The Infatuations

I remained silent, for longer than I wished. I wasn’t sure how to respond, and this time he had left a pause as if prompting me to say something. In just a few sentences, Díaz-Varela had dismissed and demeaned my feelings and revealed his, piercing me with a small, entirely unnecessary barb, for I already knew how he felt despite never having heard him speak so clearly on the subject, and certainly not in such wounding terms. However idiotic they might be, and all feelings are idiotic as soon as you describe or explain or simply give voice to them, he had deemed mine to be far inferior in quality to his feelings for another person, but how could he compare? What did he know about me, always so silent, so prudent? So meek and submissive, so lacking in aspiration, so little inclined to compete and fight, or, rather, not inclined at all. I was not, of course, capable of planning and commissioning a murder, but who knows what might have happened later on, had it festered away for years, our present relationship, or rather the relationship that had existed up until two weeks ago, when everything changed after that conversation with Ruibérriz, the conversation I had overheard. If I hadn’t eavesdropped on them, Díaz-Varela could have continued to wait indefinitely for Luisa’s slow recovery and her predicted falling in love and, meanwhile, not have replaced or discarded me, and I could have continued meeting him on the same terms. And then who wouldn’t start wanting more, who wouldn’t begin to grow impatient and disgruntled, and feel that with the passing of all those identical months and years, with the mere accumulation of time, he or she had acquired certain rights as if something as insignificant and neutral as the passage of the days could be considered some kind of merit mark for the one traversing or perhaps enduring them and neither giving up nor giving in. The person who never expected anything ends up making demands, the person who was all devotion and modesty turns tyrant and iconoclast, the person who once begged for smiles or attention or kisses from her beloved plays hard to get and grows proud, and is miserly with her favours to that same beloved, who has succumbed to the drip-drip of time. The passing of time exacerbates and intensifies any storm, even though there wasn’t the tiniest cloud on the horizon at the beginning. We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Each morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday – the balance of power – that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us. And yet quite the opposite is true, but time conceals this from us with its treacherous minutes and its sly seconds, until a strange, unthinkable day arrives, when nothing is as it always was: when two daughters, their father’s beneficiaries, leave him to die in a garret, without a penny to his name; when wills deemed unfavourable to the living are burned; when mothers rob their children and husbands their wives; when a wife, in order that she might live contentedly with her lover, kills her husband or else uses her husband’s love to drive him into madness or imbecility; when a woman administers lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to benefit the bastard child she bore the man she now loves, although who knows how long that love will last; when a widow who inherited position and wealth from her soldier husband fallen at the battle of Eylau in the coldest of cold winters denies that she knows him and accuses him of being an impostor when, after many years and many hardships, he manages to return from the dead; when Luisa will beg Díaz-Varela, whom she took such a long time to see, will beg him, please, not to leave her, but to remain by her side, and when she will abjure her former love for Deverne, which will be dismissed as nothing and not to be compared with the love she now professes for this second, unfaithful husband, who is now threatening to leave her; when Díaz-Varela will implore me not to go, but to stay and share his pillow for ever, and will joke about the stubborn, ingenuous love he felt for Luisa for so very long and that led him to murder a friend, and will say to himself and to me: ‘How blind I was, why could I not see you, when there was still time’; a strange, unimaginable day, on which I will plan to murder Luisa, who stands between us and doesn’t even know that there is an ‘us’ and against whom I bear no grudge, and I might just see it through, because on that day, everything would be possible. Yes, it’s all a matter of time, infuriating time, but our time is over, time, as far as we’re concerned, has run out, time, which consolidates and prolongs even while, without our noticing, it is simultaneously rotting and ruining us and turning the tables on us. I will not see that day, because for me, as for Lady Macbeth, there is no ‘hereafter’, fortunately or unfortunately, I am safe from that beneficent or harmful deferral.

‘Who told you I’m not in love with you? What do you know? I’ve never talked to you about it. And you’ve never asked me.’

‘Oh, come on now, don’t exaggerate,’ he replied, unsurprised. His last words were pure acting, he knew exactly how I felt or had felt up until two weeks before. I may well have felt the same then, but my feelings were stained or besmirched by things entirely incompatible with the state of being in love. He knew exactly how I felt, the loved one always does, if he’s in his right mind and isn’t himself in love, because in that case he won’t be able to tell and will misinterpret the signs. But he wasn’t in love, and didn’t want me to love him, and, to be fair, had done little to encourage me. – ‘If you were in love with me,’ he added, ‘you wouldn’t be so horrified by what you’ve discovered, nor would you have drawn your conclusions so quickly. You would be in suspense, waiting for me to provide some acceptable explanation. You would be thinking that perhaps, for some reason unknown to you, I had no alternative. And you would be prepared to accept that, you would be happy to deceive yourself.’

I ignored these cunning comments, which were intended to lead me down a previously chosen path. I responded only to the first of them.

‘Maybe I’m not exaggerating. As you well know, I may not be exaggerating at all. It’s just that you don’t want the responsibility, although I realize that isn’t the right word to use: no one is responsible for someone else falling in love with them. Don’t worry, I’m not making you responsible for some idiotic feelings that are entirely my concern. But you will, nevertheless, perceive them as a minor burden. If Luisa were aware of the intensity of your feelings for her (it may be that in her current self-absorbed state, she sees only the surface, your gallantry and affection for the widow of your best friend), let alone if she found out what those feelings had led to, then she would experience them as an unbearable burden. She might even kill herself, unable to carry that burden. That is one of the reasons I will say nothing to her. You don’t need to worry on that score, I’m not that heartless.’ – I had not yet made a firm decision on the subject, my intentions kept wavering as I listened to him and grew angry or perhaps not angry (‘I’ll think about it later on, calmly and coolly, when I’m alone,’ I thought), but it was as well to reassure him so that I could leave there without feeling that a threat, either present or future, hung over me, although that feeling would never entirely disappear, I imagined, for as long as I lived. And I ventured to say teasingly, because teasing seemed like a good idea: ‘Of course, that would be the best way of getting rid of her, to do what you did to Desvern, although without soiling my hands quite as much.’

Far from appreciating the humour of my remark – a very black humour it must be said – he became very serious and almost defensive. This time he really did roll up his sleeves still further, very energetically too, as if he were preparing to go into combat or about to attack me physically, he rolled them up above his biceps as if he were some exotic romantic lead from the 1950s, Ricardo Montalbán or Gilbert Roland, one of those attractive men now forgotten by almost everyone. He wasn’t going into combat, of course, nor was he going to hit me, that wasn’t in his nature. What I had said, I realized, had wounded him deeply and he was about to refute it.

‘Don’t forget, I didn’t soil my hands. I took every care not to. You don’t know what it means to really soil your hands. You don’t know to what extent delegating distances you from the deed, you have no idea how helpful it is to have intermediaries. Why else, do you think, people do delegate, if they can, when confronted by any situation that’s in any way uncomfortable or unpleasant. Why do you think lawyers are called in whenever there’s a dispute or a divorce? It’s not only to take advantage of their knowledge and skill. Why do you think actors and actresses and writers have agents, and bullfighters and boxers have managers? When, that is, boxing still existed. These modern-day puritans will end up doing away with everything. Why do you think businessmen hire frontmen, or why any criminal with enough money sends in the heavies or hires a hit man? It’s not just because they, quite literally, don’t want to soil their hands, nor out of cowardice, so as not to have to face the consequences or risk getting hurt. Most of those who turn to such people as a matter of course (unlike people like myself, for whom it’s very much the exception) began by doing their own dirty work and may have been very good at it: they’re accustomed to handing out beatings and even shooting people, and so it’s unlikely they would emerge the worse for wear from any such encounter. Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them? Of course, unlike criminals, they wouldn’t be able to do the work of the soldiers, but it’s more than that. In all these cases, mediation, keeping a distance from actual events and being privileged enough not to have to witness them, all provide scope for a high degree of autosuggestion. It seems incredible, but that’s how it works, as I’ve found out for myself. You manage to convince yourself that you have nothing to do with what is happening on the ground, or in the head-on confrontation, even if you provoked or unleashed it and even if you paid for it to happen. The man suing for divorce ends up persuading himself that the mean, vicious demands he is making come not from him, but from his lawyer. Famous actors and writers, bullfighters and boxers apologize for the economic aspirations of their agents or the difficulties they create, as if their agents were not simply obeying orders and doing as they were told. When a politician sees on television or in the press the effects of the bombardments he initiated or learns of the atrocities his army is committing, he shakes his head in disapproval and disgust, he wonders how his generals can be so stupid, so inept, why they can’t control their men when the fighting begins and they lose sight of them, but he never himself feels guilty about what is going on thousands of kilometres away, without him actually taking part or witnessing events: he has instantly forgotten that it was his decision, that he gave the order to advance. It’s the same with the capo who unleashes his thugs: he reads or is told that they have overstepped the mark, that they didn’t confine themselves, in accordance with his wishes, to bumping off a few people, but went on to cut off heads and balls, stuffing the latter in their victims’ mouths; he shudders slightly when he imagines this and thinks what sadists his henchmen are, forgetting that he left them free to use their imaginations and their hands as they wished, saying: “We want to terrify people, to teach them a lesson and spread panic.”’

Díaz-Varela stopped, as if this long enumeration had left him momentarily drained. He poured himself another drink and took a long, thirsty draught of it. He lit another cigarette. He sat for a while staring at the floor, absorbed in thought. For a few seconds, he looked the very image of the dejected, weary man, possibly full of remorse, even repentant. But none of this had been apparent up until then, either in this latest account or in his other digressions. On the contrary. ‘Why does he associate himself with such individuals?’ I wondered. ‘Why does he summon them up for me, rather than shooing them away? What does he gain by showing me his actions in such a repellent light? You can always find some way of embellishing the most heinous crime, of finding some minimal justification for it, a not entirely sinister reason that at least allows one to understand it without feeling sick. “That’s how it works, as I’ve found out for myself,” he said, including himself in the list. I can see the connection with divorced men or bullfighters, but not with cynical politicians or professional criminals. It’s as if, far from looking for palliatives, he wanted to drip-feed me with horror. Perhaps he’s just setting me up so that I’ll embrace any excuse, the excuses that he’ll start offering me at any moment, they’re sure to come along sooner or later, he can’t possibly be owning up to me so frankly about his egotism and his baseness, his treachery, his lack of scruples, he hasn’t even insisted overmuch on his love for Luisa, his passionate need for her, he hasn’t stooped so low as to utter the ridiculous words that nonetheless touch and soften the listener, such as “I can’t live without her, you see. I just couldn’t stand it any more, she’s the air that I breathe, and I was suffocating with no hope of ever making her mine, whereas now I do have some hope. I didn’t wish Miguel ill at all, on the contrary, he was my best friend, but he was, unfortunately, standing in the way of my one life, the only life I want, and if something or someone is stopping you from living, then he has to be removed.” People accept the excesses of those in love, not all excesses, of course, but there are occasions when it’s enough to say that someone is or was very much in love to make all other reasons irrelevant. “I loved her so much,” someone says, “that I didn’t know what I was doing,” and people nod sagely, as if he or she were talking about feelings familiar to everyone. “She lived entirely for him and through him, he was the only man in the world as far as she was concerned, she would have sacrificed everything, nothing else mattered to her,” and this is taken as an excuse for all kinds of vile, ignoble acts and even as a reason to forgive. Why doesn’t Javier lay more stress on his morbid obsession, saying that it could happen to anyone? Why doesn’t he take refuge in that? He takes it for granted, but doesn’t place much emphasis on it, he doesn’t put it first, instead he associates himself with these cold, despicable characters. Yes, perhaps that’s what it is: the more he shocks me and fills me with panic, and the more I feel the pull of vertigo, the more likely I will be to cling to any extenuating circumstance. And if that is what he intends, he would be quite right. I keep hoping for some such mitigating factor to appear, some explanation or extenuating circumstance that will lift a little of the weight off me. I can’t cope with the facts as they stand and as I imagined them to be on that wretched day when I eavesdropped from behind that door. I was on the other side of the door then, and will never be there again, that much is certain. Even if Javier were to come to me and put his arms around me and caress me with fingertips and lips. Even if he were to whisper in my ear words he had never said before. Even if he were to say to me: “How blind I’ve been, why could I not see you before, but there’s still time.” Even if he were to lead me over to that door and beg me.’





Not that any of those things would happen. Not even if I were to blackmail him or threaten to tell someone or even if I were to beg him. He was still strangely distant, absorbed in his thoughts, still staring at the floor. I shook him out of his introspection rather than seizing the chance to escape, it was too late for that: after hearing what he had to say, I wished I had stuck to my sombre conjectures and to knowing nothing for certain; but now I wanted him to finish, to see if his story was less dreadful and less sad than it seemed.

‘And what did you think? What did you manage to persuade yourself had happened? That you had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of your best friend? That’s rather hard to believe, isn’t it? However heavily you rely on autosuggestion.’

He looked up and rolled his sleeves down as far as his forearms again, as if he suddenly felt cold. But he didn’t entirely emerge from the depression or exhaustion that seemed to have come over him. He spoke more slowly, less confidently and energetically, his eyes fixed on my face, and yet they still seemed slightly unfocused, as though he were looking at me from a long way off.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course, deep down, you know the truth, how could you not, how could you possibly not know? You know that you’ve set a mechanism in motion, one that you have the power to stop, nothing is inevitable until it has happened and until the “hereafter” that we all take for granted has ceased to exist for someone else. But, as I said before, that’s the mysterious thing about delegating. I gave Ruibérriz a commission to carry out, and from that moment on, I felt that the whole business was somehow less mine, or was, at least, shared. Ruibérriz gave orders to someone else to get the gorrilla a mobile phone and then keep phoning him, they both called him in fact, taking it in turns, because two voices are more convincing than one, and together they set his brain buzzing; I don’t even know quite how that third party manages to provide him with the mobile, I suppose he leaves it in the car the man was living in, so that it just appears there as if by magic, and presumably he does the same with the knife later on, so as not to be seen, it was impossible to anticipate how it would all turn out. At any rate, that other man, that third party, doesn’t know my name or my face and I don’t know his, and his anonymous intervention places me at a still further remove from it all, as I said, it’s less mine, and my role in it all grows increasingly blurred, it’s not entirely in my hands, but more and more dispersed. Once you activate something and pass it over to someone else, it’s as if you let it go and got rid of it, I don’t know if you can understand that, possibly not, you’ve never had to arrange and organize a death.’ – I picked up on the words ‘had to’, what an absurd idea, he hadn’t ‘had to’ do anything, no one had forced him. And he had said ‘a death’, using the most neutral term possible, not ‘a homicide’ or ‘a murder’ or ‘a crime’. – ‘You get brief reports on how it’s going and you supervise things, but you’re not directly involved. Sure, a mistake happens, Canella attacks the wrong man and news of that reaches me, even Miguel mentions poor Pablo’s misfortune, never suspecting that it could have had anything to do with the favour he’d asked of me, never connecting the two things, never imagining that I might be behind it, or if he did, he concealed the fact very well, that’s something I’ll never know.’ – I realized that I was getting lost (what favour? connecting what two things? concealing what?), but he continued as if he had suddenly got a second wind and didn’t give me a chance to interrupt. – ‘That idiot Ruibérriz doesn’t trust the other man after that, and because I pay him well and he owes me various favours, he takes over and goes to see the gorrilla himself, just to make sure that Canella doesn’t make the same mistake again and end up stabbing poor Pablo the chauffeur to death, thus ruining all our plans, he visits him cautiously, in secret, and it’s true that there’s never anyone hanging around in the street at night, but it means that the gorrilla sees him in that leather coat of his, I really hope he’s thrown them all away by now. So, yes, I hear, for example, about that particular incident, but to me, it’s just a story recounted to me in the safety of my own home, I don’t move from here, I never go to that street, I don’t soil myself in any way, and so I feel that none of what happens is wholly my responsibility or my work, they are simply remote events. Don’t be so surprised, others go still further: there are those who order somebody’s removal and don’t even want to know about the actual process, the steps taken, the “how”. They trust that in the end some minion will come and tell them that the person is dead. He was the victim of an accident, they say, or of medical negligence, or he threw himself off a balcony or was run over or he got mugged one night and, unfortunately, fought back and was killed by his attackers. And yet, strange though it may seem, the same person who ordered that death, without specifying how or when, can exclaim with relative sincerity or a certain degree of surprise: “Oh dear God, how dreadful!” almost as if he’d had nothing to do with it and fate had conspired to carry out his desires. That’s what I tried to do, to keep as far away from it all as possible, even though I had, in part, planned the “how”: Ruibérriz found out about the big drama in the beggar’s life, the thing that really angered and affronted him, and whether he found this out by chance or not, I don’t know, but, one day, he came to me with this story about how the guy’s daughters had been forced or tricked into prostitution, Ruibérriz’s into all kinds of things and has contacts in every social sphere, and so the plan was mine or, rather, ours. Nevertheless, I kept my distance, kept right out of it: there was Ruibérriz, along with that third party, his friend, and, above all, there was Canella, who would not only decide when to act, he could also decide to do nothing, so really it was completely out of my hands. So much is delegated, so much is left for others to do, so much is left to chance, there’s so much distance between instigator and act, that it’s easy enough to tell yourself, once it’s happened: “What have I got to do with that, with what some homeless nutter has done at an hour and in a street everyone assumes to be safe? He was obviously a public danger, a menace, he shouldn’t have been on the loose, especially not after Pablo was attacked. It’s all the fault of the authorities who refuse to take action, that and sheer bad luck, of which there’s never any shortage in the world.”’

Díaz-Varela got up, took a turn about the room, then again came up behind me, put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed them gently, but not in the way he had gripped my shoulder two weeks before, when he and I were both standing up, that hand, then, had been intent on keeping me there, like a great slab of stone. I wasn’t afraid this time, it felt like an affectionate gesture, and his tone of voice was different too. It had become tinged with a kind of sorrow or slight despair – slight because it was retrospective – in the face of something irremediable, and he had abandoned all cynicism, as if it had been pure artifice. He had started to mix up his tenses too, present and past and imperfect, as happens sometimes when someone relives a bad experience or is recounting a process from which he only believes he has emerged, but is not yet sure. His voice had gradually, not suddenly, taken on a truthful tone, and that made him more credible. But perhaps that was fake too. It’s horrible not knowing, because what had gone before had also seemed true, and he had spoken in the same tone then, well, not the same perhaps, it had been different, but equally truthful. Now he had fallen silent and I could ask him about the incomprehensible references he had let slip. Or perhaps he hadn’t let them slip at all, but had introduced them deliberately and was awaiting my reaction, knowing that I would pick up on them.

‘You mentioned Deverne asking you a favour and about him possibly concealing something. What favour was that? What would he have to conceal? I don’t understand.’ – And as I said that, I thought: ‘What the hell am I doing, how can I talk about all this so politely, how can I question him like this about the details of a murder? And why are we talking about it at all? It’s hardly a proper topic of conversation, or only if it had happened many years ago, as with the story about Anne de Breuil who had been killed by Athos before he was Athos. Whereas Javier is still Javier, and hasn’t had time to be transformed into someone else.’

He again gently squeezed my shoulders, it was almost a caress. I had not turned round when I spoke, I didn’t need to be able to see him now, that touch was neither unfamiliar nor worrying. I was filled by a sense of unreality, as if this were another day, a day prior to my eavesdropping, when I still knew nothing and there was no threat, no horror, only provisional pleasure and the resigned waiting of the unrequited lover, waiting to be either dismissed or driven from his side when it was Luisa’s turn to be in love, or when she at least allowed him to fall asleep each night and wake each morning in her bed. It occurred to me now to think that this would not be long in coming. I hadn’t seen her for ages, not even from a distance. Who knows how she would have evolved, if she had recovered from the blow, or to what extent Díaz-Varela had managed to inoculate her with his presence, if he had made himself indispensable to her in her solitary widow’s life with children who sometimes weighed on her, when she wanted to shut herself away and cry and do nothing. Just as I had tried to become indispensable to him in his solitary bachelor’s life, except that I had done so timidly and without conviction or determination, as if admitting defeat right from the start.





On another day, Díaz-Varela’s hands might have slid from my shoulders down to my breasts, and not only would I have allowed him to do that, I would have mentally encouraged him: ‘Undo a couple of buttons and slip your hands under my jersey or my blouse,’ we think to ourselves, or even plead. ‘Come on, do it now, what are you waiting for?’ And an impulse flashed through me to ask him, silently, of course, to do just that, such is the force of expectation, the irrational persistence of desire, which often makes us forget the circumstances and who is who, and erases the opinion we have of the person arousing our desire, and, at that moment, my predominant feeling was contempt. But he wouldn’t give in to that plea today, he was even more aware than I was that this was not another day, but the one on which he had chosen to tell me about his conspiracy and his actions and then say goodbye to me for ever, because after that conversation, we could not continue to meet, that would be impossible, and we both knew that. And so he did not slowly slide his hands down, but quickly lifted them up like someone who has been told off for taking liberties or overstepping the bounds – although neither I nor my attitude had said anything – and he returned to his armchair, sat down in front of me again and fixed me with his hazy or indecipherable eyes that never entirely fixed on anything and with that same hint of sorrow or retrospective despair that had appeared in his voice shortly before and that would not leave him now, neither his tone of voice nor his gaze, as if he were saying to me once more, not impatiently but regretfully: ‘Why don’t you understand?’

‘Everything I’ve told you is true, as regards the facts,’ he said. ‘Except that I haven’t told you the most important thing. That is something no one else knows, or only Ruibérriz, but he only half-knows, because fortunately he doesn’t ask many questions now; he just listens, does as he’s told, follows instructions and gets paid. He’s learned. Life’s difficulties have made him a man who is prepared to do all kinds of things in return for money, especially if the person paying him is an old friend, who isn’t going to drop him in it or betray him or sacrifice him, he’s even learned to be discreet. We really did do it like that, with no guarantee at all that our plan would work, it was almost like tossing a coin, but for the reasons I gave earlier, I didn’t want to use a professional hit man. You drew your own conclusions and I don’t blame you for that, well not entirely, I mean, I understand you in part: if you don’t know the reason for something, you simply have to take things at face value. Nor am I going to deny that I love Luisa or that I intend to stay by her side, to be there if she needs me, if, one day, she finally does forget Miguel and take a few steps in my direction: I’ll be waiting close by, so close that she doesn’t have time for second thoughts or regrets as she takes those steps. I believe that will happen sooner or later, probably sooner, and she will recover, everyone does, because, as I said to you once before, people do, in the end, allow the dead to depart, however fond of them they were, when they realize that their own survival is at risk and that the dead are a great burden; and the worst the latter can do is to resist, to cling to the living and pursue them and stop them moving on, or even come back if they can, as Colonel Chabert did in that novel, souring his wife’s life and causing her more pain than his death in that remote battle ever did.’

‘She caused him far more pain,’ I said, ‘by her denial of him and her cunning ploys to keep him dead, to deprive him of a legal existence and bury him alive for a second time. He had suffered greatly, what was his was his, and it wasn’t his fault that he was still alive or that he still remembered who he was. In that passage you read out to me, the poor man even said: “If my illness had taken from me all memory of my past existence, I would have been happy.”’

But Díaz-Varela was in no mood to discuss Balzac, he wanted to continue his story to the end. ‘What happened is the least of it,’ he had said when he spoke to me about Colonel Chabert. ‘It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.’ Perhaps he thought the same applied to real events, to events in our own lives. That’s probably true for the person experiencing them, but not for other people. Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true. And so he went on as if I had said nothing.

‘Yes, Luisa will emerge from her abyss, you can be sure of that. In fact, she’s already beginning to, a little more with each day that passes, I can sense it and there’s no going back once that process of farewell has begun, that second, final farewell, which is purely mental and pricks our conscience because it feels as if we were dismissing the dead person, which we are. There may be the occasional backward step, depending on how things go or on the occasional stroke of bad luck, but that’s all. The dead only have the energy that the living give them, and if that energy is withdrawn … Luisa will free herself from Miguel, to a far greater degree than she can even imagine right now, and he knew that very well. More than that, he decided to make things easier for her, insofar as he could, and that was partly why he asked me that favour. Only partly. There was, of course, a weightier reason.’

‘What is this favour you keep talking about? What favour?’ I couldn’t help my impatience, I had the feeling that he wanted to draw me in through curiosity.

‘I’m coming to that, because that’s the cause of all this,’ he said. ‘Listen carefully. Months before his death, Miguel experienced a general feeling of lassitude, not significant or serious enough to merit seeing a doctor, he wasn’t worried and was in good health. Soon afterwards, he noticed another trivial symptom, slightly blurred vision in one eye, but he thought it was a temporary thing and delayed visiting an ophthalmologist. When he did, when the blurred vision didn’t clear up on its own, the ophthalmologist made a thorough examination and came up with a very gloomy diagnosis: a large intraocular melanoma, and sent him to a consultant for further tests. The consultant checked him over, gave him a CAT scan, a full-body MRI scan, as well as an extensive array of other tests. His diagnosis was even worse: generalized metastasis throughout the body, or as Miguel told me the doctor told him in his cold, aseptic jargon: “a very advanced metastatic melanoma”, even though Miguel was almost asymptomatic at the time and had no other ailments.’

‘So,’ I thought, ‘Desvern couldn’t have said to Javier, as I had once imagined he might: “No, I don’t foresee any problems, nothing imminent or even impending, nothing concrete, my health’s fine”, quite the contrary. At least that’s what Javier is saying now.’ That evening, I was still calling him Javier, although that would soon change, but at the time, I had not yet decided to think of him and refer to him by his surname alone, in order to distance myself from our past proximity or to at least allow myself that illusion.

‘Right, and what does all this mean exactly, apart, obviously, from it being very bad news?’ I asked, trying to give a note of scepticism or incredulity to my question: ‘Go on, go on, keep talking, but I’m not going to swallow this last-minute story of yours that easily, I have a pretty good idea where you’re going with this.’ But at the same time, I was already intrigued by what he had started to tell me, regardless of whether it was true or not. Díaz-Varela often amused me and always interested me. And so I added, speaking now with genuine, credulous concern: ‘But can that happen, can you have such a serious illness with almost no symptoms? Well, I know you can, of course, but that serious? And completely out of the blue like that? And so advanced? It makes you shudder to think of it, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, it can happen and it happened to Miguel. But don’t worry, that particular form of melanoma is, fortunately, very infrequent and very rare. Nothing like that will happen to you. Or to Luisa or to me or to Professor Rico, that would be too much of a coincidence.’ – He had noticed my instantaneous fear of illness. He waited for his baseless prediction to take effect and reassure me as if I were a child, he waited a few seconds before going on. – ‘Miguel didn’t say a word to me about this until he had all the facts, and he didn’t even tell Luisa about the early stages, when there was as yet nothing to fear: not even that he had an appointment with an ophthalmologist, nor that his vision was slightly blurred, because the last thing he wanted was to worry her unnecessarily, and she’s very easily worried. And he certainly didn’t tell her about what followed. In fact, he didn’t tell anyone anything, with one exception. After the consultant’s diagnosis, he knew his illness was terminal, but the consultant didn’t give him all the information, not in detail, or perhaps he tried to play it down, or perhaps Miguel didn’t even ask, I don’t know, he preferred to ask a doctor friend who he knew would hide nothing from him: an old school friend, a cardiologist, who gave him the occasional check-up and whom he trusted completely. He went to see him with his final diagnosis and said: “Tell me what I can expect, tell me straight. Talk me through the various stages. Tell me how it’s going to be.” And his friend described to him a prospect that he found quite simply unbearable.’

‘Right,’ I said again, like someone determined to doubt, to disbelieve. But I couldn’t keep up that tone. I tried, I did my best, and finally managed to come out with these completely neutral words: ‘And what were those terrible stages?’ – Although that neutrality was a lie; the description of the whole process, of the discovery, terrified me.

‘It wasn’t just that there was no cure, given how widely the disease had spread throughout his organism. There was barely any palliative care they could give him, or the treatment that was available was almost worse than the illness itself. Without any treatment, his friend gave him four to five months, and not much more with treatment. A course of extraordinarily aggressive chemotherapy with devastating side effects would gain him a little time, but whether that time would be worth gaining was another matter. There was worse, though: the intraocular melanoma distorts the eye and is hideously painful, the pain is apparently unbearable, according to his cardiologist friend, who, true to his word, kept nothing back. The only way to avoid this would be to remove the eye, that is, take it out, what doctors call “enucleation”, according to Miguel, because of the size of the tumour. Do you understand, María? An enormous tumour inside his eye, which pushes outwards and inwards, I suppose; a protuberant eye, an increasingly bulbous forehead and cheekbone; and then a hollow, an empty socket, and that wouldn’t be the final metamorphosis either, even in the best-case scenario, and it wouldn’t even really help.’ – This brief, graphic description increased my feelings of distrust, it was the first time he had resorted to gruesome, imagined details; up until then, he had spoken very soberly. – ‘The patient’s appearance becomes increasingly horrific, and the progressive deterioration is pitiful to see, and it doesn’t just affect the face, of course, everything begins to collapse with alarming rapidity, and all you achieve with the removal of the eye and that brutal chemotherapy are a few more months of life. If you can call it life, that dead or pre-dead life of suffering and deformity, of no longer being yourself, but an anguished ghost who does nothing but enter and leave hospital. One positive thing was that this transformation in appearance wouldn’t happen immediately: he had a month and a half or two months before the facial symptoms would appear or become visible, before other people would notice anything, so he had that amount of time in which to conceal the truth from the world and to pretend.’ – Díaz-Varela’s voice sounded genuinely affected, but he might have merely been affecting that affect. I have to say that he didn’t seem to be when he added in a bitter, doom-laden voice: ‘A month and a half or two months, that was the deadline he gave me.’





I more or less knew what the answer would be, but I asked anyway, because some stories need the encouragement of a few rhetorical questions in order to continue. This particular story would have continued anyway, I simply chivvied it along a little, eager for it to be over as soon as possible, despite my personal interest in it. I wanted to hear the whole thing and then go home and stop hearing it.

‘Why did he give you a deadline?’ However, I couldn’t resist telling him what I could guess he was about to tell me. – ‘Now you’re going to say that he asked you to do what you did to him as a favour: getting him stabbed to death by some nutcase in the middle of the street, is that right? A somewhat disagreeable, roundabout way of committing suicide, given that there are pills you can take and so many other ways too. And it meant putting you and your friends to an awful lot of trouble.’

Díaz-Varela shot me an angry, reproving look; my comments clearly struck him as inappropriate.

‘Let’s just make one thing clear, María, and listen well. I’m not telling you this because I want you to believe me, I really don’t care if you believe me or not, Luisa’s another matter, of course, and I hope never to have such a conversation with her, and that, in part, will depend on you. The only reason I am telling you is because of what happened earlier, that’s all. I don’t like having to do it, as you can imagine. Ruibérriz and I didn’t like doing what we did, which was tantamount to murder really. Well, technically, that’s what it was, and a judge and jury wouldn’t care two hoots about the real reason we did it, and we couldn’t prove that anyway. They base their judgment on the facts and they are what they are, that’s why we were so alarmed when Canella started to talk about mobile phone calls and the rest. It was bad luck, too, that you overheard us that evening, or, rather, that I was stupid enough to allow it to happen. And on the basis of what you heard, you’ve come up with a false or inexact idea of what happened. Naturally, I don’t like that, why would I, and I want you to know the real facts. That’s why I’m telling you, in a personal capacity, because you’re not a judge, and so that you’ll have a better understanding of what lay behind what we did. Then it’s up to you. You can decide what you do with the information. But if you don’t want me to go on, I won’t, I’m not going to force you to listen. It isn’t up to me whether you believe me or not, so if you want, we can stop this conversation right now. If you think you know it all already and don’t want to hear what else I have to say, there’s the door.’

But I did want to hear more. As I said, I wanted to know the end, wanted him to finish his story.

‘No, no, go on. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on, please, everyone has the right to be heard, of course.’ – And I tried to lend a touch of irony to that last ‘of course’. – ‘So why did he give you that deadline?’

In the light of Díaz-Varela’s pained, offended tone, I noticed the faintest of doubts creeping into my mind, even though that is one of the easiest tones to put on or imitate, and the one that almost anyone guilty of anything immediately resorts to. As do the innocent. I realized that the more he told me, the more doubts I would have, and that I certainly wouldn’t leave there with no doubts at all, that’s the problem with letting people talk and explain, which is why we so often try to stop them, in order to preserve our certainties and leave no room for doubts, that is, for lies. Or, needless to say, for the truth. He took a while to answer or to resume speaking, and when he did, he returned to his previous tone of voice, one of sorrow and retrospective despair, which he hadn’t, in fact, completely abandoned, merely adding to it, for a moment, the tone of someone deeply wounded.

‘Miguel had few qualms about dying, if one can say such a thing of a man whose life was going well, who had small children and a wife he loved, or, rather, with whom he was in love. Of course it was a tragedy, as it would be for anyone. But he was always very aware that the fact we are here at all is entirely thanks to an improbable coming-together of various chance events, and when that coming-together ceases, we cannot really complain. People think they have a right to life. Indeed, religions and most countries’ legal systems, even their constitutions, say the same thing, and yet he didn’t see it like that. How can you have a right to something that you neither built nor earned, he used to say. No one can complain about not having been born or not having been in the world before or not having always been in the world, so why should anyone complain about dying or not being in the world hereafter or not remaining in it for ever? He found both points of view equally absurd. We don’t object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance. Even violent deaths, even suicides, depend on chance. And since we were all once denizens of the void or enjoying a state of non-existence, what is so strange or terrible about returning to that state, even though we now have something to compare it with and the capacity to miss what went before? When he found out what was wrong with him, when he knew he was about to die, he was devastated and cursed his ill luck as roundly as the next man, but he also remembered how many others had disappeared at a much younger age than him; how they had been eliminated by that second chance event of their lives, with barely enough time or opportunity to experience anything: young men and women, children, newborns who were never even given a name … In that respect, he showed great integrity and didn’t fall to pieces. What he couldn’t bear, though, what demoralized him and drove him mad, was the manner of his death, the whole dreadful process, the slowness contained within the swift encroachment of the disease, the deterioration, the pain and the deformity, everything, in short, that his doctor friend had warned him about. He wasn’t prepared to go through all that, still less allow his children and Luisa to witness it. Or anyone else, for that matter. He accepted the idea that he would cease to be, but not the senseless torment, the months of suffering for no reason and no reward, the thought of leaving behind him the image of a defenceless, disfigured, one-eyed man. He didn’t see the point, and he did rebel against that, he did protest and rail at fate. It wasn’t in his power to remain in the world, but he could leave it in a more elegant manner than the one in prospect, he would simply have to depart a little early.’ – ‘A case,’ I thought, ‘in which it would be inappropriate to say: “He should have died hereafter,” because that “hereafter” would mean something far worse, involving more suffering and humiliation, less dignity and more horror for his nearest and dearest, so it’s not always desirable for everything to last a little longer, a year, a few months, a few weeks, a few hours, it isn’t always true that we will think it too soon to put an end to things or people, nor is it true that there is never an opportune moment, for there may come a time when we ourselves say: “That’s fine. That’s enough. What comes next will be worse, an abasement, a denigration, a stain,” when we will be brave enough to acknowledge: “This time is over, even though it’s our time.” And even if the ending of things did lie in our hands, everything would go on indefinitely, becoming grubby and contaminated, with no living creature ever dying. We must not only allow the dead to leave when they try to linger or when we hold on to them, we must also let go of the living sometimes.’ And I realized that in thinking this, I was, momentarily and against my will, believing the story that Díaz-Varela was telling me now. We do tend to believe things while we’re hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it’s another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.

‘Why didn’t he just commit suicide?’

Díaz-Varela again looked at me as if I were a child, that is, as if I were an innocent.

‘What kind of question is that!’ he said. ‘Like most people, he was incapable of committing suicide. He didn’t dare, he couldn’t bring himself to decide the “when”: why today and not tomorrow, if today I see no further changes in myself and feel quite well? If that decision were left up to each individual, hardly anyone would ever find the right moment. He wanted to die before the effects of the illness took hold, but there was no way he could put a date on that “before”: as I said, he had a month and a half or two months, possibly a little longer, no one could tell. And, again like most people, he didn’t want to know for certain beforehand when that would happen, he didn’t want to wake up one morning and say to himself: “This is my last day. I won’t see another night.” Even if he got others to help him, he would still know what was going to happen, what they were up to, he would still know the date in advance. His friend mentioned a serious-minded organization in Switzerland called Dignitas, which is run by doctors and is, of course, totally legal (well, legal there), and people from any country can apply to them for an assisted suicide, always assuming there’s sufficient reason, a decision taken by the doctors, not by the person involved. The applicant has to submit an up-to-date medical record, and its accuracy and authenticity are then checked; apparently, except in cases of extreme urgency, they put you through a meticulous preparatory process and, initially, try to persuade you to remain alive with the help of palliative care, if that’s available but for some reason hasn’t already been offered; they make sure you’re in full possession of your mental faculties and aren’t merely suffering a temporary depression, it’s a really excellent place, Miguel told me. Despite all these requirements, his friend didn’t think there would be any objections in his case. He spoke to him about this place as a possible solution, as a lesser evil, but Miguel still felt unable to contemplate it, he just didn’t dare. He wanted to die, but without knowing how or when it was going to happen, not at least with any exactitude.’

‘Who is this doctor friend?’ it occurred to me to ask, forcing myself to suspend the belief that tends gradually to invade us when we listen to someone else’s story.

Díaz-Varela didn’t seem overly surprised, well, perhaps just a little.

‘Do you mean his name? Dr Vidal.’

‘Vidal? But which Vidal? That’s not exactly telling me much. There are loads of Vidals.’

‘What’s wrong? Do you want to check up on him? Do you want to go to him and have him confirm my version of events? Go ahead, he’s a really friendly, helpful guy. I’ve met him a couple of times. His name is Dr Vidal Secanell. José Manuel Vidal Secanell. He’ll be easy enough to find, you just have to look him up on the register of the Medical Association or whatever it’s called, it’s bound to be on the Internet.’

‘And what about the ophthalmologist and the consultant?’

‘That I don’t know. Miguel never mentioned them by name, or if he did I’ve forgotten. I know Vidal because, as I say, he was a childhood friend of Miguel’s. But I don’t know the others. Nevertheless, I shouldn’t imagine it would be that difficult to find out who his ophthalmologist was, if you really want to. Are you going to turn detective? Best not ask Luisa directly, though, unless you’re prepared to tell her the whole story, to tell her the rest. She knew nothing about the melanoma or anything else, that was how Miguel wanted it.’

‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? You’d think it would be less traumatic for her to find out about his illness than see him stabbed to death and bleeding on the ground. You’d think it would be harder to recover from such a violent, vicious death. Or to move on, as people say nowadays.’

‘Possibly,’ said Díaz-Varela. ‘But although that was an important consideration, it was a secondary one at the time. What horrified Miguel was having to go through the phases Vidal had described to him, and having Luisa see him in that state, although, admittedly, that thought wasn’t uppermost in his mind, it was a minor consideration by comparison. When you know your time has come, you tend to be very sunk in yourself and have little thought for other people, even those closest to you, even those you most love, however much you try not to ignore them and not to lose sight of them in the midst of your own tribulations. The knowledge that you’re the only one who’ll be leaving and that they’ll be staying can give rise to a certain degree of annoyance, almost resentment, as if they were somehow removed from and indifferent to it all. So, yes, while he wanted to save Luisa from being a witness to his death, more than that, he wanted to save himself from it. Bear in mind, too, that he didn’t know what form his sudden death would take. He left that to me. He didn’t even know for sure that he would meet a sudden death or would, instead, have no option but to endure the evolution of his illness until the end, or hope that he might get up the courage to throw himself out of a window when he got worse and began to notice his face becoming deformed and to experience terrible pain. I never guaranteed him anything, I never said Yes.’

‘Said Yes to what? Never said Yes to what?’

Díaz-Varela gave me his usual hard look, which somehow never felt hard, but, rather, drew one in. I thought I caught a glimmer of irritation in his eyes, but, like all glimmers, it didn’t last, because he answered me at once and, as he did so, that hard look vanished.

‘What do you think? To his request. “Get rid of me,” he said. “Don’t tell me how or when or where, let it be a surprise, we have a month and a half or two months, find a way and do it. I don’t care what method you use. The quicker the better. The less suffering and pain the better. The sooner the better. Do what you like, hire someone to shoot me, or to run me down as I’m crossing the street, or have a wall collapse on top of me or make my brakes fail or my lights, I don’t know, I don’t want to know or think about it, you do the thinking, whatever you like, whatever you can, whatever occurs to you. You must do me this favour, you must save me from what awaits me otherwise. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m incapable of killing myself or flying to some place in Switzerland knowing that I’m going there in order to die among strangers, I mean, who could possibly agree to such a grim journey, travelling towards your own execution, it would be like dying over and over while you were on the plane and while you were there. I prefer to wake up here each morning with at least a semblance of normality and to carry on with my life while I can, but always with the fear and the hope that this day will be my last. With the uncertainty too, that above all, because uncertainty is the only thing that can help me; and I know I can bear that. What I can’t bear is knowing that it all depends on me. It has to depend on you. Get rid of me before it’s too late, you must grant me this favour.” That, more or less, was what he said to me. He was desperate and terribly afraid too. But he wasn’t out of control. He had thought about it a lot. Almost, you might say, coldly. And he could see no other solution. He really couldn’t.’

‘And what was your answer?’ I asked, and as soon as I had, I realized again that I was thus giving his story some measure of credence, however hypothetical and transient, however much I told myself that my question had really been: ‘And always supposing that what you say is true, and let’s imagine for a moment that it is, what was your answer?’ The truth is, of course, that I didn’t put it that way.

‘At first, I refused point-blank, and wouldn’t even let him continue. I told him it was impossible, that it was simply too much to ask, that you couldn’t expect someone else to perform a task that only you could do. That he should either get up the necessary courage to end his own life or else hire a hit man, it wouldn’t be the first time someone had commissioned and paid for his own execution. He said he was perfectly aware that he lacked the necessary courage, but also that he couldn’t bring himself to hire his own killer and then, inevitably, be aware of the how and, almost, the when: once contact had been established, the hit man would set to work, they’re efficient people and don’t hang about, they do what they have to do, then move on to the next job. That wouldn’t be so very different to making the trip to Switzerland, he said, it would still be his decision, it would mean fixing a specific date for his death and renouncing the minor consolation of uncertainty, and the one thing he was incapable of deciding was whether it should be today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. He would keep putting it off from one day to the next, the days would pass and he still wouldn’t have screwed up the necessary courage, the right moment would never come and then the full force of the disease would fall on him, which was what he wanted to avoid at all costs … And I did understand what he meant; in those circumstances, it’s very easy to say to yourself: “Not yet, not yet. Perhaps tomorrow. Yes, definitely tomorrow. But tonight I’m going to sleep at home, in my bed, with Luisa by my side. Just one more day.”’ – ‘I should die hereafter, and meanwhile linger on a little,’ I thought. ‘After all, there’ll be no coming back. And even if I could come back: the dead should never return.’ – ‘Miguel had many virtues, but he was weak and indecisive. Perhaps we all would be in those circumstances. I imagine I would be too.’

Díaz-Varela stopped talking and looked away as if he were putting himself in his friend’s shoes or remembering the time when he had done so. I had to shake him out of his stupor, regardless of whether he was faking it or not.

‘That was how you reacted at first, you said. And afterwards? What made you change your mind?’

For a few moments, he remained thoughtful, stroking his chin, like someone checking that he was still clean-shaven or that his beard hadn’t started growing again. When he spoke, he sounded very tired, perhaps worn out by his explanations and by that conversation in which he was doing most of the talking. His gaze remained abstracted, and he murmured as if to himself:

‘I didn’t change my mind. I never did. From the first moment, I knew that I had no alternative, that, however hard it was for me, I would have to grant his request. What I said to him was one thing, but what I had to do was quite another. I had to get rid of him, as he put it, because he would never dare to do so, either actively or passively, and what awaited him was truly cruel. He insisted, he begged, he offered to sign a piece of paper accepting full responsibility, he even proposed going to a lawyer. I refused. If I agreed, he would have the feeling that he had signed a kind of contract or pact, he would have taken it as a Yes and I wanted to avoid that, I preferred him to believe that I had said No. In the end, though, I didn’t entirely close the door. I told him that I would think it over, even though I was sure I wouldn’t change my mind. I said he shouldn’t count on it, should never broach the subject with me again or ask about it, that it would be best if, for the moment, we didn’t see or phone each other. It would be impossible for him to resist bringing the subject up again, if not in words, then with a glance, a tone of voice, an expectant look, and I couldn’t bear that: I didn’t want to hear that macabre commission, to have that morbid conversation again. I told him that I would get in touch with him from time to time to find out how he was, that I wouldn’t leave him all alone, and that, meanwhile, he should get on with his life – that is, with his death – but without relying on my participation. He couldn’t involve a friend in such a project, it was up to him to solve the problem. But I allowed him a tiny doubt. I didn’t give him hope, but at the same time I did: enough for him to be able to enjoy the saving grace of uncertainty, so that he would neither entirely rule out my help nor feel that there was any real and imminent threat or that his elimination was in train. That was the only way in which he would be able to continue living what remained of his “healthy” life with a semblance of normality, as he had put it and as was his vain intention. But who knows, perhaps, insofar as it was possible, he did do that, at least to some extent. So much so that he perhaps didn’t even connect the gorrilla’s attack on Pablo or his insults and accusations with his request to me, I can’t possibly know, I don’t know. I did end up calling him sometimes, to ask how he was and if he had experienced any pain or any other symptoms or not yet. We even met on a couple of occasions and he kept strictly to his word, he didn’t raise the topic again or pester me, we acted as though that other conversation had never taken place. But it was as if he were relying on me, I could tell; as if he were waiting for me to dig him out of that hole and deliver the coup de grâce when he was least expecting it, before it was too late, and still saw me as his salvation, if such a word can be used to describe his violent elimination. I hadn’t for one moment agreed to help him, but basically he was right: from the very first instant, as soon as he explained his situation to me, my brain had begun to work. I asked Ruibérriz to help me out and he took charge of setting things in motion, and, well, you know the rest. My mind had to start working and plotting like the mind of a criminal. I had to consider how to go about killing a friend promptly and within a specified time limit without it looking like a murder and without anyone suspecting me. And so, yes, I delegated, used intermediaries, avoided soiling my hands, other people’s wills intervened, I left plenty of loose ends for chance to do with as it wished and detached the deed from myself and my influence so effectively that I came to imagine I had nothing to do with it or only as its instigator. But I was also always aware that, as the instigator, I had to think and act like a murderer. So it’s not really so very strange that you should see me as one. But frankly, María, what you believe really isn’t as important as you might perhaps think.’

Then he got up as if he had finished or didn’t feel like going on, as if he felt that the session was over. I had never seen his lips so pale, despite the many times I had looked at them. The fatigue and dejection, the retrospective despair that had appeared in him a while before, had grown suddenly very marked. He really did seem exhausted, as though he had made not just a verbal effort, but a huge physical effort too, as he had announced, almost at the very start, by rolling up his sleeves. Perhaps someone who had just stabbed a man nine or perhaps ten or sixteen times would look equally exhausted.

‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘a murder, nothing more.’