The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  IV

  That, as I imagined it would be, was the last occasion on which I saw Díaz-Varela alone, and quite some time passed before I met him again, and then in company and by chance. But for most of that time he haunted my days and my nights, at first intensely, then only palely loitering, as Keats put it. I suppose he thought we had nothing more to say, he must have been left with the feeling that he had more than fulfilled the unexpected task of giving me an explanation he had doubtless assumed he would never have to give to anyone. He had acted imprudently with the Prudent Young Woman (I’m no longer so very young, nor was I t
hen), and he’d had no choice but to tell me his story, sinister or sombre depending on which version he gave. After that, there was no need for him to stay in touch with me, to expose himself to my suspicions, my looks, my evasive comments, my silent judgements, nor would I have wanted to submit him to them, we would have become enveloped in an atmosphere of grim unease. He did not seek me out nor did I seek him out. We had said an implicit goodbye, had reached a conclusion that no amount of mutual physical attraction or non-mutual love could delay.

  The following day, despite his weariness, he must have felt that a weight had been lifted off his shoulders or been replaced by another far lighter one – I now knew more, having been present at a confession – because it was even less likely than ever that I would go to anyone with my still unprovable knowledge. He, though, has passed a weight on to me, because far worse than my grave suspicions and my possibly hasty and unfair conjectures was the burden of having two versions of events and not knowing which to believe, or, rather, knowing that I would have to believe both and that both would cohabit in my memory until it grew weary of the duplication and turfed them out. Anything anyone tells you becomes absorbed into you, becomes part of your consciousness, even if you don’t believe it or know that it never happened and that it’s pure invention, like novels and films, like the remote story of Colonel Chabert. And although Díaz-Varela had followed the old precept of keeping the ‘true’ story until last and telling me the ‘false’ story first, that rule is never enough to erase the initial or previous version. You still heard it and, although it might be momentarily refuted by what comes afterwards, which contradicts and gives the lie to it, its memory endures, as does our own credulity while we were listening, when, not knowing that it would be followed by a denial, we mistook it for the truth. Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers, if not when we’re awake, then as we drift off to sleep or in our dreams, where the order of things doesn’t matter, and it remains there tossing and turning and pulsating as if it were someone who had been buried alive or perhaps a dead man who reappears because he didn’t actually die, either in Eylau or on the road back or having been hanged from a tree or something else. What has been said continues to watch us and occasionally revisits us, as ghosts do, and then it never seems enough, we recall even the longest conversation as having been all too brief and the most thorough explanation as being full of holes; we wish we had asked more questions and listened more closely and paid more attention to non-verbal signs, which are slightly less deceiving than verbal ones.

  Needless to say, I considered the possibility of tracking down Dr Vidal Secanell, with a surname like that there would be no problem finding him. Indeed, I learned from the Internet that he worked for an odd-sounding organization called the Anglo-American Medical Unit, based in Calle Conde de Aranda, in the Salamanca district of Madrid; I could easily make an appointment and ask him to check me over and give me an electrocardiogram, well, we all worry about our heart. Unfortunately, I lack the detective instinct, it’s just not me, and, besides, I felt it was a move that was as risky as it was futile: if Díaz-Varela had been happy to tell me his name, the doctor was sure to corroborate his version, whether it was true or not. Perhaps Dr Vidal was an old school friend of his, not of Desvern, perhaps he had been told what he should tell me if I came to see him and questioned him; he could always deny me access to a medical record that may never even have existed, confidentiality rules in such cases, and what right did I have, after all: I should really go there with Luisa and have her demand to see it, but she knew nothing about her husband’s illness and had not the slightest suspicion, and how could I so abruptly open her eyes, something that would involve multiple decisions and taking on an enormous responsibility, that of revealing the truth to someone who possibly didn’t want to know it, because you can never tell what someone wants to know until the revelation has been made, and then the evil has been done and it’s too late to withdraw, to put it behind you. Vidal might be yet another collaborator, he might owe Díaz-Varela enormous favours, he might be part of the conspiracy. Or perhaps it wasn’t even necessary. Two weeks had passed since I eavesdropped on that conversation with Ruibérriz; Díaz-Varela had had plenty of time in which to come up with a story that would neutralize or appease me, if I can put it like that; he could have gone to that cardiologist on some pretext or other (the novelists we publish, with that vain man Garay Fontina at their head, were always pestering all kinds of professionals with all kinds of questions), and asked him what painful, unpleasant, terminal illness could credibly justify a man preferring to kill himself or, if he couldn’t bring himself to do that, asking a friend to get rid of him instead. Dr Vidal might well be an honest, ingenuous sort and have given Díaz-Varela that information in good faith; and Díaz-Varela would have counted on my never going to visit the doctor, however tempted I was, as turned out to be the case (that I was tempted, I mean, but did not go). It occurred to me that he knew me better than I thought, that during our time together, he had been less distracted than he seemed and had studied me carefully, and, foolishly, I found that thought vaguely flattering, or maybe that was just a remnant of my infatuation; such feelings never end suddenly, nor are they transformed instantly into loathing, scorn, shame or mere stupor, there is a long road to be travelled before one arrives at those possible replacement feelings, there is a troubled period of infiltrations and mixtures, of hybridization and contamination, and the state of being infatuated or in love never entirely ends until it becomes indifference or, rather, tedium, until one can think: ‘What’s the point of living in the past, why bother even thinking about seeing Javier again. I can’t even be bothered to remember him. I want to drive that whole inexplicable time from my mind, like a bad dream. And that’s not so very difficult, given that I’m no longer the person I was. The only snag is that, even though I’m not that person, there are often moments when I can’t forget who I was and then, quite simply, my very name is loathsome to me and I wish I wasn’t me. At least a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although a memory can, at times, be somewhat devouring. But this memory no longer is, no, it no longer is.’

  As is only to be expected and as is only natural, such thoughts took time to arrive. And I could not help considering from a hundred different angles (or perhaps it was only ten angles repeated over and over) what Díaz-Varela had told me, his two versions, if they were two versions, and pondering details that had remained unclear in both, for there is no story, whether real or invented, without blind spots or contradictions or obscurities or mistakes, and in that respect – that of the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative – it didn’t really matter which was which.

  I revisited the articles I had read on the Internet about Desvern’s death, and in one of them I found the sentences that kept going round and round in my head: ‘The autopsy revealed that the victim had been stabbed sixteen times by his murderer. Every blow struck a vital organ, and according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five of the wounds proved fatal.’ I didn’t quite understand the difference between a fatal wound and one that struck a vital organ. At first sight, to a layman, they seemed to be the same thing. But that was only a secondary cause of my unease: if a pathologist had been involved and had drawn up that report, if there had been an autopsy, as was inevitable after any violent death and certainly after a homicide, how was it possible that no one noticed a ‘generalized metastasis throughout the body’, which Díaz-Varela had told me was the diagnosis given by Desvern’s consultant? On that afternoon, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask Díaz-Varela, the penny hadn’t dropped, and now I didn’t want to or couldn’t phone him, still less about that, he would have felt suspiciou
s, wary or simply weary, he might have come up with other ways of neutralizing me, when he saw that his explanations or the act he had put on had failed to appease me. I could understand that the newspapers might not have made much of it or that the information wasn’t even given to them, because it bore no relation to what had happened, but it seemed very strange that no one had informed Luisa. When I spoke to her, it was clear that she knew nothing about Deverne’s illness, which was precisely as he had wanted, according, that is, to his friend and indirect executioner, the ‘instigator’ of his death. I could also imagine what Díaz-Varela’s response would be, if I had been able to ask him: ‘Do you really think that a pathologist examining a guy who’s received sixteen stab wounds is going to take the trouble to look any further and inquire into the victim’s previous state of health? He may not even have opened him up and so wouldn’t know; maybe he didn’t even carry out a proper autopsy and merely filled in the form with his eyes shut: it was obvious what Miguel had died from.’ And he may well have been right: that had been the attitude of the two negligent surgeons two centuries before, despite being under orders from Napoleon himself: knowing what they knew, they didn’t even bother to take the pulse of fallen, trampled Chabert. Besides, in Spain, most people do only the bare minimum and have little desire to probe beneath the surface and waste time doing something they deem to be unnecessary.

  And then there were those overly technical terms used by Díaz-Varela. It was highly unlikely that he would have remembered them after having heard them once from Desvern some time before, nor even that Desvern would have used them when telling him about his misfortune, however often they were used by his doctors, the ophthalmologist, the consultant and the cardiologist. A desperate, terrified man wouldn’t resort to such dry-as-dust terminology when telling a friend he was under sentence of death, that just wouldn’t be normal. ‘Intraocular melanoma’, ‘a very advanced metastatic melanoma’, the adjective ‘asymptomatic’ or the noun ‘enucleation’, all those expressions struck me as having been recently learned, or recently heard from Dr Vidal. But perhaps my distrust was unfounded: after all, I haven’t forgotten them and much more time has passed since I heard him say them, and only on that one occasion too. And perhaps they would be repeated and used by someone suffering from an illness, as if that way he or she could somehow explain it better.