I remained silent, for longer than I wished. I wasn’t sure how to respond, and this time he had left a pause as if prompting me to say something. In just a few sentences, Díaz-Varela had dismissed and demeaned my feelings and revealed his, piercing me with a small, entirely unnecessary barb, for I already knew how he felt despite never having heard him speak so clearly on the subject, and certainly not in such wounding terms. However idiotic they might be, and all feelings are idiotic as soon as you describe or explain or simply give voice to them, he had deemed mine to be far inferior in quality to his feelings for another person, but how could he compare? What did he know about me, always so silent, so prudent? So meek and submissive, so lacking in aspiration, so little inclined to compete and fight, or, rather, not inclined at all. I was not, of course, capable of planning and commissioning a murder, but who knows what might have happened later on, had it festered away for years, our present relationship, or rather the relationship that had existed up until two weeks ago, when everything changed after that conversation with Ruibérriz, the conversation I had overheard. If I hadn’t eavesdropped on them, Díaz-Varela could have continued to wait indefinitely for Luisa’s slow recovery and her predicted falling in love and, meanwhile, not have replaced or discarded me, and I could have continued meeting him on the same terms. And then who wouldn’t start wanting more, who wouldn’t begin to grow impatient and disgruntled, and feel that with the passing of all those identical months and years, with the mere accumulation of time, he or she had acquired certain rights as if something as insignificant and neutral as the passage of the days could be considered some kind of merit mark for the one traversing or perhaps enduring them and neither giving up nor giving in. The person who never expected anything ends up making demands, the person who was all devotion and modesty turns tyrant and iconoclast, the person who once begged for smiles or attention or kisses from her beloved plays hard to get and grows proud, and is miserly with her favours to that same beloved, who has succumbed to the drip-drip of time. The passing of time exacerbates and intensifies any storm, even though there wasn’t the tiniest cloud on the horizon at the beginning. We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Each morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday – the balance of power – that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us. And yet quite the opposite is true, but time conceals this from us with its treacherous minutes and its sly seconds, until a strange, unthinkable day arrives, when nothing is as it always was: when two daughters, their father’s beneficiaries, leave him to die in a garret, without a penny to his name; when wills deemed unfavourable to the living are burned; when mothers rob their children and husbands their wives; when a wife, in order that she might live contentedly with her lover, kills her husband or else uses her husband’s love to drive him into madness or imbecility; when a woman administers lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to benefit the bastard child she bore the man she now loves, although who knows how long that love will last; when a widow who inherited position and wealth from her soldier husband fallen at the battle of Eylau in the coldest of cold winters denies that she knows him and accuses him of being an impostor when, after many years and many hardships, he manages to return from the dead; when Luisa will beg Díaz-Varela, whom she took such a long time to see, will beg him, please, not to leave her, but to remain by her side, and when she will abjure her former love for Deverne, which will be dismissed as nothing and not to be compared with the love she now professes for this second, unfaithful husband, who is now threatening to leave her; when Díaz-Varela will implore me not to go, but to stay and share his pillow for ever, and will joke about the stubborn, ingenuous love he felt for Luisa for so very long and that led him to murder a friend, and will say to himself and to me: ‘How blind I was, why could I not see you, when there was still time’; a strange, unimaginable day, on which I will plan to murder Luisa, who stands between us and doesn’t even know that there is an ‘us’ and against whom I bear no grudge, and I might just see it through, because on that day, everything would be possible. Yes, it’s all a matter of time, infuriating time, but our time is over, time, as far as we’re concerned, has run out, time, which consolidates and prolongs even while, without our noticing, it is simultaneously rotting and ruining us and turning the tables on us. I will not see that day, because for me, as for Lady Macbeth, there is no ‘hereafter’, fortunately or unfortunately, I am safe from that beneficent or harmful deferral.
‘Who told you I’m not in love with you? What do you know? I’ve never talked to you about it. And you’ve never asked me.’
‘Oh, come on now, don’t exaggerate,’ he replied, unsurprised. His last words were pure acting, he knew exactly how I felt or had felt up until two weeks before. I may well have felt the same then, but my feelings were stained or besmirched by things entirely incompatible with the state of being in love. He knew exactly how I felt, the loved one always does, if he’s in his right mind and isn’t himself in love, because in that case he won’t be able to tell and will misinterpret the signs. But he wasn’t in love, and didn’t want me to love him, and, to be fair, had done little to encourage me. – ‘If you were in love with me,’ he added, ‘you wouldn’t be so horrified by what you’ve discovered, nor would you have drawn your conclusions so quickly. You would be in suspense, waiting for me to provide some acceptable explanation. You would be thinking that perhaps, for some reason unknown to you, I had no alternative. And you would be prepared to accept that, you would be happy to deceive yourself.’
I ignored these cunning comments, which were intended to lead me down a previously chosen path. I responded only to the first of them.
‘Maybe I’m not exaggerating. As you well know, I may not be exaggerating at all. It’s just that you don’t want the responsibility, although I realize that isn’t the right word to use: no one is responsible for someone else falling in love with them. Don’t worry, I’m not making you responsible for some idiotic feelings that are entirely my concern. But you will, nevertheless, perceive them as a minor burden. If Luisa were aware of the intensity of your feelings for her (it may be that in her current self-absorbed state, she sees only the surface, your gallantry and affection for the widow of your best friend), let alone if she found out what those feelings had led to, then she would experience them as an unbearable burden. She might even kill herself, unable to carry that burden. That is one of the reasons I will say nothing to her. You don’t need to worry on that score, I’m not that heartless.’ – I had not yet made a firm decision on the subject, my intentions kept wavering as I listened to him and grew angry or perhaps not angry (‘I’ll think about it later on, calmly and coolly, when I’m alone,’ I thought), but it was as well to reassure him so that I could leave there without feeling that a threat, either present or future, hung over me, although that feeling would never entirely disappear, I imagined, for as long as I lived. And I ventured to say teasingly, because teasing seemed like a good idea: ‘Of course, that would be the best way of getting rid of her, to do what you did to Desvern, although without soiling my hands quite as much.’
Far from appreciating the hu
mour of my remark – a very black humour it must be said – he became very serious and almost defensive. This time he really did roll up his sleeves still further, very energetically too, as if he were preparing to go into combat or about to attack me physically, he rolled them up above his biceps as if he were some exotic romantic lead from the 1950s, Ricardo Montalbán or Gilbert Roland, one of those attractive men now forgotten by almost everyone. He wasn’t going into combat, of course, nor was he going to hit me, that wasn’t in his nature. What I had said, I realized, had wounded him deeply and he was about to refute it.
‘Don’t forget, I didn’t soil my hands. I took every care not to. You don’t know what it means to really soil your hands. You don’t know to what extent delegating distances you from the deed, you have no idea how helpful it is to have intermediaries. Why else, do you think, people do delegate, if they can, when confronted by any situation that’s in any way uncomfortable or unpleasant. Why do you think lawyers are called in whenever there’s a dispute or a divorce? It’s not only to take advantage of their knowledge and skill. Why do you think actors and actresses and writers have agents, and bullfighters and boxers have managers? When, that is, boxing still existed. These modern-day puritans will end up doing away with everything. Why do you think businessmen hire frontmen, or why any criminal with enough money sends in the heavies or hires a hit man? It’s not just because they, quite literally, don’t want to soil their hands, nor out of cowardice, so as not to have to face the consequences or risk getting hurt. Most of those who turn to such people as a matter of course (unlike people like myself, for whom it’s very much the exception) began by doing their own dirty work and may have been very good at it: they’re accustomed to handing out beatings and even shooting people, and so it’s unlikely they would emerge the worse for wear from any such encounter. Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them? Of course, unlike criminals, they wouldn’t be able to do the work of the soldiers, but it’s more than that. In all these cases, mediation, keeping a distance from actual events and being privileged enough not to have to witness them, all provide scope for a high degree of autosuggestion. It seems incredible, but that’s how it works, as I’ve found out for myself. You manage to convince yourself that you have nothing to do with what is happening on the ground, or in the head-on confrontation, even if you provoked or unleashed it and even if you paid for it to happen. The man suing for divorce ends up persuading himself that the mean, vicious demands he is making come not from him, but from his lawyer. Famous actors and writers, bullfighters and boxers apologize for the economic aspirations of their agents or the difficulties they create, as if their agents were not simply obeying orders and doing as they were told. When a politician sees on television or in the press the effects of the bombardments he initiated or learns of the atrocities his army is committing, he shakes his head in disapproval and disgust, he wonders how his generals can be so stupid, so inept, why they can’t control their men when the fighting begins and they lose sight of them, but he never himself feels guilty about what is going on thousands of kilometres away, without him actually taking part or witnessing events: he has instantly forgotten that it was his decision, that he gave the order to advance. It’s the same with the capo who unleashes his thugs: he reads or is told that they have overstepped the mark, that they didn’t confine themselves, in accordance with his wishes, to bumping off a few people, but went on to cut off heads and balls, stuffing the latter in their victims’ mouths; he shudders slightly when he imagines this and thinks what sadists his henchmen are, forgetting that he left them free to use their imaginations and their hands as they wished, saying: “We want to terrify people, to teach them a lesson and spread panic.”’
Díaz-Varela stopped, as if this long enumeration had left him momentarily drained. He poured himself another drink and took a long, thirsty draught of it. He lit another cigarette. He sat for a while staring at the floor, absorbed in thought. For a few seconds, he looked the very image of the dejected, weary man, possibly full of remorse, even repentant. But none of this had been apparent up until then, either in this latest account or in his other digressions. On the contrary. ‘Why does he associate himself with such individuals?’ I wondered. ‘Why does he summon them up for me, rather than shooing them away? What does he gain by showing me his actions in such a repellent light? You can always find some way of embellishing the most heinous crime, of finding some minimal justification for it, a not entirely sinister reason that at least allows one to understand it without feeling sick. “That’s how it works, as I’ve found out for myself,” he said, including himself in the list. I can see the connection with divorced men or bullfighters, but not with cynical politicians or professional criminals. It’s as if, far from looking for palliatives, he wanted to drip-feed me with horror. Perhaps he’s just setting me up so that I’ll embrace any excuse, the excuses that he’ll start offering me at any moment, they’re sure to come along sooner or later, he can’t possibly be owning up to me so frankly about his egotism and his baseness, his treachery, his lack of scruples, he hasn’t even insisted overmuch on his love for Luisa, his passionate need for her, he hasn’t stooped so low as to utter the ridiculous words that nonetheless touch and soften the listener, such as “I can’t live without her, you see. I just couldn’t stand it any more, she’s the air that I breathe, and I was suffocating with no hope of ever making her mine, whereas now I do have some hope. I didn’t wish Miguel ill at all, on the contrary, he was my best friend, but he was, unfortunately, standing in the way of my one life, the only life I want, and if something or someone is stopping you from living, then he has to be removed.” People accept the excesses of those in love, not all excesses, of course, but there are occasions when it’s enough to say that someone is or was very much in love to make all other reasons irrelevant. “I loved her so much,” someone says, “that I didn’t know what I was doing,” and people nod sagely, as if he or she were talking about feelings familiar to everyone. “She lived entirely for him and through him, he was the only man in the world as far as she was concerned, she would have sacrificed everything, nothing else mattered to her,” and this is taken as an excuse for all kinds of vile, ignoble acts and even as a reason to forgive. Why doesn’t Javier lay more stress on his morbid obsession, saying that it could happen to anyone? Why doesn’t he take refuge in that? He takes it for granted, but doesn’t place much emphasis on it, he doesn’t put it first, instead he associates himself with these cold, despicable characters. Yes, perhaps that’s what it is: the more he shocks me and fills me with panic, and the more I feel the pull of vertigo, the more likely I will be to cling to any extenuating circumstance. And if that is what he intends, he would be quite right. I keep hoping for some such mitigating factor to appear, some explanation or extenuating circumstance that will lift a little of the weight off me. I can’t cope with the facts as they stand and as I imagined them to be on that wretched day when I eavesdropped from behind that door. I was on the other side of the door then, and will never be there again, that much is certain. Even if Javier were to come to me and put his arms around me and caress me with fingertips and lips. Even if he were to whisper in my ear words he had never said before. Even if he were to say to me: “How blind I’ve been, why could I not see you before, but there’s still time.” Even if he were to lead me over to that door and beg me.’
Not that any of those things would happen. Not even if I were to blackmail him or threaten to tell someone or even if I were to beg him. He was still strangely distant, absorbed in his thoughts, still staring at the floor. I shook him out of his introspection rather than seizing the chance to
escape, it was too late for that: after hearing what he had to say, I wished I had stuck to my sombre conjectures and to knowing nothing for certain; but now I wanted him to finish, to see if his story was less dreadful and less sad than it seemed.
‘And what did you think? What did you manage to persuade yourself had happened? That you had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of your best friend? That’s rather hard to believe, isn’t it? However heavily you rely on autosuggestion.’
He looked up and rolled his sleeves down as far as his forearms again, as if he suddenly felt cold. But he didn’t entirely emerge from the depression or exhaustion that seemed to have come over him. He spoke more slowly, less confidently and energetically, his eyes fixed on my face, and yet they still seemed slightly unfocused, as though he were looking at me from a long way off.