And there was no other story, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, and, after a certain point, I stopped bothering Tupra, it was no use, and he, too, disappeared from my life, in his case very easily. The bureaucratic wheels moved at their usual leisurely pace, and, after the necessary time had passed, Tomás Nevinson was declared officially dead, in Spain and in England and, I assumed, in any other country too; and I became a widow and my children became fatherless, I mean our children, but he’d been so little present in their brief existences that I often forgot they were also his children. The children were always with me and belonged to me, just me.

I immediately began to receive the monthly, tax-free salary from the OMT that Tupra had proposed and arranged for me, so that I wouldn’t have to go without while I waited for the declaration of death in absentia and for the slow arrival of 1989 and 1990, along with the inheritance due to my children and myself. In England, I didn’t even have to wait for the obligatory seven years to pass, they allowed for exceptions – that is, a reduction in the term – depending on the circumstances and the probability of death, which, in Tomás’s case, was very high: officially, he’d disappeared in a war scenario, even though, over time, the Falklands conflict had come to be seen as only a miniature war; but wars large and small produce corpses, although those who die in the smaller wars are granted less importance and are less likely to be remembered. And so once he’d been declared legally dead, the British government assigned me a widow’s pension, as the widow of an employee of the embassy in Madrid, what they call a civil servant. Since I was already being paid that other undeserved salary plus what I earned at the university, where I was now a permanent member of staff, that additional sum helped me keep my resolution not to touch Tomás’s money, at least not the money he’d kept in his English account, which was doubtless from some unofficial or obscure source, perhaps given to him in person by Tupra himself once he’d completed a mission, a deception, an infiltration, an abomination.

There is, almost everywhere, an element of superstition about bodies: until they turn up, no one dares consider them to be cadavers, not entirely. Especially if there’s no oral or written evidence from whoever saw them die, and no one had seen Tomás die. I’d now read Colonel Chabert, after Tupra had mentioned it, and if Tomás did one day rise from the dead, I didn’t want the same thing to happen to him as happened to that poor colonel, whose survival was denied even by his own wife, who was horrified at his resurrection, having since married a count and had children by that second husband who was richer, higher up the social scale and promised her a far better future; that colonel with the huge scar on his head from a sword blow to the skull, who could make her a bigamist and her children bastards; whom she had stripped of his fortune, and now, necessarily and logically, of his identity too; whom she accused of being an impostor, and who would end up utterly disillusioned and mad in an asylum, or else having forgotten everything, the state that best befits the living (or the uninterrupted living), his stubborn persistence abandoned at last. As I say, that was pure superstition. The truth is that I didn’t really believe Tomás would come back, and, after all, Balzac’s novella was a fiction.

This was not the case with the subject matter of a French film I saw shortly afterwards and that enjoyed great popularity, The Return of Martin Guerre. It was made in 1981 or 1982, but I probably only saw it in 1984, when I finally overcame my reluctance and got up the courage to go; several people had spoken to me about it and its subject matter filled me with terror. It was based on a true story, which happened in the south of France, very close to the Spanish border, in the sixteenth century, and also – as I found out later – on an excellent novel published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre, written by Janet Lewis, an American writer I’d never heard of until then (despite my classes and my teaching specialism). The trials that ensued were so famous in their day that the then young Montaigne travelled to Rieux or Toulouse to attend the court sessions, to which he referred in one of his Essays. It told of the sudden disappearance of a well-off husband in the provinces, who left one day with no explanation, and then, after several years, came back – or, rather, a man returned who not only closely resembled him, but also had a detailed knowledge of Martin Guerre’s past, and so must have been him. He was accepted as such by his sisters, his uncle, now head of the family, and also by his wife, Bertrande de Rols, to use her maiden name, who went on to have a second child by him, having had her first child by Martin before his mysterious departure. I’m not sure now whether all this is in the film, the novel of forty years before or a later book of ‘microhistory’ by a professor at Princeton, which I also took the trouble to read once the threshold of fear had been crossed and my curiosity aroused. Probably all three did, for none of them departed from the fundamental facts, none of them departed from the truth. After her initial reaction of joy and welcome (a reaction that lasted a long time), doubt and remorse began gradually to eat away at Bertrande, and she ended up convinced that this second Martin was an impostor, who had led her to commit adultery (or, put in the ugliest of terms, had raped her by dint of deception), to conceive and give birth to an illegitimate child and to hand over her absent husband’s money to an adventurer, a swindler. Hence the denunciation and the trials, the first one in the small town of Rieux and the definitive one in Toulouse. The shocking, paradoxical aspect of the case was that the supposed impostor was kinder and more affectionate, more benevolent and harder-working than the surly, awkward, discontented young man who had abandoned her all those years before. And, yes, that story was real, it had actually happened, for alongside those artistic reconstructions or reworkings, there were chronicles from the period and even the proceedings from one of the trials; there was documentation. The sixteenth century, though, was so long ago that it was just as unreal as the story imagined by Balzac. People’s memories were doubtless vaguer then, and it would have been harder to recognise someone’s face, skin or smell.

And so the years passed and more years passed, and with each month that went by, I felt Tomás was even more dead, both before and after the certificates that condemned him to be dead in the eyes of the world, that confirmed his death. But you should never underestimate what you see and read and hear. We soon forget the twists and turns, let alone the details, of any story, whether real or fictional, which tend to become flattened out beneath the sheer weight of subsequent layers of time. And yet, whatever we’re told remains lurking in the nooks and crannies, on the edges and boundaries of our imagination. It forms part of our knowledge and, therefore, of what’s possible. And although I was sure Tomás wouldn’t reappear, either like Chabert or like Martin Guerre, I couldn’t help fantasising about that in a tenuous, timid way, especially when I was most alone. And I would again remember that line: ‘as death resembles life, being between two lives’, as I waited for my second life to begin. And I would also recite, softly or to myself, those lines so appropriate to dreams born of desperation: ‘We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them.’