Berta Isla Read online

  Tom did not allow himself the same air of premature superiority with his mother, Mercedes, an affectionate, very bright woman, whom he’d had to respect and suffer as a teacher for a couple of courses at the British Institute, where she was one of the teaching staff. ‘Miss Mercedes’, as the students called her, knew her husband’s language very well and spoke it more confidently than he did hers, although she, too, had a foreign accent. The only ones who didn’t were the four children: Tom, his brother and his two sisters.

  Berta Isla, on the other hand, was pure madrileña (of the fourth or fifth generation, which was not that common at the time), a dark-haired beauty, a serene or restrained and imperfect beauty. If you analysed her features, none was exactly striking, but the combination of face and figure proved deeply alluring, for she was as irresistibly attractive as are all cheerful, smiling women prone to bursts of laughter; she appeared to be always contented, or contented with very little or determined to be so at all costs, and there are many men for whom this becomes a desirable characteristic: it’s as if they want to master that laughter – or suppress it if they’re of a malicious bent – or to have that laughter directed at them or to be the ones to provoke it, not realising that the toothsome smile permanently illuminating her face, and which proves a strong magnet to whoever sees it, would appear anyway, with no need for it to be summoned up, as invariable a feature as nose, forehead or ears. This cheerful side of Berta indicated a kind, almost obliging nature, but this was slightly misleading: her good cheer came naturally, easily and readily, although if she could find no reason to be cheerful, she didn’t squander that good cheer or pretend to be happy when she wasn’t; she could, it’s true, always find many reasons to be cheerful, but if there was no reason, she could become very serious or sad or even irritable. This never lasted long, though, as if she grew bored with those glum, surly states of mind, as if she could see that they would bring her no reward nor evolve in any interesting way, and that to prolong them would be monotonous and unenlightening, an insistent drip-drip-drip that succeeded only in raising the level of the liquid without in any way changing it, but neither did she blithely shrug them off when they occurred. Beneath her appearance of harmony, almost of bonhomie, she was a young woman with very clear, almost stubborn ideas. If she wanted something, she went for it, not head-on, not by instilling fear or imposing herself or hurrying, but by being persuasive, intelligent and kind, by making herself indispensable, although always with great determination, as though she saw no need to hide her desires as long as they were not grubby or malign. She had an ability to delude her acquaintances, friends and boyfriends – insofar as the chosen ones of her adolescence could be called boyfriends – she managed to convince them all that the worst thing that could possibly happen to them would be to lose her or her friendship or her jovial company; in the same way, she convinced them that there was no greater blessing on Earth than her companionship, than the chance to share with her classes, games, plans, amusements, conversation or existence itself. Not that she was crafty, a kind of Iago figure who directs and manipulates and deceives by constantly whispering in her victim’s ear, far from it. She herself must have spontaneously and proudly believed all this herself, and so she carried the belief with her, painted on her forehead or on her smile or on her pink cheeks, unwittingly infecting others with that same belief. She was not only successful with boys, but with her girlfriends too: to become her friend was like a badge of honour, as it was to be part of her circle; strangely, she did not arouse envy or jealousy, or very little, it was as if the genuine affection she showed to almost everyone shielded her from the grudges and pitiless malevolence of that fickle and arbitrary age. Berta, like Tomás, seemed to know very early on what kind of person she was, what kind of girl and future woman, as if she had never doubted that she would play a lead role rather than a supporting one, at least in her own life. For some people have a dread of becoming mere supporting actors even in their own story, as if they had been born knowing that, regardless of the uniqueness of each individual life, their story did not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting someone else’s more eventful and interesting life. Not even as a way of passing the time during some prolonged after-dinner conversation, or sitting beside the fire one sleepless night.

  It was the third term of the fifth year of baccalaureate when Berta and Tom paired up as openly as one can at that age, and his other suitors accepted this with a sigh of resignation and forbearance: if Berta truly was interested in Tom, then it was hardly surprising that he should prefer her; after all, the whole masculine half of the Studio would turn to stare at her, and had done for the last couple of years, whenever they passed her on the vast marble staircase or in the playground at break time. She drew the gazes of all the boys in the school, the older ones and the younger ones, and there were several boys of ten or eleven for whom Berta Isla was their first distant, dazzling love – a love that did not as yet bear that name – which is why they never forgot her, in youth or maturity or old age, even though they had never so much as exchanged a word with her and even though, as far as she was concerned, they did not exist. Even boys from other schools would hang around outside to see her leave and follow her, and the Studio boys, with an exaggerated sense of ownership, rebelled against these intruders and kept a careful watch to ensure that she did not fall into the nets of someone who was not ‘one of us’.

  Neither Tom nor Berta, who had been born in August and September respectively, had turned fifteen when they agreed to ‘go out’ or ‘be sweethearts’, as people used to say then, and revealed their feelings to each other. She had revealed her feelings a long time before, but had taken pains to disguise her primitive, obsessive passion – or to contain it – at least enough so as not to appear too pushy or too brazen, enough to appear proper – in the terms of the mid-1960s – and so that he would have a sense, once he did decide to make a move, that he had not merely been chosen and led, but had himself taken the initiative.

  Couples who meet very early on are condemned to develop a vaguely fraternal relationship, even if only during the initial phase – the inaugural phase, which is such an indicator of the direction things will take in the future – when they know that they must wait to fulfil their loves and ardours. In that social class and at that time, and despite the urgings of an untried and often explosive sexuality, they deemed it imprudent and disrespectful to force things once they were serious about each other, and Tomás and Berta knew at once that theirs was a serious relationship and not a brief flirtation that would end along with the term, or even two years later, when school came to an end and abandoned them. There was in Tom Nevinson, as well as his complete lack of experience in the field, a kind of timidity, and, besides, he felt as many boys do: they feel too much respect for the girl they have chosen as the love of their present, future and eternal life, and so they avoid overstepping the mark with her as they certainly don’t with other girls, and often become overly protective and cautious because they see her as an ideal despite her being a creature of curious, healthy flesh and blood and inquisitive sexual desires, for fear of profaning her and making her almost untouchable. And Berta experienced what many other girls experience: knowing that their true love is free to touch them and eager to profane them, they do not want to be seen to be impatient, still less overkeen. So much so that it is not unusual – after so much restraint and passionate looks and tentative kisses, excluding all other areas of the body – that, after so many deferential caresses and holding back when they sense that same deference giving way, the first time they do consummate their love, they do so separately and vicariously, that is, with chance third parties.

  They both lost their virginity during their first year at university, and neither of them told the other. They spent that year relatively far apart, or, rather, comparatively speaking, much further apart. Tom was given a place at Oxford, in large measure due to the good offices of his father and Walter Starkie, but th
anks also to his own extraordinary linguistic abilities, and Berta began her course in the Faculty of Arts at the Complutense University in Madrid. The vacation periods at Oxford are very long, a little over a month between Michaelmas and Hilary, the same again between Hilary and Trinity, and three whole months between Trinity and the next Michaelmas, which meant that Tomás was able to return to Madrid after his eight or nine weeks of hard study away, and thus have time to resume his Madrid life, or at least not to lose sight of it entirely, to cut himself off from it or replace it, or to forget anything. However, during those eight or nine weeks, they could both put the other person on hold, in parentheses. And, at the same time, they knew that what they were placing in parentheses was that period of separation, and that once they were together again, everything would return to normal. Repeated absences allow this, so that neither of those alternating periods is ever really real, so that both seem phantasmagoric, and that while they last, each one blurs and negates and almost erases the other; in short, anything that occurs during them is part of a dream world, and hasn’t actually happened and, besides, is of little importance. Tom and Berta did not know that this would be the model for much of their life together – together, but mainly apart and with no normal to return to, or together, but facing away from each other.

  In 1969, two fashions were doing the rounds in Europe, both mainly affecting the young: politics and sex. The May 1968 riots in Paris and the Prague Spring crushed by Soviet tanks set half the continent buzzing, at least temporarily. In Spain, a dictatorship that had begun more than three decades earlier was still dragging on. Strikes by workers and students prompted the Francoist regime to declare a state of emergency throughout the country, although this was merely a euphemism for reducing still further our few, feeble rights, increasing the prerogatives and the impunity of the police, and giving them a free hand to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted. On 20 January, the law student Enrique Ruano, who, three days before, had been arrested for throwing leaflets at members of the much-feared Brigada Político-Social, died while in custody. The official version, which kept changing and was full of contradictions, was that the twenty-one-year-old had been taken to the seventh floor of a building in what is now Calle Príncipe de Vergara in order to be searched, but that, once there, he broke away from the three policemen guarding him and either fell or threw himself from a window. The Minister of Information, Fraga Iribarne, and the newspaper ABC did their best to present his death as a suicide and to suggest that Ruano was mentally frail and unbalanced, publishing on the front page and in instalments a letter he had written to his psychiatrist, which they cut up and manipulated so that it appeared to have been extracted from a supposedly tormented private diary. However, almost no one believed this version and the episode was seen as a political assassination, since the student was a member of the Frente de Liberación Popular, or ‘Felipe’, a clandestine anti-Franco organisation of little account, as all such organisations inevitably were (of little account and clandestine, that is). The general public disbelief was perfectly justified, and not just because of the deep-seated habit of lying common to all governments under the dictatorship: twenty-seven years later, when Ruano’s body was exhumed for the problematic trial of the three policemen involved – Spain was, by then, a democracy – they found that part of his clavicle had been sawn off, because, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that bone had been pierced by a bullet. At the time, the autopsy had been falsified, the family were not allowed to see the body or to publish an obituary in the newspaper; and Fraga, in person, phoned Ruano’s father to urge him not to protest and to keep quiet, saying words to the effect of: ‘Remember you have a daughter to worry about too’, referring to Ruano’s sister, Margot, who was also involved in politics. After so much time had passed, it was impossible to prove anything, and the three sociales, or members of the Brigada Política-Social, were found not guilty of murder – Colino, Galván and Simón were their names – but the young man had probably been tortured while under arrest, including on the final day, when they took him to that seventh-floor room in Príncipe de Vergara, shot him and threw him out into the street. That is what his companions believed in 1969.

  So great was the anger among students that, during the demonstrations that followed, even students like Berta Isla took part, students who had previously been either apolitical or unwilling to take risks or to court trouble. Some university friends persuaded her to join them on a demonstration arranged one evening in Plaza de Manuel Becerra, not far from Las Ventas bullring. Such demonstrations, all of which were illegal, never lasted very long: the armed police, the grises – so-called because of their grey uniforms – would know about them beforehand and would disperse any group by using physical force, and, if a group did manage to gather in strength and march a few metres, chanting slogans, not to mention throwing stones at shops and banks, they would immediately set upon them, either on foot or on horseback, with their long, black, flexible truncheons (the ones wielded by the mounted police were longer and even more flexible, rather like short, fat whips), and there would always be one particularly cocky or nervous individual among them who would get out his pistol so as to instil more fear or in order to feel less afraid himself.

  As soon as the scuffle began, Berta found herself running ahead of the police, along with a number of friends and strangers. Each one raced off in a different direction, in the hope that their pursuers wouldn’t choose them as their target but would beat up someone else instead. She was a novice at such insurrections and had no idea what to do for the best, whether to go down into the metro or take refuge in a bar and mingle with the other customers or stay out in the street, where there was always the possibility of escaping and not being trapped in one place. She knew that being arrested at some political rally would mean, at best, a night and a beating in the Dirección General de Seguridad – where the security police had their headquarters – and, at worst, a trial and a prison sentence of months or even a couple of years, depending on how malevolent the judge was feeling, as well as immediate expulsion from the university. She also knew that being a woman and very young (she was in her first year at university) was no safeguard against whatever punishment might befall her.

  She soon lost sight of her friends, and in the dark night, only dimly lit by the rather feeble street lamps, she began to panic, running aimlessly this way and that – the January chill soon disappearing beneath the burning sensation of dangers unknown – instinctively breaking away from the rest of the crowd and distancing herself from the Plaza, racing off down a rather narrow nearby street, which was fairly empty of other demonstrators, the rest of the stampede having opted for other paths or doing their best not to get too dispersed, in the hope that they might regroup and vainly try again, their fear and fury only growing, their courage high, pulses racing and all well-laid plans banished. She was running as if the devil himself were after her, absolutely terrified, glimpsing no one either to left or right out of the corners of her eyes as she flew along, intending never to stop or not until she thought she was safe, until she had left the city behind her or reached home, and then, without in the least diminishing her speed, it occurred to her to look back – perhaps she heard a strange noise, the sound of snorting or trotting, a summer sound, a village or rustic sound, a sound from childhood – and almost immediately behind her she saw the huge figure of a gris on horseback, his truncheon already raised, about to unleash a blow on the back of her neck or on her buttocks or her back, one that would doubtless knock her over, probably leaving her unconscious or dazed, unable to fight back or keep running, fated to receive a second and a third blow if the policeman was in a particularly vicious mood, or, if he wasn’t, being dragged off in handcuffs and thrown into a police van and, in just a few rash, unlucky moments, seeing her present utterly altered and her future ruined. She saw the face of the black horse and thought she also saw that of the man in grey, even though his forehead was covered by his helmet, and his chin by the r
ather thick, sturdy strap. Berta didn’t stumble nor was she paralysed with fright, instead, quite pointlessly, she ran still faster, fuelled by the final impetus of despair, which is what we always do even when we’re doomed; after all, what chance do a young woman’s legs have against the legs of a swift quadruped, and yet those legs nonetheless quickened their pace, like those of an ignorant beast still convinced it can escape. Then an arm appeared from an alleyway, and a hand tugged hard at her, making her lose her balance and fall flat on her face, but snatching her away from horse and rider and the inevitable blow from that truncheon. Horse and rider continued on past, at least for a few metres, out of sheer inertia, it’s very hard to rein in a horse at full gallop, and, she hoped, horse and rider would lose interest and go in search of other subversives to punish, for there were hundreds of them around. With another tug the hand helped her to her feet, and Berta found herself looking at a rather handsome young man, who didn’t appear to be a student or the type to take part in protests: agitators don’t usually wear a tie or a hat, and this young man did, as well as an overcoat that had aspirations to elegance, being long and navy blue and with the collar turned up. He was an old-fashioned sort, and the hat had a rather narrow brim, as if it were a hand-me-down.