The Infatuations by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page B

instinct keeps whispering to us, and to whose voice we say: “Be quiet, be quiet, keep silent, I don’t yet want to hear you, I’m still not strong enough, I’m not ready.” When you have been abandoned, you can fantasize about a return, you can imagine that the abandoner will suddenly see the light and come back to share your pillow, even if you know he has already replaced you and is involved with another woman, with another story, and that he will only remember you if that new relationship suddenly turns sour, or if you insist and make your presence felt against his will and try to pester him or win him round or force him to feel sorry for you or take your revenge by giving him a sensethat he’ll never be entirely free of you and that you don’t intend to be a slowly fading memory but an immovable shadow that will stalk and haunt him for ever; making his life impossible and, ultimately, making him hate you. On the other hand, you cannot fantasize about a dead man, unless you have lost your mind, and there are those who choose to do that, even if only temporarily, those who consent to do so while they manage to convince themselves that what happened really happened, the improbable and the impossible, the thing that did not even have a place in the calculation of probabilities by which we live in order to get up each morning without a sinister, leaden cloud urging us to close our eyes again, thinking: “What’s the point if we’re all doomed anyway? It’s all pointless. Whatever we do, we’ll only be waiting, like dead men on leave, as someone once said.” I don’t believe, though, that Luisa has lost her mind, but that’s just a feeling, I don’t know her. And if she hasn’t, then what is she waiting for, how does she spend the hours, the days, the weeks and now months, to what purpose does she drive time forwards or flee from it and withdraw, and how, at this very moment, is she managing to push it away from her? She doesn’t know that I am about to come over and speak to her, as the waiters did the last time I saw her here, not that I’ve ever seen her anywhere else. She doesn’t know that I’m going to lend her a hand and erase a couple of minutes for her with my conventional words of commiseration, perhaps three or four minutes at most if she says anything beyond “Thank you”. She’ll still be left with hundreds more until sleep comes to her aid and clouds her ever-counting consciousness, because it’s her consciousness that is always counting: one, two, three and four; five, six and seven and eight and so on ceaselessly and indefinitely until she falls asleep.’
    ‘Forgive the intrusion,’ I said, standing by her table; she did notget up at once. ‘You don’t know me, but my name’s María Dolz. I’ve been having breakfast here at the same time as you and your husband for years now. And I just wanted to say how terribly sad I am about what happened, what he went through and what you must have been going through ever since. I read about it in the newspaper, somewhat belatedly, after not seeing you for several mornings. I only ever knew you by sight, but you obviously got on so well and I always thought you made such a lovely couple. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
    I realized that with my penultimate sentence, I had killed her off as well, by using the past tense to refer to them both and not just to her late husband. I tried to think of some way to remedy this, but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t either clumsy or unnecessarily complicated. I imagined, though, that she would have understood what I meant, that I had enjoyed seeing the two of them as a couple, and as such they no longer existed. Then I thought that perhaps I had highlighted something she was trying to hold in suspense or confine to some kind of limbo, because it would be impossible for her to forget or deny it to herself: that they were not two people any more and that she was no longer part of a