The Infatuations

Contrary to how I had felt when I was listening to them without seeing them, when Ruibérriz de Torres’s face was still unknown to me, I did not feel afraid of the two men during the brief time I spent in their company, even though the new arrival’s features and manners were hardly reassuring. Everything about him revealed him to be an utter rogue, and yet he was not in the least sinister; he was doubtless capable of a thousand minor despicable deeds, which might lead him to commit worse things from time to time, as if drawn briefly into a neighbouring country, rather as one might make a short incursion into alien territory, an experience that would horrify him if repeated on a daily basis. The two men were clearly not on friendly or harmonious terms, and it seemed to me that far from making them a potentially murderous duo, the presence of one neutralized the dangerousness of the other, and neither of them, I felt, would dare to reveal his suspicions or interrogate me or do anything to me with a witness present, even if that witness was their accomplice in planning a murder. It was as if they had come together purely by chance and only temporarily for that one act, they were certainly not a permanent partnership nor did they have any longer-term plans, as though they had joined forces exclusively to carry out that one now completed enterprise and to face any likely consequences, an alliance of convenience, possibly unwished for by both parties, and in which Ruibérriz had become involved perhaps to earn a little money or to pay off debts, and Díaz-Varela because he knew no other – more crooked – crook, and so had no alternative but to entrust himself to a wide boy. ‘Besides, why would you call me, we haven’t spoken in ages. This had better be important,’ the former had said to the latter when the latter had told him off for not having his mobile phone switched on. They weren’t usually in contact, the intimacy that allowed them to reproach each other came solely from their shared secret or shared guilt, if they felt any guilt, although I didn’t have that impression at all, they had sounded completely devoid of scruples. People feel bound to each other when they commit a crime together, when they conspire or plot, even more so when they put a plan into action. And that does breed a kind of instant overfamiliarity, because the plotters have taken off their masks and can no longer pretend to their fellows that they are not what they are nor that they would never do what they have, in fact, done. They are bound together by that mutual knowledge, rather as clandestine lovers are and even those lovers who are not clandestine and have no need to be, but who opt for discretion, those who believe that their private lives are not the business of the rest of the world, and that there is no reason to tell the world about every kiss and every embrace, as was the case with Díaz-Varela and me, for we kept silent about our affair, indeed, that man Ruibérriz was the first to know anything about it. Every criminal knows what his accomplice is capable of and knows that his accomplice knows exactly the same about him. Every lover knows that the other person has a weak point and that in her presence he can no longer pretend that he doesn’t find her physically alluring, that he finds her repulsive or is indifferent to her, he can no longer pretend that he scorns or rejects her, not at least in the field of carnal relations, a deeply prosaic field in which, much to women’s regret, most men tend to get stuck for far too long – until they get used to us and grow sentimental. Indeed, we’re lucky if our encounters with them have a slightly humorous edge, which is often a first step towards softening even the surliest of men.

If we are irritated by the overfamiliarity of, say, a stranger or an acquaintance after he has spent a brief time in our bed – or we in his bed, it makes no difference – how much more galling must it be between partners in crime, a relationship that must engender a complete lack of respect, especially if the malefactors in question are mere amateurs, ordinary individuals who, just a few days before they had conceived their own vile deeds and doubtless after they had carried them out as well, would have been horrified to hear an account of those deeds as committed by others. The kind of person who, after bringing about a murder or even ordering it, will still think smugly: ‘I’m not a murderer, I certainly don’t consider myself to be one. It’s just that things happen and occasionally one has to intervene at a certain point, it makes no difference if it’s halfway through, at the end or at the beginning, you can’t have one without the other. There are always many factors involved and one factor alone cannot be the cause. Ruibérriz could have refused, as could the man he dispatched to poison the gorrilla’s mind. The gorrilla could have failed to answer the calls to the mobile phone he had in his possession for a time, we gave it to him, we made the calls and managed to convince him that Miguel was the person responsible for prostituting his daughters; he could have ignored those malicious lies or chosen the wrong person to attack and instead stabbed the chauffeur sixteen times, five times fatally – after all, only a few days before, the man had punched the chauffeur. Miguel might have chosen not to drive the car on his birthday and then nothing would have happened, not on that day or perhaps on any other, the necessary elements might never have come together … The tramp might not have had a knife, the one I ordered to be bought for him, it opens so quickly … What responsibility do I bear for that cluster of coincidences, any plans one draws up are only ever attempts and experiments, cards to be turned over one by one, and, more often than not, the card you want doesn’t appear, doesn’t match. The only thing you can be found guilty of is picking up a weapon and actually using it yourself. Everything else is pure contingency, things that one imagines – a bishop in chess making a diagonal move, a knight jumping over another piece – things that one desires, fears, instigates, ideas that one toys with and fantasizes about, and which, sometimes, actually happen. And if they do, they happen even if you don’t want them to or don’t happen even if you yearn for them to happen, at any rate, little depends on us, no intrigue, however carefully woven, is safe from a thread coming loose. It’s like firing an arrow up into the sky in the middle of a field: the normal thing, once the arrow begins its descent, is for the arrow to fall straight to earth, without deviating, without striking or wounding anyone. Or only, perhaps, the archer.’

I noticed this complete lack of mutual respect in the way Díaz-Varela addressed Ruibérriz, even ordering him to leave (after my brief exchange with Ruibérriz, he said bluntly: ‘Right, you’ve taken up quite enough of my time and I can’t neglect my visitor any longer. So clear off, will you, Ruibérriz, scram!’ He must have paid him money or was perhaps still paying him for his services as intermediary, for organizing the murder and keeping abreast of the consequences), and in the way that Ruibérriz ran his eyes over me from the very first moment right up until he left: for he maintained his initial appreciative gaze, understandable when I made my surprise appearance, even after he had realized that this wasn’t the first time I had been there in that bedroom, that’s something one always senses immediately; when he saw that my presence was neither the result of a chance encounter nor a trial run, that I wasn’t a woman who has gone up to a man’s apartment for the evening – an inaugural evening, shall we say, which often ends up being a one-off – just as she might have gone up to the apartment of some other man she fancied, but that I was, how can I put it, ‘taken’ by his friend, at least for the time being, which, as it turned out, was almost the case. Not that this bothered him: he didn’t for a moment moderate his appraising masculine gaze or his salacious, flirtatious, gummy smile, as if unexpectedly seeing a woman in bra and skirt and making her acquaintance was, for him, an investment for the near future and brought with it the hope of meeting me again very soon, alone and in another place, or even asking for my phone number later on from the person who had been obliged, against his will, to introduce us.

‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I said, when I returned to the living room, this time wearing my sweater. ‘I wouldn’t have appeared in that state if I’d known we weren’t alone.’ I understood that I needed to emphasize this in order to dispel any suspicions. Díaz-Varela was still regarding me seriously, almost reprovingly or harshly; not so Ruibérriz.

‘There’s absolutely no need to apologize,’ he said with old-fashioned gallantry. ‘Your attire could not have been more striking. Sadly all too fleeting.’

Díaz-Varela scowled, he was distinctly unamused by everything that had happened: the arrival of his accomplice and the news he had brought with him, my irruption on to the scene and the fact that Ruibérriz and I now knew each other, plus the possibility that I might have heard them through the door, when he thought I was safely asleep; he was doubtless equally displeased by the way Ruibérriz had gazed so covetously at my bra and skirt, or at the little they concealed, and by his subsequent compliments, even though these had been couched in the politest of terms. I felt a childish and, after what I had just discovered, incongruous pleasure – it lasted only an instant – in imagining that Díaz-Varela could feel something resembling or, rather, reminiscent of jealousy in my regard. He was visibly put out and even more so when we were left alone, once Ruibérriz had departed, his coat draped over his shoulders, as he walked slowly towards the lift, as if he were very pleased with his own image and wanted to give me time to admire him from behind: he was clearly an optimist, of the kind who doesn’t believe that he’ll ever get old. Before entering the lift, he turned to us, for we were watching him from the front door like a married couple, and he bade farewell by raising a hand to one eyebrow for a second, then raising it slightly higher in a gesture that mimicked doffing a hat. The problem he had brought with him seemed to have vanished, he was obviously a frivolous man whose anxieties were easily displaced by whatever cheering moment the present might bring him. It occurred to me that he would not do as his friend had asked and destroy his leather coat; he was too pleased with the way he looked in it.

‘Who’s he?’ I asked Díaz-Varela, trying to use an indifferent, casual tone of voice. ‘What does he do? He’s the first friend of yours I’ve met, and you seem an unlikely pair. He strikes me as a bit of an oddball.’

‘He’s Ruibérriz,’ he replied tartly, as if that were an entirely new fact or a defining piece of information. Then he realized that he had been rather sharp with me and hadn’t told me anything. He remained silent for a few moments, as if weighing up how much he could say without compromising himself. ‘You met Rico on one occasion,’ he said. ‘Anyway, as for Ruibérriz, he does all kinds of things and nothing in particular. He’s not a friend, I only know him superficially, although I’ve known him for a while now. He has various vague business deals going on, none of which make him very much money, which is why he has his fingers in all kinds of different pies. If he wins the heart of some wealthy woman, he lives off her for a while until she gets fed up with him. Otherwise, he writes television scripts and speeches for ministers, company directors, bankers or whoever, and does some ghostwriting too. He carries out research for punctilious historical novelists: what did people wear in the nineteenth century or in the 1930s, what was the transportation system like, what weapons did they use, what were shaving brushes or hairpins made of, when was such and such a building put up or a certain film first shown, the kind of superfluous stuff that bores readers, but which writers think will impress. He trawls newspaper archives and provides whatever information people ask him for. He’s picked up quite a lot along the way. I think, as a young man, he published a couple of novels, but they didn’t sell. I don’t know. He does favours here and there, and he probably lives off that more than anything else, off his contacts: he’s a useful man in his uselessness, or vice versa.’ He stopped, hesitated as to whether or not it would be imprudent to add what he was about to say, then decided there was no reason why it would be imprudent or thought perhaps that it would be worse to give the impression that he didn’t want to complete an apparently innocuous portrait. ‘He’s currently part-owner of a restaurant or two, but they’re doing very badly, his businesses never last, he opens them and closes them. The odd thing is that, after a while, once he’s recovered, he always manages to start another.’

‘And what did he want? He just turned up without warning, didn’t he?’

I immediately regretted asking so many questions.

‘Why do you want to know? What’s it got to do with you?’

He said this angrily, almost violently. I felt sure that, suddenly, he no longer trusted me, but saw me as a nuisance, maybe a threat, a possibly awkward witness, he had raised his guard, it was odd, just a short while before I had been a pleasant, inoffensive person, certainly not a cause for concern, probably quite the opposite, a most agreeable distraction while he waited for time to pass and to heal and for his expectations to be fulfilled, or for time to do the work he could not do, that of persuading, laying siege to, seducing, even making Luisa fall in love with him; I was merely someone who wanted no more than she already had and who asked of him nothing he was not prepared to give. Now he was gripped by a fear, a doubt. He couldn’t ask me if I had heard their conversation: if I hadn’t, he would be drawing my attention to whatever he and Ruibérriz might have been talking about while I was asleep, even though that was no concern of mine and of no great interest to me, I was just passing through, after all; if I had heard their conversation, I would obviously tell him that I hadn’t, and he still wouldn’t know the truth. It was inevitable, then, that I would be a potential problem from then on, or worse still, a nuisance, a hindrance.

Then I felt slightly afraid again, afraid of him, on his own, with no one there to restrain him. Removing me might be his only way of ensuring that his secret was safe, they say that once you’ve committed a crime it’s not so very hard to commit another, that once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no turning back, that the quantitative aspect becomes secondary given the magnitude of the leap taken, the qualitative leap that makes you forever a murderer until the very last day of your existence and in the memories of those who survive you, that is, if they know what happened or find out later on, when you are no longer there to obfuscate or deny. A thief can give back the thing he stole, a slanderer can acknowledge his calumny and put it right and wipe clean the good name of the person he accused, even a traitor can sometimes make amends for his treachery before it’s too late. The trouble with murder is that it’s always too late and you cannot restore to the world the person you killed, that is irreversible and there’s no possible means of reparation, and saving other lives in the future, however many they might be, would never make up for the one life you took. And if, as they say, there is no forgiveness, then, whenever necessary, you must continue along the road taken. The important thing becomes not so much to avoid staining yourself, given that you carry in your breast an ineradicable stain, but to make sure that no one knows, that no one finds out, that what you did has no consequences and doesn’t destroy you, because, then, adding another stain is not so very grave, it gets mixed up with the first or is absorbed, the two join together and become one, and you get used to the idea that killing is part of your life, that this is your fate as it has been for so many others throughout history. You tell yourself that there’s nothing new about your situation, that innumerable other people have had the same experience and learned to live with it without too much difficulty and without going under, and have even managed intermittently to forget about it, for a brief moment each day in the day-to-day life that sustains and carries us along. No one can spend every hour regretting some concrete act or being fully conscious of what he did once, long ago, or twice or seven times, there are always going to be carefree, sorrow-free moments, and the very worst of murderers will enjoy them probably no less than an entirely innocent person. And he will continue to live and cease thinking of murder as a monstrous exception or a tragic mistake, but, rather, as another resource that life offers the boldest and toughest, the most resolute and most resistant. He doesn’t feel in the least isolated, but part of a large, abundant, ancient band, a kind of lineage that helps him to feel less ill-favoured or anomalous and to understand himself and justify his actions: as if he had inherited those actions, or as if he had won them in a raffle at a fair from which no one is exempt, which means that he didn’t wholly commit those acts, or not at least alone.





‘Oh, no reason,’ I said quickly, in the most surprised – surprised ostensibly at his defensive reaction – and innocent tone that my throat could manage. That throat was afraid now, his hands could encircle it at any moment and it would be easy for them to squeeze and squeeze, my throat is quite slender and would offer not the least resistance, my hands wouldn’t be strong enough to push his away, to prise open his fingers, my legs would buckle, I would fall to the floor, he would throw himself on top of me as he had on other occasions, I would feel the weight of his body and his heat – or perhaps his cold – I would have no voice with which to persuade or implore. But as soon as I gave in to that fear, I realized that it was a false fear: Díaz-Varela would never take it upon himself to expel someone from the earth, he had not done so with his friend Deverne. Unless, of course, he was desperate and felt under imminent threat, unless he thought I would go straight to Luisa and tell her what I had discovered by a combination of chance and my own indiscretion. The trouble is, you can never rule out anything about anyone, and so that same slightly artificial fear came and went. ‘I was just asking for asking’s sake.’ – And I even had the courage or lack of prudence to add: ‘And because if that Ruibérriz fellow does do favours, maybe I can do you the odd favour too. I doubt it, but if I can help you in anyway, here I am.’

He looked at me hard for a few seconds that seemed to me very long, as if he were weighing me up, trying to decipher me, the way you look at people who don’t know they’re being looked at, and as if I weren’t there but on a TV screen and he could observe me at his leisure, unconcerned about how I would react to such an insistent, penetrating gaze, his expression was now anything but dreamy and myopic, as it usually was, instead it was piercing and intimidating. I stood firm (we were, after all, lovers, who had contemplated each other in silence and with barely a shred of modesty), I held his gaze and even returned his scrutiny, wearing what I hoped was an expression of puzzlement and incomprehension. Until I could stand it no longer and I lowered my gaze to his lips, the lips I had grown so used to gazing at ever since the day I first met him, regardless of whether he was talking or silent, the lips of which I never tired and which had never inspired fear in me, only attraction. They were my momentary refuge, and there was nothing odd about my resting my gaze on his lips, I did that so frequently it was normal, and there was no reason why it should reinforce his suspicions, I raised one finger and touched his lips, gently traced their outline with the tip of my finger, a long caress, I thought it might calm him, fill him with a sense of confidence and security, a wordless way of saying to him: ‘Nothing has changed, I’m still here, I still love you. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know already, you realized that a long time ago and you allow yourself to be loved by me, it’s nice to feel loved by someone who isn’t going to ask anything of you. I’ll withdraw whenever you decide that enough is enough, when you open the front door and watch me walk over to the lift, knowing that I won’t be back. When Luisa’s grief finally runs its course and your love is reciprocated, I will stand aside without a murmur, I know I’m a purely temporary feature in your life, another day and another, then no more. But don’t worry yourself now, it’s all right, I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t find out anything you would want to hide or keep to yourself, and if I did, it doesn’t matter, you’re safe with me, I’m not going to betray you, I’m not even sure I heard what I heard, or, rather, I don’t believe what I heard, I’m sure there must be some mistake, an explanation or even – who knows – a justification. Perhaps Desvern harmed you in some way, perhaps he had already tried to kill you, again through a third party, by sheer cunning, and then it was either you or him, perhaps you had no alternative, there wasn’t room in the world for both of you, and that makes it almost like self-defence. There’s no reason for you to fear me, I love you, I’m on your side, I’m not going to judge you. Besides, don’t forget, this is all pure imagination on your part, I don’t know anything.’

I didn’t actually think all this and certainly not as clearly, but that is what I tried to transmit to him through that fingertip lingering on his lips, and he let me stroke his lips, all the while fixing me with his eyes, trying to detect any signals that contradicted those I was intently giving out, for it was clear that he still didn’t trust me. That lack of trust would be difficult if not impossible to rectify, it would never go away entirely, it would diminish or increase, shrink or expand, but it would always be there.

‘He didn’t come to do me a favour,’ he answered. ‘This time, he came to ask a favour of me, that’s why he had to see me so urgently. Thanks for your offer, though.’

I knew this wasn’t true, they were both in the same tight spot, and it would be difficult for one to extricate the other, the most they could do was reassure each other and await events, trusting that nothing else would happen, that the tramp’s words would fall on deaf ears and that no one would bother to investigate further. Yes, that’s what they had done, calmed each other down and banished any feelings of panic.

‘My pleasure.’

Then he placed one hand on my shoulder, and it felt like a heavy weight, as if a great lump of meat had fallen on me. Díaz-Varela was not particularly big or strong, although he was reasonably tall, but nearly all men, or most, can dredge up strength from somewhere, at least they seem by comparison much stronger than us women, we are so easily frightened, all it takes is a single threatening or angry or immoderate gesture, the way they grab our wrist or embrace us too roughly or push us back violently on to the bed. I was glad that my shoulder was covered by my sweater, because that weight on my bare skin would, I thought, have made me shudder, it wasn’t something he usually did. He squeezed my shoulder slightly, without hurting me, as if he were going to offer me a piece of advice or confide in me, I imagined how that one hand would feel around my throat, just one, let alone two. I feared that, with a rapid movement, he might transfer his hand to my throat, he must have sensed my alarm, my tension, because he maintained that pressure on my shoulder or, as it seemed to me, increased it, he wanted to frighten me, to subjugate me, his right hand on my left shoulder, as if he were a father or a teacher and I were a child, a pupil – I felt very small, and that was doubtless his intention, to make me answer him honestly or, if not honestly, anxiously.

‘So you didn’t hear anything he said? You were asleep when he arrived, weren’t you? I came in to check before talking to him and you seemed to be deep asleep, you were asleep, weren’t you? What he had to tell me was very private, and he wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it. Even though you’re a complete stranger. There are some things one would feel ashamed to have anyone hear, it was hard enough for him to tell me, even though that’s why he came, and so he had no choice but to tell me if he wanted me to do him the favour he was asking. So you really didn’t hear anything? What woke you up then?’

So he had decided to ask me straight out, pointlessly, or perhaps not: he could work out or deduce whether or not I was lying by the way I answered, or so he thought. But that’s all it would be, a deduction, an imagination, a supposition, a conviction; it’s extraordinary how, after so many centuries of ceaseless talking, we still don’t know when people are telling us the truth. ‘Yes,’ they say, and that could always mean ‘No’. ‘No,’ they say, and that could always mean ‘Yes’. Not even science or all the infinite technological advances we have made can help us to know one way or the other, not with any certainty. And nevertheless, he could not resist asking me directly, what use was it to him if I answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’? What use to Deverne had been the professions of affection over the years by one of his best friends, if not the best friend? The last thing you imagine is that your friend is going to kill you, even if from a distance and without being there to witness it, without intervening or soiling so much as a finger, in such a way that he can occasionally think afterwards, in his happy or exultant days: ‘I didn’t really do it, it was nothing to do with me.’

‘No, don’t worry, I didn’t hear anything. I slept really deeply, but not for long. Besides, you had closed the door, so I wouldn’t have been able to hear you anyway.’

The hand on my shoulder continued to squeeze, slightly harder I thought, almost imperceptibly so, as if, without my noticing, he wanted to drive me very slowly down into the floor. Or perhaps he wasn’t squeezing and it was just that, as the weight and pressure continued, so the feeling of oppression intensified. I gently lifted my shoulder, delicately, timidly, not brusquely at all, as though to indicate to him that I would prefer my shoulder to be free of that lump of meat, there was something vaguely humiliating about that unaccustomed contact: ‘Feel my strength,’ it seemed to be saying. Or ‘Imagine what I might be capable of.’ He ignored that slight movement – perhaps it was too slight – and returning to his last question, which I had not yet answered, asked again:

‘What woke you up then? If you thought I was the only person here, why did you put your bra on before coming out? You must have heard the sound of our voices, which means that you must have heard some of what we said.’

I had to keep calm and continue denying that I had heard anything. The more suspicious he was, the firmer I had to be in my denials. But I had to deny it without a hint of vehemence or emphasis. What did I care about some deal he was doing with a guy I’d never even heard him mention before, that was my main weapon if I was to convince him or at least fend off his certainty for a while longer; why would I spy on him, what did I care what happened outside that bedroom or indeed inside it when I wasn’t there, surely he must know that our relationship wasn’t only transient, it was confined to and circumscribed by those occasional meetings in his apartment, in one or two of its rooms, what did any of the rest matter to me, his comings and goings, his past, his friendships, his plans, his entourage, his whole life, I wasn’t part of that, nor would I be ‘hereafter’, henceforth or later on, our days were numbered and that final number was never far away. And yet, although this was all true in essence, it wasn’t absolutely true: I had felt curious, I had woken up when I heard a key word – perhaps ‘bird’ or ‘know’ or ‘wife’ or probably the combination of all three – I had got up from the bed, pressed my ear to the door, opened it a tiny crack so that I could hear better, I had felt glad when he and Ruibérriz had proved incapable of moderating their voices, of keeping to a whisper, overcome by their own agitation. I started wondering why I had done that, and immediately began to regret it: why did I have to know what I now knew, why did I do it, why was it no longer possible for me to put my arms about his waist and draw him to me, it would have been so easy to remove his hand from my shoulder with that one movement, which would have seemed utterly natural and simple a few minutes before; why could I not force him to embrace me without further delay or hesitation, there were his beloved lips, which, as usual, I wanted to kiss, only I didn’t dare to now, or else there was something about them that simultaneously repelled and attracted me, or the thing that repelled me lay not in his lips – poor, innocent lips – but in him. I still loved him and yet was afraid of him, I still loved him and yet my knowledge of what he had done disgusted me, not him, but that knowledge.

‘You do ask some strange questions,’ I said breezily. ‘How should I know what woke me up, a bad dream, lying in an awkward position, knowing that I could be spending my time with you, I don’t know, what does it matter? And why should I care what that man told you, I didn’t even know he was here. And the reason I put my bra on was because it’s not the same being seen lying down and close to or in short bursts as being seen standing up and walking around the house like a model for Victoria’s Secret, except, of course, that they’re always wearing lingerie. Do I have to explain everything to you?’

‘What do you mean?’

He seemed genuinely bewildered and uncomprehending, and this – this shift in interest, this distraction – gave me a slight, momentary advantage, soon, I thought, he would stop asking me devious questions and then I could leave, I needed to shake off that hand and get out of there. Although my former self, which was still hanging around – it hadn’t yet been substituted or replaced, or cancelled or exiled, that couldn’t possibly happen so very quickly – was in no hurry to leave: each time I left, I never knew when I would return or if I ever would.

‘You men are so dense sometimes,’ I said firmly, for some such clichéd comment seemed to me advisable in order to change the subject and guide the conversation into more vulgar territory, which also tends to be safer and more conducive to confidences and a lowering of guards. – ‘There are certain parts of the female anatomy that we women deem to be past it by the time we’re twenty-five or thirty, let alone ten years later. We compare ourselves with ourselves as we were, remembering each year that passes. And that’s why we prefer not to expose those areas in too unseemly or full-frontal a manner. Well, that’s my view, but there are plenty of women who don’t give a damn, the beaches are packed with brutal, catastrophic displays of flesh, among them women who’ve had a couple of those rock-hard implants put in, thinking that they will solve the problem. Frankly, they set my teeth on edge.’ I laughed briefly at my choice of phrase, and added another: ‘They really give me the creeps.’

‘I see,’ he said and he laughed briefly too, which was a good sign. ‘I wouldn’t say that any parts of your anatomy were past it, they look pretty good to me.’

‘He’s feeling calmer,’ I thought, ‘less worried and suspicious, because after the fright he’s had, he needs to feel that. But later on, when he’s alone, he’ll convince himself again that I know what I shouldn’t know, what no one but Ruibérriz should know. He’ll ponder my attitude, remember my premature blush as I came out of the bedroom and my subsequent feigned ignorance, he’ll think that after all that passionate sex, the normal thing would be for me not to care how I look, bra or no bra, sex does, after all, relax you and make you drop your defences; he’ll cease to believe the explanation that he finds acceptable now because of its surprise value and because it would never have occurred to him that some women could be so perennially self-conscious about their appearance, about what they cover up and what they reveal, even how loudly they pant or moan, that they never entirely lose their modesty, even when very aroused. He’ll turn it over in his mind again and won’t know quite what to do, whether to distance me slowly and naturally or abruptly sever all contact or carry on as if nothing had happened in order to keep a close eye on me, to control me, to make a daily calculation as to how likely I am to betray him, that’s a very stressful situation to be in, ceaselessly having to interpret someone, someone who has us in their power and who could destroy us or blackmail us, no one can stand such anxiety for very long, and so we try to remedy it as best we can, by lying, intimidating, deceiving, bribing, coming to some arrangement, removing the person, the latter being both the most certain route in the long run – the most definitive – and the most dangerous in the moment, as well as the most difficult both now and later, and, in a sense, the most enduring, for you are linked to the dead person forever after, and liable to have him or her appear to you alive in your dreams, so that it seems as if you didn’t do the deed, and then you feel a great sense of relief because you didn’t kill her or else feel so horrified or threatened that you plan to do it all over again; you run the risk that the dead person will haunt your pillow every night with her smiling or frowning face, her eyes wide open, eyes that were closed either centuries ago or only the day before yesterday, that she will whisper curses or pleas in that unmistakable voice that no one else hears any more, and the task will seem to you never-ending and exhausting, an endless undertaking, not knowing what each morning will bring. But all those things will come later, when Díaz-Varela goes over in his mind what happened or what he fears might have happened. He might find some excuse to send me to Ruibérriz so that he can sound me out, pump me for information, rather, I hope, than to do anything more alarming, and leave it to that intermediary to blur or weaken the link, because I’m not going to be able to live in peace from now on either. But that moment is not now, and time will tell, I need to make the most of the fact that I’ve distracted him from his fears and made him laugh, and get out of here as quickly as possible.’

‘Thanks for the compliment, you’re not usually so lavish with them,’ I said. And with no physical effort, but with considerable mental effort, I leaned towards him and gently kissed him on the lips with my closed, dry lips – I was thirsty – and rather as my finger had before, my mouth caressed his, that’s how it was I think. That’s all.

Then he raised his hand and liberated my shoulder and removed that odious weight, and with that same hand that had almost caused me pain – that, at least, is how it was beginning to feel – he stroked my cheek, again as if I were a child and he had the power to punish or reward me, as he chose, with a single gesture. I very nearly reared back from that caress, there was a difference now between me touching him and him touching me, fortunately, though, I restrained myself and allowed him to caress my cheek. And when I left his apartment a few minutes later, I wondered, as I always did, if I would ever go back there. Except that this time, I did not think this with only mingled hope and desire, but with a mixture of feelings, perhaps repugnance or fear, or was it, rather, desolation?