time together, he had been less distracted than he seemed and had studied me carefully, and, foolishly, I found that thought vaguely flattering, or maybe that was just a remnant of my infatuation; such feelings never end suddenly, nor are they transformed instantly into loathing, scorn, shame or mere stupor, there is a long road to be travelled before one arrives at those possible replacement feelings, there is a troubled period of infiltrations and mixtures, of hybridization and contamination, and the state of being infatuated or in love never entirely ends until it becomes indifference or, rather, tedium, until one can think: ‘What’s the point of living in the past, why bother even thinking about seeing Javier again. I can’t even be bothered to remember him. I want to drive that whole inexplicable time from my mind, like a bad dream. And that’s not so very difficult, given that I’m no longer the person I was. The only snag is that, even though I’m not that person, there are often moments when I can’t forget who I was and then, quite simply, my very name is loathsome to me and I wish I wasn’t me. At least a memory is less troublesome than a living creature, although a memory can, at times, be somewhat devouring. But this memory no longer is, no, it no longer is.’
As is only to be expected and as is only natural, such thoughts took time to arrive. And I could not help considering from a hundred different angles (or perhaps it was only ten angles repeated over and over) what Díaz-Varela had told me, his two versions, if they were two versions, and pondering details that had remained unclear in both, for there is no story, whether real or invented, without blind spots or contradictions or obscurities or mistakes, and in that respect – that of the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative – it didn’t really matter which was which.
I revisited the articles I had read on the Internet about Desvern’s death, and in one of them I found the sentences that kept going round and round in my head: ‘The autopsy revealed that the victim had been stabbed sixteen times by his murderer. Every blow struck a vital organ, and according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five of the wounds proved fatal.’ I didn’t quite understand the difference between a fatal wound and one that struck a vital organ. At first sight, to a layman, they seemed to be the same thing. But that was only a secondary cause of my unease: if a pathologist had been involved and had drawn up that report, if there had been an autopsy, as was inevitable after any violent death and certainly after a homicide, how was it possible that no one noticed a ‘generalized metastasis throughout the body’, which Díaz-Varela had told me was the diagnosis given by Desvern’s consultant? On that afternoon, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask Díaz-Varela, the penny hadn’t dropped, and now I didn’t want to or couldn’t phone him, still less about that, he would have felt suspicious, wary or simply weary, he might have come up with other ways of neutralizing me, when he saw that his explanations or the act he had put on had failed to appease me. I could understand that the newspapers might not have made much of it or that the information wasn’t even given to them, because it bore no relation to what had happened, but it seemed very strange that no one had informed Luisa. When I spoke to her, it was clear that she knew nothing about Deverne’s illness, which was precisely as he had wanted, according, that is, to his friend and indirect executioner, the ‘instigator’ of his death. I could also imagine what Díaz-Varela’s response would be, if I had been able to ask him: ‘Do you really think that a pathologist examining a guy who’s received sixteen stab wounds is going to take the trouble to look any further and inquire into the victim’s previous state of health? He may not even have opened him up and so wouldn’t know; maybe he didn’t even carry out a proper autopsy and merely filled in the form with his eyes shut: it was obvious what Miguel had died from.’ And he may well have been right: that had been the attitude of the two negligent surgeons two centuries before, despite being under orders from Napoleon