This conversation continued on other occasions; in fact, the subject seemed to come up, or Díaz-Varela would himself bring it up, every time we met – which wasn’t very often – I still can’t bring myself to call Díaz-Varela ‘Javier’ even though that was what I called him and how I thought of him on certain nights when I returned home late to my apartment after having spent a while in bed with him (one is only ever in someone else’s bed for ‘a while’, on loan, unless invited to spend the whole night there, and that never happened with him; indeed, he would invent absurd, unnecessary excuses to get rid of me, unnecessary because I’ve never stayed anywhere longer than I should have, unless asked). Before closing my eyes, I would stare out of the open window of my own bedroom and look across at the trees opposite, which, having no streetlamp to light them, are barely visible, but I would hear them stirring close by in the darkness, like a prelude to the storms that sometimes pass over Madrid, and I would say to myself: ‘What is the point of this, for me at least? He’s not pretending, he’s not deceiving me, he doesn’t conceal his hopes from me or his motivation, which, although he may not know it, are all blindingly obvious: he’s just waiting for her to emerge from her state of deep depression or enervation and begin to see him differently, not merely as the faithful friend her husband bequeathed to her. He has to be very careful, though, with the small steps he takes, which must, inevitably, be very small if he is not to look as if he were showing a lack of respect for her natural grief or even for the dead man’s memory, and he must, at the same time, remain alert in case someone else slips in before him, which means that he cannot discount as rivals even the ugliest or stupidest or most casual or most boring or most languid of suitors, because any one of them could present an unforeseen danger. While he keeps watch over her, he sees me from time to time and possibly other women too (we tend to avoid asking each other questions), and maybe I’m doing the same as him in a way, trying to make myself indispensable without him noticing, making myself one of his habits, even if only a very sporadic habit, so that he will find me hard to replace when he does decide to abandon me. Some men make things very clear from the start without anyone needing to ask: “I must warn you that there will never be anything more between us than there is already, and if you’re hoping for more, then we’d better finish right now” or “You’re not the only one nor should you aim to be; if you’re looking for exclusivity, this isn’t the place” or, as was the case with Díaz-Varela: “I’m in love with someone else who hasn’t yet realized that she could be in love with me. That time will come, though, I just have to be constant and patient. There’s nothing wrong, however, with you keeping me amused in the meantime, if you want to, but be quite clear, that’s all we are to each other, temporary companionship and amusement and sex; at most, camaraderie and a little affection.” Not that Díaz-Varela has ever said those precise words to me, there’s no need, because that is the unequivocal message that emerges from our encounters. On the other hand, those same men who issue warnings sometimes eat their words later on, and a lot of us women tend to be optimistic and conceited in a way, more profoundly so than many men, who, in the field of love, remain conceited only briefly and forget to be so after a while: we think men will change their mind or their beliefs, that they will gradually discover that they can’t do without us, that we will be the exception in their lives or the visitors who end up staying, that they will eventually grow tired of those other invisible women whose existence we begin to doubt or whom we prefer to think do not exist, the more we see of the men and the more we love them despite ourselves; that we will be the chosen ones if only we have the necessary staying power to remain by their side, uncomplaining and uninsistent. When we don’t arouse immediate passion, we believe that loyalty and our mere persistent presence will finally be rewarded and prove stronger and more durable than any momentary rapture or caprice. In such cases, we know that we will be hard-pressed to feel flattered even if our fondest hopes come true, but if they do, we will feel inwardly triumphant. There is, however, no certainty of this for as long as the struggle continues, and even the most justifiably confident of women, even those who, up until then, have been universally courted, can be badly let down by those men who refuse to surrender and issue them with arrogant warnings. I don’t belong to the category of the confident, the truth is that I harbour no real hopes of triumphing, or, rather, the only hopes I allow myself revolve around Díaz-Varela’s failure to win Luisa, and then, perhaps, with luck, he’ll stay with me out of pure inertia, because even the most restless and diligent and scheming of men can grow lazy, especially after a frustration or a failure or a very long and pointless wait. I know that it wouldn’t offend me to be a substitute, because we are all of us substitutes for someone, especially initially: Díaz-Varela would be a substitute for Luisa’s dead husband; as far as I was concerned, my substitute for Díaz-Varela would be Leopoldo, whom I have not yet ruled out – just in case, I suppose – even though I only half-like him, and with whom I only started going out – how very opportune – just before I met Díaz-Varela in the Natural History Museum and heard him talk and talk while I ceaselessly watched his lips as I still do whenever we’re together, only taking my eyes off them to look up at his clouded gaze; perhaps Luisa was a substitute for someone else when she met Deverne, who knows, perhaps for his first wife, although it was incomprehensible that anyone could wound or leave such a pleasant, cheerful man, and yet there he is, stabbed to death for no reason and now en route to oblivion. Yes, we are all poor imitations of people whom, generally speaking, we never met, people who never even approached or simply walked straight past the lives of those we now love, or who did perhaps stop, but grew weary after a time and disappeared without leaving so much as a trace, or only the dust from their fleeing feet, or who died, causing those we love a mortal wound that almost always heals in the end. We cannot pretend to be the first or the favourite, we are merely what is available, the leftovers, the leavings, the survivors, the remnants, the remaindered goods, and it is on this somewhat ignoble basis that the greatest loves are built and on which the best families are founded, and from which we all come, the product of chance and making do, of other people’s rejections and timidities and failures, and yet we would give anything sometimes to stay by the side of the person we rescued from an attic or a clearance sale, or won in a game of cards or who picked us up from among the scraps; strange though it may seem, we manage to believe in these chance fallings in love, and many think they can see the hand of destiny in what is really nothing more than a village raffle at the fag-end of summer …’ Then I would turn out the light on my bedside table and, after a few seconds, the trees being blown about by the wind would become slightly more visible and I could go to sleep watching, or perhaps merely sensing, the swaying of their leaves. ‘What is the point?’ I would think. ‘The only point, in these silly, insurmountable circumstances, is to cling on to the smallest thing, the smallest handhold. Another day, another hour at his side, even if that hour takes ages to arrive; the vague promise of seeing him again even though many days, many empty days, must pass before that happens. We note down in our diary the dates when he phoned us or we saw him, we count the days that pass with no news from him, and stay awake into the small hours before giving the night up as definitively barren and lost, just in case, at the last moment, the phone should ring and he should whisper some nonsense or other that fills us with an entirely unjustified euphoria and a sense that life is kind and merciful. We interpret every inflection of his voice and every insignificant word, which we nevertheless repeat to ourselves and endow with stupid, promising meaning. We value any contact, however brief, even if it’s only to receive some flimsy excuse or to be let down or
to listen to a barely elaborated lie. “At least, at some point, he thought of me,” we tell ourselves gratefully. “He thinks of me when he’s bored or if he’s suffered some setback with Luisa, the person he really cares about, I may only be in second place, but that’s better than nothing.” It occurs to us sometimes – but only sometimes – that all it needs is for the person occupying first place to fall, a feeling familiar to all younger brothers of kings and princes and even to more distant relatives and remote, isolated bastard children, who know that this is how one can pass from tenth place to ninth, from sixth to fifth and from fourth to third, and, at some point, all will have silently formulated the inexpressible desire: “He should have died yesterday,” or the wish that appears in the minds of the boldest pretenders: “There’s still time for him to die tomorrow, which will be the yesterday of the day after tomorrow, assuming I’m alive then.” We don’t care about humiliating ourselves to ourselves, after all, no one is going to judge us and there are no witnesses. When we get caught in the spider’s web, we fantasize endlessly and, at the same time, make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him, smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.’
With me, Díaz-Varela made no attempt to hide the impatience that he was obliged to conceal from Luisa, whenever, that is, we returned to his favourite topic of conversation, the one he could not have with her and the only one, it seemed to me, of any real importance to him, as if until that matter was settled, everything else was postponable and provisional, as if the effort invested in it were so huge that all other decisions had to remain in abeyance, waiting for some resolution, and as if his whole life depended on the failure or success of that stubborn hope of his, which had no definite completion date. Perhaps there was no indefinite completion date either: what would happen if Luisa failed to respond to his entreaties and advances, to his passion, if he gave voice to it, but chose, rather, to remain alone? When would he consider that it was time to abandon his long wait? I didn’t want to find myself sliding imperceptibly into the same situation and so I continued to cultivate Leopoldo, whom I had decided to keep in the dark about Díaz-Varela. It was ridiculous enough that my steps depended, indirectly, on those taken or not taken by an inconsolable widow, and it would have been even more ridiculous to lengthen the chain still further and add to it the steps of a poor, unwitting man who didn’t even know her: with a little bad luck and a few more lovers of the kind who allow themselves to be loved and neither reject nor reciprocate that love, the chain could have gone on for ever. A series of people lined up like dominoes, all waiting for the surrender of one entirely oblivious woman, to find out who would fall next to them.
At no point did it occur to Díaz-Varela that I might be upset by his statement of intent, although it is also true that he never presented himself as Luisa’s salvation and destiny; he never said, ‘When she climbs out of the abyss and breathes again by my side, and smiles,’ still less, ‘When she marries again, marries me, that is.’ He never put himself forward as a candidate or included himself, but it was perfectly clear that he was the immovable man who waits; had he lived in another age, he would have been counting off the remaining days of the mourning period, then those of half-mourning and would have consulted the older women – who knew most about such matters – as to what would be an acceptable moment for him to remove his mask and make a play for her. That’s the worst thing about losing our old codes of conduct, we don’t know which is the right moment to act or what rules to follow, when it would be too soon or so late that we would have missed our turn. We have to be guided by ourselves and then it’s very easy to make a blunder.
I don’t know if it was simply that his desires coloured everything or if he deliberately sought out literary and historical texts that would support his arguments and come to his aid (perhaps he received guidance from Rico, that man of compendious knowledge, although, as I understand it, it is impossible to extract that disdainful scholar from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, for it seems that nothing that has happened since 1650, including his own existence, merits his attention).
‘I read a book recently, which, although I hadn’t heard of it before, is, apparently, very famous,’ Díaz-Varela said, taking a French book down from the shelf and waving it before my eyes, as if he could speak more authoritatively with it in his hand and prove, moreover, that he had actually read it. ‘It’s a novella by Balzac which agrees with me as regards Luisa, as regards what will happen to her in the fullness of time. It tells the story of one of Napoleon’s colonels who was given up for dead at the Battle of Eylau. The battle took place between the 7th and 8th of February 1807 near the town of that name in East Prussia, and pitted the French and Russian armies against each other in Arctic conditions; they say that the battle was fought in what was possibly the most inclement weather ever, although I’ve no idea how they can know this, still less state it as a fact. This Colonel, Chabert by name, is in charge of a cavalry regiment and, during the fighting, receives a terrible blow to the skull from a sword. There is a moment in the novella when, in removing his hat in the presence of a lawyer, he accidentally removes the wig he is wearing too and reveals a monstrously long scar that begins at the nape of his neck and ends just above his right eye, can you imagine?’ – and he demonstrated the line of the scar by running his index finger slowly over his head – ‘forming what Balzac described as “a prominent seam”, adding that one’s first thought on seeing the wound was: “His intelligence must have escaped through that gash!” Marshal Murat, the same man who crushed the 2nd of May uprising in Madrid, promptly dispatches fifteen hundred horsemen to rescue him, but all of them, with Murat at the head, ride straight over him, over his prostrate body. He is assumed to be dead, despite the Emperor – who greatly admires him – sending two surgeons on to the battlefield to check that he is dead; those negligent men, however, knowing that his skull has been sliced open and that he has then been trampled on by two cavalry regiments, do not even bother to take his pulse and officially and hastily certify him as dead, and that death then appears in the French army’s bulletins, where it is recorded in detail, thus becoming historical fact. He is thrown into a grave along with the other naked corpses, as was the custom: he had been a famous man while alive, but now he is just another corpse lying in a cold grave, and all corpses go to the same place. The Colonel tells his improbable but entirely convincing story to a Parisian lawyer, Derville, who he hopes will take on his case, he recounts how he recovered consciousness before being buried, thought, at first, that he was actually dead, then realized he was still alive, and with great difficulty and great luck managed to escape from that pyramid of ghosts, after having himself been one of them for who knows how many hours and having heard, or as he says, thought he could hear …’ – and here Díaz-Varela opened the book and looked for a particular quotation, he must have underlined various sections, which is perhaps why he had picked up the book, so as to be able to read out the actual words to me – ‘“groans from the world of the dead amongst whom I was lying”, adding “there are nights when I think I still hear those stifled moans”. His wife is left a widow and, after a decent interval, she marries again, a certain Count Ferraud, by whom she has two children, her first marriage having been childless. She inherits a considerable fortune from her fallen hero, she recovers and carries on with her life, she is still young, after all, she has a fair stretch of road before her and that is the determining factor: the road that foreseeably lies ahead of us and how we want to travel that road once we have decided to remain in the world and not go chasing after
ghosts, which exercise a powerful attraction when they are still recent, as if they wanted to drag us after them. Whether many people die around us, as happens during a war, or just one much-loved individual, we feel an initial temptation to join them, or at least to carry their weight and not let them go. Most people, though, do let go of them after a time, when they recognize that their own survival is at risk, that the dead are a great burden and prevent any possible advance, and even stop your breath, if you’re too wrapped up in them, if you live too much in their dark shadow. Regrettably, they are as fixed as paintings, they don’t move, they don’t add anything, they don’t speak and never respond, and drive us into a blind alley, into one corner of their painting, which, being finished, allows for no retouching. The novella doesn’t describe the widow’s grief, if she went through what Luisa is going through; it doesn’t mention her pain or her grief, it doesn’t show the character at all during the period when she would have received the fateful news, but only ten years later, in 1817, I believe, but given that she doesn’t appear to be a heartless person or at least not someone who was heartless from the start – the fact is we don’t know, because it’s left unexplored – one assumes that she experienced all the usual stages of bereavement (shock, desolation, sadness, languor, apathy, anxiety, fear upon realizing that time is passing, and consequent recovery).’