it up or it resurfaces without being called. On the other hand, it can be unbearable knowing that we still share air and time with the person who broke our heart or deceived or betrayed us, with the person who ruined our life or opened our eyes too wide or too brutally; it can have a paralysing effect knowing that the same creature still exists and has not been struck down or hanged from a tree and could, therefore, reappear. That is another reason why the dead should not return, at least those whose departure brings us relief and allows us to carry on living, if you like, as ghosts, having buried our former self: so it was with Athos and Milady, with the Count de la Fère and Anne de Breuil, who could continue their lives thanks to their shared belief that the other was dead and, being incapable of breathing, could no longer make so much as a leaf tremble; as with Madame Ferraud, who started her new life unobstructed because, as far as she was concerned, her husband, Colonel Chabert, was only a memory and not even a devouring one.
‘If only Javier had died,’ I found myself thinking that evening, while I took one step after another. ‘If only he were to die right now and didn’t answer when I ring the bell because he’s lying on the floor, forever motionless, unable to discuss anything with me and with me unable to speak to him. If he were dead, all my doubts and fears would be dispelled, I wouldn’t have to hear his words or wonder what to do. Nor could I fall into the temptation of kissing him or going to bed with him, deluding myself with the idea that it would be the last time. I could keep silent for ever without worrying about Luisa, still less about justice, I could forget about Deverne, after all, I never actually knew him, or only by sight for several years, during the time it took me to eat my breakfast each morning. If the person who robbed him of his life loses his own life and thus also becomes a mere memory and if there’s no one to accuse him, the consequences are less important and then what does it matter what happened. Why say or tell anything, indeed, why try to find out the truth, keeping silent is the far easier option, there’s no need to trouble the world with stories of those who are already themselves corpses and therefore deserve a little pity, even if only because they have been stopped in their tracks, have ended and no longer exist. Our age is not one in which everything must be judged or at least known about; innumerable crimes go unresolved or unpunished because no one knows who committed them – so many that there are not enough pairs of eyes to look out for them – and it is rare to find anyone who can, with any credibility, be placed in the dock: terrorist attacks, the murders of women in Guatemala and in Ciudad Juárez, revenge killings among drug-traffickers, the indiscriminate slaughters that occur in Africa, the bombing of civilians by our aircraft with no pilot and therefore no face … Even more numerous are those that no one cares about and are never even investigated, it’s seen as a hopeless task and their cases are filed away as soon as they happen; and there are still more that leave no trace, that remain unrecorded, undiscovered, and unknown. Such crimes have doubtless always existed and it may be that for many centuries the only crimes that were punished were those committed by servants, by the poor or the disinherited, whereas – with a few exceptions – those committed by the powerful and the rich, to speak in vague and superficial terms, went unpunished. But there was a simulacrum of justice, and, at least publicly, at least in theory, the authorities pretended to pursue all crimes and, on occasion, did actually pursue some, and any cases that were not cleared up were deemed to be “pending”, however, it isn’t like that now: there are too many cases that simply can’t be cleared up or that people possibly don’t want to clear up or else feel that it isn’t worth the effort or the time or the risk. The days are long gone when accusations were uttered with extreme solemnity and sentences handed out with barely a