Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  Tupra had been right about one thing: something had told those women whether they should keep hoping or should abandon hope altogether – need, perhaps, or a lack of need, or a feeling that they’d had enough, or perhaps a growing sense of detachment from or resentment towards the disappeared husband for having left like that and thus exposed himself to danger, not just like Ulysses, but like all those men who had set sail for Troy and besieged that city for years, thus signalling the start of one of literature’s and real life’s long absences (for only what we’re told, what succeeds in being told, exists). ‘So you forget when you want to forget.’ And he had been right, too, when he said: ‘Obviously, it’s a long process, it’s not like an arrow heading straight for the bullseye, there are advances and retreats and times when it wanders off down side streets.’ And that was so true: whenever I grew distracted or became excited about a project, whenever some promising lover appeared, the arrow of forgetting took on a new potency and speed and seemed as if it would, unstoppably, hit the target. The memory of Tomás would fade, and resentment would grow inside me: ‘Why did he choose that absurd existence, why did he opt for a double life that would take him away from me, until he became an autumn leaf that trembled and then fell?’ Then I would reject him, loathe him, curse him. Then I would bury him. The arrow would stray off course as soon as the lover ceased to be promising and I would again feel alone; I would turn around and retrace my steps and set off along the other path, that of memory, nostalgia, patience and baseless hope. And I would be assailed by that final question: ‘What if he isn’t dead? What if he reappears one day because he’s run out of hiding places and doesn’t know where to go? Will he only return then, when he doesn’t know where else to go?’ At times like that, I would struggle to recall his face and discover, to my consternation, that the harder I tried, the vaguer his face became, and the more it eluded and resisted me, so that I had to resort to looking at photos to see his features with any clarity, the deceptive clarity of something caught in a particular light, at a particular angle and a particular moment. As soon as I closed the album, I would again be incapable of imagining him, and nothing exists without the imagination. Even when things are happening and are present, they, too, require the imagination, because it’s the only thing that highlights certain events and teaches us to distinguish, while they are happening, the memorable from the unmemorable.

  Out of long habit, or enduring melancholy, I would go into his study every day and look around. That was where he used to work when he was at home, where he made his notes and sketches or prepared reports or wrote things he never asked me to read; and where, with the door closed, he held phone conversations in English. Not that he used the room a lot, but he was the only one to do so. I couldn’t bring myself to empty or dismantle it, and I had kept it exactly as it was the last day he was here, 3 April 1982. How remote that date sounded in 1987, 1988 or 1989 and later still – for so many years had passed already – far more remote than my memory of that date, than our actual farewell. I would give the office a peremptory tidy, remove the non-existent dust, look at the globe and wonder where in the world Tomás had stopped, then give the globe a flick to set it turning. And every morning, when I was choosing what to wear, I would see, out of the corner of my eye, his clothes hanging in the shared wardrobe in our bedroom. I’d felt incapable of throwing those out too. If I ever stopped to smell his clothes or touch them, I would, for a moment, feel quite drunk on sadness; it was like an exhalation, even though nothing smelled of him any more. If I noticed a small stain on a jacket, I would think I should take it to the dry-cleaners, only immediately to dismiss the idea, asking myself: ‘Whatever for?’ And if I noticed any creases, I would imagine that they reflected the way he used to move or sit; and any bulges or sagging pockets seemed to me like traces of his wallet, his keys, his pack of cigarettes, his lighter or his glasses case, for he rarely wore his glasses. Indeed, I discovered one day that they were fake, not prescription glasses at all, and I found three more pairs in a drawer in his desk, all with very different frames and the same innocent lenses, because faces do change depending on what you wear on them, and it occurred to me that these must have been elements of different disguises.

  And sometimes I would sit thinking or even address him in my thoughts: ‘How little I knew about you. I don’t know the you in that other half of your life at all, which was perhaps the half you valued more. I don’t know the faraway you, the one that went off on journeys or childish missions, and which doubtless led you to a violent death. How many hardships did you suffer that you could so easily have avoided? How much fear did you feel? How many wicked deeds did you commit, and how many people would willingly have fallen like lead upon your soul and pierced you with a sharp blade? How many watchful, sleepless nights did you spend, how many nightmares like a knee pressed into your chest, no, what am I saying, like the body of some large, dead animal – a horse, a bull – that no one could move alone? How many women loved you and how many did you deceive and disappoint? How many secrets did you pluck from those who came to trust you? How many deaths did you cause, deaths that the dead were not expecting and would have met with incredulity? What a very devious trade yours was, however much good you may have achieved with it. I know nothing about that and never will, since you won’t be coming back. And even if you did come back, I don’t suppose you’d tell me anything anyway. Nor where you’ve been all these years nor what happened to you, why you couldn’t or didn’t want to return, or give any signs of life, even if only to phone me and say: “I’m alive. Wait for me.” I don’t know why I stayed with you nor why I still haven’t entirely left, when you’re no longer here, neither here nor anywhere else. Your life stopped and mine continued walking, but in a rather meaningless, directionless way, or else I’ve contented myself with whatever direction my children, your children, point me in – they’re my compass – the children you didn’t know and never will. Whenever I’ve tried to find a direction of my own, separate from theirs and yours, the path has become blocked at some point or I left it of my own accord. Yes, I look at your empty suits and it occurs to me that if you were here and I could look at you, you would seem equally empty, complete with sagging pockets and bulges and stains and creases, you yourself would be a hollow space. Absence and silence; or, at most, the repetition of a line like the illegible inscription on a snow-covered stone. At most, a whisper in my ear that I won’t understand. I’ve known you since we were both adolescents. And, since then, I have continued stubbornly to love you. But afterwards, in the long afterwards that I already trail along behind me and that still awaits me, how little I knew about you.’

  In the space of just eleven months, both my parents died, and so did Tomás’s mother, Miss Mercedes – as her students at the British Institute used to call her. It was as if they’d agreed to mark the end of a story, the end of a generation, and the only one to miss this rendezvous was Jack Nevinson, who was left very alone and sad. His two daughters and his other son had lived away from Madrid for a long time. One of my sisters-in-law came to spend a couple of weeks here, to keep her father company for the first few days, but her home, her husband and her little girl were all in Barcelona, and she soon had to get back to them. The other daughter, who worked as a civil servant in Brussels, only came for the funeral, and her brother, Jorge, didn’t even turn up for that, using distance and work commitments as an excuse: he’d never shown any interest in literature or diplomacy, and had, for years, been running a sanitation company in Canada. He had long since cast off the family, and rarely thought it worth his while to cross the Atlantic, not even for his mother’s funeral. He told one sister over the phone: ‘After all, it won’t make any difference to Mum if I’m there or not, so don’t give me that stuff about “she would have wanted the four of us to be there to say goodbye to her”. She won’t know anything about it, and, besides, Tom won’t be there either. And my grief will be no less deeply felt in Montreal.’ He was known as George there.

>   I had the feeling that, without his wife, Jack must, for the first time, have asked himself what the hell he was doing in a foreign country whose language he had never quite mastered, and where there was nothing to keep him any more, neither love nor work. He would still sometimes drop in at the British Council or the embassy, but hardly anyone there knew him now and the staff were not as loyal as they once had been. Returning to England, however, wasn’t an option: the country would have needed to stop changing or he would have needed to stop getting older, and neither of those things ever stop, in any age or any place. We usurp the country we’re unwittingly born into, and are usurped, in turn, by the adults or the old people we unwittingly become.

  Guillermo and Elisa and I became, perhaps, his mainstays, the ones who provided him with company and some justification for staying in Madrid: his grandchildren, who had been fatherless almost since they were born, and his daughter-in-law, who was officially a widow and now an orphan. In his shy, modest way, he had always tried to make up for Tomás’s absence from the children’s lives, and, after our latest losses, he discreetly offered himself as a father to me as well. In the circumstances, he saw me as more of a daughter than his real daughters, and Guillermo and Elisa were his favourite grandchildren because he saw them most often and because they were the legacy of the son who had died doing his duty, and whom he hadn’t been able to bury or to mourn openly and finally. (Another of the inconvenient things about those who leave behind no body, no trace, is that grief is gradual and happens in stages, but it’s never complete, and there can be no real mourning if you advance through the process hesitantly and in instalments.) But we still weren’t really part of his day-to-day life, although ever since Miss Mercedes had died, and he was left alone in the family apartment in Calle Jenner, I would phone him every day before I went off to the university or sat down to work at home, just to see how he was. It would have been indelicate to make this any more explicit, for, put bluntly, I was checking to see that he had woken up and hadn’t died in the night, in his silence and solitude. There were no mobile phones then, but there were answering machines. If he didn’t pick up the phone, I would leave him a message urging him to get back to me, and I wouldn’t rest easy until he had done so.

  Even though I wasn’t really expecting Tomás to turn up for his mother’s funeral, the fact that he didn’t was another nail in his imaginary coffin. He was, in his fashion, very close to her (although he was more protective of his father, and had Jack been the one to die, Tomás’s coffin would have been nailed even more tightly shut), and the news was made as public as possible. Jack paid for a couple of death notices in the Spanish press and another in the British press, and, a few days later, a colleague of his in England managed to persuade a newspaper to publish a brief obituary or note, full of simple, affectionate praise. If Tomás was still alive, of course, and living in some remote country, it would have been almost impossible for him to know any of this.

  It was after hammering in that nail that I began a foolish, pointless enterprise: to find the young man – although he would no longer be so very young – with whom I’d had sex for the first time, with whom I’d made my debut, so to speak. It had all been pure chance and had never gone any further. I’d met him in the street in 1969, when I wasn’t yet eighteen, as I was escaping from the grises at a student demonstration in which he didn’t even take part. He’d helped me escape from a mounted policeman, had protected me and subdued both man and beast, then taken me back to his apartment, where he’d cleaned and dressed a cut to my knee, and, in doing so, had touched my thigh, first accidentally (hands that heal cannot really avoid touching the person being healed), then intentionally. He was a banderillero who lived near Plaza de Las Ventas and his name was Esteban Yanes, and I’ve never really understood how it all happened. It was so unpremeditated that I’ve always put it down to the lax sexual mores of the time, to my state of shock after the incident with the policeman and to a high degree of curiosity on my part. As well as feeling a powerful, primitive attraction, of course. He had a mane of black hair, blue or brown, almost plum-coloured eyes, the thick, dark eyebrows of a southerner, enviably perfect teeth, and a calm, frank smile. Tomás had already begun his string of absences, studying at Oxford and coming back in the vacations, and little did I know that this coming and going would continue indefinitely, that it would become our way of being together: together and separate at the same time, until separation won out.

  I hadn’t given the banderillero my phone number and he hadn’t given me his. Neither of us made any attempt to find each other; the very brief time we spent together must have been enough for us to realise how little we had in common, and I had no intention of conducting a parallel relationship, because Tomás’s absence then was only a temporary thing, and I was determined, sooner or later, to become Berta Isla de Nevinson. Over the years, though, I often thought of Esteban Yanes, both when I was alone and when accompanied. It was a pleasant memory, nice, if that’s an appropriate adjective to use, even if only because it belonged to a carefree, spontaneous, capricious, frivolous time in my life. A time that was clear and unclouded, before Tomás had obliged me to see the world cut in two and as though blind in one eye. It was a small memory-cum-refuge, if you like, and I didn’t have too many of those. I’d known Tomás for so long that only my childhood memories remained uncontaminated by his lack of transparency. I did know where Yanes used to live, and I would still recognise the street door even though twenty years had passed since that day. What seemed unlikely, though, was that he would still be living in that well-furnished apartment, full of photos and posters from the world of bullfighting, and loads of books, for he was clearly an avid, if undisciplined reader, or so he had told me or I had inferred.

  I don’t quite know what took me back there. I suppose it was my eagerness not to remain still, not to be definitively widowed, not yet, or perhaps a desire to find out if, as a young woman, I had left some mark on his memory. (When you exist in a void, you need to fill it up somehow, even if that means returning to the diffuse, insignificant past.) It was ridiculous to think anything would come of that re-encounter, if it happened. Yanes was probably married and with a string of kids, or else would have moved to another city, or abandoned the profession altogether: making the rounds of the bullrings when you’re twenty-something is quite different from doing so when you’re in your forties. When I arrived in the street, I was immediately beset by doubts. At the time, I hadn’t noticed the number of the building, and there were two very similar street doors, right next to each other. I went into the one that seemed more familiar and asked the female porter for ‘Don Esteban Yanes’, that’s how I gave his name. ‘Yanes, you say. No, there’s no Yanes here,’ she said brusquely. I went to the next building and asked the same question, without much hope of success. To my surprise, the porter there said: ‘Don Esteban’s away at the moment and won’t be back until next month, although you never quite know with him. He might be away for longer.’ ‘Would you mind giving him a note from me when he comes back?’ ‘Yes, of course, I’ll leave it in his postbox along with his other mail.’ I hadn’t foreseen having to write a note, and would have to go to a café to do so, then buy an envelope from a local stationer’s, because I wouldn’t want anyone else to read what I’d written – not for any particular reason, just out of habit. I first wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a mere coincidence. ‘We are talking about the matador, aren’t we?’ The man looked at me rather condescendingly. ‘A matador? Well, Don Esteban’s certainly in the bullfighting world, but he’s not a matador. You must mean manager.’ ‘Yes, that’s what I meant. A Freudian slip, sorry.’ He looked at me rather dubiously, as if I’d wanted to make him feel small by using a term he didn’t know. ‘I’ll go away and write him a note and bring it back,’ I added. ‘Thanks very much.’ And I decided I would give him a tip when I returned.

  This, more or less, is what I wrote to Yanes: ‘Dear Esteban Yanes, You probably don’t remember me. M
y name’s Berta Isla, and twenty years ago, you saved me from a galloping horse and a policeman’s truncheon, near Plaza de Manuel Becerra. Afterwards, you took me to your apartment and dressed a cut on my knee.’ I thought it best not to mention what happened afterwards, some people prefer not to be reminded of such youthful escapades. ‘The porter in your building says you won’t be back in Madrid for a while. I happened to be in the area, and I remembered that day and you. It would be great to see you again and catch up, if you’d like to, that is, and if you have time to spare for an acquaintance you’re barely acquainted with. Here’s my phone number if you want to call me. I hope life has treated you well. It seems like a whole lifetime since we last met, which was, in fact, the only time we met. Best wishes, Berta Isla.’ I went back to the apartment building and gave the porter the envelope and a five-hundred-peseta tip, not bad for doing very little, but my way of reassuring myself that he wouldn’t throw the envelope away or tear it up, out of spite or just for the hell of it. And when I got home, I prepared myself for a long wait, but I was so used to long waits that, two days later, I’d completely forgotten about it.

  That’s why Esteban Yanes’s phone call almost a month later caught me completely off guard. ‘Of course I remember you,’ he said. ‘How could I forget? I’ve often regretted not having asked you for your number that night. Not that I would have pestered you or anything. But now that you’ve taken the first step, sweetheart, it would be great to meet up. Just say a time and a place and I’ll be there with drasticity.’ I was amused to find that he still used that non-existent word, which had caught my ear when he’d used it twenty years ago. The word ‘sweetheart’, though, jarred somewhat, he had been so proper then, even in our most intimate moments. ‘Your porter told me that you’re a very important man now,’ I said. ‘A manager, no less. To the uninitiated that conjures up an image of fat cigars, wads of notes and oodles of influence.’ He laughed: ‘No, not me. I’m just managing a few novices, no one special. Of course, if one of them were to make it big, then I’d be rolling in it, fingers crossed, eh, love.’ Again that form of address grated on me, he had grown coarser. ‘So you left the banderillas behind, did you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, a long way behind. You need to be very quick on your feet for that game.’ I suggested we meet for coffee in one of the cafés in Plaza de Oriente. I couldn’t be bothered to go over to his part of town again, an area I’d never liked and to which I’d only gone back once since that January in 1969, to talk to the people at Ediciones Siruela about possibly publishing an anthology of strange, fantastic English tales, a project that never came to anything. They had their offices in Plaza de Manuel Becerra itself, which was a much more interesting place than you’d expect in that otherwise soulless district. Anyway, Esteban Yanes sounded very nice, and I enjoyed imagining his big African smile. It would be fun to see him again after all that time, and who knows, afterwards we might meet up occasionally and become friends. Even if the memory is as tenuous as a static image or a painting seen once in a foreign art gallery, you never forget someone you had sex with. And even if that person turned out to be disappointing or unbearable, you still feel for them something akin to involuntary affection or loyalty. Esteban Yanes hadn’t had time to become disappointing or unbearable, he was still intact.