The Infatuations (16 page)

When someone is in love, or, more precisely, when a woman is in love and in the early stages of an affair, when it still has all the allure of the new and surprising, she is usually capable of taking an interest in anything that the object of her love is interested in or speaks about. She’s not just pretending as a way of pleasing him or winning him over or establishing a fragile stronghold, although there is an element of that, she really does pay attention and allow herself to be genuinely caught up in what he feels and transmits, be it enthusiasm, aversion, sympathy, fear, anxiety or even obsession. Not to mention accompanying him in his improvised lucubrations, which are what most bind and attract her because she is there at their birth and pushes them out into the world and watches them stretch and waver and stumble. She develops a sudden passion for things to which she had never before given a moment’s thought, she acquires unexpected dislikes, picks up on details that had previously passed her by unnoticed and that her senses would have continued to ignore until the end of her days, she focuses her energies on matters that affect her only vicariously or because she is under some sort of spell or influence, as if she had decided to live out her life on screen or on stage or inside a novel, in an alien fictional world that absorbs and amuses her more than her real life, which she puts temporarily on hold or relegates to second place, and takes a brief rest from it (there is nothing more tempting than to
surrender yourself to someone else, even if only in your imagination, and to make his problems your own and to submerge yourself in his existence, which, because it is not yours, seems easier to bear). I’m possibly going too far in putting it like that, but initially we women do place ourselves at the service or at the disposal of the person we happen to love, and mostly we do this innocently, that is, not knowing that there will come a day, if we ever feel solid and established enough, when he will look at us with disappointment and perplexity as it dawns on him that, in fact, we care nothing for what once excited us, that we are bored by what he tells us, even though he hasn’t changed his topics of conversation, which are no less interesting than they used to be. It just means that we will have stopped struggling to maintain that initial enthusiasm and passion, but not that we were pretending or were being false from the very start. With Leopoldo there was never any crux moment, because I never felt the same wilful, ingenuous, unconditional love for him that I felt for Díaz-Varela, into whom I threw myself body and soul – albeit prudently and discreetly, so that he would barely notice – despite knowing beforehand that he could never reciprocate my love, that he, in turn, was at Luisa’s service and had, inevitably, been waiting a long time for his opportunity.

I borrowed the Balzac novella (yes, I do know French) because he had read it to me and talked to me about it, and how could I not be interested in something that had interested him, given that I was still in that early phase of falling in love when everything about him was a revelation. I did so out of curiosity too: I wanted to know what had happened to the Colonel, although I assumed he had not met with a happy end, that he had failed to recover wife, fortune or dignity, that he might perhaps have ended up yearning for his condition as corpse. I had never read anything by Balzac, he was another famous writer who, like so many others, I hadn’t so much as glanced at, because,
paradoxical though it may seem, working in a publishing house prevents you from reading almost any of the truly great literature that has been written, the literature that time has sanctioned and miraculously authorized to endure beyond that briefest of moments, which grows ever briefer. I was also intrigued to know why Díaz-Varela had found it so fascinating and spent so much time over it, why it had led him into those thoughts, why he was using it as evidence that the dead are fine where they are and should never come back, even if their death was untimely and unjust, stupid, gratuitous and unfortunate, like that of Desvern, and even if there was no risk of them ever reappearing. It was as if he feared that, were his friend to be resurrected, were such a thing possible, he wanted to convince me or convince himself that any resurrection would be inopportune, a mistake, and even bad for both the living and for the dead man, as Balzac ironically dubbed the surviving and ghostly Chabert, and that it would even cause everyone unnecessary suffering, always assuming that the truly dead can still suffer. I also had the impression that Díaz-Varela was keen to endorse and accept the lawyer Derville’s pessimistic vision, his gloomy ideas about the infinite capacity of normal individuals (like you and me) for covetousness and crime, for placing their own miserly interests before any consideration of pity, affection or even fear. It was as if he wanted to find verification for this in a novel – not in a chronicle or in the annals or in a history book – and to find there persuasive arguments to prove that this was simply how humankind always was and had been, that there was no escaping this and that one should expect only the basest of deeds, betrayals and cruelties, the broken promises and deceptions that have sprung up and been committed in every time and place with no need for examples or models to imitate, although most such crimes remain secret, covered up, and were performed surreptitiously and never came to light, not even after a hundred years had
passed, when no one can be bothered to find out what happened all that time ago. And although he hadn’t said as much, it was easy to deduce that he didn’t even believe that there were many exceptions, apart, perhaps, from a few unusually innocent beings, but, rather, that any seeming exceptions could usually be attributed to a lack of imagination or boldness or possibly the physical inability to carry out a robbery or a crime, or were the product of our own ignorance, our lack of knowledge as to what people had done or planned or ordered to be done and had very successfully concealed.

When I reached the end of the novel and the words spoken by Derville, of which Díaz-Varela had improvised a translation in Spanish, I noticed that he had made a mistake or had perhaps misunderstood, either unwittingly or, possibly, on purpose, to prove his point; perhaps he had chosen or opted to read something into the text that wasn’t there, so that his mistaken interpretation, whether deliberate or not, would reinforce what he was trying to endorse or emphasize, that is, the ruthlessness of men or, in this case, women. He had translated it thus: ‘I have seen women administer lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child.’ When I heard that sentence, my blood froze, because it seems unimaginable that a mother could make such distinctions between her children, especially when those distinctions depended solely on who the father was, that she should have loved one and detested or only tolerated the other, still less that she could be capable of causing the death of the first-born in order to benefit her favourite child, by giving the former some sort of poisoned bait, perhaps in the shape of curative drops for a cough, thus taking advantage of the child’s blind faith in the person who had brought him into the world and who had fed and cared for and tended him throughout his whole existence. But that isn’t what the original said, it didn’t say:
‘
J’ai vu des femmes donnant à l’enfant d’un premier lit des gouttes qui devaient amener sa mort …
’, but ‘
des goûts
’, which doesn’t mean ‘drops’ but ‘tastes’, although you couldn’t translate it like that, because it would be ambiguous, to say the least, and lead to confusion. Díaz-Varela’s French was doubtless better than mine, he had, after all, studied at the Lycée, but I was tempted to think that a more accurate translation of what Balzac had written would be something like this: ‘I have seen women instil in a legitimate child born of the marriage bed certain tastes’ (or perhaps ‘inclinations’) ‘that would bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child.’ The meaning still wasn’t very clear even in that interpretation, nor was it easy to imagine what exactly Derville meant. To give or instil in a child tastes or inclinations that would bring about his death? Drink or opium or gambling or a tendency to criminal behaviour perhaps? A taste for luxury that he would be unable to give up and that would lead him to commit crimes in order to satisfy that taste? A morbid lust that would expose him to diseases or propel him into rape? A character so weak and fearful that the slightest setback would drive him to suicide? It was obscure and almost enigmatic. Whatever the true interpretation, what a long time it would take to produce that desired and carefully planned death, what a very slow process and what a large investment of time. And the mother’s level of perversity would be far greater than if she had simply given her child a few murderous drops disguised as something else, and which perhaps only an inquisitive, stubborn doctor would be able to detect. There is a difference between preparing someone for their early ruin and death and killing them outright, and we tend to believe that the latter is the graver and more reprehensible of the two, because we have a horror of violence and find direct intervention more shocking, or maybe it’s because there is then no room for doubts or excuses, the person carrying out
or committing the act has no hiding place, and cannot say it was a mistake or an accident or a miscalculation or an error. A mother who had ruined her son’s life, who had intentionally spoiled or perverted her child, could always say, when faced by the unfortunate consequences: ‘That wasn’t what I intended at all. How stupid of me, how could I possibly have imagined that things would turn out this way? I did everything out of excessive love and with the best of intentions. I may have kept him wrapped in cotton wool for so long that I made a coward of him, I may have given in to his every whim and so twisted his mind that he turned into a despot, but my one thought was always his happiness. How blind I have been and how unthinkingly pernicious!’ And she could even come to believe this herself, whereas she couldn’t possibly think or tell herself such things if her child had died at her hands, because of something she had done and at an hour she herself had determined. Actually causing someone’s death is a very different matter, says the person not holding the weapon (and we, unwittingly, accept his reasoning), from, say, preparing the ground for it and waiting for it to come about or to happen of its own accord; as is desiring and ordering someone’s death, for the desire and the order sometimes become confused and can prove indistinguishable for those accustomed to having their desires satisfied as soon as they have been expressed or even implied, or to having their desires carried out as soon as they have been conceived. That is why the most powerful and most cunning of people never dirty their own hands or even their tongue, because that way they still have the option of saying, when they are at their smuggest, or when most troubled and wearied by their conscience: ‘I didn’t actually do it. Was I there, was I holding the gun, the spoon, the knife that finished him off? I wasn’t even there when he died.’

It was one night, after I came back from Díaz-Varela’s apartment feeling cheerful and in a good mood, that I began not to suspect so much as to wonder, and lying in bed looking out at my dark, agitated trees, I found myself wishing or, rather, fantasizing about the possibility that Luisa might die and thus leave the field open for me with Díaz-Varela, since she was doing nothing to occupy that field herself. He and I got on well, what he had to say interested me or at least it cost me no great effort to take an interest, and it was clear that he found my company pleasant and amusing, both in bed and out of it, and it is the latter that counts, or, while the former may be necessary, it’s still not enough without the latter, and I enjoyed both those advantages. In my vainer moments, I would think that, but for his long-held fixation, his cerebral passion – I didn’t dare to call it his long-held plan, because that would have implied suspicion, which I did not yet feel – he would not only have been perfectly content with me, I would also gradually have made myself indispensable to him. I sometimes had the feeling that he couldn’t let himself go with me, couldn’t entirely give himself, because he had decided in his head, a long time ago, that Luisa was the chosen one, and she had remained so with all the conviction that hopelessness brings with it, since there was not the remotest chance of his dream coming true, given that she was the wife of his best friend whom they both loved
very much. Perhaps he had also made her the ideal excuse for never fully committing himself, instead jumping from one woman to another and letting none of those relationships become either very important or very lasting, because, as he lay awake with some woman in his arms, he was always looking out of the corner of his eye or over her shoulder (or should I say, over our shoulder, since I must include myself among the women thus embraced). When you want something for a long time, it’s very difficult to stop wanting it, I mean, to admit or to realize that you no longer desire it or that you would prefer something else. Waiting feeds and fosters that desire, waiting is accumulative as regards the thing awaited, it solidifies desire and turns it to stone, and then we resist acknowledging that we have wasted years expecting a signal, which, when it finally comes, no longer tempts us, or else we simply can’t be bothered to answer a belated call that we no longer trust, perhaps because it doesn’t now suit us to move. One grows accustomed to waiting for an opportunity that never comes, feeling deep down rather calm and safe and passive, unable quite to believe that it never will present itself.

But, alas, at the same time, no one entirely gives up on that hope, and that itch keeps us awake or prevents us from fully submerging ourselves in sleep. After all, the most unlikely things do happen, and that is something everyone feels, even those who know nothing of history or what happened in the previous world, or even what is happening in this world, which advances at the same hesitant pace as they do. Who hasn’t been witness to some unlikely event, which we often don’t even notice until someone points it out to us and puts it into words: the school dunce is made a minister and the layabout turns banker; the coarsest, ugliest boy in class enjoys a wild success with the best-looking women; while the most simple-minded student becomes a venerated writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize, as
may well be the case with Garay Fontina, for, who knows, perhaps the day will yet come when he gets that call from Stockholm; the most tedious and ordinary of fans manages to get close to her idol and ends up marrying him; the corrupt, thieving journalist passes himself off as a moralist and a champion of honesty; the most distant and pusillanimous of heirs, the very last on the list and the most disastrous, ascends to the throne; the most annoying, stuck-up, scornful woman is adored by the masses whom she crushes and humiliates from her leader’s podium and who should, by rights, loathe her; the greatest imbecile and the greatest rogue gain a landslide victory from a population mesmerized by baseness or perhaps driven by a suicidal desire to be deceived; the murderous politician, when the tables turn, is liberated and acclaimed as a hero and a patriot by the crowd who had, until then, concealed their own criminal tendencies; and an out-and-out yokel is appointed ambassador or President of the Republic or made prince consort if love is involved, and love tends always to be idiotic and foolish. We are all waiting or looking out for that golden opportunity, sometimes it depends solely on how much effort you invest in getting what you wish for, how much enthusiasm and patience you put into each objective, however megalomaniac and preposterous that might be. How could I help nurturing the idea that Díaz-Varela would one day be mine, either because he finally saw the light or because it didn’t work out with Luisa even though the opportunity had now arisen and he could doubtless count on his dead friend Deverne having given him permission, or even a commission, to take on the task? How could I help thinking that my turn would come, when even the ancient spectre of Colonel Chabert had believed for a moment that he would be able to rejoin the narrow world of the living and recover his fortune and the affections, even if only filial, of the terrified wife who felt so threatened by his resurrection? How
could such thoughts not occur to me on certain hopeful, overexcited nights or on nights when I was feeling slightly emotionally tipsy, given that we are surrounded by people with zero talent who succeed in convincing their contemporaries that their talent is, in fact, boundless, or by fools and flatterers who successfully pretend, for half or more than half their lives, to be extremely intelligent and who are listened to as if they were oracles; when there are people with no gift at all for what they do and yet who, nonetheless, enjoy a brilliant career that is greeted by universal applause, at least until they depart this world and are plunged into instant oblivion; when there are uncouth boors who dictate what the polite classes should wear, and to whom the polite classes, for some mysterious reason, listen with rapt attention; when there are unpleasant, twisted, malicious men and women who rouse passions wherever they go; and when there is no shortage of lovers with grotesque pretensions seemingly doomed to defeat and mockery, who, however, triumph in the end against all the odds and against all reason. Anything is possible, anything can happen, and most of us know this, which is why few give up on their great task, though they may rest or momentarily lose sight of it, those, that is, who have set themselves a great task, and there are never so many that they risk swamping the world with their endless vigour and determination.