chain could have gone on for ever. A series of people lined up like dominoes, all waiting for the surrender of one entirely oblivious woman, to find out who would fall next to them.
At no point did it occur to Díaz-Varela that I might be upset by his statement of intent, although it is also true that he never presented himself as Luisa’s salvation and destiny; he never said, ‘When she climbs out of the abyss and breathes again by my side, and smiles,’ still less, ‘When she marries again, marries me, that is.’ He never put himself forward as a candidate or included himself, but it was perfectly clear that he was the immovable man who waits; had he lived in another age, he would have been counting off the remaining days of the mourning period, then those of half-mourning and would have consulted the older women – who knew most about such matters – as to what would be an acceptable moment for him to remove his mask and make a play for her. That’s the worst thing about losing our old codes of conduct, we don’t know which is the right moment to act or what rules to follow, when it would be too soon or so late that we would have missed our turn. We have to be guided by ourselves and then it’s very easy to make a blunder.
I don’t know if it was simply that his desires coloured everything or if he deliberately sought out literary and historical texts that would support his arguments and come to his aid (perhaps he received guidance from Rico, that man of compendious knowledge, although, as I understand it, it is impossible to extract that disdainful scholar from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, for it seems that nothing that has happened since 1650, including his own existence, merits his attention).
‘I read a book recently, which, although I hadn’t heard of it before, is, apparently, very famous,’ Díaz-Varela said, taking a French book down from the shelf and waving it before my eyes, as if he could speak more authoritatively with it in his hand and prove, moreover, that he had actually read it. ‘It’s a novella by Balzac which agrees with me as regards Luisa, as regards what will happen to her in the fullness of time. It tells the story of one of Napoleon’s colonels who was given up for dead at the Battle of Eylau. The battle took place between the 7th and 8th of February 1807 near the town of that name in East Prussia, and pitted the French and Russian armies against each other in Arctic conditions; they say that the battle was fought in what was possibly the most inclement weather ever, although I’ve no idea how they can know this, still less state it as a fact. This Colonel, Chabert by name, is in charge of a cavalry regiment and, during the fighting, receives a terrible blow to the skull from a sword. There is a moment in the novella when, in removing his hat in the presence of a lawyer, he accidentally removes the wig he is wearing too and reveals a monstrously long scar that begins at the nape of his neck and ends just above his right eye, can you imagine?’ – and he demonstrated the line of the scar by running his index finger slowly over his head – ‘forming what Balzac described as “a prominent seam”, adding that one’s first thought on seeing the wound was: “His intelligence must have escaped through that gash!” Marshal Murat, the same man who crushed the 2nd of May uprising in Madrid, promptly dispatches fifteen hundred horsemen to rescue him, but all of them, with Murat at the head, ride straight over him, over his prostrate body. He is assumed to be dead, despite the Emperor – who greatly admires him – sending two surgeons on to the battlefield to check that he is dead; those negligent men, however, knowing that his skull has been sliced open and that he has then been trampled on by two cavalry regiments, do not even bother to take his pulse and officially and hastily certify him as dead, and that death then appears in the French army’s bulletins, where it is recorded in detail, thus becoming historical fact. He is thrown into a grave along with the other naked corpses, as was the custom: he had been a famous man while alive, but