and punched and kicked them to the ground. A journalist described the moment when the corporals realised they were lost and how one of them: ‘didn’t cry
out, just looked at us with terrified eyes, as though we were all enemies in a foreign country who wouldn’t have understood what language he was speaking if he called out for help’. They were dragged to a nearby sports ground, where a group of men stripped them down to their underpants and socks. A Redemptorist Catholic priest, Father Alec Reid, attempted to stop the beating and asked for an ambulance to be called, because, according to the BBC, the soldiers were being tortured. He was pulled away from them, and told he would be shot if he tried to intervene further. The beatings continued, and, in the end, the corporals were thrown over a wall and into a waiting black cab, which drove away at high speed. Inside were the half-dead soldiers and two or three other individuals, plus the driver. One of the passengers was seen to wave an angry, triumphant fist in the air. You can see some of what happened on YouTube, the part that the TV crew were able to film before the crowd, aware of what was to come, stopped them and shoved the cameras out of the way. You can see that fist very clearly, though, the gesture of someone making off with some promising booty.
What was promised soon came to pass, or else their captors were in a great hurry to keep that promise. The taxi didn’t travel very far, only about two hundred yards, to a piece of waste ground, where, once the identities of the two men had been confirmed, ‘we executed them’, to use the words of the communiqué issued shortly afterwards by the Belfast brigade of the IRA. The word ‘execute’ doesn’t fit well with the state of Wood’s corpse – he was the one who had fired his gun into the air when he found himself surrounded by the crowd: he had been shot twice in the head and four times in the chest, had been stabbed four times in the back of the neck and suffered multiple injuries to other parts of his body. This seemed to be the work of numerous frenzied hands, not that of one cool-headed executioner. Father Alec Reid had followed the taxi on foot, guessing what would be the corporals’ final fate and hoping to prevent it. However, when he arrived at the waste ground, it was too late (the whole incident lasted only twelve minutes), and all he could do was give the last rites to the dead, the newly dead. A photographer captured the moment, and the image became so famous that Life magazine named it one of the best photographs of the last fifty years, that is, of the last half-century. In the picture, we see Father Reid wearing a kind of zip-up cagoule or anorak and kneeling beside the bloodstained, near-naked body of the younger of the corporals, Howes. The priest is looking at the camera, or rather at the person holding the camera (perhaps seeking another human being who might share and comprehend his desolation), with an expression of impotence or modesty, as if he knew deep down that those last rites would be of no use to the dead man. But it’s the only thing he can think of to do, and some people feel a need to do something, even in the face of the irremediable.
Berta Isla Page 36
