Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

And so one year, and then two, three, four, five and six years passed. Once Tomás had been able to tell me, at least partially, what he actually did, he seemed less preoccupied, more light-hearted and in a better mood when he was in Madrid; the bouts of despondency and insomnia were no longer permanent, only appearing or getting worse just before he had to leave for London, although he also brought them with him on his return, as if he needed time to let go of his other life, his other lives – which, however transient, were doubtless lived with greater intensity – so as to get used to the idea that his other life, whichever one it was, had been left behind him for good, and that the only recurring life, the only one that could be repeated and recovered, was the life I offered him in our city. Little by little at first, then ever more quickly, he would become calmer and seemed able to detach himself from whatever it was that he’d done during one of his long absences, from what he’d experienced and from the people he’d had dealings with, although who knew where, and on whom he had doubtless practised a deception, pretending to be one of them for weeks or possibly months, pretending to share their religion or region or country with his amazing talent for imitation and pretence, as impostor and actor, because that was what it came down to. I tended to assume he would be going back to London and, from there – although not always – to some other place. I learned to know or rather guess when he was somewhere else, because while he remained in London, presumably at the Foreign Office or the offices of MI5 or MI6, assuming these were different entities, he would call me with a certain regularity, especially after the birth of Elisa, our little girl, for whom he always felt a particular paternal weakness, as most men do with their daughters, seeing them as both more amusing and more vulnerable, and never as future rivals, as individuals who will one day believe themselves to be superior to them and despise or displace them, as fathers often view their sons even from birth.

  That contact became less frequent when he was elsewhere in Great Britain, undergoing, as I deduced or as he implied, some specific training. In that strange profession it seemed they never ceased learning, studying, polishing and perfecting, probably because each mission required its own bespoke coaching and preparation, an impeccable command of a language or an accent, absolute fluency and naturalness in a particular dialect, a thorough knowledge of history, a familiarity with dates, place names, geography, customs and traditions. In my imagination, it seemed possible to me that Tomás, or whoever, could successfully pass himself off as someone else, but not as various different people in different places and circumstances, however radically he changed his appearance or disguised himself, because a person’s memory is so chock-full of different factors, which all have to be taken into account when you bring that person to life or interpret them or invent or supplant them. Whatever the truth, I assumed that when he stopped phoning, he had set off on another mission, or ‘field trip’ as I’d heard him refer to it. When those calls stopped, they stopped completely, and the silences would last for a minimum of a month, but usually two or three and sometimes longer, and I couldn’t help but find those silences troubling, disturbing, alarming. They would pass without a word from him, without my knowing if he was still alive, always wondering if he’d been unmasked and, if so, what, if any, measures would be taken against him, if he would manage to get out of wherever he’d been sent and return once more to my side, if he had the necessary support or an escape plan when things turned ugly or he was caught, if that man Reresby or someone else would lend him a hand or abandon him to his fate and give him up as one of the disappeared, the lost.

  I not only feared for what might happen to him, I was also concerned about the kind of thing he was involved in. In theory, I wholeheartedly wanted the best for him, and, naturally, I took his side: he was, after all, my husband, the father of my children, and he was still the same Tomás I’d always known, even though he’d changed and chosen a strange, dark life that was beyond my comprehension, and for which I saw no need. Sometimes I couldn’t help thinking that he must inevitably be causing harm by his actions: that he must be duping men and women into trusting him, into greeting him like a brother, a lover, or even their one true love, and then he would betray them, inform on them, revealing their names and descriptions and any surreptitious photos he might have managed to take, he would report on their plans and activities and perhaps lead them to their deaths (‘And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat or to an illegible stone …’), and how could you cause or make possible the death of someone who has been your affectionate friend or faithful colleague, someone who has held you in their arms in bed, skin against skin, someone who would have given their own life to save you? All those things were possible, for Tomás was the kind of person people took to easily, and even the hardest, most ruthless of individuals can, despite themselves, grow fond of others or have moments of weakness or sympathy, and even mere sexual desire isn’t something you can necessarily control, still less who you fall in love with. What a feeble thing our will is. Tomás would facilitate the detention or failure of those ingenuous folk who had put their faith in him, and some countries and organisations cannot forgive failure, not to mention being tricked by an infiltrator, by an enemy agent to whom you have given too much information about what has been done or remains to be done.

  I understood that while this was precisely what his job entailed, he also averted tragedies, but then when it comes to enmities and conflicts, it all depends on one’s point of view, because what is a tragedy for one side is a blessing for the other. He had dedicated himself to the cause of England, his chosen country, whether its causes were just or not, something which, I imagined, was not for him to judge, his job was merely to accept and obey. But I was in no position to share his patriotism – if I can call it that – how could I? And at the time, most Spaniards (well, those of us who hadn’t been Franco supporters) felt an unwavering distaste for the secret police and infinite scorn for all infiltrators. They had belonged to only one side, that of the dictatorship, the far right, and had been the detested members of the Brigada Político-Social, the so-called sociales, who had passed themselves off as workers in factories, as miners in mines and as dockers in dockyards, as trades unionists in the illegal trades unions, as militants or leaders of political parties (all of them clandestine), as political prisoners in prisons and as students in universities. With their feigned radicalism they had even encouraged many people to commit crimes they would never have committed without their pressure or their urging, their aggressive speeches, their persuasive powers and their flamboyant extremism. Many people had ended up in prison because of those impostors, who had not only acted as traitors but also as instigators, in the hope of increasing the sentences that would be handed down to those ‘subversives’: distributing pamphlets was quite a different matter from throwing stones at the windows of a bank or a big shop; running away from the grises at a demonstration was not the same as turning on a policeman and knocking him off his horse with an iron bar; being a member of a political party was not the same as shooting an army colonel. The sociales wanted peaceful people to stop being peaceful, for free spirits to form organisations or associations, and they didn’t restrict themselves to finding out facts and names, for they spurred on whoever fell under their influence, so that they could then be accused of the gravest of crimes. There were also those who administered torture and threw detainees down stairs or out of windows, as happened, in my day, with that student, Enrique Ruano, and with others who, according to the sociales, were always trying to escape when there was no escape route and either fell or ‘jumped’, despite being handcuffed with their hands behind their backs and under permanent guard. That sinister body had still not been entirely dissolved or dismantled, and none of its members had been punished or suspended, still less brought to justice: in the end, they had been found jobs and tasks that were more covert and more in accord with the new democratic era.

  I still clung to the idea that England was different, t
hat it had never had a dictatorship and that its Secret Service would be sure to comply with strict laws and be controlled by elected politicians and by honest, independent judges, given that, as a nation, it enjoyed separation of powers and a free press, things that we were only just beginning to enjoy; that they would never commit abuses or crimes comparable to those of the sociales, and, if they did, they would not go unpunished, as had so many of those who served under Franco for nearly forty years, some in anodyne posts, others in more sinister roles. But I couldn’t be absolutely sure. I took a few books out of the British Institute library in Calle Almagro, and read about the Second World War; and the cruel operations of the SOE, the SIS, and the PWE (I soon came to know all the acronyms) made my hair stand on end. I did my best to convince myself that, in wartime, everything is different and more exaggerated, that anything is permissible, and that you have to do whatever is necessary to defeat the enemy, and, above all, to survive and not be crushed; that those excesses were a thing of the past, the product of that truly terrible conflict. However, it also occurred to me that when you do perpetrate some cruel act, even when obliged to by extraordinary circumstances – and it makes no difference if it’s a country or an individual doing the perpetrating, although a country will often turn a blind eye and choose not to know – there’s always a trace left of that cruelty, and then it’s much easier than we imagine to resort to it again. All it takes is for us successfully to sidestep the rules just once for us to see that it’s really not such a dreadful thing to do and then to do it again, even if it’s not strictly necessary. It’s simply the easiest, shortest route, and there’s no need to explain yourself or make excuses to anyone. That’s what people usually say about murderers: once a murderer has taken the first step, once he’s injected the poison or dealt the fatal blow and discovered that he can still live with that weight on his conscience, or, indeed, finds that the weight grows lighter by the day, that it’s actually not so very hard and that he can half-forget about the life he took because he’s actually better off without that burden, obstacle or threat, that presence – that he can breathe more easily without the other person’s presence in the world and that his own life is far easier to bear – once he’s gone through that phase, once he’s crossed that line and found that the consequences are not so very burdensome, then he’s much more likely to reoffend and commit a second and a third and even a fourth murder. It’s almost a cliché to say this, but there’s a lot of truth in it, as there is in all clichés.

  No, I wasn’t at all sure, and in one of those books that I skim-read or half-read with my now much-improved English, perhaps a book entitled Trail Sinister, the autobiography of Sefton Delmer, the main organiser and brains behind the PWE or Political Warfare Executive, a secret body devoted to waging a dirty war and spreading what they called ‘black propaganda’ during the war with Nazi Germany, I came across certain paragraphs that echoed what Tomás had said about doing something and yet not doing it, about what happened without happening, about the non-existence of what existed and – the impossible thing we all want – the ability to erase our actions. (It was probably the other way round, and the words Tomás had learned were an echo of those used by the PWE.) Delmer would give this speech, or something similar, to the Germans who joined his team (former members of the International Brigade, émigrés, refugees, some prisoners of war prepared to collaborate, deserters): ‘We are waging against Hitler a kind of total war of wits. Anything goes, so long as it serves to bring nearer the end of the war and the complete defeat of the Reich. If you are at all squeamish about what you may be called upon to do against your own countrymen you must say so now. I shall understand it. In that case, however, you will be no good to us and no doubt some other job will be found for you. But if you feel like joining me, I must warn you that in my unit we are up to all the dirty tricks we can devise. The dirtier the better. No holds barred. Lies, phone-tapping, embezzlement, treachery, forgery, defamation, disinformation, spreading dissension, making false statements and accusations, you name it. Even, don’t forget, sheer murder.’ I still remember that English expression: ‘sheer murder’.

  At the time, I happened to read an article about the Watergate affair, a scandal that rocked the English-speaking world, a world to which, for obvious reasons, I was paying ever closer attention, and the author of the article, a certain Richard Crossman – a minister under Harold Wilson in the 1960s and, in his day, almost as important a figure in the PWE as Delmer – acknowledged that, between 1941, when that implacable, unstoppable organisation had been created, and the end of the war, England basically had an ‘inner government’ with rules and codes of conduct completely at odds with those of the visible, public government, adding that, during total warfare, this was a necessary mechanism. Since he had been very high up in the PWE, it wasn’t easy to contradict or disprove what he said, for he also admitted that black propaganda, like the ‘strategic’ bombing of German cities and the civilian population – Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Mannheim and others – was ‘nihilistic in its aims and purely destructive in its effects’.

  I also read, either in Trail Sinister or its sequel, Black Boomerang, or somewhere else, that Sefton Delmer’s unit didn’t officially exist and that its members were told to deny its existence to everyone, including other almost equally hermetic organisations, with whom the PWE did, in practice, collaborate (not in theory, of course, since there was no record of its existence), such as the SOE – in charge of commando units and surprise attacks – and MI6, in charge of espionage. Neither its name nor its acronym became public knowledge until long afterwards. Many of the people who worked there didn’t even know they were working for it and thought they were just part of the Foreign Office’s PID, Political Intelligence Department, supposedly a small, non-secret section of the ministry. The people who wrote the white propaganda (the BBC broadcasts intended for Germany and occupied Europe, for example) tended to know absolutely nothing about the existence of the black propaganda being created by their colleagues, who were working in separate divisions and in utmost secrecy. The great advantage of black propaganda, and the terrible, limitless damage it caused, was that no one ever acknowledged that it was British in origin, and the government, of course, when they had to, always denied having anything to do with any acts of excessive barbarism. As a consequence, the people involved had a completely free hand, unhampered by scruples or restraints.

  The PWE was considered to be such an anomaly, even while it was in operation (and there can be no doubt that it was crucial in winning the war), that not only was it dismantled as soon as the Germans had signed the unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945, its members were given more or less the following instructions: ‘For years we have abstained from talking about our work to anyone not in our unit, including husbands, wives, fathers and children. And to keep it that way, we want you to continue as you have up until now. Don’t allow anything or anyone to provoke you into boasting about the work we’ve done. If we start to show off to people about the ingenious things we got up to, and which proved far superior to the most evil of minds, who knows where it will end. So, mum’s the word.’ Reading all these things, sometimes skipping over whole sections, it was hard to determine if that unit had been dismantled so quickly for reasons of prudence or of shame, so as not to give away information to future enemies or to hide what it had been obliged, or not even obliged, to do. Perhaps being superior to the most evil of minds implied, in a sense, being even more evil. Whatever the truth of the matter, the PWE was buried alive – once it was dead. In other words, it didn’t exist while it existed and when it ceased to exist, it hadn’t existed, until, I imagine, someone spoke about it many years later. Until someone, whether evil or not, could not resist boasting.

  Tomás did pretty well, and hardly ever succumbed to the temptation to boast. I mean that he obeyed the order not to reveal to anyone the nature of his travels or the places they took him to, nor the real reason for his absences or for some of them, nor
the names of the people he had been involved with, doubtless in order to bring about their destruction or ruin. I assume he didn’t reveal anything to anyone, because he didn’t even confide in me, and I was really the only one who needed to be informed of his activities, at least in Madrid; the only one who, given my position and to assuage my suspicions and other evils – perhaps even my own acts of espionage, my rummaging around in his belongings at home – the only one who had a right to be kept up to date on his double life. We had agreed that I wouldn’t ask him any questions about the part of his life that took place far away, out of sight and hearing, and that had nothing to do with me, but there were moments when curiosity got the better of me, and I couldn’t resist asking him something openly or obliquely. (The desire to know is a curse and the greatest source of misfortune; even if you’re already in the know or can guess what’s happening, it’s impossible to repress that desire.) He would then stop me in my tracks with a few predictable words: ‘Look, it’s best you don’t know’, or ‘You know you’re not allowed to know that’, or ‘Just be grateful I’m not authorised to tell you, that I’m bound by the Official Secrets Act’ (which meant that what he’d experienced or done was very grim indeed and nothing to be proud of), or simply ‘Don’t ask. Remember what we agreed’. Or sometimes he would frighten me, which is always the easiest and most effective way to dissuade any individual, as well as the masses: ‘If I were to tell you anything, I’d be putting you at risk, you and the children, and we don’t want that, do we? We don’t want any more Kindeláns or someone even worse, someone capable of throwing the lighter into the cradle instead of putting it away. Because they did put it away, didn’t they? And our children are safe and sound.’

  There are many roundabout ways of showing off, even if reason tells you not to. Tomás had integrity, he was discreet, but he did sometimes make leading comments, as if drawing attention to himself or perhaps looking for a little compassion or appreciation – after all, he was the one who did all the work, who suffered, the one who brought most money into the household, a lot of money, I realised, for they were paying him more and more, and we were living very comfortably. His return from some particularly difficult or dangerous mission, or one that had required a high degree of ingenuity, or that had worked out perfectly, would sometimes provoke one or two comments that were impossible not to respond to. ‘You can’t imagine the hell I’ve been through this time’, for example. Or: ‘I’m absolutely shattered. I need to sleep for about three whole days, more than anything to recover from the things I’ve seen, and to stop seeing them even when I’m awake.’ Or: ‘You have no idea how hard it is having to bring down the people you have to bring down, even if it’s vital for us and they really deserve it. And the bastards certainly deserved it this time.’ And I would always fall into that initial trap, how could I not? ‘What hell have you been through? What have you seen? Who did you have to bring down? Which bastards are you talking about? If you don’t tell me, how can I console you? How can I even understand what you mean?’ But Tomás would immediately clam up, and the most he would allow himself were long disquisitions on the nature of his work, which was the least he should be allowed to do with his wife, perhaps the only person in the world he could talk to, colleagues apart; but they would never admire him or feel intrigued or astonished. ‘Sorry to go on about it, Berta, but it’s best this way, better that you know nothing about the life you’re not a part of. It’s often really unpleasant, full of sad stories, none of which end happily, for one side or the other,’ he said, then again talked for a while in general terms.