The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

  His uncertainty did not last long and he soon regained his composure. Having scanned his memory and found no very clear evidence there, he must have thought that, basically, regardless of what I knew or didn’t know, I was entirely dependent on him now, as one always is on the person doing the telling, for he is the one who decides where to begin and where to end, what to reveal and suggest and keep silent about, when to tell the truth and when to lie or whether to combine the two so that neither is recognizable, or whether to deceive with the truth, as I had initially suspected he was trying to do with me; no, it’s not that difficult, you just have to present your story in such a way that it seems unbelievable or so hard to believe that your listener ends up rejecting it. Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It’s quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that did have consequences, but might equally well not have had any, Canella was free to reject the knife or to take it and then throw it away or sell it. Or to hang on to it, but not use it. It was possible, too, that he might have lost it or had it stolen beforehand; among beggars, a knife is a prized possession, because every beggar feels under threat and defenceless. In short, providing someone with a motive and a weapon is absolutely no guarantee that he’s going to use either of them. My plans were very dangerous even once they had been carried out. The man very nearly killed the wrong person. About a month before. Yes, of course, it was necessary to lecture him and badger him and generally clarify matters, a blunder like that was all we needed. Of course, that wouldn’t have happened with a hit man, but as I said, they bring problems too, if not in the short term, then in the long term. I preferred to risk failure, for the plan to fail, rather than end up being found out.’ – He stopped, as if he regretted having spoken that last sentence, or, perhaps regretted having spoken it just then, maybe it wasn’t the right moment; anyone telling a preprepared, pre-planned story usually decides beforehand what should come first and what should come later, and takes great pains not to violate or change that order. He took a sip of his drink, rolled up his already rolled-up sleeves with a familiar, mechanical gesture, then, finally, lit his cigarette. He smoked a very light German brand made by Reemtsma, a company whose owner was once kidnapped, and for whom the biggest ransom in the history of his country was paid – an enormous sum. He went on to write a book about the experience; I read the English translation at work and we considered publishing it in Spain, but, in the end, Eugeni judged it to be too depressing and turned it down. I imagine Díaz-Varela will still be smoking the same brand of cigarettes now unless he’s given up, which I doubt, he isn’t the kind of person to bow to social pressures, just like his friend Rico, who does and says whatever he wants wherever he is and doesn’t care a fig for the consequences (I sometimes wonder if he knows what Díaz-Varela did, or if he even suspects: it’s unlikely, I got the impression that he wasn’t very interested in or even aware of what was near at hand and contemporary). Díaz-Varela seemed uncertain as to whether to continue along the same path. He did so, very briefly, perhaps so as not to draw attention to his feelings of regret with too brusque a change of direction. – ‘Strange though it may seem in a case of homicide, killing Miguel was much less important than not getting found out or caught. I mean that it wouldn’t have been worth making sure that he died then, on that day or thereabouts, if, on the other hand, I ran the slightest risk of being exposed or coming under suspicion, even if that were to happen thirty years from now. I couldn’t possibly allow that, and if there were the remotest possibility of that happening, it would have been better for him to remain alive and for me to abandon the plan and renounce his death for the time being. I should just say in passing that I did not choose the day; the gorrilla did that. Once my task was over, everything was in his hands. It would have been in extremely bad taste for me to choose Miguel’s birthday of all days. That was pure chance, no one could possibly know when Canella would decide to do it or if he ever would. But I’ll explain all that to you later. Let’s go back to your idea, to your view of the situation; you’ll have had plenty of time to take stock over the last two weeks.’

  I wanted to keep quiet and allow him to talk until he grew tired or had finished, but again I couldn’t help myself, my mind had picked up on two or three things he had said, and they were buzzing too loudly inside my head for me to remain silent about them all. ‘Now he’s talking about homicide rather than outright murder, how can that be if he isn’t pretending any more?’ I thought. ‘From the gorrilla’s point of view, it would be the former, and from Luisa’s point of view too, and from that of the police and of any witnesses, and from that of the newspaper readers who came upon the news one morning and were horrified to see that such a crime was possible in what everyone considered to be one of Madrid’s safest districts, and then they forgot all about it because the story was dropped and because, once their imaginations had been satisfied, that other man’s misfortune made them feel that they themselves were out of danger: “It didn’t happen to me,” they said to themselves, “and something like that is hardly going to happen twice.” But not from Javier’s point of view, no, he sees it as a murder, he knows it makes no difference that there were defects in his plan or an element of chance, or that his calculations might not work out, he’s too intelligent to be deceived by that. And why had he said “then” and “for the time being”? – “making sure that he died then” he had said and “renounce his death for the time being” – as if he could have postponed it or left it for later on, that is, for “hereafter”, in the certain knowledge that the time would come. He had also said: “It would have been in extremely bad taste,” as if it wasn’t in bad enough taste to have given orders for a friend to be killed.’ I was left with the last point, as always happens, even if it wasn’t the most urgent one, although it was, perhaps, the most offensive.

  ‘In extremely bad taste?’ I repeated. ‘What are you saying, Javier? Do you really believe that changes the main issue in any way? You’re telling me about a murder.’ – And I took the opportunity to give the act its proper name. – ‘Do you think that fixing on one date or another can actually add to or subtract from the seriousness of what happened? That it can add good taste or subtract a little bad taste? I don’t understand you. Well, I don’t really expect to understand any of this, I don’t even know why I’m listening to you.’ – And now it was my turn to feel upset and to light a second cigarette and take a sip of my drink; I swallowed too quickly, before I had expelled the first mouthful of smoke, and almost choked.

  ‘Of course you understand, María,’ he said hastily, ‘and that’s why you’re listening, to convince yourself, to check that you’ve got the story right. You’ve told it to yourself over and over, all day and all night for the last two weeks. You’ve realized that my desires override all other considerations, all restraints and all scruples. And all loyalties too. I have been absolutely clear for some time now that I want to spend what remains of my life with Luisa. There is only one woman for me and that woman is Luisa and I know that you can’t just trust to luck, to things happening of their own accord, you can’t assume that all obstacles and barriers will suddenly fall away as if by magic. You have to set to work. The world is full of lazy people and pessimists who never achieve anything because they don’t apply themselves, and then have the nerve to complain and feel frustrated and direct their resentment outwards: that’s what most people are like, idle fools, who are defeated right from the start by the way they
live their lives and by themselves. I’ve remained single all these years; yes, I’ve had some very enjoyable affairs, to distract me while I was waiting. Waiting, initially, for someone who had a weakness for me and I for her. Then … For me that’s the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can’t be quite that straightforward because it doesn’t exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don’t know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can’t be sure: el enamoramiento – the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I’m referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, though not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning … We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I’ve experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it’s important to distinguish between the two things, they’re easily confused, but they’re not the same … It’s very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness. That’s the determining factor, they break down our objectivity and disarm us in perpetuity, so that we cave in over every dispute, which is what happened with Colonel Chabert when confronted by his wife, when he saw her alone again, I told you about that novella, you read it. It happens with children, they say, and I can quite believe that, but it must be a different feeling, they’re such vulnerable beings from the moment they’re born, from the very first instant, and our weakness for them must have its roots in their absolute defencelessness, and, it would seem, that feeling continues … Generally speaking, though, people don’t experience such feelings for another adult, nor do they hope to. They don’t wait, they’re impatient, prosaic, perhaps they don’t even want to experience that feeling because it seems inconceivable, and so they get together with or get married to the first likely person they meet, which is not so very odd, in fact, it’s always been the norm. Some people think that being in love or infatuated is a modern invention that appears only in novels. Be that as it may, it nevertheless exists, the invention, the word, and our capacity for such a feeling.’ – Díaz-Varela had left the odd phrase unfinished or hanging in the air, he had hesitated, been tempted to make digressions of his digressions, but stopped himself; he didn’t want to speechify, despite his natural tendency to do so, but to tell me something. He had leaned forward and was sitting almost on the edge of the armchair now, his elbows on his knees and his hands together; his tone had grown vehement within the usually cold, expository, almost didactic limits he imposed on such speeches. And, as always happened when he spoke at length, I could not take my eyes off his face or his lips, which moved quickly as he uttered the words. Not that I wasn’t interested in what he was saying, I had always been interested, all the more so now that he was confessing to me what he had done and why and how, or, rather, what he, quite rightly, believed that I believed. But even if I hadn’t been interested, I would have continued listening to him indefinitely, listening and looking. He switched on another light, the lamp beside him (he sometimes sat reading in that armchair), because night had fallen and the one light that was on was not enough. I could see him better, I could see his rather long eyelashes and his somewhat dreamy expression, which was dreamy even then. His face showed no signs of anxiety or embarrassment at what he was telling me. He did not, for the moment, find it difficult. I had to remind myself how odious his overriding calm was in those circumstances, because the truth is I did not find him odious. – ‘You know that you would do anything for that person,’ he went on, ‘that you will help or support her no matter what, even if that involves undertaking some horrible enterprise (say, she wants someone bumping off, you’ll assume she has her reasons and that there’s no alternative), and that you will do whatever she asks of you. Such a person doesn’t merely charm you, in the usual sense of the word, rather, you feel intensely drawn or bound to them, and that feeling is much stronger and longer-lasting. As we all know, such unconditionality has little to do with reason, or indeed with causes. It’s really very odd, because the effect is huge and yet there are no real causes, at least not usually, or none that can be put into words. It seems to me that it’s a lot to do with making a decision, but a decision that is entirely arbitrary … But that’s another story.’ – Again he had been tempted into speechifying, and was forcing himself to resist. He was trying to get to the point, and my feeling was that, if he was still taking his time, he was not doing so unwillingly and unwittingly, but had an end in mind, perhaps he was trying to draw me in and gradually accustom me to the facts. Occasionally, I would stop and think: ‘We are talking about a murder, after all, not something ordinary, and yet here I am listening to him instead of hanging him from a tree.’ And I was immediately reminded of Athos’s response to d’Artagnan’s horrified reaction: ‘Yes, a murder, nothing more.’ And yet I thought this less and less. – ‘Almost no one can answer the questions that others ask about them, about anyone: “Why did he fall in love with her? What did he see in her?” Especially when that person is deemed unbearable, which is not, I think, the case with Luisa; but then who am I to say, precisely for the reasons I’ve just set out. But not even you, María, to look no further, would be able to explain why you’ve been so attracted to me during the short time we’ve known each other, despite all my defects and despite knowing, from the start, that my real interest lay elsewhere, that I had a long-held, ineluctable objective, that you and I would go no further than we have done. You wouldn’t be able to come up with an explanation, I mean, apart from mumbling a few vague, airy-fairy, highly subjective phrases, as arguable as they are unarguable, unarguable for you (how could anyone argue with you?), but highly arguable for other people.’ – ‘It’s true, I wouldn’t be able to explain,’ I thought. ‘Like a fool. What could I say, that I liked looking at him and kissing him, going to bed with him, that I enjoyed the anxiety of not knowing whether we would end up in bed or not, enjoyed listening to him. He’s right, they’re idiotic reasons that would convince no one, or would sound idiotic to someone who doesn’t share our feelings or has never experienced anything similar. As Javier said, they aren’t even reasons, they’re probably more akin to a leap of faith than anything else; although perhaps they do constitute causes. And the effect is huge, he’s right there. Irresistible.’ I must have blushed slightly, or perhaps even shifted uneasily on the sofa, out of discomfort and embarrassment. It bothered me that he should have spoken about me openly like that, that he should have referred to my feelings for him when I had always been so discreet and sparing in what I said, had never pestered him with pleas or declarations, or with subtle comments that invited some reciprocal expression of affection, I had never made him feel the least responsibility or obligation or need to respond, not once; nor had I harboured any hopes that the situation would change, or only in the solitude of my bedroom, looking out at the trees, far from him and in secret, like someone fantasizing to herself as sleep steals over her, but everyone has a right to do that, to imagine the impossible as wakefulness finally wanes, why not, and as the day closes. It troubled me that he should have included me in all that, he could have kept it to himself; he wouldn’t have said it innocently, he had something in mind, he didn’t just let it slip. Again I felt
like getting up and going, and leaving that beloved, dreaded apartment for good, never to return; but now I knew that I would not leave until he had finished, until he had told me his whole truth or his whole lie, or his truth and his lie together, no, I would not leave just yet. Díaz-Varela noticed my flushed cheeks and my unease, or whatever it was, because he quickly added, like someone trying to pour oil on troubled waters: ‘Not that I’m suggesting you’re in love with me or that you’d do absolutely anything for me, nor that you feel intensely drawn to me, not at all. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. I know that you’re very far from having such feelings, that there’s no comparison between what you feel for me after only a brief acquaintance and what I’ve felt for Luisa for years now. I know that I’m just a diversion, an amusement. As you are for me, unless I’m much mistaken, there’s barely any difference. I only mention it as proof that even the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that’s even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that.’