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