I didn’t recognise him when he appeared in the square. As so often before, I’d gone out onto one of the balconies very early one morning, a Sunday when Guillermo and Elisa had both stayed over with friends the previous night. It was still getting light or almost, because the clocks had just gone forward an hour, an hour stolen from the previous night for what is known as ‘summer time’, a theft that takes place at the beginning of April or even the end of March. Twelve years had passed since Tomás had said goodbye to me at Barajas airport, on his way to the Falklands according to my conjectures, and that war was now as remote as Britain’s two Afghanistan wars or the Crimean War, or our war in Morocco or that of the soldier beloved by women, Luis Noval, he of the ugly statue. Who can ever properly remember their dead: it’s as if they’d never existed, erased just a little sooner than those who managed to survive the wars.
It was a cold day lit by a yellowish light that presaged snow, which is why I went out onto the balcony in my coat, thinking I wouldn’t stay long. I had to revisit Moby-Dick for one of my repeated courses, although I knew the book inside out; I’d gone to bed vainly going over and over in my head a sentence from the first chapter which may or may not be mysterious, but then we teachers always like to scrutinise each and every word: ‘Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.’ Why ‘every one’? With that superfluous question I managed to fall asleep, but woke up later feeling ill at ease, and far too early for a relaxing Sunday, perhaps it was the sudden drop in temperature or the unease brought on by that arbitrary change of the clocks. And sure enough, just a couple of minutes after I stepped out onto the balcony, some flakes of snow began to fall, slow and lacklustre to begin with, and not enough to bother me. Nevertheless, I felt a shudder run through me, more psychological than physical, and I drew my coat around me, without buttoning it up; I leaned on the balustrade and looked to right and left; there were very few people about at that precarious hour, so few that I could count the number of passers-by. And as I did – one, two, three, four, five, six; and seven – I saw a figure approaching from the direction of the Teatro Real, carrying a small suitcase in one hand; every few steps, he rather half-heartedly raised his other hand as if he were timidly greeting someone. He would take those few steps, then stop, put down his case, look around, and again raise one hand before advancing a little further. I couldn’t see his face until he was quite close, or, rather, I could see only part of his face, and what I saw I didn’t recognise at all. He was middle-aged, rather heavily built, and with a grey beard, the kind of beard worn by submariners in films, at once thick and well trimmed, or perhaps kept in check. He was wearing a dark, belted raincoat, black or navy blue, and a rather old-fashioned peaked cap – more French or Dutch than Spanish, and worn perhaps as protection against the coming snow – which made it hard to discern his features. He looked rather like a sailor home from the sea, which, in Madrid, was a distinctly incongruous image. I had the impression that he was waving at me, that he’d seen me on the balcony, which is why he kept raising his hand now and then, only to lower it at once – it was a matter of seconds – as if he wanted both to attract my attention and not attract it, as if he regretted the gesture, as if it were quite involuntary and to be suppressed the moment it occurred. Or perhaps he lowered it because there was no response from me, but then I wasn’t going to wave to a complete stranger carrying a suitcase – he was probably drunk – on a morning of unexpected snow and with so few people around. I just wanted to savour briefly those first flakes of snow before submerging myself in Melville’s November of the soul, before those flakes grew heavier and thicker and more energetic, if, that is, they did.
And they did, but I didn’t realise quickly enough to close the balcony window and take shelter indoors, because that man had distracted me. He approached the street door below, then abruptly moved away and walked into the little park containing the statue of the soldier, and there he sat down on a bench. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and I watched him smoking, sideways on to me now, although I could barely see him through the trees. I heard the sound of horses’ hooves, and he did too, and both he and I looked round to see where the sound was coming from; a couple of mounted policemen were riding along Calle de San Quintín on their way to Plaza de la Encarnación, one white horse and one black, on the former the snowflakes were invisible, and on the latter they really stood out, momentarily turning it into a piebald. When they reached Calle Pavía, they turned and headed off towards the Teatro Real; it was odd that they should be out patrolling so early, in the middle of all that silence and with the square almost empty. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as they rode past, I followed them until they were out of sight, leaving behind them a trail of dung, at my feet so to speak. Then I looked again for the flying Dutchman, but couldn’t see him, he had vanished while I was watching those two snowy horses. My coat was spattered with snowflakes, as was I, and I imagined my hair must be too, half white. Before I returned to that ‘substitute for pistol and ball’, I needed to dry myself off.
Then the bell rang, which was the last thing I was expecting. I closed the balcony window and tiptoed over to the front door, cautiously peering through the spyhole; it was too early for visitors or deliveries, and, besides, it was Sunday. There was the sailor, with his cap still on. He kept his eyes lowered, whether out of modesty or patience, I couldn’t tell, and with his head bowed like that, the peaked cap concealed his whole face, apart from his chin. I was tempted not to answer, to pretend no one was at home. He must have come to the wrong apartment. I couldn’t understand how he’d got into the building, because the street door was locked, and he hadn’t rung my entryphone; the neighbour he was visiting or staying with must have opened the door and he’d then mistaken the apartment number or the floor. I still don’t know why I revealed my presence.
‘Who is it?’ I asked. ‘Who are you looking for? I think you’ve got the wrong apartment.’ And I added irrelevantly: ‘It’s very early.’
He then doffed his cap with a respectful, gentlemanly gesture, as if I were standing there before him. I saw his receding hair, which was darker than his beard. He looked up. The glass of the spyhole does tend to distort, but even so there was something familiar about that face, although only vaguely. You never expect a dead man to reappear, even if his body has never been found. And you don’t expect the disappeared or the fugitive or the exiled either.
‘It’s anything but early, Berta,’ said the man. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you? I’m not surprised. I barely recognise myself. I’m Tomás, and it’s anything but early. In fact, it’s probably too late.’
I believed him and I didn’t believe him, both things at once, how could I know. But what could I do, what could I do but open the door to him.
A year and a half has passed since that ghost reappeared on a cold Sunday morning in early spring. Tomás Nevinson, or the person who is beginning to resemble or replace him, the one who has memories that could only be his and who perhaps has no one else in the world, doesn’t live with me and the children, not exactly. He was the first to reject the idea, to give up all claim to that privilege; indeed, he thought it best for us to live apart, felt it wouldn’t be right to share the same living space permanently. He gave various reasons, all of which were eminently sensible and coincided with my own: Guillermo and Elisa would have to get used to him and accept him, if they could; I had, for years, been leading an independent life as a singleton or widow, and he didn’t expect me to welcome him back with open arms unless and until I wanted to; and although he didn’t say as much, not openly at least, I sensed that he still didn’t feel entirely safe, and the last thing he would have wanted was to put us in any danger. After many months had passed, the most explicit comment he made on the subject was this: ‘I think I can live in peace now, despite all those years of playing dirty tricks on people, because that’s what the job involved; circumstances change, though, your enemies stop being your enemies, time passes, those people wi
thdraw, go into hiding, grow old and tired; some of them die, and almost everything is forgotten. But you never know. There could still be someone who stays anchored in the past and neither forgets nor forgives.’
As in the past, as always, I didn’t receive any concrete answers to my questions, and I soon stopped asking them; I’ve never found out what he did during those twelve years of absence, of absence and death, or, rather, of pretending to be dead. ‘I’m still not authorised to tell you anything,’ he said and says. ‘Even less than before, because, in order to bring my activities to an end and still receive their financial aid, I signed an additional absolute confidentiality agreement. We would lose the money they pay me if I were to talk; worse than that, they would prosecute me, and I’d be sent to prison.’ I myself no longer received my ‘salary’ from the Organización Mundial del Turismo. It was deemed unnecessary once Tomás went back to working at the embassy – in a higher and better-paid position – and would have been tantamount to paying two salaries.
Tomás rented a small apartment, almost a garret really, just near us, on the other side of Plaza de Oriente, in Calle de Lepanto, more or less where the Casa de las Matemáticas once stood a few centuries before. And so while he doesn’t exactly live with us, he’s only a stone’s throw away and visits often, more and more often in fact, with my consent and that of the children. He can’t recount any of his own adventures – something which, at their still-idealistic age, they would probably love – but he has won them over with his pitch-perfect imitations of all kinds of people, people they know. Just as he used to do at school. They were very wary of him at first: Elisa was shy and stand-offish, Guillermo clearly cross and upset. Their father, though, has been so discreet, so sensitive, during this year and a half, asking them questions without seeming to probe too deeply, taking an interest in them, but not in an ingratiating way, almost asking their permission to talk to them, as if he really were a totally unexpected intruder and not the person who, indirectly and in large measure, provides for and has provided for them (even when he was thought to be dead), that they’ve gradually taken him to their hearts, even asking him to come and see them. They find him amusing with his different voices and accents and mimicry, and they sense that he’s someone who has led a far from ordinary life; they take it for granted that he’s had some strange, possibly mysterious experiences (he sometimes drops hints, as discreet as they are intriguing), and that he will one day reveal these to them. That’s where they’re wrong, of course, but they don’t know that, so it doesn’t matter: they look at him expectantly, that is, with sustained curiosity. They find his presence stimulating, at least for the moment. They’re coming to depend on him more and more as they grow accustomed to him being around, and if he has nothing else to entertain them with, Tomás will come up with some invented story, since he has more than enough material to draw on. I sometimes think it must be child’s play for him, winning over his still young children, because, in the past, he must have had to win over all kinds of cruel, vicious people, guarded and suspicious, whose main companion and shield was distrust. He’s been trained to break down people’s resistance.
He soon lost the weight he’d gained and was no longer the burly figure who came to the door with his Dutch hat still on, a hat he hasn’t worn since. He shaved off his Captain Nemo beard and looked much younger once he’d divested himself of all that grizzled hair, thus revealing a scar on his chin, one I hadn’t seen before, but it didn’t even occur to me to ask him about it. As soon as he resumed work at the embassy, he went back to wearing a suit and tie, and he sometimes dons a hideous pinstripe affair, complete with ridiculous waistcoat, perhaps to emphasise his English half. He goes to work every day, and fulfils his tasks brilliantly, or so he tells me, boasting slightly, as if he expects me to be impressed. He’s invited me to a few receptions and suppers, to keep up appearances, and, after resisting for months, I have accepted on a few occasions, as I did in the old days. After all, we never divorced, and I was only his widow by mistake, and the mistake has been put right.
He found me much harder work than the children, because for them he was a novelty, whereas for me, he was a returning ghost. He was always very respectful and careful and never tried to force anything, but, initially, I eyed him reproachfully whenever he came to visit and still kept asking myself if he really was him or if he possibly could be after all those years, during which he hadn’t once phoned to say: ‘Berta, I’m alive.’ ‘You have to understand, Berta, I simply couldn’t. It was essential that, during that time, no one should know I was alive, because if anyone found out, I would probably be dead. Besides, those were my orders,’ he said to justify his silence. I understood this intellectually, but I would still look at him and think: ‘How utterly unimportant I’ve been to you during our life together. What a tiny role I’ve played in your life, a life that was always happening elsewhere.’ Resentment is inevitable, and I know I’ll feel it until I die. Even if he dies first, I’ll still feel it, because there are some posthumous resentments that continue to seethe away even when the person who caused them has disappeared.
But I hated seeing myself turning into this mean-spirited wretch, and, besides, I hadn’t, as the saying goes, made a fresh start, and nothing can be deemed to be over and done with until it’s been buried and replaced by something else. And you realise – not with any great surprise – that there are such things as undeserved loyalties and inexplicable fidelities, people whom you chose with a youthful or, rather, primitive resolve or determination, and that choice prevails over maturity and logic, over resentment and the feelings of loathing felt by the deceived. I began allowing him to spend more time with us, he sometimes stayed for supper and, one night, he didn’t leave after supper nor when the children had gone to bed. I let him into my sometimes woeful, sometimes dull bed, through which other men had passed and barely rumpled the sheets, and there I found that he was him or a part of him, that he hadn’t changed very much on his journey to the block, to the fire; that he’d come very close, but hadn’t quite reached them: his way of making love was the same as it had been in his now distant bouts of insomnia or wakefulness, the same almost animal-ish way of entering me, albeit with slightly less vigour (we are, after all, in our forties now), as if he wanted his body temporarily to deceive or confuse his mind, or silence it. He didn’t talk about what he’d done, but his thoughts were doubtless constantly filled with his memories and experiences, whether he was alone or at work or with us, and he needed to empty his mind through that physical act, even if it lasted only a few minutes. I couldn’t help holding out my arms to him not so much to welcome him as to keep him there, as if, rather than coming back to stay, he were about to leave. And afterwards, I would run my index finger over his lips, which, though less firm and smooth, were as clearly drawn as ever.
Uncertainty and waiting, as well as irrational expectation and fantasy, can become essential to the human heart, and prove impossible to relinquish. Even grief and sorrow and spite can become essential, and end up shaping the way you live your life. That neither is nor was the case with me. However, letting him into my bed was an expression of hope that was unrealistic, but which survived nonetheless, because that night and the nights that followed and that continue still, as and when I choose – although they are and have been few and far between – I treat as exceptions that won’t necessarily be repeated, rather than a return to normality. We’ll see, and will continue to see, because everything remains as uncertain as when Tomás hovered between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and had even inclined towards the latter. And it’s of absolutely no significance that, when he’s in my arms, this recurring thought flashes through my mind: ‘How utterly unimportant I’ve been to you during our life together. What a tiny role I’ve played in your life, a life that was always happening elsewhere. But here you are now, inside me.’ As I say, it’s only a flash, which is gone the next instant.
There’s been a change in Tomás during this year
and a half, in some aspects at least. He appeared to adapt very quickly to living in Madrid again, and to his distinguished post at the embassy; he met new people, made a few superficial friendships, recovered a couple of old friends insofar as that was possible, given the long gap in time. But behind that apparently normal existence, I could see that he was permanently on edge, ill at ease. He would jump at the slightest noise, and he reacted to crowds as if he feared they were about to turn on him, that someone still anchored in the past might have come from afar to find him or sent someone more local to do the job.
Berta Isla Page 47