should then be nothing. It was as if the play had ended too early, as if everything were left up in the air, unresolved, floating, lingering in its lack of resolution, like an unpleasant smell in a lift. My thoughts were confused, I both wanted and didn’t want to hear from him, my dreams were contradictory too and, when I spent a sleepless night, I hardly noticed, aware only that my head was crammed with thoughts and that I was miserably incapable of emptying it.
As I lay unable to sleep, I wondered if I should speak to Luisa, who no longer had breakfast in the same café as me, she must have given up the habit so as not to increase her grief or else to help her forget more easily, or perhaps she went there later, when I had already gone to work (maybe it was her husband who had had to get up early and she had only gone with him in order to postpone their parting). I wondered if it wasn’t my duty to warn her, to let her know who he was, that friend of hers, that possibly unnoticed suitor, her constant protector; but I lacked any proof, and she might think me mad or spiteful, vengeful and unhinged, it’s awkward going to anyone with such a sinister, murky tale, the more bizarre and complex the story, the harder it is to believe; this, in part, is what those who commit atrocities rely on, that the sheer magnitude of the atrocity will make it hard for people to credit. But it wasn’t so much that as something far stranger, because it’s so rare: the majority of people would be glad to tell, most take delight in pointing the finger in secret, in accusing and denouncing, in grassing on friends, neighbours, superiors and bosses, to the police, to the authorities, uncovering and revealing those guilty of something or other, even if only in their imaginations; in destroying the lives of those other people if they can, or at least making things awkward for them, doing their best to create outcasts, rejects, discards, leaving casualties all around and excluding them from their society, as if it were a comfort to be able to say after each victim or each piece of silver: ‘He’s been broken off, detached from the bunch, he has fallen, and I have not.’ Among these people there are a few – we grow fewer by the day – who feel, on the contrary, an indescribable aversion to taking on the role of betrayer. And we take that antipathy so far that it is not always easy for us to overcome it even when we should – for our own good or for that of others. There is something repugnant to us about dialling a number and saying, without giving our name: ‘I’ve seen a terrorist the police are after, his photo has been in the newspapers and he’s just gone through that door.’ Well, we would probably do so in a case like that, but more with an eye to averting crimes than to meting out punishments for past crimes, because no one can put those right and there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it? It sounds strange and even wrong, and yet it can happen: those of us who feel that aversion would sometimes prefer to act unjustly and for someone to go unpunished than see ourselves as betrayers, we can’t bear it – when all’s said and done, justice simply isn’t our thing, it’s not our job; and that role is still more odious when it’s a matter of unmasking someone we have loved or, even worse, someone who, however inexplicable this might seem, we have not entirely ceased to love – despite the horror and the nausea afflicting our conscience or our consciousness, which, nonetheless, grows less troubled with each day that passes and is gone. And then we think something that we can’t quite put into words, managing only an incoherent, reiterative, almost feverish murmur, something like: ‘Yes, what he did is very grave, very grave, but he is still him, still him.’ During that time of waiting or of unspoken farewell, I just couldn’t see Díaz-Varela as a future danger to anyone else, not even to me,