'Who have you heard mention it? Tupra? Can you remember if what happened involved Wheeler's wife? Her name was Valerie. Does that ring any bells?'
'I don't know who I heard it from, Jaime. It could have been Bertie, it probably was, or Rendel, or Mulryan, or perhaps some other person in some other place, I don't recall now. But that's all I know, nothing more-that something bad happened, that he failed in some way, or at least he thought so, and I believe he came close to withdrawing from the group altogether, to giving it up. It was all a very long time ago.'
I didn't know if she was telling me the truth or if she didn't feel authorized to tell me the story or if she simply wanted to get away from my endless questions and not-at this late hour of the night-get into some obscure, possibly long tale about someone else, which she would, at best, know only at second hand and which bore no relation to her current problems, the problems that had brought her to my house after much thought and much trudging through the rain: her father and that man Vanni Incompara and the banker Vickers and that leap-frogging debt of two hundred thousand pounds, I'm amazed at some people's ability to accumulate sums of money they don't have, and in a way I envy them-it's quite a talent, if not a gift; it requires a cheerful mindset-although any envy I might feel is purely theoretical or fictional, literary and cinematographic, Pérez Nuix's vicarious position at that point was not in the least enviable. For the first time, I felt sorry for her (pity always intervenes), perhaps because tiredness made her seem more childlike, or perhaps it was the suppressed anxiety that surfaced now and then in her bright darting eyes and at the corners of her mouth, which kept trying to form brief, fearful smiles, to please me. I decided that it was time to put her out of her misery: she had expended a lot of effort, she had followed me for a long time through that half-deserted city, getting drenched in the process, she had pondered what to do, she had put her case and she had expended on me, first, her indecision and her time and then her resolve and still more time.
'All right, Patricia,' I said, bringing to an end my session of interrogations and postponements. 'I'll try, although I still think Tupra will see whatever there is to see, and more than me. But I'll do what I can, I'll try my best.'
This was the lowest level of commitment I could give. I might fail and make a mistake and not do as well as I had hoped, she herself had said as much and so she wouldn't be able to reproach me with failure. Nor be disappointed, for I had given her due warning. This left me much freer than if my answer had been 'I want this in return,' mainly because now I ran no risk of beginning to desire or to hope for what I had demanded from her, and thus to fear my own defeat. More than that, if you're not afraid, your chances of success will probably increase, and there'll still be time later on to raise your hand and demand a prize and say: 'I want this as a reward.' Naturally, this could be denied to us outright, with no explanation or excuse: there's no moral obligation then, no link, no agreement, nothing explicit, and there may very soon be no trace left of the immense favor we granted, just like the drop of blood or its rim that one looks for after it has disappeared, having been scrubbed and rubbed away, or the infinite crimes and noble acts not known about since their commission or which the slow centuries amuse themselves by very slowly diluting until they're completely erased and then by pretending that they've never been. As if everything always fell like snow on our shoulders, slippery and docile, even things that make a great din and spread fires. (And from our shoulders it vanishes into the air or else melts or falls to the ground. And the snow always stops, eventually.)
Almost no trace remains of what happened next or only the faintest of vestiges in my more languid memory and perhaps in hers too, but we will never find out-I mean she and I, face to face, through an exchange of words. It happened as if in the very moment it was occurring we both wanted to pretend that it wasn't happening, or preferred not to notice, not to register it, to pretend it didn't matter, or to keep it so hushed up that later on we could deny it to each other, or to others if one of us let the cat out of the bag or started boasting about it, even if each of us only did so to ourselves, as if we both knew that something of which there is no record or no explicit recognition and which is never mentioned simply doesn't exist; something which, in a way, is committed secretly or behind the backs of its perpetrators and without their full consent or with only a drowsing awareness: something we do while telling ourselves we're not doing it, something that occurs even as we're persuading ourselves that it isn't happening, something not as strange as it sounds or seems, indeed, it happens all the time and causes us almost no alarm or doubts about our own judgement. We convince ourselves that we never had that unworthy or evil thought, that we never desired that woman or that death-the death of an enemy, husband or friend-that we never felt even momentary scorn or hostility towards the person we most respected or to whom we owed the greatest debt of gratitude, nor envied our irksome children who will go on living when we're no longer here and who will appropriate everything and quickly take our place; that we never intrigued or betrayed or plotted, never sought the ruin of anyone when in fact we diligently sought that of several people, that we were never tempted to do anything we might feel ashamed of; that we never acted in bad faith when we recounted some malicious gossip to someone so that he could defend himself-or so we argued, thus becoming instantly virtuous and charitable-and so that he would stop being so naive and realize just who he was dealing with; and-even more extraordinary, because it affects actual events and not just the easily-deceived mind-that we didn't flee when in fact we ran away for all we were worth and left all regrets behind us, that we didn't push or shove a child out of the way to make room for ourselves in the lifeboat when the ship was sinking, that we didn't shield ourselves behind someone else when things were at their worst, so that the blows or the knife-thrusts or the bullets hit the person next to us who was, perhaps, expecting our protection: who knows, perhaps the person we loved most in the world, to whom we declared a thousand times that we would unhesitatingly give up our life for him or her, and it turns out that we did hesitate and didn't and haven't given up our life, nor would we if a second opportunity were to arise; that we didn't lay the blame for something we did on someone else nor make a false accusation in order to save ourselves, that we never acted out of the most terrible egotism and fear. We really believe that we weren't born when and where we came into the world, that we're younger than we are and from some nobler, less obscure place, that our parents aren't our parents and bear a much less vulgar surname; that we earned by our own merit what we stole or was given to us, that we fairly inherited some scepter or throne or mere stick or chair without using guile and without usurping them, that we came up with witticisms and ideas written or spoken by other wiser and more thoughtful men, whose dread names we never mention and whom we loathe for having 'got in' before us, although deep down we know, in some small surviving corner of our consciousness, that there was no question of their 'getting in before us' and that if they hadn't 'preceded' us, those ideas so personal to them would be even less our ideas, indeed could never be ours; we believe ourselves to be the person we most admire, and to make this come true, we set out to destroy him, believing we can supplant and obliterate him with our achievements which we owe entirely to him and drive him from the world's fickle memory, reassuring ourselves with the thought that he was only a pioneer whom we have exceeded and absorbed, and thus made highly dispensable; we persuade ourselves that the past does not weigh on us because we have never traversed it ('It wasn't me, it didn't happen to me, I never lived through that, I didn't see anything, I know nothing about it, it's the fruit of someone else's imaginings, someone else's memory that has somehow or other been transplanted into mine or else infected it') and that we never said what we said or stole what we stole, that we never cheered the dictator or betrayed our best friend who was so unbearably much better than us from the first day to the last ('He brought it on himself, I had nothing to do with it, I kept my mouth shut, he was a hothead, he made his own fate, he stood out when he shouldn't have and didn't change sides in time, didn't even want to'); and we don't even call ourselves by our real name, but only by a false one or by whichever of the ever-changing names that keep coming along and being added, be it Rylands or Wheeler, or Ure or Reresby or Tupra or Dundas, or Jacques the Fatalist or Jacobo or Jaime.