The Infatuations (11 page)

Díaz-Varela would probably have laughed, perhaps to take the edge off his friend’s ominous tone, but also because this extravagant, unexpected request made him laugh despite himself.

‘You’re asking me to replace you if you die,’ he would have said, halfway between a statement and a question. ‘For me to become Luisa’s non-husband and a sort of live-out dad. Why think of such things, I
mean, why think that you could leave their lives at any moment, if, as you say, you’re in good health and there’s no real reason to believe that anything bad might happen to you? Are you sure you’re all right? No diseases? You’re not mixed up in some mess I know nothing about, are you? You haven’t run up a lot of unpayable debts or debts that can’t be paid off in cash? No one has threatened you, have they? You’re not thinking of skipping off, are you, doing a runner?’

‘No, really, I’m not hiding anything from you. It’s exactly as I said, that sometimes I start thinking about what the world would be like without me and I feel afraid. For the kids and for Luisa, not for anyone else, I can assure you, I don’t think I’m that important. I just want to be sure that you would be there to take care of them, at least initially. So that they would have someone as similar to me as possible to support them. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, you are the person who most resembles me. Even if only because we’ve known each other such a long time.’

Díaz-Varela would have thought for a moment, then given a half-sincere, certainly not wholly sincere, answer:

‘But do you realize what you would be getting me into? Do you realize how difficult it would be to become a non-husband without subsequently going on to become a real husband? In the kind of situation you described, it would be all too easy for the widow and the bachelor to believe that they mean rather more to each other, and who can blame them? Put someone in another person’s daily life, make him feel responsible and protective and with a duty to make himself indispensable to that other person, and you can imagine how things will end up. Always assuming they’re both reasonably attractive and there isn’t a vast age difference between them. It will come as no surprise to you if I say that Luisa is very attractive, and I can’t complain about my own success with the ladies. I don’t think I’ll ever
marry, that’s not it, but if you were to die and I started going to your house on a daily basis, I find it very hard to believe that what should never have happened while you were alive wouldn’t happen once you were dead. Would you want to die knowing that? More than that, you would be encouraging it, procuring it, propelling us into it.’

Desvern would have remained silent for a few seconds, thinking, as if he had not considered that scenario before formulating his request. Then he would have given a rather paternalistic laugh and said:

‘You are incorrigibly vain and incorrigibly optimistic. That’s why you would make such a good handle to hold on to, such a good support. I don’t think what you describe would happen at all. Precisely because you’re too familiar a figure, like a cousin whom it would be impossible to see in any other way, with any other eyes,’ here he would have hesitated for a moment or pretended to, ‘any other eyes than mine, that is. Her view of you comes from me, it’s inherited, tainted. You’re an old friend of her husband, a friend of whom she has often heard me speak, as you can imagine, with a mixture of affection and mockery. Before Luisa met you, I had already told her what you were like, I had painted a picture of you for her. She has always seen you in that light and with those features, and there’s no changing them now, she had a complete portrait of you before you were even introduced. And I can’t deny that your entanglements and, how can I put it, your smugness, often made us laugh. I’m afraid you’re not someone she could take seriously. I’m sure you don’t mind me saying that. That’s one of your virtues, and it’s what you’ve always strived for, isn’t it, not to be taken too seriously. You’re not going to deny that, are you?’

Díaz-Varela would doubtless have felt slightly put out, but would have disguised the fact. No one likes to be told that he or she stands
no chance with someone, even if that person is of no interest and has never been seen as a potential conquest. Many seductions have taken place, or at least begun, out of nothing more than pique or defiance, because of a bet or to prove someone wrong. Any genuine interest comes later. And it often does, provoked by the manoeuvring and the effort involved. But it’s not there at the beginning, certainly not before the dissuasive arguments or the challenge. Perhaps, at that moment, Díaz-Varela wanted Deverne to die so that he could prove to him that Luisa could take him seriously when there were no mediators, no go-betweens. Although, of course, how can you prove something to a dead man? How can you gain their acknowledgement, their recognition that they were wrong? They never tell us we were right when we need them to, and all you can think is: ‘If he or she were to come back today …’ But they never do. He would prove it to Luisa, in whom, according to Desvern, he, the husband, would carry on or continue to live for a while longer. Perhaps it would be like that, perhaps he was right. Until he swept him away. Until he erased his memory and all other traces and supplanted him entirely.

‘No, I don’t deny it, and of course I don’t mind. But our views of people change a lot, especially if the person who painted the original portrait can no longer go on retouching it and the portrait is left in the hands of the portrayed. The latter can correct and redraw every line, one by one, and leave the original artist looking like a liar. Or just plain wrong, or like a bad artist, superficial and lacking in perception. “They gave me an entirely false impression of him,” someone looking at the picture might think. “This man isn’t as he was described to me at all, he has substance, passion, integrity and maturity.” It happens every day, Miguel, all the time. People start out seeing one thing and end up seeing quite the opposite. They start out loving and end up hating, or shifting from indifference to adoration. We can
never be sure of what is going to be vital to us and who we will consider to be important. Our convictions are transient and fragile, even the ones we believe to be the strongest. It’s the same with our feelings. We shouldn’t trust ourselves.’

Deverne would have sensed a touch of wounded pride and ignored it.

‘Even so,’ he would have said, ‘even if I don’t think it’s possible, what does it matter if it does happen afterwards, after my death? I’ll know nothing about it. But I would have died convinced of the impossibility of such a bond between you and her, it’s what you think will happen that counts, because what you see and experience in your final moment is the end of the story, the end of your personal story. You know that everything will carry on without you, that nothing stops because you have disappeared. But that “afterwards” doesn’t concern you. What matters is that you stop, because then everything stops, the world is frozen in that moment when the person whose life is ending finally ends, even though we know that this isn’t true in actual fact. But that “actual fact” doesn’t matter. It’s the one moment when there is no future, in which the present seems to us unchangeable and eternal, because we won’t witness any more events or any more changes. There have been people who have tried to bring forward the publication of a book so that their father would see it in print and die thinking that their son was an accomplished writer; what did it matter if, after that, the son never wrote another line? There have been desperate attempts to bring about a momentary reconciliation between two people so that the person dying would believe that they had made their peace and everything was sorted and settled; what did it matter if, two days after the death, the hostile parties had a blazing row? What mattered was what existed immediately before that death. There have been people who have pretended to
forgive a dying man so that he can die in peace or more happily; what did it matter if, the following morning, his forgiver hoped privately to see him rot in hell? There have been those who have lied their socks off at the deathbed of a wife or husband and convinced them that they had never been unfaithful and had loved them unwaveringly and constantly; what did it matter if, a month later, they had moved in with their lover of many years? The only definitive truth is what the person about to die sees and believes immediately before his or her departure, because nothing exists after that. There is a great chasm between what Mussolini, executed by his enemies, believed and what Franco, on his deathbed, believed, the latter surrounded by his loved ones and adored by his compatriots, whatever those hypocrites may say now. My father once told me that Franco kept a photograph in his office of Mussolini strung up like a pig in the petrol station in Milan where they took his corpse and that of his lover, Clara Petacci, to be put on display and publicly mocked, and that whenever visitors expressed shock and bewilderment on seeing the photograph, Franco would say: “Yes, take a good look: that’s never going to happen to me.” And he was right, he made sure that it didn’t. He doubtless died happy – if such a thing is possible – believing that everything would continue as he had ordained. Many people console themselves for this great injustice or for their rage with the thought: “If he were to come back today …” or “Given the way things have turned out, he must be spinning in his grave,” forgetting that no one ever comes back or spins in his grave or knows what happens once he has expired. It’s like thinking that someone who has not yet been born should care about what’s going on in the world. To someone who does not yet exist everything is, inevitably, a matter of complete indifference, just as it is for someone who has died. Both are nothing, neither possesses any consciousness, the former cannot even sense
what its life will be and the latter cannot recall it, as if he or she had never had a life. They are on the same plane, that is, they neither exist nor know anything, however hard that is for us to accept. What does it matter to me what happens once I am gone? All that counts is what I can believe and foresee now. I believe that, in my absence, it would better for my children if you were around. I foresee that Luisa would recover sooner and suffer a little less if you were on hand as a friend. I can’t fathom other people’s conjectures, even yours or Luisa’s, I can only know my own, and I can’t imagine you two in any other way. So I ask you again, if anything bad should happen to me, give me your word that you’ll take care of them.’

Díaz-Varela might still have disputed certain points with him.

‘Yes, you’re right in part, but not about one thing: not having been born is not the same as having died, because the person who dies always leaves some trace behind him and he knows that. He knows, too, that he’ll know nothing about it, but that he will, nonetheless, leave his mark in the form of memories. He knows he’ll be missed, as you yourself said, and that the people who knew him won’t behave as if he had never existed. Some will feel guilty about him, some will wish they had treated him better while he was alive, some will mourn him and be unable to understand why he doesn’t respond, some will be plunged into despair by his absence. No one has any difficulty recovering from the loss of someone who has not been born, with the exception, perhaps, of a mother who has undergone an abortion and finds it hard to abandon hope and wonders sometimes about the child who might have been. But in reality there is no loss of any kind, there is no void, there are no past events. On the other hand, no one who has lived and died disappears completely, not at least for a couple of generations: there is evidence of his actions and, when he dies, he’ll be aware of that. He knows that he won’t be able to see or ascertain
anything of what happens thereafter and he knows that his story ends in that instant. You yourself are concerned about what will happen to your wife and children, you’ve taken care to put your affairs in order, you’re aware of the gap you would leave and you’re asking me to fill that gap, to be some kind of substitute for you if you’re not here. None of that would concern someone who had never been born.’

‘Of course not,’ Desvern would have replied, ‘but I’m doing all of those things while I’m still alive, and a living person is not the same as a dead person, even though that isn’t what we tend to think. When I’m dead, I won’t even be a person, and won’t be able to sort out or ask for anything, or be aware of or concerned about anything. In that respect a dead person is the same as someone who has never been born. I’m not talking about the others, those who survive us and think of us and who still exist in time, nor of myself now, of the me who has not yet departed. He still does things, of course, and, needless to say, thinks them; he plots, takes steps and decisions, tries to influence others, has desires, is vulnerable and can also inflict harm. I’m talking about myself dead, which you obviously find harder to imagine than I do. You shouldn’t confuse us, the living me and the dead me. The former is asking you for something that the latter won’t be able to question or remind you about or else check up on you to see whether or not you have carried out his wishes. What’s so difficult, then, about giving me your word? There’s nothing to prevent you from failing to keep it, it will cost you nothing.’

Díaz-Varela would have put one hand to his forehead and sat looking at his friend oddly and slightly irritably, as if he had just emerged from a daydream or some drug-induced torpor. He was, at the least, emerging from an unexpected and inappropriately gloomy conversation.

‘Fine, you have my word of honour, you can count on it,’ he would
have said. ‘But please, no more of these macabre conversations, they give me the creeps. Let’s go and have a drink and talk about something more cheerful.’

‘What rubbishy edition is this?’ I heard Professor Rico muttering as he took a book off a shelf; he had been snooping around looking at the books, as if no one else were in the room. I saw that he was holding an edition of
Don Quixote
with the very tips of his fingers, as though the book made his skin crawl. ‘How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine? It’s full of a lot of intuitive nonsense, there’s no method or science in it, it’s not even original, he’s just copied from other people. And to find it in the house of someone who is, as I understand it, a university teacher, well, that really takes the biscuit. But then that’s Madrid University for you,’ he added, looking reprovingly at Luisa.