It might also be that Luisa was still in the phase of extreme egotism, that is, capable of seeing only her own misfortune and not so much Desvern’s, despite the concern she expressed for his final moments, which he must have known were his last. The world belongs so much to the living and so little to the dead – although it may well be that they all remain on earth and are, doubtless, far more numerous – that the former tend to think that the death of a loved one is something that has happened more to them than to the deceased, who is, after all, the person who has died. He is the one who has had to say goodbye, almost always against his will, he is the one who has lost everything that was to come (the person, for example, in the case of Deverne, who will not see his children grow up or change), who has had to renounce his desire to know and his curiosity, who left plans unfulfilled and words unspoken, thinking that there would always be time later on, he is the one who will not be there; if he was an artist, he is the one who will be unable to finish a book or a film or a painting or a composition, or if he was only the recipient of those, the one who won’t be able to finish reading the first or seeing the second or listening to the fourth. You only have to glance around the room of the person who has vanished to comprehend how much was interrupted and left hanging, how much becomes, in that instant, unusable and useless; yes, the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away, or the special pillow or mattress on which head and body will no longer lie; the glass of water from which he will never take another sip, and the forbidden pack of cigarettes of which only three are left, and the sweets someone bought for him and which no one will dare to finish, as if doing so were an act of theft or profanation; the glasses that will be of no use to anyone and the expectant clothes that will stay hanging in his wardrobe for days or years, until someone gathers enough courage to remove them; the plants that the disappeared person lovingly cared for and watered, and which no one will perhaps want to take on, and the person’s soft fingerprints still there in the skin cream applied each night; someone will doubtless want to inherit and take away the telescope with which the departed used to amuse himself watching the storks nesting on a distant tower, but what they will use it for, who knows, and the window through which he gazed during a pause in his work will be left sightless, with no one to look through it; the diary in which he noted down his appointments and his daily tasks will not move on to the next page, and the last day will lack the final annotation that used to mean: ‘I’ve done what I had to do today.’ All those speaking objects have been left dumb and meaningless, as if a blanket had been thrown over them to silence and soothe them, making them think that night has come, or as if they, too, regretted the loss of their owner and had withdrawn instantaneously, strangely aware that they had become redundant, futile, and were thinking: ‘What will we do here now? We’ll be taken away. We have no master now. All that awaits us is exile or the rubbish bin. Our mission is over.’ Perhaps that is how Desvern’s things had felt months before. Luisa, though, was not a thing. Luisa, therefore, would not have thought that.
I had assumed she meant ‘you’ in the singular, but two people arrived. I heard the voice of the first person, the one she had said hello to, announcing the second person, who was obviously not expected: ‘Hi, I’ve brought Professor Rico with me so as not to leave him hanging around out there in the street. He’s kicking his heels until supper. The restaurant’s somewhere near here and there isn’t time for him to go back to his hotel first. You don’t mind, do you?’ And then he introduced them: ‘Professor Francisco Rico, Luisa Alday.’ ‘Of course I don’t mind, it’s an honour,’ I heard Luisa say. ‘I have another visitor with me, but come in, come in. Would you like a drink?’
I knew Professor Rico’s face well, he often appears on television and in the press, with his wide, expressive mouth, immaculate bald head, which he carries off with great aplomb, his rather large glasses, his casual elegance – slightly English, slightly Italian – his disdainful way of speaking and his half-indolent, half-scathing manner, which is perhaps a way of concealing the underlying melancholia evident in his eyes, as if, already feeling himself to be a man of the past, he hates having to deal with his contemporaries, most of whom are ignorant, trivial individuals, and, at the same time, feels a twinge of anticipatory regret that, one day, he will be obliged to cease dealing with them – dealing with them must also, in a way, be a relief – when his sense that he is a man of the past finally becomes a reality. The first thing he did was to refute what his companion had said:
‘Now look here, Díaz-Varela, I am never to be found “hanging around”, as you put it, even when I find myself out in the street without knowing what to do – quite a frequent occurrence as it happens. I often sally forth in Sant Cugat, where I live,’ and he directed this explanation, with an accompanying oblique glance, at Luisa and at me, to whom he had not yet been introduced, ‘and I suddenly realize that I have no idea why I came out. Or I go into Barcelona and, once there, I can’t for the life of me remember the reason for my trip. Then I stand still for a while – I don’t wander around or pace up and down – until I can recall the purpose of my visit. Anyway, even on those occasions, I could not be said to be “hanging around”, indeed, I am one of the few people capable of standing in the street motionless and bewildered without actually giving that impression. Rather, the impression I give is of being very focused, let’s say, on the verge of making some crucial discovery or of putting the finishing touches in my head to a complicated sonnet. If some acquaintance spots me in these circumstances, he would never venture to say so much as a “Hello”, even though I’m standing alone, stock-still in the middle of the pavement (I never lean against the wall, that would look as if I’d been stood up), for fear of interrupting some demanding line of reasoning or a moment of deep meditation. Nor am I ever at risk of being mugged, because my stern, absorbed appearance dissuades all malefactors. They can tell I am a man whose intellectual faculties are on full alert and fully functioning (or “working flat out”, to use a more colloquial expression), and they wouldn’t dare pick a fight with me. They can see that it would prove dangerous to them, that I would react with a rare violence and speed. I rest my case.’
Luisa couldn’t help but laugh, and nor, I believe, could I. The fact that she could switch so rapidly from being immersed in the anxious thoughts she had been telling me about to being amused by someone she had only just met made me think again that she had an enormous capacity for enjoyment and – how can I put it – for being ordinarily and momentarily happy. Some people are like that, not many, it’s true, people who grow impatient and bored with unhappiness and in whom it rarely lasts very long, even though, for a while, it could be said to have taken a terrible toll on them. From what I had seen of him, Desvern must have been the same, and it occurred to me that had Luisa been the one to die and he the one to survive, it was likely that he would have had a similar reaction to his wife’s now. (‘If he were still alive and a widower, I would not be here,’ I thought.) Yes, there are people who cannot bear misfortune. Not because they’re frivolous or empty-headed. They’re not, of course, immune to grief, and they doubtless experience grief as intensely as anyone else. But they’re designed to shake it off more quickly and without too much difficulty, as if they were simply incompatible with such states of mind. It’s in their nature to be light-hearted and cheerful and they see no particular prestige in suffering, unlike most of the rest of boring humanity, and our own nature always catches up with us, because almost nothing can break or distort it. Maybe Luisa was a simple mechanism: she cried when something made her cry and laughed w
hen something made her laugh, and one emotion could follow seamlessly on from the other, she was simply responding to a stimulus. Not that simplicity is necessarily at odds with intelligence. I knew she was intelligent. Her lack of malice and her ready laughter did not diminish that fact in the slightest, for these are things that depend not on intelligence, but on character, which belongs in another category and another sphere.
Professor Rico was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket and an ivory-coloured shirt; his nonchalantly knotted tie was a brighter, more luminous green – melon green perhaps. He was extremely well coordinated without, however, seeming to have put much thought into that excellent combination of colours, apart from the clover-green handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, which was, perhaps, a green too far.
‘But I thought you were mugged once, Professor, here in Madrid,’ protested the man called Díaz-Varela. ‘It was years ago now, but I remember it well. In the Gran Vía, it was, after you’d drawn some money from a cashpoint, isn’t that right?’
The Professor did not care to be reminded of this. He took out a cigarette and lit it, as if doing so without first asking permission were as normal today as it was forty years ago. Luisa immediately handed him an ashtray, which he took with his other hand. Then, with both hands occupied, he spread his arms wide and said, like an orator exasperated by lies or stupidity:
‘That was completely different. Not the same thing at all.’
‘Why? You were in the street and the malefactor certainly didn’t show you much respect.’
The Professor made a condescending gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, which he then dropped. He looked at it where it lay on the floor with a mixture of displeasure and curiosity, as if it were a live cockroach that had nothing to do with him, and he was waiting for someone else to pick it up or stamp on it or kick it out of sight. When none of us gave any sign of bending down, he again produced his pack of cigarettes and took out another. It didn’t seem to bother him that the fallen cigarette might burn the wooden floor; he must have been one of those men who doesn’t really notice such things and leaves it to others to sort out any awkwardnesses or imperfections. This is not because they are thoughtless or because they consider themselves too high and mighty, it’s simply that their brains don’t register these practicalities or the world around them. Luisa’s children had looked up when they heard the doorbell and had now sneaked into the living room to observe the visitors. It was the boy who ran to pick up the cigarette, but his mother, pre-empting him, picked it up and stubbed it out in the ashtray she had been using before, for her equally unfinished cigarettes. Rico lit his second cigarette and gave his reply. Neither he nor Díaz-Varela seemed prepared to interrupt their discussion, and having them there was like being at the theatre, as if two actors had strolled on to the stage talking and ignoring the audience, as was their professional duty.
‘First: I had my back to the street, in the undignified position forced on one by all cashpoints, namely, with my face to the wall, and so my normally dissuasive gaze was invisible to the mugger. Second: I was busy tapping in my answers to all those tedious questions they ask you. Third: when asked in what language I wished to communicate with the machine, I had answered “Italian” (a habit born of my many visits to Italy, where I spend half my life) and I was distracted by all the crass spelling and grammatical errors appearing on the screen, the thing had obviously been programmed by some fraud with very dodgy Italian. Fourth: I had been on the go all day with various people and had had no option but to have a few drinks here and there in different places; I am not my usual alert self when tired and a little tipsy – well, who is? Fifth: I was late for an appointment which was already very late in the day and I was feeling disoriented and harassed and worried that the person waiting impatiently for me would give up and leave the place where we had agreed to meet (I’d already had a hard job persuading her to prolong her night in order that we might see each other alone), only that we might converse, you understand. Sixth: for all the above reasons, the first indication that I was about to be mugged came when I noticed, with my money in my hand, but not yet in my pocket, the point of a knife being pressed against my lumbar region, it even penetrated a little: when, at the end of the night, I got undressed in the hotel, there was a tiny spot of blood here. Just here.’ – And lifting up the tails of his jacket, he quickly touched some point immediately above his belt, so quickly that I doubt if any of those present could have said precisely where. – ‘You have to have experienced that slight pricking, there or in any other vital zone – aware that your attacker would only have to press a little harder for that point to enter the flesh unopposed – to know you have no alternative but to give them whatever it is they want, and all the fellow said was: “Give us your money.” Oddly enough, you feel an unbearable tingling in your groin, which then spreads throughout the body. But the origin of that sensation is not in the part of your body under threat, but here. Just here.’ – And he indicated the two sides of his groin with his two middle fingers. – ‘Not, you will notice, in the balls, but in the groin, which is quite a different matter, although people sometimes get confused and describe some frightening event as being “ball-shrivelling” or say “my heart leapt into my mouth or throat”’ – and he touched his throat with index finger and thumb – ‘but that’s only because the sensation spreads outwards and upwards from the groin. Anyway, as everyone has known since the weak wheel of the world first began to turn, given the nature of such an ambush or treacherous attack, there is no preventive action to be taken or, indeed, defence. I rest my case. Or would you like me to continue my enumeration? I can easily keep going at least as far as ten.’ – When Díaz-Varela did not respond, Rico assumed he had won the argument by sheer force of logic and, looking around him for the first time, he noticed me, the children and Luisa too, in a way, even though she had already been introduced to him. I think he really hadn’t properly taken us in before, otherwise he would, I think, have refrained from using the word ‘balls’, mainly because of the children. – ‘Now who have we here?’ he asked without the slightest hint of embarrassment.
I noticed that Díaz-Varela had suddenly gone very silent and serious, and for precisely the same reason that Luisa had taken three steps towards the sofa and sat down on it before even inviting the two men to do so, as if her legs had given way beneath her and she could no longer remain standing. She had gone from the spontaneous laughter of a moment before to an expression of grief, her gaze clouded and her skin pale. Yes, she must have been a very simple mechanism. She raised her hand to her forehead and lowered her eyes, and I feared that she might cry. There was no reason why Professor Rico should have known that her life had been destroyed by a knife that had stabbed and stabbed, perhaps his friend hadn’t told him – although that was strange, because one tends to recount other people’s misfortunes almost without thinking – or if Díaz-Varela had told him, he had quite forgotten about it: he had a (considerable) reputation for retaining information only about the remote past, on which he was a world authority, and for listening to accounts of more recent events politely, but with scant attention. Any crime, any event dating from the Middle Ages or the Golden Age was of far more importance to him than what had happened the day before yesterday.
Looking concerned, Díaz-Varela went over to Luisa, took her hands in his and said softly:
‘It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t worry. I’m so sorry. It hadn’t occurred to me where this nonsense might lead.’ And I thought I sensed in him an impulse to stroke her cheek, as one would when consoling a child for whom one would give one’s very life; in the end, though, he repressed that impulse.
If his murmu
red comment was audible to me, it was equally so to the Professor.
‘Whatever’s wrong? What did I say? It wasn’t the word “balls”, was it? Well, you are a thin-skinned lot. I could have used something far worse; after all, “balls” is a euphemism. Vulgar and graphic and overused, I agree, but a euphemism nonetheless.’
‘What does “thin-skinned” mean? What are “balls”?’ asked the little boy, who had noticed the Professor’s gesture of pointing towards his groin. Fortunately, everyone ignored him and his question went unanswered.
Luisa recovered at once and realized that she hadn’t yet introduced me. She could not, in fact, remember my surname, because although she gave the full names of the two men (‘Professor Francisco Rico, Javier Díaz-Varela’), she gave only my first name, as she did with the children, and then added my nickname by way of compensation (‘This is my new friend María; Miguel knew her as the Prudent Young Woman when we used to have breakfast most mornings in the same café, but today is the first time we’ve actually spoken’). I thought it only right that I should make up for her faulty memory (‘María Dolz,’ I added). Javier must have been the person she had mentioned earlier, referring to him as ‘one of Miguel’s best friends’. He was, at any rate, the man I had seen that morning at the wheel of what had once been Deverne’s car, the man who had picked up the children from the café, presumably to take them to school, a little later than usual. He was not, therefore, the chauffeur, as I had thought. Perhaps Luisa had felt obliged to dispense with a chauffeur; when someone is widowed, their first step is always to try to reduce expenses, it’s like a reflex reaction of vulnerability and retreat, even if they’ve inherited a fortune. I did not, of course, know the state of her finances, although I imagined she was quite well off, but she might still have felt her situation to be precarious even if it wasn’t, the whole world seems to totter after the death of someone important to us, nothing seems solid or firm, and the person most closely affected tends to wonder: ‘What’s the point of this and why bother with that, what’s the point of money or a business and all its complications, why a house and a library, why go out to work and make plans, why have children, why anything? Nothing lasts long enough because everything ends and, once it’s over, it was never enough, even if it lasted a hundred years. I only had Miguel with me for a few years, so why should anything he left behind, anything that survives him, last any longer. Not even the money or the house or me or the children. We are all merely in abeyance and under threat.’ And there is also an impulse towards death: ‘I want to be where he is, and the only place where we could coincide is the past, in that place of not being but of having been. He is past, whereas I am still present. If I were also past, at least I would be the same as him in that respect, which would be something, and I would be in no position to miss him or remember him. I would be on the same level as him or in the same dimension, in the same time, and we would not be left alone in this precarious world in which everything familiar is being taken away from us. Nothing more can be taken away from us if we are not here. Nothing more can die on us if we are already dead.’
The Infatuations Page 8