Berta Isla - Hardcover

Marías, Javier

 
9780525521365: Berta Isla
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525521364 ISBN 13: 9780525521365
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

From the award-winning, internationally best-selling Spanish writer, author of The Infatuations, comes a gripping new novel of intrigue and missed chances--at once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on secrets and lies.

When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson--the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAVIER MARÍAS was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-four languages, has sold more than eight and a half million copies worldwide, and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

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I

For a while, she wasn’t sure her husband was her husband, much as, when you’re dozing, you’re not sure whether you’re thinking or dreaming, whether you’re actually in charge of your own thoughts or have completely lost track of them out of sheer exhaustion. Sometimes she thought he was, sometimes not, and at other times, she decided to believe nothing and simply continue living her life with him, or with that man so similar to him, albeit older. But then she, too, had grown older in his absence; she was very young when they married.

Those other times were the best times, the calmest, gentlest, most satisfactory times, but they never lasted very long, it’s not easy to shrug off such a doubt. She would manage to set it aside for weeks at a time and immerse herself in unconsidered daily life, which most of the Earth’s inhabitants have no difficulty in enjoying, those who merely watch the days begin and see how they trace an arc as they pass and then end. Then they imagine there’s some sort of closure, a pause, a division or a frontier, marked by falling asleep, but no such thing exists: time continues to advance and to work, not only on our body, but on our consciousness too, time doesn’t care whether we’re deep asleep or wide awake or unable to sleep at all or if our eyes unwittingly close as if we were raw recruits on night duty, what in Spanish we call la imaginaria, literally, something that exists only in the imagination, perhaps because, afterwards, to the person standing guard while the rest of the world sleeps, it does seem as if that period of time hadn’t really happened—always assuming the soldier did manage to stay awake and wasn’t subsequently confined to barracks or, in time of war, executed. One irresistible slide into sleep and you find yourself dead, asleep for ever. How very danger­ous everything is.

When she believed that her husband was her husband, she felt less at ease and found it harder to get out of bed and begin the day, she felt a prisoner of what she had so long been waiting for and which had now happened and for which she no longer waited, because anyone who has grown used to waiting never entirely consents to that waiting coming to a close, it’s like having half the air you breathe snatched from you. And when she believed that he wasn’t her husband, then she would spend the night feeling agitated and guilty, and hope not to wake up so as not to have to face her own suspicions about him or the reproaches with which she chastised herself. She hated to see herself becoming this hard-hearted wretch. On the other hand, during the times when she decided, or was able, to believe nothing, she felt the lure of the hidden doubt, the post­poned uncertainty, which, sooner or later, would inevitably return. She had discovered how boring it was to live with absolute certainty and how it condemned you to just a single existence, or to experi­encing the real and the imaginary as one and the same, but then none of us ever quite escapes that. She discovered, too, that a state of permanent suspicion is equally unbearable, because it’s exhaust­ing to be constantly observing yourself and others, especially if that other is the person closest to you, always comparing him with your memories of him, for memories can never be relied upon. No one can see clearly what is no longer there before them, even if it’s only just happened, even if the aroma or discontent left behind by someone is still hanging there in the room. Someone only has to go through a door and disappear for their image to begin to fade, you only have to stop seeing something to stop seeing it clearly or at all; the same happens with hearing and, of course, with touch. How, then, can one remember clearly and in its proper sequence something that happened long ago? How could she faithfully recall the husband of fifteen or twenty years ago, the husband who, when she had already been asleep for a while, would slip into bed and, without a word, penetrate her? Maybe all these things vanish and blur, just as happens perhaps with those soldiers on night duty, la imaginaria. Perhaps they are precisely the things that fade most rapidly.

 
 
Her simultaneously Spanish and English husband, Tom or Tomás Nevinson by name, hadn’t always been gripped by discontent. He hadn’t always exuded a kind of  all pervading irritation, a deep seated annoyance, which he dragged with him around the apartment, so that it managed to be both  deep seated and superficial at the same time. It came with him into the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, like an emanation, or as if it were a storm hanging over his head, following him everywhere and rarely leaving him. This caused him to be somewhat abrupt and to answer very few questions, regardless of whether these were compromising or entirely inoffensive. He took shelter from the first kind by saying that he was not authorised to reveal anything, always taking the opportunity to remind his wife, Berta Isla, that he never would be given such authorisation, that even if whole decades passed and he were about to die, he would never be able to tell her about his current exploits or his past assignments or missions, about the life he lived when he was away from her. Berta had to accept this and she did: there was a zone or a dimension of her husband that would remain for ever in darkness, always just beyond her field of vision and her hearing, the untold tale, the half closed or myopic or, rather, blind eye; a life she could only imagine or speculate about.

“Besides, it’s best you don’t know,” he told her on one occasion, for his enforced hermeticism did not prevent him from occasion-ally talking about it, in the abstract and without making any specific reference to places or individuals. “It’s often unpleasant, and contains some very sad stories, all doomed to end unhappily for one party or the other; sometimes it’s amusing, but it’s nearly always ugly or, worse, depressing. And I often emerge from it with a bad conscience. Fortunately, that soon passes, it doesn’t last. And fortu­nately, too, I forget what I’ve done, which is the advantage of such pretend situations, you’re not the one experiencing it, or only as if you were an actor. Actors return to their own selves once the film or the play is over, and films and plays eventually fade. In the long term, they leave only a vague memory, as if they were something dreamed and improbable and definitely dubious. Or else are so out of keeping with yourself, that you think: ‘No, I couldn’t possibly have behaved like that, my memory’s playing tricks on me, that was another me, it never happened.’ Or as if you were a sleepwalker unaware of what you did.”

Berta Isla knew she was living partially with a stranger. And any­one who is barred from explaining whole months of his existence ends up feeling he has the right not to explain anything ever. On the other hand, Tom was, again partially, someone she had known all her life, someone she took as much for granted as the air she breathed. And no one interrogates the air.

They had known each other almost since they were children, when Tomás Nevinson was cheerful and frivolous, and free of mists and shadows. The British Institute in Calle Martínez Campos—next to the Museo Sorolla and where he had always studied—abandoned or released its students when they were thirteen or fourteen, after the fourth year of baccalaureate. The fifth, sixth and pre- university years, the three years preceding university, had to be taken else­where, and quite a few students moved to Berta’s school, the Studio, even if...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525521364
ISBN 13 
9780525521365
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
479
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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