The Infatuations by Javier Marías

danger. On the contrary, she sees you as a shield, a defence. That worries me a little, that she should become afraid of men, be on her guard and feel nervous in their company, the ones she doesn’t know, of course. I hope it will pass, she can’t go through life in fear of half the human race.’
    ‘Do they know how exactly their father died?’ I hesitated, unsure whether to bring it up again. ‘About the knife, I mean.’
    ‘No, I’ve never gone into detail, I just told them that he’d been attacked by that man, but never explained how. But Carolina must know, I’m sure she’s read about it in some newspaper and that her friends will have talked about it, well, they’re bound to be shocked. She must have found the idea so horrifying that she’s never asked me or referred to it. It’s as if we had a tacit agreement not to discuss it, not to think about it, to erase that element from Miguel’s death (the key element, the one that caused his death), so that it can remain an isolated, neutral fact. Besides, that’s what everyone does with their dead. We try to forget the how and keep only the image of the personwhen alive or, possibly, when dead, but we avoid thinking about the frontier, the crossing, the actual process of dying, the cause. They’re alive one moment and dead the next, and in between there is nothing, as if they passed without transition or reason from one state to the other. But I can’t not think about it, not yet, and that’s what stops me living or prevents me from beginning to recover, always assuming one can recover from something like this.’ – ‘You will, you will,’ I thought again, ‘and much sooner than you think. And that’s what I wish for you, poor Luisa, with all my heart.’ – ‘I can do it with Carolina, because that’s what best for her and that’s all I want. When I’m alone, though, I find it impossible, especially around this time of evening, when it’s neither day nor night. I think of that knife going in, what Miguel must have felt, and whether he had time to think anything, if he realized that he was dying. Then I despair and I feel positively ill. And that’s not just a manner of speaking: I really do feel ill. My whole body hurts.’

 
    The doorbell rang and even though I had no idea who it was, I knew that our conversation and my visit were over. Luisa had asked nothing about me, she hadn’t even gone back to the questions she had asked at the café that morning, what I did and what nickname I had given to her and Deverne when I used to watch them during our shared breakfasts. She wasn’t yet ready to be curious about others, she was in no state to take an interest in anyone or to probe other people’s lives, her own life was all-consuming and took all her energy and concentration, and doubtless all her imagination too. I was merely an ear into which she could pour her unhappiness and her persistent thoughts, a virgin but interchangeable ear, or perhaps not entirely interchangeable: as with her little girl, I obviously inspired both her confidence and her familiarity, and she would not perhaps have confided in just anyone in quite the same way. After all, I had often seen her husband and could, therefore, put a name to her loss, I knew the absence that was the cause of her desolation, the figure that had disappeared from her field of vision, day after day after day and so on monotonously and irremediably until the end. In a way, I belonged to the ‘before’ and was capable of missing the departed in my own way, even though they had always ignored me, and Desvern would now be obliged to do so for all eternity, I had arrived too late for him and would never be more than the Prudent Young Womanwhom he had barely noticed and then only glancingly. ‘And yet,’ I thought with some surprise, ‘I’m only here because of his death. If he hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be in his house, because, after all, this was his house, he lived here, and this was his