I looked across at the children’s room, indicating it with a lift of my head.
‘They must be a great help to you in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘I imagine having to look after them must give you a reason to get up every morning, to be strong and put on a brave face. Knowing that they depend on you entirely, even more than before. They’re doubtless a burden, but a lifeline too, a reason to start each day. Or perhaps not,’ I added, when I saw her face grow still darker and her larger eye contract, so that it was the same size as the smaller one.
‘No, it’s quite the opposite,’ she replied, taking a deep breath, as if she had to muster all her serenity in order to say what she then went on to say: ‘I would give anything for them not to be here now, not to have them. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not that I suddenly regret having had them, their existence is vital to me and they’re what I love most, more even than Miguel probably, or, rather, I realize that their loss would have been far worse, the loss of either of them, it would
have killed me. But I just can’t cope with them at the moment, they weigh too much on me. I wish I could put them in parentheses or into hibernation, I don’t know, send them to sleep and not wake them up until further notice. I’d like them to leave me in peace and not ask or demand anything of me, not keep tugging at me and hanging on me, poor loves. I need to be alone, without responsibilities, and not to have to make a superhuman effort of which I feel incapable, not to have to worry if they’ve eaten or are well wrapped up or if they’ve got a cold or a fever. I’d like to stay in bed all day or do what I like without having to concern myself about anything except me, and just get better gradually, with no interruptions and no obligations. If, that is, I ever do get better, I hope I do, although I don’t see how. It’s just that I feel so debilitated that the last thing I need is to have by my side two even weaker people, who can’t cope on their own and who have even less of an understanding of what happened than I do. More than that, I feel so sad for them, so unalterably, constantly sad for them, and that feeling goes beyond the present circumstances. The circumstances simply accentuate that feeling, but it’s always been there.’
‘What do you mean, “constantly”? What do you mean, “beyond the present circumstances”? What do you mean by “always”?’
‘Do you not have any children?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘Children bring a lot of joy and all the other things people say they bring, but you can’t help but feel permanently sad for them too, and I don’t think that changes even when they’re older, although rather fewer people mention that. You see your children’s bewilderment when they’re confronted by certain situations, and that makes you sad. You see their willingness to help, when they want to contribute and do their bit and they can’t, and that makes you sad too. Their seriousness makes you sad, as do their silly jokes and their transparent lies, their expectations and their minor disappointments, their
innocence, their incomprehension, their very logical questions, and even their occasional bad idea. It makes you sad to think how much they have to learn, and about the long, long road that lies ahead and which no one can travel for them, even though we’ve spent centuries doing it and can’t understand why everyone who’s born has to start all over from the beginning. What sense does it make that each person should have to experience more or less the same griefs and make more or less the same discoveries, and so on for eternity? And of course something completely out of the ordinary has happened to them, something that needn’t have happened, a great, unforeseeable misfortune. It isn’t normal in our society for one’s father to be killed, and the sadness they feel is an added sadness for me. I’m not the only one who has suffered a loss, if only I was. It’s up to me to explain it to them, and I haven’t got an explanation. It’s quite beyond my capabilities. I can’t tell them that the man hated their father or that he was his enemy, and if I tell them that he was mad, mad enough to kill their father, they can’t really understand that either, well, Carolina can sort of grasp it, but not Nicolás.’
‘So what have you told them? How are they coping?’
‘Well, I told them a slightly modified version of the truth. I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything to Nicolás, with him being so young, but people said it would be worse if he heard it from his school friends. Because it came out in the press, everyone who knows us found out straight away, and you can imagine what four-year-olds might make of it, their versions could be even more gruesome and outrageous than reality. So I told them that the man was very angry because someone had taken his daughters away, and that he got muddled up and attacked their papa instead of the person who had stolen his daughters. Then, of course, they asked me
who
had stolen the daughters and I said I didn’t know, and that the man obviously didn’t
know either, which was why he was so angry and in need of someone he could take it out on. That he couldn’t really tell people apart and was suspicious of everyone, which was why he hit Pablo one day, believing that he was the one to blame. It’s odd, they grasped that at once, that he should get angry because someone had stolen his daughters, and even now they sometimes ask me if there’s any news of them or if they’ve been found, as if it were an ongoing story, I suppose they think the daughters were children like them. I said it was simply a case of bad luck. That it was like an accident, like when a car hits a pedestrian or a builder falls off the building he’s working on. That their father wasn’t to blame and that he hadn’t harmed anyone. Nicolás asked me if he was ever coming back. And I said no, that he’d gone very far away, like when he used to go on trips only much further, so far away that he couldn’t return, but from where he was he could still see them and still care for them. It also occurred to me to tell them, so that it wasn’t quite so sudden and definitive, that I could speak to him now and then, and that if they wanted anything from him, anything important, they should tell me and I would pass it on. I don’t think Carolina believed that bit, because she never gives me any message for him, but Nicolás does and sometimes asks me to tell his father something, some silly little thing that’s happened at school but which looms very large for him, and the following day, he asks me if I told his father and what he said, or if he was pleased to know that he’d started playing football. And I tell him that I haven’t had a chance to speak to him just yet, that he’ll have to wait, that it’s not always easy to make contact, then I let a few days pass, and if he remembers and asks again, then I invent an answer. I’ll let more and more time pass until he stops asking and forgets about it, and he will in the end. He’ll mostly think he’s remembering what his sister and I tell him. Carolina is more of a worry. She hardly mentions it at all,
she’s more serious and more silent than she used to be, and when, for example, I tell Nicolás that their father laughed when I told him what he’d said or that he told me to tell Nicolás to kick the ball and not the other boys, she looks at me with the same sadness I feel for them, as if my lies saddened her, and so there are moments when we feel sad for each other, I feel sad for them and they for me, well, Carolina does anyway. They see that I’m sad, they see me in a state they’ve never seen me in before, even though, believe me, I try very hard not to cry and to make sure when I’m with them that they don’t notice how sad I am. But I’m sure they do. I’ve only cried once in their presence.’ I remembered the impression the little girl had made on me when I saw the three of them that morning at the café: how attentive she was to her mother, almost watching over her, insofar as that was possible; and the way she had briefly stroked her mother’s cheek when she said goodbye. ‘And they’re afraid for me,’ added Luisa, with a sigh, pouring herself another glass. She hadn’t drunk anything for a while, she had slowed down, perhaps she was one of those people who know when to stop or who are even moderate in their excesses, who skirt round dangers and never fall into them, even when they feel they have nothing to lose and are beyond caring. She was clearly in desperate straits, but I couldn’t imagine her in a state of wild abandon: getting hopelessly drunk or hooked on drugs or neglecting her children or missing work or (later on) going with one man after another in order to forget the person who really mattered to her; it was as if she possessed a last resort of common sense, or a sense of duty or serenity or self-preservation or pragmatism, I wasn’t quite sure which. And then I saw it very clearly: ‘She’ll get over this,’ I thought, ‘she’ll recover sooner than she thinks, everything she’s been through during these months will seem quite unreal, and she’ll get married again, perhaps to someone as perfect as Desvern, or
someone with whom she will, at least, make a similarly perfect or almost perfect couple.’ – ‘They’ve discovered that people die, that even the people who seemed most indestructible, their parents, die. It’s not just a bad dream, because Carolina has reached the age of having nightmares, you see: she dreamed once that I was dying or that her father was dying, and that was before all this happened. She called to us from her bedroom in the middle of the night, she was really frightened, and we had to convince her that we wouldn’t die, that such a thing was impossible. She’s seen now that we were wrong or were perhaps lying to her; that she was right to be afraid, that what she saw in her dreams has come to pass. She hasn’t ever reproached me with this directly, but the day after Miguel was buried and there was clearly no going back and the only thing to do was to continue living without him, she said to me twice, as if what she was saying were unimpeachable: “You see? You see?” And I asked her uncomprehendingly: “What is it I should see, sweetheart?” I was still too dazed to understand. Then she retreated and has continued to do so ever since: “Oh, nothing,” she said, “just that Papa won’t be at home with us any more, don’t you see?” All my strength went from me, and I sat down on the edge of the bed, we were in my bedroom. “Of course I see that, my love,” I said and burst into tears. She hadn’t seen me cry before and she felt sorry for me, and she still does now. She came over to me and started drying my tears with her dress. As for Nicolás, he’s discovered death too soon, without even being able to dream about it or fear it, when he still had no awareness of death, I’m not sure he even knows quite what it is, although he’s starting to realize that it means people cease to exist, that you won’t ever see them again. And given that their father has died and disappeared from one day to the next, or, worse, that their father has been killed and ceased to exist suddenly and without warning, that he proved fragile enough
to be felled by some wretch’s first blow, they’re bound to think that the same thing could happen to me some day, because they see me as being the weaker of the two. Yes, they’re afraid for me, afraid that something bad might happen to me and that I’ll leave them all alone, they look at me apprehensively, as if I were more vulnerable and at risk than they are. It’s an instinctive reaction in Nicolás, but in Carolina it’s more conscious. I notice that she’s always looking around when we’re out in the street and immediately goes on the alert whenever she spots a stranger or, rather, a strange man. She’s happier when I’m accompanied by some of my female friends. She’s all right now, because I’m at home and with you, she’s stopped finding pretexts to keep coming in here and checking on me or bothering me. She’s only just met you, but she trusts you, you’re a woman, and she doesn’t see you as a danger. On the contrary, she sees you as a shield, a defence. That worries me a little, that she should become afraid of men, be on her guard and feel nervous in their company, the ones she doesn’t know, of course. I hope it will pass, she can’t go through life in fear of half the human race.’
‘Do they know how exactly their father died?’ I hesitated, unsure whether to bring it up again. ‘About the knife, I mean.’
‘No, I’ve never gone into detail, I just told them that he’d been attacked by that man, but never explained how. But Carolina must know, I’m sure she’s read about it in some newspaper and that her friends will have talked about it, well, they’re bound to be shocked. She must have found the idea so horrifying that she’s never asked me or referred to it. It’s as if we had a tacit agreement not to discuss it, not to think about it, to erase that element from Miguel’s death (the key element, the one that caused his death), so that it can remain an isolated, neutral fact. Besides, that’s what everyone does with their dead. We try to forget the how and keep only the image of the person
when alive or, possibly, when dead, but we avoid thinking about the frontier, the crossing, the actual process of dying, the cause. They’re alive one moment and dead the next, and in between there is nothing, as if they passed without transition or reason from one state to the other. But I can’t not think about it, not yet, and that’s what stops me living or prevents me from beginning to recover, always assuming one can recover from something like this.’ – ‘You will, you will,’ I thought again, ‘and much sooner than you think. And that’s what I wish for you, poor Luisa, with all my heart.’ – ‘I can do it with Carolina, because that’s what best for her and that’s all I want. When I’m alone, though, I find it impossible, especially around this time of evening, when it’s neither day nor night. I think of that knife going in, what Miguel must have felt, and whether he had time to think anything, if he realized that he was dying. Then I despair and I feel positively ill. And that’s not just a manner of speaking: I really do feel ill. My whole body hurts.’
The doorbell rang and even though I had no idea who it was, I knew that our conversation and my visit were over. Luisa had asked nothing about me, she hadn’t even gone back to the questions she had asked at the café that morning, what I did and what nickname I had given to her and Deverne when I used to watch them during our shared breakfasts. She wasn’t yet ready to be curious about others, she was in no state to take an interest in anyone or to probe other people’s lives, her own life was all-consuming and took all her energy and concentration, and doubtless all her imagination too. I was merely an ear into which she could pour her unhappiness and her persistent thoughts, a virgin but interchangeable ear, or perhaps not entirely interchangeable: as with her little girl, I obviously inspired both her confidence and her familiarity, and she would not perhaps have confided in just anyone in quite the same way. After all, I had often seen her husband and could, therefore, put a name to her loss, I knew the absence that was the cause of her desolation, the figure that had disappeared from her field of vision, day after day after day and so on monotonously and irremediably until the end. In a way, I belonged to the ‘before’ and was capable of missing the departed in my own way, even though they had always ignored me, and Desvern would now be obliged to do so for all eternity, I had arrived too late for him and would never be more than the Prudent Young Woman
whom he had barely noticed and then only glancingly. ‘And yet,’ I thought with some surprise, ‘I’m only here because of his death. If he hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be in his house, because, after all, this was his house, he lived here, and this was his living room and I am perhaps sitting where he used to sit; he left here on the last morning I saw him alive, which was also the last morning his wife saw him alive.’ It was clear that she liked me and could tell that I was on her side, that I felt sympathetic to and saddened by her loss; she might think vaguely that, in other circumstances, we could have been friends. But now she was inside a bubble, talkative but basically isolated and indifferent to everything outside her, and that bubble would take a long time to burst. Only then would she be able to see me properly, only then would I cease to be the Prudent Young Woman from the café. If I had asked her what my name was, she would probably not have remembered, or perhaps only my first name, but not my surname. I didn’t even know if we would meet again, if there would be another occasion: when I left there, I would be lost in a mist.