I noticed this complete lack of mutual respect in the way Díaz-Varela addressed Ruibérriz, even ordering him to leave (after my brief exchange with Ruibérriz, he said bluntly: ‘Right, you’ve taken up quite enough of my time and I can’t neglect my visitor any longer. So clear off, will you, Ruibérriz, scram!’ He must have paid him money or was perhaps still paying him for his services as intermediary, for organizing the murder and keeping abreast of the consequences), and in the way that Ruibérriz ran his eyes over me from the very first moment right up until he left: for he maintained his initial appreciative gaze, understandable when I made my surprise appearance, even after he had realized that this wasn’t the first time I had been there in that bedroom, that’s something one always
senses immediately; when he saw that my presence was neither the result of a chance encounter nor a trial run, that I wasn’t a woman who has gone up to a man’s apartment for the evening – an inaugural evening, shall we say, which often ends up being a one-off – just as she might have gone up to the apartment of some other man she fancied, but that I was, how can I put it, ‘taken’ by his friend, at least for the time being, which, as it turned out, was almost the case. Not that this bothered him: he didn’t for a moment moderate his appraising masculine gaze or his salacious, flirtatious, gummy smile, as if unexpectedly seeing a woman in bra and skirt and making her acquaintance was, for him, an investment for the near future and brought with it the hope of meeting me again very soon, alone and in another place, or even asking for my phone number later on from the person who had been obliged, against his will, to introduce us.
‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I said, when I returned to the living room, this time wearing my sweater. ‘I wouldn’t have appeared in that state if I’d known we weren’t alone.’ I understood that I needed to emphasize this in order to dispel any suspicions. Díaz-Varela was still regarding me seriously, almost reprovingly or harshly; not so Ruibérriz.
‘There’s absolutely no need to apologize,’ he said with old-fashioned gallantry. ‘Your attire could not have been more striking. Sadly all too fleeting.’
Díaz-Varela scowled, he was distinctly unamused by everything that had happened: the arrival of his accomplice and the news he had brought with him, my irruption on to the scene and the fact that Ruibérriz and I now knew each other, plus the possibility that I might have heard them through the door, when he thought I was safely asleep; he was doubtless equally displeased by the way Ruibérriz had gazed so covetously at my bra and skirt, or at the little they concealed,
and by his subsequent compliments, even though these had been couched in the politest of terms. I felt a childish and, after what I had just discovered, incongruous pleasure – it lasted only an instant – in imagining that Díaz-Varela could feel something resembling or, rather, reminiscent of jealousy in my regard. He was visibly put out and even more so when we were left alone, once Ruibérriz had departed, his coat draped over his shoulders, as he walked slowly towards the lift, as if he were very pleased with his own image and wanted to give me time to admire him from behind: he was clearly an optimist, of the kind who doesn’t believe that he’ll ever get old. Before entering the lift, he turned to us, for we were watching him from the front door like a married couple, and he bade farewell by raising a hand to one eyebrow for a second, then raising it slightly higher in a gesture that mimicked doffing a hat. The problem he had brought with him seemed to have vanished, he was obviously a frivolous man whose anxieties were easily displaced by whatever cheering moment the present might bring him. It occurred to me that he would not do as his friend had asked and destroy his leather coat; he was too pleased with the way he looked in it.
‘Who’s he?’ I asked Díaz-Varela, trying to use an indifferent, casual tone of voice. ‘What does he do? He’s the first friend of yours I’ve met, and you seem an unlikely pair. He strikes me as a bit of an oddball.’
‘He’s Ruibérriz,’ he replied tartly, as if that were an entirely new fact or a defining piece of information. Then he realized that he had been rather sharp with me and hadn’t told me anything. He remained silent for a few moments, as if weighing up how much he could say without compromising himself. ‘You met Rico on one occasion,’ he said. ‘Anyway, as for Ruibérriz, he does all kinds of things and nothing in particular. He’s not a friend, I only know him superficially,
although I’ve known him for a while now. He has various vague business deals going on, none of which make him very much money, which is why he has his fingers in all kinds of different pies. If he wins the heart of some wealthy woman, he lives off her for a while until she gets fed up with him. Otherwise, he writes television scripts and speeches for ministers, company directors, bankers or whoever, and does some ghostwriting too. He carries out research for punctilious historical novelists: what did people wear in the nineteenth century or in the 1930s, what was the transportation system like, what weapons did they use, what were shaving brushes or hairpins made of, when was such and such a building put up or a certain film first shown, the kind of superfluous stuff that bores readers, but which writers think will impress. He trawls newspaper archives and provides whatever information people ask him for. He’s picked up quite a lot along the way. I think, as a young man, he published a couple of novels, but they didn’t sell. I don’t know. He does favours here and there, and he probably lives off that more than anything else, off his contacts: he’s a useful man in his uselessness, or vice versa.’ He stopped, hesitated as to whether or not it would be imprudent to add what he was about to say, then decided there was no reason why it would be imprudent or thought perhaps that it would be worse to give the impression that he didn’t want to complete an apparently innocuous portrait. ‘He’s currently part-owner of a restaurant or two, but they’re doing very badly, his businesses never last, he opens them and closes them. The odd thing is that, after a while, once he’s recovered, he always manages to start another.’
‘And what did he want? He just turned up without warning, didn’t he?’
I immediately regretted asking so many questions.
‘Why do you want to know? What’s it got to do with you?’
He said this angrily, almost violently. I felt sure that, suddenly, he no longer trusted me, but saw me as a nuisance, maybe a threat, a possibly awkward witness, he had raised his guard, it was odd, just a short while before I had been a pleasant, inoffensive person, certainly not a cause for concern, probably quite the opposite, a most agreeable distraction while he waited for time to pass and to heal and for his expectations to be fulfilled, or for time to do the work he could not do, that of persuading, laying siege to, seducing, even making Luisa fall in love with him; I was merely someone who wanted no more than she already had and who asked of him nothing he was not prepared to give. Now he was gripped by a fear, a doubt. He couldn’t ask me if I had heard their conversation: if I hadn’t, he would be drawing my attention to whatever he and Ruibérriz might have been talking about while I was asleep, even though that was no concern of mine and of no great interest to me, I was just passing through, after all; if I had heard their conversation, I would obviously tell him that I hadn’t, and he still wouldn’t know the truth. It was inevitable, then, that I would be a potential problem from then on, or worse still, a nuisance, a hindrance.
Then I felt slightly afraid again, afraid of him, on his own, with no one there to restrain him. Removing me might be his only way of ensuring that his secret was safe, they say that once you’ve committed a crime it’s not so very hard to commit another, that once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no turning back, that the quantitative aspect becomes secondary given the magnitude of the leap taken, the qualitative leap that makes you forever a murderer until the very last day of your existence and in the memories of those who survive you, that is, if they know what happened or find out later on, when you are no longer there to obfuscate or deny. A thief can give back the thing he stole, a slanderer can acknowledge his calumny and put it right and
wipe clean the good name of the person he accused, even a traitor can sometimes make amends for his treachery before it’s too late. The trouble with murder is that it’s always too late and you cannot restore to the world the person you killed, that is irreversible and there’s no possible means of reparation, and saving other lives in the future, however many they might be, would never make up for the one life you took. And if, as they say, there is no forgiveness, then, whenever necessary, you must continue along the road taken. The important thing becomes not so much to avoid staining yourself, given that you carry in your breast an ineradicable stain, but to make sure that no one knows, that no one finds out, that what you did has no consequences and doesn’t destroy you, because, then, adding another stain is not so very grave, it gets mixed up with the first or is absorbed, the two join together and become one, and you get used to the idea that killing is part of your life, that this is your fate as it has been for so many others throughout history. You tell yourself that there’s nothing new about your situation, that innumerable other people have had the same experience and learned to live with it without too much difficulty and without going under, and have even managed intermittently to forget about it, for a brief moment each day in the day-to-day life that sustains and carries us along. No one can spend every hour regretting some concrete act or being fully conscious of what he did once, long ago, or twice or seven times, there are always going to be carefree, sorrow-free moments, and the very worst of murderers will enjoy them probably no less than an entirely innocent person. And he will continue to live and cease thinking of murder as a monstrous exception or a tragic mistake, but, rather, as another resource that life offers the boldest and toughest, the most resolute and most resistant. He doesn’t feel in the least isolated, but part of a large, abundant, ancient band, a kind of lineage that helps him to feel less ill-favoured
or anomalous and to understand himself and justify his actions: as if he had inherited those actions, or as if he had won them in a raffle at a fair from which no one is exempt, which means that he didn’t wholly commit those acts, or not at least alone.
‘Oh, no reason,’ I said quickly, in the most surprised – surprised ostensibly at his defensive reaction – and innocent tone that my throat could manage. That throat was afraid now, his hands could encircle it at any moment and it would be easy for them to squeeze and squeeze, my throat is quite slender and would offer not the least resistance, my hands wouldn’t be strong enough to push his away, to prise open his fingers, my legs would buckle, I would fall to the floor, he would throw himself on top of me as he had on other occasions, I would feel the weight of his body and his heat – or perhaps his cold – I would have no voice with which to persuade or implore. But as soon as I gave in to that fear, I realized that it was a false fear: Díaz-Varela would never take it upon himself to expel someone from the earth, he had not done so with his friend Deverne. Unless, of course, he was desperate and felt under imminent threat, unless he thought I would go straight to Luisa and tell her what I had discovered by a combination of chance and my own indiscretion. The trouble is, you can never rule out anything about anyone, and so that same slightly artificial fear came and went. ‘I was just asking for asking’s sake.’ – And I even had the courage or lack of prudence to add: ‘And because if that Ruibérriz fellow does do favours, maybe I can do you the odd favour too. I doubt it, but if I can help you in anyway, here I am.’
He looked at me hard for a few seconds that seemed to me very
long, as if he were weighing me up, trying to decipher me, the way you look at people who don’t know they’re being looked at, and as if I weren’t there but on a TV screen and he could observe me at his leisure, unconcerned about how I would react to such an insistent, penetrating gaze, his expression was now anything but dreamy and myopic, as it usually was, instead it was piercing and intimidating. I stood firm (we were, after all, lovers, who had contemplated each other in silence and with barely a shred of modesty), I held his gaze and even returned his scrutiny, wearing what I hoped was an expression of puzzlement and incomprehension. Until I could stand it no longer and I lowered my gaze to his lips, the lips I had grown so used to gazing at ever since the day I first met him, regardless of whether he was talking or silent, the lips of which I never tired and which had never inspired fear in me, only attraction. They were my momentary refuge, and there was nothing odd about my resting my gaze on his lips, I did that so frequently it was normal, and there was no reason why it should reinforce his suspicions, I raised one finger and touched his lips, gently traced their outline with the tip of my finger, a long caress, I thought it might calm him, fill him with a sense of confidence and security, a wordless way of saying to him: ‘Nothing has changed, I’m still here, I still love you. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know already, you realized that a long time ago and you allow yourself to be loved by me, it’s nice to feel loved by someone who isn’t going to ask anything of you. I’ll withdraw whenever you decide that enough is enough, when you open the front door and watch me walk over to the lift, knowing that I won’t be back. When Luisa’s grief finally runs its course and your love is reciprocated, I will stand aside without a murmur, I know I’m a purely temporary feature in your life, another day and another, then no more. But don’t worry yourself now, it’s all right, I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t find out
anything you would want to hide or keep to yourself, and if I did, it doesn’t matter, you’re safe with me, I’m not going to betray you, I’m not even sure I heard what I heard, or, rather, I don’t believe what I heard, I’m sure there must be some mistake, an explanation or even – who knows – a justification. Perhaps Desvern harmed you in some way, perhaps he had already tried to kill you, again through a third party, by sheer cunning, and then it was either you or him, perhaps you had no alternative, there wasn’t room in the world for both of you, and that makes it almost like self-defence. There’s no reason for you to fear me, I love you, I’m on your side, I’m not going to judge you. Besides, don’t forget, this is all pure imagination on your part, I don’t know anything.’