The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

  ‘Why can’t I be like Athos or like the Count de la Fère, as he was initially and then ceased to be?’ I wondered as I sat in the Embassy tea rooms, wrapped in the continuous buzz coming from ladies talking very fast and from the occasional idle diplomat. ‘Why can’t I see things with that same clarity and act accordingly, and go to the police or to Luisa and tell them what I know, enough for them to revisit the crime and investigate and track down Ruibérriz de Torres, that would be a start? Why aren’t I capable of tying the hands of the man I love behind his back and simply hanging him from a tree, if I know that he has committed an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries to protect him and hide his face, making use of a poor, crazed wretch, a witless beggar who could not defend himself and would always be at his mercy? No, it isn’t up to me to act with such ruthless rigour because I do not have the right to mete out justice high and low, and, besides, the dead man cannot speak, whereas the living can, he can explain himself, persuade and argue, and is even capable of kissing me and making love to me, while the former can neither see nor hear, but lies rotting in the grave and cannot answer or influence or threaten, nor give me the slightest pleasure; nor can he call me to account or feel disappointment or look at me accusingly with an expression of infinite sadness and immense grief, he cannot even brush my skin or breathe on me, there is nothing to be done with him.’

  I finally plucked up enough resolve, or perhaps it was merely boredom or a desire to rid myself of the fear that assailed me now and then, or impatience to see the old me who continued to love and who had not yet entirely vanished and still prevailed over the sullied and the sombre, like the living image of a dead person, even one who had died a long time ago. I asked for the bill, paid and left and started walking in the direction I knew so well, towards the apartment I will never forget, even though I didn’t visit it so very often and even though it no longer exists – not, at least, as far as I’m concerned, given that Díaz-Varela no longer lives there. I was still walking slowly, in no hurry to arrive, I walked as if I were out for a stroll, rather than heading for a particular place where someone had been waiting for me for quite a while now in order to discuss something, that is, to question me again or to tell or perhaps ask me something, or, possibly, to silence me. Another quotation from The Three Musketeers surfaced in my memory, one that my father did not quote, but which I knew in Spanish, for things that impress us as children endure like a fleur-de-lys engraved on our imagination: the marked woman who was hanged from a tree and began life as Anne de Breuil, who spent a brief period in a convent until she ran away, then, very fleetingly, became the Countess de la Fère, and was known later on as Charlotte, Lady Clarick, Lady de Winter, Baroness of Sheffield (as a child, I was amazed that anyone could change her name so often in a single lifetime), and who had become fixed in literature as plain ‘Milady’, no, that marked woman had not died, just as Colonel Chabert had not died. But while Balzac explained in great detail the miracle of the Colonel’s survival and how he had dragged himself out from beneath the pyramid of ghosts into which he had been thrown after the battle, Dumas, perhaps under pressure of deadlines and the constant demand for action, and, of course, freer or perhaps sloppier as a narrator, had not bothered to explain – at least as far as I could recall – how the devil that young woman had managed to escape death after that impassioned hanging dictated by rage and wounded honour disguised as a great lord’s right to mete out justice high and low. (He also never explained how a husband could fail to have noticed the fatal fleur-de-lys while in the marital bed.) Making the most of her great beauty, her cunning and her lack of scruples – and, one imagines, her bitter resentment – she had become a powerful figure, who enjoyed the favour of Cardinal Richelieu no less, and had heaped up crimes without a flicker of remorse. During the novel, she commits a few more crimes, becoming possibly the most evil, venomous, ruthless female character in the history of literature, and, as such, has since been imitated ad nauseam. She and Athos meet in a chapter ironically entitled ‘A Conjugal Scene’, and it takes her a few seconds to recognize, with a shudder, her former husband and executioner, whom she had assumed dead, just as he had assumed his beloved wife to be dead, and with rather more reason. ‘You have already crossed my path,’ says Athos, or words to that effect, ‘I thought I had crushed you, Madame, but either I am much mistaken or hell has resuscitated you.’ And he adds, in response to his own doubt: ‘Yes, hell has made you rich, hell has given you another name, hell has almost fashioned another face for you; but it has not erased the stains on your soul or the mark on your body.’ And shortly after that comes the quote I remembered as I walked towards Díaz-Varela for the last or next-to-last time: ‘You believed me dead, didn’t you, just as I believed you to be dead. Our position is indeed a strange one; we have both lived up until now only because we believed each other to be dead, and because a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although sometimes a memory can be a devouring thing.’

  If those words had stayed in my mind, or my mind had retrieved them, it was because, as we grow older, Athos’s words ring ever truer: we can live with a feeling resembling peace or are, at least, capable of carrying on living when we believe that the person who caused us terrible pain or grief is dead and no longer exists on earth, when he is only a memory and not a living creature, no longer a real being who breathes and still walks the world with his poisoned steps, and whom we might meet again and see; someone, if we knew he had been found – if we knew he was still here – from whom we would fly at all costs, or have the even more mortifying experience of making him pay for his evil deeds. The death of the person who wounded us or made our life a living death – an exaggerated expression that has become something of a cliché – is not a complete cure nor does it enable us to forget, Athos himself carried his remote grief about with him beneath his disguise as a musketeer and his new personality, but it does appease us and allow us to live, breathing becomes easier when we are left only with a lingering remembrance and the feeling that we have settled our accounts with this the only world, however much the memory still hurts us whenever we summon it up or it resurfaces without being called. On the other hand, it can be unbearable knowing that we still share air and time with the person who broke our heart or deceived or betrayed us, with the person who ruined our life or opened our eyes too wide or too brutally; it can have a paralysing effect knowing that the same creature still exists and has not been struck down or hanged from a tree and could, therefore, reappear. That is another reason why the dead should not return, at least those whose departure brings us relief and allows us to carry on living, if you like, as ghosts, having buried our former self: so it was with Athos and Milady, with the Count de la Fère and Anne de Breuil, who could continue their lives thanks to their shared belief that the other was dead and, being incapable of breathing, could no longer make so much as a leaf tremble; as with Madame Ferraud, who started her new life unobstructed because, as far as she was concerned, her husband, Colonel Chabert, was only a memory and not even a devouring one.

  ‘If only Javier had died,’ I found myself thinking that evening, while I took one step after another. ‘If only he were to die right now and didn’t answer when I ring the bell because he’s lying on the floor, forever motionless, unable to discuss anything with me and with me unable to speak to him. If he were dead, all my doubts and fears would be dispelled, I wouldn’t have to hear his words or wonder what to do. Nor could I fall into the temptation of kissing him or going to bed with him, deluding myself with the idea that it would be the last time. I could keep silent for ever without worrying about Luisa, still less
about justice, I could forget about Deverne, after all, I never actually knew him, or only by sight for several years, during the time it took me to eat my breakfast each morning. If the person who robbed him of his life loses his own life and thus also becomes a mere memory and if there’s no one to accuse him, the consequences are less important and then what does it matter what happened. Why say or tell anything, indeed, why try to find out the truth, keeping silent is the far easier option, there’s no need to trouble the world with stories of those who are already themselves corpses and therefore deserve a little pity, even if only because they have been stopped in their tracks, have ended and no longer exist. Our age is not one in which everything must be judged or at least known about; innumerable crimes go unresolved or unpunished because no one knows who committed them – so many that there are not enough pairs of eyes to look out for them – and it is rare to find anyone who can, with any credibility, be placed in the dock: terrorist attacks, the murders of women in Guatemala and in Ciudad Juárez, revenge killings among drug-traffickers, the indiscriminate slaughters that occur in Africa, the bombing of civilians by our aircraft with no pilot and therefore no face … Even more numerous are those that no one cares about and are never even investigated, it’s seen as a hopeless task and their cases are filed away as soon as they happen; and there are still more that leave no trace, that remain unrecorded, undiscovered, and unknown. Such crimes have doubtless always existed and it may be that for many centuries the only crimes that were punished were those committed by servants, by the poor or the disinherited, whereas – with a few exceptions – those committed by the powerful and the rich, to speak in vague and superficial terms, went unpunished. But there was a simulacrum of justice, and, at least publicly, at least in theory, the authorities pretended to pursue all crimes and, on occasion, did actually pursue some, and any cases that were not cleared up were deemed to be “pending”, however, it isn’t like that now: there are too many cases that simply can’t be cleared up or that people possibly don’t want to clear up or else feel that it isn’t worth the effort or the time or the risk. The days are long gone when accusations were uttered with extreme solemnity and sentences handed out with barely a tremor in the voice, as Athos did twice with his wife, Anne de Breuil, first as a young man and later when he was older: he was not alone the second time, but in the company of the other three musketeers, Porthos, d’Artagnan and Aramis, and Lord de Winter, to whom he delegated authority, and a masked man in a red cloak who turned out to be the executioner from Lille, the same man who ages before – in another life, on another person – had branded the shameful fleur-de-lys on Milady’s shoulder. Each of them makes his accusation and all begin with a formula that is unimaginable today: “Before God and before men I accuse this woman of having poisoned, of having murdered, of having caused to be assassinated, of having urged me to murder, of having afflicted someone with a strange disorder and brought about their death, of having committed sacrilege, of having stolen, of having corrupted, of having incited to crime …” “Before God and before men.” No, ours is not a solemn age. And then Athos, perhaps pretending to delude himself, in order to believe, in vain, that this time he was not the one judging or condemning her, asks each of the other men, one by one, what sentence he is demanding for the woman. To which they answer one after the other: “The penalty of death, the penalty of death, the penalty of death, the penalty of death.” Once the sentence had been heard, it was Athos who turned to her and, as master of ceremonies, said: “Anne de Breuil, Countess de la Fère, Milady de Winter, your crimes have wearied men on earth and God in heaven. If you know a prayer, say it now, because you have been condemned and are going to die.” Anyone reading this scene as a child or in early youth will always remember it, can never forget it, nor what comes next: the executioner ties the hands and feet of the woman who is still “belle comme les amours”, picks her up and carries her to a boat, in which he crosses to the other side of the river. During the crossing, Milady manages to untie the rope binding her legs and, when they reach the other shore, she jumps out and begins to run, but immediately slips and falls to her knees. She must know she is lost then, because she doesn’t even try to get up, but stays in that posture, her head bowed and her hands bound together, we’re not told whether in front or behind, as they had been when, as a young girl, she was killed for the first time. The executioner of Lille raises his sword and lowers it, thus putting an end to the creature and transforming her for ever into a memory, whether a devouring one or not, it doesn’t really matter. Then he removes his red cloak, spreads it on the ground, lays the body on it, throws in the head, ties the cloak by its four corners, loads the bundle on his shoulder and carries it back to the boat. Halfway across, where the river is deepest, he drops the body in. Her judges watch from the bank as the body disappears, they see how the waters open for a moment then close over it. But that was in a novel, as Javier pointed out to me when I asked what had happened to Chabert: “What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.” That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else … ‘Yes, if only Javier had died and become merely a memory too,’ I thought again. ‘That would save me from my problems of conscience and from my fears, my doubts and temptations and from having to make a decision, from my feelings of love and from my need to talk. And from what awaits me now, the scene I’m walking towards, and which will perhaps bear some resemblance to a conjugal scene.’

  ‘So what’s all the urgency?’ I said as soon as Díaz-Varela opened the door to me, I didn’t even kiss him on the cheek, I just said hello as I went in, tried to avoid looking him in the eye, even preferring not to touch him. If I began by demanding an explanation, I might take the lead, so to speak, gain a certain advantage in managing the situation, whatever the situation was: he had arranged it, almost insisted on it, so how could I know? ‘I haven’t got that much time, it’s been a really exhausting day. Anyway, what it is you want to discuss?’