the category of the no longer important. It doesn’t matter, it’s fine, I knew how it would be from the start, it’s fine.’ If on the twelfth or fifteenth day the phone rang and I heard his voice, I couldn’t help giving a little inner leap of joy and saying to myself: ‘So it’s not quite over yet, I’ll see him at least one more time.’ And during those periods of involuntary waiting on my part and absolute silence on his, each time the bell rang or my mobile phone told me that I’d missed a call or that someone had left a text message, I would think optimistically that it would be from him.
Now the same thing was happening, except that this time I felt only apprehension. I would glance at the tiny screen in alarm, hoping not to see his name and number and – this was the strange, disquieting thing – also hoping that I would. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him or risk another of our usual encounters, during which I had no idea how I would react or how I should behave. Were we to meet face to face, he would be more likely to notice any evasiveness or reluctance on my part than if we only talked on the phone and, of course, more likely to do so if we talked than if we didn’t. But not answering or returning his call would have had the same effect, given that I had never neglected to do so before. If I agreed to go to his apartment and he proposed having sex, as he usually did in that tacit way of his, which allowed him to act as if what was happening wasn’t happening or wasn’t worthy of recognition, and I gave some excuse and declined, that could make him suspicious. If he phoned to make a date with me and I put him off, that would give him food for thought too, because I had, as far as possible, always gone along with his suggestions. I considered it a blessing and a boon that he had remained silent since that last evening, that he hadn’t sought me out, that I was free from his wheedlings and his trick questions and his attempts to sniff out the truth, free from having to meet him again and not knowing what to do or how to behave with him, from feeling that mixture of fear and repulsion, doubtless mingled with attraction and infatuation, because those two things cannot be eliminated suddenly or at will, but tend to take a while to disappear, like a period of convalescence or like the sickness itself; indignation doesn’t really help, it soon loses its impetus, you can’t maintain that same level of virulence, or else it comes and goes, and when it goes it leaves no trace, it isn’t cumulative, it does no real damage, and when it dies down it’s forgotten, like intense cold once it abates or like fever or grief. The time it takes for feelings to change is slow and infuriatingly gradual. You settle into those feelings and it becomes very difficult to prise yourself out of them, you get into the habit of thinking about someone – and of desiring them too – in a particular, fixed way, and it’s hard to give that up from one day to the next, or even over a period of months and years, that’s how long the feelings can last. And if what you feel is disappointment, then you fight it at first, however ridiculous that might seem, you try to minimize, deny, bury it. I would think sometimes that perhaps I didn’t hear what I heard, or the feeble idea would resurface in my mind that it must all be a mistake, a misunderstanding, that there must even be some acceptable reason why Díaz-Varela had arranged for Desvern to die – but how could that ever be acceptable – I realized that, during this waiting period, I avoided even thinking the word ‘murder’. And so while I considered it fortunate that Díaz-Varela didn’t phone me and thus allowed me to compose myself and catch my breath, the fact that he didn’t get in touch also worried me and made me suffer. Maybe it seemed impossible – an insipid, maladroit ending – that everything should just dissolve once I had discovered his secret and, after a brief interrogation, aroused his suspicions, and that there