The Infatuations (33 page)

‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘a murder, nothing more.’

IV

That, as I imagined it would be, was the last occasion on which I saw Díaz-Varela alone, and quite some time passed before I met him again, and then in company and by chance. But for most of that time he haunted my days and my nights, at first intensely, then only palely loitering, as Keats put it. I suppose he thought we had nothing more to say, he must have been left with the feeling that he had more than fulfilled the unexpected task of giving me an explanation he had doubtless assumed he would never have to give to anyone. He had acted imprudently with the Prudent Young Woman (I’m no longer so very young, nor was I then), and he’d had no choice but to tell me his story, sinister or sombre depending on which version he gave. After that, there was no need for him to stay in touch with me, to expose himself to my suspicions, my looks, my evasive comments, my silent judgements, nor would I have wanted to submit him to them, we would have become enveloped in an atmosphere of grim unease. He did not seek me out nor did I seek him out. We had said an implicit goodbye, had reached a conclusion that no amount of mutual physical attraction or non-mutual love could delay.

The following day, despite his weariness, he must have felt that a weight had been lifted off his shoulders or been replaced by another far lighter one – I now knew more, having been present at a confession – because it was even less likely than ever that I would go to
anyone with my still unprovable knowledge. He, though, has passed a weight on to me, because far worse than my grave suspicions and my possibly hasty and unfair conjectures was the burden of having two versions of events and not knowing which to believe, or, rather, knowing that I would have to believe both and that both would cohabit in my memory until it grew weary of the duplication and turfed them out. Anything anyone tells you becomes absorbed into you, becomes part of your consciousness, even if you don’t believe it or know that it never happened and that it’s pure invention, like novels and films, like the remote story of Colonel Chabert. And although Díaz-Varela had followed the old precept of keeping the ‘true’ story until last and telling me the ‘false’ story first, that rule is never enough to erase the initial or previous version. You still heard it and, although it might be momentarily refuted by what comes afterwards, which contradicts and gives the lie to it, its memory endures, as does our own credulity while we were listening, when, not knowing that it would be followed by a denial, we mistook it for the truth. Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers, if not when we’re awake, then as we drift off to sleep or in our dreams, where the order of things doesn’t matter, and it remains there tossing and turning and pulsating as if it were someone who had been buried alive or perhaps a dead man who reappears because he didn’t actually die, either in Eylau or on the road back or having been hanged from a tree or something else. What has been said continues to watch us and occasionally revisits us, as ghosts do, and then it never seems enough, we recall even the longest conversation as having been all too brief and the most thorough explanation as being full of holes; we wish we had asked more questions and listened more closely and paid more attention to non-verbal signs, which are slightly less deceiving than verbal ones.

Needless to say, I considered the possibility of tracking down Dr
Vidal Secanell, with a surname like that there would be no problem finding him. Indeed, I learned from the Internet that he worked for an odd-sounding organization called the Anglo-American Medical Unit, based in Calle Conde de Aranda, in the Salamanca district of Madrid; I could easily make an appointment and ask him to check me over and give me an electrocardiogram, well, we all worry about our heart. Unfortunately, I lack the detective instinct, it’s just not me, and, besides, I felt it was a move that was as risky as it was futile: if Díaz-Varela had been happy to tell me his name, the doctor was sure to corroborate his version, whether it was true or not. Perhaps Dr Vidal was an old school friend of his, not of Desvern, perhaps he had been told what he should tell me if I came to see him and questioned him; he could always deny me access to a medical record that may never even have existed, confidentiality rules in such cases, and what right did I have, after all: I should really go there with Luisa and have her demand to see it, but she knew nothing about her husband’s illness and had not the slightest suspicion, and how could I so abruptly open her eyes, something that would involve multiple decisions and taking on an enormous responsibility, that of revealing the truth to someone who possibly didn’t want to know it, because you can never tell what someone wants to know until the revelation has been made, and then the evil has been done and it’s too late to withdraw, to put it behind you. Vidal might be yet another collaborator, he might owe Díaz-Varela enormous favours, he might be part of the conspiracy. Or perhaps it wasn’t even necessary. Two weeks had passed since I eavesdropped on that conversation with Ruibérriz; Díaz-Varela had had plenty of time in which to come up with a story that would neutralize or appease me, if I can put it like that; he could have gone to that cardiologist on some pretext or other (the novelists we publish, with that vain man Garay Fontina at their head, were always pestering
all kinds of professionals with all kinds of questions), and asked him what painful, unpleasant, terminal illness could credibly justify a man preferring to kill himself or, if he couldn’t bring himself to do that, asking a friend to get rid of him instead. Dr Vidal might well be an honest, ingenuous sort and have given Díaz-Varela that information in good faith; and Díaz-Varela would have counted on my never going to visit the doctor, however tempted I was, as turned out to be the case (that I was tempted, I mean, but did not go). It occurred to me that he knew me better than I thought, that during our time together, he had been less distracted than he seemed and had studied me carefully, and, foolishly, I found that thought vaguely flattering, or maybe that was just a remnant of my infatuation; such feelings never end suddenly, nor are they transformed instantly into loathing, scorn, shame or mere stupor, there is a long road to be travelled before one arrives at those possible replacement feelings, there is a troubled period of infiltrations and mixtures, of hybridization and contamination, and the state of being infatuated or in love never entirely ends until it becomes indifference or, rather, tedium, until one can think: ‘What’s the point of living in the past, why bother even thinking about seeing Javier again. I can’t even be bothered to remember him. I want to drive that whole inexplicable time from my mind, like a bad dream. And that’s not so very difficult, given that I’m no longer the person I was. The only snag is that, even though I’m not that person, there are often moments when I can’t forget who I was and then, quite simply, my very name is loathsome to me and I wish I wasn’t me. At least a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although a memory can, at times, be somewhat devouring. But this memory no longer is, no, it no longer is.’

As is only to be expected and as is only natural, such thoughts took time to arrive. And I could not help considering from a hundred
different angles (or perhaps it was only ten angles repeated over and over) what Díaz-Varela had told me, his two versions, if they were two versions, and pondering details that had remained unclear in both, for there is no story, whether real or invented, without blind spots or contradictions or obscurities or mistakes, and in that respect – that of the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative – it didn’t really matter which was which.

I revisited the articles I had read on the Internet about Desvern’s death, and in one of them I found the sentences that kept going round and round in my head: ‘The autopsy revealed that the victim had been stabbed sixteen times by his murderer. Every blow struck a vital organ, and according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five of the wounds proved fatal.’ I didn’t quite understand the difference between a fatal wound and one that struck a vital organ. At first sight, to a layman, they seemed to be the same thing. But that was only a secondary cause of my unease: if a pathologist had been involved and had drawn up that report, if there had been an autopsy, as was inevitable after any violent death and certainly after a homicide, how was it possible that no one noticed a ‘generalized metastasis throughout the body’, which Díaz-Varela had told me was the diagnosis given by Desvern’s consultant? On that afternoon, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask Díaz-Varela, the penny hadn’t dropped, and now I didn’t want to or couldn’t phone him, still less about that, he would have felt suspicious, wary or simply weary, he might have come up with other ways of neutralizing me, when he saw that his explanations or the act he had put on had failed to appease me. I could understand that the newspapers might not have made much of it or that the information wasn’t even given to them, because it bore no relation to what had happened, but it seemed very strange that no one had informed Luisa. When I spoke to her, it was clear that she knew nothing about
Deverne’s illness, which was precisely as he had wanted, according, that is, to his friend and indirect executioner, the ‘instigator’ of his death. I could also imagine what Díaz-Varela’s response would be, if I had been able to ask him: ‘Do you really think that a pathologist examining a guy who’s received sixteen stab wounds is going to take the trouble to look any further and inquire into the victim’s previous state of health? He may not even have opened him up and so wouldn’t know; maybe he didn’t even carry out a proper autopsy and merely filled in the form with his eyes shut: it was obvious what Miguel had died from.’ And he may well have been right: that had been the attitude of the two negligent surgeons two centuries before, despite being under orders from Napoleon himself: knowing what they knew, they didn’t even bother to take the pulse of fallen, trampled Chabert. Besides, in Spain, most people do only the bare minimum and have little desire to probe beneath the surface and waste time doing something they deem to be unnecessary.

And then there were those overly technical terms used by Díaz-Varela. It was highly unlikely that he would have remembered them after having heard them once from Desvern some time before, nor even that Desvern would have used them when telling him about his misfortune, however often they were used by his doctors, the ophthalmologist, the consultant and the cardiologist. A desperate, terrified man wouldn’t resort to such dry-as-dust terminology when telling a friend he was under sentence of death, that just wouldn’t be normal. ‘Intraocular melanoma’, ‘a very advanced metastatic melanoma’, the adjective ‘asymptomatic’ or the noun ‘enucleation’, all those expressions struck me as having been recently learned, or recently heard from Dr Vidal. But perhaps my distrust was unfounded: after all, I haven’t forgotten them and much more time has passed since I heard him say them, and only on that one occasion too. And perhaps they
would be repeated and used by someone suffering from an illness, as if that way he or she could somehow explain it better.

On the other hand, in favour of the veracity of his story, of his final version, was the fact that Díaz-Varela had been very restrained when speaking of his own sacrifice and suffering, of the heart-rendingly contradictory nature of his situation, of his immense grief at finding himself forced to do away with his best friend, the one he would most miss, and in such a precipitate and violent way – any precipitate death is, alas, bound to be violent. With time against him and with a deadline set, knowing that in this case, more than ever, ‘there would have been a time for such a word’, as Macbeth had added when he found out about his wife’s unexpected death. That is, there would have been time, another time, for such a phrase or fact: and to let in that other time, which he would neither have brought about or accelerated or disturbed, all Díaz-Varela would have had to do was refuse the commission and turn down the request, and allow things to take their natural and, inevitably, grim and pitiless course. Yes, he could have spun me some line about his accursèd fate, he could have used that very phrase to describe his task, he could have emphasized his loyalty, stressed his selflessness, even tried to arouse my compassion. If he had beaten his breast and described his anguish to me, how he’d had to keep his feelings to himself and dredge up the necessary courage to save Deverne and Luisa from a far worse fate, slower and more cruel, from deterioration and deformity and from having to contemplate both, I would have felt more suspicious of him and would have had few doubts about the falsity of his feelings. He had spared me that and given a very sober account; he had merely set out the facts and confessed his part in it. Which he had said, from the outset, was what he knew he had to do.

In the end, everything tends towards attenuation, sometimes little by little and thanks to great effort and willpower on our part; sometimes with unexpected speed and contrary to our will, while we struggle in vain to keep faces from fading and paling into nothing, and deeds and words from becoming blurred objects that drift about in our memory with the same scant value as those we’ve read about in novels or seen and heard in films: we don’t really care what happens in books and films and forget about them once they’re over, although, as Díaz-Varela had said when he spoke to me about
Colonel Chabert
, they do have the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen. When someone tells us something, it always seems like a fiction, because we don’t know the story at first hand and can’t be sure it happened, however much we are assured that the story is a true one, not an invention, but real. At any rate, it forms part of the hazy universe of narratives, with their blind spots and contradictions and obscurities and mistakes, all surrounded and encircled by shadows or darkness, however hard they strive to be exhaustive and diaphanous, because they are incapable of achieving either of those qualities.