unease, or whatever it was, because he quickly added, like someone trying to pour oil on troubled waters: ‘Not that I’m suggesting you’re in love with me or that you’d do absolutely anything for me, nor that you feel intensely drawn to me, not at all. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. I know that you’re very far from having such feelings, that there’s no comparison between what you feel for me after only a brief acquaintance and what I’ve felt for Luisa for years now. I know that I’m just a diversion, an amusement. As you are for me, unless I’m much mistaken, there’s barely any difference. I only mention it as proof that even the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that’s even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that.’
I remained silent, for longer than I wished. I wasn’t sure how to respond, and this time he had left a pause as if prompting me to say something. In just a few sentences, Díaz-Varela had dismissed and demeaned my feelings and revealed his, piercing me with a small, entirely unnecessary barb, for I already knew how he felt despite never having heard him speak so clearly on the subject, and certainly not in such wounding terms. However idiotic they might be, and all feelings are idiotic as soon as you describe or explain or simply give voice to them, he had deemed mine to be far inferior in quality to his feelings for another person, but how could he compare? What did he know about me, always so silent, so prudent? So meek and submissive, so lacking in aspiration, so little inclined to compete and fight, or, rather, not inclined at all. I was not, of course, capable of planning and commissioning a murder, but who knows what might have happened later on, had it festered away for years, our present relationship, or rather the relationship that had existed up until two weeks ago, when everything changed after that conversation with Ruibérriz, the conversation I had overheard. If I hadn’t eavesdropped on them, Díaz-Varela could have continued to wait indefinitely for Luisa’s slow recovery and her predicted falling in love and, meanwhile, not have replaced or discarded me, and I could have continued meeting him on the same terms. And then who wouldn’t start wanting more, who wouldn’t begin to grow impatient and disgruntled, and feel that with the passing of all those identical months and years, with the mere accumulation of time, he or she had acquired certain rights as if something as insignificant and neutral as the passage of the days could be considered some kind of merit mark for the one traversing or perhaps enduring them and neither giving up nor giving in. The person who never expected anything ends up making demands, the person who was all devotion and modesty turns tyrant and iconoclast, the person who once begged for smiles or attention or kisses from her beloved plays hard to get and grows proud, and is miserly with her favours to that same beloved, who has succumbed to the drip-drip of time. The passing of time exacerbates and intensifies any storm, even though there wasn’t the tiniest cloud on the horizon at the beginning. We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Each morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday – the balance of power – that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us. And yet quite the opposite is true, but time conceals this from us with its treacherous minutes and its sly seconds, until a strange, unthinkable day arrives, when nothing is as it always was: when two daughters, their father’s beneficiaries, leave him to die in a garret, without a penny to his name;