when wills deemed unfavourable to the living are burned; when mothers rob their children and husbands their wives; when a wife, in order that she might live contentedly with her lover, kills her husband or else uses her husband’s love to drive him into madness or imbecility; when a woman administers lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to benefit the bastard child she bore the man she now loves, although who knows how long that love will last; when a widow who inherited position and wealth from her soldier husband fallen at the battle of Eylau in the coldest of cold winters denies that she knows him and accuses him of being an impostor when, after many years and many hardships, he manages to return from the dead; when Luisa will beg Díaz-Varela, whom she took such a long time to see, will beg him, please, not to leave her, but to remain by her side, and when she will abjure her former love for Deverne, which will be dismissed as nothing and not to be compared with the love she now professes for this second, unfaithful husband, who is now threatening to leave her; when Díaz-Varela will implore me not to go, but to stay and share his pillow for ever, and will joke about the stubborn, ingenuous love he felt for Luisa for so very long and that led him to murder a friend, and will say to himself and to me: ‘How blind I was, why could I not see you, when there was still time’; a strange, unimaginable day, on which I will plan to murder Luisa, who stands between us and doesn’t even know that there is an ‘us’ and against whom I bear no grudge, and I might just see it through, because on that day, everything would be possible. Yes, it’s all a matter of time, infuriating time, but our time is over, time, as far as we’re concerned, has run out, time, which consolidates and prolongs even while, without our noticing, it is simultaneously rotting and ruining us and turning the tables on us. I will not see that day, because for me, as for Lady Macbeth, there is no ‘hereafter’, fortunately or unfortunately, I am safe from that beneficent or harmful deferral.
‘Who told you I’m not in love with you? What do you know? I’ve never talked to you about it. And you’ve never asked me.’
‘Oh, come on now, don’t exaggerate,’ he replied, unsurprised. His last words were pure acting, he knew exactly how I felt or had felt up until two weeks before. I may well have felt the same then, but my feelings were stained or besmirched by things entirely incompatible with the state of being in love. He knew exactly how I felt, the loved one always does, if he’s in his right mind and isn’t himself in love, because in that case he won’t be able to tell and will misinterpret the signs. But he wasn’t in love, and didn’t want me to love him, and, to be fair, had done little to encourage me. – ‘If you were in love with me,’ he added, ‘you wouldn’t be so horrified by what you’ve discovered, nor would you have drawn your conclusions so quickly. You would be in suspense, waiting for me to provide some acceptable explanation. You would be thinking that perhaps, for some reason unknown to you, I had no alternative. And you would be prepared to accept that, you would be happy to deceive yourself.’
I ignored these cunning comments, which were intended to lead me down a previously chosen path. I responded only to the first of them.
‘Maybe I’m not exaggerating. As you well know, I may not be exaggerating at all. It’s just that you don’t want the responsibility, although I realize that isn’t the right word to use: no one is responsible for someone else falling in love with them. Don’t worry, I’m not making you responsible for some idiotic feelings that are entirely my concern. But you will, nevertheless, perceive them as a minor burden. If Luisa were aware of the intensity of your feelings for her (it may be that in her current self-absorbed state, she sees only the surface, your gallantry and affection for the widow of your best friend), let alone if she found out what those feelings had led to, then she would experience them as an unbearable burden. She might