She burst out laughing. Even though she was the object of the reprimand, she obviously found his rudeness vastly amusing. Díaz-Varela laughed too, perhaps infected by her laughter or perhaps to flatter Rico into further excesses – he could hardly have been surprised by Rico’s impertinence or by the liberties he took; he then tried to provoke him further, possibly to make Luisa laugh more and draw her out of her momentarily sombre mood. And yet he seemed perfectly spontaneous. He was utterly charming and he pretended very well, if he was pretending.
‘You’re not telling me that the editor of that edition isn’t a respected authority,’ he said to Rico, ‘indeed, he’s rather more respected than you are in some circles.’
‘Huh, respected by ignoramuses and eunuchs, of which this country is filled to bursting, and by literary and philosophical societies in Spain’s lazier, lowlier provincial towns,’ retorted Professor Rico. He opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page
and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger. ‘I’ve seen one glaring error already.’ Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further. ‘I’ll write an article about it.’ He looked up with a triumphant air and smiled from ear to ear (an enormous smile made possible by his flexible mouth) and added: ‘Besides, the fellow’s jealous of me.’
II
I didn’t see Luisa Alday again for quite some time, and in the long between-time I began going out with a man I vaguely liked, and fell stupidly and secretly in love with another, with her adoring Díaz-Varela, whom I met shortly afterwards in the most unlikely of places, very close to where Deverne had died, in the reddish building that houses the Natural History Museum, which is right next to or, rather, part of the same complex as the technical college, with its gleaming glass-and-zinc cupola, about twenty-seven metres high and about twenty in diameter, erected around 1881, when these buildings were neither college nor museum, but the brand-new National Palace for the Arts and Industry, which was the site of an important exhibition that year; the area used to be known as the Altos del Hipódromo, the Hippodrome Heights, because of its various promontories and its proximity to a few horses whose ghostly exploits have become doubly or definitively so, since there can be no one alive who saw or remembers them. The Natural History Museum is rather a poor affair, especially compared with those one finds in England, but I used to take my young nieces and nephews there sometimes so that they could see and get to know the static animals in their glass display cases, and I then acquired a taste for going there on my own from time to time, mingling with – but invisible to – the groups of junior- and secondary-school students and their exasperated or patient
teachers and with a few bewildered tourists with too much time on their hands, who probably learned of the museum’s existence from some overly punctilious and exhaustive guide to the city: for apart from the large number of museum attendants, most of whom are Latin Americans now, these tend to be the only living beings in the place, which has the unreal, superfluous, fantastical air of all natural history museums.
I was studying a scale model of the vast gaping jaws of a crocodile – I always used to think how easily I would fit inside them and how lucky I was not to live in a place inhabited by such reptiles – when I heard someone say my name and was so taken aback that I spun round, feeling slightly alarmed: when you’re in that half-empty museum, you have the almost absolute, comforting certainty that no one has the least idea where you are at that precise moment.
I recognized him at once, with his feminine lips and his falsely cleft chin, his calm smile and that expression, at once attentive and discreet. He asked me what I was doing there, and I replied: ‘I like to come here now and then. It’s full of tame wild beasts you can get right up close to.’ And as soon as I said this, I thought that, actually, there were very few wild beasts there and that what I had said was just plain silly, and I realized, too, that I had merely been trying to make myself seem interesting, doubtless with dire results. ‘And it’s a nice quiet place,’ I added lamely. I, in turn, asked him what was he doing there, and he answered: ‘I like to come here sometimes too,’ and I waited for him to add some silly comment of his own, but, alas, I waited in vain. Díaz-Varela had no desire to impress me. ‘I live quite near. When I go out for a walk, my feet occasionally lead me here.’ That bit about his feet leading him there seemed slightly literary and twee and gave me some hope. ‘I sit out on the terrace for a while and then I go home. Anyway, let me buy you a drink, unless
you want to continue studying those crocodile teeth or visit one of the other rooms.’ Outside, on the hill, beneath the shade of the trees, opposite the college, there’s a refreshment kiosk with tables and chairs.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I know these teeth by heart. I was just considering going to see the absurd Adam and Eve they’ve got downstairs.’ He didn’t react, he didn’t say ‘Oh, right’ or anything, as I would have expected from someone who was a regular visitor to the museum: in the basement, there’s a vertical display case, not that big, made by an American or an English woman, Rosemary Something-or-other, which contains a highly eccentric representation of the Garden of Eden. All the animals surrounding the original couple are supposedly alive and either in motion or alert, monkeys, hares, turkeys, cranes, badgers, perhaps a toucan and even the snake, which is peering out with an all-too-human expression from among the vivid green leaves of the apple tree. By contrast, Adam and Eve, standing side by side, are mere skeletons, and the only way of telling them apart, to the uneducated eye at least, is that one of them is holding an apple in its right hand. I’ve probably read the explanatory notice at some point, but I don’t think it provided me with a satisfactory explanation. If it was a matter of illustrating the differences between the bones of a man and those of a woman, then why make them into our first parents, as the Catholic faith used to call them, and place them in that particular setting; and if it was intended to show Paradise and its rather sparse fauna, then why the skeletons when all the other animals are complete with their flesh and their fur or feathers? It’s one of the museum’s most incongruous exhibits, and no visitor can fail to notice it, not because it’s pretty, but because it makes no sense at all.
‘It’s María Dolz, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I, it is Dolz?’
Díaz-Varela said once we had sat down on the terrace, as if keen to show off his retentive memory; after all, I alone had said my surname and then only hurriedly, slipping it in like an insert of no interest to any of the others present. I felt flattered by this gesture, but didn’t feel I was being courted.
‘You obviously have a good memory – and a good ear,’ I said, so as not to be impolite. ‘Yes, it’s Dolz, not Dols or Dolç with a cedilla.’ And I drew a cedilla in the air. ‘How’s Luisa?’
‘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.