VIII
It would be an exaggeration to describe what happened shortly afterwards as a vile deed. Of course, this all depends on one’s point of view, and, needless to say, the point of view of the person listening to or reading the story — which is, after all, the viewpoint of someone hearing a rumour, even if the teller of the tale swears he’s speaking from personal experience and that he either committed or participated in the act himself — never coincides with that of the person who experienced or created it. When we hear or read something, it always seems disappointing and trivial (‘Big deal’), just another story (‘So what else is new?’), an occurrence similar to so many others, almost predictable given that we’ve been inundated with stories ever since the first person spoke the first word to us; there are far too many stories in the world, and we’re rarely surprised or shocked by them or even interested, it’s as if everything had already happened in life or, if not, in the imagination, disseminated by innumerable printed pages and multiplying screens, the old screens of cinemas and televisions and the new ones of computers and even those of the ridiculous mobile phones that everyone now gazes into as if they were crystal balls, which, in a way, they are: they may not predict the future, but they do inform us about what didn’t exist and hadn’t even happened only a second before, about the new-born coming into existence all over the world, and sometimes they’re in such a hurry that they tell us things that haven’t happened, a fallacy, a calumny, a false rumour that proves hard to deny or to shake off; our level of credulity has reverted to what it was in the Middle Ages, with rumour still stuffing our ears with false reports — from the orient to the drooping west — and we refuse to ask for proof, accepting everything as credible because everything has already happened, or so we believe.
We become more and more like that ancient sentinel of our existence, the moon, for whom what came later and of which I was co-creator could never be considered a vile deed, merely another banal, hackneyed episode, incapable of rousing it from the tedium in which it has been condemned to live, night after night, since before the world was peopled; perhaps, who knows, the first men and women at least provided it with some novelty and amusement, until, inevitably, they began to repeat themselves. As I said earlier, though, perhaps the moon takes less notice of the battles and travails of the monotonous masses, the strutting and the shouting, and focuses more on those beings who seem to tiptoe through life, to be just passing through or on temporary loan even while they’re alive, those who will never go beyond their own bounds, those who one knows early on will leave no trace or track and will barely be remembered once they disappear (they will be like falling snow that does not settle, like a lizard climbing up a sunny wall in summer that pauses for a moment beneath the indolent eye that will not even notice it, like the words, all those years ago, that a teacher painstakingly wrote on the blackboard only to erase them herself at the end of the class, or leave them to be erased by the next teacher to occupy the room) and about whom not even their nearest and dearest will have any anecdotes to recount, for the moon knows that some of them might well harbour stories that are far odder and more intriguing, clearer and more personal than the stories of the shrill exhibitionists who fill most of the globe with their racket and exhaust it with their wild gesticulations.
But although we may more and more come to resemble that moon in our indifference and saturation, we who are still alive and active tend to endow our lives and acts with some special significance, even though, when measured against the accumulation of events, they have none and, in any case, they lose all significance — alas, even for us — as soon as we decide to talk about them to others, and they join the overflowing ranks of stories already told. ‘Ah,’ thinks the person hearing or reading or watching, ‘that story reminds me of another story, and now that I know it, seems almost predictable; it didn’t happen to me, and so it doesn’t surprise me and I only half-listen to it; what happens to others seems always so diffuse and rather unimportant and perhaps not even worth talking about.’ And the person telling the story feels something similar when he passes it on, as if putting it into words or images and in order were tantamount to cheapening and trivializing it, as if only the unrevealed or the unspoken preserved its prestige and uniqueness and mystery. ‘What to me was a grave and important fact — perhaps some vile deed I committed — becomes instead merely another story, nebulous and interchangeable, an original tale intended to amuse.’ Having told it, whether orally or in writing or in images, it doesn’t matter, you think: ‘What was remarkable for me as long as it remained secret and unknown becomes commonplace once revealed and tossed into the bag along with all the other stories heard and mixed up and forgotten and that can be reported and mangled by anyone passing, by whoever hears them, because once told, they’re present in the air and there’s no way you can stop them floating or flying if they get caught up in the mist or the wind pushes them along, and they travel through space and time disfigured by all the many echoes, worn thin by repetition.’
Beatriz returned home, and Muriel set off to Barcelona with Towers, who was still alarmed, suspicious and fearful for his project — with Lom and the other actors, troubled by what had happened to their director, but more than anything bewildered, wondering if he would be in a fit state to continue filming when his suicidal wife was some six hundred kilometres away, for they knew nothing about his normal treatment of her, about the constant rebuffs and occasional insults. ‘Lard, pure lard, that’s all you are to me,’ ‘I don’t think I can stand her any longer, I’ve got to close the door on her, I must,’ and the door had been kept firmly shut for a long time, after he had made the mistake of loving her all those years, with all his heart, as long, that is, as he had known nothing, and despite her not being the love of his life, ‘as people say’; or, according to her, having done the right thing: ‘You’ve probably never done anything better.’ To which he had responded oddly, gently, regretfully: ‘I’ll grant you that.’ He had, of course, added: ‘All the more reason for me to feel I’ve thrown away my life. A part of my life. That’s why I can’t forgive you.’ But perhaps that old love during all those years partially explained Muriel’s terrified reaction when he thought Beatriz might have been successful in her third attempt, carried out, deliberately one assumes, so close to home in the Hotel Wellington and on a night when they had invited guests to supper. It’s also frightening to lose the witness to the good things one has done, even if you’ve long since ceased to do good and have instead done things, which, to that same witness, have seemed evil and harmful.