Berta Isla Read online

  Then, his expression unchanged, and keeping his eyes trained on hers as if to remain alert to the slightest hint of disapproval or rejection so that he could always take a step back, Esteban Yanes, bold and resolute, did, after that minute, go too far. However, as soon as he made this perilous move, Berta laughed out loud – the ready laugh that had won over so many people – perhaps because she found the whole situation hilarious, a situation that would have been unimaginable an hour earlier, and perhaps, too, out of an unexpected feeling of contentment, which is usually aroused by the fulfilment of a desire that is as yet unformulated or confessed and only reveals itself as a desire when it is already being fulfilled. Berta’s laugh triggered the banderillero’s African smile, which seemed to invite immediate confidence and dispel all danger, and which immediately became a laugh too. And so both were laughing at the very moment when Yanes slowly, and without further warning, placed one hand on the charming swelling or charming hillock – namely, the crotch of the knickers he had already observed with such pleasure – and then gently slipped one finger beneath the damp fabric. Tom Nevinson had never gone that far, even at his most daring, his index finger had always stopped at that cloth barrier and never ventured any further, out of respect or dread, or because he was overly conscious of their youth, or out of a wish to postpone the moment, a fear of the irreversible. Berta, however, was made of more interrogative stuff and, noting this more forward approach, she embraced the novelty of it. Of the four items of clothing that remained, she soon lost another three, by which time she was lying on the sofa; she retained only one, which there was no need to remove, and which, besides, she preferred not to take off.

  II

  * * *

  Berta would sometimes think of Esteban Yanes, both during the predictable, normal start of her married life and during the anomalous time that followed, when she didn’t know what to believe, when she had no idea if her husband, Tom Nevinson, had or had not joined the company of the dead, if he still breathed the same air as her in some distant, hidden-away place or if, for some time, he had not breathed at all, exiled from the Earth or welcomed into it, that is, buried under its surface only a few metres beneath our feet, where we nonchalantly walk with not a thought as to what the earth might conceal. Or possibly thrown into the sea or into an estuary or a lake, or a large river: when you have no control over the fate of a body, the most absurd conjectures appear and reappear, and it’s not so very hard to imagine its return. The return of the living body, you understand, not of the corpse or the ghost. They neither console nor are they of any interest, or only to minds troubled by intense uncertainty or dissatisfaction.

  After that January evening, she never again saw that banderillero suelto. He did finally explain that suelto was the name given to banderilleros who work independently, not as part of any one matador’s team (or only occasionally, as a substitute) but as a freelance, accepting whatever offers come their way and best suit them, four fights here, a couple there, another one over there, or a whole summer here. That’s why he didn’t usually cover the season in Latin America, the winter season, and remained unemployed from the end of October to March, more or less. Esteban Yanes would spend those months training and practising for a few hours each day, and live a life of leisure the rest of the time, going to the bars and restaurants frequented by his colleagues and by the big names and agents who stayed behind on this side of the Atlantic, being seen and hoping to be remembered by those who might take him on in the future. This worked well for him, he had enough work and earned enough to be able to ‘hibernate’, as he put it, that is, to eke out his savings and not have to earn a penny until the season began again around mid-March or so.

  While they were chatting after the untraumatic and rather unspectacular loss of her virginity – a little blood, a brief pain, minimal and unexpected pleasure – Berta Isla knew at once that, whatever Yanes’s physical and personal attractions – he was a calm, confident man, funny and pleasant and no fool either, an inveterate reader, albeit unmethodical and disorganised, and an interesting conversationalist to boot – their worlds were too far apart and there was no way to reconcile them, or even have them coincide in time and space. She found the idea of reducing their relationship to sporadic sexual encounters unacceptable, not just because such reductions are impossible to control and you can end up faced with tacit obligations and timetables and demands, but also because, after that inaugural evening when two lots of blood had been shed, her feelings for Tomás Nevinson had not changed one jot, nor had her certainty that her place was at his side, once he finished his studies in England and everything returned to normal, that is, to Madrid. For her, Tom was what many people describe to themselves as ‘the love of my life’ – although they might never say this out loud – and which is often used to designate a chosen one when your life has only just begun and when you still have no idea how many chosen ones there will be nor how long that life will be.

  Berta, though, never forgot that first time; however evanescent, no one does. She didn’t give Esteban Yanes her number and he didn’t give her his. She didn’t let him accompany her home in a taxi, as he wanted to do, even though it was fairly late by the time Berta recovered nearly all her clothes and set off to a metro station, with a plaster on her knee and with no tights, because the young man had not, in the end, gone out to buy her a new pair. Thus Yanes didn’t know where she lived, and although her surname was not that common, it only appeared fifty or so times in the telephone book, there was no question of him ringing all the Islas in the book just to try his luck. She alone could re-establish contact by presenting herself at his apartment or sending him a note, and although it was pleasant to know that this was a possibility and that she could take that initiative, she did neither. After a few years, she assumed that he would no longer live there, that he would have moved and perhaps married, or even left for another city. And so she merely kept that memory as a refuge, as an ever more distant and nebulous place – a rather special place that she vaguely missed – to which she could go in her mind whenever she wanted, like someone consoling herself by saying that if there had once been a time of insouciance and spontaneity, of frivolity and caprice, it must still exist somewhere, although it would be difficult to return to that time except in her slowly dissolving memory and in her frozen thoughts that neither advanced nor retreated, but kept revisiting the same scene that repeated itself over and over from the first to the last detail, until it took on the characteristics of a painting, always identical, infuriatingly fixed and unaltered. That is how she saw that youthful encounter, as a painting. The odd thing is that, as time passed and all trace of him faded in his absence, the features of the young banderillero whom she had only seen on that one occasion became blurred and confused with those of the equally young mounted policeman, whose features she had merely glimpsed for a moment as he rode after her and perhaps studied briefly while he remained still – his flexible truncheon resting on his wrist – and there were moments when she wasn’t sure which one she’d had sex with, the gris or the banderillero. Or, rather, she knew perfectly well that the beginning of her consummated sexual life had occurred with the latter, but she found it harder and harder to remember his face, or else his face and that of the policeman overlapped or became juxtaposed like interchangeable masks: the blue eyes and the wide-set, almost plum-coloured eyes, those teeth with a life of their own and the Andalusian peasant face, the thick eyebrows and the large, straight nose, the helmet and the narrow-brimmed hat concealing that abundance of hair, all formed a whole that was contained within the same venturesome day.

  What never faded was the memory of that finger slipping beneath the thin fabric of her knickers and the exploratory caresses that followed, the kisses that were more hurried or impatient than passionate, the rapid disappearance of all the man’s clothes and of hers, apart from her skirt, which did not constitute an obstacle; the strangely welcome sensation that a man’s penis – any man; after all, she had only met th
at man little more than an hour before – could, after an initial struggle, enter her and stay there for a while at its ease, and with scarcely any resistance from the protective membrane that proved more tenuous than its reputation. Although, by then, its reputation was already much diminished, and nowadays it has none at all.

  For his part, Tomás Nevinson made his debut in the usual way these things happened in England in 1969, casually and without a second thought – almost like someone going through a formality whose importance he prefers not to exaggerate by postponing it – first, with a fellow undergraduate about whom he had no qualms and who was swiftly followed by a girl who worked locally, and both he and they were determined not to lend these effusions any importance and not to be affected by them either for good or for ill; those were the days of so-called sexual liberation, which was permeated by the idea that there was barely any difference between having sex with someone and having a cup of coffee with them, as if they were equivalent activities, and as if neither should leave behind any trace or sense of unease. (Even if no memory remains of the one, and of the other it eternally does – however vague and pale that memory may become – the event does at least leave a trace, or perhaps only in our knowledge and awareness that it did occur.) Nor did he see these between-the-sheets encounters and his immovable love for Berta as contradictory or conflicting. They simply led him to think that on one of his next stays in Madrid, it would be high time that he and she finally had such an encounter, for Spain always lagged a little behind in fashion and in boldness, although less so then: those in the know prided themselves on being up to the minute, and Tom and Berta included themselves in that number. The second of those brief encounters did have some influence on his future, because, while the local girl was never a real presence in his life, she didn’t disappear entirely during the years he spent at Oxford, not even when she died: he would see her now and again at the antiquarian bookshop where she worked as an assistant, and whenever he went to the shop, they would end up arranging to meet that night or the next, which is why he preferred to space out his searches for old books, at least in that particular establishment. Tom rarely asked himself what her feelings might be, or what her expectations were of him, if indeed she had any. He tended to think that she didn’t, just as he had no expectations of her, of Janet, for that was her name. He knew she had a boyfriend or something in London and that she got together with him at weekends. He took it for granted that, for her, he was as much of a pastime, comfort and compensation for other absences as she was for him; in those places where you’re obliged to spend most of your days, even if only temporarily, you have to find some consolation. While he was sure that, sooner or later, he would return to Madrid, at no point during his time there did he see any sign of Janet leaving her job and moving to London to live with her boyfriend or get married. There appeared to be nothing temporary about her stay in Oxford, where she had, after all, been born and brought up and grown into an attractive, sensual woman.

  Equally influential for his future were his studies and his relationships with certain professors or dons, especially with the man who was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies – in an American university, he would have been called the head of the Spanish department – appointed to Exeter College after having been a fellow at Queen’s, the Hispanist and Lusitanist, Peter Edward Lionel Wheeler, a keen-witted man of growing prestige, by turns affectionate and sardonic, of whom it was rumoured that he had worked for the Secret Service during the war, like many others recruited during those extreme times, and that, afterwards, he had continued to collaborate at a distance – with MI5 or MI6 or with both – in the days of apparent peace, unlike the many people who, once the war was over, had merely returned to their civilian jobs and maintained an enforced silence under oath about any occasional, or perhaps seasonal, crimes they may have committed, crimes made legal and justifiable by the war situation, with wars treated as parentheses, as prolonged, mortally serious carnivals, cruel and almost devoid of farce, during which citizens are given carte blanche, and the most brilliant, the most intelligent, the most able and capable are even taken up and trained – a character-building exercise – to sabotage, betray, deceive, trick, to abolish all feelings, all scruples, and to murder.

  It was said that Peter Wheeler had been subjected to a harsh training regime in 1941 at the centre for commandos and special operations at Lochailort, on the west coast of Scotland, and that he suffered a serious car accident there, which partially damaged the bone structure of his face. He underwent reconstructive surgery at Basingstoke Hospital, where he remained for four months, and, as a result of those various operations, he was left with permanent scars (these faded only slowly, pining palely away), one on his chin, the other on his forehead, but these did not in the least diminish his decidedly gallant appearance. It was also said that, even while he was still convalescing, he received a terrible beating, as part of a mock interrogation, at the hands of some ex-policemen from Shanghai at Inverailort House, which had been requisitioned at the time by the Navy and by the SOE, or Special Operations Executive, in order to harden him up were he ever captured by the enemy. The following year, he had been appointed director of security in Jamaica, and later assigned to postings in West Africa – where he took advantage of the RAF’s secret surveillance flights to get a bird’s-eye view of geographical details that would prove useful in his books The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II, published in 1955, and Prince Henry the Navigator: A Life, first published in 1960 – as well as in Rangoon (Burma), Colombo (Ceylon), where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and Indonesia, after the Japanese surrender in 1945. A lot of stories were told about him, but he himself never told any, doubtless still bound by the oath of confidentiality taken by anyone involved in espionage and undercover work, that is, work whose existence will never be revealed or will always be denied. He knew that various tales and anecdotes about him regularly did the rounds of his colleagues and students, but he let them pass as if they didn’t concern him. And if anyone dared to ask him directly, he would immediately make a joke or shoot them a stern look, depending on who it was, and then divert the conversation onto the Cantar de Mío Cid, La Celestina, Iberian translators of the fifteenth century, or Edward, the Black Prince. All these rumours made him a singularly attractive figure to the few students who heard them, and Tom Nevinson, whose excellent linguistic skills soon aroused the interest of his teachers – even their admiration, to the limited extent that teachers will allow themselves to admire a student – was one of those who most benefitted from the whispers and gossip normally reserved for the clerically named ‘members of the Congregation’, that is, the faculty. Tom was one of those people to whom others tend to tell things without being asked – he came across as likeable and sympathetic without even trying, and he was a wonderful listener, whose intense attentiveness always flattered and encouraged his interlocutors, unless, that is, he chose not to listen, in which case he would cut the conversation short – making him the repository of their trust without even wondering why they were talking so much about themselves or why the hell they were blithely divulging secrets without having them wheedled or coaxed out of them.

  His outstanding linguistic gifts were immediately noticed by his tutors, and, of course, by the former Lieutenant Colonel Peter Wheeler, who, at the time, was not yet sixty and who combined his exceptionally acute antennae – his alert, curious mind – with long years of experience. When he went up to Oxford, Tomás had already mastered to perfection most of the registers, intonations, varieties, dictions and accents of his two family languages; he also spoke almost impeccable French and very respectable Italian. At Oxford, he not only made huge advances in those last two languages, but by the end of his third year, in 1971, when he was almost twenty, after having been persuaded to enrol in Slavonic languages too, he could speak Russian almost flawlessly, with barely any mistakes, and could get by in Polish, Czech and Serbo-
Croat. He was clearly extraordinarily gifted in that field, a prodigy, as if he had retained the linguistic malleability of a small child, who can learn however many languages are spoken around him, can master and allow them to become part of his being, because, in his eyes, they are all his language, as any language could be, depending on where the wind took him and where he ended up living; who can retain them all and keep them separate, and only rarely confuse or mix them up. His imitative skills also developed and grew as he immersed himself in his studies, and one Easter vacation, when he decided not to go back to Spain, he devoted himself to travelling around Ireland instead, and at the end of that time (the vacation lasted almost five weeks), he had mastered all the island’s main dialects. He was already familiar with the accents of Scotland and Wales, of Liverpool, Newcastle, York, Manchester and other places, having heard them here and there, on the radio and television, during his summer holidays as a child. Anything he heard he could learn instantly, could memorise and later reproduce with precision and skill.

  Tomás Nevinson stayed on for a fourth year, intending to return to Spain when he was almost twenty-one, having gained the highest marks of his year in his final exams, and with his Bachelor of Arts degree in his pocket. In those days, contrary to popular belief, everything happened more rapidly and was more advanced, people grew up more quickly than they do now, and young men felt they were adults from very early on, ready to tackle whatever tasks were set for them, ready to learn by doing and thus scramble up onto the world’s back. There was no reason to wait or shirk, to try and prolong adolescence or childhood; with their placid lack of definition, such actions were for the cowardly and the fearful, with whom the world is now so full that no one even notices. They are the norm, an overprotected, idle humanity, which has sprung up out of nowhere after centuries of exactly the opposite: action, restlessness, boldness and impatience.