Díaz-Varela would doubtless have felt slightly put out, but would have disguised the fact. No one likes to be told that he or she stands no chance with someone, even if that person is of no interest and has never been seen as a potential conquest. Many seductions have taken place, or at least begun, out of nothing more than pique or defiance, because of a bet or to prove someone wrong. Any genuine interest comes later. And it often does, provoked by the manoeuvring and the effort involved. But it’s not there at the beginning, certainly not before the dissuasive arguments or the challenge. Perhaps, at that moment, Díaz-Varela wanted Deverne to die so that he could prove to him that Luisa could take him seriously when there were no mediators, no go-betweens. Although, of course, how can you prove something to a dead man? How can you gain their acknowledgement, their recognition that they were wrong? They never tell us we were right when we need them to, and all you can think is: ‘If he or she were to come back today …’ But they never do. He would prove it to Luisa, in whom, according to Desvern, he, the husband, would carry on or continue to live for a while longer. Perhaps it would be like that, perhaps he was right. Until he swept him away. Until he erased his memory and all other traces and supplanted him entirely.
‘No, I don’t deny it, and of course I don’t mind. But our views of people change a lot, especially if the person who painted the original portrait can no longer go on retouching it and the portrait is left in the hands of the portrayed. The latter can correct and redraw every line, one by one, and leave the original artist looking like a liar. Or just plain wrong, or like a bad artist, superficial and lacking in perception. “They gave me an entirely false impression of him,” someone looking at the picture might think. “This man isn’t as he was described to me at all, he has substance, passion, integrity and maturity.” It happens every day, Miguel, all the time. People start out seeing one thing and end up seeing quite the opposite. They start out loving and end up hating, or shifting from indifference to adoration. We can never be sure of what is going to be vital to us and who we will consider to be important. Our convictions are transient and fragile, even the ones we believe to be the strongest. It’s the same with our feelings. We shouldn’t trust ourselves.’
Deverne would have sensed a touch of wounded pride and ignored it.
‘Even so,’ he would have said, ‘even if I don’t think it’s possible, what does it matter if it does happen afterwards, after my death? I’ll know nothing about it. But I would have died convinced of the impossibility of such a bond between you and her, it’s what you think will happen that counts, because what you see and experience in your final moment is the end of the story, the end of your personal story. You know that everything will carry on without you, that nothing stops because you have disappeared. But that “afterwards” doesn’t concern you. What matters is that you stop, because then everything stops, the world is frozen in that moment when the person whose life is ending finally ends, even though we know that this isn’t true in actual fact. But that “actual fact” doesn’t matter. It’s the one moment when there is no future, in which the present seems to us unchangeable and eternal, because we won’t witness any more events or any more changes. There have been people who have tried to bring forward the publication of a book so that their father would see it in print and die thinking that their son was an accomplished writer; what did it matter if, after that, the son never wrote another line? There have been desperate attempts to bring about a momentary reconciliation between two people so that the person dying would believe that they had made their peace and everything was sorted and settled; what did it matter if, two days after the death, the hostile parties had a blazing row? What mattered was what existed immediately before that death. There have been people who have pretended to forgive a dying man so that he can die in peace or more happily; what did it matter if, the following morning, his forgiver hoped privately to see him rot in hell? There have been those who have lied their socks off at the deathbed of a wife or husband and convinced them that they had never been unfaithful and had loved them unwaveringly and constantly; what did it matter if, a month later, they had moved in with their lover of many years? The only definitive truth is what the person about to die sees and believes immediately before his or her departure, because nothing exists after that. There is a great chasm between what Mussolini, executed by his enemies, believed and what Franco, on his deathbed, believed, the latter surrounded by his loved ones and adored by his compatriots, whatever those hypocrites may say now. My father once told me that Franco kept a photograph in his office of Mussolini strung up like a pig in the petrol station in Milan where they took his corpse and that of his lover, Clara Petacci, to be put on display and publicly mocked, and that whenever visitors expressed shock and bewilderment on seeing the photograph, Franco would say: “Yes, take a good look: that’s never going to happen to me.” And he was right, he made sure that it didn’t. He doubtless died happy – if such a thing is possible – believing that everything would continue as he had ordained. Many people console themselves for this great injustice or for their rage with the thought: “If he were to come back today …” or “Given the way things have turned out, he must be spinning in his grave,” forgetting that no one ever comes back or spins in his grave or knows what happens once he has expired. It’s like thinking that someone who has not yet been born should care about what’s going on in the world. To someone who does not yet exist everything is, inevitably, a matter of complete indifference, just as it is for someone who has died. Both are nothing, neither possesses any consciousness, the former cannot even sense what its life will be and the latter cannot recall it, as if he or she had never had a life. They are on the same plane, that is, they neither exist nor know anything, however hard that is for us to accept. What does it matter to me what happens once I am gone? All that counts is what I can believe and foresee now. I believe that, in my absence, it would better for my children if you were around. I foresee that Luisa would recover sooner and suffer a little less if you were on hand as a friend. I can’t fathom other people’s conjectures, even yours or Luisa’s, I can only know my own, and I can’t imagine you two in any other way. So I ask you again, if anything bad should happen to me, give me your word that you’ll take care of them.’
Díaz-Varela might still have disputed certain points with him.
‘Yes, you’re right in part, but not about one thing: not having been born is not the same as having died, because the person who dies always leaves some trace behind him and he knows that. He knows, too, that he’ll know nothing about it, but that he will, nonetheless, leave his mark in the form of memories. He knows he’ll be missed, as you yourself said, and that the people who knew him won’t behave as if he had never existed. Some will feel guilty about him, some will wish they had treated him better while he was alive, some will mourn him and be unable to understand why he doesn’t respond, some will be plunged into despair by his absence. No one has any difficulty recovering from the loss of someone who has not been born, with the exception, perhaps, of a mother who has undergone an abortion and finds it hard to abandon hope and wonders sometimes about the child who might have been. But in reality there is no loss of any kind, there is no void, there are no past events. On the other hand, no one who has lived and died disappears completely, not at least for a couple of generations: there is evidence of his actions and, when he dies, he’ll be aware of that. He knows that he won’t be able to see or ascertain anything of what happens thereafter and he knows that his story ends in that instant. You yourself are concerned about what will happen to your wife and children, you’ve taken care to put your affairs in order, you’re aware of the gap you would leave and you’re asking
me to fill that gap, to be some kind of substitute for you if you’re not here. None of that would concern someone who had never been born.’
‘Of course not,’ Desvern would have replied, ‘but I’m doing all of those things while I’m still alive, and a living person is not the same as a dead person, even though that isn’t what we tend to think. When I’m dead, I won’t even be a person, and won’t be able to sort out or ask for anything, or be aware of or concerned about anything. In that respect a dead person is the same as someone who has never been born. I’m not talking about the others, those who survive us and think of us and who still exist in time, nor of myself now, of the me who has not yet departed. He still does things, of course, and, needless to say, thinks them; he plots, takes steps and decisions, tries to influence others, has desires, is vulnerable and can also inflict harm. I’m talking about myself dead, which you obviously find harder to imagine than I do. You shouldn’t confuse us, the living me and the dead me. The former is asking you for something that the latter won’t be able to question or remind you about or else check up on you to see whether or not you have carried out his wishes. What’s so difficult, then, about giving me your word? There’s nothing to prevent you from failing to keep it, it will cost you nothing.’
Díaz-Varela would have put one hand to his forehead and sat looking at his friend oddly and slightly irritably, as if he had just emerged from a daydream or some drug-induced torpor. He was, at the least, emerging from an unexpected and inappropriately gloomy conversation.
‘Fine, you have my word of honour, you can count on it,’ he would have said. ‘But please, no more of these macabre conversations, they give me the creeps. Let’s go and have a drink and talk about something more cheerful.’
‘What rubbishy edition is this?’ I heard Professor Rico muttering as he took a book off a shelf; he had been snooping around looking at the books, as if no one else were in the room. I saw that he was holding an edition of Don Quixote with the very tips of his fingers, as though the book made his skin crawl. ‘How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine? It’s full of a lot of intuitive nonsense, there’s no method or science in it, it’s not even original, he’s just copied from other people. And to find it in the house of someone who is, as I understand it, a university teacher, well, that really takes the biscuit. But then that’s Madrid University for you,’ he added, looking reprovingly at Luisa.
She burst out laughing. Even though she was the object of the reprimand, she obviously found his rudeness vastly amusing. Díaz-Varela laughed too, perhaps infected by her laughter or perhaps to flatter Rico into further excesses – he could hardly have been surprised by Rico’s impertinence or by the liberties he took; he then tried to provoke him further, possibly to make Luisa laugh more and draw her out of her momentarily sombre mood. And yet he seemed perfectly spontaneous. He was utterly charming and he pretended very well, if he was pretending.
‘You’re not telling me that the editor of that edition isn’t a respected authority,’ he said to Rico, ‘indeed, he’s rather more respected than you are in some circles.’
‘Huh, respected by ignoramuses and eunuchs, of which this country is filled to bursting, and by literary and philosophical societies in Spain’s lazier, lowlier provincial towns,’ retorted Professor Rico. He opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger. ‘I’ve seen one glaring error already.’ Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further. ‘I’ll write an article about it.’ He looked up with a triumphant air and smiled from ear to ear (an enormous smile made possible by his flexible mouth) and added: ‘Besides, the fellow’s jealous of me.’
II
I didn’t see Luisa Alday again for quite some time, and in the long between-time I began going out with a man I vaguely liked, and fell stupidly and secretly in love with another, with her adoring Díaz-Varela, whom I met shortly afterwards in the most unlikely of places, very close to where Deverne had died, in the reddish building that houses the Natural History Museum, which is right next to or, rather, part of the same complex as the technical college, with its gleaming glass-and-zinc cupola, about twenty-seven metres high and about twenty in diameter, erected around 1881, when these buildings were neither college nor museum, but the brand-new National Palace for the Arts and Industry, which was the site of an important exhibition that year; the area used to be known as the Altos del Hipódromo, the Hippodrome Heights, because of its various promontories and its proximity to a few horses whose ghostly exploits have become doubly or definitively so, since there can be no one alive who saw or remembers them. The Natural History Museum is rather a poor affair, especially compared with those one finds in England, but I used to take my young nieces and nephews there sometimes so that they could see and get to know the static animals in their glass display cases, and I then acquired a taste for going there on my own from time to time, mingling with – but invisible to – the groups of junior- and secondary-school students and their exasperated or patient teachers and with a few bewildered tourists with too much time on their hands, who probably learned of the museum’s existence from some overly punctilious and exhaustive guide to the city: for apart from the large number of museum attendants, most of whom are Latin Americans now, these tend to be the only living beings in the place, which has the unreal, superfluous, fantastical air of all natural history museums.
I was studying a scale model of the vast gaping jaws of a crocodile – I always used to think how easily I would fit inside them and how lucky I was not to live in a place inhabited by such reptiles – when I heard someone say my name and was so taken aback that I spun round, feeling slightly alarmed: when you’re in that half-empty museum, you have the almost absolute, comforting certainty that no one has the least idea where you are at that precise moment.
I recognized him at once, with his feminine lips and his falsely cleft chin, his calm smile and that expression, at once attentive and discreet. He asked me what I was doing there, and I replied: ‘I like to come here now and then. It’s full of tame wild beasts you can get right up close to.’ And as soon as I said this, I thought that, actually, there were very few wild beasts there and that what I had said was just plain silly, and I realized, too, that I had merely been trying to make myself seem interesting, doubtless with dire results. ‘And it’s a nice quiet place,’ I added lamely. I, in turn, asked him what was he doing there, and he answered: ‘I like to come here sometimes too,’ and I waited for him to add some silly comment of his own, but, alas, I waited in vain. Díaz-Varela had no desire to impress me. ‘I live quite near. When I go out for a walk, my feet occasionally lead me here.’ That bit about his feet leading him there seemed slightly literary and twee and gave me some hope. ‘I sit out on the terrace for a while and then I go home. Anyway, let me buy you a drink, unless you want to continue studying those crocodile teeth or visit one of the other rooms.’ Outside, on the hill, beneath the shade of the trees, opposite the college, there’s a refreshment kiosk with tables and chairs.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I know these teeth by heart. I was just considering going to see the absurd Adam and Eve they’ve got downstairs.’ He didn’t react, he didn’t say ‘Oh, right’ or anything, as I would have expected from someone who was a regular visitor to the museum: in the basement, there’s a vertical display case, not that big, made by an American or an English woman, Rosemary Something-or-other, which contains a highly eccentric representation of the Garden of Eden. All the animals surrounding the original couple are supposedly alive and either in motion or alert, monkeys, hares, turkeys, cranes, badgers, perhaps a toucan and even the snake, which is
peering out with an all-too-human expression from among the vivid green leaves of the apple tree. By contrast, Adam and Eve, standing side by side, are mere skeletons, and the only way of telling them apart, to the uneducated eye at least, is that one of them is holding an apple in its right hand. I’ve probably read the explanatory notice at some point, but I don’t think it provided me with a satisfactory explanation. If it was a matter of illustrating the differences between the bones of a man and those of a woman, then why make them into our first parents, as the Catholic faith used to call them, and place them in that particular setting; and if it was intended to show Paradise and its rather sparse fauna, then why the skeletons when all the other animals are complete with their flesh and their fur or feathers? It’s one of the museum’s most incongruous exhibits, and no visitor can fail to notice it, not because it’s pretty, but because it makes no sense at all.
‘It’s María Dolz, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I, it is Dolz?’ Díaz-Varela said once we had sat down on the terrace, as if keen to show off his retentive memory; after all, I alone had said my surname and then only hurriedly, slipping it in like an insert of no interest to any of the others present. I felt flattered by this gesture, but didn’t feel I was being courted.
‘You obviously have a good memory – and a good ear,’ I said, so as not to be impolite. ‘Yes, it’s Dolz, not Dols or Dolç with a cedilla.’ And I drew a cedilla in the air. ‘How’s Luisa?’