all, actually.’
He took a few steps, moved away from his position at my back, but rather than sitting down again beside me, he remained standing, taking refuge this time behind an armchair opposite me. And the truth is I kept my eyes trained on him at all times. I watched his hands and watched his lips, both because they would speak and because that was what I always did, they were my magnet. Then he took off his jacket and, as usual, hung it over the back of the chair. Afterwards, he slowly rolled up his shirtsleeves and although that was normal too – he always had his sleeves rolled up when he was at home, indeed that was the only day I had ever seen him with his cuffs buttoned and then not for long – that gesture now put me even more on my guard, because it’s so often a prelude to action, to some physical effort, and there was none in prospect. When he had finished rolling up his sleeves, he leaned on the back of the armchair, as if about to make a speech. For a few seconds, he stood observing me very intently in a manner I had seen before and yet the same thing happened as on that other occasion: I looked away, feeling troubled by those eyes fixed on mine, by that gaze, which was neither transparent nor penetrating, but perhaps hazy and enveloping or merely indecipherable, and tempered at any rate by his myopia (he was wearing lenses), it was as if those almond eyes were saying to me: ‘Why don’t you understand?’ not impatiently, but regretfully. And his posture was no different from what it had been on other evenings, when he had spoken to me about Colonel Chabert or about something else that had occurred to him or that he had noticed, and I would listen to whatever it was with pleasure. ‘On other late afternoons or evenings,’ I thought, ‘the twilight hour, which is doubtless the worst time for Luisa as it is for most people, the hardest time of day to bear, on those evenings when he and I would meet’ – I realized at once that I was thinking in the past tense, as if we had already said goodbye and each already belonged to the other’s day before yesterday; but I continued anyway: ‘On those evenings Javier didn’t go to her house, didn’t visit or distract her or keep her company or lend her a hand, he probably needed to have a rest sometimes – every ten or twelve days – from the persistent sadness of the woman he loved so constantly and for whom he waited with such inexhaustible patience; he would have needed to draw energy from somewhere, from me, from another close relationship, from someone else, so that he could carry that renewed energy back to her. Perhaps I had helped her a little in that way, indirectly, without intending to or imagining that I was, not that it bothered me. Who would he draw that energy from now, if I was no longer at his side? He’ll have no problem replacing me, I’m sure of that.’ And as I thought this, I returned to the present tense.
‘I don’t want to leave any mark on you that has no reason to exist, that has no basis in reality, or has its basis only in what happened, but not in any possible motives or intentions, still less in the original conception, the starting point. Let’s have a look at what you imagine to have happened, at the set of circumstances or story you have constructed for yourself: I ordered Miguel to be killed, making sure to keep myself at a safe distance. I drew up a plan that was not without risks (above all the risk that it might not work), but that left me beyond suspicion. I didn’t go anywhere near the scene of the crime, I wasn’t there, his death had nothing to do with me and it would be quite impossible to connect me with some barmy beggar with whom I had never exchanged so much as a single word. I left it to other people to find out what his problems were and to direct and manipulate his fragile mind. Miguel’s death looked like a tragic accident, a piece of terrible bad luck. Why didn’t I just get a hit man in? That would, apparently, have been far simpler and