The Infatuations

III





In all unequal relationships, those lacking a name or explicit recognition, there is usually one person who takes the initiative, who phones to suggest meeting up, while the other person has just two possibilities or ways of reaching the same goal of not fading away or vanishing, even though he or she believes that, whatever happens, this is sure to be his or her final fate. One way is simply to wait and do nothing, trusting that eventually the other person will miss you, that your silence and absence will become unexpectedly unbearable or even worrying, because we all very quickly grow accustomed to what is given to us or what is there. The second way is to try, subtly, to infiltrate the daily life of that other person, to persist without insisting, to make a space for yourself, to phone, not in order to suggest getting together – that is still forbidden – but to ask a question, some advice or a favour, to let him know what has been going on in your life – the most efficient and most drastic way of involving someone else – or offering information; being present, acting as a reminder to him of your existence, humming and buzzing away in the distance, creating a habit that imperceptibly, almost stealthily, installs itself in his life, until one day the other person, missing your, by now, customary phone call, feels almost affronted – or experiences something bordering on abandonment – and, overcome by impatience, invents some absurd excuse, awkwardly picks up the phone and finds himself dialling your number.

I did not belong to that bold and enterprising band, but to the silent kind, who, while prouder and more subtle, are also more exposed to being promptly erased or forgotten, and after that evening, I was glad to run that risk, to be, as usual, subordinate to the requests and suggestions of the person whom I still thought of as Javier, but who was already on the way to becoming a hard-to-remember double-barrelled name; and I was glad, too, not to have to call or seek him out, in the knowledge that failing to do so would not seem suspicious or incriminating. My not getting in touch with him would not mean that I wanted to avoid him, nor that I was disappointed in him – a rank understatement – nor that I was afraid of him, nor that I wanted to have no more to do with him after learning that he had plotted to have his best friend stabbed to death without even being sure that his plotting would achieve its end, for he was still left with the easier or perhaps more arduous task, one never knows, of making Luisa fall in love with him (the most insignificant or the most substantial part of the task). The fact that I gave no signs of life would not signify that I knew anything about the plot or anything new about him, my silence would not betray me, everything was as it always had been during our brief relationship, only if, in some vague way, he missed me or thought of me and summoned me to his bedroom, only then would I have to consider how I should behave and what to do. Making someone fall in love with you is insignificant, waiting for it to happen, on the other hand, is a thing of substance.

When Díaz-Varela had spoken to me about Colonel Chabert, I had immediately identified the Colonel with Desvern: the dead man who ought to remain dead because his death has been reported and itemized and set down in the annals and thus become historical fact, and whose new and incomprehensible life is a tiresome addendum, an intrusion into the lives of others; the person who comes back to disturb a universe which, knowing nothing about what really happened and unable to rectify matters, has carried on without him. The fact that Luisa could not immediately shake off Deverne, that she continued in her inert and routine way to be subject to him and his still recent memory – recent for the widow but remote for the person who had long been anticipating his departure – must have seemed to Díaz-Varela rather like being haunted by a ghost, as annoying a phantasm as Chabert, except that the latter had returned in the flesh, complete with scars, when he had already been forgotten and when his return was a nuisance even to time itself, which had to go against its nature and try to retrace its steps and correct the past, whereas Desvern had not entirely departed, at least not in spirit, he was still hanging around and did so with the connivance of his wife, who was still immersed in the slow process of getting over his abandonment or desertion of her; she was even trying to hold on to him for a little longer, knowing that, unlikely though it might seem, a day would come when his face would fade or become frozen in one of the many photos that she insisted on looking at again and again, sometimes with a foolish smile on her face and sometimes sobbing, but always alone, always in secret.

And yet now it seemed to me that it was Díaz-Varela who was more like Chabert. The latter had suffered countless sorrows and hardships, while the former had inflicted them; the latter had been the victim of a war, of negligence, of bureaucracy and incomprehension, while the former was a self-appointed executioner, who had gravely disturbed the universe with his cruelty, his possibly sterile egotism and his extraordinary frivolity. But both had to wait for a gesture, a kind of miracle, a word of encouragement, an invitation, Chabert for the near-impossibility that his wife would fall in love with him again and Díaz-Varela for the improbability that Luisa would fall in love with him or at least seek consolation in his company. There was something similar about the hope and patience shared by both men, although in the old soldier, those feelings were dominated by scepticism and incredulity, and those of my temporary lover by optimism and excitement or, perhaps, by necessity. Both men were like ghosts pulling faces and making signs and even occasionally gesturing, innocently, wildly, in the hope that they would be seen, recognized and perhaps summoned, longing to hear at last the words: ‘Yes, of course, I recognize you now, it’s you,’ although in the case of Chabert this meant only the letter confirming his existence that was being denied to him and in Díaz-Varela’s case: ‘I want to be by your side, come closer and stay here with me, fill this empty space, come to me and embrace me.’ And both must have thought something similar, something that gave them strength and sustained them in their waiting and kept them from giving up: ‘I can’t have gone through everything I’ve gone through, being killed by a sword blow to the skull and by the galloping hooves of infinite horses, and then emerging from among a great pile of corpses after that long and futile battle that transformed forty thousand men like me into cadavers, of which I should have been one, just another corpse; I can’t have gone through that whole difficult recovery process, enough to be able to stand on my own two feet and walk, to have wandered Europe like the poorest of beggars and with no one to believe my story, obliged instead to persuade every imbecile I met that I am still me, that I am not dead, even though my death has been formally recorded; and that I should arrive here, where I once had wife, house, rank and fortune, here where I used to live, and to have the person I most loved and who inherited my wealth not even to admit that I exist, to pretend she doesn’t recognize me and call me an impostor. What sense would it make to survive my reiterated death, to emerge from the grave in which I had resigned myself to living, naked and with no distinguishing emblems or badges, made equal with all my fallen equals, officers and privates, compatriots and perhaps enemies, what sense would it make if what awaited me at the end of my journey was to have my existence denied, to be stripped of my identity, my memory and everything that happened to me after my death, the whole superfluity of my ill fortune, my ordeal, the enormous effort of survival, of what seemed so much like fate …’ That is what Colonel Chabert must have thought as he came and went in Paris, while he begged to be received and seen by the lawyer Derville and by Madame Ferraud, who, in the light of his resurrection, was not his widow, but his wife, and, thus, alas for her, became again the equally buried, forgotten and loathed Madame Chabert.

And Díaz-Varela, in turn, must have thought: ‘I can’t have done what I’ve done or what I conspired to do and set in train, after pondering it long and hard and being consumed by doubt, I can’t have brought about a death, that of my best friend, pretending I was leaving it all slightly to chance, that it might or might not happen, might or might not come to pass, or perhaps I wasn’t pretending and that’s how it really was; perhaps I did devise an imperfect plan full of loose ends precisely so that I could still face myself and be able to tell myself that I had, after all, allowed for numerous loopholes and escape routes, that I hadn’t made a cast-iron plan, hadn’t sent in a hit man or issued anyone with the order: “Kill him”; I can’t have involved two – or perhaps three – other people, Ruibérriz, the assistant who made the phone calls and the beggar who listened to them, in order to distance myself as much as possible from the actual execution, from the events when they happened, if they did happen, because there was no guarantee as to how the gorrilla would react, he might have ignored the calls or simply hurled insults at Miguel or punched him as he did the chauffeur when he confused the two men, my attempt to sow discord might have fallen on barren ground from the start and had no effect whatsoever, but it did have an effect, so what does that mean; no, my wishes can’t, against all probability, have come true and, in doing so, have lost any resemblance they might have had to a gamble or a wager and become, instead, a tragedy and, most probably, murder by instigation which has, in turn, made me, indirectly, the instigator, since it was my idea and my decision to begin the process, to throw the loaded dice, to tamper with the wheel and then set it turning, I was the one who said: “Get him a mobile phone and pour poison in his ear and thus reach both the insane and the sane parts of his mind; buy him a knife to tempt him, to have him stroke it and open and close it, only someone in possession of a weapon is likely to think of using it”; no, I can’t have done all that and left myself with an ineradicable stain only for it all to come to nothing and for my intention to fail. What would be the point of having impregnated myself like this, with this murder, this conspiracy, this horror, of carrying the deceit and the betrayal within my breast for ever, of never being able to shake them off or forget them except in moments of unconsciousness or of a strange feeling of plenitude that I have not myself, as yet, experienced, I don’t know, what would be the point of having established a link that will reappear in my dreams and that I will never be able to break, what would be the point of all this vileness, if I fail to reach my one goal, if what awaits me at the end of this journey is a No or indifference or pity, or only the old affection she always felt for me and which would merely keep me in my place, or, worse still, if what awaits me is accusation, discovery, disdain, her back turned on me and her icy voice saying, as if from inside a helmet: “Get out of my sight and never let me see you again”? As if she were a Queen condemning her most fervent and adoring subject to eternal exile. And that could happen now, that could easily happen if this woman, María, did hear what she shouldn’t have heard and decides to go and tell her, because even if I denied it, the tiniest doubt would be enough for all my hopes to vanish, to cease to exist. I know I have nothing to fear from Ruibérriz, which is why I asked him to take charge of the operation, I’ve known him for a long time and he would never blab, not even if the beggar were to identify him and the police tracked him down, and he was questioned or arrested, not even under great pressure, because of the possible consequences to himself and because he’s trustworthy. The others, Canella and the one who phoned him, the one who several times a day reminded him of his prostitute daughters and forced him to imagine them hard at work in mortifying detail, the one who fed his obsession and accused Miguel, they have never seen me or heard my name or my voice, so as far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist, only Ruibérriz exists with his T-shirts and his leather coats and his salacious smile. But I don’t really know anything about María, I can see that she’s falling or has fallen in love with me, far too quickly for that falling in love to be anything more than a generous impulse, one from which she can still walk away any time she wants, out of weariness or pique or common sense or disappointment, she doesn’t appear to feel that second emotion nor seems likely to, she has accepted that there will be nothing more than there already is and she knows that one day I will stop seeing her and erase her from my life because Luisa will, finally, have summoned me, that isn’t in any way certain, of course, but it could happen, more than that, sooner or later, it should happen. Unless María has a strong, stupid sense of justice, and her disappointment at discovering that I am a criminal overcomes all other considerations, in which case it would not be enough for her to renounce me and separate from me, she would also want to separate me from my love. And then, if Luisa knew, or if the idea even entered her head, that would be that, what point would there be then, if, having followed the foulest of paths, there was no hope, not even the remotest, most unreal of hopes, the kind that helps us to live? Perhaps even waiting would be forbidden to me, not just hope, but mere waiting, the last refuge of the poorest wretch, of the sick and the decrepit and the doomed and the dying, who wait for night to come and then for day and night to come again, just for that change in the light, which will at least tell them where they are, whether they are awake or sleeping. Even animals wait. The refuge of every being on earth, except me …’





The days passed with no news from Díaz-Varela, one, two, three and four, and that was entirely normal. Five, six, seven and eight, and that was normal too. Nine, ten, eleven and twelve, and that wasn’t quite so normal, but nor was it so very strange either, sometimes he was away and sometimes I was too, we didn’t tend to issue any advance warning of our movements and certainly didn’t bother to say goodbye, we never reached that degree of intimacy nor was our relationship important enough for us to feel it either necessary or prudent to keep each other informed of any absences from Madrid. In the past, whenever he had taken that long or longer to call or get in touch, I would think sadly – but always philosophically or perhaps resignedly – that it was time for me to leave the stage, that the brief space I had allotted myself in his life had indeed been very brief; I assumed he had grown tired of me or that, true to his usual mode of behaviour, he had chosen a new playmate (I never thought I was more than that, even though I would like to have been more) for the duration of his – as I saw it – immemorial waiting, or, rather, his lying in wait; or that Luisa’s acceptance of his new role was happening more quickly than expected and that there was now no room for me nor, presumably, for anyone else; or that he was devoting all his time and attention to her, to taking the children to school and helping her as much as he could, keeping her company and being there if she needed him. ‘That’s it, he’s gone, he’s dumped me, it’s over,’ I would think. ‘It was so short-lived that I’ll just merge in with all the others and he’ll find it hard to remember who I was. I will be indistinguishable, I will be a before, a blank page, the opposite of a “hereafter”, relegated to the category of the no longer important. It doesn’t matter, it’s fine, I knew how it would be from the start, it’s fine.’ If on the twelfth or fifteenth day the phone rang and I heard his voice, I couldn’t help giving a little inner leap of joy and saying to myself: ‘So it’s not quite over yet, I’ll see him at least one more time.’ And during those periods of involuntary waiting on my part and absolute silence on his, each time the bell rang or my mobile phone told me that I’d missed a call or that someone had left a text message, I would think optimistically that it would be from him.

Now the same thing was happening, except that this time I felt only apprehension. I would glance at the tiny screen in alarm, hoping not to see his name and number and – this was the strange, disquieting thing – also hoping that I would. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him or risk another of our usual encounters, during which I had no idea how I would react or how I should behave. Were we to meet face to face, he would be more likely to notice any evasiveness or reluctance on my part than if we only talked on the phone and, of course, more likely to do so if we talked than if we didn’t. But not answering or returning his call would have had the same effect, given that I had never neglected to do so before. If I agreed to go to his apartment and he proposed having sex, as he usually did in that tacit way of his, which allowed him to act as if what was happening wasn’t happening or wasn’t worthy of recognition, and I gave some excuse and declined, that could make him suspicious. If he phoned to make a date with me and I put him off, that would give him food for thought too, because I had, as far as possible, always gone along with his suggestions. I considered it a blessing and a boon that he had remained silent since that last evening, that he hadn’t sought me out, that I was free from his wheedlings and his trick questions and his attempts to sniff out the truth, free from having to meet him again and not knowing what to do or how to behave with him, from feeling that mixture of fear and repulsion, doubtless mingled with attraction and infatuation, because those two things cannot be eliminated suddenly or at will, but tend to take a while to disappear, like a period of convalescence or like the sickness itself; indignation doesn’t really help, it soon loses its impetus, you can’t maintain that same level of virulence, or else it comes and goes, and when it goes it leaves no trace, it isn’t cumulative, it does no real damage, and when it dies down it’s forgotten, like intense cold once it abates or like fever or grief. The time it takes for feelings to change is slow and infuriatingly gradual. You settle into those feelings and it becomes very difficult to prise yourself out of them, you get into the habit of thinking about someone – and of desiring them too – in a particular, fixed way, and it’s hard to give that up from one day to the next, or even over a period of months and years, that’s how long the feelings can last. And if what you feel is disappointment, then you fight it at first, however ridiculous that might seem, you try to minimize, deny, bury it. I would think sometimes that perhaps I didn’t hear what I heard, or the feeble idea would resurface in my mind that it must all be a mistake, a misunderstanding, that there must even be some acceptable reason why Díaz-Varela had arranged for Desvern to die – but how could that ever be acceptable – I realized that, during this waiting period, I avoided even thinking the word ‘murder’. And so while I considered it fortunate that Díaz-Varela didn’t phone me and thus allowed me to compose myself and catch my breath, the fact that he didn’t get in touch also worried me and made me suffer. Maybe it seemed impossible – an insipid, maladroit ending – that everything should just dissolve once I had discovered his secret and, after a brief interrogation, aroused his suspicions, and that there should then be nothing. It was as if the play had ended too early, as if everything were left up in the air, unresolved, floating, lingering in its lack of resolution, like an unpleasant smell in a lift. My thoughts were confused, I both wanted and didn’t want to hear from him, my dreams were contradictory too and, when I spent a sleepless night, I hardly noticed, aware only that my head was crammed with thoughts and that I was miserably incapable of emptying it.

As I lay unable to sleep, I wondered if I should speak to Luisa, who no longer had breakfast in the same café as me, she must have given up the habit so as not to increase her grief or else to help her forget more easily, or perhaps she went there later, when I had already gone to work (maybe it was her husband who had had to get up early and she had only gone with him in order to postpone their parting). I wondered if it wasn’t my duty to warn her, to let her know who he was, that friend of hers, that possibly unnoticed suitor, her constant protector; but I lacked any proof, and she might think me mad or spiteful, vengeful and unhinged, it’s awkward going to anyone with such a sinister, murky tale, the more bizarre and complex the story, the harder it is to believe; this, in part, is what those who commit atrocities rely on, that the sheer magnitude of the atrocity will make it hard for people to credit. But it wasn’t so much that as something far stranger, because it’s so rare: the majority of people would be glad to tell, most take delight in pointing the finger in secret, in accusing and denouncing, in grassing on friends, neighbours, superiors and bosses, to the police, to the authorities, uncovering and revealing those guilty of something or other, even if only in their imaginations; in destroying the lives of those other people if they can, or at least making things awkward for them, doing their best to create outcasts, rejects, discards, leaving casualties all around and excluding them from their society, as if it were a comfort to be able to say after each victim or each piece of silver: ‘He’s been broken off, detached from the bunch, he has fallen, and I have not.’ Among these people there are a few – we grow fewer by the day – who feel, on the contrary, an indescribable aversion to taking on the role of betrayer. And we take that antipathy so far that it is not always easy for us to overcome it even when we should – for our own good or for that of others. There is something repugnant to us about dialling a number and saying, without giving our name: ‘I’ve seen a terrorist the police are after, his photo has been in the newspapers and he’s just gone through that door.’ Well, we would probably do so in a case like that, but more with an eye to averting crimes than to meting out punishments for past crimes, because no one can put those right and there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it? It sounds strange and even wrong, and yet it can happen: those of us who feel that aversion would sometimes prefer to act unjustly and for someone to go unpunished than see ourselves as betrayers, we can’t bear it – when all’s said and done, justice simply isn’t our thing, it’s not our job; and that role is still more odious when it’s a matter of unmasking someone we have loved or, even worse, someone who, however inexplicable this might seem, we have not entirely ceased to love – despite the horror and the nausea afflicting our conscience or our consciousness, which, nonetheless, grows less troubled with each day that passes and is gone. And then we think something that we can’t quite put into words, managing only an incoherent, reiterative, almost feverish murmur, something like: ‘Yes, what he did is very grave, very grave, but he is still him, still him.’ During that time of waiting or of unspoken farewell, I just couldn’t see Díaz-Varela as a future danger to anyone else, not even to me, although I had felt a momentary fear and still did intermittently in his absence, in retrospect or in anticipation. Perhaps I was being overly optimistic, but I didn’t think he would be capable of doing the same thing again. I still saw him as an amateur, an accidental transgressor, as an essentially ordinary man, who had done one anomalous thing.





On the fourteenth day, he phoned my mobile when I was in a meeting with Eugeni and a semi-young author recommended to us by Garay Fontina as a reward for the adulation bestowed on him by the former in his blog and in a specialized literary review of which he was editor, ‘specialized’ meaning pretentious and marginal. I left the office for a moment and told Díaz-Varela that I would call him back later; he, however, seemed not to believe me and kept me on the phone for a moment longer.

‘It won’t take a minute,’ he said. ‘How about getting together this evening? I’ve been away for a few days and it would be good to see you. If you like, come over to my apartment when you finish work.’

‘I might have to stay late this evening, things are absolutely crazy here,’ I said, inventing an excuse on the spur of the moment; I wanted to think about it or at least give myself time to get used to the idea of seeing him again. I still didn’t know what I wanted, his simultaneously expected and unexpected voice brought me both alarm and relief, but what immediately prevailed was my pleasure at feeling wanted, at knowing that he had not yet shelved me, washed his hands of me or allowed me silently to disappear, it was not yet time for me to fade into the background. ‘Look, I’ll let you know later, and depending on how things go, I’ll either drop by or phone to say I won’t be able to make it.’

Then he said my name, something he didn’t usually do.

‘No, María. Come and see me.’ And then he paused as if he really wanted what he had said to sound imperative, which it had. When I didn’t immediately say anything in response, he added something to mitigate that impression. ‘It isn’t just that I want to see you, María.’ He had used my name twice now, which was unheard of, a bad sign. ‘I need to discuss an urgent matter with you. It doesn’t matter if it’s late, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait in for you anyway. If not, I’ll come and fetch you from work,’ he concluded firmly.

I didn’t often say his name either, and I did so this time only because he had said mine and so as not to be caught on the back foot, hearing your own name often makes you feel uneasy, as if you were about to receive a warning or as if it were the prelude to some mishap or to a farewell.

‘We haven’t seen each other in days, Javier, can it really be so urgent that it can’t wait a day or two longer? I mean, if it turns out that I can’t make this evening.’

I was playing hard to get, but nevertheless hoping that he wouldn’t give up, that he wouldn’t be satisfied with a ‘we’ll see’ or a ‘perhaps’. I found his impatience flattering, even though I could sense that this was not a merely carnal impatience. Indeed, it was likely that there wasn’t an ounce of carnality in it, but had to do only with his haste to bring something verbally to a close: because once it becomes clear that things cannot simply drift on, that they are not going to dissolve of their own accord or quietly die or come to a peaceful conclusion, then, generally speaking, it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, to wait; one feels a need to say the words, to come out with them immediately, to tell the other person and then vanish, so that she knows where she stands and won’t continue living in a fool’s paradise, so that she won’t still think that she matters to us when she doesn’t, that she occupies a place in our thoughts and our heart when she has, in fact, been replaced; so that we can erase her from our existence without delay. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if Díaz-Varela was summoning me simply in order to get rid of me, to say goodbye, I hadn’t seen him for fourteen days and had feared that I might never see him again and that was all that mattered to me: if he saw me again, it might be harder for him to keep to his decision, I could try, I could give him an inkling of what the future would be like without me, persuade him by my presence to reverse his decision. I thought this and realized at once how idiotic it was: such moments are unpleasant, when we don’t even feel ashamed to realize how idiotic we are, but abandon ourselves to our idiocy anyway, fully aware of what we are doing and knowing that soon we will be saying to ourselves: ‘I knew it, I was sure of it. How stupid can you get?’ And that reaction, which came to me as surely as iron to magnet, was even more inconsistent and idiotic, given that I had already half-decided to break off with him if he ever got back in touch. He had arranged to have his best friend murdered and that was too much for my awakened conscience. Now, however, I discovered that it wasn’t too much, at least not yet, or that my conscience had grown murky or else simply fell asleep if I let my attention wander for an instant, and that made me think precisely those words: ‘God, I’m stupid!’

Díaz-Varela was, at any rate, not used to me putting any obstacles in the way when he suggested that we meet, apart from my work, that is, and there are few tasks that cannot be left until the following day, at least in the world of publishing. Leopoldo was never an obstacle for as long as that relationship lasted, he was in the same position as I was vis-à-vis Díaz-Varela, or perhaps in an even worse position, because I had to make a real effort to enjoy being with him, whereas it never felt to me that Díaz-Varela had to make such an effort of will when he was with me, although that may have been a mere illusion on my part, for who ever really knows what anyone else feels. With Leopoldo, I was the one who decided when we could and couldn’t see each other and for how long; for him, I was always a woman absorbed in an inexhaustible string of activities about which I didn’t even talk to him, he must have imagined my small, unhurried world as being a barely sustainable maelstrom, so rarely did I make time for him, so burdened with work did I seem. He lasted for as long as Díaz-Varela did in my life: as often occurs when you have two relationships on the go at once, the one cannot survive without the other, however different or even opposed they might be. Lovers often end their adulterous affair when the married party divorces or is widowed, as if they were suddenly terrified of finding themselves face to face or didn’t know how to continue without all the usual impediments, how to live or how to develop what had, until then, been a circumscribed love, comfortably condemned to not manifesting itself in public, possibly never even leaving one room; we often discover that what began purely by chance needs always to cleave to that way of being, with any attempt at change being experienced and rejected by both parties as an imposture or a falsification. Leopoldo never knew about Díaz-Varela, I never so much as mentioned his existence, why should I, it was none of his business. We parted on good terms, I didn’t wound him deeply, and he still phones me from time to time, but we don’t talk for long, we bore each other and after the first three sentences find we have nothing else to say. His was merely a brief hope cut short, a hope that was inevitably tenuous and somewhat sceptical, because an absence of enthusiasm is not something that can be easily concealed and is obvious even to the most optimistic of lovers. That, at least, is what I think, that I barely hurt him at all, that he never knew. Not that I’m going to bother finding out now, what does it matter, or, rather, what does it matter to me? Díaz-Varela certainly wouldn’t take the trouble to find out how much harm he had done me or if he had wounded me: I had, after all, always been sceptical about our relationship, I couldn’t even say that I ever had any hopes of him. With others I did, but not with him. If I learned one thing from him as a lover, it was not to take things too seriously and not to look back.

What he said next sounded like a demand barely disguised as a plea.

‘Please, María, come and see me, it can’t be that difficult. The question I have to ask could possibly wait a day or two more, but I can’t wait, and you know what it’s like with these subjective emergencies, they refuse to be postponed. It would be to your advantage too. Please, come and see me.’

I hesitated a few seconds before replying, just so that it wouldn’t seem quite as easy to him as it usually did; something horrible had happened last time I was there, although he didn’t know that, or perhaps he did. I was in fact burning to see him, to put us to the test, to enjoy looking at his face and his lips again, even go to bed with him, with his former self, who was still there in the new Díaz-Varela, where else would he be? Finally, I said:

‘All right, if you insist. I can’t be sure what time, but I’ll be there. And if you get tired of waiting, phone me and save me the trip. Anyway, I must go now.’

I hung up, switched off my mobile, and returned to my pointless meeting. From then on, I was incapable of paying any attention to the semi-young author who had been recommended to us, and who clearly disapproved of me because that is precisely what he wanted, namely, an audience and lots of attention. I was quite sure of one thing, though: he wasn’t going to be published by us, certainly not if I had anything to do with it.





In the event, I had more than enough time and it wasn’t late at all when I set off for Díaz-Varela’s apartment. So much so, in fact, that I was able to pause along the way to conjecture and hesitate, to take several turns about the block and put off the moment of arrival. I even went into Embassy, that archaic place where ladies and diplomats take afternoon tea, I sat down at a table, ordered a drink and waited. I wasn’t waiting for a specific time – I was merely aware that the longer I delayed things, the more nervous he would get – but waiting, rather, for the minutes to pass and for me to pluck up enough resolve or for my impatience to become sufficiently condensed to make me stand up and take one step and then another and another, until I found myself at his front door agitatedly ringing the bell. But, having decided to meet him and knowing that it was in my power to see him again, neither the necessary determination nor the impatience came. ‘In a while,’ I thought, ‘there’s no hurry, I’ll wait a little longer. He’ll stay there in his apartment, he’s not going to run away or leave. May every second seem long to him, may he count them one by one, may he read a few pages of a book without taking anything in, aimlessly turn the TV on and then off again, grow exasperated, prepare or memorize what he’s going to say to me, may he go out on to the landing every time he hears the lift and be disappointed when it stops before it reaches his floor or goes straight past. What can he possibly want to discuss with me? Those are the words he used, vacuous, meaningless words, a kind of stock phrase which usually conceals something else, the trap one lays for a person so that he or she feels important and, at the same time, curious.’ And after a few more minutes, I thought: ‘Why did I agree? Why didn’t I say No, why don’t I run away from him and hide, or, rather, why don’t I simply report him? Why, even knowing what I know, did I agree to see him, to listen to him if he wants to explain himself, and probably go to bed with him if he suggests doing so with the merest gesture or caress, or even with that prosaic, male tilt of the head in the direction of the bedroom, not even bothering with any flattering, intervening words, being as lazy with his tongue as so many men are.’ I recalled a quote from The Three Musketeers that my father knew by heart in French and which he occasionally recited for no apparent reason, almost like a pet phrase he trotted out to fill a silence, he probably liked the rhythm, the sound and the concision, or perhaps it had impressed him as a boy, the first time he read it (like Díaz-Varela he had studied at a French lycée, San Luis de los Franceses, if I remember rightly). Athos is talking about himself in the third person, that is, he’s telling d’Artagnan his story as if it were that of an old aristocratic friend, who had got married at twenty-five to an innocent, intoxicatingly beautiful young girl of sixteen, ‘belle comme les amours’, so says Athos, who, at the time, was not a musketeer, but the Count de la Fère. While they are out hunting, his very young, angelic wife – whom he had married despite knowing almost nothing about her and without bothering to find out where she came from, never imagining that she had a past to conceal – has an accident, falls from her horse and faints. Rushing to her aid, Athos notices that her dress is constricting her breathing and, to help her breathe more easily, he takes out his dagger and cuts open her dress, thus leaving her shoulder bare. And it is then that he sees the fleur-de-lys with which executioners branded prostitutes or female thieves or perhaps criminals in general, I’m not sure. ‘The angel was a devil,’ declares Athos, adding the somewhat contradictory statement: ‘The poor girl had been a thief.’ D’Artagnan asks him what the Count did, to which his friend replies with succinct coldness (and this was the quotation that my father used to repeat and which I remembered): ‘Le Comte était un grand seigneur, il avait sur les terres droit de justice basse et haute: il acheva de déchirer les habits de la Comtesse, il lui lia les mains derrière le dos et la pendit à un arbre.’ ‘The Count was a great lord, he had the right on his estates to mete out justice both high and low; he tore the rest of the Countess’s dress to shreds, tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree.’ And that, without a moment’s hesitation, without listening to reason or seeking extenuating circumstances, without batting an eyelid, without pity or regret for her youth, that is what the young Athos did to the girl with whom he had fallen so deeply in love that, in his desire to treat her honestly, he had made her his wife, when, as he acknowledges, he could easily have seduced her or taken her by force if he liked; he was, after all, the great lord, and, besides, who would have come to the aid of a stranger, a girl about whom nothing was known except that her true or false name was Anne de Breuil? But no: ‘the fool, the simpleton, the imbecile’ had to marry her, Athos says reproachfully of his former self, the Count de le Fère, as upright as he was fierce, who, as soon as he discovered the deception, the infamy, the indelible stain, abandoned all questions and conflicting feelings, all hesitations and postponements and compassion – he did not stop loving her, though, because he still continued to love her, or at least never fully recovered – and without giving the Countess an opportunity to explain or defend herself, to deny or to persuade, to beg for mercy or to bewitch him again, not even ‘to die hereafter’, as perhaps even the most wretched creature on earth deserves, ‘he tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree’, without wavering for a moment. D’Artagnan is horrified and cries out: ‘Good heavens, Athos, a murder!’ To which Athos replies mysteriously, or, rather, enigmatically: ‘Yes, a murder, nothing more,’ and then calls for more wine and ham, considering the story at an end. What remains mysterious or even enigmatic are those two words ‘nothing more’, ‘pas davantage’ in French. Athos doesn’t refute d’Artagnan’s cry of outrage, he doesn’t justify himself or contradict him, saying: ‘No, it was simply an execution’ or ‘It was an act of justice’; he doesn’t even attempt to make the precipitate, ruthless and presumably solitary hanging of the wife he loved more comprehensible, for doubtless only he and she were there in the middle of a wood, a spur-of-the-moment decision with no witnesses, with no one to advise or help him, no one to whom he could appeal; nor did he say anything along the lines of: ‘He was blind with rage and couldn’t restrain himself; he needed to take his revenge; he regretted it for the rest of his life.’ He admits that it was a murder, yes, but nothing more than that, not something more execrable, as if murder were not the worst conceivable thing or else so common and everyday that it need provoke no feelings of scandal or surprise, which is basically the view of the lawyer Derville, who took on the case of old Colonel Chabert, the living dead man who should have stayed dead, for Derville, like all lawyers, saw ‘the same wicked feelings repeated over and over’, feelings that nothing could correct and which transformed his offices into ‘sewers that can never be washed clean’; murder is something that happens, an act of which anyone is capable and that has been happening since the dawn of time and will continue to do so until, after the last day, no dawn comes, nor is there any time in which to accommodate more murders; murder is something banal and anodyne and commonplace, purely temporal; the world’s newspapers and televisions are full of murders, so why such hysteria, such horror, such outrage? Yes, a murder. Nothing more.

‘Why can’t I be like Athos or like the Count de la Fère, as he was initially and then ceased to be?’ I wondered as I sat in the Embassy tea rooms, wrapped in the continuous buzz coming from ladies talking very fast and from the occasional idle diplomat. ‘Why can’t I see things with that same clarity and act accordingly, and go to the police or to Luisa and tell them what I know, enough for them to revisit the crime and investigate and track down Ruibérriz de Torres, that would be a start? Why aren’t I capable of tying the hands of the man I love behind his back and simply hanging him from a tree, if I know that he has committed an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries to protect him and hide his face, making use of a poor, crazed wretch, a witless beggar who could not defend himself and would always be at his mercy? No, it isn’t up to me to act with such ruthless rigour because I do not have the right to mete out justice high and low, and, besides, the dead man cannot speak, whereas the living can, he can explain himself, persuade and argue, and is even capable of kissing me and making love to me, while the former can neither see nor hear, but lies rotting in the grave and cannot answer or influence or threaten, nor give me the slightest pleasure; nor can he call me to account or feel disappointment or look at me accusingly with an expression of infinite sadness and immense grief, he cannot even brush my skin or breathe on me, there is nothing to be done with him.’





I finally plucked up enough resolve, or perhaps it was merely boredom or a desire to rid myself of the fear that assailed me now and then, or impatience to see the old me who continued to love and who had not yet entirely vanished and still prevailed over the sullied and the sombre, like the living image of a dead person, even one who had died a long time ago. I asked for the bill, paid and left and started walking in the direction I knew so well, towards the apartment I will never forget, even though I didn’t visit it so very often and even though it no longer exists – not, at least, as far as I’m concerned, given that Díaz-Varela no longer lives there. I was still walking slowly, in no hurry to arrive, I walked as if I were out for a stroll, rather than heading for a particular place where someone had been waiting for me for quite a while now in order to discuss something, that is, to question me again or to tell or perhaps ask me something, or, possibly, to silence me. Another quotation from The Three Musketeers surfaced in my memory, one that my father did not quote, but which I knew in Spanish, for things that impress us as children endure like a fleur-de-lys engraved on our imagination: the marked woman who was hanged from a tree and began life as Anne de Breuil, who spent a brief period in a convent until she ran away, then, very fleetingly, became the Countess de la Fère, and was known later on as Charlotte, Lady Clarick, Lady de Winter, Baroness of Sheffield (as a child, I was amazed that anyone could change her name so often in a single lifetime), and who had become fixed in literature as plain ‘Milady’, no, that marked woman had not died, just as Colonel Chabert had not died. But while Balzac explained in great detail the miracle of the Colonel’s survival and how he had dragged himself out from beneath the pyramid of ghosts into which he had been thrown after the battle, Dumas, perhaps under pressure of deadlines and the constant demand for action, and, of course, freer or perhaps sloppier as a narrator, had not bothered to explain – at least as far as I could recall – how the devil that young woman had managed to escape death after that impassioned hanging dictated by rage and wounded honour disguised as a great lord’s right to mete out justice high and low. (He also never explained how a husband could fail to have noticed the fatal fleur-de-lys while in the marital bed.) Making the most of her great beauty, her cunning and her lack of scruples – and, one imagines, her bitter resentment – she had become a powerful figure, who enjoyed the favour of Cardinal Richelieu no less, and had heaped up crimes without a flicker of remorse. During the novel, she commits a few more crimes, becoming possibly the most evil, venomous, ruthless female character in the history of literature, and, as such, has since been imitated ad nauseam. She and Athos meet in a chapter ironically entitled ‘A Conjugal Scene’, and it takes her a few seconds to recognize, with a shudder, her former husband and executioner, whom she had assumed dead, just as he had assumed his beloved wife to be dead, and with rather more reason. ‘You have already crossed my path,’ says Athos, or words to that effect, ‘I thought I had crushed you, Madame, but either I am much mistaken or hell has resuscitated you.’ And he adds, in response to his own doubt: ‘Yes, hell has made you rich, hell has given you another name, hell has almost fashioned another face for you; but it has not erased the stains on your soul or the mark on your body.’ And shortly after that comes the quote I remembered as I walked towards Díaz-Varela for the last or next-to-last time: ‘You believed me dead, didn’t you, just as I believed you to be dead. Our position is indeed a strange one; we have both lived up until now only because we believed each other to be dead, and because a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although sometimes a memory can be a devouring thing.’

If those words had stayed in my mind, or my mind had retrieved them, it was because, as we grow older, Athos’s words ring ever truer: we can live with a feeling resembling peace or are, at least, capable of carrying on living when we believe that the person who caused us terrible pain or grief is dead and no longer exists on earth, when he is only a memory and not a living creature, no longer a real being who breathes and still walks the world with his poisoned steps, and whom we might meet again and see; someone, if we knew he had been found – if we knew he was still here – from whom we would fly at all costs, or have the even more mortifying experience of making him pay for his evil deeds. The death of the person who wounded us or made our life a living death – an exaggerated expression that has become something of a cliché – is not a complete cure nor does it enable us to forget, Athos himself carried his remote grief about with him beneath his disguise as a musketeer and his new personality, but it does appease us and allow us to live, breathing becomes easier when we are left only with a lingering remembrance and the feeling that we have settled our accounts with this the only world, however much the memory still hurts us whenever we summon it up or it resurfaces without being called. On the other hand, it can be unbearable knowing that we still share air and time with the person who broke our heart or deceived or betrayed us, with the person who ruined our life or opened our eyes too wide or too brutally; it can have a paralysing effect knowing that the same creature still exists and has not been struck down or hanged from a tree and could, therefore, reappear. That is another reason why the dead should not return, at least those whose departure brings us relief and allows us to carry on living, if you like, as ghosts, having buried our former self: so it was with Athos and Milady, with the Count de la Fère and Anne de Breuil, who could continue their lives thanks to their shared belief that the other was dead and, being incapable of breathing, could no longer make so much as a leaf tremble; as with Madame Ferraud, who started her new life unobstructed because, as far as she was concerned, her husband, Colonel Chabert, was only a memory and not even a devouring one.

‘If only Javier had died,’ I found myself thinking that evening, while I took one step after another. ‘If only he were to die right now and didn’t answer when I ring the bell because he’s lying on the floor, forever motionless, unable to discuss anything with me and with me unable to speak to him. If he were dead, all my doubts and fears would be dispelled, I wouldn’t have to hear his words or wonder what to do. Nor could I fall into the temptation of kissing him or going to bed with him, deluding myself with the idea that it would be the last time. I could keep silent for ever without worrying about Luisa, still less about justice, I could forget about Deverne, after all, I never actually knew him, or only by sight for several years, during the time it took me to eat my breakfast each morning. If the person who robbed him of his life loses his own life and thus also becomes a mere memory and if there’s no one to accuse him, the consequences are less important and then what does it matter what happened. Why say or tell anything, indeed, why try to find out the truth, keeping silent is the far easier option, there’s no need to trouble the world with stories of those who are already themselves corpses and therefore deserve a little pity, even if only because they have been stopped in their tracks, have ended and no longer exist. Our age is not one in which everything must be judged or at least known about; innumerable crimes go unresolved or unpunished because no one knows who committed them – so many that there are not enough pairs of eyes to look out for them – and it is rare to find anyone who can, with any credibility, be placed in the dock: terrorist attacks, the murders of women in Guatemala and in Ciudad Juárez, revenge killings among drug-traffickers, the indiscriminate slaughters that occur in Africa, the bombing of civilians by our aircraft with no pilot and therefore no face … Even more numerous are those that no one cares about and are never even investigated, it’s seen as a hopeless task and their cases are filed away as soon as they happen; and there are still more that leave no trace, that remain unrecorded, undiscovered, and unknown. Such crimes have doubtless always existed and it may be that for many centuries the only crimes that were punished were those committed by servants, by the poor or the disinherited, whereas – with a few exceptions – those committed by the powerful and the rich, to speak in vague and superficial terms, went unpunished. But there was a simulacrum of justice, and, at least publicly, at least in theory, the authorities pretended to pursue all crimes and, on occasion, did actually pursue some, and any cases that were not cleared up were deemed to be “pending”, however, it isn’t like that now: there are too many cases that simply can’t be cleared up or that people possibly don’t want to clear up or else feel that it isn’t worth the effort or the time or the risk. The days are long gone when accusations were uttered with extreme solemnity and sentences handed out with barely a tremor in the voice, as Athos did twice with his wife, Anne de Breuil, first as a young man and later when he was older: he was not alone the second time, but in the company of the other three musketeers, Porthos, d’Artagnan and Aramis, and Lord de Winter, to whom he delegated authority, and a masked man in a red cloak who turned out to be the executioner from Lille, the same man who ages before – in another life, on another person – had branded the shameful fleur-de-lys on Milady’s shoulder. Each of them makes his accusation and all begin with a formula that is unimaginable today: “Before God and before men I accuse this woman of having poisoned, of having murdered, of having caused to be assassinated, of having urged me to murder, of having afflicted someone with a strange disorder and brought about their death, of having committed sacrilege, of having stolen, of having corrupted, of having incited to crime …” “Before God and before men.” No, ours is not a solemn age. And then Athos, perhaps pretending to delude himself, in order to believe, in vain, that this time he was not the one judging or condemning her, asks each of the other men, one by one, what sentence he is demanding for the woman. To which they answer one after the other: “The penalty of death, the penalty of death, the penalty of death, the penalty of death.” Once the sentence had been heard, it was Athos who turned to her and, as master of ceremonies, said: “Anne de Breuil, Countess de la Fère, Milady de Winter, your crimes have wearied men on earth and God in heaven. If you know a prayer, say it now, because you have been condemned and are going to die.” Anyone reading this scene as a child or in early youth will always remember it, can never forget it, nor what comes next: the executioner ties the hands and feet of the woman who is still “belle comme les amours”, picks her up and carries her to a boat, in which he crosses to the other side of the river. During the crossing, Milady manages to untie the rope binding her legs and, when they reach the other shore, she jumps out and begins to run, but immediately slips and falls to her knees. She must know she is lost then, because she doesn’t even try to get up, but stays in that posture, her head bowed and her hands bound together, we’re not told whether in front or behind, as they had been when, as a young girl, she was killed for the first time. The executioner of Lille raises his sword and lowers it, thus putting an end to the creature and transforming her for ever into a memory, whether a devouring one or not, it doesn’t really matter. Then he removes his red cloak, spreads it on the ground, lays the body on it, throws in the head, ties the cloak by its four corners, loads the bundle on his shoulder and carries it back to the boat. Halfway across, where the river is deepest, he drops the body in. Her judges watch from the bank as the body disappears, they see how the waters open for a moment then close over it. But that was in a novel, as Javier pointed out to me when I asked what had happened to Chabert: “What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.” That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else … ‘Yes, if only Javier had died and become merely a memory too,’ I thought again. ‘That would save me from my problems of conscience and from my fears, my doubts and temptations and from having to make a decision, from my feelings of love and from my need to talk. And from what awaits me now, the scene I’m walking towards, and which will perhaps bear some resemblance to a conjugal scene.’