I took out the second bullet and put it away, I uncocked the pistol, removed my finger from the trigger and rested it once more on the guard, as Miquelin had advised me to do unless I was sure I was going to fire. I saw on Custardoy's face a look of contained or repressed relief, he didn't dare feel entirely relieved, how could he, when he still had the barrel of a gun pointing at his face and when the man holding the gun was wearing gloves and had just done something very worrying: he had picked up the two ashtrays with the two cigarette butts in them and their corresponding ash, his own and Custardoy's, the ash from the burned-out Karelias cigarettes, and emptied them into his other raincoat pocket to keep them separate from the bullets, just as, in the handicapped toilet, Tupra had put away his sodden gloves, wrung out and wrapped up in toilet paper, although he had done so only once his task was complete, while mine still lay before me. 'Now I do have his coldness, Reresby's coldness that is, now that I've recognized my similarity or affinity with this man, which is why he's going to emerge from this alive,' I thought, 'and now that I've thoroughly frightened him, even though he has barely shown it and put on a brave face, anything else I do to him will seem all right and of no account, he'll think himself lucky and find it perfectly reasonable. I will not be Sergeant Death or Sir Death or Sir Cruelty or even Sir Thrashing, I will be Sir Blow or Sir Wound or Sir Punishment, because something has to be done to keep him out of the picture, just as Tupra did with De la Garza.'
And while I was thinking (and much of this I thought later on), I realized who it was that Custardoy reminded me of; what, to use Wheeler's word, his affinity was; or his relationship, although in this case there was even a resemblance. And it was probably that very frivolous fact that saved him, truly and definitively, a nonsense, a mere nothing, a chance superfluous flash, an opportune association or a fickle memory that might or might not have surfaced; sometimes what we do or don't do depends on that, just as we decide to give alms to one beggar among many, whose appearance, for some reason, moves us: we suddenly see the person, see beyond his condition and function and needs, we individualize him, and he no longer seems to us indistinguishable or interchangeable as an object of compassion, of which there are hundreds; that's what happened to Luisa with the young Romanian or Hungarian or Bosnian woman and her sentinel son at the entrance to the supermarket, and about whom I had occasionally thought while I was far away in London, having first known of their existence through a story told to me. I associated Custardoy with my dancing neighbor opposite, with whom I had never exchanged a word, but who had so often cheered or soothed me with his improvised dances beyond the trees and the statue, on the other side of the square, alone or accompanied by his friends or
partenaires or lovers. Yes, they had quite a lot in common: my dancer is a thin fellow with bony features-jaw and nose and forehead-but a strong athletic build, just as Custardoy is all sinew; he has a thick but well-groomed mustache, like that of a boxer from the early days, except that it's cut straight with no nineteenth-century curlicues, and he wears his hair combed back with a middle parting as if he had a ponytail, although I've never seen it, perhaps one day he'll reveal that he has one just like Custardoy, he also sometimes wears a tie as Custardoy always does, even when he's running and leaping about his empty living room, the guy's mad, but so happy, so contented, so oblivious to everything that wears the rest of us down and consumes us, immersed in his dances danced for no one, it's fun and even rather cheering to watch, and mysterious too, I can't imagine who he is or what he does, he eludes-and this doesn't happen very often-my interpretative or deductive faculties, which may or may not be right, but which never hold back, springing immediately into action to compose a brief, improvised portrait, a stereotype, a flash, a plausible supposition, a sketch or snippet of life however imaginary and basic or arbitrary these might be, it's my alert, detective mind, the idiotic mind that Clare Bayes criticized and reproached me for years ago now, before I met Luisa, and which I had to suppress with Luisa so as not to irritate her or fill her with fear, the superstitious fear that always does the most damage and yet serves so little purpose, for there's nothing to be done to protect ourselves from what we already know and dread (perhaps because we are fatalistically drawn to it and seek it out so as to avoid disappointment), and we usually know how things will end, how they will evolve and what awaits us, where things are going and what their conclusion will be; everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest straightforward stories, you only have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history-one grave pregnant moment-and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to decipher their meanings, if you are prepared to do so-but it's very difficult and can prove catastrophic…