advise or help him, no one to whom he could appeal; nor did he say anything along the lines of: ‘He was blind with rage and couldn’t restrain himself; he needed to take his revenge; he regretted it for the rest of his life.’ He admits that it was a murder, yes, but nothing more than that, not something more execrable, as if murder were not the worst conceivable thing or else so common and everyday that it need provoke no feelings of scandal or surprise, which is basically the view of the lawyer Derville, who took on the case of old Colonel Chabert, the living dead man who should have stayed dead, for Derville, like all lawyers, saw ‘the same wicked feelings repeated over and over’, feelings that nothing could correct and which transformed his offices into ‘sewers that can never be washed clean’; murder is something that happens, an act of which anyone is capable and that has been happening since the dawn of time and will continue to do so until, after the last day, no dawn comes, nor is there any time in which to accommodate more murders; murder is something banal and anodyne and commonplace, purely temporal; the world’s newspapers and televisions are full of murders, so why such hysteria, such horror, such outrage? Yes, a murder. Nothing more.
‘Why can’t I be like Athos or like the Count de la Fère, as he was initially and then ceased to be?’ I wondered as I sat in the Embassy tea rooms, wrapped in the continuous buzz coming from ladies talking very fast and from the occasional idle diplomat. ‘Why can’t I see things with that same clarity and act accordingly, and go to the police or to Luisa and tell them what I know, enough for them to revisit the crime and investigate and track down Ruibérriz de Torres, that would be a start? Why aren’t I capable of tying the hands of the man I love behind his back and simply hanging him from a tree, if I know that he has committed an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries to protect him and hide his face, making use of a poor, crazed wretch, a witless beggar who could not defend himself and would always be at his mercy? No, it isn’t up to me to act with such ruthless rigour because I do not have the right to mete out justice high and low, and, besides, the dead man cannot speak, whereas the living can, he can explain himself, persuade and argue, and is even capable of kissing me and making love to me, while the former can neither see nor hear, but lies rotting in the grave and cannot answer or influence or threaten, nor give me the slightest pleasure; nor can he call me to account or feel disappointment or look at me accusingly with an expression of infinite sadness and immense grief, he cannot even brush my skin or breathe on me, there is nothing to be done with him.’
I finally plucked up enough resolve, or perhaps it was merely boredom or a desire to rid myself of the fear that assailed me now and then, or impatience to see the old me who continued to love and who had not yet entirely vanished and still prevailed over the sullied and the sombre, like the living image of a dead person, even one who had died a long time ago. I asked for the bill, paid and left and started walking in the direction I knew so well, towards the apartment I will never forget, even though I didn’t visit it so very often and even though it no longer exists – not, at least, as far as I’m concerned, given that Díaz-Varela no longer lives there. I was still walking slowly, in no hurry to arrive, I walked as if I were out for a stroll, rather than heading for a particular place where someone had been waiting for me for quite a while now in order to discuss something, that is, to question me again or to tell or perhaps ask me something, or, possibly, to silence me. Another quotation from The Three Musketeers surfaced in my memory, one that my father did not quote, but which I knew in Spanish, for things that impress us as children endure like