I didn’t even know if we would meet again, if there would be another occasion: when I left there, I would be lost in a mist.
She didn’t wait for one of the servants to answer, because there was at least one maid, who had answered when I arrived. She got up and went over to the door and picked up the entryphone. I heard her say ‘Hello’ and then ‘Hi. I’ll open the door for you.’ It was obviously someone she knew well, someone she was expecting or who dropped by every day at about that time, because there wasn’t a hint of surprise or excitement in her voice, he could even have been the boy from the grocer’s delivering some shopping. She waited with the door open for the person to cross the small stretch of garden that separated the street door from the house itself; she lived in a detached house, there are various such developments in central parts of Madrid, not just in El Viso, but behind Paseo de la Castellana and in Fuente del Berro and other places, miraculously hidden away from the appalling traffic and the perpetual generalized chaos. I realized then that she hadn’t actually talked to me about Deverne either. She hadn’t spoken about him at all or described his character or his manner, she hadn’t said how much she missed a particular trait of his or something they used to do together, or how dreadful it was that he was no longer alive, adding, for example, particularly someone who had enjoyed life so much, which had been my impression of him. I realized that I knew no more about that man than when I had arrived. It was as if his anomalous death had darkened or erased everything else, which happens sometimes: the way a person’s life ends can be so unexpected or so painful, so striking or so premature or so tragic – occasionally even picturesque or ridiculous or sinister – that it becomes impossible to speak of that person without him being instantly swallowed up or contaminated by that ending, without the dramatic manner of his death blackening the whole of his previous existence and, even more unfairly, stealing that existence from him. The spectacular death so dominates the person who died that it becomes very difficult to recall him without that ultimate annihilating fact immediately hovering over one’s recollection, or even to remember how he was during the long years when no one suspected that the heavy curtain would fall on him so abruptly. Everything is seen in the light of that denouement, or rather the light of that denouement is so blindingly bright that it prevents us recovering what went before and being able to smile at the reminiscence or fantasy; you could say that those who die such a death die more deeply, more completely, or perhaps they die twice over, in reality and in the memory of others, because their memory is forever lost in the glare of that stupid culminating event, is soured and distorted and also perhaps poisoned.
It might also be that Luisa was still in the phase of extreme egotism, that is, capable of seeing only her own misfortune and not so much Desvern’s, despite the concern she expressed for his final moments, which he must have known were his last. The world belongs so much to the living and so little to the dead – although it may well be that they all remain on earth and are, doubtless, far more numerous – that the former tend to think that the death of a loved one is something that has happened more to them than to the deceased, who is, after all, the person who has died. He is the one who has had to say goodbye, almost always against his will, he is the one who has lost everything that was to come (the person, for example, in the case of Deverne, who will not see his children grow up or change), who has had to renounce his desire to know and his curiosity, who left plans unfulfilled and words unspoken, thinking that there would always be time later on, he is the one who will not be there; if he was an artist, he is the one who will be unable to finish a book or a film or a painting or a composition, or if he was only the recipient of those, the one who won’t be able to