With me, Díaz-Varela made no attempt to hide the impatience that he was obliged to conceal from Luisa, whenever, that is, we returned to his favourite topic of conversation, the one he could not have with her and the only one, it seemed to me, of any real importance to him, as if until that matter was settled, everything else was postponable and provisional, as if the effort invested in it were so huge that all other decisions had to remain in abeyance, waiting for some resolution, and as if his whole life depended on the failure or success of that stubborn hope of his, which had no definite completion date. Perhaps there was no indefinite completion date either: what would happen if Luisa failed to respond to his entreaties and advances, to his passion, if he gave voice to it, but chose, rather, to remain alone? When would he consider that it was time to abandon his long wait? I didn’t want to find myself sliding imperceptibly into the same situation and so I continued to cultivate Leopoldo, whom I had decided to keep in the dark about Díaz-Varela. It was ridiculous enough that
my
steps depended, indirectly, on those taken or not taken by an inconsolable widow, and it would have been even more ridiculous to lengthen the chain still further and add to it the steps of a poor, unwitting man who didn’t even know her: with a little bad luck and a few more lovers of the kind who allow themselves to be loved and neither reject nor reciprocate that love, the chain could have gone on for ever. A series
of people lined up like dominoes, all waiting for the surrender of one entirely oblivious woman, to find out who would fall next to them.
At no point did it occur to Díaz-Varela that I might be upset by his statement of intent, although it is also true that he never presented himself as Luisa’s salvation and destiny; he never said, ‘When she climbs out of the abyss and breathes again by my side, and smiles,’ still less, ‘When she marries again, marries me, that is.’ He never put himself forward as a candidate or included himself, but it was perfectly clear that he was the immovable man who waits; had he lived in another age, he would have been counting off the remaining days of the mourning period, then those of half-mourning and would have consulted the older women – who knew most about such matters – as to what would be an acceptable moment for him to remove his mask and make a play for her. That’s the worst thing about losing our old codes of conduct, we don’t know which is the right moment to act or what rules to follow, when it would be too soon or so late that we would have missed our turn. We have to be guided by ourselves and then it’s very easy to make a blunder.
I don’t know if it was simply that his desires coloured everything or if he deliberately sought out literary and historical texts that would support his arguments and come to his aid (perhaps he received guidance from Rico, that man of compendious knowledge, although, as I understand it, it is impossible to extract that disdainful scholar from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, for it seems that nothing that has happened since 1650, including his own existence, merits his attention).
‘I read a book recently, which, although I hadn’t heard of it before, is, apparently, very famous,’ Díaz-Varela said, taking a French book down from the shelf and waving it before my eyes, as if he could speak more authoritatively with it in his hand and prove, moreover,
that he had actually read it. ‘It’s a novella by Balzac which agrees with me as regards Luisa, as regards what will happen to her in the fullness of time. It tells the story of one of Napoleon’s colonels who was given up for dead at the Battle of Eylau. The battle took place between the 7th and 8th of February 1807 near the town of that name in East Prussia, and pitted the French and Russian armies against each other in Arctic conditions; they say that the battle was fought in what was possibly the most inclement weather ever, although I’ve no idea how they can know this, still less state it as a fact. This Colonel, Chabert by name, is in charge of a cavalry regiment and, during the fighting, receives a terrible blow to the skull from a sword. There is a moment in the novella when, in removing his hat in the presence of a lawyer, he accidentally removes the wig he is wearing too and reveals a monstrously long scar that begins at the nape of his neck and ends just above his right eye, can you imagine?’ – and he demonstrated the line of the scar by running his index finger slowly over his head – ‘forming what Balzac described as “a prominent seam”, adding that one’s first thought on seeing the wound was: “His intelligence must have escaped through that gash!” Marshal Murat, the same man who crushed the 2nd of May uprising in Madrid, promptly dispatches fifteen hundred horsemen to rescue him, but all of them, with Murat at the head, ride straight over him, over his prostrate body. He is assumed to be dead, despite the Emperor – who greatly admires him – sending two surgeons on to the battlefield to check that he is dead; those negligent men, however, knowing that his skull has been sliced open and that he has then been trampled on by two cavalry regiments, do not even bother to take his pulse and officially and hastily certify him as dead, and that death then appears in the French army’s bulletins, where it is recorded in detail, thus becoming historical fact. He is thrown into a grave along with the other naked
corpses, as was the custom: he had been a famous man while alive, but now he is just another corpse lying in a cold grave, and all corpses go to the same place. The Colonel tells his improbable but entirely convincing story to a Parisian lawyer, Derville, who he hopes will take on his case, he recounts how he recovered consciousness before being buried, thought, at first, that he was actually dead, then realized he was still alive, and with great difficulty and great luck managed to escape from that pyramid of ghosts, after having himself been one of them for who knows how many hours and having heard, or as he says, thought he could hear …’ – and here Díaz-Varela opened the book and looked for a particular quotation, he must have underlined various sections, which is perhaps why he had picked up the book, so as to be able to read out the actual words to me – ‘“groans from the world of the dead amongst whom I was lying”, adding “there are nights when I think I still hear those stifled moans”. His wife is left a widow and, after a decent interval, she marries again, a certain Count Ferraud, by whom she has two children, her first marriage having been childless. She inherits a considerable fortune from her fallen hero, she recovers and carries on with her life, she is still young, after all, she has a fair stretch of road before her and that is the determining factor: the road that foreseeably lies ahead of us and how we want to travel that road once we have decided to remain in the world and not go chasing after ghosts, which exercise a powerful attraction when they are still recent, as if they wanted to drag us after them. Whether many people die around us, as happens during a war, or just one much-loved individual, we feel an initial temptation to join them, or at least to carry their weight and not let them go. Most people, though, do let go of them after a time, when they recognize that their own survival is at risk, that the dead are a great burden and prevent any possible advance, and even stop your breath, if you’re too
wrapped up in them, if you live too much in their dark shadow. Regrettably, they are as fixed as paintings, they don’t move, they don’t add anything, they don’t speak and never respond, and drive us into a blind alley, into one corner of their painting, which, being finished, allows for no retouching. The novella doesn’t describe the widow’s grief, if she went through what Luisa is going through; it doesn’t mention her pain or her grief, it doesn’t show the character at all during the period when she would have received the fateful news, but only ten years later, in 1817, I believe, but given that she doesn’t appear to be a heartless person or at least not someone who was heartless from the start – the fact is we don’t know, because it’s left unexplored – one assumes that she experienced all the usual stages of bereavement (shock, desolation, sadness, languor, apathy, anxiety, fear upon realizing that time is passing, and consequent recovery).’
Díaz-Varela broke off and took a sip of the whisky and ice he had poured himself. He hadn’t sat down again after getting up to take the book off the shelf, I was lying on the sofa, we hadn’t yet gone to his bed. That was what usually happened, we would sit down first and talk for at least an hour, and I was never sure whether there would be a second act or not, our behaviour gave no indication either way, it was that of two people who have things to tell each other or to talk about and who will not inevitably end up having sex together. I always had the feeling that it might or might not happen, and that the two possibilities were equally natural and neither could be taken for granted, as if each time were the first time and as if there had been no accumulation of experiences from whatever had happened previously in that regard – not even a sense of trust, not even a caress – and we would eternally have to start the same journey from the beginning. I was also sure that we would do whatever he wanted or rather
proposed, because the fact is that he was always the one, with a word or gesture, who would propose moving to the bedroom, but only after we had talked, and in the face of my invincible timidity. I feared that one day, instead of making the gesture or saying the word that would invite me to join him in bed or to pull up my skirt, he would suddenly – or after a pause – bring the conversation and our meeting to a close as if we were two friends who had run out of things to say or had various errands to do and would send me out into the street with a kiss, I could never be certain that my visit would end up with our bodies entangling. I both liked and didn’t like that strange uncertainty: on the one hand, it made me think that he enjoyed my company whatever the circumstances and didn’t see me merely as an instrument for his sexual hygiene or relief; on the other hand, it infuriated me that he could hold off for so long, that he didn’t feel an urgent need to pounce on me without further ado, as soon as he opened the door, in order to satisfy his desire; that he found it so easy to postpone that moment, or perhaps his desire was merely accumulating while I looked at him and listened. But that quibble can be put down to the dissatisfaction that predominates in us all and without which we cannot live, especially since, in the end, the thing I always feared wouldn’t happen did happen, and I had no reason to complain.
‘Go on, what happened next, in what way does that book prove you right?’ I said. He definitely had the gift of the gab and I loved to listen to him, regardless of what he talked about and even if he was recounting an old Balzac story that I could easily read for myself, a story not invented by him, but doubtless interpreted in his own free and possibly distorted fashion. I found anything he said interesting or, worse, amusing (worse, because I was aware that one day I would have to stand aside). Now that I never go to his apartment, I recall those visits as forays into a secret territory, as a small adventure,
perhaps more because of the first act of each encounter than the second, although, at the time, the very uncertainty of that second act made it seem even more desirable.
‘The Colonel wants to recover his name, career, rank, dignity, fortune or part of it (he has spent years living in dire poverty) as well as the most complicated thing of all: his wife, who will be shown to be a bigamist if Chabert can prove that he really is Chabert and not an impostor or a lunatic. Perhaps Madame Ferraud really loved him and mourned his death when she was told of it, and felt that the world had fallen in on her; but his reappearance is surplus to requirements, his resurrection a real nuisance, a great problem, threatening catastrophe and ruin, and, paradoxically, it brings with it again the sense that the world is falling in on her: how can the return of the person whose disappearance first evoked those feelings evoke precisely the same feelings? We see quite clearly that, with the passing of time, what
has been
should continue to
have been
, to exist only in the past, as is always or almost always the case, that is how life is intended to be, so that there is no undoing what is done and no unhappening what has happened; the dead must stay where they are and nothing can be corrected. We can allow ourselves to miss them because we know they are safely gone: we lost someone and, knowing that he is never going to come back or reclaim the place he vacated, a place that, besides, has since been swiftly filled, we are free to long for his return with all our might. We can miss him safe in the knowledge that our proclaimed desires will never be granted and that there is no possible return, that he can no longer intervene in our existence or in mundane matters, that he can no longer intimidate or inhibit or even overshadow us, that he will never again be better than us. We sincerely regretted his departure, and when it happened, we truly wished he could have gone on living; a vast gap or even abyss opened up and
we were tempted to hurl ourselves after him; that, at least, is what we felt momentarily. It’s rare, though, for that initial temptation not to expire. Then the days and months and years pass and we adapt; we get used to that gap and don’t even consider the possibility that the dead man will come back to fill it, because the dead don’t do that, and we are safe from them, and, besides, that gap has been filled in and is no longer the same or has become purely fictitious. We remember those closest to us every day and still feel sad to think that we will not see them again or hear them or laugh with them or kiss those we used to kiss. But there is no death that is not also, in some way, a relief, that does not offer some advantage. Once it has occurred, of course; we do not desire anyone’s death in advance, possibly not even that of our enemies. We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken
another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone. This glee is observable even in journalists, who come up with such headlines as “The last genius of the piano dies” or “Death of the last great cinema legend”, as if they were joyfully celebrating the fact that, finally, there are no more geniuses and never will be, that this latest demise frees us from the eternal nightmare of knowing that superior, very gifted people exist and that, much to our regret, we cannot help but admire them; that we are a step closer to banishing that curse or, at least, bringing it down a peg or two. Naturally, one mourns a friend, as I have mourned Miguel, but there is also the pleasant sense of having survived and of better prospects, of being present at a friend’s death rather than your own, of being able to view his finished portrait and tell his story, to defend and console the people he has left behind. As your friends die, you feel more shrunken and more alone, but, at the same time, you count them off, “One less, and another, I know what their lives were like up until the final instant, and I am the only one who can tell the tale. In my case, though, no one who really cares about me will see me die or be able to tell my whole story, and so, in a sense, I will remain forever unfinished, because, not having seen me fall, how can anyone be certain that I won’t continue to live eternally?”’