sense, is more discouraging than a massive act of carnage ordered by a single man, a single mind, which we will always consider to be an unfortunate and inhuman exception: the kind of mind that declares an unjust, all-out war or sets in motion a cruel persecution or institutes a programme of extermination or unleashes a jihad. But however atrocious, that isn’t the worst thing, or only in quantitative terms. The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country – each on his own account and at his own risk, each with his own thoughts and particular, untransferable aims – should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives, or lovers of whom they now wish to dispose, and who were doubtless the very people whom they once loved most, for whom, at another time, they would have given their life or killed anyone who threatened them, indeed, it’s possible that they would have confronted themselves had they been able to see themselves in the future as they prepare, without remorse or hesitation, to unleash upon their former loved one the fatal blow. That’s what Derville was talking about: “We see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession … ”’ – This time, Díaz-Varela quoted from memory and stopped, perhaps because he couldn’t remember any more, perhaps because there was no point in going on. He looked again at the cover, which featured a portrait, possibly by Géricault, of a hussar with a long, curled moustache and a helmet; and he added, as if finally tearing himself away from that abstracted gaze and emerging from a daydream: ‘Apparently, it’s a very famous novel, although I’d never heard of it before. They’ve even made three films of it, imagine that.’
When someone is in love, or, more precisely, when a woman is in love and in the early stages of an affair, when it still has all the allure of the new and surprising, she is usually capable of taking an interest in anything that the object of her love is interested in or speaks about. She’s not just pretending as a way of pleasing him or winning him over or establishing a fragile stronghold, although there is an element of that, she really does pay attention and allow herself to be genuinely caught up in what he feels and transmits, be it enthusiasm, aversion, sympathy, fear, anxiety or even obsession. Not to mention accompanying him in his improvised lucubrations, which are what most bind and attract her because she is there at their birth and pushes them out into the world and watches them stretch and waver and stumble. She develops a sudden passion for things to which she had never before given a moment’s thought, she acquires unexpected dislikes, picks up on details that had previously passed her by unnoticed and that her senses would have continued to ignore until the end of her days, she focuses her energies on matters that affect her only vicariously or because she is under some sort of spell or influence, as if she had decided to live out her life on screen or on stage or inside a novel, in an alien fictional world that absorbs and amuses her more than her real life, which she puts temporarily on hold or relegates to second place, and takes a brief rest from it (there is nothing more tempting than to surrender yourself to someone else, even if only in your imagination, and to make his problems your own and to submerge yourself in his existence, which, because it is not yours, seems easier to bear). I’m possibly going too far in putting it like that, but initially we women do place ourselves at the service or at the disposal of the person we happen to love, and mostly we do this innocently, that is, not knowing that there will come a day, if we ever feel solid and established enough, when he will look at us with disappointment and perplexity as it dawns on him that, in fact, we care nothing for what once excited us, that we are bored by what he tells us, even though he hasn’t changed his topics