What he said next sounded like a demand barely disguised as a plea.
‘Please, María, come and see me, it can’t be that difficult. The question I have to ask could possibly wait a day or two more, but
I
can’t wait, and you know what it’s like with these subjective emergencies, they refuse to be postponed. It would be to your advantage too. Please, come and see me.’
I hesitated a few seconds before replying, just so that it wouldn’t seem quite as easy to him as it usually did; something horrible had happened last time I was there, although he didn’t know that, or perhaps he did. I was in fact burning to see him, to put us to the test, to enjoy looking at his face and his lips again, even go to bed with him, with his former self, who was still there in the new Díaz-Varela, where else would he be? Finally, I said:
‘All right, if you insist. I can’t be sure what time, but I’ll be there. And if you get tired of waiting, phone me and save me the trip. Anyway, I must go now.’
I hung up, switched off my mobile, and returned to my pointless meeting. From then on, I was incapable of paying any attention to the semi-young author who had been recommended to us, and who clearly disapproved of me because that is precisely what he wanted, namely, an audience and lots of attention. I was quite sure of one thing, though: he wasn’t going to be published by us, certainly not if I had anything to do with it.
In the event, I had more than enough time and it wasn’t late at all when I set off for Díaz-Varela’s apartment. So much so, in fact, that I was able to pause along the way to conjecture and hesitate, to take several turns about the block and put off the moment of arrival. I even went into Embassy, that archaic place where ladies and diplomats take afternoon tea, I sat down at a table, ordered a drink and waited. I wasn’t waiting for a specific time – I was merely aware that the longer I delayed things, the more nervous he would get – but waiting, rather, for the minutes to pass and for me to pluck up enough resolve or for my impatience to become sufficiently condensed to make me stand up and take one step and then another and another, until I found myself at his front door agitatedly ringing the bell. But, having decided to meet him and knowing that it was in my power to see him again, neither the necessary determination nor the impatience came. ‘In a while,’ I thought, ‘there’s no hurry, I’ll wait a little longer. He’ll stay there in his apartment, he’s not going to run away or leave. May every second seem long to him, may he count them one by one, may he read a few pages of a book without taking anything in, aimlessly turn the TV on and then off again, grow exasperated, prepare or memorize what he’s going to say to me, may he go out on to the landing every time he hears the lift and be disappointed when it stops before it reaches his floor or goes straight past. What can he
possibly want to discuss with me? Those are the words he used, vacuous, meaningless words, a kind of stock phrase which usually conceals something else, the trap one lays for a person so that he or she feels important and, at the same time, curious.’ And after a few more minutes, I thought: ‘Why did I agree? Why didn’t I say No, why don’t I run away from him and hide, or, rather, why don’t I simply report him? Why, even knowing what I know, did I agree to see him, to listen to him if he wants to explain himself, and probably go to bed with him if he suggests doing so with the merest gesture or caress, or even with that prosaic, male tilt of the head in the direction of the bedroom, not even bothering with any flattering, intervening words, being as lazy with his tongue as so many men are.’ I recalled a quote from
The Three Musketeers
that my father knew by heart in French and which he occasionally recited for no apparent reason, almost like a pet phrase he trotted out to fill a silence, he probably liked the rhythm, the sound and the concision, or perhaps it had impressed him as a boy, the first time he read it (like Díaz-Varela he had studied at a French lycée, San Luis de los Franceses, if I remember rightly). Athos is talking about himself in the third person, that is, he’s telling d’Artagnan his story as if it were that of an old aristocratic friend, who had got married at twenty-five to an innocent, intoxicatingly beautiful young girl of sixteen, ‘
belle comme les amours
’, so says Athos, who, at the time, was not a musketeer, but the Count de la Fère. While they are out hunting, his very young, angelic wife – whom he had married despite knowing almost nothing about her and without bothering to find out where she came from, never imagining that she had a past to conceal – has an accident, falls from her horse and faints. Rushing to her aid, Athos notices that her dress is constricting her breathing and, to help her breathe more easily, he takes out his dagger and cuts open her dress, thus leaving her shoulder bare. And it is
then that he sees the fleur-de-lys with which executioners branded prostitutes or female thieves or perhaps criminals in general, I’m not sure. ‘The angel was a devil,’ declares Athos, adding the somewhat contradictory statement: ‘The poor girl had been a thief.’ D’Artagnan asks him what the Count did, to which his friend replies with succinct coldness (and this was the quotation that my father used to repeat and which I remembered): ‘
Le Comte était un grand seigneur, il avait sur les terres droit de justice basse et haute: il acheva de déchirer les habits de la Comtesse, il lui lia les mains derrière le dos et la pendit à un arbre.
’ ‘The Count was a great lord, he had the right on his estates to mete out justice both high and low; he tore the rest of the Countess’s dress to shreds, tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree.’ And that, without a moment’s hesitation, without listening to reason or seeking extenuating circumstances, without batting an eyelid, without pity or regret for her youth, that is what the young Athos did to the girl with whom he had fallen so deeply in love that, in his desire to treat her honestly, he had made her his wife, when, as he acknowledges, he could easily have seduced her or taken her by force if he liked; he was, after all, the great lord, and, besides, who would have come to the aid of a stranger, a girl about whom nothing was known except that her true or false name was Anne de Breuil? But no: ‘the fool, the simpleton, the imbecile’ had to marry her, Athos says reproachfully of his former self, the Count de le Fère, as upright as he was fierce, who, as soon as he discovered the deception, the infamy, the indelible stain, abandoned all questions and conflicting feelings, all hesitations and postponements and compassion – he did not stop loving her, though, because he still continued to love her, or at least never fully recovered – and without giving the Countess an opportunity to explain or defend herself, to deny or to persuade, to beg for mercy or to bewitch him again, not even ‘to die hereafter’, as
perhaps even the most wretched creature on earth deserves, ‘he tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree’, without wavering for a moment. D’Artagnan is horrified and cries out: ‘Good heavens, Athos, a murder!’ To which Athos replies mysteriously, or, rather, enigmatically: ‘Yes, a murder, nothing more,’ and then calls for more wine and ham, considering the story at an end. What remains mysterious or even enigmatic are those two words ‘nothing more’, ‘
pas davantage
’ in French. Athos doesn’t refute d’Artagnan’s cry of outrage, he doesn’t justify himself or contradict him, saying: ‘No, it was simply an execution’ or ‘It was an act of justice’; he doesn’t even attempt to make the precipitate, ruthless and presumably solitary hanging of the wife he loved more comprehensible, for doubtless only he and she were there in the middle of a wood, a spur-of-the-moment decision with no witnesses, with no one to advise or help him, no one to whom he could appeal; nor did he say anything along the lines of: ‘He was blind with rage and couldn’t restrain himself; he needed to take his revenge; he regretted it for the rest of his life.’ He admits that it was a murder, yes, but nothing more than that, not something more execrable, as if murder were not the worst conceivable thing or else so common and everyday that it need provoke no feelings of scandal or surprise, which is basically the view of the lawyer Derville, who took on the case of old Colonel Chabert, the living dead man who should have stayed dead, for Derville, like all lawyers, saw ‘the same wicked feelings repeated over and over’, feelings that nothing could correct and which transformed his offices into ‘sewers that can never be washed clean’; murder is something that happens, an act of which anyone is capable and that has been happening since the dawn of time and will continue to do so until, after the last day, no dawn comes, nor is there any time in which to accommodate more murders; murder is something banal and anodyne and commonplace,
purely temporal; the world’s newspapers and televisions are full of murders, so why such hysteria, such horror, such outrage? Yes, a murder. Nothing more.
‘Why can’t I be like Athos or like the Count de la Fère, as he was initially and then ceased to be?’ I wondered as I sat in the Embassy tea rooms, wrapped in the continuous buzz coming from ladies talking very fast and from the occasional idle diplomat. ‘Why can’t I see things with that same clarity and act accordingly, and go to the police or to Luisa and tell them what I know, enough for them to revisit the crime and investigate and track down Ruibérriz de Torres, that would be a start? Why aren’t I capable of tying the hands of the man I love behind his back and simply hanging him from a tree, if I know that he has committed an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries to protect him and hide his face, making use of a poor, crazed wretch, a witless beggar who could not defend himself and would always be at his mercy? No, it isn’t up to me to act with such ruthless rigour because I do not have the right to mete out justice high and low, and, besides, the dead man cannot speak, whereas the living can, he can explain himself, persuade and argue, and is even capable of kissing me and making love to me, while the former can neither see nor hear, but lies rotting in the grave and cannot answer or influence or threaten, nor give me the slightest pleasure; nor can he call me to account or feel disappointment or look at me accusingly with an expression of infinite sadness and immense grief, he cannot even brush my skin or breathe on me, there is nothing to be done with him.’
I finally plucked up enough resolve, or perhaps it was merely boredom or a desire to rid myself of the fear that assailed me now and then, or impatience to see the old me who continued to love and who had not yet entirely vanished and still prevailed over the sullied and the sombre, like the living image of a dead person, even one who had died a long time ago. I asked for the bill, paid and left and started walking in the direction I knew so well, towards the apartment I will never forget, even though I didn’t visit it so very often and even though it no longer exists – not, at least, as far as I’m concerned, given that Díaz-Varela no longer lives there. I was still walking slowly, in no hurry to arrive, I walked as if I were out for a stroll, rather than heading for a particular place where someone had been waiting for me for quite a while now in order to discuss something, that is, to question me again or to tell or perhaps ask me something, or, possibly, to silence me. Another quotation from
The Three Musketeers
surfaced in my memory, one that my father did not quote, but which I knew in Spanish, for things that impress us as children endure like a fleur-de-lys engraved on our imagination: the marked woman who was hanged from a tree and began life as Anne de Breuil, who spent a brief period in a convent until she ran away, then, very fleetingly, became the Countess de la Fère, and was known later on as Charlotte, Lady Clarick, Lady de Winter, Baroness of Sheffield (as a child, I was amazed
that anyone could change her name so often in a single lifetime), and who had become fixed in literature as plain ‘Milady’, no, that marked woman had not died, just as Colonel Chabert had not died. But while Balzac explained in great detail the miracle of the Colonel’s survival and how he had dragged himself out from beneath the pyramid of ghosts into which he had been thrown after the battle, Dumas, perhaps under pressure of deadlines and the constant demand for action, and, of course, freer or perhaps sloppier as a narrator, had not bothered to explain – at least as far as I could recall – how the devil that young woman had managed to escape death after that impassioned hanging dictated by rage and wounded honour disguised as a great lord’s right to mete out justice high and low. (He also never explained how a husband could fail to have noticed the fatal fleur-de-lys while in the marital bed.) Making the most of her great beauty, her cunning and her lack of scruples – and, one imagines, her bitter resentment – she had become a powerful figure, who enjoyed the favour of Cardinal Richelieu no less, and had heaped up crimes without a flicker of remorse. During the novel, she commits a few more crimes, becoming possibly the most evil, venomous, ruthless female character in the history of literature, and, as such, has since been imitated ad nauseam. She and Athos meet in a chapter ironically entitled ‘A Conjugal Scene’, and it takes her a few seconds to recognize, with a shudder, her former husband and executioner, whom she had assumed dead, just as he had assumed his beloved wife to be dead, and with rather more reason. ‘You have already crossed my path,’ says Athos, or words to that effect, ‘I thought I had crushed you, Madame, but either I am much mistaken or hell has resuscitated you.’ And he adds, in response to his own doubt: ‘Yes, hell has made you rich, hell has given you another name, hell has almost fashioned another face for you; but it has not erased the stains on your soul or the mark on your body.’
And shortly after that comes the quote I remembered as I walked towards Díaz-Varela for the last or next-to-last time: ‘You believed me dead, didn’t you, just as I believed you to be dead. Our position is indeed a strange one; we have both lived up until now only because we believed each other to be dead, and because a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although sometimes a memory can be a devouring thing.’