‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course, deep down, you know the truth, how could you not, how could you possibly not know? You know that you’ve set a mechanism in motion, one that you have the power to stop, nothing is inevitable until it has happened and until the “hereafter” that we all take for granted has ceased to exist for someone else. But, as I said before, that’s the mysterious thing about delegating. I gave Ruibérriz a commission to carry out, and from that moment on, I felt that the whole business was somehow less mine, or was, at least, shared. Ruibérriz gave orders to someone else to get the gorrilla a mobile phone and then keep phoning him, they both called him in fact, taking it in turns, because two voices are more convincing than one, and together they set his brain buzzing; I don’t even know quite how that third party manages to provide him with the mobile, I suppose he leaves it in the car the man was living in, so that it just appears there as if by magic, and presumably he does the same with the knife later on, so as not to be seen, it was impossible to anticipate how it would all turn out. At any rate, that other man, that third party, doesn’t know my name or my face and I don’t know his, and his anonymous intervention places me at a still further remove from it all, as I said, it’s less mine, and my role in it all grows increasingly blurred, it’s not entirely in my hands, but more and more dispersed. Once you activate something and pass it over to someone else, it’s as if you let it go and got rid of it, I don’t know if you can understand that, possibly not, you’ve never had to arrange and organize a death.’ – I picked up on the words ‘had to’, what an absurd idea, he hadn’t ‘had to’ do anything, no one had forced him. And he had said ‘a death’, using the most neutral term possible, not ‘a homicide’ or ‘a murder’ or ‘a crime’. – ‘You get brief reports on how it’s going and you supervise things, but you’re not directly involved. Sure, a mistake happens, Canella attacks the wrong man and news of that reaches me, even Miguel mentions poor Pablo’s misfortune, never suspecting that it could have had anything to do with the favour he’d asked of me, never connecting the two things, never imagining that I might be behind it, or if he did, he concealed the fact very well, that’s something I’ll never know.’ – I realized that I was getting lost (what favour? connecting what two things? concealing what?), but he continued as if he had suddenly got a second wind and didn’t give me a chance to interrupt. – ‘That idiot Ruibérriz doesn’t trust the other man after that, and because I pay him well and he owes me various favours, he takes over and goes to see the gorrilla himself, just to make sure that Canella doesn’t make the same mistake again and end up stabbing poor Pablo the chauffeur to death, thus ruining all our plans, he visits him cautiously, in secret, and it’s true that there’s never anyone hanging around in the street at night, but it means that the gorrilla sees him in that leather coat of his, I really hope he’s thrown them all away by now. So, yes, I hear, for example, about that particular incident, but to me, it’s just a story recounted to me in the safety of my own home, I don’t move from here, I never go to that street, I don’t soil myself in any way, and so I feel that none of what happens is wholly my responsibility or my work, they are simply remote events. Don’t be so surprised, others go still further: there are those who order somebody’s removal and don’t even want to know about the actual process, the steps taken, the “how”. They trust that in the end some minion will come and tell them that the person is dead. He was the victim of an accident, they say, or of medical negligence, or he threw himself off a balcony or was run over or he got mugged one night and, unfortunately, fought back and was killed by his attackers. And yet, strange though it may seem, the same person who ordered that death, without specifying how or when, can exclaim with relative sincerity or a certain degree of surprise: “Oh dear God, how dreadful!” almost as if he’d had nothing to do with it and fate had conspired to carry out his desires. That’s what I tried to do, to keep as far away from it all as possible, even though I had, in part, planned the “how”: Ruibérriz found out about the big drama in the beggar’s life, the thing that really angered and affronted him, and whether he found this out by chance or not, I don’t know, but, one day, he came to me with this story about how the guy’s daughters had been forced or tricked into prostitution, Ruibérriz’s into all kinds of things and has contacts in every social sphere, and so the plan was mine or, rather, ours. Nevertheless, I kept my distance, kept right out of it: there was Ruibérriz, along with that third party, his friend, and, above all, there was Canella, who would not only decide when to act, he could also decide to do nothing, so really it was completely out of my hands. So much is delegated, so much is left for others to do, so much is left to chance, there’s so much distance between instigator and act, that it’s easy enough to tell yourself, once it’s happened: “What have I got to do with that, with what some homeless nutter has done at an hour and in a street everyone assumes to be safe? He was obviously a public danger, a menace, he shouldn’t have been on the loose, especially not after Pablo was attacked. It’s all the fault of the authorities who refuse to take action, that and sheer bad luck, of which there’s never any shortage in the world.”’
Díaz-Varela got up, took a turn about the room, then again came up behind me, put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed them gently, but not in the way he had gripped my shoulder two weeks before, when he and I were both standing up, that hand, then, had been intent on keeping me there, like a great slab of stone. I wasn’t afraid this time, it felt like an affectionate gesture, and his tone of voice was different too. It had become tinged with a kind of sorrow or slight despair – slight because it was retrospective – in the face of something irremediable, and he had abandoned all cynicism, as if it had been pure artifice. He had started to mix up his tenses too, present and past and imperfect, as happens sometimes when someone relives a bad experience or is recounting a process from which he only believes he has emerged, but is not yet sure. His voice had gradually, not suddenly, taken on a truthful tone, and that made him more credible. But perhaps that was fake too. It’s horrible not knowing, because what had gone before had also seemed true, and he had spoken in the same tone then, well, not the same perhaps, it had been different, but equally truthful. Now he had fallen silent and I could ask him about the incomprehensible references he had let slip. Or perhaps he hadn’t let them slip at all, but had introduced them deliberately and was awaiting my reaction, knowing that I would pick up on them.
‘You mentioned Deverne asking you a favour and about him possibly concealing something. What favour was that? What would he have to conceal? I don’t understand.’ – And as I said that, I thought: ‘What the hell am I doing, how can I talk about all this so politely, how can I question him like this about the details of a murder? And why are we talking about it at all? It’s hardly a proper topic of conversation, or only if it had happened many years ago, as with the story about Anne de Breuil who had been killed by Athos before he was Athos. Whereas Javier is still Javier, and hasn’t had time to be transformed into someone else.’
He again gently squeezed my shoulders, it was almost a caress. I had not turned round when I spoke, I didn’t need to be able to see him now, that touch was neither unfamiliar nor worrying. I was filled by a sense of unreality, as if this were another day, a day prior to my eavesdropping, when I still knew nothing and there was no threat, no horror, only provisional pleasure and the resigned waiting of the unrequited lover, waiting to be either dismissed or driven from his side when it was Luisa’s turn to be in love, or when she at least allowed him to fall asleep each night and wake each morning in her bed. It occurred to me now to think that this would not be long in coming. I hadn’t seen her for ages, not even from a di
stance. Who knows how she would have evolved, if she had recovered from the blow, or to what extent Díaz-Varela had managed to inoculate her with his presence, if he had made himself indispensable to her in her solitary widow’s life with children who sometimes weighed on her, when she wanted to shut herself away and cry and do nothing. Just as I had tried to become indispensable to him in his solitary bachelor’s life, except that I had done so timidly and without conviction or determination, as if admitting defeat right from the start.
On another day, Díaz-Varela’s hands might have slid from my shoulders down to my breasts, and not only would I have allowed him to do that, I would have mentally encouraged him: ‘Undo a couple of buttons and slip your hands under my jersey or my blouse,’ we think to ourselves, or even plead. ‘Come on, do it now, what are you waiting for?’ And an impulse flashed through me to ask him, silently, of course, to do just that, such is the force of expectation, the irrational persistence of desire, which often makes us forget the circumstances and who is who, and erases the opinion we have of the person arousing our desire, and, at that moment, my predominant feeling was contempt. But he wouldn’t give in to that plea today, he was even more aware than I was that this was not another day, but the one on which he had chosen to tell me about his conspiracy and his actions and then say goodbye to me for ever, because after that conversation, we could not continue to meet, that would be impossible, and we both knew that. And so he did not slowly slide his hands down, but quickly lifted them up like someone who has been told off for taking liberties or overstepping the bounds – although neither I nor my attitude had said anything – and he returned to his armchair, sat down in front of me again and fixed me with his hazy or indecipherable eyes that never entirely fixed on anything and with that same hint of sorrow or retrospective despair that had appeared in his voice shortly before and that would not leave him now, neither his tone of voice nor his gaze, as if he were saying to me once more, not impatiently but regretfully: ‘Why don’t you understand?’
‘Everything I’ve told you is true, as regards the facts,’ he said. ‘Except that I haven’t told you the most important thing. That is something no one else knows, or only Ruibérriz, but he only half-knows, because fortunately he doesn’t ask many questions now; he just listens, does as he’s told, follows instructions and gets paid. He’s learned. Life’s difficulties have made him a man who is prepared to do all kinds of things in return for money, especially if the person paying him is an old friend, who isn’t going to drop him in it or betray him or sacrifice him, he’s even learned to be discreet. We really did do it like that, with no guarantee at all that our plan would work, it was almost like tossing a coin, but for the reasons I gave earlier, I didn’t want to use a professional hit man. You drew your own conclusions and I don’t blame you for that, well not entirely, I mean, I understand you in part: if you don’t know the reason for something, you simply have to take things at face value. Nor am I going to deny that I love Luisa or that I intend to stay by her side, to be there if she needs me, if, one day, she finally does forget Miguel and take a few steps in my direction: I’ll be waiting close by, so close that she doesn’t have time for second thoughts or regrets as she takes those steps. I believe that will happen sooner or later, probably sooner, and she will recover, everyone does, because, as I said to you once before, people do, in the end, allow the dead to depart, however fond of them they were, when they realize that their own survival is at risk and that the dead are a great burden; and the worst the latter can do is to resist, to cling to the living and pursue them and stop them moving on, or even come back if they can, as Colonel Chabert did in that novel, souring his wife’s life and causing her more pain than his death in that remote battle ever did.’
‘She caused him far more pain,’ I said, ‘by her denial of him and her cunning ploys to keep him dead, to deprive him of a legal existence and bury him alive for a second time. He had suffered greatly, what was his was his, and it wasn’t his fault that he was still alive or that he still remembered who he was. In that passage you read out to me, the poor man even said: “If my illness had taken from me all memory of my past existence, I would have been happy.”’
But Díaz-Varela was in no mood to discuss Balzac, he wanted to continue his story to the end. ‘What happened is the least of it,’ he had said when he spoke to me about Colonel Chabert. ‘It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.’ Perhaps he thought the same applied to real events, to events in our own lives. That’s probably true for the person experiencing them, but not for other people. Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true. And so he went on as if I had said nothing.
‘Yes, Luisa will emerge from her abyss, you can be sure of that. In fact, she’s already beginning to, a little more with each day that passes, I can sense it and there’s no going back once that process of farewell has begun, that second, final farewell, which is purely mental and pricks our conscience because it feels as if we were dismissing the dead person, which we are. There may be the occasional backward step, depending on how things go or on the occasional stroke of bad luck, but that’s all. The dead only have the energy that the living give them, and if that energy is withdrawn … Luisa will free herself from Miguel, to a far greater degree than she can even imagine right now, and he knew that very well. More than that, he decided to make things easier for her, insofar as he could, and that was partly why he asked me that favour. Only partly. There was, of course, a weightier reason.’
‘What is this favour you keep talking about? What favour?’ I couldn’t help my impatience, I had the feeling that he wanted to draw me in through curiosity.
‘I’m coming to that, because that’s the cause of all this,’ he said. ‘Listen carefully. Months before his death, Miguel experienced a general feeling of lassitude, not significant or serious enough to merit seeing a doctor, he wasn’t worried and was in good health. Soon afterwards, he noticed another trivial symptom, slightly blurred vision in one eye, but he thought it was a temporary thing and delayed visiting an ophthalmologist. When he did, when the blurred vision didn’t clear up on its own, the ophthalmologist made a thorough examination and came up with a very gloomy diagnosis: a large intraocular melanoma, and sent him to a consultant for further tests. The consultant checked him over, gave him a CAT scan, a full-body MRI scan, as well as an extensive array of other tests. His diagnosis was even worse: generalized metastasis throughout the body, or as Miguel told me the doctor told him in his cold, aseptic jargon: “a very advanced metastatic melanoma”, even though Miguel was almost asymptomatic at the time and had no other ailments.’
‘So,’ I thought, ‘Desvern couldn’t have said to Javier, as I had once imagined he might: “No, I don’t foresee any problems, nothing imminent or even impending, nothing concrete, my health’s fine”, quite the contrary. At least that’s what Javier is saying now.’ That evening, I was still calling him Javier, although that would soon change, but at the time, I had not yet decided to think of him and refer to him by his surname alone, in order to distance myself from our past proximity or to at least allow myself that illusion.
‘Right, and what does all this mean exactly, apart, obviously, from it being very bad news?’ I asked, trying to give a note of scepticism or incredulity to my question: ‘Go on, go on, keep talking, but I’m not going to swallow this last-minute story of yours that easily, I have a pretty good idea where you’re going with this.’ But at the same time, I was already intr
igued by what he had started to tell me, regardless of whether it was true or not. Díaz-Varela often amused me and always interested me. And so I added, speaking now with genuine, credulous concern: ‘But can that happen, can you have such a serious illness with almost no symptoms? Well, I know you can, of course, but that serious? And completely out of the blue like that? And so advanced? It makes you shudder to think of it, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it can happen and it happened to Miguel. But don’t worry, that particular form of melanoma is, fortunately, very infrequent and very rare. Nothing like that will happen to you. Or to Luisa or to me or to Professor Rico, that would be too much of a coincidence.’ – He had noticed my instantaneous fear of illness. He waited for his baseless prediction to take effect and reassure me as if I were a child, he waited a few seconds before going on. – ‘Miguel didn’t say a word to me about this until he had all the facts, and he didn’t even tell Luisa about the early stages, when there was as yet nothing to fear: not even that he had an appointment with an ophthalmologist, nor that his vision was slightly blurred, because the last thing he wanted was to worry her unnecessarily, and she’s very easily worried. And he certainly didn’t tell her about what followed. In fact, he didn’t tell anyone anything, with one exception. After the consultant’s diagnosis, he knew his illness was terminal, but the consultant didn’t give him all the information, not in detail, or perhaps he tried to play it down, or perhaps Miguel didn’t even ask, I don’t know, he preferred to ask a doctor friend who he knew would hide nothing from him: an old school friend, a cardiologist, who gave him the occasional check-up and whom he trusted completely. He went to see him with his final diagnosis and said: “Tell me what I can expect, tell me straight. Talk me through the various stages. Tell me how it’s going to be.” And his friend described to him a prospect that he found quite simply unbearable.’