‘Yes, it was his birthday, can you believe that? The world normally allows its characters to enter and leave the stage in too disorderly a fashion for someone actually to be born and to die on the same date, with a gap of fifty years, exactly fifty years, in between. It doesn’t make any sense, precisely because it seems to. It could so easily not have happened like that. It could have been any other day or no day. Better if it had never happened at all.’
Several months passed before I saw Luisa Alday again, and a few more before I knew her name, that name, and before she spoke those words and many more. I didn’t know then if she talked continually about what had happened to her, with anyone prepared to listen, or if she had found in me a person with whom she felt comfortable opening up her heart, a stranger who would not report what she heard to any of her close friends or family and whose incipient friendship could be interrupted at any moment without explanation or consequences, and who was also compassionate, loyal and curious and whose face was both new to her and vaguely familiar and associated with happier times unclouded by sorrow, although I had always thought that she had barely noticed my presence, even less so than her husband.
Luisa reappeared towards the tail-end of summer, late into September, and she arrived at the usual time, accompanied by two women
friends or work colleagues; the tables were still set out on the pavement and I watched her arrive and sit or, rather, drop on to a chair; I saw how one of her friends grabbed her forearm with mechanical solicitude, as if fearing that Luisa might lose her balance and taking her friend’s fragility for granted. Luisa looked terribly thin and not at all well, and had the kind of profound pallor that blurs all the features, as though not only her skin had lost its lustre and its colour, but also her hair, brows, lashes, eyes, teeth and lips, all dull and diffuse. She seemed to be there on temporary loan, I mean on loan to life. She no longer talked vivaciously as she used to with her husband, but with a false naturalness that betrayed a sense of obligation and indifference. It occurred to me that she might be on medication. They had sat down quite close to me, with only an empty table between us, which meant that I could hear scraps of their conversation, mostly what her friends said, rather than her, for she spoke only in muted tones. They were consulting or questioning her about the details of a memorial service, doubtless Desvern’s, although I couldn’t tell whether this would be a service held to commemorate the three-month anniversary of his death (which would, I calculated, be around that time) or if it was the first such service, which had not been held after the usual one- or two-week interval, as is still sometimes the custom, at least in Madrid. Perhaps she hadn’t felt strong enough so soon after the incident, or the gruesome circumstances had made such a service inadvisable – people can never resist poking their nose into such public ceremonies, or spreading rumours – and so, assuming the family liked to keep to the traditional way of doing things, it was still pending. Or perhaps some protective figure – a brother, for example, or her parents or a woman friend – had whisked her away from Madrid after the funeral, so that she could become accustomed to her husband’s absence from a distance, without the usual familiar,
domestic scenes that only underlined his absence or made it all the more poignant: a pointless postponement of the horror awaiting her. The most I heard her say was: ‘Yes, that’s fine’ or ‘If you say so, you’re thinking more clearly than me’ or ‘Make sure the priest keeps it short, Miguel wasn’t too keen on priests, they made him a bit nervous’ or ‘No, not Schubert, he’s too obsessed with death, and we’ve had quite enough of that.’
I noticed that the two waiters at the café, after a moment’s discussion behind the bar, went over to her table together, stiffly rather than solemnly, and although they spoke shyly and very quietly, I heard them offer their brief condolences: ‘We just wanted to say how very sad we were to hear about your husband, he was always very kind to us,’ said one. And the other contributed the usual old, vacuous phrase: ‘Please accept our deepest sympathy. A real tragedy.’ She thanked them with her lacklustre smile and that was all, and it seemed perfectly understandable to me that she should prefer not to go into detail or to comment or to prolong the conversation. When I got up, I felt an impulse to follow their example, but did not dare to further interrupt her desultory conversation with her friends. Besides, time was getting on, and I didn’t want to arrive late at work, now that I had mended my ways and arrived punctually at my post every day.
Another month passed before I saw her again, and although the leaves were falling and the days were growing cooler, there were still those who preferred to breakfast al fresco – speedy breakfasts eaten by people in a hurry, people who would subsequently spend many hours shut up in an office and who didn’t linger long enough at the café to get cold; most, like me, ate in sleepy silence – and so the tables were still outside on the pavement. This time, Luisa Alday arrived with her two children and ordered them each an ice cream. I imagined – basing myself on a remote childhood memory – that she had
taken them to the doctors for a blood test without letting them have any breakfast beforehand and was giving them a treat to make up for both the jab and for having had to go hungry, a treat that included allowing them to miss the first hour of school. The little girl was very attentive to her brother, who was about four years younger than her, and I got the impression that she was also, in her fashion, looking after her mother, as if they occasionally swapped roles, or, if they didn’t perhaps go quite that far, as if they both occasionally competed for the role of mother, in the few areas where such competition was possible. I mean that, while the little girl was eating her ice cream from a glass, wielding her spoon with childlike meticulousness, she was also making sure that Luisa did not let her coffee go cold and urging her to drink it. She kept one eye on her mother all the time, watching her every gesture and expression, and if she noticed that her mother was becoming too abstracted and sunk in her own thoughts, she would immediately speak to her, make some remark or ask a question or perhaps tell her something, as if to prevent her mother from becoming entirely lost, as if it made her sad to see her mother plunging back into memory. When a car drew up and double-parked outside the café, very faintly sounding its horn, and the children sprang to their feet, grabbed their satchels, quickly kissed their mother and walked, hand in hand, towards the car, knowing that it had come to pick them up, I had the feeling then that the daughter was more concerned about leaving Luisa than the other way around (she it was who fleetingly stroked her mother’s cheek as if counselling her to be good and not to get into any trouble, or wishing to leave her some small tactile consolation until they saw each other again). The car had probably come to pick them up and take them to school. I looked to see who was driving, and could not help a sudden quickening of the pulse, because although I know nothing
about cars, which all look the same to me, this one I recognized instantly: it was the same car Deverne used to drive when he went off to work, leaving his wife to stay on for a while in the café either alone or with a friend. It was doubtless the same car he had driven and parked next to the college, the car he should never have got out of on that day, his birthday. There was a man at the wheel, and at first I thought it must be the chauffeur with whom Deverne occasionally alternated as driver and who could have replaced him on that fateful day, could have died instead of him, and who was perhaps the person the
gorrilla
actually wanted to kill, the intended murder victim, and who had, therefore, narrowly escaped death – by pure chance, who knows, perhaps he had a doctor’s appointment that day. If he was the chauffeur, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I couldn’t quite see him, half-concealed as he was by the other cars parked alongside the pavement; nevertheless, I thought he looked rather attractive. He didn’t resemble Miguel Desvern, but they had certain characteristics in common or were at least not complete opposites; it was easy to see how a mistake could be made, especially by someone mentally disturbed. From her table, Luisa waved goodbye, or waved hello and goodbye, from the moment he arrived until he left. Yes, she waved three or four times, slightly absurdly, while the car was parked. She repeated the gesture with an absorbed look in her eyes, eyes that saw perhaps only a ghost. Or was she only waving goodbye to her children? I didn’t see if the driver waved back or not.
That was when I decided to go over to her. The children had left in what had been their father’s car, and she was alone, with no one for company, no work colleague or fellow mother from school or friend. She was using the long, sticky spoon that her son had left in his glass to absent-mindedly stir what remained of his ice cream, as if she were intent on instantly reducing it to liquid, thus accelerating its inevitable fate. ‘How many small eternities will she experience in which she will struggle to make time move on,’ I thought, ‘if such a thing is possible, which I doubt. You wait for time to pass during the temporary or indefinite absence of the other – of husband, of lover – as well as during an absence which is not yet definitive, but that bears all the marks of being so, as our instinct keeps whispering to us, and to whose voice we say: “Be quiet, be quiet, keep silent, I don’t yet want to hear you, I’m still not strong enough, I’m not ready.” When you have been abandoned, you can fantasize about a return, you can imagine that the abandoner will suddenly see the light and come back to share your pillow, even if you know he has already replaced you and is involved with another woman, with another story, and that he will only remember you if that new relationship suddenly turns sour, or if you insist and make your presence felt against his will and try to pester him or win him round or force him to feel sorry for you or take your revenge by giving him a sense
that he’ll never be entirely free of you and that you don’t intend to be a slowly fading memory but an immovable shadow that will stalk and haunt him for ever; making his life impossible and, ultimately, making him hate you. On the other hand, you cannot fantasize about a dead man, unless you have lost your mind, and there are those who choose to do that, even if only temporarily, those who consent to do so while they manage to convince themselves that what happened really happened, the improbable and the impossible, the thing that did not even have a place in the calculation of probabilities by which we live in order to get up each morning without a sinister, leaden cloud urging us to close our eyes again, thinking: “What’s the point if we’re all doomed anyway? It’s all pointless. Whatever we do, we’ll only be waiting, like dead men on leave, as someone once said.” I don’t believe, though, that Luisa has lost her mind, but that’s just a feeling, I don’t know her. And if she hasn’t, then what is she waiting for, how does she spend the hours, the days, the weeks and now months, to what purpose does she drive time forwards or flee from it and withdraw, and how, at this very moment, is she managing to push it away from her? She doesn’t know that I am about to come over and speak to her, as the waiters did the last time I saw her here, not that I’ve ever seen her anywhere else. She doesn’t know that I’m going to lend her a hand and erase a couple of minutes for her with my conventional words of commiseration, perhaps three or four minutes at most if she says anything beyond “Thank you”. She’ll still be left with hundreds more until sleep comes to her aid and clouds her ever-counting consciousness, because it’s her consciousness that is always counting: one, two, three and four; five, six and seven and eight and so on ceaselessly and indefinitely until she falls asleep.’
‘Forgive the intrusion,’ I said, standing by her table; she did not
get up at once. ‘You don’t know me, but my name’s María Dolz. I’ve been having breakfast here at the same time as you and your husband for years now. And I just wanted to say how terribly sad I am about what happened, what he went through and what you must have been going through ever since. I read about it in the newspaper, somewhat belatedly, after not seeing you for several mornings. I only ever knew you by sight, but you obviously got on so well and I always thought you made such a lovely couple. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
I realized that with my penultimate sentence, I had killed her off as well, by using the past tense to refer to them both and not just to her late husband. I tried to think of some way to remedy this, but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t either clumsy or unnecessarily complicated. I imagined, though, that she would have understood what I meant, that I had enjoyed seeing the two of them as a couple, and as such they no longer existed. Then I thought that perhaps I had highlighted something she was trying to hold in suspense or confine to some kind of limbo, because it would be impossible for her to forget or deny it to herself: that they were not two people any more and that she was no longer part of a couple. I was about to add: ‘That’s all I wanted to say, I won’t delay you any further,’ then turn and leave, when Luisa Alday stood up, smiling – it was a broad smile that she made no attempt to repress, she was incapable of deceit or malice, she could even be ingenuous – and placed one hand affectionately on my shoulder and said:
‘Yes, of course, we know
you
by sight as well.’ She unhesitatingly addressed me as
tú
despite my more formal approach, well, we were the same age more or less, or she was possibly just a couple of years older; she spoke in the plural and in the present tense, as if she had not yet become used to being singular or perhaps considered herself to have already crossed over to the other side, to be as dead as her
husband and therefore an inhabitant of the same dimension or territory: as if she hadn’t yet separated from him and saw no reason to give up that ‘we’ to which she had been accustomed for nearly a decade and which she wasn’t going to abandon after a mere three months. However, she did then go on to use the imperfect tense, perhaps because the verb demanded it: ‘We used to call you the Prudent Young Woman. You see, we even gave you a name. Thank you so much for your kind words. Won’t you sit down?’ And she indicated one of the chairs that had been occupied by her children, still keeping her hand on my shoulder, and now I had a sense that I was a support for her or a handle to hold on to. I was sure that, had I moved even slightly closer, she would, quite naturally, have embraced me. She looked fragile, like a hesitant novice ghost, who is not yet fully convinced that she is one.