‘Oh, haven’t you seen her? I thought you had become friends.’
‘Well, yes, if you can be friends with someone for a day. I haven’t seen her since that one time in her house. We did get on very well, it’s true, and she spoke to me as if I were a friend, more out of need than anything, I think. But I haven’t seen her since. How is she?’ I asked again. ‘You must see her every day, I imagine.’
He seemed slightly put out by my response and remained silent for a few seconds. It occurred to me that perhaps all he wanted was to pump me for information, in the belief that she and I kept in touch, and that his encounter with me had now lost its purpose almost before it had begun, or, even more ironically, that he would be the one to give me news and information about her.
‘Not very good,’ he replied at last, ‘and I’m starting to get worried. I know it hasn’t been that long, of course, but she just can’t seem to pull herself together, she hasn’t progressed a millimetre, she can’t even raise her head, however fleetingly, and look about her and see how much she still has. Despite the death of her husband, she, nonetheless, has a lot going for her; I mean, at her age, she has a whole life ahead of her. Most widows get over their grief quite quickly, especially if they’re fairly young and have children to look after. But it’s not just the children, who soon cease to be children. If she were only able to imagine herself in a few years’ time, or even a year, she would see then how the image of Miguel, which, at the moment, haunts her incessantly, will fade and shrink with each passing day, and how her new love will allow her to remember him occasionally and with surprising serenity, always with sorrow, yes, but with hardly any sense of unease. Because she will experience new love, and her first marriage will eventually seem almost like a dream, a dim, flickering memory. What seems like a tragic anomaly today will be perceived as an inevitable and even desirable normality, given that it will have happened. Right now it seems to her unbelievable that Miguel should no longer exist, but a time will come when it will seem incomprehensible that he could ever be restored to life, that he could ever exist, when merely imagining a miraculous reappearance, a resurrection, a return, will seem to her intolerable, because she will already have assigned him a place in time, both him and his character frozen for ever, and she will not allow that fixed and finished portrait to be exposed once more to the changes that afflict everything that is still alive and therefore unpredictable. We tend to hope that, of the people and habits we cherish, no one will die and none will end, not realizing that the only thing that maintains those habits intact is their sudden withdrawal, with no possible alteration or evolution, before they can abandon us or we abandon them. Anything that lasts goes bad and putrefies, it bores us, turns against us, saturates and wearies us. How many people who once seemed vital to us are left by the wayside, how many relationships wear thin, become diluted for no apparent reason or certainly none of any weight. The only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us, the only ones we don’t drop are those who abruptly disappear and so have no time to cause us pain or disappointment. When that happens, we despair momentarily, because we believe we could have continued with them for much longer, with no foreseeable expiry date. That’s a mistake, albeit understandable. Continuity changes everything, and something we thought wonderful yesterday would have become a torment tomorrow. Our reaction to the death of someone close to us is similar to Macbeth’s reaction to the news that his wife, the Queen, has died. “She should have died hereafter,” he replies rather enigmatically, meaning: “She should have died at some point in the future, later on.” Or he could have meant, less ambiguously and more plainly: “She should have waited a little longer, she should have held on”; what he means is “not at this precise moment, but at the chosen moment”. And what would be the chosen moment? The moment never seems quite right, we always think that whatever pleases or brings us joy, whatever solaces or succours us, whatever drives us through the days, could have lasted a little longer, a year, a few months, a few weeks, a few hours, we always feel it is too soon for things or people to end, we never feel there is a right moment, one in which we ourselves would say: “Fine, that’s enough. That’s all over with and a good thing too. Anything that happens from now on will be worse, a deterioration, a diminution, a blot.” We never dare to go so far as to say: “That time is past, even if it was our time,” which is why the ending of things does not lie in our hands, because if it did, everything would continue indefinitely, becoming grubby and contaminated, and no living creature would ever die.’
He paused briefly to drink his beer, because talking always dries the throat, and, after an initial hesitation, he launched into his speech almost vehemently, as if seizing the opportunity to vent his feelings. He spoke fluently and eloquently, his English pronunciation was good and unaffected, what he said was interesting and his thoughts coherent, I wondered what he did for a living, but I couldn’t ask him without interrupting what he was saying and I didn’t want to do that. I was looking at his lips as he talked, staring at them, quite blatantly I fear, I was letting myself be lulled by his words and couldn’t take my eyes off the place out of which those words had emerged, as if he were all kissable mouth, the source of all abundance, from which everything flows, what persuades and what seduces us, what changes and charms us, what sucks us in and what convinces us. In the Bible somewhere it says: ‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.’ I was puzzled to find myself so attracted to that man, even fascinated, a man I barely knew, and even more puzzled when I recalled that for Luisa, on the other hand, he was almost invisible and inaudible, because she had seen and heard him so often. How could that be? We believe that whoever we fall in love with should be desired by everyone. I didn’t want to say anything so as not to break the spell, but it occurred to me also that, if I said nothing, he might think I wasn’t paying attention, when the fact is I hung on his every word, everything that came from those lips interested me. I must be brief, though, I thought, so as not to distract him too much.
‘Yes, but how things end does lie in our hands if those hands are suicidal, not to mention murderous,’ I said. And I was on the point of adding: ‘Right here, right next door, your friend Desvern was cruelly cut down. It’s strange us sitting here in this clean and peaceful place, as if nothing had happened. If we had been here on that other day, we might perhaps have saved him. Although if he hadn’t died, we wouldn’t be together anywhere. We wouldn’t even have met.’
I was on the point of adding this, but I didn’t, because, among other reasons, he suddenly cast a rapid glance – he had his back to the street, I was facing it – at the spot where the stabbing had taken place, and I wondered if he might perhaps be thinking the same as me or something similar, at least as regards the first part of my thought. He ran his fingers through his slightly receding hair, which he wore combed backwards, like a musician. Then with those same four fingers, he drummed with his nails – hard, neatly trimmed nails – against his glass.
‘Those are the exceptions, the anomalies. Of course there are people who decide to end their own life, and they do, but they’re the minority, which is why it seems so shocking, because their actions go completely counter to the longing to endure, which is shared by the vast majority of us and which makes us believe that there is always time and, when time does run out, makes us ask for a little more, just a little more. As for the murderous hands you mention, they can never be seen as our hands. They end a life much as an illness does, or an accident, I mean, they are external causes, even in those cases where the dead person has brought it upon himself, because of the disreputable life he has led or the risks he has taken or because he has himself killed and thu
s laid himself open to someone else’s revenge. Not even the most bloodthirsty mafioso or the President of the United States, to give just two examples of individuals at permanent risk of assassination, and who know that it is a real possibility and live with that possibility every day, even they do not long for that threat, that latent torture, that unbearable anxiety to be over. They don’t want anything that exists or anything they have to end, however horrible or burdensome that might be; they live from day to day in the hope that the following day will be there too, identical or very similar to every other day, if I exist today, they think, why shouldn’t I continue to exist tomorrow, and tomorrow leads to the day after tomorrow and the day after tomorrow to the day after that. That is how we all live, the happy and the unhappy, the fortunate and the unfortunate, and if it was up to us, we would go on like that until the end of time.’ – It seemed to me that he had become slightly confused or was trying to confuse me. ‘Those murderous hands,’ I thought, ‘are not, of course, ours unless they do suddenly become our hands, and besides, they always belong to someone, who will call them “my hands”. And regardless of who they belong to, it isn’t true that those hands do not want any living being to die, because that is precisely what they do want, more than that, they can’t wait for a chance to bring it about nor for time to do its work; they take it upon themselves to transform life into death. They don’t want everything to continue uninterrupted, on the contrary, they feel a need to annihilate and destroy someone else’s cherished habits. They would never say of their victim “She should have died hereafter” but, rather, “He should have died yesterday,” years ago, a long, long time ago; if he had never been born and never left any trace in the world, then we wouldn’t have had to kill him. With one thrust of his knife, the gorrilla had destroyed his own habits and those of Deverne, along with those of Luisa and the children and the chauffeur, who was saved perhaps by a case of mistaken identity, by a whisker; as well as Díaz-Varela’s habits and even mine in part. And those of other people I don’t even know.’ But I didn’t say any of this, I didn’t want to take the floor, I didn’t want to speak, I wanted him to carry on talking. I wanted to hear his voice and track his thoughts, and to keep watching his lips moving. So spellbound was I by them that I ran the risk of not taking in what he was saying. He took another sip of his drink and went on, first clearing his throat as if he were trying to focus his thoughts. – ‘What’s amazing is that when these things happen, when these interruptions or deaths occur, more often than not, people eventually come to accept them. Don’t misunderstand me. No one can ever find a death, still less a murder, acceptable. Deaths and murders will always be sources of regret, whenever they happen, but ultimately, life prevails over us, so much so that, in the long run, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine ourselves without the sorrows life brings, to imagine, for example, that something that happened didn’t happen. “My father was killed during the Civil War,” someone might say bitterly, sadly or angrily. “They came for him one night, dragged him from the house and bundled him into a car, I saw how he struggled and how they manhandled him. They dragged him along by the arms as if his legs were paralysed and could no longer bear his weight. They drove him to the outskirts of town, where they shot him in the back of the neck and threw his body in a ditch, so that the sight of his corpse would be a warning to others.” The person telling that story doubtless regrets and deplores it and might even spend his whole life seething with hatred for his father’s assassins, a universal, abstract hatred if he doesn’t know exactly who they were, their names, as was so often the case during the Civil War; in many instances, all they knew was that “the other side” had done it. However, in large measure that horrible event constitutes the essence of that person, which he could never relinquish because that would be tantamount to denying himself, to erasing what he is and having nothing to replace it with. He is the son of a man who was cruelly murdered during the Civil War; he is a victim of Spanish violence, a tragic orphan; that fact shapes and defines and determines him. That is his story or the beginning of his story, his origin. In a sense, he cannot wish that it hadn’t happened, because if it hadn’t, he would be a different person, and he has no idea who that person would be. He can neither see nor imagine himself, he doesn’t know how he would have turned out, and how he would have got on with that living father, if he would have hated or loved him or felt quite indifferent, and, above all, he cannot imagine himself without that background of grief and rancour that has always accompanied him. The force of events is so overwhelming that we all end up more or less accepting our story, what happened and what we did or failed to do, regardless of whether we believe or acknowledge it; in fact, it’s something most of us refuse to acknowledge. The truth is that we almost all curse our fate at some point in our lives and yet almost no one admits that.’
At this point, I could not help but interrupt:
‘Luisa cannot possibly accept what has happened to her. No woman could accept that her husband had been stupidly and gratuitously stabbed to death, by mistake, for no reason, and when he had done nothing to provoke it. No one can accept that their life has been destroyed for ever.’
Díaz-Varela sat looking at me intently, his cheek resting on one fist and his elbow resting on the table. I looked away, troubled by those eyes fixed on mine, by that gaze, which was neither transparent nor penetrating, but perhaps hazy and enveloping or merely indecipherable, and tempered at any rate by his myopia (he was probably wearing lenses), it was as if those almond eyes were saying to me: ‘Why don’t you understand?’ not impatiently, but regretfully.
‘That’s the mistake people make,’ he said after a few seconds, without looking away or changing his posture, as though, rather than speaking, he was waiting, ‘a childish mistake that many adults cling to until the day they die, as if throughout their entire existence they had failed to grasp how things work, as if they lacked all experience. The mistake of believing that the present is for ever, that what happens in each moment is definitive, when we should all know that as long as we still have a little time left, nothing is definitive. We have all experienced enough twists and turns, not just in terms of luck but as regards our state of mind. We gradually learn that what seems really important now will one day seem a mere fact, a neutral piece of information. We learn that there will come a time when we don’t even give a thought to the person we once couldn’t live without and over whom we spent sleepless nights, without whom life seemed impossible, on whose words and presence we depended day after day, and if we ever do, very occasionally, give that person a thought, it will merely be to shrug and think at most: “I wonder what became of her?” without a flicker of concern or curiosity. What do we care now about what happened to our first girlfriend, when we used to long for her phone call or to be with her? What indeed do we care about our penultimate girlfriend, after a year without seeing her? What do we care about our friends from school or university and afterwards, even though whole swathes of our existence revolved around them and seemed as if they would never end? What do we care about those who break away, who leave, those who turn their backs on us and distance themselves, those whom we discard and who become invisible to us, mere names that we recall only when, by chance, their names happen to reach our ears, or, indeed, those who die and thus desert us? For example, my mother died twenty-five years ago, and although I feel obliged to be sad whenever I think of her, and do, in fact, feel sad, I’m incapable of reliving what I felt at the time, let alone of weeping as I did then. It has become just that, a fact: my mother died twenty-five years ago, and I have been without a mother ever since. It’s simply a part of me, one of many facts that have shaped the person I am; I’ve been wi
thout a mother since I was a young man, that’s all, or almost all, just as I’m single or as someone else might have been orphaned in childhood or an only child or the youngest of seven siblings or the descendant of a soldier or a doctor or a criminal, what does it matter, in the end, these are simply facts and not of any great importance, everything that happens to us or that precedes us could be summed up in a couple of lines in a story. Luisa’s present life has been destroyed, but not her future life. Think how much time she has left in which to move forward, she isn’t going to stay trapped in the moment, no one ever is, still less in the very worst of moments, from which we always emerge, unless we’re sick in the head and feel justified by and even protected by our comfortable misery. The bad thing about terrible misfortunes, the kind that tear us apart and appear to be unendurable, is that those who suffer them believe or almost demand that the world should end right there, and yet the world pays no heed and carries on regardless and even tugs at the sleeve of the person who suffered the misfortune, I mean, it won’t just let them depart this world the way a disgruntled spectator might leave the theatre, unless the unfortunate person kills him or herself. That does happen, I don’t deny it. But very rarely, and it’s far less frequent in our age than it was in any other. Luisa might shut herself away, withdraw for a while, be seen by no one apart from her family and myself, always assuming she doesn’t weary of me and decide to do without me as well; but she won’t kill herself, even if only because she has two children to look after and because it’s not in her character. It will take the time it takes, but in the end, the pain and the despair will become less intense, the sense of shock will diminish and, above all, she will get used to the idea: “I’m a widow,” she will think or “I’ve been widowed.” That will be the fact, the piece of information, that she will tell people to whom she’s introduced and who ask about her marital status, she’ll probably choose not to explain how it happened, because it’s too gruesome and wretched a tale to tell to a new acquaintance whom she barely knows, it would cast an immediate pall over any conversation. And that will be what others say about her, and what others say about us plays a part in defining us, however superficially and inexactly, after all, for most people, we are only superficial beings, a sketch, a few scrawled lines. “She’s a widow,” they’ll say, “she lost her husband in horrific circumstances that have never been fully explained, I’m not even sure what happened myself, I think he was attacked by a man in the street, whether by a madman or a hit man, I don’t know, or perhaps it was a kidnap attempt that went badly wrong because he resisted with all his might and was killed on the spot for his pains; he was a wealthy man, so he had a lot to lose or perhaps he just instinctively put up a hard fight.” And when Luisa marries again, which will be in a couple of years from now at most, that fact, that piece of information, will have changed, while remaining the same as before, and she will no longer say of herself: “I’ve been widowed” or “I’m a widow”, because she won’t be, and will say instead “I lost my first husband, and he’s moving further away from me all the time. It’s such a long time since I saw him, whereas this other man is here by my side and is always by my side. I call him ‘husband’ too, which is odd. But he has taken the other husband’s place in my bed and by virtue of that juxtaposition is gradually blurring and erasing him. A little more each day, a little more each night.”’
The Infatuations Page 11
