musician. Then with those same four fingers, he drummed with his nails – hard, neatly trimmed nails – against his glass.
‘Those are the exceptions, the anomalies. Of course there are people who decide to end their own life, and they do, but they’re the minority, which is why it seems so shocking, because their actions go completely counter to the longing to endure, which is shared by the vast majority of us and which makes us believe that there is always time and, when time does run out, makes us ask for a little more, just a little more. As for the murderous hands you mention, they can never be seen as our hands. They end a life much as an illness does, or an accident, I mean, they are external causes, even in those cases where the dead person has brought it upon himself, because of the disreputable life he has led or the risks he has taken or because he has himself killed and thus laid himself open to someone else’s revenge. Not even the most bloodthirsty mafioso or the President of the United States, to give just two examples of individuals at permanent risk of assassination, and who know that it is a real possibility and live with that possibility every day, even they do not long for that threat, that latent torture, that unbearable anxiety to be over. They don’t want anything that exists or anything they have to end, however horrible or burdensome that might be; they live from day to day in the hope that the following day will be there too, identical or very similar to every other day, if I exist today, they think, why shouldn’t I continue to exist tomorrow, and tomorrow leads to the day after tomorrow and the day after tomorrow to the day after that. That is how we all live, the happy and the unhappy, the fortunate and the unfortunate, and if it was up to us, we would go on like that until the end of time.’ – It seemed to me that he had become slightly confused or was trying to confuse me. ‘Those murderous hands,’ I thought, ‘are not, of course, ours unless they do suddenly become our hands, and besides, they always belong to someone, who will call them “my hands”. And regardless of who they belong to, it isn’t true that those hands do not want any living being to die, because that is precisely what they do want, more than that, they can’t wait for a chance to bring it about nor for time to do its work; they take it upon themselves to transform life into death. They don’t want everything to continue uninterrupted, on the contrary, they feel a need to annihilate and destroy someone else’s cherished habits. They would never say of their victim “She should have died hereafter” but, rather, “He should have died yesterday,” years ago, a long, long time ago; if he had never been born and never left any trace in the world, then we wouldn’t have had to kill him. With one thrust of his knife, the gorrilla had destroyed his own habits and those of Deverne, along with those of Luisa and the children and the chauffeur, who was saved perhaps by a case of mistaken identity, by a whisker; as well as Díaz-Varela’s habits and even mine in part. And those of other people I don’t even know.’ But I didn’t say any of this, I didn’t want to take the floor, I didn’t want to speak, I wanted him to carry on talking. I wanted to hear his voice and track his thoughts, and to keep watching his lips moving. So spellbound was I by them that I ran the risk of not taking in what he was saying. He took another sip of his drink and went on, first clearing his throat as if he were trying to focus his thoughts. – ‘What’s amazing is that when these things happen, when these interruptions or deaths occur, more often than not, people eventually come to accept them. Don’t misunderstand me. No one can ever find a death, still less a murder, acceptable. Deaths and murders will always be sources of regret, whenever they happen, but ultimately, life prevails over us, so much so that, in the long run, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine ourselves without the sorrows life brings, to imagine, for example, that something that happened didn’t