I was always so careful not to give myself away, not to wound and to be kind, I only ever met María at her apartment so that no one would see me out with her anywhere and ask questions later on, or be cruel and tell tales, or simply wait to be introduced. Her apartment was nearby and I spent many afternoons there, though not every afternoon, on the way back to my own apartment, that meant a delay of only half an hour or three quarters of an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes I would amuse myself looking out of her window, the window of a lover is always more interesting than our own will ever be. I never made a mistake, because mistakes in these matters reveal a sort of lack of consideration, or worse, they are acts of real cruelty. I met María once when I was out with Luisa, in a packed cinema at a première, and my lover took advantage of the crowd to come over to us and to hold my hand for a moment, as she passed by without looking at me, she brushed her familiar thigh against mine and took hold of my hand and stroked it. Luisa could not possibly have seen this or noticed or even suspected the existence of that tenuous, ephemeral, clandestine contact, but even so, I decided not to see María for a couple of weeks, after which time and after my refusing to answer the phone in my office, she called me one afternoon at home, luckily, my wife was out.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“You must never phone me here, you know that.”
“I wouldn’t phone you there if you’d pick up the phone in your office. I’ve been waiting a whole fortnight,” she said.
And then, making an effort to recover the anger I had felt a fortnight before, I said:
“And I’ll never pick up the phone to you again if you ever touch me when Luisa is there. Don’t even think of it.”
She fell silent.
You forget almost everything in life and remember everything in death, or in this cruel state which is what being a ghost is. But in life I forgot and so I started seeing her again now and then, thanks to that process by which everything becomes indefinitely postponed for a while, and we always believe that there will continue to be a tomorrow in which it will be possible to stop what today and yesterday passes and elapses and flows, what is imperceptibly becoming another routine which, in its way, also levels out our days and our nights until they become unimaginable without all their essential elements, and the nights and days must be identical, at least in their essence, so that nothing is relinquished or sacrificed by those who want them and those who endure them. Now I remember everything and that’s why I remember my death so clearly, or, rather, what I knew of my death when it happened, which was little and, indeed, nothing in comparison with all that I know now, given the constant razor edge of repetition.
I returned from one of my trips exhausted and Luisa didn’t fail me, she came to meet me. We didn’t talk much in the car, nor while I was mechanically unpacking my suitcase and glancing through the accumulated mail and listening to the messages on the answering machine that she had kept for my return. I was alarmed when I heard one of them, because I immediately recognized Maria’s voice, she said my name once and was then cut off, and that made my feeling of alarm subside for a moment, the voice of a woman saying my name and then breaking off was of no significance, there was no reason why Luisa should have felt worried if she had heard it. I lay down on the bed in front of the television, changing channels, Luisa brought me some cold meat and a shop-bought dessert, she clearly had neither the time nor the inclination to make me even an omelette. It was still early, but she had turned out the light in the bedroom to help me get to sleep, and there I stayed, drowsy and peaceful, with a vague memory of her caresses, the hand that calms even when it touches your chest distractedly and possibly impatiently. Then she left the bedroom and I eventually fell asleep with the television on, at some point, I stopped changing channels.
I don’t know how much time passed, no, that’s not true, since now I know exactly, I enjoyed seventy-three minutes of deep sleep and of dreams that all took place in foreign parts, whence I had once again returned safe and sound. Then I woke up and I saw the bluish light of the television, the light illuminating the foot of the bed, rather than any actual images, because I didn’t have time. I see and I saw rushing towards me something black and heavy and doubtless as cold as a stethoscope, but it was violent rather than salutary. It fell once only to be raised again, and in those tenths of a second before it came crashing down a second time, already spattered with blood, I thought that Luisa must be killing me because of that message which had said only my name and then broken off and perhaps there had been many other things that she had erased after listening to them all, leaving only the beginning for me to listen to on my return, a mere foreshadowing of what was killing me. The black thing fell again and this time it killed me, and my last conscious thought was not to put up any resistance, to make no attempt to stop it because it was unstoppable and perhaps too because it didn’t seem such a bad death, to die at the hands of the person with whom I had lived in peace and contentment, and without ever hurting each other until, that is, we finally did. It’s a tricky word to use, and can easily be misconstrued, but perhaps I came to feel that my death was a just death.
I see this now and I see the whole thing, with an afterwards and a before, although the afterwards does not, strictly speaking, concern me and is therefore not so painful. But the before is, or rather the rebuttal of what I glimpsed and half-thought between the lowering and the raising and the lowering again of the black thing that finished me off. Now I can see Luisa talking to a man I don’t know and who has a moustache like the one Dr Arranz wore in his day, not a slim moustache, though, but soft and thick and with a few grey hairs. He’s middle-aged, as I was and as perhaps Luisa was, although she always seemed young to me, just as my parents or Arranz never did. They are in the living room of an unfamiliar apartment, his apartment, a ramshackle place, full of books and paintings and ornaments, a very mannered apartment. The man is called Manolo Reyna and he has enough money never to have to dirty his hands. It is the afternoon and they are sitting on a sofa, talking in whispers, and at that moment I am visiting María, two weeks before my death on the return from a trip, and that trip has still not begun, they are still making their preparations. The whispers are clearly audible, they have a degree of reality which seems incongruous now, not with my current non-tactile state, but with life itself, in which nothing is ever quite so concrete, in which nothing ever breathes quite so much. There is a moment, though, when Luisa raises her voice, like someone raising their voice to defend themselves or to defend someone else, and what she says is this:
“But he’s always been so good to me, I’ve nothing to reproach him with, and that’s what’s so difficult.”
And Manolo Reyna answers slowly:
“It wouldn’t be any easier or any more difficult if he had made your life impossible. When it comes to killing someone, it doesn’t matter any more what they’ve done, it always seems an extreme response to any kind of behaviour.”
I see Luisa put her thumb to her mouth and bite it a little, a gesture I’ve so often seen her make when she’s uncertain, or, rather, before making a decision. It’s a trivial gesture and it’s unseemly that it should also appear in the midst of a conversation we were not party to, the one that takes place behind our backs and mentions us or criticizes us or even defends us, or judges us and condemns us to death.
“Well, you kill him, then; you can’t expect me to do anything that extreme.”
Now I see that the person standing next to my television set — still on — and wielding the black thing is not Luisa, nor even Manolo Reyna with his folkloric name, but someone contracted and paid to do it, to strike me twice on the forehead, the word is assassin, in the war a lot of militiamen were used for such purposes. My assassin hits me twice and does so quite dispassionately, and that death no longer seems to me just or appropriate or, of course, compassionate, as life usually is, and as mine was. The black thing is a hammer with a wooden shaft and an iron head, a common-or-garden hammer. It belongs in my apartment, I recognize it.