in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.’ And just after that, she had said: ‘I miss him all the time, you see. I miss him when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I dream and throughout the whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.’ And then I thought, as I approached – nine, ten: ‘She won’t feel like that now, she will have freed herself from his corpse, from her dead husband, his ghost, who has been kind enough not to come back. She has someone there before her now, and they can use each other to hide their own fate, as lovers do, according to a line I vaguely remember, a line of poetry I read in my adolescence. Her bed will no longer be sad or woeful, a living body will enter it each night, a body whose weight I know well and once greatly enjoyed.’
I saw them turn to look at me as I approached and they sensed my shape or my shadow – eleven, twelve and thirteen – he with horror, as if asking himself: ‘What’s she doing here? Where did she spring from? And why is she coming over? To unmask me?’ But I didn’t see that expression on her face, she was already looking at me with great sympathy, with an open smile, wide and warm, as if she had recognized me instantly. And she had, for she exclaimed:
‘The Prudent Young Woman!’ She had doubtless forgotten my name.
She stood up at once to kiss me on both cheeks and almost embrace me, and her friendliness stopped in its tracks any intention I might have had of saying anything to Díaz-Varela that might turn Luisa against him or cause her to view him with mistrust or stupefaction or disgust or, as she had said, to hate the instigator; nothing that would ruin his life and therefore ruin hers as well – again – and thus ruin their marriage, as it had occurred to me to do only shortly before. ‘Who am I to disturb the universe,’ I thought. ‘Even though others might do it, like this man here, pretending not to know me even though I loved him well and have never done him any harm. The fact that others disrupt and buffet and generally maltreat the universe doesn’t mean that I should follow their example, not even on the pretext that, unlike them, I would be righting a wrong and punishing a possibly guilty man and imposing justice.’ As I said, I cared nothing for justice or injustice. What business were they of mine, for if Díaz-Varela had been right about one thing, as had the lawyer Derville in his fictional world and in his time that does not pass and stays quite still, it was this: ‘Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded.’ And perhaps also when he said: ‘The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country, each on his own account and at his own risk, and not, in principle, subject to mutual contagion, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, each with his own thoughts and particular aims, should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives or lovers whom they once loved the most. Crimes committed in ordinary life are more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest, however incessantly they occur: how could it be any other way, given that society lives alongside them and has been impregnated with their very nature since time immemorial.’ Why should I intervene, or perhaps I should say contravene? If I did, what difference would that make to the order of the universe? Why should I denounce a single crime, which I’m not even sure was a crime, nothing was quite certain, the truth is always a tangled mess. And if it was a premeditated, cold-blooded