Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  ‘No, he might not,’ said Tupra, and took another sip of his beer without, for an instant, taking his eyes off Tom. ‘But he’s of little account, a mere pawn. He’ll never rise very far in the ranks unless he learns to adapt. He reports to his superiors and obeys orders, and the higher up the ladder those superiors are, the more sensitive they are. Sensitive to favours, I mean. Not so much receiving favours as handing them out. Doing favours is what people like best, Nevinson; you must have noticed that, despite your youth; even a child knows that, he picks it up from his dealings with adults. Receiving favours diminishes, doing favours enlarges.’

  ‘Yes, it makes you feel really good doing someone a favour,’ added Blakeston, who apparently never disagreed with his young boss. ‘Even if those favours will never be repaid. Some people don’t even say thank you or deign to notice, and they’re the ones who remain undiminished, proud, ungrateful people who think the world owes them. There are quite a few like that. But it still makes you feel really good doing someone a favour, even when you get no thanks.’ He must have been speaking from experience; perhaps he was one of those men with no initiative, someone who has to be directed and guided like a wind-up toy, the kind whose only talent is to serve and who expects nothing in exchange, only new orders and new tasks to keep them on the move. Without some external stimuli they would sleep out their life from cradle to grave.

  ‘I see,’ said Tomás. ‘So what do you suggest I do, then? You’re going to do me a favour, I assume, even though I’m nobody, and I certainly need a favour. I’m already diminished enough, and I don’t mind being a little more diminished if I can get out of this mess. Professor Wheeler told me you would advise me, Mr Tupra, that I should listen to your suggestions, but you haven’t yet made any. All you’ve done so far is paint a very bleak picture of the future, even bleaker than it was before I met you. I was hoping that this Hugh fellow would save me, that, if I was lucky, he’d become the main focus, and now you’re telling me that, precisely because he is the man I saw, or so I believe, I’m even closer to being charged and, very likely, condemned. Is that right?’ And he recalled Wheeler’s warning words: ‘You’ve got yourself into a far more serious situation than you realise. There are certain factors of which you know nothing and that will make it very hard for you to extricate yourself.’ He must have been referring to the fact that Janet’s boyfriend was an MP, something he must already have known, which meant that he was presumably in constant, fluid communication with Tupra; so what exactly was their relationship? Tupra and Blakeston fell silent, as if concurring, or as if, when something is self-evident, there is no point in wasting words on it. Tupra was regarding him almost wryly, as if he found the situation merely entertaining rather than downright comical. He must have been accustomed to spreading confusion and despair, to causing people to think there was no way out or that any possibility of escape depended entirely on him (perhaps that was his job, driving the people he interviewed into a corner and forcing them to beg him for a solution, a fix, to intercede on their behalf, to rescue them; and he did this very subtly, as if he were not imposing any decision on them at all, leaving scorn to do his work for him, because scorn disheartens and undermines). Blakeston was trying hard to imitate his superior, but failing miserably: his gaze, also fixed on Tom, was entirely neutral or, worse, impenetrable. He had barely touched his beer, limiting himself to blowing at the foam, even when the foam had gone. Tom rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, unable to bear this continued scrutiny, as if both men were expecting him, not them, to propose some solution. He took out a cigarette, and, so immersed was he in the mental fog surrounding him, he didn’t even offer one to Blakeston or to Tupra, causing Tupra to take out one of his own from a packet – the brand was Rameses II, decorated with colourful Egyptian figures and pharaohs – and each then lit his own, Tomás lighting the same kind of Marcovitch cigarette that Janet had knocked from his lips when she accidentally scratched him. ‘How odd that those fingers can no longer caress or scratch or pick anything up,’ he thought. ‘The night before last, they could do whatever they chose and now they can do nothing, it makes no sense at all, and death is nothing like life, nor does it make any sense that one should succeed the other, let alone replace it.’ The scratch and the cigarette spotted by Morse would both work against him, and Tom again touched the tiny scab. It made him angry being forced to see his life in such an absurdly gloomy light, his future snuffed out or dark and overcast. ‘Anyway, who are you? Who do you represent?’ He realised suddenly that he had no idea. He had his suspicions, but neither Tupra nor Blakeston, nor Reresby nor Montgomery, had actually introduced themselves, or told him on whose authority they were acting, nor what body they belonged to – if they belonged to any (they were probably free agents, mafia men authorised to do deals, to blackmail, since, according to Southworth, Wheeler knew people from all walks of life) – nor, of course, had they shown him a card or a badge, so he had no idea how much influence they had or whose side they were on either, nor if their power lay in the sheer breadth of their influence, greater than that of the police, the courts, even the Cabinet. He nursed the brief illusory hope that they might be omnipotent and capable of erasing the episode completely, even her death by strangulation, and bring Janet back with them; but this lasted only a second. They hadn’t so much as offered to help him – yet. So far, all they had done was set out the problems facing him. The truth is, he had no idea who he was talking to, and yet he had placed himself in their hands, had surrendered himself to them.

  Then Tupra gave a short laugh, a sympathetic laugh. He was, all in all, and despite his offhand manner, a pleasant man: he may have devoted himself to intimidating and dissuading, to spreading gloom and despondency, possibly terrifying all those he met, but he did so with grace and charm. He could doubtless turn coldly, methodically violent (the coarse, broken nose, the bulging cranium that his thick curls failed to attenuate), but what prevailed in him was a certain affability (the thick eyelashes, the permanently moist lips). Blakeston laughed too, lagging slightly behind his boss. He had been given permission or been set an example.

  ‘Did you hear that, Bertram, the boy is asking us who we represent? I mean, what an absurd question!’ he exclaimed jovially, and this caused him to laugh out loud again, and he began then to laugh stridently and unstoppably, his laugh infinitely more piercing than his voice, and which continued to grow still louder, a real attack of the giggles, ha ha ha, ha ha ha, each guffaw slightly longer and more outrageous, so much so that the denizens of The Eagle and Child craned their necks to look over at their table, for, up until then, their conversation had been conducted very quietly, none of them wishing to attract attention, and now here was Blakeston attracting it in spades, and since it was hardly normal to go around dressed as a war hero, moustache and all, everyone would retain that image of him as a hysterical viscount. ‘We don’t represent anyone, Nevinson, no one. That’s the funny part, we never represent anyone,’ he managed to blurt out in the midst of his extravagant hilarity. His laugh was at once infectious and embarrassing, a laugh Tom had only heard before from certain jolly, ingenuous homosexuals. The real Field Marshal Montgomery would definitely not have approved of that laugh, he would have been indignant even to be associated with it, even at one remove, in the form of a not very successful lookalike. The toggles on his duffel coat, all tightly fastened, prevented Blakeston from giving full rein to his guffaws. Tomás thought he might burst out of them, but instead, Blakeston, still laughing, succumbed to a coughing fit, intermingling coughing and laughing.

  ‘That’s enough, Blakeston,’ Tupra said. ‘Stop laughing and have something to drink. You’ll choke if you don’t stop.’ But he, too, had been infected by his colleague’s giggling fit, and he sounded singularly unauthoritative. Even Tom was affected, despite his anxious state.

  Montgomery pulled his hood up over his beret, covered his mouth with a few paper napkins, and his laughter gradually subsided. He then drank his beer, downing half
in one go.

  ‘Pardon, pardon,’ he said in French. ‘It’s just that I thought it was a question we might well ask ourselves.’ And he very nearly began laughing again, this time in rather more difficult circumstances (hunkered down inside his hood), but fortunately he managed to get a grip on himself.

  ‘Blakeston is quite right in what he says,’ said Tupra, addressing Tomás. ‘Although it hardly merits such hilarity. My friend Blakeston is sometimes overcome by these giggling fits, luckily not that often. What he finds so funny is that we don’t really belong anywhere, neither officially nor officiously. We are simultaneously somebody and nobody. We both exist and don’t exist. We both act and don’t act, Nevinson; or rather, we don’t carry out the actions we carry out, or the things we do are done by nobody. They simply happen.’ These last utterances sounded to Tom like something out of Beckett, who was very much in vogue at the time among the intelligentsia, and whose plays were staged in London with elitist veneration; he had, after all, been awarded the Nobel Prize only a short time before. To continue in that vein, Tom both understood and didn’t understand. ‘We can change things, but we leave no trace behind and so can’t be held responsible for those changes. No one will call us to account for the things we do but don’t do. And given that we don’t exist, no one gives us orders or sends us anywhere.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you, Mr Tupra.’

  Blakeston had completely calmed down now, and so he took off his hood, but did so rather too abruptly, accidentally removing his beret as well and briefly uncovering his head to reveal a most unexpected sight: a shock of reddish hair which he had kept carefully tucked under his beret, and this made him look still more intimidating, like some kind of Hells Angel. He took on a rather savage appearance and entirely lost his martial air, although only for a few seconds, because he very skilfully scooped up his hair again with one hand, and, with the other, pulled on his (badgeless) Montgomery beret, although the real Montgomery would have loathed that hair even more than he had the man’s shrill laughter. The result of this manoeuvre was that, unbeknown to Blakeston, the napkins with which he had muffled his cough ended up in the hood of his duffel coat. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off them, they lay there all crumpled up, and rather resembled cauliflower florets in a basket.

  ‘We’re a bit like the third-person narrator of a novel, and I’m sure you’ve read a few novels, Nevinson,’ Tupra went on didactically. ‘He’s the one who decides what will happen and the one who does the telling, but he can’t be challenged or interrogated. Unlike a first-person narrator, he has no name and he’s not a character, therefore we believe and trust him; we don’t know why he knows what he knows and why he omits what he omits and keeps silent about what he keeps silent about and why it is that he can determine the fate of all his creatures, without once being called into question. It’s clear that he both exists and doesn’t exist, or that he exists but, at the same time, cannot be found. He’s even undetectable. I’m speaking about the narrator, mind, not the author, who is stuck at home and is not responsible for anything his narrator says; even he can’t explain why the narrator knows as much as he does. In other words, the omniscient third-person narrator is an accepted convention, and the average reader of novels doesn’t usually stop to ask why that narrator takes the floor and doesn’t relinquish it for hundreds of pages, droning on in that invisible man’s voice, that autonomous, external voice that comes from nowhere.’ He paused, twiddled one of the ringlets at his temple, then took a sip of his now flat beer. ‘Well, we’re something similar, an accepted convention, just as one accepts and doesn’t object to chance, as one accepts and doesn’t dispute accidents or coincidences, illnesses, catastrophes, events fortunate and unfortunate. We can stop a disaster from happening, but rather as a sudden change in the wind direction can save a boat, or a fog can conceal the pursued from their pursuers, or a snowfall can erase the footprints of the former, disorienting the latter and their dogs, or as black night can stop someone in their tracks and block their view. Or just as the sea parted to make way for the Israelites, then closed again on Pharaoh’s army following behind them in order to destroy them. That’s what we are, and we really don’t represent anyone.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ thought Tomás. ‘They’re a blade of grass, a speck of dust, a life with no origin and a war with no cause, a handful of ashes, a puff of smoke, an insect, simultaneously something and nothing.’ However, the main message he retained was this: ‘We can stop a disaster from happening.’ Perhaps that was true, perhaps they could bring to a halt the disaster hanging over him, but they still hadn’t said how, or what they needed to do in order to become a change in the wind direction, a snowfall, a fog or a black night or a sea that parts. And yet he couldn’t resist saying to Tupra:

  ‘I assume you must have studied literature, Mr Tupra, to have had such thoughts.’

  Tupra gave a rather condescending laugh, which seemed to say: ‘What do you take me for? An unthinking man of action? Yes, I’m capable of taking action and jettisoning all scruples, but I do so knowingly and consciously.’ Anyone would have thought he was not just a few years older than Tom, but about twenty-five years older.

  ‘I’ve studied many things,’ he said. ‘Here in Oxford and in other places too. I’ve spent my whole life learning. My main subject was Medieval History, but you and I have shared some of the same teachers, and they might be the ones who will, indirectly, save you, Nevinson.’ This explained the slightly Oxonian accent Tomás had noticed. He wondered how someone like Tupra could have gained admission to that snobbish university, someone who could well have come from a rundown area like Bethnal Green in East London, or even worse places like Streatham, Clapham or Brixton. He must have a lot of good qualities, or be very astute or, as Wheeler had said, resourceful. He must come across as extremely convincing, either that or rather frightening.

  ‘Indirectly?’

  ‘Yes, through us,’ said Tupra, smiling. ‘Through the encroaching fog. You know the person who acted as intermediary.’

  Then Tomás decided to ask him straight out:

  ‘Can you stop my disaster from happening?’ Yes, that was the expression that had stuck in his mind.

  ‘Possibly. It depends. We might be able to make you cease to be a nobody and become Somebody, isn’t that right, Blakeston?’ Blakeston nodded somewhat doubtfully. ‘In that case, you could become as armour-plated as Saumarez-Hill. Not in the same way nor for the same reasons, but to a similar degree. It would, of course, be a problem getting rid of the two individuals who were in Janet Jefferys’ flat on that worst of all possible nights to visit her, let alone have sex with her. Namely, you certainly and Mr Saumarez-Hill only possibly, or perhaps not at all. Be that as it may, those two people would have to be quietly airbrushed from the picture. Yes, that would be slightly problematic, but not impossible. That all depends on you, Mr Thomas Nevinson. On whether it would be worth our while starting the snowstorm or changing the direction of the wind.’ And for the first time, he didn’t just call him by his surname, but added ‘Mr’, as if he were trying it out, as if he were demonstrating the considerable difference that exists between being nobody and being Somebody.

  ‘And if you did get rid of us, what then? Wouldn’t that cause a terrific scandal? What would that man Morse say? How could it be explained away?’

  ‘Oh, he’d get angry and protest, as, doubtless, would his immediate superior, assuming he’s made of the same stern stuff, but their complaints wouldn’t get very far. They would immediately be silenced, as happens in all hierarchical institutions. Janet Jefferys’ death would, for the moment, remain an unsolved case: a lack of proof, a lack of sufficient evidence for charges to be brought; no one wants to bring a case they won’t win. And there are a lot of such cases. Sometimes it takes years to discover the guilty party, and sometimes they’re never found. Leaf through the files of fifty years ago, or twenty or ten. The people of this country love a good crime, but they soon forget all abou
t it if there’s no continuity, no conclusion, with the exception of the occasional nutter who keeps sending letters to the police until even he finally gets bored. If the number of unresolved cases was made public, there’d be a huge outcry and people would live in a permanent state of fear. But the number of cases that do get solved keeps them happy, and there are enough trials and sentences handed down to give an impression of efficiency. If you were to ask the general population, the majority of them would be convinced that our police and our legal system work far better than any other, and that a murderer is unlikely to go unpunished here. But people don’t keep track of the cases that fade into oblivion, or that are left in a limbo no one ever peers into.’ Tupra was obviously rather pleased with that last phrase, because he paused before saying it, as if it were the clinching line of a poem. ‘In six months’ time, no one will remember Janet, except those close to her. Not even the inhabitants of Oxford, who are currently all stirred up and agog for news, and will remain so for several weeks, but after a month or two with no news, well, no one can stay on tenterhooks for that long.’

  ‘But news will get around that I was with her. The neighbour who saw me will already have spread the word. People will eye me suspiciously, they’ll wonder why I haven’t been arrested and will cut me dead. Or worse still, they’ll turn nasty.’

  ‘Possibly, for those first few weeks,’ said Tupra calmly. ‘Then they’ll assume you had nothing to do with it, that you’re innocent, precisely because you haven’t been arrested or charged. Some may even think: “Poor boy, his girlfriend was killed on the night after he’d been with her, he must have been through hell. He made love to her and then someone strangled her.” Besides, you’ve nearly finished your studies, haven’t you? You won’t stay here much longer. You’ll go back to Spain or be posted somewhere else temporarily to perfect your languages. And when you visit Oxford at some later date, no one will remember you or make the connection.’