I looked at my watch and saw that it was late. I wanted to ask her about that nickname, I felt surprised and slightly flattered. They had noticed me, had spoken about me and given me a name. I smiled unwittingly, we both smiled with a kind of tentative happiness, that of two people recognizing each other in the very saddest of circumstances.
‘The Prudent Young Woman,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, that’s how we see you.’ She returned again to the present tense, as if Deverne were at home and still alive or as if she could separate herself from him only in some respects. ‘You don’t mind, I hope. Please, sit down.’
‘Why should I mind? I had my own private name for you too.’ I was still using the formal
usted
, not because I didn’t want to address her as
tú
, but because, having included him in that plural ‘you’, I didn’t dare address her husband in such familiar terms, just as one cannot refer to a stranger who has died by his first name. At least one
shouldn’t, but nowadays no one worries about such niceties, everyone is overfamiliar. ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t stop now, I have to go to work.’ I glanced at my watch again, either mechanically or simply to corroborate that I was in a hurry, because I knew perfectly well what time it was.
‘Of course. If you like, we can meet later on. Come to our house. What time do you leave work? What do you do, by the way? And what was the name that you gave us?’ She still had her hand on my shoulder, she wasn’t demanding, but rather pleading. A superficial plea, born of the moment. If I declined, come the evening, she would probably have forgotten all about our encounter.
I didn’t answer her penultimate question – there wasn’t time – still less her last one, because telling her that I had thought of them as the Perfect Couple could only have added to her pain and sorrow, after all, she was about to be left alone again, as soon as I left. But I said, yes, I would drop by on my way home from work, if that suited her, at around half past six or seven. I asked for her address and she told me, it was quite near by. I said goodbye and briefly placed my hand on hers, the hand resting on my shoulder, and I took the opportunity to squeeze that hand gently before removing it, again very gently, and she seemed grateful for that contact. I was just about to cross the road, when I realized I had forgotten something and had to go back.
‘How silly of me to forget,’ I said. ‘I don’t know your name.’
And it was only then that I found out, for her name had not appeared in any newspaper, and I hadn’t seen any of the death notices.
‘Luisa Alday,’ she answered. ‘Luisa Desvern,’ she added, correcting herself. In Spain, a woman doesn’t lose her maiden name when she gets married, and I wondered if she had decided to call herself that now as an act of loyalty or homage. ‘No, Luisa Alday,’ she said, correcting herself again. That’s probably how she had always
thought of herself. ‘It’s a good job you remembered, because Miguel’s name doesn’t appear on the door, only mine.’ She paused for a moment, then added: ‘He did that as a precautionary measure, because his name has so many links with business. Much good it did him.’
‘The strangest thing is that it’s changed the way I think,’ she said to me that same evening or, rather, when night had already fallen in her living room. Luisa was on the sofa and I was seated in a nearby armchair, I had accepted her offer of a glass of port, which had been her choice of drink; she took frequent small sips and kept pouring herself a little more and was, if I’m not mistaken, already on her third glass; she had a naturally elegant way of crossing her legs, right leg over left, then left over right, she was wearing a skirt that day, and shiny, black, low-vamp shoes with small but very dainty heels, which made her look rather like an American college girl; in contrast, the soles of her shoes were almost white, as if she hadn’t yet worn them out in the street; her children or one of them would occasionally come in to tell her something or to ask a question or settle an argument, they were watching television in the next room, which was like an extension of the living room, with no separating door; Luisa had explained to me that there was another TV in the little girl’s bedroom, but that she preferred to have the children close by, where she could hear them, in case anything happened or they quarrelled, as well as for the company, and so she obliged them to stay near her, if not in sight at least within earshot; they didn’t disturb her concentration because she couldn’t concentrate on anything anyway, and had given up hope of ever doing so again, whether reading a book or watching a film all the
way through or preparing a class in anything more than a haphazard fashion or in the taxi on her way to the university, and she could listen to music only now and again, short pieces or songs or a single movement from a sonata, anything longer simply wearied and irritated her; she also followed the occasional TV series, because the episodes were usually short, and she bought them on DVD now so that she could rewind if she lost track of the plot, she found it so hard to pay attention, her mind wandering off to other places, or, rather, always to the same one, to Miguel, to the last time she had seen him alive, which was also the last time I had seen him, to the peaceful little garden next to the college off Paseo de la Castellana, along with the man who had stabbed and stabbed and stabbed him with one of those apparently illegal butterfly knives. ‘I don’t know, it’s as though I had a different mind entirely, I’m continually thinking things that would never have occurred to me before,’ she said with genuine bewilderment, her eyes very wide, as she scratched one knee with the tips of her fingers as if she had an itch, although it was probably just her general state of unease. ‘It’s as though I’ve become a different person since then, or a different sort of person, with an unfamiliar, alien mentality, someone given to making strange connections and being frightened by them. I hear a siren from an ambulance or a police car or a fire engine, and I wonder who’s dying or being burned or perhaps choking to death, and then I’m assailed by the dreadful idea of all the people who would have heard the siren on the police car that arrived to arrest the
gorrilla
or of the ambulance that went to help Miguel in the street and take him to hospital, they would have listened to it distractedly or even irritably, thinking, “Why do they have to make such a racket?” – you know the kind of thing, it’s what we all say – “Why so loud, it can’t be that urgent.” We almost never ask ourselves what very real misfortune they’re rushing to, it’s just
another familiar city sound, a sound with no specific content, a mere nuisance, empty of meaning. Before, when there weren’t so many of them and they didn’t make so much noise, we never suspected the drivers of turning on their sirens for no reason, just so that they could drive faster and make the other cars get out of the way, people used to stand on their balcony to see what was going on and even assumed that there would be a report in the next day’s newspaper. No one rushes out on to their balcony now, we all just wait for the siren to go away and remove from our auditory field the ill or injured or wounded or perhaps dying person, so that they’ll stop bothering us and stop setting our nerves on edge. I don’t actually stand on the balcony either, but during the weeks immediately following Miguel’s death, I couldn’t resist rushing over there or going to the window and trying to spot the police car or ambulance and follow it with my eyes for as long as I could, but you can’t usually see them from the house, only hear them, and so, after a while, I gave up, and yet still, every time I hear a siren, I stop what I’m doing and look up and listen until it’s gone; I listen to it as if it were someone moaning or pleading with me, as if each siren were saying: “Please, I’m a gravely wounded man, fighting for my life, and it’s not my fault, I haven’t done anything to make someone stab me like this, I just got out of my car as I have on many other days and suddenly felt a sharp pain in my back, then another and another and another in other parts of my body, I don’t even know how many, and then I realized that I was bleeding profusely and was going to die even though I wasn’t ready to and even though I’d done nothing to deserve it. Let me through, I beg you, you can’t be in anywhere near as much of a hurry as me, and if there is a chance I can be saved, I have to get to the hospital quickly. Today’s my birthday, and my wife has no idea what’s happened, she’s sitting in a restaurant waiting to celebrate,
she’s probably bought me a gift, a surprise, don’t let her find me dead.”’
Luisa stopped and took another sip of port, it was a mechanical gesture really, because there was only a tiny drop left in her glass. Her eyes no longer had an absent look, rather, they were very bright and alert, as if her imaginings, far from distracting her, had given her a momentary burst of energy, made her feel more part of the real world, even if that real world existed only in the past. I hardly knew her, but my feeling was that she found her present life so bewildering that she felt much more vulnerable and powerless now than when she placed herself back in the past, as she had done just now, even in that most painful and final of moments. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes looked lovely lit up like that; she had one eye visibly larger than the other, but that didn’t spoil her looks in the least, her eyes were filled with a new intensity and vitality when she put herself in the shoes of the dying Desvern. Even in the midst of her suffering, she was still almost pretty, especially when she was happy, as she had been on the mornings when I used to see her at the café.
‘But he couldn’t possibly have thought any of that, if what they said in the newspapers was right,’ I pointed out. I didn’t know what else to say or perhaps there was no need to say anything, but it seemed wrong to stay silent.
‘No, of course he couldn’t,’ she said quickly and slightly defiantly. ‘He couldn’t have thought it while they were taking him to the hospital, because he was unconscious by then and never regained consciousness. Perhaps he thought something like that before, though, while he was being stabbed. I can’t stop imagining that moment, those seconds, from the time the attack began until he stopped trying to defend himself and became unaware of anything, until he lost consciousness and felt nothing, neither despair nor pain
nor …’ She fumbled briefly for what else he might have felt before he collapsed, half-dead. ‘Or farewell. I had never thought anyone else’s thoughts before, never wondered what another person might be thinking, not even him, it’s not my style, I lack imagination, I don’t have that kind of mind. And yet now I do it almost all the time. Like I say, it’s changed my way of thinking, and it’s as if I don’t recognize myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn’t know me either: he couldn’t have, it would have been beyond him, isn’t that strange? If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I’ve been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I’m not, indefinitely. Do you understand what I mean?’ she added, realizing that what she was saying was pretty abstruse.
It was almost like a mental tongue-twister to me, but I did more or less understand. I thought: ‘This woman is in a very bad way indeed, and who can blame her? Her grief must be immense, and she must spend all day and all night going over and over what happened, imagining her husband’s final conscious moments, wondering what he could have been thinking, when he would probably have had quite enough to do trying to avoid the first knife-thrusts and get away, get free, he probably never gave her so much as a thought, he would have been focused entirely on what he foresaw might be his death and on doing all he could to avoid it, and if anything else crossed his mind it would have been merely his sense of infinite astonishment, incredulity and incomprehension, what’s going on here, how is this possible, what is this man doing and why is he stabbing me, why has he chosen me out of millions and who has he mistaken me for, doesn’t he realize
that I am not the cause of his ills, and how ridiculous, how awful, how stupid to die like this, because of someone else’s mistake or obsession, to die violently and at the hands of a stranger or of someone so secondary in my life that I had barely noticed him until forced to by his intemperance and his disruptive behaviour, by the fact that he increasingly made himself a nuisance and one day even attacked Pablo, to die at the hands of a man who is of even less importance to me than the pharmacist on the corner or the waiter at the café where I have breakfast, someone purely anecdotal, insignificant, as if I suddenly found myself being attacked by the Prudent Young Woman who is also there at the café every morning and with whom I have never exchanged a word, people who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear, or whose absence we don’t notice, this can’t be happening because it’s just too absurd, a stroke of inconceivably bad luck, I won’t even have a chance to tell someone about it, which is the one thing that very slightly makes up for the worst misfortunes, you never know what or who will don the disguise or shape of your unique and individual death, which is always unique even if you depart this world at the same time as many others in some massive catastrophe, but there are usually some warning signs, an inherited disease, an epidemic, a car accident, a plane crash, some bodily organ wearing out, a terrorist attack, a landslide, a derailment, a heart attack, a fire, a violent raid on your house at night, or straying into a dangerous area as soon as you’ve arrived in an, as yet, unexplored city, I’ve found myself in just such places on my travels, especially when I was younger and travelled a lot and took more risks, something could easily have happened to me through my own imprudence or ignorance in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and in Mexico, in New
York and in Moscow and in Hamburg and even in Madrid itself, but not right here, yes, perhaps in one of Madrid’s more troubled, downtrodden, darker streets, but not in this bright, quiet, well-heeled area which is more or less my home patch, and which I know like the back of my hand, not while getting out of my car as I have on so many other occasions, why today and not yesterday or tomorrow, why today and why me, it could easily have happened to someone else, even to Pablo, who had already had a far more serious altercation with this man, if only he had made a formal complaint to the police when the brute punched him, I was the one who advised him to drop the matter, what a fool, I felt sorry for this man whose name I don’t even know, but that would have got rid of him, and now that I think of it, I had my warning yesterday, when he shouted at me, and I just shrugged it off and put it out of my mind, I should have been afraid and have acted more cautiously and not entered his territory again for several days or at least until I had ceased to be a target, I shouldn’t have put myself within range of this furious madman who has got it into his head to stick his knife into me again and again, and the knife is sure to be filthy, although that’s hardly important now, it won’t be an infection that carries me off, the point plunging into my body and the blade turning inside are killing me far more quickly, he’s so close to me and he stinks, he can’t have washed in ages, he doesn’t have anywhere to wash, always stuck in his abandoned car, I don’t want to die with that stench in my nostrils, but we don’t get a choice, why does that have to be the last thing to surround me before I say goodbye, that and the now overwhelming smell of the blood, a metallic smell from childhood, which is when one tends to bleed most, it’s my blood, it can’t be anyone else’s, not this madman’s blood, I haven’t wounded him, he’s very strong and very overwrought and there’s no way I could have fought him off, I have no knife to stick in him,
whereas he has opened and pierced my skin, my flesh, and my life is flowing out through those wounds, I’m slowly bleeding to death, so many wounds, there’s nothing I can do, so many, he’s done for me.’ And then I, too, thought: ‘But he couldn’t have thought any of that. Or perhaps he could, in very concentrated form.’