Díaz-Varela broke off and took a sip of the whisky and ice he had poured himself. He hadn’t sat down again after getting up to take the book off the shelf, I was lying on the sofa, we hadn’t yet gone to his bed. That was what usually happened, we would sit down first and talk for at least an hour, and I was never sure whether there would be a second act or not, our behaviour gave no indication either way, it was that of two people who have things to tell each other or to talk about and who will not inevitably end up having sex together. I always had the feeling that it might or might not happen, and that the two possibilities were equally natural and neither could be taken for granted, as if each time were the first time and as if there had been no accumulation of experiences from whatever had happened previously in that regard – not even a sense of trust, not even a caress – and we would eternally have to start the same journey from the beginning. I was also sure that we would do whatever he wanted or rather proposed, because the fact is that he was always the one, with a word or gesture, who would propose moving to the bedroom, but only after we had talked, and in the face of my invincible timidity. I feared that one day, instead of making the gesture or saying the word that would invite me to join him in bed or to pull up my skirt, he would suddenly – or after a pause – bring the conversation and our meeting to a close as if we were two friends who had run out of things to say or had various errands to do and would send me out into the street with a kiss, I could never be certain that my visit would end up with our bodies entangling. I both liked and didn’t like that strange uncertainty: on the one hand, it made me think that he enjoyed my company whatever the circumstances and didn’t see me merely as an instrument for his sexual hygiene or relief; on the other hand, it infuriated me that he could hold off for so long, that he didn’t feel an urgent need to pounce on me without further ado, as soon as he opened the door, in order to satisfy his desire; that he found it so easy to postpone that moment, or perhaps his desire was merely accumulating while I looked at him and listened. But that quibble can be put down to the dissatisfaction that predominates in us all and without which we cannot live, especially since, in the end, the thing I always feared wouldn’t happen did happen, and I had no reason to complain.
‘Go on, what happened next, in what way does that book prove you right?’ I said. He definitely had the gift of the gab and I loved to listen to him, regardless of what he talked about and even if he was recounting an old Balzac story that I could easily read for myself, a story not invented by him, but doubtless interpreted in his own free and possibly distorted fashion. I found anything he said interesting or, worse, amusing (worse, because I was aware that one day I would have to stand aside). Now that I never go to his apartment, I recall those visits as forays into a secret territory, as a small adventure, perhaps more because of the first act of each encounter than the second, although, at the time, the very uncertainty of that second act made it seem even more desirable.
‘The Colonel wants to recover his name, career, rank, dignity, fortune or part of it (he has spent years living in dire poverty) as well as the most complicated thing of all: his wife, who will be shown to be a bigamist if Chabert can prove that he really is Chabert and not an impostor or a lunatic. Perhaps Madame Ferraud really loved him and mourned his death when she was told of it, and felt that the world had fallen in on her; but his reappearance is surplus to requirements, his resurrection a real nuisance, a great problem, threatening catastrophe and ruin, and, paradoxically, it brings with it again the sense that the world is falling in on her: how can the return of the person whose disappearance first evoked those feelings evoke precisely the same feelings? We see quite clearly that, with the passing of time, what has been should continue to have been, to exist only in the past, as is always or almost always the case, that is how life is intended to be, so that there is no undoing what is done and no unhappening what has happened; the dead must stay where they are and nothing can be corrected. We can allow ourselves to miss them because we know they are safely gone: we lost someone and, knowing that he is never going to come back or reclaim the place he vacated, a place that, besides, has since been swiftly filled, we are free to long for his return with all our might. We can miss him safe in the knowledge that our proclaimed desires will never be granted and that there is no possible return, that he can no longer intervene in our existence or in mundane matters, that he can no longer intimidate or inhibit or even overshadow us, that he will never again be better than us. We sincerely regretted his departure, and when it happened, we truly wished he could have gone on living; a vast gap or even abyss opened up and we were tempted to hurl ourselves after him; that, at least, is what we felt momentarily. It’s rare, though, for that initial temptation not to expire. Then the days and months and years pass and we adapt; we get used to that gap and don’t even consider the possibility that the dead man will come back to fill it, because the dead don’t do that, and we are safe from them, and, besides, that gap has been filled in and is no longer the same or has become purely fictitious. We remember those closest to us every day and still feel sad to think that we will not see them again or hear them or laugh with them or kiss those we used to kiss. But there is no death that is not also, in some way, a relief, that does not offer some advantage. Once it has occurred, of course; we do not desire anyone’s death in advance, possibly not even that of our enemies. We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone. This glee is observable even in journalists, who come up with such headlines as “The last genius of the piano dies” or “Death of the last great cinema legend”, as if they were joyfully celebrating the fact that, finally, there are no more geniuses and never will be, that this latest demise frees us from the eternal nightmare of knowing that superior, very gifted people exist and that, much to our regret, we cannot help but admire them; that we are a step closer to banishing that curse or, at least, bringing it down a peg or two. Naturally, one mourns a friend, as I have mourned Miguel, but there is also the pleasant sense of having survived and of better prospects, of being present at a friend’s death rather than your own, of being able to view his finished portrait and tell his story, to defend and console the people he has left behind. As your friends die, you feel more shrunken and more alone, but, at the same time, you count them off, “One less, and another, I know what their lives were like up until the final instant, and I am the only one who can tell the tale. In my case, though, n
o one who really cares about me will see me die or be able to tell my whole story, and so, in a sense, I will remain forever unfinished, because, not having seen me fall, how can anyone be certain that I won’t continue to live eternally?”’
He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress, as I have noticed to be the case with many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren’t enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories, which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic. But Díaz-Varela wasn’t a writer, and I didn’t mind his digressions, in fact, my response was exactly the same as it had been the second time I met him, in the café next to the museum, namely, that, while he continued to expatiate, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and delighted in his grave, somehow inward-turned voice and the often arbitrary syntactic leaps he made, the whole effect seeming sometimes not to emanate from a human being, but from a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings, perhaps a piano played with great agility. On this occasion, however, I wanted to find out more about Colonel Chabert and Madame Ferraud, and, more especially, how, according to him, the novella proved him to be right about Luisa, although I could easily imagine his reasoning.
‘Yes, but what happened to the Colonel?’ I said, interrupting his flow, and I saw that he didn’t mind my interruption, for he was aware of his own discursive tendencies and was perhaps glad when someone stopped him. ‘Was he accepted by the world of the living to which he wanted to return? Did his wife accept him? Did he manage to resume his existence?’
‘What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention. Besides, you can find out what happened to the Colonel on your own, it would do you good to read a few non-contemporary authors now and then. I can lend you the book, if you like, or don’t you read French? There’s a Spanish translation available, but it’s not much good. And so few people know French these days.’ – He had studied at the Lycée; we had talked little about our respective histories, but that much he had told me. – ‘What’s important here is that Chabert’s reappearance is, of course, an absolute disaster for his wife, who has recovered and made another life in which there is no room for him, or only as a figure from the past, as he had once been, as an ever-fainter memory, well and truly dead, buried in a distant, unknown grave alongside others who fell in that Battle of Eylau, which, ten years on, almost no one remembers or wants to remember, because, among other things, the person who led that battle has been sent into lonely exile on St Helena, and Louis XVIII now sits on the throne, and the first thing any new regime does is to forget and minimize and erase the previous regime, and to convert those who served it into putrefying nostalgics, who are left with nothing to do but slowly burn out and die. The Colonel realizes this from the very first moment and knows that his inexplicable survival is a curse for the Countess, who doesn’t answer his first letters and has no wish to see him, for fear that she might recognize him, preferring to believe that he will turn out to be a madman or a fraud, or, if not, that he will simply give up eventually out of exhaustion, bitterness and desolation. Or that when he can no longer maintain his stubborn refusal to leave, he will return to the snowy fields and die again – once and for all. When they do finally meet and talk, the Colonel, who has had no reason to cease loving her during his long exile from earth, during which he suffered all the infinite hardships of being dead, asks her …’ And here Díaz-Varela looked for another quote in the small book, although this one was so short that he must have known it by heart: ‘“Are the dead quite wrong, then, to come back?” Or perhaps: “Is it a mistake for the dead to return?” In French it says: “Les morts ont donc bien tort de revenir?”’ – And it seemed to me that his accent in French was as good as it was in English. – ‘The Countess’s hypocritical answer is: “No, no, Monsieur! Don’t think me ungrateful,” and adds: “It is no longer in my power to love you, but I know how much I owe you and I can still offer you the affection of a daughter.” And Balzac says that, after hearing the Colonel’s sympathetic and generous response to these words’ – and Díaz-Varela again read from the book (with his fleshy, kissable mouth) – ‘“The Countess shot him a look of such intense gratitude that poor Chabert would gladly have returned to Eylau and climbed back into his grave.” Meaning that he wishes to cause her no further problems or anxieties or to intrude upon a world that is no longer his, to cease being her nightmare or ghost or torment, and to remove himself and disappear.’
‘And is that what he did? Did he just abandon the field and accept defeat? Did he return to his grave, did he retreat?’ I asked, taking advantage of a pause.
‘You’ll find out when you read it for yourself. The great misfortune of remaining alive having once died and been assumed dead even according to the army records (“an historical fact”), doesn’t affect only his wife, but him as well. You cannot pass from one state to the other, or, rather, of course, from the second to the first, and he is fully aware of being a corpse, an official and, to a large extent, real corpse, because he himself had thought he was dead and had heard the moans of his fellow corpses, which no living person could hear. When, at the beginning of the novel, he turns up at the lawyer’s office, one of the clerks or messengers asks him his name. He answers: “Chabert,” and the other man says: “The Colonel who died at Eylau?” And the ghost, far from protesting or rebelling and growing angry and immediately contradicting him, merely nods and says meekly: “The very same, sir.” And a little later, he makes this definition his own. When, at last, he manages to see the lawyer, Derville, and the latter asks him: “To whom do I have the honour of speaking?” he responds: “Colonel Chabert.” “Which one?” insists the lawyer, and the answer is an absurdity, but absolutely true for all that: “The one who died at Eylau.” Later, Balzac himself refers to Chabert in the same terms, albeit ironically: “Sir,” said the dead man …”, that’s what he writes. The Colonel cannot escape from his vile condition as a man who did not die when he should have died or, indeed, when he did die, as Napoleon himself had regretfully ordered two doctors to verify. When he sets out his case to Derville, he says the following’ – and Díaz-Varela searched through the pages to find the quotation – ‘“To be frank, during that period, and even now sometimes, my name is distasteful to me. I would prefer not to be me. My sense of what should be mine by rights is killing me. If my illness had taken from me all memory of my past existence, I would have been happy.” That’s what he says: “My name is distasteful to me. I would prefer not to be me.”’ – Díaz-Varela repeated the words to me, underlined them. – ‘The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others do, is to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it’s too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all. For the person who returns, there is no greater misfortune than to discover that he is surplus to requirements, that his presence isn’t wanted, that he is disturbing the universe, that he constitutes a hindrance to his loved ones, who don’t know what to do with him.’
‘“The worst thing that can happen to anyone”? Oh, come on. You’re talking as if the story were real, but things like that never happen, or only in fiction.’
‘Fiction has the ability to show us what we don?
??t know and what doesn’t happen,’ he retorted, ‘and in this case, it allows us to imagine the feelings of a dead man who finds himself obliged to come back, and shows us why the dead shouldn’t come back. With the exception of mad people or the very old, everyone, sooner or later, tries to forget the dead. They avoid thinking about them, and when, for some reason or other, they can’t avoid it, they grow sad and gloomy, they stop whatever they’re doing, their eyes fill with tears, and they find themselves unable to go on until they have shaken off the dark thought or suppressed the memory. Believe me, in the long term, and in the medium term too, everyone ends up shaking off the dead, because that is their final fate, as they would doubtless agree, and, once they have tried and experienced their new condition, they wouldn’t be prepared to come back anyway. No one who has departed this life and washed his hands of it, even if his death occurred against his will and much to his regret, as the victim, say, of a murder, no one would choose to be reinstated and thus resume the terrible fatigue of existing. Think about it, Colonel Chabert endured unspeakable suffering and saw what we all believe to be the worst of horrors, namely war; you would think that no one could give lessons in horror to someone who had taken part in pitiless battles fought in sub-zero temperatures, as happened in Eylau, and that was not his first battle, but the last; there, two armies of seventy-five thousand men confronted each other; we don’t know exactly how many died, but they say there were at least forty thousand, and that they fought for fourteen hours or more to achieve very little: the French took possession of the field, a field that was nothing but a vast snowy waste piled with corpses, and although the Russian army was badly battered when it retreated, it was not destroyed. The French were so debilitated and exhausted and so stiff with cold, that it was four hours, when night had already fallen, before they realized that the enemy was silently slipping away. Not they would have been in any condition to pursue them. It’s said that the following morning, Marshal Ney rode round the battlefield and that his only comment reflected a mixture of horror, disgust and disapproval: “What slaughter! And for what?” And yet, despite all this, it is not the soldier, it is not Chabert, but the lawyer, Derville, who has never seen a cavalry charge or a bayonet wound or the havoc caused by cannon fire, who has spent his life either in his chambers or in court, safe from physical violence, barely leaving Paris, he is the one who, at the end of the novel, is allowed to speak and enlighten us about the horrors he has seen during his entirely non-military career, not at war but at peace, not at the front line but in the rearguard. He says to his former clerk, Godeschal, who is about to take his first case as a lawyer: “You know, my dear friend, there are three men in modern society who can never think well of the world: the Priest, the Doctor, and the Man of Law. They all wear black robes, worn perhaps in mourning for lost virtues and lost hopes. The unhappiest of these three is the lawyer.” He explains that when a man goes to a priest, he does so prompted by feelings of remorse and repentance, by beliefs that make him more interesting, which elevate him, and that, in a way, are a comfort to the soul of his intercessor. “But we lawyers”’ – and here Díaz-Varela read in Spanish from the final page of the book, presumably translating as he went, because he was hardly likely to have made a version beforehand – ‘“we see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession! I have seen a father left to die in a garret, without a penny to his name, abandoned by two daughters to whom he had given forty thousand pounds a year! I’ve seen wills burned; I’ve seen mothers rob their children, husbands rob their wives, wives kill their husbands or else use their husbands’ love to drive them into madness or imbecility, in order that they might live contentedly with their lover. I have seen women administer lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child. I can’t tell you everything I’ve seen, because I have been privy to crimes against which justice is impotent. All the horrors that novelists think they invent are as nothing compared to the truth. You will come to know all these delightful things. I bequeath them to you. Meanwhile, I am going to live in the countryside with my wife. Paris disgusts me.”’