myself now, of the me who has not yet departed. He still does things, of course, and, needless to say, thinks them; he plots, takes steps and decisions, tries to influence others, has desires, is vulnerable and can also inflict harm. I’m talking about myself dead, which you obviously find harder to imagine than I do. You shouldn’t confuse us, the living me and the dead me. The former is asking you for something that the latter won’t be able to question or remind you about or else check up on you to see whether or not you have carried out his wishes. What’s so difficult, then, about giving me your word? There’s nothing to prevent you from failing to keep it, it will cost you nothing.’
Díaz-Varela would have put one hand to his forehead and sat looking at his friend oddly and slightly irritably, as if he had just emerged from a daydream or some drug-induced torpor. He was, at the least, emerging from an unexpected and inappropriately gloomy conversation.
‘Fine, you have my word of honour, you can count on it,’ he would have said. ‘But please, no more of these macabre conversations, they give me the creeps. Let’s go and have a drink and talk about something more cheerful.’
‘What rubbishy edition is this?’ I heard Professor Rico muttering as he took a book off a shelf; he had been snooping around looking at the books, as if no one else were in the room. I saw that he was holding an edition of Don Quixote with the very tips of his fingers, as though the book made his skin crawl. ‘How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine? It’s full of a lot of intuitive nonsense, there’s no method or science in it, it’s not even original, he’s just copied from other people. And to find it in the house of someone who is, as I understand it, a university teacher, well, that really takes the biscuit. But then that’s Madrid University for you,’ he added, looking reprovingly at Luisa.
She burst out laughing. Even though she was the object of the reprimand, she obviously found his rudeness vastly amusing. Díaz-Varela laughed too, perhaps infected by her laughter or perhaps to flatter Rico into further excesses – he could hardly have been surprised by Rico’s impertinence or by the liberties he took; he then tried to provoke him further, possibly to make Luisa laugh more and draw her out of her momentarily sombre mood. And yet he seemed perfectly spontaneous. He was utterly charming and he pretended very well, if he was pretending.
‘You’re not telling me that the editor of that edition isn’t a respected authority,’ he said to Rico, ‘indeed, he’s rather more respected than you are in some circles.’
‘Huh, respected by ignoramuses and eunuchs, of which this country is filled to bursting, and by literary and philosophical societies in Spain’s lazier, lowlier provincial towns,’ retorted Professor Rico. He opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger. ‘I’ve seen one glaring error already.’ Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further. ‘I’ll write an article about it.’ He looked up with a triumphant air and smiled from ear to ear (an enormous smile made possible by his flexible mouth) and added: ‘Besides, the fellow’s jealous of me.’
II
I didn’t see Luisa Alday again for quite some time, and in the long between-time I began going out with a man I vaguely liked, and fell stupidly and secretly in love with another, with her adoring Díaz-Varela, whom I met shortly afterwards in the most unlikely of places, very close to where Deverne had died, in the reddish building that houses the Natural History Museum, which is right next to or, rather, part of the same complex as the technical college, with its gleaming glass-and-zinc cupola, about twenty-seven metres high and about twenty in diameter, erected around 1881, when these buildings were neither college nor museum, but the brand-new National Palace for the Arts and Industry, which was the site of an important exhibition that year; the area used to be known as the Altos del Hipódromo, the Hippodrome Heights, because of its various promontories and its proximity to a few horses whose ghostly exploits have become doubly or definitively so, since there can be no one alive who saw or remembers them. The Natural