‘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 thus 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 without 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.”’
This conversation continued on other occasions; in fact, the subject seemed to come up, or Díaz-Varela would himself bring it up, every time we met – which wasn’t very often – I still can’t bring myself to call Díaz-Varela ‘Javier’ even though that was what I called him and how I thought of him on certain nights when I returned home late to my apartment after having spent a while in bed with him (one is only ever in someone else’s bed for ‘a while’, on loan, unless invited to spend the whole night there, and that never happened with him; indeed, he would invent absurd, unnecessary excuses to get rid of me, unnecessary because I’ve never stayed anywhere longer than I should have, unless asked). Before closing my eyes, I would stare out of the open window of my own bedroom and look across at the trees opposite, which, having no streetlamp to light them, are barely visible, but I would hear them stirring close by in the darkness, like a prelude to the storms that sometimes pass over Madrid, and I would say to myself: ‘What is the point of this, for me at least? He’s not pretending, he’s not deceiving me, he doesn’t conceal his hopes from me or his motivation, which, although he may not know it, are all blindingly obvious: he’s just waiting for her to emerge from her state of deep depression or enervation and begin to see him differently, not merely as the faithful friend her husband bequeathed to her. He has to be very careful, though, with the small steps he takes, which must,
inevitably, be very small if he is not to look as if he were showing a lack of respect for her natural grief or even for the dead man’s memory, and he must, at the same time, remain alert in case someone else slips in before him, which means that he cannot discount as rivals even the ugliest or stupidest or most casual or most boring or most languid of suitors, because any one of them could present an unforeseen danger. While he keeps watch over her, he sees me from time to time and possibly other women too (we tend to avoid asking each other questions), and maybe I’m doing the same as him in a way, trying to make myself indispensable without him noticing, making myself one of his habits, even if only a very sporadic habit, so that he will find me hard to replace when he does decide to abandon me. Some men make things very clear from the start without anyone needing to ask: “I must warn you that there will never be anything more between us than there is already, and if you’re hoping for more, then we’d better finish right now” or “You’re not the only one nor should you aim to be; if you’re looking for exclusivity, this isn’t the place” or, as was the case with Díaz-Varela: “I’m in love with someone else who hasn’t yet realized that she could be in love with me. That time will come, though, I just have to be constant and patient. There’s nothing wrong, however, with you keeping me amused in the meantime, if you want to, but be quite clear, that’s all we are to each other, temporary companionship and amusement and sex; at most, camaraderie and a little affection.” Not that Díaz-Varela has ever said those precise words to me, there’s no need, because that is the unequivocal message that emerges from our encounters. On the other hand, those same men who issue warnings sometimes eat their words later on, and a lot of us women tend to be optimistic and conceited in a way, more profoundly so than many men, who, in the field of love, remain conceited only briefly and forget to be so after a
while: we think men will change their mind or their beliefs, that they will gradually discover that they can’t do without us, that we will be the exception in their lives or the visitors who end up staying, that they will eventually grow tired of those other invisible women whose existence we begin to doubt or whom we prefer to think do not exist, the more we see of the men and the more we love them despite ourselves; that we will be the chosen ones if only we have the necessary staying power to remain by their side, uncomplaining and uninsistent. When we don’t arouse immediate passion, we believe that loyalty and our mere persistent presence will finally be rewarded and prove stronger and more durable than any momentary rapture or caprice. In such cases, we know that we will be hard-pressed to feel flattered even if our fondest hopes come true, but if they do, we will feel inwardly triumphant. There is, however, no certainty of this for as long as the struggle continues, and even the most justifiably confident of women, even those who, up until then, have been universally courted, can be badly let down by those men who refuse to surrender and issue them with arrogant warnings. I don’t belong to the category of the confident, the truth is that I harbour no real hopes of triumphing, or, rather, the only hopes I allow myself revolve around Díaz-Varela’s failure to win Luisa, and then, perhaps, with luck, he’ll stay with me out of pure inertia, because even the most restless and diligent and scheming of men can grow lazy, especially after a frustration or a failure or a very long and pointless wait. I know that it wouldn’t offend me to be a substitute, because we are all of us substitutes for someone, especially initially: Díaz-Varela would be a substitute for Luisa’s dead husband; as far as I was concerned, my substitute for Díaz-Varela would be Leopoldo, whom I have not yet ruled out – just in case, I suppose – even though I only half-like him, and with whom I only started going out – how very opportune – just
before I met Díaz-Varela in the Natural History Museum and heard him talk and talk while I ceaselessly watched his lips as I still do whenever we’re together, only taking my eyes off them to look up at his clouded gaze; perhaps Luisa was a substitute for someone else when she met Deverne, who knows, perhaps for his first wife, although it was incomprehensible that anyone could wound or leave such a pleasant, cheerful man, and yet there he is, stabbed to death for no reason and now en route to oblivion. Yes, we are all poor imitations of people whom, generally speaking, we never met, people who never even approached or simply walked straight past the lives of those we now love, or who did perhaps stop, but grew weary after a time and disappeared without leaving so much as a trace, or only the dust from their fleeing feet, or who died, causing those we love a mortal wound that almost always heals in the end. We cannot pretend to be the first or the favourite, we are merely what is available, the leftovers, the leavings, the survivors, the remnants, the remaindered goods, and it is on this somewhat ignoble basis that the greatest loves are built and on which the best families are founded, and from which we all come, the product of chance and making do, of other people’s rejections and timidities and failures, and yet we would give anything sometimes to stay by the side of the person we rescued from an attic or a clearance sale, or won in a game of cards or who picked us up from among the scraps; strange though it may seem, we manage to believe in these chance fallings in love, and many think they can see the hand of destiny in what is really nothing more than a village raffle at the fag-end of summer …’ Then I would turn out the light on my bedside table and, after a few seconds, the trees being blown about by the wind would become slightly more visible and I could go to sleep watching, or perhaps merely sensing, the swaying of their leaves. ‘What is the point?’ I would think. ‘The only point, in these
silly, insurmountable circumstances, is to cling on to the smallest thing, the smallest handhold. Another day, another hour at his side, even if that hour takes ages to arrive; the vague promise of seeing him again even though many days, many empty days, must pass before that happens. We note down in our diary the dates when he phoned us or we saw him, we count the days that pass with no news from him, and stay awake into the small hours before giving the night up as definitively barren and lost, just in case, at the last moment, the phone should ring and he should whisper some nonsense or other that fills us with an entirely unjustified euphoria and a sense that life is kind and merciful. We interpret every inflection of his voice and every insignificant word, which we nevertheless repeat to ourselves and endow with stupid, promising meaning. We value any contact, however brief, even if it’s only to receive some flimsy excuse or to be let down or to listen to a barely elaborated lie. “At least, at some point, he thought of me,” we tell ourselves gratefully. “He thinks of me when he’s bored or if he’s suffered some setback with Luisa, the person he really cares about, I may only be in second place, but that’s better than nothing.” It occurs to us sometimes – but only sometimes – that all it needs is for the person occupying first place to fall, a feeling familiar to all younger brothers of kings and princes and even to more distant relatives and remote, isolated bastard children, who know that this is how one can pass from tenth place to ninth, from sixth to fifth and from fourth to third, and, at some point, all will have silently formulated the inexpressible desire: “He should have died yesterday,” or the wish that appears in the minds of the boldest pretenders: “There’s still time for him to die tomorrow, which will be the yesterday of the day after tomorrow, assuming I’m alive then.” We don’t care about humiliating ourselves to ourselves, after all, no one is going to judge us and there are no witnesses. When we get caught in the spider’s
web, we fantasize endlessly and, at the same time, make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him, smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.’