gruesome or pathetic. But Díaz-Varela wasn’t a writer, and I didn’t mind his digressions, in fact, my response was exactly the same as it had been the second time I met him, in the café next to the museum, namely, that, while he continued to expatiate, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and delighted in his grave, somehow inward-turned voice and the often arbitrary syntactic leaps he made, the whole effect seeming sometimes not to emanate from a human being, but from a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings, perhaps a piano played with great agility. On this occasion, however, I wanted to find out more about Colonel Chabert and Madame Ferraud, and, more especially, how, according to him, the novella proved him to be right about Luisa, although I could easily imagine his reasoning.
‘Yes, but what happened to the Colonel?’ I said, interrupting his flow, and I saw that he didn’t mind my interruption, for he was aware of his own discursive tendencies and was perhaps glad when someone stopped him. ‘Was he accepted by the world of the living to which he wanted to return? Did his wife accept him? Did he manage to resume his existence?’
‘What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention. Besides, you can find out what happened to the Colonel on your own, it would do you good to read a few non-contemporary authors now and then. I can lend you the book, if you like, or don’t you read French? There’s a Spanish translation available, but it’s not much good. And so few people know French these days.’ – He had studied at the Lycée; we had talked little about our respective histories, but that much he had told me. – ‘What’s important here is that Chabert’s reappearance is, of course, an absolute disaster for his wife, who has recovered and made another life in which there is no room for him, or only as a figure from the past, as he had once been, as an ever-fainter memory, well and truly dead, buried in a distant, unknown grave alongside others who fell in that Battle of Eylau, which, ten years on, almost no one remembers or wants to remember, because, among other things, the person who led that battle has been sent into lonely exile on St Helena, and Louis XVIII now sits on the throne, and the first thing any new regime does is to forget and minimize and erase the previous regime, and to convert those who served it into putrefying nostalgics, who are left with nothing to do but slowly burn out and die. The Colonel realizes this from the very first moment and knows that his inexplicable survival is a curse for the Countess, who doesn’t answer his first letters and has no wish to see him, for fear that she might recognize him, preferring to believe that he will turn out to be a madman or a fraud, or, if not, that he will simply give up eventually out of exhaustion, bitterness and desolation. Or that when he can no longer maintain his stubborn refusal to leave, he will return to the snowy fields and die again – once and for all. When they do finally meet and talk, the Colonel, who has had no reason to cease loving her during his long exile from earth, during which he suffered all the infinite hardships of being dead, asks her …’ And here Díaz-Varela looked for another quote in the small book, although this one was so short that he must have known it by heart: ‘“Are the dead quite wrong, then, to come back?” Or perhaps: “Is it a mistake for the dead to return?” In French it says: “Les morts ont donc bien tort de revenir?”’ – And it seemed to me that his accent in French was as good as it was in English. – ‘The Countess’s hypocritical answer is: “No, no, Monsieur! Don’t think me ungrateful,” and adds: “It is no longer in my power to love you, but I know how much I owe you and I can still offer you the affection of