happen. “My father was killed during the Civil War,” someone might say bitterly, sadly or angrily. “They came for him one night, dragged him from the house and bundled him into a car, I saw how he struggled and how they manhandled him. They dragged him along by the arms as if his legs were paralysed and could no longer bear his weight. They drove him to the outskirts of town, where they shot him in the back of the neck and threw his body in a ditch, so that the sight of his corpse would be a warning to others.” The person telling that story doubtless regrets and deplores it and might even spend his whole life seething with hatred for his father’s assassins, a universal, abstract hatred if he doesn’t know exactly who they were, their names, as was so often the case during the Civil War; in many instances, all they knew was that “the other side” had done it. However, in large measure that horrible event constitutes the essence of that person, which he could never relinquish because that would be tantamount to denying himself, to erasing what he is and having nothing to replace it with. He is the son of a man who was cruelly murdered during the Civil War; he is a victim of Spanish violence, a tragic orphan; that fact shapes and defines and determines him. That is his story or the beginning of his story, his origin. In a sense, he cannot wish that it hadn’t happened, because if it hadn’t, he would be a different person, and he has no idea who that person would be. He can neither see nor imagine himself, he doesn’t know how he would have turned out, and how he would have got on with that living father, if he would have hated or loved him or felt quite indifferent, and, above all, he cannot imagine himself without that background of grief and rancour that has always accompanied him. The force of events is so overwhelming that we all end up more or less accepting our story, what happened and what we did or failed to do, regardless of whether we believe or acknowledge it; in fact, it’s something most of us refuse to acknowledge. The truth is that we almost all curse our fate at some point in our lives and yet almost no one admits that.’
At this point, I could not help but interrupt:
‘Luisa cannot possibly accept what has happened to her. No woman could accept that her husband had been stupidly and gratuitously stabbed to death, by mistake, for no reason, and when he had done nothing to provoke it. No one can accept that their life has been destroyed for ever.’
Díaz-Varela sat looking at me intently, his cheek resting on one fist and his elbow resting on the table. I looked away, troubled by those eyes fixed on mine, by that gaze, which was neither transparent nor penetrating, but perhaps hazy and enveloping or merely indecipherable, and tempered at any rate by his myopia (he was probably wearing lenses), it was as if those almond eyes were saying to me: ‘Why don’t you understand?’ not impatiently, but regretfully.
‘That’s the mistake people make,’ he said after a few seconds, without looking away or changing his posture, as though, rather than speaking, he was waiting, ‘a childish mistake that many adults cling to until the day they die, as if throughout their entire existence they had failed to grasp how things work, as if they lacked all experience. The mistake of believing that the present is for ever, that what happens in each moment is definitive, when we should all know that as long as we still have a little time left, nothing is definitive. We have all experienced enough twists and turns, not just in terms of luck but as regards our state of mind. We gradually learn that what seems really important now will one day seem a mere fact, a neutral piece of information. We learn that there will come a time when we don’t even give a thought to the person we once couldn’t live without and over whom we spent sleepless nights, without whom life seemed impossible, on whose words and presence we depended day after day, and if we ever do, very occasionally, give that person a thought, it will merely be to shrug and think at most: “I wonder what became of her?” without a flicker