The Infatuations

It was then that the process of attenuation began in earnest, after that first act of washing my hands, after thinking for the first time – or not even thinking it, perhaps it has less to do with one’s mind than one’s spirit, or with one’s mere breath: ‘Why should I care, what’s it got to do with me anyway?’ That thought is always within the grasp of anyone regarding any situation, however close to home or serious it might be, and if someone can’t shake a situation off, it’s because they don’t want to, because they feed on it and find it gives meaning to their lives; it’s the same with those who happily carry the tenacious burden of the dead, who are always ready to continue to loiter at the first indication that someone wants to hold on to them, because they are all would-be Chaberts, despite the rebuffs and the denials and the grimaces with which they are received if they actually dare to return.

The process is a slow one, of course, and it’s hard work and you have to apply willpower and effort and not be tempted by memory, which returns now and then and often disguises itself as a refuge, when you walk past a particular street or catch a whiff of cologne or hear a tune, or notice that they’re showing a film on TV that you once watched together. I never watched any films with Díaz-Varela.

As for literature, of which we did have some shared experiences, I immediately warded off that danger by facing it full on: although our publishing house usually only publishes contemporary writers – to the frequent misfortune of readers and myself – I persuaded Eugeni to bring out an edition of Colonel Chabert, in a new and very good translation (the most recent one was, indeed, abominable), and we added three more stories by Balzac to bulk it out, because the story itself is quite short, what the French call a nouvelle. It was in the bookshops within a matter of months, and I thus shuffled off its shadow by producing a fine edition of it in my own language. I thought of it while I had to, while we were editing and preparing it for publication, and then I could forget about it. Or I at least ensured that it was never going to catch me out or take me by surprise.

I was on the point of leaving the publishing house after that final manoeuvre, so as not to have to continue going to the same café, so as not even to have to continue seeing it from my office, although the trees did partially block my view; so that nothing would remind me of anything. I was also tired of having to cope with living writers – what a delight to deal with dead authors, like Balzac, who don’t pester you or try to manipulate their future – with Cortezo the Bore’s clingy phone calls, with the demands of mean, repellent Garay Fontina, with the pretentious cybernetic nonsense of the fake young men, each of whom managed to be, at one and the same time, more ignorant, stupid and pedantic than the last. However, the other offers I received, from our competitors, did not convince me, despite a promised increase in salary: I would still have to continue dealing with writers of overweening ambition and who breathed the same air as me. Eugeni, moreover, having grown a little lazy and absent-minded, urged me to take more of the decisions, and I did: I trusted that the day would come when I could get rid of the odd fatuous author without even asking Eugeni’s permission, my sights being set particularly on that ever-imminent scourge of King Carl Gustaf, who was still tirelessly polishing his speech in garbled Swedish (those who had heard him practising assured me that his accent was execrable). Above all, though, I realized that I mustn’t flee that landscape, but master it as best I could, just as Luisa must have done with her house, forcing herself to continue living in it rather than suddenly moving out; stripping it of its saddest and most sentimental connotations and conferring on it a new day-to-day routine, in short, remaking it. I knew that the publishing house was, for me, a place tinged with sentiment, which is impossible to conceal or avoid, even if the sentiment is only half-imagined. You simply have to get on good terms with it and appease it.

Almost two years passed. I met another man whom I found sufficiently interesting and amusing, Jacobo (who is not, thank heavens, a writer), I got engaged to him at his insistence, we made tentative plans to get married, plans that I kept postponing without actually cancelling them, well, I’ve never been that keen on matrimony, but in the end, what convinced me was my age – late-thirty-something – more, at least, than a desire to wake up in company every day, I don’t really see the advantage of that, although it’s probably not that bad, I suppose, if you love the person you go to bed with and sleep next to, as is true in my case – needless to say. There are things about Díaz-Varela I still miss, but that’s another matter. It doesn’t make me feel guilty, for nothing is incompatible in the land of memory.

I was having supper with a group of people in the Chinese restaurant at the Hotel Palace when I saw them, about three or four tables away, shall we say. I had a good view of them both, in profile, as if I were in the stalls and they were on stage, except that we were on the same level. The fact is, I didn’t take my eyes off them – they were like a magnet – apart from when one of the other guests spoke to me, which wasn’t very often: we had come from a book launch, and most of the guests were the proud author’s friends, whom I didn’t know from Adam; they chatted among themselves and hardly bothered me at all, I was there as the publisher’s representative – and to pay the bill, of course; most of the guests looked strangely like flamenco artistes, and my main fear was that they might whip out their guitars from some strange hiding place and start singing loudly, between courses. Quite apart from the sheer embarrassment that would cause me, it would have been sure to make Luisa and Díaz-Varela look over at our table, for they were otherwise too immersed in each other’s company to notice my presence in the midst of that assembly of dark, curly heads. It did occur to me, though, that she might not even remember me. There came a moment when the novelist’s girlfriend noticed my gaze permanently trained on that one point. She turned round rather ostentatiously and sat looking at them, at Javier and Luisa. I was afraid that her uninhibited stare might alert them to my presence, and so I felt obliged to explain.

‘I’m sorry, they’re a couple I know, but whom I haven’t seen in ages. And, at the time, they weren’t a couple. Don’t think me rude, please. I’m just very curious to see them like that, if you know what I mean.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she replied warmly, after shooting them another impertinent glance. She had understood the situation at once; I must be very transparent at times. ‘I’m not surprised. He’s gorgeous, isn’t he? Anyway, don’t you worry, it’s your business. Nothing to do with me.’

Yes, they really were a couple, that’s something that usually even complete strangers can tell, and I knew him very well, but not her, whom I knew very little, or only from talking to her at length on one occasion – or, rather, from her talking to me, she could have been speaking to anyone that day, I was just a useful pair of ears. But I had observed her in a similar situation over several years, that is, with her then partner, who had been dead for long enough now for Luisa not to describe herself first and foremost, as if it were a definitive state, with the words: ‘I’ve been widowed’ or I’m a widow’, because she wouldn’t be that at all, and that fact or piece of information, while remaining the same as before, would have changed. She would say instead: ‘I lost my first husband, and he’s moving further away from me all the time. It’s such a long time since I saw him, whereas this other man is here by my side and is always by my side. I call him “husband” too, which is odd. But he has taken the other husband’s place in my bed and by virtue of that juxtaposition is gradually blurring and erasing him. A little more each day, a little more each night.’ And I had seen them together before, again only once, but enough to sense his love and solicitude for her and her obliviousness and blindness to him. Now it was all changed. They were both talking vivaciously, hanging on each other’s every word, occasionally gazing into each other’s eyes without speaking, or holding hands across the table. He was wearing a wedding ring, they must have got married in a civil ceremony at some point, perhaps very recently, perhaps the day before yesterday or even yesterday. She looked much better, and his looks had certainly not deteriorated, there was Díaz-Varela with those same lips, whose movements I followed at a distance – some habits we never lose or else recover immediately, as if they were automatic. Unwittingly, I made a gesture with my hand, as if to touch those lips from afar. The novelist’s girlfriend, the only one of the guests who occasionally glanced in my direction, noticed this and asked kindly:

‘Sorry, did you want something?’ She perhaps thought I had been signalling to her.

‘No, no, don’t worry.’ And I waved my hand, adding: ‘Just personal stuff.’

I must have looked if not upset, then troubled. Fortunately, the other guests were offering endless toasts and talking very loudly. Worryingly, one of them was beginning to sing to himself (I heard the words ‘Ay de mi niña, mi niña, Virgen del Puerto’), but I’ve no idea why they should all resemble performers in a flamenco show, because the novelist wasn’t like that at all, he was wearing an argyle sweater, the kind of glasses a rapist or maniac might wear, and had the look of a neurotic, who, for some incomprehensible reason, had a very pleasant, attractive girlfriend and sold a lot of books – a pretentious con trick, each and every one of them – which is why we had taken him to that rather expensive restaurant. I offered up a prayer – a short prayer to the Virgen del Puerto, even though I had no idea who she was – that the song would go no further. I didn’t want to be disturbed. I couldn’t take my eyes off that stage-like table, and suddenly a sentence from those now old newspapers started going round and round in my head, the same newspapers that had carried the news for just two wretched days, then fallen silent about it for ever: ‘He hovered on the brink of life and death for five hours, during which time he never recovered consciousness; the victim finally succumbed late that evening, with the doctors unable to do anything more to save him.’

‘Five hours in an operating theatre,’ I thought. ‘It’s just not possible that, after five whole hours, the doctors wouldn’t have noticed that “generalized metastasis throughout the body”, which is what Javier told me they had told Desvern.’ And then it seemed to me that I saw clearly – or at least more clearly – that the illness had never existed, unless the fact of those five hours was false or erroneous; after all, the newspaper reports didn’t even agree about which hospital the dying man had been taken to. Nothing was conclusive, of course, and Ruibérriz’s version hadn’t actually contradicted Díaz-Varela’s. That didn’t mean a great deal, though, because it all depended on how much of the truth Díaz-Varela had revealed to Ruibérriz when he first gave him that cold-blooded commission. I suppose it was irritation that led me to that momentary belief – well, it lasted longer than a moment, that is, for at least some of the time I was in the Chinese restaurant – the belief that I could see things more clearly (later, it all seemed far more obscure, when I went home, and the couple were no longer there and Jacobo was waiting for me). It irritated me, I think, to see that Javier had got what he wanted, to discover that things had worked out exactly as he had foreseen. I did feel some resentment towards him, even though I had never had any real hopes and certainly couldn’t accuse him of having given me false hopes. It wasn’t moral indignation that I felt, nor a desire for justice, but something much more basic and perhaps more mean-spirited. I really didn’t care about justice or injustice. I was doubtless suffering from retrospective jealousy or spite, from which, I imagine, none of us is immune. ‘Look at them,’ I thought, ‘there they are, at the end of all that patient waiting, of all that time: she is more or less recovered and happy, he is exultant, there they are married, and with not a thought for Deverne or for me, I barely left so much as a trace. It’s in my power to ruin that marriage right now, and to ruin the life he has built as a usurper, yes, that’s the word, “usurper”. I would simply have to get up, go over to their table and say: “Well, well, so you finally got what you wanted, you removed the obstacle without her ever suspecting a thing.” I wouldn’t have to say anything more or give any further explanations or tell the whole story, I would turn on my heel and leave. Those hints would be all it would take to sow the seeds of uncertainty in Luisa’s mind and for her to demand to know what it meant. Yes, it’s so easy to introduce doubt into someone’s mind.’

And no sooner had I thought this – although I spent many minutes thinking it, repeating it over and over as if it were a tune I couldn’t get out of my head, and silently getting myself all fired up, with my eyes fixed on them, I don’t know how they didn’t notice, how they didn’t feel burned or pierced by them, my eyes were like hot coals or like needles – no sooner had I thought this than I stood up, again unwittingly and unthinkingly, just as I had when I reached out my hand to touch his lips, and still clutching my napkin, I said to the much-fêted-conman’s girlfriend, who was the only one still aware of my existence and who might, therefore, miss me if I was gone for long:

‘Excuse me a moment, I’ll be right back.’





I really had no idea what my intentions were or else those intentions changed several times at great speed while I took the steps – one, two, three – that separated my table from theirs. I know that into my head came this fleeting idea, which would take much longer to put into words, while I walked without realizing – four, five – that I was still clutching my soiled and crumpled napkin: ‘She hardly knows me and, after all this time, there’s no reason why she should recognize me until I introduce myself and tell her my name; as far as she’s concerned, I’ll be a complete stranger coming over to their table. He, on the other hand, knows me well and will recognize me instantly, yet, in theory, in Luisa’s eyes, he has even less reason to remember me. In theory, he and I have only ever seen each other on one occasion, when we happened to meet at her house, one evening, over two years ago, and when we barely exchanged a word. He’ll have to pretend he doesn’t know who I am, if he didn’t, it would look very strange. And so it’s also in my power to unmask him in that respect too, we women can usually tell at once if the woman who comes over to say hello to the man we’re with has had a relationship with him in the past. Unless the two ex-lovers can pretend to perfection and not give themselves away. And unless we’re mistaken, for it’s also true that some of us tend to attribute to our partners a whole host of past lovers, often quite wrongly.’

As I advanced – six, seven, eight, skirting round the odd table and avoiding the pell-mell Chinese waiters, it wasn’t a straightforward trajectory – I could see them better, and they looked very calm and happy, immersed in their conversation, pretty much oblivious to anyone else but them. At one point, I felt for Luisa something resembling happiness or perhaps acceptance or was it relief? The last time I had seen her, all those months ago, I had felt real pity for her. She had spoken to me about the hatred she could not feel for the gorrilla: ‘No, hating him serves no purpose, it doesn’t console or give me strength,’ she had said. And about the hatred she couldn’t have felt either for some newly arrived, abstract hit man, had he been the one hired to kill Deverne. ‘But I could hate the instigators,’ she had added, and then read me part of the definition of ‘envidia’ or ‘envy’ in Covarrubias, dated 1611, regretting that she couldn’t even blame the death of her husband on that: ‘Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.’ And just after that, she had said: ‘I miss him all the time, you see. I miss him when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I dream and throughout the whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.’ And then I thought, as I approached – nine, ten: ‘She won’t feel like that now, she will have freed herself from his corpse, from her dead husband, his ghost, who has been kind enough not to come back. She has someone there before her now, and they can use each other to hide their own fate, as lovers do, according to a line I vaguely remember, a line of poetry I read in my adolescence. Her bed will no longer be sad or woeful, a living body will enter it each night, a body whose weight I know well and once greatly enjoyed.’

I saw them turn to look at me as I approached and they sensed my shape or my shadow – eleven, twelve and thirteen – he with horror, as if asking himself: ‘What’s she doing here? Where did she spring from? And why is she coming over? To unmask me?’ But I didn’t see that expression on her face, she was already looking at me with great sympathy, with an open smile, wide and warm, as if she had recognized me instantly. And she had, for she exclaimed:

‘The Prudent Young Woman!’ She had doubtless forgotten my name.

She stood up at once to kiss me on both cheeks and almost embrace me, and her friendliness stopped in its tracks any intention I might have had of saying anything to Díaz-Varela that might turn Luisa against him or cause her to view him with mistrust or stupefaction or disgust or, as she had said, to hate the instigator; nothing that would ruin his life and therefore ruin hers as well – again – and thus ruin their marriage, as it had occurred to me to do only shortly before. ‘Who am I to disturb the universe,’ I thought. ‘Even though others might do it, like this man here, pretending not to know me even though I loved him well and have never done him any harm. The fact that others disrupt and buffet and generally maltreat the universe doesn’t mean that I should follow their example, not even on the pretext that, unlike them, I would be righting a wrong and punishing a possibly guilty man and imposing justice.’ As I said, I cared nothing for justice or injustice. What business were they of mine, for if Díaz-Varela had been right about one thing, as had the lawyer Derville in his fictional world and in his time that does not pass and stays quite still, it was this: ‘Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded.’ And perhaps also when he said: ‘The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country, each on his own account and at his own risk, and not, in principle, subject to mutual contagion, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, each with his own thoughts and particular aims, should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives or lovers whom they once loved the most. Crimes committed in ordinary life are more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest, however incessantly they occur: how could it be any other way, given that society lives alongside them and has been impregnated with their very nature since time immemorial.’ Why should I intervene, or perhaps I should say contravene? If I did, what difference would that make to the order of the universe? Why should I denounce a single crime, which I’m not even sure was a crime, nothing was quite certain, the truth is always a tangled mess. And if it was a premeditated, cold-blooded murder, whose sole aim was to occupy a place already occupied by another, at least the person who caused that death took it upon himself to console the widow, namely the surviving victim, the widow of Miguel Desvern, businessman, whom she will no longer miss quite so much: not when she wakes up or goes to bed or when she dreams or throughout the whole of the intervening day. Fortunately or unfortunately, the dead are as fixed as paintings, they don’t move, they don’t add anything, they don’t speak and never respond. And they are wrong to come back, those who can. Deverne could not, and that was just as well.

My visit to their table was brief, we exchanged a few words, Luisa invited me to join them for a moment, I declined, saying that my guests needed me, which was a pure lie, of course, except when it came to paying the bill. She introduced me to her new husband, forgetting that, in theory, he and I had met at her house, because, then, he still only existed in the shadows. Neither of us refreshed her memory, what did it matter, what would be the point? Díaz-Varela had stood up almost at the same time as her, we kissed each other on both cheeks as is the custom in Spain when a man and a woman are first introduced. He had lost the look of horror when he saw that I was being discreet and was prepared to play my part in the pantomime. And then he, too, regarded me with sympathy, in silence, with his almond eyes, so hazy and enveloping and indecipherable. They regarded me with sympathy, but they did not miss me in the least. I won’t deny that I was tempted to linger, despite all, so as not to lose sight of him just yet, but to palely loiter. It wasn’t right, though, the longer I spent in their company, the more likely it was that Luisa would detect some trace, some remnant, some still-warm ember in my gaze: my eyes were drawn as always to his lips, it was inevitable and, of course, involuntary, and I didn’t want to harm either him or Luisa.

‘We must get together some time, give me a call, I’m still living at the same address,’ she said with genuine warmth and not a hint of suspicion. It’s one of those things people come out with when they say goodbye and which they forget once the goodbyes have been said. I would not reappear in her memory, I was just a prudent young woman whom she knew largely by sight and who belonged now to another life. I wasn’t even that young any more.

I preferred not to go over to his side of the table again. So after exchanging the obligatory farewell kisses with her, I took two steps towards my own table, still looking back at her as I gave her my answer (‘Yes, I’ll call you. I’m so pleased that everything’s worked out for you’), so as to gain a little distance, and then I waved goodbye. In Luisa’s eyes, I was saying goodbye to both of them, but I was really saying goodbye to Javier, properly this time, definitively and for real, because now he had his wife beside him. And as I walked back to the idiotic world of publishing I had left only a few minutes before – minutes that seemed suddenly very long – I thought, in order to justify myself: ‘No, I don’t want to be an accursèd fleur-de-lys on his shoulder, which betrays him and points the finger and prevents even the most ancient of crimes from disappearing; let the past be purely dumb matter and let things simply fade and hide themselves away, let them keep silence and neither recount nor bring with them new misfortunes. Nor do I want to be like the wretched books among which I spend my life, whose time stands still and waits inside, trapped and watching, begging to be opened so that it can flow freely again and retell its old and oft-repeated story. I don’t want to be like those written voices that so often sound like muffled sighs, groans uttered in a world of corpses in the middle of which we all lie, if we drop our guard for a moment. It doesn’t matter that some, if not most, civilian acts go unrecorded, ignored, as is the norm. Men, however, tend to strive to achieve quite the opposite effect, although they often fail: to leave branded on the skin a fleur-de-lys that perpetuates and accuses and condemns, and possibly unleashes more crimes. That would probably have been my intention with anyone else, or with him too, had I not fallen stupidly and silently in love, and if I did not still love him a little, I suppose, despite all, and that “all” is no small thing. It will pass, it already is passing, that’s why I don’t mind acknowledging it. In my defence, I have just seen him when I did not expect to, looking well and happy.’ And I continued to think as I turned my back on him, and my steps and my shape and my shadow were moving away from him for ever: ‘Yes, there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. No one is going to judge me, there are no witnesses to my thoughts. It’s true that when we get caught in the spider’s web – between the first chance event and the second – we fantasize endlessly and are, at the same time, willing to make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him – as if he were the time itself that exists between those two chance events – smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.’