only once, but enough to sense his love and solicitude for her and her obliviousness and blindness to him. Now it was all changed. They were both talking vivaciously, hanging on each other’s every word, occasionally gazing into each other’s eyes without speaking, or holding hands across the table. He was wearing a wedding ring, they must have got married in a civil ceremony at some point, perhaps very recently, perhaps the day before yesterday or even yesterday. She looked much better, and his looks had certainly not deteriorated, there was Díaz-Varela with those same lips, whose movements I followed at a distance – some habits we never lose or else recover immediately, as if they were automatic. Unwittingly, I made a gesture with my hand, as if to touch those lips from afar. The novelist’s girlfriend, the only one of the guests who occasionally glanced in my direction, noticed this and asked kindly:
‘Sorry, did you want something?’ She perhaps thought I had been signalling to her.
‘No, no, don’t worry.’ And I waved my hand, adding: ‘Just personal stuff.’
I must have looked if not upset, then troubled. Fortunately, the other guests were offering endless toasts and talking very loudly. Worryingly, one of them was beginning to sing to himself (I heard the words ‘Ay de mi niña, mi niña, Virgen del Puerto’), but I’ve no idea why they should all resemble performers in a flamenco show, because the novelist wasn’t like that at all, he was wearing an argyle sweater, the kind of glasses a rapist or maniac might wear, and had the look of a neurotic, who, for some incomprehensible reason, had a very pleasant, attractive girlfriend and sold a lot of books – a pretentious con trick, each and every one of them – which is why we had taken him to that rather expensive restaurant. I offered up a prayer – a short prayer to the Virgen del Puerto, even though I had no idea who she was – that the song would go no further. I didn’t want to be disturbed. I couldn’t take my eyes off that stage-like table, and suddenly a sentence from those now old newspapers started going round and round in my head, the same newspapers that had carried the news for just two wretched days, then fallen silent about it for ever: ‘He hovered on the brink of life and death for five hours, during which time he never recovered consciousness; the victim finally succumbed late that evening, with the doctors unable to do anything more to save him.’
‘Five hours in an operating theatre,’ I thought. ‘It’s just not possible that, after five whole hours, the doctors wouldn’t have noticed that “generalized metastasis throughout the body”, which is what Javier told me they had told Desvern.’ And then it seemed to me that I saw clearly – or at least more clearly – that the illness had never existed, unless the fact of those five hours was false or erroneous; after all, the newspaper reports didn’t even agree about which hospital the dying man had been taken to. Nothing was conclusive, of course, and Ruibérriz’s version hadn’t actually contradicted Díaz-Varela’s. That didn’t mean a great deal, though, because it all depended on how much of the truth Díaz-Varela had revealed to Ruibérriz when he first gave him that cold-blooded commission. I suppose it was irritation that led me to that momentary belief – well, it lasted longer than a moment, that is, for at least some of the time I was in the Chinese restaurant – the belief that I could see things more clearly (later, it all seemed far more obscure, when I went home, and the couple were no longer there and Jacobo was waiting for me). It irritated me, I think, to see that Javier had got what he wanted, to discover that things had worked out exactly as he had foreseen. I did feel some resentment towards him, even though I had never had any real hopes and certainly couldn’t accuse him of having given me false hopes. It wasn’t moral indignation that I felt, nor a desire for justice, but something much more basic and perhaps more mean-spirited. I really didn’t care about justice or injustice. I was doubtless suffering from retrospective jealousy or spite, from which, I imagine, none of us is immune. ‘Look at them,’ I thought, ‘there they are, at the end of all that patient waiting, of all that time: she is