“Look, León, I pass a lot of information on to the police and it never fails; basically, what I say goes. I’ve taken a while to get around to you but I know perfectly well what you got up to in the war, how you gave the nod to the militiamen on who to take for a ride. But even if that wasn’t so, in your case, I’ve no need to make anything much up, I just have to stretch the facts a little, to say that you consigned to the ditch half the people in our neighbourhood wouldn’t be that far from the truth, you’d have done the same to me if you could. More than ten years have passed, but you’d still be hauled up in front of a firing squad if I told them what I know, and I’ve no reason to keep quiet about it. So it’s up to you, you can either have a bit of a rough time on my terms or you can stop having any kind of time at all, neither good nor bad nor average.”
“And what are your terms exactly?”
I see Dr Arranz gesture with his head in the direction of my silent mother — a gesture that makes of her a thing — whom he also knew during the war and from before, in that same neighbourhood that lost so many of its residents.
“I want to screw her. Night after night, until I get tired of it.”
Arranz got tired as everyone does of everything, given time. He got tired when I was still at an age when that essential word did not even figure in my vocabulary, nor did I even conceive of its meaning. My mother, on the other hand, was at the age when she was beginning to lose her bloom and to laugh only rarely, while my father began to prosper and to dress better, and to sign with his own name — which was not León — the articles and the reviews that he wrote and to lose the look of melancholy in his clouded eyes; and to go out at night with some good tickets while my mother stayed at home playing solitaire or listening to the radio, or, a little later, watching television, resigned.
All those who have speculated on the afterlife or the continuing existence of consciousness beyond death — if that is what we are, consciousness — have not taken into account the danger or rather the horror of remembering everything, even what we did not know: knowing everything, everything that concerns us or that involved us either closely or from afar. I see with absolute clarity faces that I passed once in the street, a man I gave money to without even glancing at him, a woman I watched in the underground and whom I haven’t thought of since, the features of a postman who delivered some unimportant telegram, the figure of a child I saw on a beach, when I too was a child. I relive the long minutes I spent waiting at airports or those spent queuing outside a museum or watching the waves on a distant beach, or packing my bags and later unpacking them, all the most tedious moments, those that are of no account and which we usually refer to as dead time. I see myself in cities I visited a long time ago, just passing through, with a few free hours to stroll around them and then wipe them from my memory: I see myself in Hamburg and in Manchester, in Basle and in Austin, places I would never have gone to if my work hadn’t taken me there. I see myself too in Venice, some time ago, on honeymoon with my wife Luisa, with whom I spent those last few years of peace and contentment, I see myself in the most recent part of my life, even though it is now remote. I’m coming back from a trip and she’s waiting for me at the airport, not once, all the time we were married, did she fail to come and meet me, even if I’d only been away for a couple of days, despite the awful traffic and despite all the activities we can so easily do without and which are precisely those that we find most pressing. I’d be so tired that I’d only have the strength to change television channels, the programmes are the same everywhere now anyway, while she prepared me a light supper and kept me company, looking bored but patient, knowing that after that initial torpor and the imminent night’s rest, I would be fully recovered and that the following day, I would be my usual self, an energetic, jokey person who spoke in a rather low voice, in order to underline the irony that all women love, laughter runs in their veins and, if it’s a funny joke, they can’t help but laugh, even if they detest the person making the joke. And the following afternoon, once I’d recovered, I used to go and see María, my lover, who used to laugh even more because my jokes were still new to her.