for far too long – until they get used to us and grow sentimental. Indeed, we’re lucky if our encounters with them have a slightly humorous edge, which is often a first step towards softening even the surliest of men.
If we are irritated by the overfamiliarity of, say, a stranger or an acquaintance after he has spent a brief time in our bed – or we in his bed, it makes no difference – how much more galling must it be between partners in crime, a relationship that must engender a complete lack of respect, especially if the malefactors in question are mere amateurs, ordinary individuals who, just a few days before they had conceived their own vile deeds and doubtless after they had carried them out as well, would have been horrified to hear an account of those deeds as committed by others. The kind of person who, after bringing about a murder or even ordering it, will still think smugly: ‘I’m not a murderer, I certainly don’t consider myself to be one. It’s just that things happen and occasionally one has to intervene at a certain point, it makes no difference if it’s halfway through, at the end or at the beginning, you can’t have one without the other. There are always many factors involved and one factor alone cannot be the cause. Ruibérriz could have refused, as could the man he dispatched to poison the gorrilla’s mind. The gorrilla could have failed to answer the calls to the mobile phone he had in his possession for a time, we gave it to him, we made the calls and managed to convince him that Miguel was the person responsible for prostituting his daughters; he could have ignored those malicious lies or chosen the wrong person to attack and instead stabbed the chauffeur sixteen times, five times fatally – after all, only a few days before, the man had punched the chauffeur. Miguel might have chosen not to drive the car on his birthday and then nothing would have happened, not on that day or perhaps on any other, the necessary elements might never have come together … The tramp might not have had a knife, the one I ordered to be bought for him, it opens so quickly … What responsibility do I bear for that cluster of coincidences, any plans one draws up are only ever attempts and experiments, cards to be turned over one by one, and, more often than not, the card you want doesn’t appear, doesn’t match. The only thing you can be found guilty of is picking up a weapon and actually using it yourself. Everything else is pure contingency, things that one imagines – a bishop in chess making a diagonal move, a knight jumping over another piece – things that one desires, fears, instigates, ideas that one toys with and fantasizes about, and which, sometimes, actually happen. And if they do, they happen even if you don’t want them to or don’t happen even if you yearn for them to happen, at any rate, little depends on us, no intrigue, however carefully woven, is safe from a thread coming loose. It’s like firing an arrow up into the sky in the middle of a field: the normal thing, once the arrow begins its descent, is for the arrow to fall straight to earth, without deviating, without striking or wounding anyone. Or only, perhaps, the archer.’
I noticed this complete lack of mutual respect in the way Díaz-Varela addressed Ruibérriz, even ordering him to leave (after my brief exchange with Ruibérriz, he said bluntly: ‘Right, you’ve taken up quite enough of my time and I can’t neglect my visitor any longer. So clear off, will you, Ruibérriz, scram!’ He must have paid him money or was perhaps still paying him for his services as intermediary, for organizing the murder and keeping abreast of the consequences), and in the way that Ruibérriz ran his eyes over me from the very first moment right up until he left: for he maintained his initial appreciative gaze, understandable when I made my surprise appearance, even after he had realized that this wasn’t the first time I had been there in that bedroom, that’s something one always senses immediately; when he saw that my presence was neither the result of a chance encounter nor a trial run, that I wasn’t a woman who has gone up to a man’s apartment for the evening – an inaugural evening, shall