The Infatuations

IV





That, as I imagined it would be, was the last occasion on which I saw Díaz-Varela alone, and quite some time passed before I met him again, and then in company and by chance. But for most of that time he haunted my days and my nights, at first intensely, then only palely loitering, as Keats put it. I suppose he thought we had nothing more to say, he must have been left with the feeling that he had more than fulfilled the unexpected task of giving me an explanation he had doubtless assumed he would never have to give to anyone. He had acted imprudently with the Prudent Young Woman (I’m no longer so very young, nor was I then), and he’d had no choice but to tell me his story, sinister or sombre depending on which version he gave. After that, there was no need for him to stay in touch with me, to expose himself to my suspicions, my looks, my evasive comments, my silent judgements, nor would I have wanted to submit him to them, we would have become enveloped in an atmosphere of grim unease. He did not seek me out nor did I seek him out. We had said an implicit goodbye, had reached a conclusion that no amount of mutual physical attraction or non-mutual love could delay.

The following day, despite his weariness, he must have felt that a weight had been lifted off his shoulders or been replaced by another far lighter one – I now knew more, having been present at a confession – because it was even less likely than ever that I would go to anyone with my still unprovable knowledge. He, though, has passed a weight on to me, because far worse than my grave suspicions and my possibly hasty and unfair conjectures was the burden of having two versions of events and not knowing which to believe, or, rather, knowing that I would have to believe both and that both would cohabit in my memory until it grew weary of the duplication and turfed them out. Anything anyone tells you becomes absorbed into you, becomes part of your consciousness, even if you don’t believe it or know that it never happened and that it’s pure invention, like novels and films, like the remote story of Colonel Chabert. And although Díaz-Varela had followed the old precept of keeping the ‘true’ story until last and telling me the ‘false’ story first, that rule is never enough to erase the initial or previous version. You still heard it and, although it might be momentarily refuted by what comes afterwards, which contradicts and gives the lie to it, its memory endures, as does our own credulity while we were listening, when, not knowing that it would be followed by a denial, we mistook it for the truth. Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers, if not when we’re awake, then as we drift off to sleep or in our dreams, where the order of things doesn’t matter, and it remains there tossing and turning and pulsating as if it were someone who had been buried alive or perhaps a dead man who reappears because he didn’t actually die, either in Eylau or on the road back or having been hanged from a tree or something else. What has been said continues to watch us and occasionally revisits us, as ghosts do, and then it never seems enough, we recall even the longest conversation as having been all too brief and the most thorough explanation as being full of holes; we wish we had asked more questions and listened more closely and paid more attention to non-verbal signs, which are slightly less deceiving than verbal ones.

Needless to say, I considered the possibility of tracking down Dr Vidal Secanell, with a surname like that there would be no problem finding him. Indeed, I learned from the Internet that he worked for an odd-sounding organization called the Anglo-American Medical Unit, based in Calle Conde de Aranda, in the Salamanca district of Madrid; I could easily make an appointment and ask him to check me over and give me an electrocardiogram, well, we all worry about our heart. Unfortunately, I lack the detective instinct, it’s just not me, and, besides, I felt it was a move that was as risky as it was futile: if Díaz-Varela had been happy to tell me his name, the doctor was sure to corroborate his version, whether it was true or not. Perhaps Dr Vidal was an old school friend of his, not of Desvern, perhaps he had been told what he should tell me if I came to see him and questioned him; he could always deny me access to a medical record that may never even have existed, confidentiality rules in such cases, and what right did I have, after all: I should really go there with Luisa and have her demand to see it, but she knew nothing about her husband’s illness and had not the slightest suspicion, and how could I so abruptly open her eyes, something that would involve multiple decisions and taking on an enormous responsibility, that of revealing the truth to someone who possibly didn’t want to know it, because you can never tell what someone wants to know until the revelation has been made, and then the evil has been done and it’s too late to withdraw, to put it behind you. Vidal might be yet another collaborator, he might owe Díaz-Varela enormous favours, he might be part of the conspiracy. Or perhaps it wasn’t even necessary. Two weeks had passed since I eavesdropped on that conversation with Ruibérriz; Díaz-Varela had had plenty of time in which to come up with a story that would neutralize or appease me, if I can put it like that; he could have gone to that cardiologist on some pretext or other (the novelists we publish, with that vain man Garay Fontina at their head, were always pestering all kinds of professionals with all kinds of questions), and asked him what painful, unpleasant, terminal illness could credibly justify a man preferring to kill himself or, if he couldn’t bring himself to do that, asking a friend to get rid of him instead. Dr Vidal might well be an honest, ingenuous sort and have given Díaz-Varela that information in good faith; and Díaz-Varela would have counted on my never going to visit the doctor, however tempted I was, as turned out to be the case (that I was tempted, I mean, but did not go). It occurred to me that he knew me better than I thought, that during our time together, he had been less distracted than he seemed and had studied me carefully, and, foolishly, I found that thought vaguely flattering, or maybe that was just a remnant of my infatuation; such feelings never end suddenly, nor are they transformed instantly into loathing, scorn, shame or mere stupor, there is a long road to be travelled before one arrives at those possible replacement feelings, there is a troubled period of infiltrations and mixtures, of hybridization and contamination, and the state of being infatuated or in love never entirely ends until it becomes indifference or, rather, tedium, until one can think: ‘What’s the point of living in the past, why bother even thinking about seeing Javier again. I can’t even be bothered to remember him. I want to drive that whole inexplicable time from my mind, like a bad dream. And that’s not so very difficult, given that I’m no longer the person I was. The only snag is that, even though I’m not that person, there are often moments when I can’t forget who I was and then, quite simply, my very name is loathsome to me and I wish I wasn’t me. At least a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although a memory can, at times, be somewhat devouring. But this memory no longer is, no, it no longer is.’

As is only to be expected and as is only natural, such thoughts took time to arrive. And I could not help considering from a hundred different angles (or perhaps it was only ten angles repeated over and over) what Díaz-Varela had told me, his two versions, if they were two versions, and pondering details that had remained unclear in both, for there is no story, whether real or invented, without blind spots or contradictions or obscurities or mistakes, and in that respect – that of the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative – it didn’t really matter which was which.

I revisited the articles I had read on the Internet about Desvern’s death, and in one of them I found the sentences that kept going round and round in my head: ‘The autopsy revealed that the victim had been stabbed sixteen times by his murderer. Every blow struck a vital organ, and according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five of the wounds proved fatal.’ I didn’t quite understand the difference between a fatal wound and one that struck a vital organ. At first sight, to a layman, they seemed to be the same thing. But that was only a secondary cause of my unease: if a pathologist had been involved and had drawn up that report, if there had been an autopsy, as was inevitable after any violent death and certainly after a homicide, how was it possible that no one noticed a ‘generalized metastasis throughout the body’, which Díaz-Varela had told me was the diagnosis given by Desvern’s consultant? On that afternoon, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask Díaz-Varela, the penny hadn’t dropped, and now I didn’t want to or couldn’t phone him, still less about that, he would have felt suspicious, wary or simply weary, he might have come up with other ways of neutralizing me, when he saw that his explanations or the act he had put on had failed to appease me. I could understand that the newspapers might not have made much of it or that the information wasn’t even given to them, because it bore no relation to what had happened, but it seemed very strange that no one had informed Luisa. When I spoke to her, it was clear that she knew nothing about Deverne’s illness, which was precisely as he had wanted, according, that is, to his friend and indirect executioner, the ‘instigator’ of his death. I could also imagine what Díaz-Varela’s response would be, if I had been able to ask him: ‘Do you really think that a pathologist examining a guy who’s received sixteen stab wounds is going to take the trouble to look any further and inquire into the victim’s previous state of health? He may not even have opened him up and so wouldn’t know; maybe he didn’t even carry out a proper autopsy and merely filled in the form with his eyes shut: it was obvious what Miguel had died from.’ And he may well have been right: that had been the attitude of the two negligent surgeons two centuries before, despite being under orders from Napoleon himself: knowing what they knew, they didn’t even bother to take the pulse of fallen, trampled Chabert. Besides, in Spain, most people do only the bare minimum and have little desire to probe beneath the surface and waste time doing something they deem to be unnecessary.

And then there were those overly technical terms used by Díaz-Varela. It was highly unlikely that he would have remembered them after having heard them once from Desvern some time before, nor even that Desvern would have used them when telling him about his misfortune, however often they were used by his doctors, the ophthalmologist, the consultant and the cardiologist. A desperate, terrified man wouldn’t resort to such dry-as-dust terminology when telling a friend he was under sentence of death, that just wouldn’t be normal. ‘Intraocular melanoma’, ‘a very advanced metastatic melanoma’, the adjective ‘asymptomatic’ or the noun ‘enucleation’, all those expressions struck me as having been recently learned, or recently heard from Dr Vidal. But perhaps my distrust was unfounded: after all, I haven’t forgotten them and much more time has passed since I heard him say them, and only on that one occasion too. And perhaps they would be repeated and used by someone suffering from an illness, as if that way he or she could somehow explain it better.

On the other hand, in favour of the veracity of his story, of his final version, was the fact that Díaz-Varela had been very restrained when speaking of his own sacrifice and suffering, of the heart-rendingly contradictory nature of his situation, of his immense grief at finding himself forced to do away with his best friend, the one he would most miss, and in such a precipitate and violent way – any precipitate death is, alas, bound to be violent. With time against him and with a deadline set, knowing that in this case, more than ever, ‘there would have been a time for such a word’, as Macbeth had added when he found out about his wife’s unexpected death. That is, there would have been time, another time, for such a phrase or fact: and to let in that other time, which he would neither have brought about or accelerated or disturbed, all Díaz-Varela would have had to do was refuse the commission and turn down the request, and allow things to take their natural and, inevitably, grim and pitiless course. Yes, he could have spun me some line about his accursèd fate, he could have used that very phrase to describe his task, he could have emphasized his loyalty, stressed his selflessness, even tried to arouse my compassion. If he had beaten his breast and described his anguish to me, how he’d had to keep his feelings to himself and dredge up the necessary courage to save Deverne and Luisa from a far worse fate, slower and more cruel, from deterioration and deformity and from having to contemplate both, I would have felt more suspicious of him and would have had few doubts about the falsity of his feelings. He had spared me that and given a very sober account; he had merely set out the facts and confessed his part in it. Which he had said, from the outset, was what he knew he had to do.





In the end, everything tends towards attenuation, sometimes little by little and thanks to great effort and willpower on our part; sometimes with unexpected speed and contrary to our will, while we struggle in vain to keep faces from fading and paling into nothing, and deeds and words from becoming blurred objects that drift about in our memory with the same scant value as those we’ve read about in novels or seen and heard in films: we don’t really care what happens in books and films and forget about them once they’re over, although, as Díaz-Varela had said when he spoke to me about Colonel Chabert, they do have the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen. When someone tells us something, it always seems like a fiction, because we don’t know the story at first hand and can’t be sure it happened, however much we are assured that the story is a true one, not an invention, but real. At any rate, it forms part of the hazy universe of narratives, with their blind spots and contradictions and obscurities and mistakes, all surrounded and encircled by shadows or darkness, however hard they strive to be exhaustive and diaphanous, because they are incapable of achieving either of those qualities.

Yes, everything becomes attenuated, but it’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits, as cadaverous as ruined tympana with their fractured inscriptions, past matter, dumb matter, almost indecipherable, nearly meaningless, absurd remnants preserved for no reason, because they can never be put together again, and they give out less light than darkness, are not so much memory as forgetting. And yet there they are, and no one destroys them or pieces together their sundry fragments scattered or lost centuries ago: they are kept there like small treasures or out of superstition, as valuable witnesses to the fact that someone once existed and died and had a name, even though we cannot see the whole person and reconstructing him is impossible, even though no one cares at all about that someone who is now no one. The name of Miguel Desvern will not vanish entirely, even though I never actually knew him and merely enjoyed watching him from a distance, every morning, as he breakfasted with his wife. The same is true of the fictitious names of Colonel Chabert and Madame Ferraud, of the Count de la Fère and Milady de Winter or, as she was in her youth, Anne de Breuil, who, with her hands tied behind her back, was hanged from a tree only mysteriously not to die and to return, ‘belle comme les amours’. Yes, the dead are quite wrong to come back, and yet almost all of them do, they won’t give up, and they strive to become a burden to the living until the living shake them off in order to move on. We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to silence that past matter, and sometimes we hear an almost imperceptible breathing, like that of a dying soldier thrown naked into a grave along with his dead companions, or perhaps like the imaginary groans of those companions, like the muffled sighs which, on some nights, he still thought he could hear, perhaps because he lay cheek by jowl with them for so long and because he so nearly shared their fate, was on the point of becoming one of them and perhaps was one of them, which means that his subsequent adventures, his wanderings in Paris, his re-infatuation and his hardships and his longing to be restored, were like those of fragments of gravestones in a room in a museum, of a few ruined tympana with illegible, fractured inscriptions, of the shadow of a trace, an echo of an echo, a tiny curve, a piece of ash, a scrap of past, dumb matter that refused to pass or to remain dumb. I could have played that role for Deverne, but I couldn’t do that either. Or perhaps I didn’t want even his most tenuous lament to filter into the world, through me.





That process of attenuation must have begun, as all such processes do as soon as something ends, the day after my last visit to Díaz-Varela and my farewell to him, just as the attenuation of Luisa’s grief doubtless began on the day after her husband’s death, even though she could only see that day as the first day of her eternal sorrow.

It was dark by the time I left, and on that occasion, I left without the slightest hint of a doubt. I had never felt sure that there would be a next time, that I would return, that I would ever again touch his lips or, of course, go to bed with him, everything was always very vague between us, as if each time we met, we had to start all over, as if nothing ever accumulated, as if no sediment built up, as if we had never covered that territory before, and as if what happened one evening was no guarantee – not even a sign or a probability – that the same thing would happen on another evening, in the near or distant future; only a posteriori would I discover that it would, but that was never any help when it came to the next opportunity; it was always an unknown, there was always the lurking possibility that there would be no next time, although there was also, of course, the possibility that there would, otherwise what ended up happening would not have happened.

On that occasion, however, I was sure that his front door would never open to me again, that once it had shut behind me and I had walked towards the lift, that apartment would remain closed to me, as if its owner had moved or gone into exile or died, one of those doors that you try not to walk past once you have been excluded, and if you do pass by it, by chance or because a detour would take too long and there is no way of avoiding it, you glance at it out of the corner of your eye with an anguished shudder – or perhaps simply the ghost of an old emotion – and quicken your step, in order not to become submerged in the memory of what was and is no longer. At night in my room, looking out at my dark, agitated trees, before closing my eyes to go to sleep, or not, I saw this quite clearly and said to myself: ‘Now I know I won’t see Javier again, and that’s just as well, even though I’m already missing the good times and the things I so enjoyed when I used to go there. That was over even before today. Tomorrow, I will begin the task of making all that happened cease to be a living creature and become instead a memory, even if, for some time, it remains a devouring one. Be patient, a day will come when that will cease too.’

However, after a week, or possibly less, something interrupted that process, when I was still struggling to get it started. I was leaving work with my boss, Eugeni, and my colleague Beatriz, slightly late because, as we all do when we apply ourselves to that slow task of forgetting and to not thinking about what we inevitably tend to think about, I was trying to spend as many hours as possible there, in company and with my mind occupied by things I didn’t much care about. As I was saying goodbye to them, near the café towards the top of Príncipe de Vergara, where I still had breakfast every morning and where I always, at some point, thought of my Perfect Couple, I immediately spotted, pacing up and down on the pavement opposite, a tall figure with his hands in his overcoat pockets, as if he had been hanging about there for some time and had got cold, as if he had arranged to meet someone who had not yet turned up. And although he wasn’t wearing a leather overcoat, but a rather old-fashioned camel-coloured and even, possibly, camel-skin coat, I recognized him at once. It couldn’t have been a coincidence, he was clearly waiting for me. ‘What’s he doing here?’ I wondered. ‘Javier must have sent him,’ and mixed up in that thought – as with everything connected to the latest version of Javier, the two-faced or unmasked version, if you like – were both irrational fear and foolish hope. ‘He’s sent him to find out if I’m still neutralized and appeased, or purely out of interest, to ask after me, to find out how I’m coping after all his revelations and his stories, but whatever the reason, he still hasn’t managed to dislodge me from his mind. Or perhaps it’s intended as a threat, a warning, and Ruibérriz is going to tell me what will happen if I don’t keep my peace until the end of time or if I start snooping around or going to see Dr Vidal; Javier is the kind of man who broods on things, that’s what he did after I eavesdropped on their conversation.’ And while I was thinking this, I was also wondering whether to avoid him and head off with Beatriz and accompany her wherever she happened to be going, or to follow my first instinct and stay there alone and allow him to approach. Succumbing once more to curiosity, I chose the latter path: I said my goodbyes and took seven or eight steps towards the bus stop, without looking at him. Only seven or eight, because he immediately crossed the road, dodging the cars, and stopped me, touching me lightly on the elbow, so as not to startle me, and when I turned round, I was confronted by his flashing teeth, a smile so broad that, as I had noticed on that first occasion, his top lip folded back to reveal its moist interior, it was quite striking really, as if his lips were on the wrong way round. He had the same appraising, male gaze, even though, on this occasion, I was fully clothed rather than wearing only my bra and a skirt that was either rumpled or had ridden up. It made no difference, he was obviously a man with a synthetic or global vision: before a woman knew it, he would have examined her in her totality. I didn’t feel greatly flattered by this, because he seemed to me to be one of those men who lower their standards as they grow older and need little incentive to go chasing after any woman who still has a slight spring in her step.

‘Why, María, what a delightful coincidence,’ he said and raised one hand to his right eyebrow, mimicking the gesture of taking off his hat, as he had when he said goodbye to me on that other occasion, as he was about to get into the lift. – ‘You remember me, I hope. We met at Javier’s apartment, Javier Díaz-Varela. To my great good fortune, you didn’t know I was there, do you remember? You got a shock and I a dazzling and all-too-fleeting surprise.’

I wondered what he was playing at. There he was, pretending that this was an entirely chance encounter, when I had seen him waiting there and he must have seen me see him, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the door of our office while he was walking up and down, who knows for how long, perhaps since the theoretical end of our working day, which he could have ascertained over the phone, but which had nothing to do with the real end. I decided to humour him, at least to begin with.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, and I smiled back, out of politeness. ‘Yes, that was a bit embarrassing. It’s Ruibérriz, isn’t it? An unusual surname.’

‘Ruibérriz de Torres, actually. Yes, it is unusual. We’re a family of soldiers, prelates, doctors, lawyers and notaries. Oh, I could tell you a tale or two. I’m on the family’s black list, of course, I’m the black sheep, you know, although you wouldn’t know it today.’ – And he stroked the lapel of his coat with the back of his hand, a disdainful gesture, as if he were not yet used to wearing that particular item of clothing and felt awkward without his usual black Gestapo leather. He laughed for no reason at his own mini-joke. Or perhaps he found himself funny or was trying to infect me with his humour. He looked every inch the rogue, but one’s first impression was that he was a cheerful, rather inoffensive rogue, and it was hard to believe that he had been involved in fabricating an assassination. Like Díaz-Varela, although each in his own way, of course, he seemed a perfectly normal guy. If he had taken part in that murder (and he had taken a very active part, that much was certain, whatever his motives were, whether vaguely loyal or unquestionably vile), he seemed unlikely to reoffend. ‘But perhaps,’ I thought, ‘that’s how most criminals are, pleasant and amiable, when they’re not committing crimes.’ – ‘Let me buy you a drink to celebrate our meeting. If you have time, that is. How about here?’ – And he pointed to the café where I usually had breakfast. – ‘Although I know hundreds of infinitely more amusing places and with far more atmosphere too, places you wouldn’t even imagine could exist in Madrid. Later on, if you fancy it, we could go to one of them. Or what about supper in a nice restaurant? Are you hungry? Or we could go dancing, if you’d rather.’

I was tickled by this last suggestion, that we go dancing, which seemed to belong to another age. And how did he expect me to go dancing straight from work, at an absurdly early hour and with an almost complete stranger, as if I were sixteen again? And because the idea tickled me, I laughed out loud.

‘What are you talking about? How can I possibly go dancing now, dressed like this? I’ve been at work since nine o’clock this morning.’ And I gestured with my head towards the door of the office building.

‘I did say later on, after supper. It’s up to you. If you like, we can drop by your apartment, you can shower and change and then we’ll go out on the town. You obviously don’t realize that there are places where you can dance at any hour of the day. Even at noon.’ And he let out a guffaw. Even his laughter was dissolute. ‘I don’t mind waiting or I can pick you up somewhere.’

He was invasive and mischievous. The way he was behaving, he didn’t give the impression of having been sent by Díaz-Varela, although he must have been. How else would he know where I worked? And yet he was behaving as if he were acting on his own initiative, as if he had clung on to that scantily-clad image of me from a few weeks before and decided, quite simply, to take a chance, to dive in, on a kind of urgent whim, it’s a tactic some men use and it usually works too, if they’re the jolly, convivial sort. I remembered feeling then that, not only was he immediately registering my existence, he also deemed our summary introduction to each other to be some sort of step forward or even an investment for the near future; that he had noted me down in his mental diary as if hoping to meet me again very soon, alone and in another place, or was even blithely considering asking Díaz-Varela for my phone number later on. Perhaps Díaz-Varela had referred to me as a ‘bird’ because that was the only term Ruibérriz de Torres was capable of understanding: because that’s all I was to him, ‘a bird’. I didn’t mind, I myself think of some men simply as ‘guys’. He was the kind of man who possesses limitless self-confidence and cheek, so much so that it’s almost disarming sometimes. I had put that attitude down to the two men’s mutual lack of respect, to their being accomplices and knowing each other’s weakest points, to being partners in crime. Ruibérriz didn’t seem to care what my relationship to Díaz-Varela was. It also occurred to me that perhaps the latter had told him there was no relationship now. And that idea bothered me, the possibility that he might have given Ruibérriz the green light without so much as a flicker of regret, without the slightest trace of jealousy, with no sense that, in some diffuse way, I belonged to him – that, if you like, he had discovered me – and that idea made me more determined to take that shameless individual down a peg or two, albeit gently, wordlessly, because I was still intrigued to know what he was doing there. I agreed to have a drink with him, a very quick one, I told him, nothing more. We sat at the table next to the window, the one where the Perfect Couple used to sit, when they existed, and I thought: ‘What a falling off was there.’ He removed his overcoat with the dramatic, resolute gesture of a trapeze artist, and immediately puffed out his chest, he was doubtless proud of his pectorals and considered them an asset. He kept his scarf on, he must have thought it suited him and went well with his close-fitting trousers, both items being light stone in colour, a distinguished colour, but one more appropriate for spring, he clearly didn’t pay much attention to the seasons.





He continued firing flirtatious remarks at me and spoke of trivialities. His remarks were direct and unashamedly adulatory, but not in bad taste; he was trying to get off with me and appear witty – he was, in fact, wittier when he wasn’t trying so hard, his jokes were predictable, mediocre, slightly gauche – that was all. I grew impatient, my initial friendliness was wearing thin, I found it hard to laugh, I was beginning to feel the effects of a long day at work, and I hadn’t been sleeping very well since I said goodbye to Díaz-Varela, being tormented by nightmares and by troubled awakenings. I didn’t dislike Ruibérriz despite what I knew about him – well, perhaps he really had been repaying a favour or helping out a friend who had the terrible task of providing a swift death for another friend who should have died yesterday, far too early or at least before his natural or appointed time (before the second chance event in his life, which comes to the same thing) – but he didn’t interest me in the least, he was too smooth, I couldn’t even appreciate his gallant compliments. He was quite unaware that he was getting on a bit, closer to sixty than fifty, but he behaved like a thirty-year-old. Perhaps this was partly because he kept himself very fit, that much was undeniable, and at first sight, he looked about forty or so.

‘Why has Javier sent you?’ I asked suddenly, taking advantage of a moment of silence or a lull in the conversation: he either didn’t realize that his courtship was fast running out of steam, along with any chance of success, or else he was invincibly tenacious, once he put himself to the task.

‘Javier?’ He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Javier didn’t send me, I’m here on my own account, I had some business on this side of town. And even if that wasn’t the case, don’t underestimate yourself, I certainly wouldn’t need any encouragement to come and see you.’ He never missed a chance to flatter me, but got straight to the point. As I said before, he was acting on an urgent whim and had an equally urgent need to see if he could or couldn’t satisfy that whim. If he could, great. If not, on to the next thing; he certainly didn’t seem like a man who would bother trying twice or would linger over a hoped-for conquest. If something didn’t work out after his first and probably only attack, he wouldn’t waste time trying again, for, since he wasn’t particularly choosy, there was no shortage of candidates.

‘Really? But how did you know where I work? Don’t give me that stuff about how you just happened to be passing. I could see you’d been waiting a while. How long had you been there? It’s a cold day to be hanging about in the street, you’re going to an awful lot of trouble on your own account, and I’m not that special. When Javier introduced us, he didn’t even give you my surname. So how were you able to locate me with such precision if he didn’t send you? What does he want to know? If I believed his tale of friendship and sacrifice?’

Ruibérriz slowly interrupted one of his smiles, or, rather, his smile, because the truth is he never entirely stopped smiling, he doubtless considered his dazzling Vittorio Gassman-like teeth to be another of his assets, indeed his striking resemblance to that actor did contribute to making him more sympathetic. Or, rather, the interruption was not slow exactly, it was more as if his backward-folded upper lip became caught or stuck on his gums – which can happen when your mouth is dry – and he took longer than usual to liberate it. That must have been what happened, because he made some rather strange rodent-like movements with his lips.

‘No, he didn’t give me your surname then,’ he answered, as if perplexed by my reaction, ‘but we talked about you later on, over the phone, and he let slip enough information for me to be able to track you down in two ticks. Make no mistake, I’m a pretty good detective, and I’ve got contacts aplenty too, and nowadays, what with the Internet and Facebook and all that, almost no one can slip through the net once you know the odd detail about them. Is it so very hard for you to believe that I fancied you like mad the first time I saw you? Come on. I think you’re a knockout, María, that much must be obvious. I feel the same today, despite meeting you in very different circumstances and attire from that first occasion, but then one doesn’t always strike so lucky. That really was a mind-blower, though. God’s own truth, María, I haven’t been able to get that image out of my head for weeks.’ – And he nonchalantly regained his smile. He was quite happy to refer again and again to my half-naked state, it didn’t bother him that he might appear rude, for he clearly assumed that his arrival had interrupted Díaz-Varela and me in mid-shag, more or less. That hadn’t been the case, but almost. He said ‘knockout’ and ‘mind-blower’, words that already sounded old-fashioned, and the expression ‘slip through the net’ is on its way out as well: his vocabulary betrayed his age, more than his appearance did, for he did preserve a certain elegance.

‘You talked about me? But why? Our relationship wasn’t exactly public knowledge. On the contrary. He was most put out that you should see me, that we should meet, or didn’t you notice, that it really bugged him, I mean? I find it very odd that he should mention me to you later, I’d have thought he would want to forget all about that particular encounter …’ – I stopped talking, because then I remembered what I had thought afterwards, that Díaz-Varela would have tried to reconstruct with Ruibérriz the dialogue they’d had while I was listening from behind the door, to calculate precisely how much and what I might have heard, how much I would have pieced together; and that, after sifting through their words, Díaz-Varela would have reached the conclusion that it was best to meet me face to face and offer me an explanation, to invent a story or confess to what had happened, and, at the least, provide me with a better story than the one I had imagined, which was why he had phoned to summon me after those two weeks had elapsed. And so, yes, it was highly likely that they had talked about me, and that Javier would have told him enough for Ruibérriz to have come looking for me on his own account and, if I can put it like this, without permission. Although, he was clearly not the kind of guy to ask anyone for their permission before approaching ‘a bird’. He was the sort who neither respected his friends’ wives or girlfriends nor considered them off-limits; there are far more such men than you might think and they trample over everyone. Perhaps Díaz-Varela really didn’t know about this approach, this incursion. ‘Wait a minute,’ I added quickly. ‘He did speak to you about me, didn’t he? As being a problem, I mean. He was worried and told you that I’d overheard your conversation, that I could get you both into a lot of trouble if I decided to tell my story to someone, to Luisa or to the police. That’s why he spoke to you about me, isn’t it? And I presume the two of you then came up with that story about the melanoma or perhaps Vidal helped you out. Or maybe it was your idea, you’re a resourceful man. Or was it him? No, now that I think about it, it probably wasn’t you, but him; being a reader of novels, he’s sure to have a few stories up his sleeve.’

Ruibérriz lost his smile again, with no transitional phase this time, as if someone had wiped it from his face with a cloth. He grew serious, I caught a glint of alarm in his eyes, he immediately stopped playing the frivolous gallant and even moved his chair away from mine, having, earlier on, tried to move a little closer.

‘So you know about the illness? What else do you know?’

‘He told me the whole melodrama. About what you did to poor Canella, about the mobile phone and the knife. I hope he’s grateful, after all, you did the dirty work, while he stayed at home. Directing operations, like Rommel.’ – I couldn’t resist sliding into sarcasm, I had a grievance against Díaz-Varela.

‘You know what we did?’ – This was more a statement than a question. He hesitated before continuing, as if he had to digest this discovery, or so it seemed. He used his fingers to draw down his upper lip, a swift, furtive gesture: it hadn’t got stuck again, but it was a little high up. Maybe he wanted to make sure that he was no longer smiling. What he had just heard worried him, he didn’t like it at all, unless, of course, he was pretending. Finally, he added in a disappointed tone of voice: ‘I thought he wasn’t going to tell you anything, that’s what he said. The prudent thing would be to leave things as they were and hope that you hadn’t heard too much or that you wouldn’t put two and two together, or that you would simply keep quiet about it. Oh, and he mentioned that he was going to break off his relationship with you. It wasn’t anything serious, he said, he could easily just let it die. It would simply be a matter of not getting in touch with you again or not returning any calls you made or else fobbing you off with some excuse. Not that he thought you would insist. “She’s very discreet,” he said, “she never expects anything.” Nor was he under any obligation to you. He would just hope that you would gradually forget what you might have heard of our conversation. Best not to give you any facts, he said, and in time you would start to doubt what you had heard. “It will end up seeming quite unreal to her, as if it had all been in her imagination, her auditory imagination.” Not a bad plan really. That’s why I assumed the way was open for me, with you, I mean. And that you’d know nothing about me, as regards that business.’ – He fell silent again. He seemed sunk in thought, so much so that what he said next sounded as if he were talking to himself, not to me: ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like the fact that he doesn’t keep me informed, that he thinks it’s perfectly acceptable not to tell me about something that directly affects me. He shouldn’t have told anyone that story, because it isn’t his alone, it’s more mine, in fact, than his. I’ve run more risks, and I’m more exposed. No one saw him. I don’t like it one bit that he should have changed his mind and told you, especially without telling me. You must have thought me a right fool, now, I mean, with you.’

He looked thoroughly fed up, his gaze abstracted or absorbed. His ardour for me had cooled. I waited a while before saying anything.

‘Yes, well, if you’re going to confess to a murder committed by various people,’ I said, ‘you really should consult the others first. That’s the least you can do.’ – I couldn’t resist getting a little dig in.

He sprang to his feet, outraged.

‘Now you watch what you say. It wasn’t a murder. It was a case of giving a friend a better, less painful death. All right, all right, there’s no such thing as a good death, and the gorrilla did get rather carried away with the stabbing, but that wasn’t something we could have foreseen, we didn’t even know for sure he would use the knife. But what awaited him otherwise was just awful, dreadful. Javier described the whole process to me. At least he died quickly, once and for all, and without having to go through various stages, involving terrible pain and deterioration, with his wife and kids watching him slowly turning into a monster. You can’t call what we did murder, come off it. It was something else entirely. An act of mercy is how Javier put it. A merciful homicide.’

He sounded convinced, he sounded sincere. And so I thought: ‘It could be one of three things: the melodrama is true and not an invention; Javier has lied to this guy about the illness as well; the guy is playing a part under orders from the man paying him. And if the latter is true, then I have to say he’s a very good actor.’ I remembered the photograph of Desvern that had appeared in the press and of which I had seen only a poor reproduction on the Internet: without a jacket or tie or even, almost, a shirt – where could his cufflinks have got to – full of tubes and surrounded by ambulance staff manipulating him, with his wounds on display, lying in the middle of the street in a pool of blood and on view to passers-by and drivers alike, unconscious and dishevelled and dying. He would have been horrified to see himself or to know that he had been so exposed. It’s true that the gorrilla did get carried away, but who could have foreseen that? It was a merciful homicide, and perhaps it was, maybe it was all true, and Ruibérriz and Díaz-Varela had acted in good faith, up to a point and bearing in mind the convoluted nature of their plan. And its recklessness. And as soon as I had admitted those three possibilities and recalled that image, I was overcome by a kind of dismay or perhaps surfeit. When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess – which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels. I made one last attempt, albeit a very reluctant one, because I could already imagine the answer.

‘I see. And what about Luisa, Deverne’s wife? Is it also an act of mercy for Javier to console her?’

Ruibérriz de Torres again looked surprised or did a brilliant impression of looking surprised.

‘His wife? What do you mean? What kind of consolation are you talking about? Naturally, he’ll help her and console her as best he can, as he will the kids. She’s his friend’s widow, they’re his friend’s orphaned children.’

‘Javier has been in love with her for years. Or has insisted on being in love, which comes to the same thing. Getting rid of the husband has proved highly providential to him. They really loved each other, that couple. He wouldn’t have stood a chance with Deverne alive. Now he does stand a chance. Patiently, little by little. By staying close.’

Ruibérriz immediately, effortlessly, recovered his smile. It was a smile of commiseration, as if he felt sorry to see me so hopelessly barking up the wrong tree, to see how innocent I was and how little I understood the man who had been my lover.

‘What are you talking about?’ he answered scornfully. ‘He’s never said a single word to me about that, and I’ve certainly never noticed anything. Don’t delude yourself, don’t console yourself thinking that he’s finished with you because he loves someone else. That’s just ridiculous, Javier isn’t the kind to fall in love with anyone, no way. I’ve known him for years. Why do think he’s never married?’ – He gave a short laugh intended to be sarcastic. – ‘“Patiently,” you say. He doesn’t know what patience is, not at least when it comes to women. That, among other reasons, is why he’s still a bachelor.’ – He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. – ‘What rubbish. You have absolutely no idea.’ – Nevertheless he again remained silent for a while, thinking or searching his memory. How easy it is to introduce doubts into someone else’s mind.

It was likely that Díaz-Varela had never told him anything about that, especially if he had deceived him as to his motive. I remembered that when he mentioned Luisa in the conversation I overheard, he didn’t refer to her by name. In Ruibérriz’s presence, I had been ‘a bird’, but she, in turn, had been ‘the wife’, ‘la mujer’ in the sense not of ‘woman’ but of ‘wife’, someone else’s wife. As if she wasn’t someone who was dear to him. As if she were condemned to being just that, his friend’s wife. Ruibérriz had obviously never seen the two of them together, otherwise, he would have been as struck by this as I was the very first moment I met him, that evening at Luisa’s house. I imagined Professor Rico must have noticed too, although who knows, he seemed too absorbed in his own thoughts, too abstracted, to be aware of the outside world. I chose to say nothing more on the subject. Ruibérriz’s gaze was, once again, pensive, absorbed. There was nothing more to say. He had abandoned his courtship of me, which had, it seems, been genuine; he must have been very disappointed. I clearly wasn’t going to make any more sense of it all, and, besides, I really didn’t care. I had just washed my hands of the matter, at least until another day, or another century.

‘What happened to you in Mexico?’ I asked suddenly, intending to shake him out of his relative stupor, to cheer him up. I sensed that it would be fairly easy to grow to like him. Not that there would be an opportunity, I had no intention of ever seeing him again, and the same went for Díaz-Varela and for Luisa Alday and for the whole lot of them. I just hoped that the publishing house didn’t commission Professor Rico to write a book.

‘In Mexico? How do you know about that?’ – This question did take him very much by surprise, he had obviously forgotten. – ‘Not even Javier knows the whole story.’

‘I heard you mention it at Javier’s place, when I was listening from behind the door. You said you’d got into a bit of trouble there, that you were wanted by the police or had a record or something.’

‘Bloody hell, so you heard that too?’ – And he immediately added, as if he needed to explain something of which I was still unaware: ‘That wasn’t a murder either, not at all. It was pure self-defence, it was either him or me. And besides, I was only twenty-two …’ He stopped, realizing that he had said too much, that he was still remembering something or talking to himself, but doing so out loud and before a witness. The fact that I had referred to Desvern’s death as a murder had clearly touched a nerve.

I was startled. It had never occurred to me that he might have another corpse lurking in his past, whatever the circumstances of that first killing. He seemed to me an ordinary, straightforward crook, not really capable of violent crimes. I had seen the killing of Deverne as an exception, as something he felt obliged to do, and, when all was said and done, he hadn’t been the one to wield the weapon, he, too, had delegated, although to a lesser extent than Díaz-Varela.

‘I didn’t say anything about that,’ I responded rapidly. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I was just asking a question. But I’d almost prefer not to know, not if there was another death involved. Let’s drop the subject. The lesson is: never ask questions.’ – I glanced at my watch. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable to be sitting where Desvern used to sit, talking to his indirect executioner. – ‘Anyway, I have to go, it’s getting late.’

He ignored my last words, still pondering. I had sown doubt in his mind, I just hoped he didn’t go to Díaz-Varela now and ask him about Luisa, demand an explanation, and that Díaz-Varela did not then summon me again, I don’t know, to give me a telling-off or something. Or perhaps Ruibérriz was reliving what had happened in Mexico all those years ago, which clearly still weighed on him.

‘It was all Elvis Presley’s fault, you know,’ he said after a few seconds, in a quite different tone of voice, as if he had suddenly alighted upon a new way to impress me and not leave entirely empty-handed, so to speak.

I giggled slightly, I couldn’t help it.

‘You mean the Elvis Presley?’

‘Yes, I worked for him for about ten days, when he was shooting a film in Mexico.’

This time I laughed out loud, despite the sombre nature of the conversation.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, still laughing. – ‘And I suppose you know which island he’s living on. That’s what his fans believe, isn’t it? Who is he currently hiding out with: Marilyn Monroe or Michael Jackson?’

He looked annoyed and shot me a cutting glance. He really was annoyed because he said to me:

‘Don’t be such a dickhead, woman. Don’t you believe me? I did work for him, and he got me into deep trouble.’

He sounded far more serious than he had at any other point in the conversation. Genuinely miffed and angry. But that couldn’t possibly be true, it sounded like pure bluster, or else a delusion; but he had taken my scepticism very much to heart. I swiftly backpedalled.

‘Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. But you must admit it does sound a touch unbelievable.’ – And I added, in order to change the subject without completely abandoning it, without beating a retreat that would lead him to believe that I thought him either a complete fraud or a nutter: ‘How old are you, then, if you worked with the King no less? He died years ago, didn’t he? It must be nearly fifty years.’ I was still struggling not to laugh, but fortunately, managed to contain myself.

I noticed at once that he was recovering some of his old flirtatiousness. But he began by ticking me off.

‘Don’t exaggerate. It will thirty-four years ago next 16th of August, I think. That’s all.’ – He knew the exact date, he must be a real fan. – ‘All right then, so how old do you think I am?’

I wanted to be kind, to make amends. But I couldn’t go too far, I mustn’t flatter him too much.

‘Oh, I don’t know, about fifty-five?’

He smiled smugly, as if he had already forgotten the offence I had caused him. He smiled so broadly that his top lip once again shot upwards, revealing his healthy, white, rectangular teeth, and his gums.

‘Add another ten, at least,’ he replied, pleased. ‘What do you think?’

So he really was very well preserved. There was a childish quality about him, which was what made him so likeable. He was doubtless another victim of Díaz-Varela, whom I was now growing accustomed to calling not by his first name, Javier, that name I had so often spoken and whispered in his ear, but by his surname. That’s pretty childish too, but it helps to distance us from those we have loved.