Then I would turn out the light on my bedside table and, after a few seconds, the trees being blown about by the wind would become slightly more visible and I could go to sleep watching, or perhaps merely sensing, the swaying of their leaves. ‘What is the point?’ I would think. ‘The only point, in these silly, insurmountable circumstances, is to cling on to the smallest thing, the smallest handhold. Another day, another hour at his side, even if that hour takes ages to arrive; the vague promise of seeing him again even though many days, many empty days, must pass before that happens. We note down in our diary the dates when he phoned us or we saw him, we count the days that pass with no news from him, and stay awake into the small hours before giving the night up as definitively barren and lost, just in case, at the last moment, the phone should ring and he should whisper some nonsense or other that fills us with an entirely unjustified euphoria and a sense that life is kind and merciful. We interpret every inflection of his voice and every insignificant word, which we nevertheless repeat to ourselves and endow with stupid, promising meaning. We value any contact, however brief, even if it’s only to receive some flimsy excuse or to be let down or to listen to a barely elaborated lie. “At least, at some point, he thought of me,” we tell ourselves gratefully. “He thinks of me when he’s bored or if he’s suffered some setback with Luisa, the person he really cares about, I may only be in second place, but that’s better than nothing.” It occurs to us sometimes – but only sometimes – that all it needs is for the person occupying first place to fall, a feeling familiar to all younger brothers of kings and princes and even to more distant relatives and remote, isolated bastard children, who know that this is how one can pass from tenth place to ninth, from sixth to fifth and from fourth to third, and, at some point, all will have silently formulated the inexpressible desire: “He should have died yesterday,” or the wish that appears in the minds of the boldest pretenders: “There’s still time for him to die tomorrow, which will be the yesterday of the day after tomorrow, assuming I’m alive then.” We don’t care about humiliating ourselves to ourselves, after all, no one is going to judge us and there are no witnesses. When we get caught in the spider’s web, we fantasize endlessly and, at the same time, make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him, smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.’
With me, Díaz-Varela made no attempt to hide the impatience that he was obliged to conceal from Luisa, whenever, that is, we returned to his favourite topic of conversation, the one he could not have with her and the only one, it seemed to me, of any real importance to him, as if until that matter was settled, everything else was postponable and provisional, as if the effort invested in it were so huge that all other decisions had to remain in abeyance, waiting for some resolution, and as if his whole life depended on the failure or success of that stubborn hope of his, which had no definite completion date. Perhaps there was no indefinite completion date either: what would happen if Luisa failed to respond to his entreaties and advances, to his passion, if he gave voice to it, but chose, rather, to remain alone? When would he consider that it was time to abandon his long wait? I didn’t want to find myself sliding imperceptibly into the same situation and so I continued to cultivate Leopoldo, whom I had decided to keep in the dark about Díaz-Varela. It was ridiculous enough that my steps depended, indirectly, on those taken or not taken by an inconsolable widow, and it would have been even more ridiculous to lengthen the chain still further and add to it the steps of a poor, unwitting man who didn’t even know her: with a little bad luck and a few more lovers of the kind who allow themselves to be loved and neither reject nor reciprocate that love, the