The Assignment
Page 23
Behounek came into the room, unbuttoned his tunic, and flung himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.
He bit his thumbnail thoughtfully and seemed to look beyond the other man to a point far away. Then he said: “Have you ever killed anyone? I mean actually—by force?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve got something to be thankful for.”
Manuel stared at him.
“You see, the first time one kills, one burns one’s boats in some way. One deprives oneself forever of the right to what one has left behind on the other side. One cannot gather any of it up. It’s lost and gone.”
“What is lost and gone?”
“It’s hard to explain, and besides, it’s supposed to be the same for everyone, but I find that hard to believe. If I say that you can never live again as you lived before, that you can’t love, can’t feel you’re yourself and be happy about it, not even sleep with a woman or get dead drunk, then of course you won’t believe me. Nevertheless it’s true. You can, of course, do all that, live, be happy, sleep with women, whatever you want to do, but you can only do it in a technical sense. Your technique can be improved, but it’s all a bluff. You can never deceive yourself, at least not for long. You soon realize that.”
“You’re really destructive.”
Behounek rose from his chair, laughed, and walked around the desk.
“Isn’t it absurd?” he said. “Isn’t it absolutely ridiculous to think that I was once a happy man? Yes, it’s true. I remember it very well. Together with a woman. Sometimes I wake in the night and think I remember what it feels like.”
He paused.
“Now it even seems absurd that I still have a wife and children sitting in a house somewhere, having a good time, and even thinking about me occasionally. But it’s true. I have a wife and children.”
“I, too,” said Manuel Ortega.
“You’re right of course. I am destructive, in my way. Often I feel as if I had for months and years vegetated in a mad distorted picture of the world, in which all meaning is perverted and where everything is wrong or must soon become so. But which of us do you think is the most destructive, I with my monomania or you with your sick desire to please everyone? Although you know all the time that you’re inadequate? There are perhaps a hundred thousand people in this province whom you’ve led astray with your talk and your actions. You’ve built a tall lookout tower for them. From up there they could see in perspective an existence and a future which will never materialize. Where is that building today?”
“It’s collapsed.”
“And who knocked it down?”
“I did.”
“Have you thought that if your crack shot on the ledge hadn’t been so quick on the draw, you would have been, for ten years or more, a martyr and a hero of this province? Perhaps they’d have put up a statue of you in the middle of the plaza.”
The sound of a distant salvo of shots penetrated through the stone walls, and then another. Behounek pricked up his ears and counted on his fingers. Then he mumbled: “El Campesino, Irigo, Carmen Sánchez, El Rojo Redondo. They’ve lived with me for eight months. So palpably, here in this room. Now they’ve gone. And I am left.”
He began buttoning up his tunic and then he picked up his belt from the desk.
“Well, Ortega, where shall we eat? At the club?”
“I suppose so.”