Again I was burning to ask a question and again I waited until Muriel had finished or reached the end of a paragraph, so to speak, just as we do with a silent book that couldn’t possibly take offence, before we stop reading and go out or go to bed.
‘Did you say “attempts”? How many have there been, then?’
Muriel raised his little finger, his ring finger and his middle finger.
‘This was the third.’
‘And always the same method?’
‘No, each time has been slightly different, what happened before doesn’t serve to warn or to raise one’s suspicions. But the fact that I’ve told you a little doesn’t give you the right to know everything, so don’t ask what she did, I don’t like talking about that either. Let’s leave it there. I think you’ve found out quite enough for today.’
Muriel was making an effort now to put on his usual prickly self, but he had either softened or was tired, perhaps the shock of what had happened two nights before had temporarily tamed him, dulled his sharpness and his vigour. I sensed that I could push my luck a little further.
‘At least tell me who came to you with that story about the Doctor. What if, one day, he tells me of some vile deed he did, without my trying to wheedle it out of him? How will I know if that was the one we were after?’ I deliberately used the first-person plural, in order to remind him of his disquiet and anger, now extinguished or banished or kept at bay by gratitude. ‘That’s how you described it, wasn’t it, a vile deed? That he had behaved indecently with a woman. I assume the person who told you was the victim of that deed, a woman.’
Muriel got up from the floor and sat down at his desk, and I moved my chair so that I was facing him. He rested his cheek on one hand, rather than the other way round. As if his face had grown very heavy or as if he’d felt dizzy when he stood up, for he had done so far too suddenly, with no intermediate stage. However much you might want to limit or mete out what you say, it isn’t easy to apply the brakes once you’ve started, you always end up saying more than you intended, more than you wanted to. He spoke without looking at me, his head bent, his eye fixed on the correspondence on the desk, and which I had left for him to read when he felt like it or had time — none of it was urgent; if he was reading one of the letters now, he was doing so purely involuntarily, without taking in what was written or without caring.
‘Yes, a woman first, and then a few others,’ he said, perhaps not even quite aware that he was answering my question, that there was someone there listening and making a mental note. ‘A woman who deserves my complete confidence. A former friend, a former actress, although she wasn’t an actress when I met her, that came later —’ He paused, broke off, but sometimes the tongue gets swept along by its own wretched velocity. ‘A former love.’ He paused again, but this time succumbed even more easily to his tongue’s speed. ‘The love of my life, as people say. Or so I believed for a long time and, during that time, I always felt indebted to her. Which is why, now, when she reappeared, I felt obliged to take what she said seriously, not to doubt her word, but to believe her version of events. Holding back slightly, of course, trying to temper the shock she felt on learning of my friendship. What possible interest could she have in lying to me about the Doctor? To deprive me of an old friend? That wouldn’t have been much of a revenge, if she’d wanted to have her revenge for something that happened a long, long time ago and to which she gave her consent or that she at least understood, or so she said. “Do what you think you ought to do,” she said. “Do what will cause you least pain, what you’ll find easiest to live with. But never think of us, of you and me. Never think of us together if you don’t want to be filled with regret day after day and, still more, night after night. Never even think of us apart either, because, by remembering that, you’ll bring us together again,” that’s what she said, what she advised. And I took her advice, while I could. The other debt, the debt owed to Beatriz, would have weighed on me far more. At the time, I did all I could to do my duty: another of youth’s downsides, quite a few of which one leaves behind as one grows older. The trouble is that once you’ve taken those steps, there’s no going back when you finally discover what a fool you’ve been. The film has been shot and edited, the actors have dispersed along with the rest of the team, there’s no way of adding scenes or changing the plot or the ending: it is what it is and will be for ever. Far too many lives are shaped by deceit or error, it’s probably always been like that, so why should I be any different, why shouldn’t my life be the same? That thought gives me some consolation, convinces me that I’m not the only one — on the contrary, I’m just one more on an endless list of those who tried to act correctly, to keep their promises, those who prided themselves on being able to say something that sounds more and more like a piece of antiquated foolishness: “My word on it”, when almost no one honours their word any more, or considers it a virtue to do so …’ He fell silent, looked up from his papers and, seeing me, fixed his sharp eye on me. He had strayed from my question, had started remembering out loud. Not that he wasn’t aware of my presence or had forgotten I was there or had been pretending I wasn’t. It was more that he had momentarily lapsed into a soliloquy and didn’t care who was listening, like a character in a play when he’s on stage talking to himself, knowing that there’s no point in doing this unless the rest of us are listening. Now he did care and perhaps regretted what he’d said. He managed to use a prolonged silence to rein in that wretched, racing tongue of his. He looked at his watch. He tapped its face. And finally added: ‘I have to go to the hospital to relieve Susana. She spent all last night there. But let’s settle this once and for all, Juan: I find it highly unlikely that the Doctor would tell you of any vile deed he committed, unless you were to ignore my orders and continue to try to draw him out for your own satisfaction. I can’t stop you doing that. But if it happened, I don’t want you to tell me about it, to test my curiosity. Keep it to yourself, say nothing. It was hard for me to decide not to know, but after what happened two nights ago, that decision is now unshakable. Don’t tell anyone else either. A lot of vile deeds were committed here over many years, but we’ve managed to live with those who committed them, and some even did us favours too. We will have to live with them until we all die, and then everything will begin to even out and no one will bother trying to track down the perpetrators. It will be about as relevant to us as the Napoleonic era, which none of us experienced personally. It will be as if it had never happened or will sound to us like fiction. I’m only including myself in that “we” rhetorically, because I, too, will have to die. It’s still early days, I know and, as I say, many vile deeds were committed over many years, but in what age and in what country has that not been the case?’