The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

  ‘I’m in no position to give advice to anyone,’ I said to Luisa, ending my prolonged silence, ‘but it seems to me that you really shouldn’t think so much about what went through his head during those moments. After all, they were very brief moments and, in the context of his whole life, almost non-existent; perhaps he didn’t have time to think anything. It doesn’t make sense that, for you, on the other hand, they should have lasted all these months and will perhaps last still longer, what do you gain from that? What does he gain? Nothing. However often you go over and over it in your head, there’s no way you could have accompanied him during those moments or died with him or taken his place or saved him. You weren’t there, you knew nothing about it, and however hard you try, you can’t change that.’ – I realized that I was the one who had spent most time over those borrowed thoughts, albeit incited or infected by her; it’s very risky imagining yourself into someone else’s mind, it’s sometimes hard to leave, I suppose that’s why so few people do it and why almost everyone avoids it, preferring to say: ‘That’s not happening to me, I’m not having to live through what he’s living through, and why on earth should I take on his sufferings? He’s the one having a rough time of it, so to each his own.’ – ‘Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s over, it no longer is and no longer counts. He’s no longer thinking those thoughts and it’s no longer happening.’

  Luisa refilled her glass – they were very small glasses – and put her hands to her cheeks, a gesture that was part thoughtful, part pained. She had long, strong hands, adorned only by her wedding ring. With her elbows resting on her thighs, she seemed to shrink or diminish. She spoke as if to herself, as though thinking out loud.

  ‘Yes, that’s what most people believe. That what has ceased to happen is not as bad as what is happening, and that we should find relief in that cessation. That what has happened should hurt us less than what is happening, or that things are somehow more bearable when they’re over, however horrible they might have been. But that’s like believing that it’s less serious for someone to be dead than dying, which doesn’t really make much sense, does it? The most painful and irremediable thing is that the person has died; and the fact that the death is over and done with doesn’t mean that the person didn’t experience it. How can one possibly not think about it, if that was the last thing the dead person shared with us, with those of us who are still alive? What came after that moment is beyond our grasp, but, on the other hand, when it took place, we were all still here, in the same dimension, him and us, breathing the same air. We shared the same time and the same world. Am I making any sense?’ She paused and lit a cigarette, her first; the pack of cigarettes had been beside her since the start of our conversation, but she hadn’t lit one until then, as though she had lost the habit of smoking, perhaps she had given up for a while and had now gone back to it or maybe only half-heartedly: she bought them, but tried to avoid them. ‘Besides, nothing ends entirely, I mean, think of dreams; the dead appear in them alive and sometimes the living die in them. I often dream about that final moment, and then I really am present, I really am there, I really do know what he’s feeling, I’m in the car with him and we both get out, and I warn him because I know what’s going to happen and even then he can’t escape. Well, that’s what dreams are like, simultaneously confusing and precise. I shake them off as soon as I wake up, and in a matter of minutes they’re gone, I forget the details; but I immediately realize that the fact remains, the fact that it’s true, that it happened, that Miguel is dead and was killed in a very similar way to what happened in my dream, however quickly the dream vanished.’ She stopped and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette, as if she found it odd to be holding it between her fingers. ‘Do you know what one of the worst things is? Not being able to get angry or to blame anyone. Not being able to hate anyone even though Miguel suffered a violent death, even though he was murdered in the street. It’s not as if he’d been murdered for a reason, because someone was after him and knew who he was, because someone saw him as an obstacle and wanted revenge or whatever, or at least intended to rob him. If he’d been a victim of ETA, I could join with the families of other victims and together we could hate the terrorists or even hate all Basques, and the more you can share hatred, share it out, the better, don’t you agree? The more the merrier. I remember that when I was very young, a boyfriend of mine left me for a girl from the Canary Islands. I not only hated her, I hated all Canary Islanders. Ridiculous, I know, an obsession, if you like. If they showed a match on TV in which Tenerife or Las Palmas were playing, I would hope they would lose regardless of who their opponents were, not that I particularly care about football and even if I wasn’t the one watching it, but my father and my brother. If there was one of those idiotic beauty contests on, I would always hope that the girls from the Canaries didn’t win, and would throw a tantrum if they did, which was often the case, because they tend to be very pretty.’ And she laughed gaily at herself, she couldn’t help it. If something amused her, it amused her, even in the midst of her grief. ‘I even vowed never to read Galdós again; however much of a denizen of Madrid he became, he was still born in the Canaries, and so I imposed a complete ban on him, which lasted for ages.’ And she laughed again, and her laughter was so contagious that I laughed too at such an inquisitorial idea. ‘Such reactions are childish and irrational, I know, but they help momentarily by varying your mood. Anyway, I’m not young any more and I don’t even have the option of spending part of the day feeling furious, instead of feeling sad all the time.’

  ‘What about the man who killed Miguel?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you hate him or hate all down-and-outs?’

  ‘No,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation, as if she had already considered the question. ‘I don’t want to know anything more about the man, I understand he refused to make a statement, and that, from the start, he opted to remain silent, but it’s obvious that he made a mistake and is not right in the head. Apparently, two of his daughters are prostitutes, and he decided that Miguel and Pablo, the chauffeur, were in some way responsible for that. How stupid. He killed Miguel just as he might have killed Pablo or anyone else from the area whom he happened to have a grudge against. I suppose he needed enemies too, someone to blame for his misfortune. It’s what everyone does: the working classes, the middle and upper classes and the socially mobile: we just can’t accept that sometimes things happen for which no one is to blame, or that there is such a thing as bad luck, or that people go off the rails, lose their way, and bring unhappiness and ruin upon themselves.’ – ‘You yourself have shaped your own fate,’ I thought, quoting Cervantes, whose words, it’s true, are no longer heeded. – ‘No, I can’t get angry with the person who killed him like that for no reason, with the person who, if you like, chose him entirely by chance; that’s the worst thing; with someone who’s mad, mentally unhinged, someone who felt no animus against him personally and didn’t even know his name, who simply saw him as the embodiment of his misfortune or the cause of his own painful situation. Well, I’ve no idea what he saw, of course, I’m not inside his head and I don’t want to be. Sometimes my brother tries to talk to me about it, as does the lawyer, or Javier, one of Miguel’s best friends, but I stop them and tell them that I don’t want to hear their more or less hypothetical explanations or their half-baked theories, because what happened was so serious that the reason why it happened really doesn’t matter to me, especially when the reason is utterly incomprehensible and exists only inside that sick, crazed mind into which I prefer not to venture.’ Luisa spoke well, using a wide vocabulary, words like ‘animus’ and ‘venture’ that crop up rarely in general conversation; after all, she was, as she had told me, a univer
sity lecturer in English, and, as a language teacher, she would, inevitably, have to read and translate a lot. ‘To exaggerate slightly, that man has the same value to me as a bit of plaster cornice that breaks off and falls on your head just as you’re walking by underneath; you could so easily not have passed by at that particular moment; a minute earlier and you would have known nothing about it. Or like a stray bullet from a hunting party, fired by some inexperienced hunter or by a fool; you could so easily not have gone into the countryside that day. Or like an earthquake you get caught up in while on a trip abroad; you could so easily not have gone to that place. No, hating him serves no purpose, it doesn’t console or give me strength, I take no comfort from waiting for him to be sentenced or hoping that he rots in prison. Not that I feel sorry for him either, of course; I can’t. He’s a matter of complete indifference to me, because nothing and no one will bring Miguel back. I imagine he’ll be sent to some psychiatric hospital, if such things still exist, I don’t know what they do now with the mentally ill who commit violent crimes. I suppose they put them out of circulation because they constitute a danger to society and so as to prevent them committing a similar crime again. But I don’t seek his punishment, that would be as stupid as the kind of thing armies used to do – in more naive times – arresting and even executing a horse that had thrown an officer and brought about his death. Nor can I take it out on beggars and homeless people in general, although I do feel afraid of them now. When I see one, I tend to move away or cross the road, a perfectly justifiable reflex action that will stay with me for ever. But that’s different. What I can’t do is actively devote myself to hating them, as I could hate a group of rival businessmen, say, who had hired a hit man to kill him, apparently that’s becoming increasingly common, even in Spain, flying in a murderer from another country, a Colombian, a Serbian, a Mexican, to get rid of an overly successful competitor who’s cramping their style, in other words, a simple business arrangement. They bring in a hit man, he does his job, they pay him and he leaves, all in the space of one or two days, and the police never find these killers, they’re discreet and professional, entirely neutral, leaving no trace, and by the time the body is found, they’re already at the airport or on the return flight home. There’s rarely any way of proving anything, still less who hired the killer, who instigated the murder or gave the order. If something like that had happened, I couldn’t even hate that abstract hit man very much, he just drew the short straw, and it could have been someone else, whoever happened to be free at the time; he wouldn’t have known Miguel or had anything against him personally. But I could hate the instigators, that would give me the chance to suspect people right, left and centre, a competitor or someone who felt resentful or hard done by, because every businessman creates victims either accidentally or deliberately, even among close colleagues, as I read again the other day in Covarrubias.’ Luisa saw my look of vague incomprehension. ‘Don’t you know it? Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. It was the first Spanish dictionary, written in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias.’ She got to her feet, picked up a fat green book from a nearby table, and began leafing through it. ‘I had to look up the word “envidia” to compare it with the English definition of “envy”, and this is how the entry ends.’ And she read out loud to me. ‘“Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.” And that’s obviously a very old idea, because look what it goes on to say: “This is a commonplace, written about by many; but since it is not my intention to dig over ground others have already dug, I have nothing to add.”’ And then she closed the book and sat down again, with the book on her lap; I noticed that various pages were marked by bits of paper. ‘My mind would have something else to occupy it then, rather than just grief and longing. Because I miss him all the time, you see. I miss him when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I dream and throughout the whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.’ She looked at her arms, as though her husband’s head were resting on them. ‘People say: “Concentrate on the good memories and not on the final one, think about how much you loved each other, think about all the wonderful times you enjoyed that others never have.” They mean well, but they don’t understand that all my memories are now soiled by that sad and bloody ending. Each time I recall something good, that final image rises up before me, the image of his cruel, stupid, gratuitous death, which could so easily have been avoided. Yes, that’s what I find hardest to bear, the sheer stupidity of it and the lack of someone to blame. And so every good memory grows murky and turns bad. I don’t really have any good memories left. They all seem false to me. They’ve all been contaminated.’

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

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

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

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