to, and all you can think is: ‘If he or she were to come back today …’ But they never do. He would prove it to Luisa, in whom, according to Desvern, he, the husband, would carry on or continue to live for a while longer. Perhaps it would be like that, perhaps he was right. Until he swept him away. Until he erased his memory and all other traces and supplanted him entirely.
‘No, I don’t deny it, and of course I don’t mind. But our views of people change a lot, especially if the person who painted the original portrait can no longer go on retouching it and the portrait is left in the hands of the portrayed. The latter can correct and redraw every line, one by one, and leave the original artist looking like a liar. Or just plain wrong, or like a bad artist, superficial and lacking in perception. “They gave me an entirely false impression of him,” someone looking at the picture might think. “This man isn’t as he was described to me at all, he has substance, passion, integrity and maturity.” It happens every day, Miguel, all the time. People start out seeing one thing and end up seeing quite the opposite. They start out loving and end up hating, or shifting from indifference to adoration. We can never be sure of what is going to be vital to us and who we will consider to be important. Our convictions are transient and fragile, even the ones we believe to be the strongest. It’s the same with our feelings. We shouldn’t trust ourselves.’
Deverne would have sensed a touch of wounded pride and ignored it.
‘Even so,’ he would have said, ‘even if I don’t think it’s possible, what does it matter if it does happen afterwards, after my death? I’ll know nothing about it. But I would have died convinced of the impossibility of such a bond between you and her, it’s what you think will happen that counts, because what you see and experience in your final moment is the end of the story, the end of your personal story. You know that everything will carry on without you, that nothing stops because you have disappeared. But that “afterwards” doesn’t concern you. What matters is that you stop, because then everything stops, the world is frozen in that moment when the person whose life is ending finally ends, even though we know that this isn’t true in actual fact. But that “actual fact” doesn’t matter. It’s the one moment when there is no future, in which the present seems to us unchangeable and eternal, because we won’t witness any more events or any more changes. There have been people who have tried to bring forward the publication of a book so that their father would see it in print and die thinking that their son was an accomplished writer; what did it matter if, after that, the son never wrote another line? There have been desperate attempts to bring about a momentary reconciliation between two people so that the person dying would believe that they had made their peace and everything was sorted and settled; what did it matter if, two days after the death, the hostile parties had a blazing row? What mattered was what existed immediately before that death. There have been people who have pretended to forgive a dying man so that he can die in peace or more happily; what did it matter if, the following morning, his forgiver hoped privately to see him rot in hell? There have been those who have lied their socks off at the deathbed of a wife or husband and convinced them that they had never been unfaithful and had loved them unwaveringly and constantly; what did it matter if, a month later, they had moved in with their lover of many years? The only definitive truth is what the person about to die sees and believes immediately before his or her departure, because nothing exists after that. There is a great chasm between what Mussolini, executed by his enemies, believed and what Franco, on his deathbed, believed, the latter surrounded by his loved ones and adored by his compatriots, whatever those hypocrites may say now. My father once told me that Franco kept a photograph in his office of Mussolini strung up like a pig in the petrol station in Milan where they took his corpse and that of his lover, Clara Petacci,