The Infatuations

She fell silent and looked over at the adjoining room where the children were. The television was on in the background, so it seemed that everything was fine. From what I’d seen of them, they were well-brought-up kids, far more so than children usually are nowadays. Curiously, I didn’t find it surprising or embarrassing that Luisa should speak to me so openly, as if I were a friend. Perhaps she couldn’t talk about anything else, and in the intervening months since Deverne’s death, she had exhausted all those closest to her with her shock and her anxieties, or she felt awkward about going on and on at them, always harping on about the same thing, and was taking advantage of the novelty of my presence there to vent her feelings. Perhaps it didn’t matter who I was, it was enough that I was there, an as yet unused interlocutor, with whom she could start afresh. That’s another of the problems when one suffers a misfortune: the effects on the victim far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen and accompany her, unconditional support never lasts very long once it has become tinged with monotony. And so, sooner or later, the grieving person is left alone when she has still not finished grieving or when she’s no longer allowed to talk about what remains her only world, because other people find that world of grief unbearable, repellent. She understands that for them sadness has a social expiry date, that no one is capable of contemplating another’s sorrow, that such a spectacle is tolerable only for a brief period, for as long as the shock and pain last and there is still some role for those who are there watching, who then feel necessary, salvatory, useful. But on discovering that nothing changes and that the affected person neither progresses nor emerges from her grief, they feel humiliated and superfluous, they find it almost offensive and stand aside: ‘Aren’t I enough for you? Why can’t you climb out of that pit with me by your side? Why are you still grieving when time has passed and I’ve been here all the while to console and distract you? If you can’t climb out, then sink or disappear.’ And the grieving person does just that, she retreats, removes herself, hides. Perhaps Luisa clung to me that afternoon because with me she could be what she still was, with no need for subterfuge: the inconsolable widow, to use the usual phrase. Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken.

I looked across at the children’s room, indicating it with a lift of my head.

‘They must be a great help to you in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘I imagine having to look after them must give you a reason to get up every morning, to be strong and put on a brave face. Knowing that they depend on you entirely, even more than before. They’re doubtless a burden, but a lifeline too, a reason to start each day. Or perhaps not,’ I added, when I saw her face grow still darker and her larger eye contract, so that it was the same size as the smaller one.

‘No, it’s quite the opposite,’ she replied, taking a deep breath, as if she had to muster all her serenity in order to say what she then went on to say: ‘I would give anything for them not to be here now, not to have them. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not that I suddenly regret having had them, their existence is vital to me and they’re what I love most, more even than Miguel probably, or, rather, I realize that their loss would have been far worse, the loss of either of them, it would have killed me. But I just can’t cope with them at the moment, they weigh too much on me. I wish I could put them in parentheses or into hibernation, I don’t know, send them to sleep and not wake them up until further notice. I’d like them to leave me in peace and not ask or demand anything of me, not keep tugging at me and hanging on me, poor loves. I need to be alone, without responsibilities, and not to have to make a superhuman effort of which I feel incapable, not to have to worry if they’ve eaten or are well wrapped up or if they’ve got a cold or a fever. I’d like to stay in bed all day or do what I like without having to concern myself about anything except me, and just get better gradually, with no interruptions and no obligations. If, that is, I ever do get better, I hope I do, although I don’t see how. It’s just that I feel so debilitated that the last thing I need is to have by my side two even weaker people, who can’t cope on their own and who have even less of an understanding of what happened than I do. More than that, I feel so sad for them, so unalterably, constantly sad for them, and that feeling goes beyond the present circumstances. The circumstances simply accentuate that feeling, but it’s always been there.’

‘What do you mean, “constantly”? What do you mean, “beyond the present circumstances”? What do you mean by “always”?’

‘Do you not have any children?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘Children bring a lot of joy and all the other things people say they bring, but you can’t help but feel permanently sad for them too, and I don’t think that changes even when they’re older, although rather fewer people mention that. You see your children’s bewilderment when they’re confronted by certain situations, and that makes you sad. You see their willingness to help, when they want to contribute and do their bit and they can’t, and that makes you sad too. Their seriousness makes you sad, as do their silly jokes and their transparent lies, their expectations and their minor disappointments, their innocence, their incomprehension, their very logical questions, and even their occasional bad idea. It makes you sad to think how much they have to learn, and about the long, long road that lies ahead and which no one can travel for them, even though we’ve spent centuries doing it and can’t understand why everyone who’s born has to start all over from the beginning. What sense does it make that each person should have to experience more or less the same griefs and make more or less the same discoveries, and so on for eternity? And of course something completely out of the ordinary has happened to them, something that needn’t have happened, a great, unforeseeable misfortune. It isn’t normal in our society for one’s father to be killed, and the sadness they feel is an added sadness for me. I’m not the only one who has suffered a loss, if only I was. It’s up to me to explain it to them, and I haven’t got an explanation. It’s quite beyond my capabilities. I can’t tell them that the man hated their father or that he was his enemy, and if I tell them that he was mad, mad enough to kill their father, they can’t really understand that either, well, Carolina can sort of grasp it, but not Nicolás.’

‘So what have you told them? How are they coping?’

‘Well, I told them a slightly modified version of the truth. I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything to Nicolás, with him being so young, but people said it would be worse if he heard it from his school friends. Because it came out in the press, everyone who knows us found out straight away, and you can imagine what four-year-olds might make of it, their versions could be even more gruesome and outrageous than reality. So I told them that the man was very angry because someone had taken his daughters away, and that he got muddled up and attacked their papa instead of the person who had stolen his daughters. Then, of course, they asked me who had stolen the daughters and I said I didn’t know, and that the man obviously didn’t know either, which was why he was so angry and in need of someone he could take it out on. That he couldn’t really tell people apart and was suspicious of everyone, which was why he hit Pablo one day, believing that he was the one to blame. It’s odd, they grasped that at once, that he should get angry because someone had stolen his daughters, and even now they sometimes ask me if there’s any news of them or if they’ve been found, as if it were an ongoing story, I suppose they think the daughters were children like them. I said it was simply a case of bad luck. That it was like an accident, like when a car hits a pedestrian or a builder falls off the building he’s working on. That their father wasn’t to blame and that he hadn’t harmed anyone. Nicolás asked me if he was ever coming back. And I said no, that he’d gone very far away, like when he used to go on trips only much further, so far away that he couldn’t return, but from where he was he could still see them and still care for them. It also occurred to me to tell them, so that it wasn’t quite so sudden and definitive, that I could speak to him now and then, and that if they wanted anything from him, anything important, they should tell me and I would pass it on. I don’t think Carolina believed that bit, because she never gives me any message for him, but Nicolás does and sometimes asks me to tell his father something, some silly little thing that’s happened at school but which looms very large for him, and the following day, he asks me if I told his father and what he said, or if he was pleased to know that he’d started playing football. And I tell him that I haven’t had a chance to speak to him just yet, that he’ll have to wait, that it’s not always easy to make contact, then I let a few days pass, and if he remembers and asks again, then I invent an answer. I’ll let more and more time pass until he stops asking and forgets about it, and he will in the end. He’ll mostly think he’s remembering what his sister and I tell him. Carolina is more of a worry. She hardly mentions it at all, she’s more serious and more silent than she used to be, and when, for example, I tell Nicolás that their father laughed when I told him what he’d said or that he told me to tell Nicolás to kick the ball and not the other boys, she looks at me with the same sadness I feel for them, as if my lies saddened her, and so there are moments when we feel sad for each other, I feel sad for them and they for me, well, Carolina does anyway. They see that I’m sad, they see me in a state they’ve never seen me in before, even though, believe me, I try very hard not to cry and to make sure when I’m with them that they don’t notice how sad I am. But I’m sure they do. I’ve only cried once in their presence.’ I remembered the impression the little girl had made on me when I saw the three of them that morning at the café: how attentive she was to her mother, almost watching over her, insofar as that was possible; and the way she had briefly stroked her mother’s cheek when she said goodbye. ‘And they’re afraid for me,’ added Luisa, with a sigh, pouring herself another glass. She hadn’t drunk anything for a while, she had slowed down, perhaps she was one of those people who know when to stop or who are even moderate in their excesses, who skirt round dangers and never fall into them, even when they feel they have nothing to lose and are beyond caring. She was clearly in desperate straits, but I couldn’t imagine her in a state of wild abandon: getting hopelessly drunk or hooked on drugs or neglecting her children or missing work or (later on) going with one man after another in order to forget the person who really mattered to her; it was as if she possessed a last resort of common sense, or a sense of duty or serenity or self-preservation or pragmatism, I wasn’t quite sure which. And then I saw it very clearly: ‘She’ll get over this,’ I thought, ‘she’ll recover sooner than she thinks, everything she’s been through during these months will seem quite unreal, and she’ll get married again, perhaps to someone as perfect as Desvern, or someone with whom she will, at least, make a similarly perfect or almost perfect couple.’ – ‘They’ve discovered that people die, that even the people who seemed most indestructible, their parents, die. It’s not just a bad dream, because Carolina has reached the age of having nightmares, you see: she dreamed once that I was dying or that her father was dying, and that was before all this happened. She called to us from her bedroom in the middle of the night, she was really frightened, and we had to convince her that we wouldn’t die, that such a thing was impossible. She’s seen now that we were wrong or were perhaps lying to her; that she was right to be afraid, that what she saw in her dreams has come to pass. She hasn’t ever reproached me with this directly, but the day after Miguel was buried and there was clearly no going back and the only thing to do was to continue living without him, she said to me twice, as if what she was saying were unimpeachable: “You see? You see?” And I asked her uncomprehendingly: “What is it I should see, sweetheart?” I was still too dazed to understand. Then she retreated and has continued to do so ever since: “Oh, nothing,” she said, “just that Papa won’t be at home with us any more, don’t you see?” All my strength went from me, and I sat down on the edge of the bed, we were in my bedroom. “Of course I see that, my love,” I said and burst into tears. She hadn’t seen me cry before and she felt sorry for me, and she still does now. She came over to me and started drying my tears with her dress. As for Nicolás, he’s discovered death too soon, without even being able to dream about it or fear it, when he still had no awareness of death, I’m not sure he even knows quite what it is, although he’s starting to realize that it means people cease to exist, that you won’t ever see them again. And given that their father has died and disappeared from one day to the next, or, worse, that their father has been killed and ceased to exist suddenly and without warning, that he proved fragile enough to be felled by some wretch’s first blow, they’re bound to think that the same thing could happen to me some day, because they see me as being the weaker of the two. Yes, they’re afraid for me, afraid that something bad might happen to me and that I’ll leave them all alone, they look at me apprehensively, as if I were more vulnerable and at risk than they are. It’s an instinctive reaction in Nicolás, but in Carolina it’s more conscious. I notice that she’s always looking around when we’re out in the street and immediately goes on the alert whenever she spots a stranger or, rather, a strange man. She’s happier when I’m accompanied by some of my female friends. She’s all right now, because I’m at home and with you, she’s stopped finding pretexts to keep coming in here and checking on me or bothering me. She’s only just met you, but she trusts you, you’re a woman, and she doesn’t see you as a danger. On the contrary, she sees you as a shield, a defence. That worries me a little, that she should become afraid of men, be on her guard and feel nervous in their company, the ones she doesn’t know, of course. I hope it will pass, she can’t go through life in fear of half the human race.’

‘Do they know how exactly their father died?’ I hesitated, unsure whether to bring it up again. ‘About the knife, I mean.’

‘No, I’ve never gone into detail, I just told them that he’d been attacked by that man, but never explained how. But Carolina must know, I’m sure she’s read about it in some newspaper and that her friends will have talked about it, well, they’re bound to be shocked. She must have found the idea so horrifying that she’s never asked me or referred to it. It’s as if we had a tacit agreement not to discuss it, not to think about it, to erase that element from Miguel’s death (the key element, the one that caused his death), so that it can remain an isolated, neutral fact. Besides, that’s what everyone does with their dead. We try to forget the how and keep only the image of the person when alive or, possibly, when dead, but we avoid thinking about the frontier, the crossing, the actual process of dying, the cause. They’re alive one moment and dead the next, and in between there is nothing, as if they passed without transition or reason from one state to the other. But I can’t not think about it, not yet, and that’s what stops me living or prevents me from beginning to recover, always assuming one can recover from something like this.’ – ‘You will, you will,’ I thought again, ‘and much sooner than you think. And that’s what I wish for you, poor Luisa, with all my heart.’ – ‘I can do it with Carolina, because that’s what best for her and that’s all I want. When I’m alone, though, I find it impossible, especially around this time of evening, when it’s neither day nor night. I think of that knife going in, what Miguel must have felt, and whether he had time to think anything, if he realized that he was dying. Then I despair and I feel positively ill. And that’s not just a manner of speaking: I really do feel ill. My whole body hurts.’





The doorbell rang and even though I had no idea who it was, I knew that our conversation and my visit were over. Luisa had asked nothing about me, she hadn’t even gone back to the questions she had asked at the café that morning, what I did and what nickname I had given to her and Deverne when I used to watch them during our shared breakfasts. She wasn’t yet ready to be curious about others, she was in no state to take an interest in anyone or to probe other people’s lives, her own life was all-consuming and took all her energy and concentration, and doubtless all her imagination too. I was merely an ear into which she could pour her unhappiness and her persistent thoughts, a virgin but interchangeable ear, or perhaps not entirely interchangeable: as with her little girl, I obviously inspired both her confidence and her familiarity, and she would not perhaps have confided in just anyone in quite the same way. After all, I had often seen her husband and could, therefore, put a name to her loss, I knew the absence that was the cause of her desolation, the figure that had disappeared from her field of vision, day after day after day and so on monotonously and irremediably until the end. In a way, I belonged to the ‘before’ and was capable of missing the departed in my own way, even though they had always ignored me, and Desvern would now be obliged to do so for all eternity, I had arrived too late for him and would never be more than the Prudent Young Woman whom he had barely noticed and then only glancingly. ‘And yet,’ I thought with some surprise, ‘I’m only here because of his death. If he hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be in his house, because, after all, this was his house, he lived here, and this was his living room and I am perhaps sitting where he used to sit; he left here on the last morning I saw him alive, which was also the last morning his wife saw him alive.’ It was clear that she liked me and could tell that I was on her side, that I felt sympathetic to and saddened by her loss; she might think vaguely that, in other circumstances, we could have been friends. But now she was inside a bubble, talkative but basically isolated and indifferent to everything outside her, and that bubble would take a long time to burst. Only then would she be able to see me properly, only then would I cease to be the Prudent Young Woman from the café. If I had asked her what my name was, she would probably not have remembered, or perhaps only my first name, but not my surname. I didn’t even know if we would meet again, if there would be another occasion: when I left there, I would be lost in a mist.

She didn’t wait for one of the servants to answer, because there was at least one maid, who had answered when I arrived. She got up and went over to the door and picked up the entryphone. I heard her say ‘Hello’ and then ‘Hi. I’ll open the door for you.’ It was obviously someone she knew well, someone she was expecting or who dropped by every day at about that time, because there wasn’t a hint of surprise or excitement in her voice, he could even have been the boy from the grocer’s delivering some shopping. She waited with the door open for the person to cross the small stretch of garden that separated the street door from the house itself; she lived in a detached house, there are various such developments in central parts of Madrid, not just in El Viso, but behind Paseo de la Castellana and in Fuente del Berro and other places, miraculously hidden away from the appalling traffic and the perpetual generalized chaos. I realized then that she hadn’t actually talked to me about Deverne either. She hadn’t spoken about him at all or described his character or his manner, she hadn’t said how much she missed a particular trait of his or something they used to do together, or how dreadful it was that he was no longer alive, adding, for example, particularly someone who had enjoyed life so much, which had been my impression of him. I realized that I knew no more about that man than when I had arrived. It was as if his anomalous death had darkened or erased everything else, which happens sometimes: the way a person’s life ends can be so unexpected or so painful, so striking or so premature or so tragic – occasionally even picturesque or ridiculous or sinister – that it becomes impossible to speak of that person without him being instantly swallowed up or contaminated by that ending, without the dramatic manner of his death blackening the whole of his previous existence and, even more unfairly, stealing that existence from him. The spectacular death so dominates the person who died that it becomes very difficult to recall him without that ultimate annihilating fact immediately hovering over one’s recollection, or even to remember how he was during the long years when no one suspected that the heavy curtain would fall on him so abruptly. Everything is seen in the light of that denouement, or rather the light of that denouement is so blindingly bright that it prevents us recovering what went before and being able to smile at the reminiscence or fantasy; you could say that those who die such a death die more deeply, more completely, or perhaps they die twice over, in reality and in the memory of others, because their memory is forever lost in the glare of that stupid culminating event, is soured and distorted and also perhaps poisoned.

It might also be that Luisa was still in the phase of extreme egotism, that is, capable of seeing only her own misfortune and not so much Desvern’s, despite the concern she expressed for his final moments, which he must have known were his last. The world belongs so much to the living and so little to the dead – although it may well be that they all remain on earth and are, doubtless, far more numerous – that the former tend to think that the death of a loved one is something that has happened more to them than to the deceased, who is, after all, the person who has died. He is the one who has had to say goodbye, almost always against his will, he is the one who has lost everything that was to come (the person, for example, in the case of Deverne, who will not see his children grow up or change), who has had to renounce his desire to know and his curiosity, who left plans unfulfilled and words unspoken, thinking that there would always be time later on, he is the one who will not be there; if he was an artist, he is the one who will be unable to finish a book or a film or a painting or a composition, or if he was only the recipient of those, the one who won’t be able to finish reading the first or seeing the second or listening to the fourth. You only have to glance around the room of the person who has vanished to comprehend how much was interrupted and left hanging, how much becomes, in that instant, unusable and useless; yes, the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away, or the special pillow or mattress on which head and body will no longer lie; the glass of water from which he will never take another sip, and the forbidden pack of cigarettes of which only three are left, and the sweets someone bought for him and which no one will dare to finish, as if doing so were an act of theft or profanation; the glasses that will be of no use to anyone and the expectant clothes that will stay hanging in his wardrobe for days or years, until someone gathers enough courage to remove them; the plants that the disappeared person lovingly cared for and watered, and which no one will perhaps want to take on, and the person’s soft fingerprints still there in the skin cream applied each night; someone will doubtless want to inherit and take away the telescope with which the departed used to amuse himself watching the storks nesting on a distant tower, but what they will use it for, who knows, and the window through which he gazed during a pause in his work will be left sightless, with no one to look through it; the diary in which he noted down his appointments and his daily tasks will not move on to the next page, and the last day will lack the final annotation that used to mean: ‘I’ve done what I had to do today.’ All those speaking objects have been left dumb and meaningless, as if a blanket had been thrown over them to silence and soothe them, making them think that night has come, or as if they, too, regretted the loss of their owner and had withdrawn instantaneously, strangely aware that they had become redundant, futile, and were thinking: ‘What will we do here now? We’ll be taken away. We have no master now. All that awaits us is exile or the rubbish bin. Our mission is over.’ Perhaps that is how Desvern’s things had felt months before. Luisa, though, was not a thing. Luisa, therefore, would not have thought that.





I had assumed she meant ‘you’ in the singular, but two people arrived. I heard the voice of the first person, the one she had said hello to, announcing the second person, who was obviously not expected: ‘Hi, I’ve brought Professor Rico with me so as not to leave him hanging around out there in the street. He’s kicking his heels until supper. The restaurant’s somewhere near here and there isn’t time for him to go back to his hotel first. You don’t mind, do you?’ And then he introduced them: ‘Professor Francisco Rico, Luisa Alday.’ ‘Of course I don’t mind, it’s an honour,’ I heard Luisa say. ‘I have another visitor with me, but come in, come in. Would you like a drink?’

I knew Professor Rico’s face well, he often appears on television and in the press, with his wide, expressive mouth, immaculate bald head, which he carries off with great aplomb, his rather large glasses, his casual elegance – slightly English, slightly Italian – his disdainful way of speaking and his half-indolent, half-scathing manner, which is perhaps a way of concealing the underlying melancholia evident in his eyes, as if, already feeling himself to be a man of the past, he hates having to deal with his contemporaries, most of whom are ignorant, trivial individuals, and, at the same time, feels a twinge of anticipatory regret that, one day, he will be obliged to cease dealing with them – dealing with them must also, in a way, be a relief – when his sense that he is a man of the past finally becomes a reality. The first thing he did was to refute what his companion had said:

‘Now look here, Díaz-Varela, I am never to be found “hanging around”, as you put it, even when I find myself out in the street without knowing what to do – quite a frequent occurrence as it happens. I often sally forth in Sant Cugat, where I live,’ and he directed this explanation, with an accompanying oblique glance, at Luisa and at me, to whom he had not yet been introduced, ‘and I suddenly realize that I have no idea why I came out. Or I go into Barcelona and, once there, I can’t for the life of me remember the reason for my trip. Then I stand still for a while – I don’t wander around or pace up and down – until I can recall the purpose of my visit. Anyway, even on those occasions, I could not be said to be “hanging around”, indeed, I am one of the few people capable of standing in the street motionless and bewildered without actually giving that impression. Rather, the impression I give is of being very focused, let’s say, on the verge of making some crucial discovery or of putting the finishing touches in my head to a complicated sonnet. If some acquaintance spots me in these circumstances, he would never venture to say so much as a “Hello”, even though I’m standing alone, stock-still in the middle of the pavement (I never lean against the wall, that would look as if I’d been stood up), for fear of interrupting some demanding line of reasoning or a moment of deep meditation. Nor am I ever at risk of being mugged, because my stern, absorbed appearance dissuades all malefactors. They can tell I am a man whose intellectual faculties are on full alert and fully functioning (or “working flat out”, to use a more colloquial expression), and they wouldn’t dare pick a fight with me. They can see that it would prove dangerous to them, that I would react with a rare violence and speed. I rest my case.’

Luisa couldn’t help but laugh, and nor, I believe, could I. The fact that she could switch so rapidly from being immersed in the anxious thoughts she had been telling me about to being amused by someone she had only just met made me think again that she had an enormous capacity for enjoyment and – how can I put it – for being ordinarily and momentarily happy. Some people are like that, not many, it’s true, people who grow impatient and bored with unhappiness and in whom it rarely lasts very long, even though, for a while, it could be said to have taken a terrible toll on them. From what I had seen of him, Desvern must have been the same, and it occurred to me that had Luisa been the one to die and he the one to survive, it was likely that he would have had a similar reaction to his wife’s now. (‘If he were still alive and a widower, I would not be here,’ I thought.) Yes, there are people who cannot bear misfortune. Not because they’re frivolous or empty-headed. They’re not, of course, immune to grief, and they doubtless experience grief as intensely as anyone else. But they’re designed to shake it off more quickly and without too much difficulty, as if they were simply incompatible with such states of mind. It’s in their nature to be light-hearted and cheerful and they see no particular prestige in suffering, unlike most of the rest of boring humanity, and our own nature always catches up with us, because almost nothing can break or distort it. Maybe Luisa was a simple mechanism: she cried when something made her cry and laughed when something made her laugh, and one emotion could follow seamlessly on from the other, she was simply responding to a stimulus. Not that simplicity is necessarily at odds with intelligence. I knew she was intelligent. Her lack of malice and her ready laughter did not diminish that fact in the slightest, for these are things that depend not on intelligence, but on character, which belongs in another category and another sphere.

Professor Rico was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket and an ivory-coloured shirt; his nonchalantly knotted tie was a brighter, more luminous green – melon green perhaps. He was extremely well coordinated without, however, seeming to have put much thought into that excellent combination of colours, apart from the clover-green handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, which was, perhaps, a green too far.

‘But I thought you were mugged once, Professor, here in Madrid,’ protested the man called Díaz-Varela. ‘It was years ago now, but I remember it well. In the Gran Vía, it was, after you’d drawn some money from a cashpoint, isn’t that right?’

The Professor did not care to be reminded of this. He took out a cigarette and lit it, as if doing so without first asking permission were as normal today as it was forty years ago. Luisa immediately handed him an ashtray, which he took with his other hand. Then, with both hands occupied, he spread his arms wide and said, like an orator exasperated by lies or stupidity:

‘That was completely different. Not the same thing at all.’

‘Why? You were in the street and the malefactor certainly didn’t show you much respect.’

The Professor made a condescending gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, which he then dropped. He looked at it where it lay on the floor with a mixture of displeasure and curiosity, as if it were a live cockroach that had nothing to do with him, and he was waiting for someone else to pick it up or stamp on it or kick it out of sight. When none of us gave any sign of bending down, he again produced his pack of cigarettes and took out another. It didn’t seem to bother him that the fallen cigarette might burn the wooden floor; he must have been one of those men who doesn’t really notice such things and leaves it to others to sort out any awkwardnesses or imperfections. This is not because they are thoughtless or because they consider themselves too high and mighty, it’s simply that their brains don’t register these practicalities or the world around them. Luisa’s children had looked up when they heard the doorbell and had now sneaked into the living room to observe the visitors. It was the boy who ran to pick up the cigarette, but his mother, pre-empting him, picked it up and stubbed it out in the ashtray she had been using before, for her equally unfinished cigarettes. Rico lit his second cigarette and gave his reply. Neither he nor Díaz-Varela seemed prepared to interrupt their discussion, and having them there was like being at the theatre, as if two actors had strolled on to the stage talking and ignoring the audience, as was their professional duty.

‘First: I had my back to the street, in the undignified position forced on one by all cashpoints, namely, with my face to the wall, and so my normally dissuasive gaze was invisible to the mugger. Second: I was busy tapping in my answers to all those tedious questions they ask you. Third: when asked in what language I wished to communicate with the machine, I had answered “Italian” (a habit born of my many visits to Italy, where I spend half my life) and I was distracted by all the crass spelling and grammatical errors appearing on the screen, the thing had obviously been programmed by some fraud with very dodgy Italian. Fourth: I had been on the go all day with various people and had had no option but to have a few drinks here and there in different places; I am not my usual alert self when tired and a little tipsy – well, who is? Fifth: I was late for an appointment which was already very late in the day and I was feeling disoriented and harassed and worried that the person waiting impatiently for me would give up and leave the place where we had agreed to meet (I’d already had a hard job persuading her to prolong her night in order that we might see each other alone), only that we might converse, you understand. Sixth: for all the above reasons, the first indication that I was about to be mugged came when I noticed, with my money in my hand, but not yet in my pocket, the point of a knife being pressed against my lumbar region, it even penetrated a little: when, at the end of the night, I got undressed in the hotel, there was a tiny spot of blood here. Just here.’ – And lifting up the tails of his jacket, he quickly touched some point immediately above his belt, so quickly that I doubt if any of those present could have said precisely where. – ‘You have to have experienced that slight pricking, there or in any other vital zone – aware that your attacker would only have to press a little harder for that point to enter the flesh unopposed – to know you have no alternative but to give them whatever it is they want, and all the fellow said was: “Give us your money.” Oddly enough, you feel an unbearable tingling in your groin, which then spreads throughout the body. But the origin of that sensation is not in the part of your body under threat, but here. Just here.’ – And he indicated the two sides of his groin with his two middle fingers. – ‘Not, you will notice, in the balls, but in the groin, which is quite a different matter, although people sometimes get confused and describe some frightening event as being “ball-shrivelling” or say “my heart leapt into my mouth or throat”’ – and he touched his throat with index finger and thumb – ‘but that’s only because the sensation spreads outwards and upwards from the groin. Anyway, as everyone has known since the weak wheel of the world first began to turn, given the nature of such an ambush or treacherous attack, there is no preventive action to be taken or, indeed, defence. I rest my case. Or would you like me to continue my enumeration? I can easily keep going at least as far as ten.’ – When Díaz-Varela did not respond, Rico assumed he had won the argument by sheer force of logic and, looking around him for the first time, he noticed me, the children and Luisa too, in a way, even though she had already been introduced to him. I think he really hadn’t properly taken us in before, otherwise he would, I think, have refrained from using the word ‘balls’, mainly because of the children. – ‘Now who have we here?’ he asked without the slightest hint of embarrassment.

I noticed that Díaz-Varela had suddenly gone very silent and serious, and for precisely the same reason that Luisa had taken three steps towards the sofa and sat down on it before even inviting the two men to do so, as if her legs had given way beneath her and she could no longer remain standing. She had gone from the spontaneous laughter of a moment before to an expression of grief, her gaze clouded and her skin pale. Yes, she must have been a very simple mechanism. She raised her hand to her forehead and lowered her eyes, and I feared that she might cry. There was no reason why Professor Rico should have known that her life had been destroyed by a knife that had stabbed and stabbed, perhaps his friend hadn’t told him – although that was strange, because one tends to recount other people’s misfortunes almost without thinking – or if Díaz-Varela had told him, he had quite forgotten about it: he had a (considerable) reputation for retaining information only about the remote past, on which he was a world authority, and for listening to accounts of more recent events politely, but with scant attention. Any crime, any event dating from the Middle Ages or the Golden Age was of far more importance to him than what had happened the day before yesterday.

Looking concerned, Díaz-Varela went over to Luisa, took her hands in his and said softly:

‘It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t worry. I’m so sorry. It hadn’t occurred to me where this nonsense might lead.’ And I thought I sensed in him an impulse to stroke her cheek, as one would when consoling a child for whom one would give one’s very life; in the end, though, he repressed that impulse.

If his murmured comment was audible to me, it was equally so to the Professor.

‘Whatever’s wrong? What did I say? It wasn’t the word “balls”, was it? Well, you are a thin-skinned lot. I could have used something far worse; after all, “balls” is a euphemism. Vulgar and graphic and overused, I agree, but a euphemism nonetheless.’

‘What does “thin-skinned” mean? What are “balls”?’ asked the little boy, who had noticed the Professor’s gesture of pointing towards his groin. Fortunately, everyone ignored him and his question went unanswered.

Luisa recovered at once and realized that she hadn’t yet introduced me. She could not, in fact, remember my surname, because although she gave the full names of the two men (‘Professor Francisco Rico, Javier Díaz-Varela’), she gave only my first name, as she did with the children, and then added my nickname by way of compensation (‘This is my new friend María; Miguel knew her as the Prudent Young Woman when we used to have breakfast most mornings in the same café, but today is the first time we’ve actually spoken’). I thought it only right that I should make up for her faulty memory (‘María Dolz,’ I added). Javier must have been the person she had mentioned earlier, referring to him as ‘one of Miguel’s best friends’. He was, at any rate, the man I had seen that morning at the wheel of what had once been Deverne’s car, the man who had picked up the children from the café, presumably to take them to school, a little later than usual. He was not, therefore, the chauffeur, as I had thought. Perhaps Luisa had felt obliged to dispense with a chauffeur; when someone is widowed, their first step is always to try to reduce expenses, it’s like a reflex reaction of vulnerability and retreat, even if they’ve inherited a fortune. I did not, of course, know the state of her finances, although I imagined she was quite well off, but she might still have felt her situation to be precarious even if it wasn’t, the whole world seems to totter after the death of someone important to us, nothing seems solid or firm, and the person most closely affected tends to wonder: ‘What’s the point of this and why bother with that, what’s the point of money or a business and all its complications, why a house and a library, why go out to work and make plans, why have children, why anything? Nothing lasts long enough because everything ends and, once it’s over, it was never enough, even if it lasted a hundred years. I only had Miguel with me for a few years, so why should anything he left behind, anything that survives him, last any longer. Not even the money or the house or me or the children. We are all merely in abeyance and under threat.’ And there is also an impulse towards death: ‘I want to be where he is, and the only place where we could coincide is the past, in that place of not being but of having been. He is past, whereas I am still present. If I were also past, at least I would be the same as him in that respect, which would be something, and I would be in no position to miss him or remember him. I would be on the same level as him or in the same dimension, in the same time, and we would not be left alone in this precarious world in which everything familiar is being taken away from us. Nothing more can be taken away from us if we are not here. Nothing more can die on us if we are already dead.’





He was a very calm fellow, Javier Díaz-Varela, virile and handsome. Even though he was clean-shaven, there was still a hint of beard, a slight bluish shadow, especially on his square chin, like that of a comic-book hero (depending on the angle and on the light, he had or didn’t have a cleft chin). A little chest hair was visible above his shirt, which he wore with the top button undone, because, unlike Desvern, he wasn’t wearing a tie, Desvern always used to wear one, but his friend was slightly younger. He had delicate features, almond eyes with a vaguely myopic or abstracted expression, rather long lashes and a full, fleshy, shapely mouth, so much so that his lips looked like those of a woman transplanted on to a man’s face, it was very difficult not to notice them, I mean, not to keep staring at them, they were like a magnet for the eyes, both when speaking and when silent. It made you feel like kissing them or touching them or using your finger to trace their outline – which looked as if it had been drawn with a fine pencil – and then, with your fingertip, pressing the fleshy part, at once firm and soft. He was discreet too, allowing Professor Rico to hold forth at will without attempting to compete with him or outshine him (not that this would have been possible). He also had a sense of humour, because he knew how to play along with the Professor and act to some extent as his straight man, allowing him to show off before these strangers or semi-strangers, for it was clear at once that the Professor was a flirtatious man, the sort who sets his theoretical cap at a woman in almost any circumstance. By ‘theoretical’ I mean that his flirtatiousness lacked any real intention and was not seriously aimed at seducing anyone (certainly not me or Luisa), he wished merely to arouse the flirtee’s curiosity or, if possible, to dazzle her, even if he was never going to see the dazzled party again. Díaz-Varela was amused by his friend’s puerile exhibitionism and allowed or even encouraged him to expatiate, as if he were unafraid of any competition or else had a definite, long-awaited goal of his own, which he did not doubt for a moment he would attain sooner or later, overcoming all eventualities or threats.

I didn’t stay long, well, I had no part to play at that meeting, which was improvised as far as Rico was concerned and probably customary as regards Díaz-Varela, who gave the impression of being a habitual, almost continuous presence in that house or in that life, that of Luisa the widow. It was the second time he had appeared in one day, as far as I knew, and that must have been the case almost every day, because when he arrived with Rico, the children had greeted him with a naturalness bordering on indifference, as if they took for granted his evening visit (his ‘dropping by’). Of course, they had already seen him that morning, and the three had made a brief journey together in the car. He seemed to be more involved in Luisa’s life than anyone else, more than her own family, because I knew she had at least one brother, she had mentioned him in the same sentence as Javier and the lawyer. And it seemed to me that this was how Luisa saw him, as an additional or adopted brother, someone who comes and goes, enters and leaves, someone who helps out with the children or with any other unforeseen event, on whom you can count for almost anything and without asking first and who you automatically go to for advice, who keeps you company without your even noticing, neither him nor his company, who offers his help spontaneously and for free, someone who doesn’t need to phone before coming round, and who slowly, imperceptibly, ends up sharing the whole territory and making himself indispensable. Someone whom one barely notices is there, but who would be missed immeasurably if he were to withdraw or disappear. That could happen with Díaz-Varela at any moment, because he wasn’t a devoted, unconditional brother who is never going to leave for good, but a friend of her dead husband, and friendship is not transferable. Although it can sometimes be usurped. Perhaps he was one of those bosom pals of whom, in a moment of weakness or dark foreboding, one asks a favour or from whom one exacts a promise:

‘If anything bad were to happen to me and I was no longer here,’ Deverne might have said one day, ‘I’m counting on you to take care of Luisa and the kids.’

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about? Why do you say that? You’re not ill, are you?’ Díaz-Varela would have replied, anxious and taken aback.

‘No, I don’t foresee any problems, nothing imminent or even impending, nothing concrete, my health’s fine. But for those of us who think about death and pause to observe the effect it has on the living, we can’t help but ask ourselves sometimes what will happen after our own death, how will it leave the people to whom we matter, how far will it affect them. I don’t mean the financial side of things, that’s more or less sorted out, but everything else. I imagine that the children will have a rough time of it for a while, and that Carolina’s memory of me will last for the rest of her life, growing ever vaguer and more diffuse, which means that she might begin to idealize me, because we can do what we like with the vague and the diffuse and manipulate it at will, transforming it into a lost paradise, into a golden age when everything was in its proper place and no one lacked for anything. But she’s too young really not to be able to let go of that eventually and to get on with her life and nurture other kinds of hopes, the hopes appropriate to each age as she reaches it. She’ll be a perfectly normal girl, with just an occasional trace of melancholy. She’ll tend to take refuge in my memory whenever she experiences an upset or things turn out badly, but that’s what we all do to a greater or lesser extent, seeking refuge in what once existed, but no longer does. Nevertheless, it would help her to have some living person who could take my place, insofar as that’s possible, someone she could talk to. Having a father-figure close by, someone she saw often and was used to. And I can’t think of anyone who could fulfil the role of substitute father better than you. I worry less about Nicolás; he’s very young and is sure to forget me. But it would still be useful if you could be around to sort out his problems, because he’s the kind of boy who’ll attract quite a few problems. It’s Luisa who will feel most lost and vulnerable. Obviously, she might marry again, but I don’t think that’s very likely, nor, of course, that she would remarry in haste, and the older she gets, the more difficult remarriage will become. I imagine that once she has got over her initial despair and grief, both of which last a long time, she probably couldn’t be bothered with the whole process, you know, meeting someone new, giving him a potted version of her life story, allowing herself to be courted or accepting someone’s advances, being encouraging and interested, showing herself in the best possible light, explaining herself and listening to the other person explaining himself, overcoming any residual distrust, getting used to someone else and having that other person get used to her, overlooking any little things she might dislike. She would find all that really tedious, well, who wouldn’t? It’s a tiring business, and there’s inevitably something repetitious and stale about the whole process, I know I wouldn’t want to go through all that at my age. It might not seem so, but it takes a lot of hard work before you can finally settle down again with someone. I find it difficult to imagine her feeling the slightest curiosity or interest, because she’s not by nature restless or discontented. If she were, after some time had passed following my death, she might start to see some advantage or compensation in that loss. Without thinking of it as such, of course, but she would. Bringing one story to an end and starting over again, if you have to, isn’t in the long run such a bad thing. Even if you were happy with what has just ended. I’ve known inconsolable widows and widowers who, for a long time, thought they would never get back on their feet again. And yet, later, once they’ve recovered and found another partner, they have a sense that he or she is the real one, the best one, and they’re secretly glad that their former partner disappeared, leaving the field clear for this new relationship they’ve built. That is the awful power of the present, which crushes the past more easily as the past recedes, and falsifies it too without the past getting a chance to speak, protest, contradict or refute anything. Not to mention the husbands or wives who daren’t or don’t know how to leave their partner or who feel that they couldn’t possibly inflict such pain on them: they secretly want the other person to die, preferring their death to having to confront the problem and find some sensible solution. It’s absurd, but that’s how it is: it’s not that they don’t wish them ill and are eager to preserve them from all ills by dint of their personal sacrifice and enforced silence (because in order to be rid of them, they do wish them ill – the worst and most irreversible of all ills) it’s just that they aren’t prepared to be the cause of those ills, they don’t want to feel responsible for someone else’s unhappiness, not even for the unhappiness of the person whose mere existence by their side is a torment to them, the tie that binds and which they could cut if they were brave. But, since they are not brave, they fantasize or dream about something as radical as another person’s death. “It would be an easy solution and an enormous relief,” they think, “and I would have nothing to do with it, I wouldn’t have to cause him any pain or sadness, he wouldn’t have to suffer because of me, it could be an accident, a devastating illness, a misfortune in which I would play no part; on the contrary, in the eyes of the world and in my own eyes too, I would be the victim, both victim and beneficiary. And I would be free.” But Luisa isn’t like that. She is fully installed and settled in our marriage and can conceive of no other life than the one she has chosen to live. She only wants more of the same, with no changes. One identical day after another, with nothing added or subtracted. So much so that what crosses my mind would never cross hers, that is, our possible death, mine or hers, that simply isn’t on her horizon, there’s no room for it. I feel the same about her death, I can hardly bear to think of it and barely consider it as a possibility. But I do consider my own death sometimes, now and then, well, we each have to struggle with our own vulnerability, not with that of other people, however much we love them. I don’t know quite how to put it, but there are times when I can very easily imagine the world without me. So if something were to happen to me one day, Javier, something final, you must be there as a back-up. I know that’s a very pragmatic, rather undignified word, but it’s the right one. Don’t misunderstand me, don’t be alarmed. I’m not, of course, asking you to marry her or anything. You have your bachelor lifestyle and your many women, which you wouldn’t give up for the world, still less to do a posthumous favour for a friend who can no longer call you to account or reproach you, who will be safely silent in the unprotesting past. But, please, stay close to her if ever I’m not here. Don’t withdraw because of my absence, on the contrary: keep her company, offer her support and conversation and consolation, go and spend a little time with her every day and call her as often as you can even if there’s no need to, but so that it becomes a natural part of her day-to-day life. Be a kind of unhusbandly husband, an extension of me. I don’t think Luisa could cope without some daily contact like that, without someone to share her thoughts with and talk to about her day, without a replacement for what she has with me now, at least in some respects. She’s known you for ages, and she wouldn’t feel as inhibited as she would with a stranger. You could even entertain her by telling her about your adventures and allow her to experience vicariously what it will seem to her impossible ever to experience again on her own account. I know it’s a lot to ask, and you wouldn’t get much out of it, it would be more of a burden really, but Luisa could, in turn, be a partial replacement for me, she could be an extension of me, as far as you’re concerned, I mean. Our loved ones are always extensions of us in a way, and they recognize each other and come together through the dead person, as if their past contact with him made them members of a brotherhood or a caste. That way you wouldn’t lose me completely, a little of me would be preserved in her. You’re always surrounded by your various women, but you don’t have that many male friends. You would miss me, you know. And, for example, she and I share the same sense of humour. And you and I have been joking around with each other on a daily basis for years now.’

Díaz-Varela would probably have laughed, perhaps to take the edge off his friend’s ominous tone, but also because this extravagant, unexpected request made him laugh despite himself.

‘You’re asking me to replace you if you die,’ he would have said, halfway between a statement and a question. ‘For me to become Luisa’s non-husband and a sort of live-out dad. Why think of such things, I mean, why think that you could leave their lives at any moment, if, as you say, you’re in good health and there’s no real reason to believe that anything bad might happen to you? Are you sure you’re all right? No diseases? You’re not mixed up in some mess I know nothing about, are you? You haven’t run up a lot of unpayable debts or debts that can’t be paid off in cash? No one has threatened you, have they? You’re not thinking of skipping off, are you, doing a runner?’

‘No, really, I’m not hiding anything from you. It’s exactly as I said, that sometimes I start thinking about what the world would be like without me and I feel afraid. For the kids and for Luisa, not for anyone else, I can assure you, I don’t think I’m that important. I just want to be sure that you would be there to take care of them, at least initially. So that they would have someone as similar to me as possible to support them. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, you are the person who most resembles me. Even if only because we’ve known each other such a long time.’

Díaz-Varela would have thought for a moment, then given a half-sincere, certainly not wholly sincere, answer:

‘But do you realize what you would be getting me into? Do you realize how difficult it would be to become a non-husband without subsequently going on to become a real husband? In the kind of situation you described, it would be all too easy for the widow and the bachelor to believe that they mean rather more to each other, and who can blame them? Put someone in another person’s daily life, make him feel responsible and protective and with a duty to make himself indispensable to that other person, and you can imagine how things will end up. Always assuming they’re both reasonably attractive and there isn’t a vast age difference between them. It will come as no surprise to you if I say that Luisa is very attractive, and I can’t complain about my own success with the ladies. I don’t think I’ll ever marry, that’s not it, but if you were to die and I started going to your house on a daily basis, I find it very hard to believe that what should never have happened while you were alive wouldn’t happen once you were dead. Would you want to die knowing that? More than that, you would be encouraging it, procuring it, propelling us into it.’

Desvern would have remained silent for a few seconds, thinking, as if he had not considered that scenario before formulating his request. Then he would have given a rather paternalistic laugh and said:

‘You are incorrigibly vain and incorrigibly optimistic. That’s why you would make such a good handle to hold on to, such a good support. I don’t think what you describe would happen at all. Precisely because you’re too familiar a figure, like a cousin whom it would be impossible to see in any other way, with any other eyes,’ here he would have hesitated for a moment or pretended to, ‘any other eyes than mine, that is. Her view of you comes from me, it’s inherited, tainted. You’re an old friend of her husband, a friend of whom she has often heard me speak, as you can imagine, with a mixture of affection and mockery. Before Luisa met you, I had already told her what you were like, I had painted a picture of you for her. She has always seen you in that light and with those features, and there’s no changing them now, she had a complete portrait of you before you were even introduced. And I can’t deny that your entanglements and, how can I put it, your smugness, often made us laugh. I’m afraid you’re not someone she could take seriously. I’m sure you don’t mind me saying that. That’s one of your virtues, and it’s what you’ve always strived for, isn’t it, not to be taken too seriously. You’re not going to deny that, are you?’

Díaz-Varela would doubtless have felt slightly put out, but would have disguised the fact. No one likes to be told that he or she stands no chance with someone, even if that person is of no interest and has never been seen as a potential conquest. Many seductions have taken place, or at least begun, out of nothing more than pique or defiance, because of a bet or to prove someone wrong. Any genuine interest comes later. And it often does, provoked by the manoeuvring and the effort involved. But it’s not there at the beginning, certainly not before the dissuasive arguments or the challenge. Perhaps, at that moment, Díaz-Varela wanted Deverne to die so that he could prove to him that Luisa could take him seriously when there were no mediators, no go-betweens. Although, of course, how can you prove something to a dead man? How can you gain their acknowledgement, their recognition that they were wrong? They never tell us we were right when we need them to, and all you can think is: ‘If he or she were to come back today …’ But they never do. He would prove it to Luisa, in whom, according to Desvern, he, the husband, would carry on or continue to live for a while longer. Perhaps it would be like that, perhaps he was right. Until he swept him away. Until he erased his memory and all other traces and supplanted him entirely.

‘No, I don’t deny it, and of course I don’t mind. But our views of people change a lot, especially if the person who painted the original portrait can no longer go on retouching it and the portrait is left in the hands of the portrayed. The latter can correct and redraw every line, one by one, and leave the original artist looking like a liar. Or just plain wrong, or like a bad artist, superficial and lacking in perception. “They gave me an entirely false impression of him,” someone looking at the picture might think. “This man isn’t as he was described to me at all, he has substance, passion, integrity and maturity.” It happens every day, Miguel, all the time. People start out seeing one thing and end up seeing quite the opposite. They start out loving and end up hating, or shifting from indifference to adoration. We can never be sure of what is going to be vital to us and who we will consider to be important. Our convictions are transient and fragile, even the ones we believe to be the strongest. It’s the same with our feelings. We shouldn’t trust ourselves.’

Deverne would have sensed a touch of wounded pride and ignored it.

‘Even so,’ he would have said, ‘even if I don’t think it’s possible, what does it matter if it does happen afterwards, after my death? I’ll know nothing about it. But I would have died convinced of the impossibility of such a bond between you and her, it’s what you think will happen that counts, because what you see and experience in your final moment is the end of the story, the end of your personal story. You know that everything will carry on without you, that nothing stops because you have disappeared. But that “afterwards” doesn’t concern you. What matters is that you stop, because then everything stops, the world is frozen in that moment when the person whose life is ending finally ends, even though we know that this isn’t true in actual fact. But that “actual fact” doesn’t matter. It’s the one moment when there is no future, in which the present seems to us unchangeable and eternal, because we won’t witness any more events or any more changes. There have been people who have tried to bring forward the publication of a book so that their father would see it in print and die thinking that their son was an accomplished writer; what did it matter if, after that, the son never wrote another line? There have been desperate attempts to bring about a momentary reconciliation between two people so that the person dying would believe that they had made their peace and everything was sorted and settled; what did it matter if, two days after the death, the hostile parties had a blazing row? What mattered was what existed immediately before that death. There have been people who have pretended to forgive a dying man so that he can die in peace or more happily; what did it matter if, the following morning, his forgiver hoped privately to see him rot in hell? There have been those who have lied their socks off at the deathbed of a wife or husband and convinced them that they had never been unfaithful and had loved them unwaveringly and constantly; what did it matter if, a month later, they had moved in with their lover of many years? The only definitive truth is what the person about to die sees and believes immediately before his or her departure, because nothing exists after that. There is a great chasm between what Mussolini, executed by his enemies, believed and what Franco, on his deathbed, believed, the latter surrounded by his loved ones and adored by his compatriots, whatever those hypocrites may say now. My father once told me that Franco kept a photograph in his office of Mussolini strung up like a pig in the petrol station in Milan where they took his corpse and that of his lover, Clara Petacci, to be put on display and publicly mocked, and that whenever visitors expressed shock and bewilderment on seeing the photograph, Franco would say: “Yes, take a good look: that’s never going to happen to me.” And he was right, he made sure that it didn’t. He doubtless died happy – if such a thing is possible – believing that everything would continue as he had ordained. Many people console themselves for this great injustice or for their rage with the thought: “If he were to come back today …” or “Given the way things have turned out, he must be spinning in his grave,” forgetting that no one ever comes back or spins in his grave or knows what happens once he has expired. It’s like thinking that someone who has not yet been born should care about what’s going on in the world. To someone who does not yet exist everything is, inevitably, a matter of complete indifference, just as it is for someone who has died. Both are nothing, neither possesses any consciousness, the former cannot even sense what its life will be and the latter cannot recall it, as if he or she had never had a life. They are on the same plane, that is, they neither exist nor know anything, however hard that is for us to accept. What does it matter to me what happens once I am gone? All that counts is what I can believe and foresee now. I believe that, in my absence, it would better for my children if you were around. I foresee that Luisa would recover sooner and suffer a little less if you were on hand as a friend. I can’t fathom other people’s conjectures, even yours or Luisa’s, I can only know my own, and I can’t imagine you two in any other way. So I ask you again, if anything bad should happen to me, give me your word that you’ll take care of them.’

Díaz-Varela might still have disputed certain points with him.

‘Yes, you’re right in part, but not about one thing: not having been born is not the same as having died, because the person who dies always leaves some trace behind him and he knows that. He knows, too, that he’ll know nothing about it, but that he will, nonetheless, leave his mark in the form of memories. He knows he’ll be missed, as you yourself said, and that the people who knew him won’t behave as if he had never existed. Some will feel guilty about him, some will wish they had treated him better while he was alive, some will mourn him and be unable to understand why he doesn’t respond, some will be plunged into despair by his absence. No one has any difficulty recovering from the loss of someone who has not been born, with the exception, perhaps, of a mother who has undergone an abortion and finds it hard to abandon hope and wonders sometimes about the child who might have been. But in reality there is no loss of any kind, there is no void, there are no past events. On the other hand, no one who has lived and died disappears completely, not at least for a couple of generations: there is evidence of his actions and, when he dies, he’ll be aware of that. He knows that he won’t be able to see or ascertain anything of what happens thereafter and he knows that his story ends in that instant. You yourself are concerned about what will happen to your wife and children, you’ve taken care to put your affairs in order, you’re aware of the gap you would leave and you’re asking me to fill that gap, to be some kind of substitute for you if you’re not here. None of that would concern someone who had never been born.’

‘Of course not,’ Desvern would have replied, ‘but I’m doing all of those things while I’m still alive, and a living person is not the same as a dead person, even though that isn’t what we tend to think. When I’m dead, I won’t even be a person, and won’t be able to sort out or ask for anything, or be aware of or concerned about anything. In that respect a dead person is the same as someone who has never been born. I’m not talking about the others, those who survive us and think of us and who still exist in time, nor of myself now, of the me who has not yet departed. He still does things, of course, and, needless to say, thinks them; he plots, takes steps and decisions, tries to influence others, has desires, is vulnerable and can also inflict harm. I’m talking about myself dead, which you obviously find harder to imagine than I do. You shouldn’t confuse us, the living me and the dead me. The former is asking you for something that the latter won’t be able to question or remind you about or else check up on you to see whether or not you have carried out his wishes. What’s so difficult, then, about giving me your word? There’s nothing to prevent you from failing to keep it, it will cost you nothing.’

Díaz-Varela would have put one hand to his forehead and sat looking at his friend oddly and slightly irritably, as if he had just emerged from a daydream or some drug-induced torpor. He was, at the least, emerging from an unexpected and inappropriately gloomy conversation.

‘Fine, you have my word of honour, you can count on it,’ he would have said. ‘But please, no more of these macabre conversations, they give me the creeps. Let’s go and have a drink and talk about something more cheerful.’

‘What rubbishy edition is this?’ I heard Professor Rico muttering as he took a book off a shelf; he had been snooping around looking at the books, as if no one else were in the room. I saw that he was holding an edition of Don Quixote with the very tips of his fingers, as though the book made his skin crawl. ‘How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine? It’s full of a lot of intuitive nonsense, there’s no method or science in it, it’s not even original, he’s just copied from other people. And to find it in the house of someone who is, as I understand it, a university teacher, well, that really takes the biscuit. But then that’s Madrid University for you,’ he added, looking reprovingly at Luisa.

She burst out laughing. Even though she was the object of the reprimand, she obviously found his rudeness vastly amusing. Díaz-Varela laughed too, perhaps infected by her laughter or perhaps to flatter Rico into further excesses – he could hardly have been surprised by Rico’s impertinence or by the liberties he took; he then tried to provoke him further, possibly to make Luisa laugh more and draw her out of her momentarily sombre mood. And yet he seemed perfectly spontaneous. He was utterly charming and he pretended very well, if he was pretending.

‘You’re not telling me that the editor of that edition isn’t a respected authority,’ he said to Rico, ‘indeed, he’s rather more respected than you are in some circles.’

‘Huh, respected by ignoramuses and eunuchs, of which this country is filled to bursting, and by literary and philosophical societies in Spain’s lazier, lowlier provincial towns,’ retorted Professor Rico. He opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger. ‘I’ve seen one glaring error already.’ Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further. ‘I’ll write an article about it.’ He looked up with a triumphant air and smiled from ear to ear (an enormous smile made possible by his flexible mouth) and added: ‘Besides, the fellow’s jealous of me.’