herself had determined. Actually causing someone’s death is a very different matter, says the person not holding the weapon (and we, unwittingly, accept his reasoning), from, say, preparing the ground for it and waiting for it to come about or to happen of its own accord; as is desiring and ordering someone’s death, for the desire and the order sometimes become confused and can prove indistinguishable for those accustomed to having their desires satisfied as soon as they have been expressed or even implied, or to having their desires carried out as soon as they have been conceived. That is why the most powerful and most cunning of people never dirty their own hands or even their tongue, because that way they still have the option of saying, when they are at their smuggest, or when most troubled and wearied by their conscience: ‘I didn’t actually do it. Was I there, was I holding the gun, the spoon, the knife that finished him off? I wasn’t even there when he died.’
It was one night, after I came back from Díaz-Varela’s apartment feeling cheerful and in a good mood, that I began not to suspect so much as to wonder, and lying in bed looking out at my dark, agitated trees, I found myself wishing or, rather, fantasizing about the possibility that Luisa might die and thus leave the field open for me with Díaz-Varela, since she was doing nothing to occupy that field herself. He and I got on well, what he had to say interested me or at least it cost me no great effort to take an interest, and it was clear that he found my company pleasant and amusing, both in bed and out of it, and it is the latter that counts, or, while the former may be necessary, it’s still not enough without the latter, and I enjoyed both those advantages. In my vainer moments, I would think that, but for his long-held fixation, his cerebral passion – I didn’t dare to call it his long-held plan, because that would have implied suspicion, which I did not yet feel – he would not only have been perfectly content with me, I would also gradually have made myself indispensable to him. I sometimes had the feeling that he couldn’t let himself go with me, couldn’t entirely give himself, because he had decided in his head, a long time ago, that Luisa was the chosen one, and she had remained so with all the conviction that hopelessness brings with it, since there was not the remotest chance of his dream coming true, given that she was the wife of his best friend whom they both loved very much. Perhaps he had also made her the ideal excuse for never fully committing himself, instead jumping from one woman to another and letting none of those relationships become either very important or very lasting, because, as he lay awake with some woman in his arms, he was always looking out of the corner of his eye or over her shoulder (or should I say, over our shoulder, since I must include myself among the women thus embraced). When you want something for a long time, it’s very difficult to stop wanting it, I mean, to admit or to realize that you no longer desire it or that you would prefer something else. Waiting feeds and fosters that desire, waiting is accumulative as regards the thing awaited, it solidifies desire and turns it to stone, and then we resist acknowledging that we have wasted years expecting a signal, which, when it finally comes, no longer tempts us, or else we simply can’t be bothered to answer a belated call that we no longer trust, perhaps because it doesn’t now suit us to move. One grows accustomed to waiting for an opportunity that never comes, feeling deep down rather calm and safe and passive, unable quite to believe that it never will present itself.
But, alas, at the same time, no one entirely gives up on that hope, and that itch keeps us awake or prevents us from fully submerging ourselves in sleep. After all, the most unlikely things do happen, and that is something everyone feels, even those who know nothing of history or what happened in the previous world, or even what is happening in this world, which advances at the same hesitant pace as they do. Who hasn’t been witness to some unlikely event, which we often don’t even