I did not belong to that bold and enterprising band, but to the silent kind, who, while prouder and more subtle, are also more exposed to being promptly erased or forgotten, and after that evening, I was glad to run that risk, to be, as usual, subordinate to the requests and suggestions of the person whom I still thought of as Javier, but who was already on the way to becoming a hard-to-remember double-barrelled name; and I was glad, too, not to have to call or seek him out, in the knowledge that failing to do so would not seem suspicious or incriminating. My not getting in touch with him would not mean that I wanted to avoid him, nor that I was disappointed in him – a rank understatement – nor that I was afraid of him, nor that I wanted to have no more to do with him after learning that he had plotted to have his best friend stabbed to death without even being sure that his plotting would achieve its end, for he was still left with the easier or perhaps more arduous task, one never knows, of making Luisa fall in love with him (the most insignificant or the most substantial part of the task). The fact that I gave no signs of life would not signify that I knew anything about the plot or anything new about him, my silence would not betray me, everything was as it always had been during our brief relationship, only if, in some vague way, he missed me or thought of me and summoned me to his bedroom, only then would I have to consider how I should behave and what to do. Making someone fall in love with you is insignificant, waiting for it to happen, on the other hand, is a thing of substance.
When Díaz-Varela had spoken to me about Colonel Chabert, I had immediately identified the Colonel with Desvern: the dead man who ought to remain dead because his death has been reported and itemized and set down in the annals and thus become historical fact, and whose new and incomprehensible life is a tiresome addendum, an intrusion into the lives of others; the person who comes back to disturb a universe which, knowing nothing about what really happened and unable to rectify matters, has carried on without him. The fact that Luisa could not immediately shake off Deverne, that she continued in her inert and routine way to be subject to him and his still recent memory – recent for the widow but remote for the person who had long been anticipating his departure – must have seemed to Díaz-Varela rather like being haunted by a ghost, as annoying a phantasm as Chabert, except that the latter had returned in the flesh, complete with scars, when he had already been forgotten and when his return was a nuisance even to time itself, which had to go against its nature and try to retrace its steps and correct the past, whereas Desvern had not entirely departed, at least not in spirit, he was still hanging around and did so with the connivance of his wife, who was still immersed in the slow process of getting over his abandonment or desertion of her; she was even trying to hold on to him for a little longer, knowing that, unlikely though it might seem, a day would come when his face would fade or become frozen in one of the many photos that she insisted on looking at again and again, sometimes with a foolish smile on her face and sometimes sobbing, but always alone, always in secret.
And yet now it seemed to me that it was Díaz-Varela who was more like Chabert. The latter had suffered countless sorrows and hardships, while the former had inflicted them; the latter had been the victim of a war, of negligence, of bureaucracy and incomprehension, while the former was a self-appointed executioner, who had gravely disturbed the universe with his cruelty, his possibly sterile egotism and his extraordinary frivolity. But both had to wait for a gesture, a kind of miracle, a word of encouragement, an invitation, Chabert for the near-impossibility that his wife would fall in love with him again and Díaz-Varela for the improbability that Luisa would fall in love with him or at least seek consolation in his company. There was something similar about the hope and patience shared by both men, although in the old soldier, those feelings were dominated by scepticism and incredulity, and those of my temporary lover by optimism and excitement or, perhaps, by necessity. Both men were like ghosts pulling faces and making signs and even occasionally gesturing, innocently, wildly, in the hope that they would be seen, recognized and perhaps summoned, longing to hear at last the words: ‘Yes, of course, I recognize you now, it’s you,’ although in the case of Chabert this meant only the letter confirming his existence that was being denied to him and in Díaz-Varela’s case: ‘I want to be by your side, come closer and stay here with me, fill this empty space, come to me and embrace me.’ And both must have thought something similar, something that gave them strength and sustained them in their waiting and kept them from giving up: ‘I can’t have gone through everything I’ve gone through, being killed by a sword blow to the skull and by the galloping hooves of infinite horses, and then emerging from among a great pile of corpses after that long and futile battle that transformed forty thousand men like me into cadavers, of which I should have been one, just another corpse; I can’t have gone through that whole difficult recovery process, enough to be able to stand on my own two feet and walk, to have wandered Europe like the poorest of beggars and with no one to believe my story, obliged instead to persuade every imbecile I met that I am still me, that I am not dead, even though my death has been formally recorded; and that I should arrive here, where I once had wife, house, rank and fortune, here where I used to live, and to have the person I most loved and who inherited my wealth not even to admit that I exist, to pretend she doesn’t recognize me and call me an impostor. What sense would it make to survive my reiterated death, to emerge from the grave in which I had resigned myself to living, naked and with no distinguishing emblems or badges, made equal with all my fallen equals, officers and privates, compatriots and perhaps enemies, what sense would it make if what awaited me at the end of my journey was to have my existence denied, to be stripped of my identity, my memory and everything that happened to me after my death, the whole superfluity of my ill fortune, my ordeal, the enormous effort of survival, of what seemed so much like fate …’ That is what Colonel Chabert must have thought as he came and went in Paris, while he begged to be received and seen by the lawyer Derville and by Madame Ferraud, who, in the light of his resurrection, was not his widow, but his wife, and, thus, alas for her, became again the equally buried, forgotten and loathed Madame Chabert.
And Díaz-Varela, in turn, must have thought: ‘I can’t have done what I’ve done or what I conspired to do and set in train, after pondering it long and hard and being consumed by doubt, I can’t have brought about a death, that of my best friend, pretending I was leaving it all slightly to chance, that it might or might not happen, might or might not come to pass, or perhaps I wasn’t pretending and that’s how it really was; perhaps I did devise an imperfect plan full of loose ends precisely so that I could still face myself and be able to tell myself that I had, after all, allowed for numerous loopholes and escape routes, that I hadn’t made a cast-iron plan, hadn’t sent in a hit man or issued anyone with the order: “Kill him”; I can’t have involved two – or perhaps three – other people, Ruibérriz, the assistant who made the phone calls and the beggar who listened to them, in order to distance myself as much as possible from the actual execution, from the events when they happened, if they did happen, because there was no guarantee as to how the gorrilla would react, he might have ignored the calls or simply hurled insults at Miguel or punched him as he did the chauffeur when he confused the two men, my attempt to sow discord might have fallen on barren ground from the start and had no effect whatsoever, but it did have an effect, so what does that mean; no, my wishes can’t, against all probability, have come true and, in doing so, have lost any resemblance they might have had to a gamble or a wager and become, instead, a tragedy and, most probably, murder by instigation which has, in turn, made me, indirectly, the instigator, since it was my idea and my decision to begin the
process, to throw the loaded dice, to tamper with the wheel and then set it turning, I was the one who said: “Get him a mobile phone and pour poison in his ear and thus reach both the insane and the sane parts of his mind; buy him a knife to tempt him, to have him stroke it and open and close it, only someone in possession of a weapon is likely to think of using it”; no, I can’t have done all that and left myself with an ineradicable stain only for it all to come to nothing and for my intention to fail. What would be the point of having impregnated myself like this, with this murder, this conspiracy, this horror, of carrying the deceit and the betrayal within my breast for ever, of never being able to shake them off or forget them except in moments of unconsciousness or of a strange feeling of plenitude that I have not myself, as yet, experienced, I don’t know, what would be the point of having established a link that will reappear in my dreams and that I will never be able to break, what would be the point of all this vileness, if I fail to reach my one goal, if what awaits me at the end of this journey is a No or indifference or pity, or only the old affection she always felt for me and which would merely keep me in my place, or, worse still, if what awaits me is accusation, discovery, disdain, her back turned on me and her icy voice saying, as if from inside a helmet: “Get out of my sight and never let me see you again”? As if she were a Queen condemning her most fervent and adoring subject to eternal exile. And that could happen now, that could easily happen if this woman, María, did hear what she shouldn’t have heard and decides to go and tell her, because even if I denied it, the tiniest doubt would be enough for all my hopes to vanish, to cease to exist. I know I have nothing to fear from Ruibérriz, which is why I asked him to take charge of the operation, I’ve known him for a long time and he would never blab, not even if the beggar were to identify him and the police tracked him down, and he was questioned or arrested, not even under great pressure, because of the possible consequences to himself and because he’s trustworthy. The others, Canella and the one who phoned him, the one who several times a day reminded him of his prostitute daughters and forced him to imagine them hard at work in mortifying detail, the one who fed his obsession and accused Miguel, they have never seen me or heard my name or my voice, so as far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist, only Ruibérriz exists with his T-shirts and his leather coats and his salacious smile. But I don’t really know anything about María, I can see that she’s falling or has fallen in love with me, far too quickly for that falling in love to be anything more than a generous impulse, one from which she can still walk away any time she wants, out of weariness or pique or common sense or disappointment, she doesn’t appear to feel that second emotion nor seems likely to, she has accepted that there will be nothing more than there already is and she knows that one day I will stop seeing her and erase her from my life because Luisa will, finally, have summoned me, that isn’t in any way certain, of course, but it could happen, more than that, sooner or later, it should happen. Unless María has a strong, stupid sense of justice, and her disappointment at discovering that I am a criminal overcomes all other considerations, in which case it would not be enough for her to renounce me and separate from me, she would also want to separate me from my love. And then, if Luisa knew, or if the idea even entered her head, that would be that, what point would there be then, if, having followed the foulest of paths, there was no hope, not even the remotest, most unreal of hopes, the kind that helps us to live? Perhaps even waiting would be forbidden to me, not just hope, but mere waiting, the last refuge of the poorest wretch, of the sick and the decrepit and the doomed and the dying, who wait for night to come and then for day and night to come again, just for that change in the light, which will at least tell them where they are, whether they are awake or sleeping. Even animals wait. The refuge of every being on earth, except me …’
The days passed with no news from Díaz-Varela, one, two, three and four, and that was entirely normal. Five, six, seven and eight, and that was normal too. Nine, ten, eleven and twelve, and that wasn’t quite so normal, but nor was it so very strange either, sometimes he was away and sometimes I was too, we didn’t tend to issue any advance warning of our movements and certainly didn’t bother to say goodbye, we never reached that degree of intimacy nor was our relationship important enough for us to feel it either necessary or prudent to keep each other informed of any absences from Madrid. In the past, whenever he had taken that long or longer to call or get in touch, I would think sadly – but always philosophically or perhaps resignedly – that it was time for me to leave the stage, that the brief space I had allotted myself in his life had indeed been very brief; I assumed he had grown tired of me or that, true to his usual mode of behaviour, he had chosen a new playmate (I never thought I was more than that, even though I would like to have been more) for the duration of his – as I saw it – immemorial waiting, or, rather, his lying in wait; or that Luisa’s acceptance of his new role was happening more quickly than expected and that there was now no room for me nor, presumably, for anyone else; or that he was devoting all his time and attention to her, to taking the children to school and helping her as much as he could, keeping her company and being there if she needed him. ‘That’s it, he’s gone, he’s dumped me, it’s over,’ I would think. ‘It was so short-lived that I’ll just merge in with all the others and he’ll find it hard to remember who I was. I will be indistinguishable, I will be a before, a blank page, the opposite of a “hereafter”, relegated to the category of the no longer important. It doesn’t matter, it’s fine, I knew how it would be from the start, it’s fine.’ If on the twelfth or fifteenth day the phone rang and I heard his voice, I couldn’t help giving a little inner leap of joy and saying to myself: ‘So it’s not quite over yet, I’ll see him at least one more time.’ And during those periods of involuntary waiting on my part and absolute silence on his, each time the bell rang or my mobile phone told me that I’d missed a call or that someone had left a text message, I would think optimistically that it would be from him.
Now the same thing was happening, except that this time I felt only apprehension. I would glance at the tiny screen in alarm, hoping not to see his name and number and – this was the strange, disquieting thing – also hoping that I would. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him or risk another of our usual encounters, during which I had no idea how I would react or how I should behave. Were we to meet face to face, he would be more likely to notice any evasiveness or reluctance on my part than if we only talked on the phone and, of course, more likely to do so if we talked than if we didn’t. But not answering or returning his call would have had the same effect, given that I had never neglected to do so before. If I agreed to go to his apartment and he proposed having sex, as he usually did in that tacit way of his, which allowed him to act as if what was happening wasn’t happening or wasn’t worthy of recognition, and I gave some excuse and declined, that could make him suspicious. If he phoned to make a date with me and I put him off, that would give him food for thought too, because I had, as far as possible, always gone along with his suggestions. I considered it a blessing and a boon that he had remained silent since that last evening, that he hadn’t sought me out, that I was free from his wheedlings and his trick questions and his attempts to sniff out the truth, free from having to meet him again and not knowing what to do or how to behave with him, from feeling that mixture of fear and repulsion, doubtless mingled with attraction and infatuation, because those two things cannot be eliminated suddenly or at will, but tend to take a while to disappear, like a period of convalescence or like the sickness itself; indignation doesn’t really help, it soon loses its impetus, you can’t maintain that same level of virulence, or else it comes and goes, and when
it goes it leaves no trace, it isn’t cumulative, it does no real damage, and when it dies down it’s forgotten, like intense cold once it abates or like fever or grief. The time it takes for feelings to change is slow and infuriatingly gradual. You settle into those feelings and it becomes very difficult to prise yourself out of them, you get into the habit of thinking about someone – and of desiring them too – in a particular, fixed way, and it’s hard to give that up from one day to the next, or even over a period of months and years, that’s how long the feelings can last. And if what you feel is disappointment, then you fight it at first, however ridiculous that might seem, you try to minimize, deny, bury it. I would think sometimes that perhaps I didn’t hear what I heard, or the feeble idea would resurface in my mind that it must all be a mistake, a misunderstanding, that there must even be some acceptable reason why Díaz-Varela had arranged for Desvern to die – but how could that ever be acceptable – I realized that, during this waiting period, I avoided even thinking the word ‘murder’. And so while I considered it fortunate that Díaz-Varela didn’t phone me and thus allowed me to compose myself and catch my breath, the fact that he didn’t get in touch also worried me and made me suffer. Maybe it seemed impossible – an insipid, maladroit ending – that everything should just dissolve once I had discovered his secret and, after a brief interrogation, aroused his suspicions, and that there should then be nothing. It was as if the play had ended too early, as if everything were left up in the air, unresolved, floating, lingering in its lack of resolution, like an unpleasant smell in a lift. My thoughts were confused, I both wanted and didn’t want to hear from him, my dreams were contradictory too and, when I spent a sleepless night, I hardly noticed, aware only that my head was crammed with thoughts and that I was miserably incapable of emptying it.