that you wouldn’t go, that you wouldn’t be seen, that if he needed a bit of a push, you’d send a third party to feed him a little more poison and show him a face he could trust. You said there would always be at least two steps between you and him, not one, that the third party wouldn’t even know of my existence. Now it turns out there’s only you between me and him, and he could easily identify you. You’ve got a record, haven’t you? Go on, tell me the truth, this is no time to pull punches, I’d rather know where I stand.’
There was a silence, perhaps that man Ruibérriz was wondering whether or not to tell the truth, as Díaz-Varela had asked him to, and if he was, that meant he did have a record and his photo would be on file. I was afraid that the pause might have been sparked by some noise I had made without realizing it, my foot on a creaking floorboard perhaps, I didn’t think so, but fear will not allow us to discount anything, not even something that doesn’t exist. I imagined the two of them standing motionless, holding their breath for a moment, suspiciously pricking up their ears, looking out of the corner of their eye at the bedroom, making a gesture with one hand, a gesture meaning ‘Hang on, she’s woken up.’ And suddenly I felt afraid of them, those two men frightened me; I tried to believe that Javier on his own wouldn’t frighten me: I had just been to bed with him, I had embraced and kissed him with all the love I dared show him, that is, with a great deal of repressed, disguised love, I let it show in tiny details that he probably wouldn’t even notice, the last thing I wanted was to frighten him, to scare him off prematurely, to drive him away – although that time would come, I was sure of it. Now I noticed that any feelings of repressed love had vanished – love, in any of its forms, is incompatible with fear; or else those feelings were deferred until a better moment, that of denial and forgetting, but I knew that neither of those things was possible. And so I stepped away from the door in case he should come back into the room to see if I was still asleep, and to check that I had not been an ear-witness to their conversation. I lay down on the bed, adopted what I thought was a convincing posture and waited, I couldn’t hear anything now, I missed Ruibérriz’s reply, which he must have given sooner or later. I stayed there for one minute, two, then three, but no one came, nothing happened, and so I screwed up my courage and got off the bed, went over to the false crack in the door, still half-undressed as he had left me, still with my skirt on. The temptation to listen is irresistible, even if we realize that it will do us no good. Especially when the process of knowing has already begun.
The voices were less audible now, just a murmur, as if they had calmed down after the initial shock. Perhaps before that, they had both been standing up and now had sat down for a moment; people talk more quietly when they’re sitting down.
‘So what do you think we should do?’ I heard Díaz-Varela say at last. He wanted to bring the discussion to a close.
‘We don’t have to do anything,’ answered Ruibérriz, raising his voice, perhaps because he was giving the orders now and felt, momentarily, in charge again. It sounded to me like he was summing up, he would leave soon, perhaps he had already picked up his coat and draped it over his arm, always assuming he had taken it off, for his was an untimely, lightning visit, Díaz-Varela probably hadn’t even offered him a glass of water. ‘This information doesn’t point to anyone, it doesn’t concern us, neither you nor I has anything to do with it, any interference from me would be counter-productive. Just forget you know about it. Nothing is going to change, nothing has changed. If there’s any other news, I’ll find out, but there’s no reason why there should be. They’ll probably make a note of his claim, file it away and do nothing. How are they going to investigate what he says if there’s no trace of that