While the Women are Sleeping (3 page)

‘I film her every day because she’s going to die, and I want to have a record of her last day, of what might be her last day, so that I can really remember it, so that when she’s dead, I can see it again in the future as often as I wish, along with the artistic videos. Because I
do
like to remember things.’

‘But is she ill?’ I asked again.

‘No, she’s not ill,’ he said, this time without pausing to think. ‘At least not as far as I know. But she’ll die one day. You know that, everyone knows that, everyone is going to die, you and me included, and I want to preserve her image. The last day in anyone’s life is important.’

‘Of course,’ I said, looking at his foot. ‘You’re just being cautious; she might have an accident, for example.’ And I thought (but only briefly) that if Luisa were to die in an accident, I wouldn’t have many images to remember her by, hardly any pictures at all. There was the odd photo around the house—ordinary photos, of course, not artistic ones—but only a few. I certainly didn’t have any videos of her. Without thinking, I glanced up at the balcony from which I had observed Viana. There were no lights on in any of the balconies or rooms. Nor, therefore, in the room belonging to Inès and Viana. I wasn’t there on our balcony now, no one was.

Viana was again immersed in thought, although now he had removed his foot from the water and placed it again—with the tip of the sock wet and dark—on the grass. I began to think that perhaps he didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken, and again I considered saying goodnight and going up to my room, yes, I suddenly wanted to go up and see again the image of Luisa asleep—not dead—wrapped in her sheet; one shoulder might have come uncovered. But once begun, conversations can’t be abandoned just like that. They can’t be left hanging, by taking advantage of a distraction or a silence, unless one of the two people involved is angry. Viana didn’t seem angry, although his alert eyes did seem even more alert and more intense; it was hard to tell what colour they were in the light cast by the moon on the water: I think they were brown. No, he didn’t seem angry, just slightly self-absorbed. He was saying something, not in a whisper now, but as if muttering.

‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ I asked.

‘No, it’s not that I think she’ll have an accident,’ he replied, his voice suddenly too loud, as if he had miscalculated the shift in tone between talking to himself and talking to someone else.

‘Lower your voice,’ I said, alarmed, although there was no reason to feel alarmed, it was unlikely anyone would hear us. I again glanced at the balconies, but they all still lay in darkness; no one had woken up.

Startled by my order, Viana immediately lowered his voice, but he wasn’t startled enough not to continue what he had begun to say so loudly. ‘I said it’s not that I think she might have an accident. But she’ll definitely die before me, if you see what I mean.’

I looked at Viana’s face, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was gazing up at the sky, at the moon, avoiding my eye. We were on an island.

‘Why are you so sure of that if she isn’t ill? You’re much older than her. The normal thing would be for you to die before her.’

Viana laughed again and, stretching his leg out still further, dipped his whole stockinged foot into the water this time and began to move it slowly, heavily around, more heavily than before because now his whole foot—that fat, obese foot—was submerged.

‘Normal,’ he said, laughing. ‘Normal,’ he repeated. ‘Nothing is normal between her and me. Or rather, nothing is normal as regards my relationship with her, and never has been. I’ve known her since she was a child. Don’t you see, I adore her.’

‘Yes, I see that. It’s obvious that you adore her. I adore my wife, Luisa, as well,’ I added, in order to counter what he clearly considered to be the extraordinary nature of his adoration of Inès. ‘But we’re more or less the same age, and so it’s difficult to know which of us will die first.’

‘You adore her? Don’t make me laugh. You don’t even own a camera. You’re not even much interested in remembering her exactly as she was—were you to lose her—in being able to see her again when it will no longer be possible for you to look at her.’

This time, fat Viana’s remark did bother me a little, I found it impertinent. I noticed this because there was something wounded and involuntary about my ensuing silence, and something fearful too, as if suddenly I no longer dared to ask him anything and as if, from that moment, I had no option but to listen to whatever he chose to tell me. It was as if that abrupt, indelicate remark had taken over the conversation entirely. And I realised that my fear came also from his use of the past tense. He had said ‘exactly as she was’ when referring to Luisa, when he should have said ‘exactly as she is’. I decided to leave him and go back up to our room. I wanted to see Luisa and to sleep by her side, to lie down and reclaim my space in the double bed that would doubtless be identical to the one shared by Inès and Viana, modern hotel rooms being all the same. I could simply bring the conversation to a close. I was feeling rather angry. However, the silence lasted only a few seconds because Viana continued talking, without this pause I have made, writing, and it was too late then not to continue listening to him.

‘What you say is very true, but it hardly takes a genius to work that out. It’s actually quite hard to know who will die first, it’s tantamount to wanting to know the order of our dying. And to know that, you have to be a part of that order, if you know what I mean. Not to disrupt it, that would be impossible, but to be a part of it. Listen, when I said that I adore Inès, I meant it literally. I adore her. It’s not just a turn of phrase, a meaningless, common-or-garden expression that you and I can share, for example. What you call “adore” has nothing whatever to do with what I mean by “adore”, we share the word because there is no other, but not the thing described. I adore her and have adored her ever since I first met her, and I know that I’ll continue to adore her for many years to come. That’s why it can’t last much longer, because that feeling has been the same inside me for too many years now, without variation or attenuation. There will be no variation on my part, it will become unbearable, it already is, and because, one day, it will all become unbearable to me, she will have to die before me, when I can no longer stand my adoration of her. One day, I’ll have to kill her, don’t you see?’

Having said that, Viana lifted his dripping foot out of the water and rested it carefully and distastefully on the grass, the sodden silk sock out of the water.

‘You’ll catch cold,’ I said. ‘You’d better take off your sock.’

Viana did as I suggested and immediately removed the drenched sock, mechanically, indifferently. For a few seconds, he held it, still distastefully, between two fingers and then draped it over the back of his lounger, where it began to drip (the smell of wet cloth). Now he had one bare foot: the other was still covered by a pale blue sock and a rabidly red moccasin. The bare foot was wet and the covered foot very dry. I found it hard to look away from the former, but I think that fixing my gaze on something was a way of deceiving my ears, of pretending that what mattered were Viana’s feet and not what he had said, that one day he would have to kill Inès. I preferred to think he hadn’t said that.

‘What are you saying?’ I didn’t want to continue the conversation, but I said precisely the words that obliged him to do so: ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Crazy? What I’m going to tell you now is, in my view, totally logical,’ replied Viana and he again smoothed his non-existent hair. ‘I’ve known Inès since she was a child, since she was seven years old. Now she’s twenty-three. She’s the daughter of a couple who were great friends of mine until five years ago, but who no longer are—it’s perfectly normal, they’re furious that their eighteen-year-old daughter went off to live with a friend of theirs whom they’d always liked and respected, and now they want nothing more to do with me, and not even, almost, with her. I often used to go to their house and I’d see Inès, and I adored her. She adored me, too, but in a different way, of course. She couldn’t know at the time, but I knew at once, and I decided to prepare myself, to wait eleven years until she came of age, I didn’t want to act in haste and ruin everything, and during the last few months of that period, I was the one who had to hold her back. It’s what people call “fixation”, and what I call “adoration”. Not that it was easy, mind, even girls of twelve or thirteen have boys chasing after them, absurd boys who want to play at being adults from early on. They lack all self-control and can cause the girls great harm. I worked out that by the time she was eighteen, I would be nearly fifty, and so I took good care of myself, for her sake, I took enormous care of myself, although I couldn’t do anything about my weight—your metabolism changes as you get older—nor about my baldness, there’s still no satisfactory remedy for that, and as I’m sure you’ll agree, a toupee is too undignified, so I had to rule that out. But I spent eleven years going to gyms and eating healthily and having check-ups every three months—because I have an absolute horror of operations; avoiding other women, avoiding diseases; and, of course, preparing myself mentally: listening to the same records she listened to, learning games, watching loads of TV, children’s programmes and years of ads, I know all the jingles by heart. As for reading matter, well, you can imagine, first I read comics, then adventure books, a few romantic novels, Spanish literature when she was studying that at school, as well as Catalan literature, Manelic and the wolf and all that, and I still read whatever she happens to be reading, American writers mainly, there are hundreds of them. I’ve played a lot of tennis and squash, done a bit of skiing and, on weekends, I’ve often had to travel to Madrid or San Sebastián just so that she could go to the races, and here we’ve been to all the fiestas in all the villages to see the horses and their riders. You may also have noticed my motorcycle. When I had to, I learned the names and heights of every basketball player, although now she’s lost interest in the game. And you’ve seen how I dress, although, of course, in summer, anything goes.’ And Viana made an eloquent gesture with his right hand, as if taking in his whole outfit. ‘Do you see what I’m saying: all these years, I’ve led a parallel existence to my own (I’m a lawyer, by the way, specialising in divorce), first a childhood existence then an adolescent one—I was the king of video games—and since I couldn’t go to the cinema with her, I’d go on my own to see all those teenage films about thugs and extraterrestrials. I’ve led a parallel existence, but one that lacks all continuity, because it’s incredibly hard to keep up to date, young people’s fads change all the time. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You said that you and your wife are about the same age, so your field of reference will be the same or very similar. You’ll have listened to the same songs at the same time, you’ll have seen the same films and read the same books, followed the same fashions, you’ll remember the same events and have experienced them with the same intensity and in the same years. It’s easy for you. Just imagine if it wasn’t like that, imagine the long silences in your conversations. And the worst thing would be having to explain everything, every reference, every allusion, every joke about your own past or your own age, your own time. You might as well not bother. I’ve had a long wait and, what’s more, I’ve had to reject my own past and create—as far as possible—another one that coincides with hers, with what will become her past.’

Viana paused for a moment, very briefly, as if a fly had brushed past him. It was night, our eyes were accustomed now to the darkness and to the light from the water. We were on an island, I had no watch. Luisa was sleeping and Inès was sleeping too, each in her respective room and double bed, perhaps lying diagonally across the bed because neither Viana nor I was by her side. Maybe they missed us in their sleep. Or maybe not, maybe they felt relieved.

‘But all that efforts over now, it no longer matters. What matters is my adoration, my immutable adoration. That’s so identical to what it was sixteen years ago that I can’t see it changing in the near future. And it would be disastrous if it did change. I’ve been devoted to her for too long now, devoted to her growing up, to her education, I couldn’t live any other way. For her, though, it’s different. She’s fulfilled her childhood dream, her childhood fixation—five years ago, she was as happy or even happier than I was when she came to live with me, because my house had been entirely designed around her and there was nothing she wanted that she didn’t have. But her character is still developing, she’s still very dependent on novelty, she’s drawn to the outside world, she’s looking around to see what else there is, what awaits her beyond me, and she’s a little tired, I think. Not just of me, but also of our strange, anomalous situation, she misses having a conventional life, misses the close relationship she had with her parents. Don’t think I don’t understand that, on the contrary, I foresaw it would happen, but the fact that I understand doesn’t help one iota. We all have our own life to lead, and we only have the one life, and none of us is prepared not to live that life according to our own desires—apart from those who have no desires, they’re the majority actually. People can say what they like, and speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance and resignation, but it’s all false: the norm is for people to think they desire whatever comes their way, whatever happens to them, what they achieve as they go along or what’s given to them, and they have no original desires. But whether those desires are preconceived or not, we each care about our own life and, compared with that, the lives of others matter only insofar as they’re interwoven with and form part of our own life, and insofar as disposing of those lives without consideration or scruple could end up affecting our own; there are, after all, laws, and punishment might follow. My adoration is excessive—that’s what makes it adoration. The length of time I had to wait was excessive too. And now I continue to wait, but the nature of that waiting has been turned on its head. Before, I was waiting to gain something, now all I can expect is for all this to end. Before, I was waiting to be given a gift, now I expect only loss. Before, I was waiting for growth, now I expect decay. Not just mine, you understand, but hers too, and that’s something I’m not prepared for. You’re probably thinking that I’m making too many assumptions, that nothing is entirely foreseeable; as I said before, the order of our dying is equally unforeseeable. You’re probably thinking that life is unforeseeable too, and that maybe Inès won’t tire of me or leave me. You’re thinking that I might be wrong to fear the passing of time, that perhaps she and I will grow old together, as you suggested earlier and as you’re convinced that you and your wife will, because I heard what you said, your words weren’t lost on me. But if that were the case, if all those years together did lie ahead of us, my adoration would still lead me to the same situation. Or do you imagine that I could allow my adoration to die? Do you think I could watch her age and deteriorate without resorting to the sole remedy that exists, namely, that she should die first? Do you imagine that, having known her as a seven-year-old (a seven-year-old), I could bear to see Inès in her forties, much less her fifties, with no trace of childhood left? Don’t be absurd. It’s like asking some particularly long-lived father to endure and celebrate the old age of his own children. Parents refuse to see their children transformed into old people, they hate them and jump over them and see only their grandchildren, if they have any. Time is always opposed to what it originated—to what is.’