to be put on display and publicly mocked, and that whenever visitors expressed shock and bewilderment on seeing the photograph, Franco would say: “Yes, take a good look: that’s never going to happen to me.” And he was right, he made sure that it didn’t. He doubtless died happy – if such a thing is possible – believing that everything would continue as he had ordained. Many people console themselves for this great injustice or for their rage with the thought: “If he were to come back today …” or “Given the way things have turned out, he must be spinning in his grave,” forgetting that no one ever comes back or spins in his grave or knows what happens once he has expired. It’s like thinking that someone who has not yet been born should care about what’s going on in the world. To someone who does not yet exist everything is, inevitably, a matter of complete indifference, just as it is for someone who has died. Both are nothing, neither possesses any consciousness, the former cannot even sense what its life will be and the latter cannot recall it, as if he or she had never had a life. They are on the same plane, that is, they neither exist nor know anything, however hard that is for us to accept. What does it matter to me what happens once I am gone? All that counts is what I can believe and foresee now. I believe that, in my absence, it would better for my children if you were around. I foresee that Luisa would recover sooner and suffer a little less if you were on hand as a friend. I can’t fathom other people’s conjectures, even yours or Luisa’s, I can only know my own, and I can’t imagine you two in any other way. So I ask you again, if anything bad should happen to me, give me your word that you’ll take care of them.’
Díaz-Varela might still have disputed certain points with him.
‘Yes, you’re right in part, but not about one thing: not having been born is not the same as having died, because the person who dies always leaves some trace behind him and he knows that. He knows, too, that he’ll know nothing about it, but that he will, nonetheless, leave his mark in the form of memories. He knows he’ll be missed, as you yourself said, and that the people who knew him won’t behave as if he had never existed. Some will feel guilty about him, some will wish they had treated him better while he was alive, some will mourn him and be unable to understand why he doesn’t respond, some will be plunged into despair by his absence. No one has any difficulty recovering from the loss of someone who has not been born, with the exception, perhaps, of a mother who has undergone an abortion and finds it hard to abandon hope and wonders sometimes about the child who might have been. But in reality there is no loss of any kind, there is no void, there are no past events. On the other hand, no one who has lived and died disappears completely, not at least for a couple of generations: there is evidence of his actions and, when he dies, he’ll be aware of that. He knows that he won’t be able to see or ascertain anything of what happens thereafter and he knows that his story ends in that instant. You yourself are concerned about what will happen to your wife and children, you’ve taken care to put your affairs in order, you’re aware of the gap you would leave and you’re asking me to fill that gap, to be some kind of substitute for you if you’re not here. None of that would concern someone who had never been born.’
‘Of course not,’ Desvern would have replied, ‘but I’m doing all of those things while I’m still alive, and a living person is not the same as a dead person, even though that isn’t what we tend to think. When I’m dead, I won’t even be a person, and won’t be able to sort out or ask for anything, or be aware of or concerned about anything. In that respect a dead person is the same as someone who has never been born. I’m not talking about the others, those who survive us and think of us and who still exist in time, nor of