The Infatuations (31 page)

‘Yes, Luisa will emerge from her abyss, you can be sure of that. In fact, she’s already beginning to, a little more with each day that passes, I can sense it and there’s no going back once that process of farewell has begun, that second, final farewell, which is purely mental and pricks our conscience because it feels as if we were dismissing the dead person, which we are. There may be the occasional backward step, depending on how things go or on the occasional stroke of bad luck, but that’s all. The dead only have the energy that the living give them, and if that energy is withdrawn … Luisa will free herself from Miguel, to a far greater degree than she can even imagine right now, and he knew that very well. More than that, he decided to make things easier for her, insofar as he could, and that
was partly why he asked me that favour. Only partly. There was, of course, a weightier reason.’

‘What is this favour you keep talking about? What favour?’ I couldn’t help my impatience, I had the feeling that he wanted to draw me in through curiosity.

‘I’m coming to that, because that’s the cause of all this,’ he said. ‘Listen carefully. Months before his death, Miguel experienced a general feeling of lassitude, not significant or serious enough to merit seeing a doctor, he wasn’t worried and was in good health. Soon afterwards, he noticed another trivial symptom, slightly blurred vision in one eye, but he thought it was a temporary thing and delayed visiting an ophthalmologist. When he did, when the blurred vision didn’t clear up on its own, the ophthalmologist made a thorough examination and came up with a very gloomy diagnosis: a large intraocular melanoma, and sent him to a consultant for further tests. The consultant checked him over, gave him a CAT scan, a full-body MRI scan, as well as an extensive array of other tests. His diagnosis was even worse: generalized metastasis throughout the body, or as Miguel told me the doctor told him in his cold, aseptic jargon: “a very advanced metastatic melanoma”, even though Miguel was almost asymptomatic at the time and had no other ailments.’

‘So,’ I thought, ‘Desvern couldn’t have said to Javier, as I had once imagined he might: “No, I don’t foresee any problems, nothing imminent or even impending, nothing concrete, my health’s fine”, quite the contrary. At least that’s what Javier is saying now.’ That evening, I was still calling him Javier, although that would soon change, but at the time, I had not yet decided to think of him and refer to him by his surname alone, in order to distance myself from our past proximity or to at least allow myself that illusion.

‘Right, and what does all this mean exactly, apart, obviously, from
it being very bad news?’ I asked, trying to give a note of scepticism or incredulity to my question: ‘Go on, go on, keep talking, but I’m not going to swallow this last-minute story of yours that easily, I have a pretty good idea where you’re going with this.’ But at the same time, I was already intrigued by what he had started to tell me, regardless of whether it was true or not. Díaz-Varela often amused me and always interested me. And so I added, speaking now with genuine, credulous concern: ‘But can that happen, can you have such a serious illness with almost no symptoms? Well, I know you can, of course, but
that
serious? And completely out of the blue like that? And so advanced? It makes you shudder to think of it, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, it can happen and it happened to Miguel. But don’t worry, that particular form of melanoma is, fortunately, very infrequent and very rare. Nothing like that will happen to you. Or to Luisa or to me or to Professor Rico, that would be too much of a coincidence.’ – He had noticed my instantaneous fear of illness. He waited for his baseless prediction to take effect and reassure me as if I were a child, he waited a few seconds before going on. – ‘Miguel didn’t say a word to me about this until he had all the facts, and he didn’t even tell Luisa about the early stages, when there was as yet nothing to fear: not even that he had an appointment with an ophthalmologist, nor that his vision was slightly blurred, because the last thing he wanted was to worry her unnecessarily, and she’s very easily worried. And he certainly didn’t tell her about what followed. In fact, he didn’t tell anyone anything, with one exception. After the consultant’s diagnosis, he knew his illness was terminal, but the consultant didn’t give him all the information, not in detail, or perhaps he tried to play it down, or perhaps Miguel didn’t even ask, I don’t know, he preferred to ask a doctor friend who he knew would hide nothing from him: an old school friend, a cardiologist, who gave him the occasional check-up
and whom he trusted completely. He went to see him with his final diagnosis and said: “Tell me what I can expect, tell me straight. Talk me through the various stages. Tell me how it’s going to be.” And his friend described to him a prospect that he found quite simply unbearable.’

‘Right,’ I said again, like someone determined to doubt, to disbelieve. But I couldn’t keep up that tone. I tried, I did my best, and finally managed to come out with these completely neutral words: ‘And what were those terrible stages?’ – Although that neutrality was a lie; the description of the whole process, of the discovery, terrified me.

‘It wasn’t just that there was no cure, given how widely the disease had spread throughout his organism. There was barely any palliative care they could give him, or the treatment that was available was almost worse than the illness itself. Without any treatment, his friend gave him four to five months, and not much more with treatment. A course of extraordinarily aggressive chemotherapy with devastating side effects would gain him a little time, but whether that time would be worth gaining was another matter. There was worse, though: the intraocular melanoma distorts the eye and is hideously painful, the pain is apparently unbearable, according to his cardiologist friend, who, true to his word, kept nothing back. The only way to avoid this would be to remove the eye, that is, take it out, what doctors call “enucleation”, according to Miguel, because of the size of the tumour. Do you understand, María? An enormous tumour inside his eye, which pushes outwards and inwards, I suppose; a protuberant eye, an increasingly bulbous forehead and cheekbone; and then a hollow, an empty socket, and that wouldn’t be the final metamorphosis either, even in the best-case scenario, and it wouldn’t even really help.’ – This brief, graphic description increased my feelings of distrust, it
was the first time he had resorted to gruesome, imagined details; up until then, he had spoken very soberly. – ‘The patient’s appearance becomes increasingly horrific, and the progressive deterioration is pitiful to see, and it doesn’t just affect the face, of course, everything begins to collapse with alarming rapidity, and all you achieve with the removal of the eye and that brutal chemotherapy are a few more months of life. If you can call it life, that dead or pre-dead life of suffering and deformity, of no longer being yourself, but an anguished ghost who does nothing but enter and leave hospital. One positive thing was that this transformation in appearance wouldn’t happen immediately: he had a month and a half or two months before the facial symptoms would appear or become visible, before other people would notice anything, so he had that amount of time in which to conceal the truth from the world and to pretend.’ – Díaz-Varela’s voice sounded genuinely affected, but he might have merely been affecting that affect. I have to say that he didn’t seem to be when he added in a bitter, doom-laden voice: ‘A month and a half or two months, that was the deadline he gave me.’

I more or less knew what the answer would be, but I asked anyway, because some stories need the encouragement of a few rhetorical questions in order to continue. This particular story would have continued anyway, I simply chivvied it along a little, eager for it to be over as soon as possible, despite my personal interest in it. I wanted to hear the whole thing and then go home and stop hearing it.

‘Why did he give
you
a deadline?’ However, I couldn’t resist telling him what I could guess he was about to tell me. – ‘Now you’re going to say that he asked you to do what you did to him as a favour: getting him stabbed to death by some nutcase in the middle of the street, is that right? A somewhat disagreeable, roundabout way of committing suicide, given that there are pills you can take and so many other ways too. And it meant putting you and your friends to an awful lot of trouble.’

Díaz-Varela shot me an angry, reproving look; my comments clearly struck him as inappropriate.

‘Let’s just make one thing clear, María, and listen well. I’m not telling you this because I want you to believe me, I really don’t care if you believe me or not, Luisa’s another matter, of course, and I hope never to have such a conversation with her, and that, in part, will depend on you. The only reason I am telling you is because of what happened earlier, that’s all. I don’t like having to do it, as you can imagine.
Ruibérriz and I didn’t like doing what we did, which was tantamount to murder really. Well, technically, that’s what it was, and a judge and jury wouldn’t care two hoots about the real reason we did it, and we couldn’t prove that anyway. They base their judgment on the facts and they are what they are, that’s why we were so alarmed when Canella started to talk about mobile phone calls and the rest. It was bad luck, too, that you overheard us that evening, or, rather, that I was stupid enough to allow it to happen. And on the basis of what you heard, you’ve come up with a false or inexact idea of what happened. Naturally, I don’t like that, why would I, and I want you to know the real facts. That’s why I’m telling you, in a personal capacity, because you’re not a judge, and so that you’ll have a better understanding of what lay behind what we did. Then it’s up to you. You can decide what you do with the information. But if you don’t want me to go on, I won’t, I’m not going to force you to listen. It isn’t up to me whether you believe me or not, so if you want, we can stop this conversation right now. If you think you know it all already and don’t want to hear what else I have to say, there’s the door.’

But I did want to hear more. As I said, I wanted to know the end, wanted him to finish his story.

‘No, no, go on. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on, please, everyone has the right to be heard, of course.’ – And I tried to lend a touch of irony to that last ‘of course’. – ‘So why
did
he give you that deadline?’

In the light of Díaz-Varela’s pained, offended tone, I noticed the faintest of doubts creeping into my mind, even though that is one of the easiest tones to put on or imitate, and the one that almost anyone guilty of anything immediately resorts to. As do the innocent. I realized that the more he told me, the more doubts I would have, and that I certainly wouldn’t leave there with no doubts at all, that’s the problem with letting people talk and explain, which is why we so often try
to stop them, in order to preserve our certainties and leave no room for doubts, that is, for lies. Or, needless to say, for the truth. He took a while to answer or to resume speaking, and when he did, he returned to his previous tone of voice, one of sorrow and retrospective despair, which he hadn’t, in fact, completely abandoned, merely adding to it, for a moment, the tone of someone deeply wounded.

‘Miguel had few qualms about dying, if one can say such a thing of a man whose life was going well, who had small children and a wife he loved, or, rather, with whom he was in love. Of course it was a tragedy, as it would be for anyone. But he was always very aware that the fact we are here at all is entirely thanks to an improbable coming-together of various chance events, and when that coming-together ceases, we cannot really complain. People think they have a right to life. Indeed, religions and most countries’ legal systems, even their constitutions, say the same thing, and yet he didn’t see it like that. How can you have a right to something that you neither built nor earned, he used to say. No one can complain about not having been born or not having been in the world before or not having always been in the world, so why should anyone complain about dying or not being in the world hereafter or not remaining in it for ever? He found both points of view equally absurd. We don’t object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance. Even violent deaths, even suicides, depend on chance. And since we were all once denizens of the void or enjoying a state of non-existence, what is so strange or terrible about returning to that state, even though we now have something to compare it with and the capacity to miss what went before? When he found out what was wrong with him, when he knew he was about to die, he was devastated and cursed his ill luck as roundly as the next man, but he also remembered how many others had disappeared at a much younger
age than him; how they had been eliminated by that second chance event of their lives, with barely enough time or opportunity to experience anything: young men and women, children, newborns who were never even given a name … In that respect, he showed great integrity and didn’t fall to pieces. What he couldn’t bear, though, what demoralized him and drove him mad, was the manner of his death, the whole dreadful process, the slowness contained within the swift encroachment of the disease, the deterioration, the pain and the deformity, everything, in short, that his doctor friend had warned him about. He wasn’t prepared to go through all that, still less allow his children and Luisa to witness it. Or anyone else, for that matter. He accepted the idea that he would cease to be, but not the senseless torment, the months of suffering for no reason and no reward, the thought of leaving behind him the image of a defenceless, disfigured, one-eyed man. He didn’t see the point, and he did rebel against that, he did protest and rail at fate. It wasn’t in his power to remain in the world, but he could leave it in a more elegant manner than the one in prospect, he would simply have to depart a little early.’ – ‘A case,’ I thought, ‘in which it would be inappropriate to say: “He should have died hereafter,” because that “hereafter” would mean something far worse, involving more suffering and humiliation, less dignity and more horror for his nearest and dearest, so it’s not always desirable for everything to last a little longer, a year, a few months, a few weeks, a few hours, it isn’t always true that we will think it too soon to put an end to things or people, nor is it true that there is never an opportune moment, for there may come a time when we ourselves say: “That’s fine. That’s enough. What comes next will be worse, an abasement, a denigration, a stain,” when we will be brave enough to acknowledge: “This time is over, even though it’s our time.” And even if the ending of things did lie in our hands, everything would go on indefinitely,
becoming grubby and contaminated, with no living creature ever dying. We must not only allow the dead to leave when they try to linger or when we hold on to them, we must also let go of the living sometimes.’ And I realized that in thinking this, I was, momentarily and against my will, believing the story that Díaz-Varela was telling me now. We do tend to believe things while we’re hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it’s another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.