had become tinged with a kind of sorrow or slight despair – slight because it was retrospective – in the face of something irremediable, and he had abandoned all cynicism, as if it had been pure artifice. He had started to mix up his tenses too, present and past and imperfect, as happens sometimes when someone relives a bad experience or is recounting a process from which he only believes he has emerged, but is not yet sure. His voice had gradually, not suddenly, taken on a truthful tone, and that made him more credible. But perhaps that was fake too. It’s horrible not knowing, because what had gone before had also seemed true, and he had spoken in the same tone then, well, not the same perhaps, it had been different, but equally truthful. Now he had fallen silent and I could ask him about the incomprehensible references he had let slip. Or perhaps he hadn’t let them slip at all, but had introduced them deliberately and was awaiting my reaction, knowing that I would pick up on them.
‘You mentioned Deverne asking you a favour and about him possibly concealing something. What favour was that? What would he have to conceal? I don’t understand.’ – And as I said that, I thought: ‘What the hell am I doing, how can I talk about all this so politely, how can I question him like this about the details of a murder? And why are we talking about it at all? It’s hardly a proper topic of conversation, or only if it had happened many years ago, as with the story about Anne de Breuil who had been killed by Athos before he was Athos. Whereas Javier is still Javier, and hasn’t had time to be transformed into someone else.’
He again gently squeezed my shoulders, it was almost a caress. I had not turned round when I spoke, I didn’t need to be able to see him now, that touch was neither unfamiliar nor worrying. I was filled by a sense of unreality, as if this were another day, a day prior to my eavesdropping, when I still knew nothing and there was no threat, no horror, only provisional pleasure and the resigned waiting of the unrequited lover, waiting to be either dismissed or driven from his side when it was Luisa’s turn to be in love, or when she at least allowed him to fall asleep each night and wake each morning in her bed. It occurred to me now to think that this would not be long in coming. I hadn’t seen her for ages, not even from a distance. Who knows how she would have evolved, if she had recovered from the blow, or to what extent Díaz-Varela had managed to inoculate her with his presence, if he had made himself indispensable to her in her solitary widow’s life with children who sometimes weighed on her, when she wanted to shut herself away and cry and do nothing. Just as I had tried to become indispensable to him in his solitary bachelor’s life, except that I had done so timidly and without conviction or determination, as if admitting defeat right from the start.
On another day, Díaz-Varela’s hands might have slid from my shoulders down to my breasts, and not only would I have allowed him to do that, I would have mentally encouraged him: ‘Undo a couple of buttons and slip your hands under my jersey or my blouse,’ we think to ourselves, or even plead. ‘Come on, do it now, what are you waiting for?’ And an impulse flashed through me to ask him, silently, of course, to do just that, such is the force of expectation, the irrational persistence of desire, which often makes us forget the circumstances and who is who, and erases the opinion we have of the person arousing our desire, and, at that moment, my predominant feeling was contempt. But he wouldn’t give in to that plea today, he was even more aware than I was that this was not another day, but the one on which he had chosen to tell me about his conspiracy and his actions and then say goodbye to me for ever, because after that conversation, we could not continue to meet, that would be impossible, and we both knew that. And so he did not slowly slide his hands down, but quickly lifted them up like someone who has been told off for taking liberties or