Berta Isla by Javier Marías

Author:Javier Marías
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241983560
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Our little girl had been crying and calling out for some time, when Tomás was only about halfway through his spiel, but he hadn’t stopped speaking, pretending that he hadn’t heard her, or perhaps thinking it wasn’t urgent enough to keep him from finishing his speech. And he clearly hadn’t finished, just as I hadn’t finished mine, but, at that point, I could bear it no longer and I got up and went to fetch her, but before I did, I said:

‘Will you stop doing that? Why are you talking to me like some old cowpoke from the Wild West? What are you playing at? You’re making me nervous, you’re frightening me. You sound as if you were someone else, I don’t know, Walter Brennan or someone. I can’t even understand you properly and I just don’t recognise you. So stop it now, stop arsing around.’

I went into the bedroom and picked my daughter up in my arms. She was thirsty, and so I gave her something to drink, then took her into the living room to be with us, cradling her head against my shoulder and rocking her back and forth, to calm her, and hoping she would fall asleep to the murmur of our voices and my gentle pacing. This wouldn’t be easy unless Tomás reverted to his normal self. His relationship with Guillermo and Elisa was a contradictory one. I’m sure he loved them and was deeply fond of them, and he just adored Elisa, but he always tried to maintain a certain distance from them when he was in Madrid. He reined in his affection and reined in their instinctive affection for him, as if he didn’t want to become overly accustomed to such fond displays, so that he wouldn’t miss them too painfully during his inevitable future absences. Even though he was often at home for several months at a time, he knew he would be summoned to London again and would again have to leave, that he was only at home with us temporarily, and he could never discount the possibility that he might not come back. This thought so saddened me that my feelings of disapproval diminished somewhat. Thomas knew that, one day, he might become an outcast from our universe, and, as a consequence, he tried hard not to become too attached to it, to be, up to a point, a visitor, insofar as that was possible. He held out his arms to take the child, and I handed her to him and he laid her on his chest, patting her gently on the back and rather inexpertly rocking her back and forth. She stopped crying, and her tears were replaced by little groans, heralding a return to sleep, and he took advantage of that moment to answer me, still in English, but in a completely different voice and accent this time: now he sounded like a rather uneducated Englishman, the kind who pronounces nearly all his vowels as ‘o’s, and instead of ‘like’ or ‘mind’ says ‘loik’ or ‘moind’, just to give a couple of examples.

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