I wondered, as I always did, if I would ever go back there. Except that this time, I did not think this with only mingled hope and desire, but with a mixture of feelings, perhaps repugnance or fear, or was it, rather, desolation?
III
In all unequal relationships, those lacking a name or explicit recognition, there is usually one person who takes the initiative, who phones to suggest meeting up, while the other person has just two possibilities or ways of reaching the same goal of not fading away or vanishing, even though he or she believes that, whatever happens, this is sure to be his or her final fate. One way is simply to wait and do nothing, trusting that eventually the other person will miss you, that your silence and absence will become unexpectedly unbearable or even worrying, because we all very quickly grow accustomed to what is given to us or what is there. The second way is to try, subtly, to infiltrate the daily life of that other person, to persist without insisting, to make a space for yourself, to phone, not in order to suggest getting together – that is still forbidden – but to ask a question, some advice or a favour, to let him know what has been going on in your life – the most efficient and most drastic way of involving someone else – or offering information; being present, acting as a reminder to him of your existence, humming and buzzing away in the distance, creating a habit that imperceptibly, almost stealthily, installs itself in his life, until one day the other person, missing your, by now, customary phone call, feels almost affronted – or experiences something bordering on abandonment – and, overcome by impatience, invents some absurd excuse, awkwardly picks up the phone and finds himself dialling your number.
I did not belong to that bold and enterprising band, but to the silent kind, who, while prouder and more subtle, are also more exposed to being promptly erased or forgotten, and after that evening, I was glad to run that risk, to be, as usual, subordinate to the requests and suggestions of the person whom I still thought of as Javier, but who was already on the way to becoming a hard-to-remember double-barrelled name; and I was glad, too, not to have to call or seek him out, in the knowledge that failing to do so would not seem suspicious or incriminating. My not getting in touch with him would not mean that I wanted to avoid him, nor that I was disappointed in him – a rank understatement – nor that I was afraid of him, nor that I wanted to have no more to do with him after learning that he had plotted to have his best friend stabbed to death without even being sure that his plotting would achieve its end, for he was still left with the easier or perhaps more arduous task, one never knows, of making Luisa fall in love with him (the most insignificant or the most substantial part of the task). The fact that I gave no signs of life would not signify that I knew anything about the plot or anything new about him, my silence would not betray me, everything was as it always had been during our brief relationship, only if, in some vague way, he missed me or thought of me and summoned me to his bedroom, only then would I have to consider how I should behave and what to do. Making someone fall in love with you is insignificant, waiting for it to happen, on the other hand, is a thing of substance.
When Díaz-Varela had spoken to me about Colonel Chabert, I had immediately identified the Colonel with Desvern: the dead man who ought to remain dead because his death has been reported and itemized and set down in the annals and thus become historical fact, and whose new and incomprehensible life is a tiresome addendum, an intrusion into the lives of others; the person who comes back to disturb a universe which, knowing nothing about what really happened and unable to rectify matters, has carried on without him. The fact that Luisa could not immediately shake off Deverne, that she continued in her inert and routine way to be subject to him and his still recent memory – recent for the widow but remote for the person who had long been anticipating his departure – must have seemed