they are incapable of achieving either of those qualities.
Yes, everything becomes attenuated, but it’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits, as cadaverous as ruined tympana with their fractured inscriptions, past matter, dumb matter, almost indecipherable, nearly meaningless, absurd remnants preserved for no reason, because they can never be put together again, and they give out less light than darkness, are not so much memory as forgetting. And yet there they are, and no one destroys them or pieces together their sundry fragments scattered or lost centuries ago: they are kept there like small treasures or out of superstition, as valuable witnesses to the fact that someone once existed and died and had a name, even though we cannot see the whole person and reconstructing him is impossible, even though no one cares at all about that someone who is now no one. The name of Miguel Desvern will not vanish entirely, even though I never actually knew him and merely enjoyed watching him from a distance, every morning, as he breakfasted with his wife. The same is true of the fictitious names of Colonel Chabert and Madame Ferraud, of the Count de la Fère and Milady de Winter or, as she was in her youth, Anne de Breuil, who, with her hands tied behind her back, was hanged from a tree only mysteriously not to die and to return, ‘belle comme les amours’. Yes, the dead are quite wrong to come back, and yet almost all of them do, they won’t give up, and they strive to become a burden to the living until the living shake them off in order to move on. We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to silence that past matter, and sometimes we hear an almost imperceptible breathing, like that of a dying soldier thrown naked into a grave along with his dead companions, or perhaps like the imaginary groans of those companions, like the muffled sighs which, on some nights, he still thought he could hear, perhaps because he lay cheek by jowl with them for so long and because he so nearly shared their fate, was on the point of becoming one of them and perhaps was one of them, which means that his subsequent adventures, his wanderings in Paris, his re-infatuation and his hardships and his longing to be restored, were like those of fragments of gravestones in a room in a museum, of a few ruined tympana with illegible, fractured inscriptions, of the shadow of a trace, an echo of an echo, a tiny curve, a piece of ash, a scrap of past, dumb matter that refused to pass or to remain dumb. I could have played that role for Deverne, but I couldn’t do that either. Or perhaps I didn’t want even his most tenuous lament to filter into the world, through me.
That process of attenuation must have begun, as all such processes do as soon as something ends, the day after my last visit to Díaz-Varela and my farewell to him, just as the attenuation of Luisa’s grief doubtless began on the day after her husband’s death, even though she could only see that day as the first day of her eternal sorrow.
It was dark by the time I left, and on that occasion, I left without the slightest hint of a doubt. I had never felt sure that there would be a next time, that I would return, that I would ever again touch his lips or, of course, go to bed with him, everything was always very vague between us, as if each time we met, we had to start all over, as if nothing ever accumulated, as if no sediment built up, as if we had never covered that territory before, and as if what happened one evening was no guarantee – not even a sign or a probability – that the same thing would happen on another evening, in the near or distant future; only a posteriori would I discover that it would, but that was never any help when it came to the next opportunity; it was always an unknown, there was always the lurking possibility that there would be no next time, although there was also, of course, the possibility that there would, otherwise what