I never guaranteed him anything, I never said Yes.’
‘Said Yes to what? Never said Yes to what?’
Díaz-Varela gave me his usual hard look, which somehow never felt hard, but, rather, drew one in. I thought I caught a glimmer of irritation in his eyes, but, like all glimmers, it didn’t last, because he answered me at once and, as he did so, that hard look vanished.
‘What do you think? To his request. “Get rid of me,” he said. “Don’t tell me how or when or where, let it be a surprise, we have a month and a half or two months, find a way and do it. I don’t care what method you use. The quicker the better. The less suffering and pain the better. The sooner the better. Do what you like, hire someone to shoot me, or to run me down as I’m crossing the street, or have a wall collapse on top of me or make my brakes fail or my lights, I don’t know, I don’t want to know or think about it, you do the thinking, whatever you like, whatever you can, whatever occurs to you. You must do me this favour, you must save me from what awaits me otherwise. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m incapable of killing myself or flying to some place in Switzerland knowing that I’m going there in order to die among strangers, I mean, who could possibly agree to such a grim journey, travelling towards your own execution, it would be like dying over and over while you were on the plane and while you were there. I prefer to wake up here each morning with at least a semblance of normality and to carry on with my life while I can, but always with the fear and the hope that this day will be my last. With the uncertainty too, that above all, because uncertainty is the only thing that can help me; and I know I can bear that. What I can’t bear is knowing that it all depends on me. It has to depend on you. Get rid of me before it’s too late, you must grant me this favour.” That, more or less, was what he said to me. He was desperate and terribly afraid too. But he wasn’t out of control. He had thought about it a lot. Almost, you might say, coldly. And he could see no other solution. He really couldn’t.’
‘And what was your answer?’ I asked, and as soon as I had, I realized again that I was thus giving his story some measure of credence, however hypothetical and transient, however much I told myself that my question had really been: ‘And always supposing that what you say is true, and let’s imagine for a moment that it is, what was your answer?’ The truth is, of course, that I didn’t put it that way.
‘At first, I refused point-blank, and wouldn’t even let him continue. I told him it was impossible, that it was simply too much to ask, that you couldn’t expect someone else to perform a task that only you could do. That he should either get up the necessary courage to end his own life or else hire a hit man, it wouldn’t be the first time someone had commissioned and paid for his own execution. He said he was perfectly aware that he lacked the necessary courage, but also that he couldn’t bring himself to hire his own killer and then, inevitably, be aware of the how and, almost, the when: once contact had been established, the hit man would set to work, they’re efficient people and don’t hang about, they do what they have to do, then move on to the next job. That wouldn’t be so very different to making the trip to Switzerland, he said, it would still be his decision, it would mean fixing a specific date for his death and renouncing the minor consolation of uncertainty, and the one thing he was incapable of deciding was whether it should be today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. He would keep putting it off from one day to the next, the days would pass and he still wouldn’t have screwed up the necessary courage, the right moment would never come and then the full force of the disease would fall on him, which was what he wanted to avoid at all costs … And I did understand what