Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  ‘But, Tomás,’ I said, ‘that isn’t what I mean. What I’m saying is that nothing obliged you to make that choice, either in Spain or in England, I don’t know how else to put it. You could simply not have done it, and then nothing would have happened, that couple wouldn’t have appeared in my life or threatened to set fire to Guillermo, I mean, do you realise how dreadful that was? Do you realise what I went through?’ He said nothing, as if admitting he’d been indirectly guilty, guilty at a distance. ‘Nor would we have to be thinking now about whether we should stay together or not. Or rather, as you put it, I wouldn’t have to ask myself that question. I understand that you want us to stay together, despite everything, despite what you tell me, despite the anomalous situation you’re proposing, with me unable to ask you any questions, with you imposing your rules in the peculiar way that I find so unsatisfactory. I don’t understand why you didn’t consider or weigh up the consequences.’

  He turned to look at me. I was still staring straight ahead, at the trees and the storm outside; but I caught the expression on his face out of the corner of my eye. This time it wasn’t a look of moral superiority; on the contrary, it was one of inferiority. The look of someone caught out or someone who has broken something valuable. That of someone regretting certain actions that are now impossible to undo.

  ‘I wouldn’t be authorised to answer your questions, Berta. That could land me in prison. And, yes, of course I want to stay with you. You have no idea. You’re the only thing that allows me sometimes to remember properly who I am. But you don’t know the obligations I’m under, you don’t know what those obligations are,’ he said.

  ‘Well, tell me, then.’

  He remained silent for some moments, as if considering the advisability or even the possibility of telling me what those obligations were, as if he were tempted to do so, but knew he shouldn’t, that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he succumbed to that temptation. Then his anguished expression softened and he said:

  ‘The obligation to avert a tragedy, Berta, does that seem so very trivial? That’s what we do. We avert tragedies. Again and again and again. Endless tragedies.’

  I was certain that this wasn’t the obligation he’d meant, but I felt that was enough for one night, it sounded good. The rain had stopped again. I was tired now, and he must have been exhausted, and who knows what troubles and sorrows he was carrying with him, from where and for how long. He had, after all, come home, he would sleep beside me, I would see his body next to mine in the bed, his face or head on the pillow, his now bearded face. Unlikely though it might seem, this calmed me. Tomorrow I would think about what I should do. I rested my head on his shoulder, a gesture he doubtless misunderstood.

  V

  * * *

  That night I genuinely didn’t know what to do, but I did, of course, stay with Tomás; you would need to have lost an awful lot before you’d be willing to renounce what you have, especially if what you have is part of a long-term plan, part of a decision that contained a large dose of obstinacy. You curb your impetuous urges, your expectations, you accept the somewhat tarnished version of what you were hoping to achieve or thought you had achieved, and besides, there are disappointments and imperfections at all stages of life, and you become less demanding: ‘Never mind, it wasn’t meant to be,’ you say. ‘All is not lost, it’s still worth my while, I can still make do, it would be far worse if there were nothing at all and the whole thing had fallen apart.’ When a woman first finds out about an infidelity (as people rather unimaginatively call it), she allows herself to fly into a fury, to heap abuse on the unfaithful partner, to throw him out of the house and shut the door on him. There are some very proud people, or perhaps they’re simply more puritanical or more virtuous, who take this attitude to its logical conclusion, but most people, after that first access of rage, begin to hope that it was merely a minor misdemeanour, a whim, a caprice, the product of boredom, vanity, a temporary moment of blindness, and not something serious that looks set to end in a complete separation from the so-called injured party, replacing her and usurping her position. That reaction can’t be put down solely to natural conservatism, the desire to keep hold of what you’ve earned and still possess – a fear of the void and an infinite reluctance to go back to square one – there’s also the advantage that the other person is then in your debt. If you stay by his side, if you ignore that transgression, you’ll always be able to point to your scar and reproach him, even if only with a look, the way you walk or even breathe. Or by falling silent, especially when falling silent is inappropriate, because then your other half will ask himself: ‘Why doesn’t she answer, why doesn’t she say something, why doesn’t she look at me? She must be thinking about what happened.’

  This wasn’t so in my case, or, rather, any likely infidelities would have occurred out of necessity, as part of his job, or possibly in order to survive; perhaps it was something more akin to the kisses and sex scenes that actors and actresses have to perform. One assumes they are acting, and that when the director says ‘Cut’ those actors and actresses stop, draw apart and treat each other as if there hadn’t been the slightest hint of intimacy between them. Or only with their bodies, but not with their souls, which is perhaps one of the few areas in which such a separation can exist. Tomás, of course, would have to perform with no director, no cameras, no team, there would be no witnesses of any kind, no one saying ‘Cut’. On the contrary, he would have to appear totally sincere and real, certainly to the other person, who would perhaps have fallen so stupidly in love that she would have revealed more than she should have to the one person to whom she should have said nothing, the person seeking her ruin, a hidden enemy, an impostor, a traitor, and she would tell him these things as evidence that she was in the know and had information that could prove useful, or – just to be kind – to offer him a date or a name and thus unwittingly betray someone else, purely to show off her knowledge, to boast. In the arena of love, a certain amount of boasting is inevitable, before or afterwards, out of a longing to feel more loved, and in that arena you do talk a lot, and you end up talking endlessly, as if that were the greatest possible gift you could give, to satisfy the other person’s curiosity and provide them with sometimes unnecessary facts. These are, however, wasted gifts, because most people instantly forget how they found out such-and-such a thing and therefore feel no gratitude or admiration for the person who told them. Once they possess a piece of information or data, they quickly come to believe that they acquired it independently, rapidly forgetting how they did actually acquired it or where, and the messenger soon fades into nothing.

  One day, I tried to get Tomás to give me just such a modest gift. Since such gifts were forbidden, I tried to make my question as general as possible, not wishing to compromise him in the least, and so dared to ask him directly:

  ‘If you have to pass yourself off as someone else when you’re wherever it is they happen to send you, I imagine that sometimes you must have to go to bed with a woman, even if only to get information out of her or gain her confidence and to create the kind of bond that will encourage her to confide in you. Is that right? You can tell me, I’ll understand. I won’t hold it against you.’

  This wasn’t entirely unbelievable – that I would understand, I mean; after all, the 1970s were more permissive, more forgiving in that sphere: nobody was anyone else’s property. Contracts and bonds were things to be despised: if I’m with you and abstain from being with others, that isn’t out of obligation, but a matter of desire and will, we’re free and each day we start anew; that was common currency among numerous couples at the time, even if people still got married believing it was for life. Besides, Tomás and I had spent a lot of time apart since very early on, when we were both still very young, which is when you’re most likely to succumb to temptation. He hadn’t even been the first man in my life nor had I been the first woman in his, that was clear when he and I finally got together; I mean fully, deeply, when, as they say in
the law, we consummated our relationship. We hadn’t told each other any details or mentioned specific encounters or names, but we both assumed their existence and took it for granted that they were our own personal business. They had happened in the past, and, therefore, had also become a fiction, up to a point. And we assumed, too, that they had taken place before our wedding. While getting married didn’t change anything for us – or perhaps it did in my case, for I naïvely experienced it as a kind of achievement, the fulfilment of a goal – there is a kind of strange, inherited mysticism about marriage to which almost no one can remain immune or indifferent, like the mysticism surrounding motherhood. These are doubtless atavistic feelings, but the married woman and the married man will never be quite the same as those who have never married. Even if you don’t believe in ceremonies, however simple or businesslike, they do have an impact, which is why they were invented, I suppose: to draw a line, to establish a before and an after, to make something that wasn’t serious serious, to underline and solemnise. To make an announcement and for that to be embraced and sanctioned by the community. No one needs to be told who the new king is (unless there’s no heir and there are dynastic disputes), and yet no monarch has ever renounced or chosen to skip the coronation ceremony. Perhaps the question I’d asked was weightier than I thought. We were sitting outside a café in Rosales, underneath the trees; it was the tail end of summer, late September, and we were alone, having left Guillermo with Tomás’s parents. Tomás looked at me, surprised and rather embarrassed, which partly answered my question, or so I thought.

  ‘Why ask that now?’ he said. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you wouldn’t ask me any questions.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m not asking you anything specific, where you’ve been or why, nor who you’ve been working with or against, nor what you’ve done or not done. I’m just asking if that happens. In general. It’s natural curiosity. Wouldn’t you be curious if it was the other way round and I were in your shoes, pretending to be another person and mixing with strangers as if I wasn’t married and didn’t have a child? You would, wouldn’t you? You’d be really curious. I’d be very offended if not.’ I tried to make light of the question, and smiled when I made this last remark, but the joke fell flat.

  He looked away and appeared to be thinking. He took a sip of his beer, then put his glass down on the table only to pick it up again.

  ‘What good will it do you to know? You’ll be worrying about it every time I go away, worrying about whether I’ll be going to bed with some woman for the sake of the mission. Nothing that happens on those missions has anything to do with you, I thought that was clear, that you accepted it. It simply doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It shouldn’t even exist for me. And it doesn’t exist, I don’t know how I can put it more clearly. It doesn’t happen, it doesn’t take place. Haven’t you heard about soldiers who, when they return home, never talk about what they experienced in the war or what they had to do? They never mention what they saw and, fifty or more years later, they die without ever having spoken about it. As if they’d never been in combat in their lives. Well, it’s the same with us, the only difference is that they choose to remain silent and we have no choice. We’re under a strict obligation to say nothing. If we did, we’d be accused of giving away State secrets, and that’s no joke, I can assure you.’ Again and again that word ‘we’; he clearly felt himself to be a member of a body, or perhaps a club, and that comforted him.

  ‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why you got involved in the first place,’ I said. ‘You and your colleagues may be defending the Realm, to use your word, but no one will ever know that, so you can’t even boast about it. Isn’t that too high a price to pay? I can understand that absolutely all your activities are what the English call “classified”, secret, confidential, and will remain so until you die and even beyond the grave, but I can’t see what you gain by it, apart from being well paid, because I imagine we’re largely living off your salary. But no one will ever see you as heroes, or even as patriots. What you do will be relegated to oblivion or obscurity. However important it may have been, however great the tragedies you may have averted, no one will know. A threat aborted, a tragedy prevented, becomes downgraded to a fear, and, a posteriori, people tend to see any fears that come to nothing as unjustified, as exaggeration and paranoia, almost a joke. All those people who built nuclear bunkers in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States, must feel rather foolish now. It’s as if what doesn’t happen somehow lacks prestige. And it’s the same or worse with what we don’t know. The chasm between what happens and what doesn’t happen is so vast that the latter fades into insignificance, becomes unimportant and barely worth thinking about. We respond to the sheer force of facts and are guided by that. Look what happened to me. If Kindelán had set fire to Guillermo, and I’d watched my child being burned alive, well, if he’d died, our lives would have been destroyed for ever and I would never have been able to forgive you. I would probably have gone mad right there and then, or perhaps run into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and stabbed them both, Miguel and Mary Kate. I would probably have been sent to prison or, best-case scenario, locked up in an insane asylum. But since it was only a threat, a nasty scare, since it didn’t happen, I could tell you about it in retrospect with relative calm, because nothing fundamental changed, Guillermo emerged unscathed, he continues to grow and thrive and will have a normal life, or so I hope, and who knows, perhaps one day I’ll tell him, as a striking anecdote and even with a touch of humour, about the terrible danger he was in when he was still in his cradle. The distance between what can occur and what does occur is so huge that we forget about the former, even if it came within an inch of happening. All the more so if we didn’t know that it could have happened, because then it can’t even be forgotten. Imagine if Franco’s coup d’état had failed after just a few days. It would have been a mere footnote in the history books, another incident that occurred during the days of the Republic. Or as if it had just been something that was greatly feared or rumoured, but never actually happened. No one would know the names of those who stopped it, would they, those who would have averted a civil war and nearly a million deaths. Since those deaths would not have occurred, the crushing of the uprising would have had no dramatic consequences and would, therefore, be of no interest, no significance.’ I fell silent for a few moments, while Tomás stared at me, surprised at my verbosity, and I added: ‘According to what you tell me, you belong to that group of people and always will, to those whose names will be forever forgotten or forever unknown. And you seem quite happy with that.’

  Tomás was sitting with one elbow resting on the table, and he raised one hesitant hand as if he were holding in it a heavy globe or perhaps Yorick’s light skull. I don’t know why, but I interpreted that gesture as condescending.

  ‘You don’t understand because you can’t understand, Berta. But then you’re not involved. The proof that it’s beyond your grasp is that you got your tenses wrong, you’re thinking in terms that simply don’t apply. You said that what we do will be relegated to oblivion and never even acknowledged. It would be more accurate to say that what we do has already been relegated to oblivion the very moment we do it. Of course it’s unacknowledged, like the actions carried out by someone who never was. Something like that. Even before we do it, it’s already non-existent. There’s really no difference between before and after. Before something has happened it hasn’t happened, and afterwards it hasn’t happened either, so everything is always as it was and remains exactly the same. It hasn’t happened, or, rather, it doesn’t happen even while it’s happening. I admit it’s not that easy to understand.’

  ‘It’s not that difficult either,’ I thought. ‘This is something he’s been taught. They’ve drummed this into him, and he’s taken it fully on board. Now he’s boasting to me, now that he’s been given permission to tell me something, although only what he needs to, and so, finally, he can boast. Although only to me, to his wi
fe, I’m now more than nobody, I’m somebody. Everyone boasts a little, it’s inevitable, even if you’ve happily resigned yourself to not boasting, even if it’s forbidden and you’re happy to obey.’

  ‘It’s not that difficult either,’ I said, and returned to the subject that had begun our conversation beneath the trees: the more he refused to answer me, the more curious I became. ‘As for those unknown and doubtless foreign women, at least tell me if we’re in the before or the after of what hasn’t happened or isn’t happening and, needless to say, won’t happen. I assume we’re not in the “while it’s happening” phase.’

  This time my joke worked a little better. He smiled at me, still holding that imaginary globe in his hand, and agreed to answer. Inevitably, there was no reason why his answer should be true, and it probably wasn’t. He finished his beer and said, slightly smugly:

  ‘It hasn’t happened yet. But it might.’

  ‘And, according to you, if it does happen, it won’t have happened.’

  He realised that he’d said too much and, in a moment of inattention, had contradicted himself. Yes, with those two brief, spontaneous – or perhaps boastful – utterances, he’d contradicted himself and left the door open to the future, a chink through which I could ask more questions, something to hold on to. It was as if he’d inadvertently slipped up, lit a fleeting match in the darkness. It was as if someone who never was had started to be born. He’d admitted that something, that ‘it’, could happen. He tried to put things right, to rectify matters, but too late. Even so he tried, and said:

  ‘That is, it won’t have happened, because, as you say, it won’t happen even if it happens.’