her faulty memory (‘María Dolz,’ I added). Javier must have been the person she had mentioned earlier, referring to him as ‘one of Miguel’s best friends’. He was, at any rate, the man I had seen that morning at the wheel of what had once been Deverne’s car, the man who had picked up the children from the café, presumably to take them to school, a little later than usual. He was not, therefore, the chauffeur, as I had thought. Perhaps Luisa had felt obliged to dispense with a chauffeur; when someone is widowed, their first step is always to try to reduce expenses, it’s like a reflex reaction of vulnerability and retreat, even if they’ve inherited a fortune. I did not, of course, know the state of her finances, although I imagined she was quite well off, but she might still have felt her situation to be precarious even if it wasn’t, the whole world seems to totter after the death of someone important to us, nothing seems solid or firm, and the person most closely affected tends to wonder: ‘What’s the point of this and why bother with that, what’s the point of money or a business and all its complications, why a house and a library, why go out to work and make plans, why have children, why anything? Nothing lasts long enough because everything ends and, once it’s over, it was never enough, even if it lasted a hundred years. I only had Miguel with me for a few years, so why should anything he left behind, anything that survives him, last any longer. Not even the money or the house or me or the children. We are all merely in abeyance and under threat.’ And there is also an impulse towards death: ‘I want to be where he is, and the only place where we could coincide is the past, in that place of not being but of having been. He is past, whereas I am still present. If I were also past, at least I would be the same as him in that respect, which would be something, and I would be in no position to miss him or remember him. I would be on the same level as him or in the same dimension, in the same time, and we would not be left alone in this precarious world in which everything familiar is being taken away from us. Nothing more can be taken away from us if we are not here. Nothing more can die on us if we are already dead.’
He was a very calm fellow, Javier Díaz-Varela, virile and handsome. Even though he was clean-shaven, there was still a hint of beard, a slight bluish shadow, especially on his square chin, like that of a comic-book hero (depending on the angle and on the light, he had or didn’t have a cleft chin). A little chest hair was visible above his shirt, which he wore with the top button undone, because, unlike Desvern, he wasn’t wearing a tie, Desvern always used to wear one, but his friend was slightly younger. He had delicate features, almond eyes with a vaguely myopic or abstracted expression, rather long lashes and a full, fleshy, shapely mouth, so much so that his lips looked like those of a woman transplanted on to a man’s face, it was very difficult not to notice them, I mean, not to keep staring at them, they were like a magnet for the eyes, both when speaking and when silent. It made you feel like kissing them or touching them or using your finger to trace their outline – which looked as if it had been drawn with a fine pencil – and then, with your fingertip, pressing the fleshy part, at once firm and soft. He was discreet too, allowing Professor Rico to hold forth at will without attempting to compete with him or outshine him (not that this would have been possible). He also had a sense of humour, because he knew how to play along with the Professor and act to some extent as his straight man, allowing him to show off before these strangers or semi-strangers, for it was clear at once that the Professor was a flirtatious man, the sort who sets his theoretical cap at a woman in almost any circumstance. By ‘theoretical’ I mean that his flirtatiousness lacked any real intention and was not seriously aimed at seducing anyone (certainly not me or