While the Women are Sleeping

while the women are sleeping

For three weeks, I used to see them every day and now I don’t know what has become of them. I probably won’t ever see them again, at least not her — one tends to assume that summer conversations and even confidences will lead nowhere. Not that anyone has anything against that, not even me, even though I do wonder about them or perhaps miss them slightly. Only very slightly, as one misses everything that disappears.

I nearly always saw them at the beach, where it’s difficult to get a good look at anyone. Particularly so in my case, because I’m nearsighted and would rather see everything through a haze than return to Madrid with a kind of white mask on my otherwise tanned face, and I never wear my contact lenses when I go to the beach or the sea, where they might be lost forever. Nevertheless, from the very first moment, I was tempted to rummage around in the bag in which my wife, Luisa, keeps my glasses case — well, the temptation came from her really, because she, if I may put it like this, was constantly transmitting to me the more peculiar activities of the more peculiar bathers around us.

‘Yes, I can see him, but only vaguely, I can’t make out his actual features,’ I would say when she, in an unnecessarily low voice, given the noise level on the beach, would point out some character she found particularly amusing. I would keep screwing up my eyes, reluctant to get my glasses out only to have to return them once more to their hiding place once my curiosity was satisfied. Then one day, Luisa, who knows the strangest and most insignificant things and is always surprising me with scraps of useful knowledge, passed me her straw hat — closer to hand than my hidden glasses since it was on her head — and advised me to look through its mesh. And I discovered that by peering through this screen I could see almost as well as with my contact lenses, more clearly in fact, although my field of vision was greatly reduced. From that point on, I myself must have become one of the more peculiar or eccentric beachgoers, bearing in mind that I often had a woman’s straw hat, complete with ribbons, clamped to my face with my right hand while I scanned the length and breadth of the beach near Fornells, where we were staying. Luisa, without a word of complaint or a flicker of annoyance, bought another hat that she didn’t like as much, because hers, with which she had intended to shade her face — her fine-featured, open, and as yet unlined face — became mine, not for my head, but for my eyes, the hat through which I saw.

One day, we were enjoying ourselves following the exploits of a small Italian sailor, that is, an insubordinate one-year-old wearing nothing but a sailor’s hat, who, as we kept reporting to each other, was going around destroying not only the fortifications built in the sand by his siblings and older cousins but doubtless some of his progenitors’ long-term friendships, and doing so with the same aplomb with which he drank the salt water (he seemed to swallow gallons) to the complete unconcern of the families accompanying him. He frequently lost his sailor’s hat and then was left completely naked, lying on the shore like a spurned cupid. On another day, we followed the despotic comments and idle comings and goings of a middle-aged Englishman — the island was heaving with Brits — who kept up a kind of running commentary on the temperature, the sand, the wind and the waves, speaking as emphatically and grandiloquently as if he were uttering deep, long-pondered maxims or aphorisms. He had the virtue, one that is becoming increasingly rare, of believing that everything is important, or, rather, that everything that comes from oneself has the virtue of knowing itself to be unique. His slothful nature was evident in how he sat — his legs always inelegantly splayed — and in the fact that he never took off the green T-shirt with which he protected his barrel chest from the sun, not even to go into the water. Needless to say, he never swam and when he did wade into the sea, never very far, he only did so in pursuit of one of his offspring so as to photograph him or her in action from a better angle or closer up. With his green stomach — but not, for example, his chest — wet from the waves, he would return to the shore muttering further unforgettable pronouncements, which the wind promptly scattered, and pressing his camera to his ear, as if it were a radio, seemingly concerned that it might have got splashed, a primitive way, I suppose, of checking that it had come to no harm. Or perhaps, we thought, it was some kind of camera-radio.

Then one day we saw them, I mean they came to our attention, well, to Luisa’s first and then to mine, through my seeing hat. From then on, they became our favourites, and, each morning, without realising it, we would look for them first before choosing our spot and would then choose somewhere close to theirs. On one occasion, we arrived at the beach before them, but, shortly afterwards, saw them roar up on a gigantic Harley-Davidson, with him at the handlebars wearing a black helmet (with the straps hanging loose) and her clinging on to him, her long hair streaming behind her. I think what drove us to seek out their company was that they offered us a rare sight, one from which it’s always hard to look away: the spectacle of one human being adoring another. In accordance with the old and still valid rule, it was he, the man, who did the adoring, and she, the woman, who was the appropriately indifferent idol (or perhaps she was just bored and wished she had something to complain about). She was beautiful, indolent, passive and, by nature, languid. Throughout the three hours we spent at the beach (they stayed longer, perhaps taking their siesta there and, who knows, remaining until sunset), she barely moved and was, of course, concerned only with her own beautification and cleanliness. She dozed or was, at any rate, lying down, eyes closed, on her front, on her back, on one side, on the other, covered in sunscreen, her gleaming arms and legs always fully extended so that no part of her would remain untanned, no fold in her skin, even her armpits, even her groin (nor, it goes without saying, her buttocks), because her bikini bottom was minuscule and revealed that she was entirely free of hair, which made one think (well, made me think) that she must have had a Brazilian wax before she arrived. Now and then she would raise herself into a sitting position and then spend a long time with her knees drawn up while she painted or polished her nails or, with a small mirror in her hand, scrutinised her face or shoulders for blemishes or unwanted hair. It was odd to see her holding the mirror to the most unlikely parts of her body (it must have been a magnifying mirror), not just to her shoulders, I mean, but to her elbows, her calves, her hips, her breasts, the inside of her thighs, even her navel. I’m sure her navel could never have had any fluff in it, and perhaps what its mistress wanted was to suppress it altogether. As well as her tiny bikini, she wore bracelets and various rings, never fewer than eight of the latter, distributed among her fingers. I rarely saw her venture into the water. It would be easy to describe her as a conventional beauty, but that would be a poor definition — too broad or too vague. Rather her beauty was unreal, which is to say ideal. It’s what children think of as beauty and which is almost always (unless the children are already deviants) an immaculate beauty, unmarked, in repose, docile, gestureless, with very white skin and large breasts, round — or at least not almond-shaped — eyes, and identical lips, that is, with upper and lower lip identical, as if they were both lower lips: the kind of beauty you get in cartoons or, if you prefer, in advertisements, and not in just any advertisements, but those you see in pharmacies, deliberately devoid of any hint of sensuality that might trouble other women or the elderly, who are the people most often in pharmacies. And yet neither was it a virginal beauty, and although I wouldn’t say it was a milky pale beauty — or perhaps creamy is the word, it was the kind that would take time to turn brown (her skin was glossy, but not golden) — like Luisa’s beauty; it was a smooth, voluptuous beauty, but one that didn’t cry out to be touched (except perhaps when clothed), as if it might melt at the slightest contact, as if even a caress or a gentle kiss could become violence or rape.

Her male companion doubtless felt the same, at least during daylight hours. He was what you might call fat or even gross or obese, and he must have been more than thirty years older. Like many bald men, he believed he could make up for his lack of hair by wearing what little he had brushed forward, Roman-style (it never works) and by cultivating an abundant moustache, and that he could disguise his age, in that particular setting, by wearing a two-tone swimsuit, that is, with the right leg lime-green and the left purple, at least, such was his chosen attire on that first day, because, like her, he rarely wore the same suit twice. The two colours (the style of trunks never varied, only the colours) invariably seemed to clash, although they were always highly original combinations: blue grey and apricot, peach and rose mallow, ultramarine and Nile green. The trunks were as small as his bulbous body allowed — it was inappropriate to talk about them having legs, really — and this meant that his movements were always slightly constrained by the ever-present threat of a rip. For the fact is he was in constant, agile movement, video camera in hand. Whereas his companion remained completely immobile or idle for hours on end, he never ceased circling her, tirelessly filming her: he would stand on tiptoe, bend double, lie on the ground, face up and face down, take pan shots, medium shots, close-ups, tracking shots and panoramic shots, from above and from below, full face, from the side, from behind (from both sides); he filmed her inert face, her softly rounded shoulders, her voluminous breasts, her rather wide hips, her firm thighs, her far from tiny feet, her carefully painted toenails, her soles, her calves, her hairless pubis and armpits. He filmed the beads of sweat provoked by the sun, probably even her pores, although that smooth uniform skin seemed to have no pores, no folds or bumps, and not a single stretch mark marred her buttocks. The fat man filmed her every day for hours at a time, with few breaks, always the same scene: the stillness and tedium of the unreal beauty who accompanied him. He wasn’t interested in the sand or the water, which changed colour as the day wore on, or the trees or the rocks in the distance, or a kite flying or a boat far off, or in other women, the little Italian sailor, the despotic Englishman, or Luisa. He didn’t ask the young woman to do anything — to play games, to make an effort or to pose — he seemed content with making a visual record, day after day, of that naked statuary figure, of that slow docile flesh, that inexpressive face and those closed or perhaps fastidious eyes, of a knee bending or a breast tilting or a forefinger slowly removing a speck from a cheek. For him, that monotonous vision was clearly a perennial source of wonder and novelty. Where Luisa or I or anyone else would see only repetition and weariness, he must, at every moment, have seen a remarkable spectacle, as multiform, varied and absorbing as a painting can be when the viewer forgets about the other paintings waiting for him and loses all notion of time, and loses, too, therefore, the habit of looking, which is replaced or supplanted — or perhaps excluded — by the capacity to see, which is what we almost never do because it’s so at odds with the purely temporal. For it is then that one sees everything, the figures and the background, the light, the composition and the shadows, the three-dimensional and the flat, the pigment and the line, as well as each brushstroke. That is, one sees both what is depicted and the rough surface of the canvas, and it is only then that one can paint the picture again with ones eyes.

They spoke little and only occasionally, in short sentences that never became conversation or dialogue, any hint of which died a natural death, interrupted by the attention the woman was giving to her body, in which she was utterly absorbed, and by the indirect attention the man was giving to her body too, through his camera lens. In fact, I don’t recall him ever stopping to look at her directly, with his own eyes, with nothing between his eyes and her. In that respect, he was like me, for I, in turn, viewed them either through the veil of my myopia or through my magnifying hat. Of the four of us, only Luisa could see everything without difficulty or mediation because I don’t think the woman looked at or even saw anyone, and she herself mostly used her mirror to scrutinise and inspect, and she often donned a pair of extravagant space-age sunglasses.

‘The sun’s hot today, isn’t it? You should put more sunscreen on, you don’t want to burn,’ the fat man would say, in an occasional pause in his circular tours of his adored one’s body; and when he didn’t receive an immediate answer, he would say her name, the way mothers say their children’s names: ‘Inès. Inès.’

‘Yes, it’s definitely hotter than yesterday, but I’ve put on some factor ten, so I won’t burn,’ replied the body, Inès, reluctantly and barely audibly while, with a pair of tweezers, she plucked out a tiny hair from her chin.

And there the conversation would end.

One day, Luisa — because we did have conversations — said:

‘To be honest, I don’t know whether I’d enjoy being filmed like poor Inès. It would make me nervous, although I suppose if someone was doing it all the time, like the fat man, I’d get used to it in the end. And then perhaps I’d take as much care of myself as she does, although she’s probably only so vigilant because she’s constantly being filmed or because she’ll see herself later on screen or maybe she does it for posterity’s sake.’ Luisa rummaged around in her bag, took out a small mirror and studied her eyes, which, in the sun, were the colour of plums, with iridescent flecks in them. ‘Then again, what kind of posterity would want to waste its time watching those tedious videos. Do you think he films her during the rest of the day, too?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Why limit yourself to the beach? I doubt he needs an excuse to see her naked.’

‘I don’t think he films her because she’s naked, but all the time, perhaps even when she’s sleeping. It’s touching really, he obviously thinks only of her. But I don’t know that I would like it. Poor Inès. Not that she seems to mind.’

That night, when we got into our double bed at the hotel, both at once, each on our own side, I lay thinking about the things we had said and which I have just set down in writing, and, unable to sleep, I spent a long time watching Luisa sleeping, in the dark, with only the moon to light her. Poor Inès, she had said. Her breathing was very soft, but still audible in the silence of the room, the hotel and the island, and her body didn’t move, apart from her eyelids, beneath which her eyes were doubtless moving about, as if they couldn’t get used to not doing at night what they did during the day. Perhaps the fat man is awake too, I thought, filming the beautiful Inès’ perfectly still eyelids, or maybe he’ll lift the sheets off her and very carefully arrange her body in different positions so as to film her sleeping. With her nightgown pulled up perhaps or with her legs apart if she isn’t wearing a nightgown or pyjamas. Luisa didn’t wear a nightgown or pyjamas in summer, but she did wrap the sheet around her like a toga, clasping it to her with both hands, although one shoulder or the nape of her neck would sometimes come uncovered, and then, if I noticed, I would always cover her up. I sometimes had to struggle a little to make sure I had enough of the sheet on my side of the bed. But this only happened in summer.

I got up and went over to the balcony to kill time until sleep came, and from there, leaning on the balustrade, I looked up at the sky and then down, and that was when I thought I saw the fat man sitting alone by the swimming pool, in darkness now, the water reflecting only the stars. I didn’t recognise him at first because he wasn’t sporting the moustache I’d become used to seeing every day, as I had that very morning, and because our eyes have to accommodate themselves to seeing, fully clothed, someone we have been used to seeing undressed. His clothes were as ugly and ill-coordinated as his two-tone swimsuits. He was wearing a baggy shirt, which looked black from my balcony (from a distance) but was probably patterned, and a pair of light-coloured slacks that appeared to be a very pale blue, possibly a reflection from the near-invisible water, so close it would have splashed him had there been any waves. On his feet he wore a pair of red moccasins, and his socks (imagine wearing socks on the island) seemed to be the same colour as his trousers, but again that might have been the effect of the moon on the water. He was resting his head on one hand and the corresponding elbow on the arm of a floral-patterned sun lounger — there were two models available at the poolside, striped and floral. He didn’t have his camera with him. I hadn’t realised they were staying at our hotel, since we had only ever seen them at the nearby beach, to the north of Fornells, in the mornings. He was alone, as motionless as Inès, although now and then he changed that drowsy, laid-back pose of head and elbow and adopted another apparently contrary position, his face buried in his hands, his feet drawn in, as if he were exhausted or tense or possibly laughing to himself. At one point, he took off one shoe or accidentally lost it, but he didn’t immediately reach out his foot to retrieve it, but stayed like that, his stockinged foot on the grass, which gave him a helpless look, at least from my fourth-floor viewpoint. Luisa was sleeping, and Inès would be sleeping too; she probably needed at least ten hours’ sleep to maintain her immutable beauty. I got dressed in the dark, taking care not to make any noise, and checked that Luisa was well wrapped up in her sheet-cum-toga. Unaware that I wasn’t in the bed, she had yet somehow sensed it in her sleep, for she was lying diagonally now, invading my space with her legs. I went down in the lift, not having looked to see what time it was, past the night porter sleeping uncomfortably, head on the counter, like a future decapitee; I had left my watch upstairs, and everything lay in silence, apart from the slight noise made by my black moccasins (I wasn’t wearing socks). I slid open the glass door that led to the swimming pool and closed it again, once I was outside on the grass. The fat man raised his head, glanced over at the door and immediately noticed my presence, although he couldn’t make me out, I mean, couldn’t identify me in the dim light. For that reason, because he had spotted me at once, I spoke to him as I walked towards him and as the reflections of the moon in the water began to reveal me and change my colours as I approached.

‘You’ve shaved off your moustache,’ I said, running my index finger over the place where a moustache usually grows and not quite sure that I should make such a comment. By the time he could reply, I had reached his side and sat down on another sun lounger, next to him, a striped one. He had sat up, his hands on the arms of his sun lounger and was looking at me slightly nonplussed, but only slightly, and without a hint of suspicion, as if he wasn’t in the least surprised to see me — or, indeed, anyone — there. I think that was the first time I had seen him face on — without a camera to his eye and without a hat to mine — or simply from close up, and my sight was already accustomed to the dim light after the brief time I’d spent gazing out from the balcony. He had an affable face, alert eyes, and his features weren’t ugly, simply fat, and he struck me as one of those handsome bald men, like the actor Michel Piccoli or the pianist Richter. He looked younger without his moustache, or perhaps it was the red moccasins, one of which lay upturned on the grass. Yet he must have been at least fifty.

‘Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognise you at first with your clothes on, we usually only see each other in our beach-wear.’ He had said exactly what I had thought earlier, when I was upstairs. We had spent nearly three weeks seeing each other every day, and it was impossible that his busy eyes would not at some point have lingered, despite everything, on me or on Luisa. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The air-conditioning in the room doesn’t always help. You’re better off out here, I think. Do you mind if I join you for a while?’

‘No, of course not. My name’s Alberto Viana,’ and he shook my hand. ‘I’m from Barcelona.’

‘I’m from Madrid,’ I said and told him my name. Then there was a silence, and I wondered whether I should make some trivial remark about the island or about vacations or some other almost equally trivial remark about the activities we had observed on the beach. It was my curiosity about those activities that had led me to his side by the pool, well, that and my insomnia, although I could have continued to struggle with that upstairs or even woken Luisa, but I hadn’t. I was speaking almost in a whisper. It was unlikely anyone could hear us, but the sight of Luisa, and of the night porter, sound asleep, had given me the feeling that if I raised my voice I would disturb their slumbers, and my hushed tones had immediately infected or influenced the way Viana spoke.

‘I’ve noticed that you’re very keen on video cameras,’ I said after that pause, that hesitation.

‘Video cameras?’ he said, slightly surprised or as if to gain time. ‘Ah, I see. No, not really, I’m not a collector. It isn’t the camera itself that interests me, although I do use it a lot, it’s my girlfriend, whom you’ve seen, I’m sure. I only film her, nothing else, I don’t experiment with it at all. That’s fairly obvious, I suppose. You’ve probably noticed.’ And he gave a short laugh, half-amused, half-embarrassed.

‘Yes, of course, my wife and I have both noticed. I think she feels slightly envious of the attention you lavish on your girlfriend. It’s very unusual. I don’t even have a regular camera. But then we’ve been married for some time.’

‘You don’t own a camera? Don’t you like being able to remember things?’ Viana asked me this with genuine bemusement. As I had imagined, his shirt did have a pattern, a multicoloured blend of palm trees and anchors and dolphins and ships’ prows, but nevertheless the predominant colour was the black I had seen from above; his trousers and socks still appeared to be pale blue, bluer than my white trousers, which, like his, were exposed now not just to the moonlight, but to the moon’s faint reflection in the water.

‘Yes, of course I do, but you can remember things in other ways, don’t you think? We all have our own camera in our memory, except that we don’t always remember what we want to remember or forget what we would prefer to forget.’

‘What nonsense,’ said Viana. He was a frank fellow, not at all the cautious type, and he could say things without offending the person he was talking to. He gave another short laugh. ‘How can you compare what you can remember with what you can see, with what you can see again, just as it happened? With what you can see again over and over, ad infinitum, and even hit the pause button, which you couldn’t do when you saw whatever it was for real? What nonsense,’ he said again.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘But you’re not telling me that you film your girlfriend all the time so that you can remember her later, by watching her on the screen. Or perhaps she’s an actress. She wouldn’t have time really, given that you appear to film her every day. And if you film her every day, there isn’t time for what you’ve taped even to begin to resemble forgetting and for you to feel the need to recall her in that faithful manner by watching her again on video. Unless you’re keeping it for when you’re both old and want to relive your stay here in Minorca hour by hour.’

‘Oh, I don’t keep all my footage, no, only a few brief fragments, maybe amounting to one tape every three or four months. But they’re all filed away in Barcelona. And, no, she isn’t an actress, she’s still very young. What I do here (and at home too) is wait for a day before I erase the previous day’s tape, if you see what I mean. In all this time, I’ve only used two tapes, always the same ones. I record one today and keep it, then record another one tomorrow and keep that, and then, the day after, I record over the first one, erasing it that way. And so on and so forth, if you see what I mean. Mind you, I shouldn’t think I’ll have time to record much tomorrow because we’re going back to Barcelona, my holiday’s over.’

‘Oh, I see. But then, once you’re home, what will you do, make a montage of everything you’ve filmed?’

‘No, you don’t see. Artistic videos are one thing, made in order to be filed away. They get put to one side, one tape every four months or so. But the daily recordings are a separate matter. Those get erased every other day.’

It may have been the lateness of the hour (I had left my watch upstairs), but I had the feeling that I still didn’t entirely understand, especially the second part of his explanation. Also I wasn’t that interested in the direction the conversation had taken, about artistic videos (that’s what he’d said, I heard him) and erased tapes, the day-to-day ones. I considered saying goodnight and going back up to my room, but I still wasn’t feeling sleepy and I thought that, if I did go back, I would probably end up waking Luisa just so she’d talk to me. That wouldn’t be fair, and it seemed best to talk to someone who was already awake.

‘But,’ I said, why do you film her every day if you erase it afterwards?’

‘I film her because she’s going to die,’ said Viana. He had stretched out his stockinged foot and dipped his big toe into the water, moving it slowly back and forth, his leg stretched right out, for he could only just reach, just far enough to touch the surface. I fell silent for a few seconds, and then, as I watched him slowly stirring the water, I asked:

‘Is she ill?’

Viana pursed his lips and ran his hand over his bald head, as if he still had hair and was smoothing it, a gesture from the past. He was thinking. I let him think, but he was taking an awfully long time. I let him think. Finally, he spoke again, not to answer my last question, but my previous one.

‘I film her every day because she’s going to die, and I want to have a record of her last day, of what might be her last day, so that I can really remember it, so that when she’s dead, I can see it again in the future as often as I wish, along with the artistic videos. Because I do like to remember things.’

‘But is she ill?’ I asked again.

‘No, she’s not ill,’ he said, this time without pausing to think. ‘At least not as far as I know. But she’ll die one day. You know that, everyone knows that, everyone is going to die, you and me included, and I want to preserve her image. The last day in anyone’s life is important.’

‘Of course,’ I said, looking at his foot. ‘You’re just being cautious; she might have an accident, for example.’ And I thought (but only briefly) that if Luisa were to die in an accident, I wouldn’t have many images to remember her by, hardly any pictures at all. There was the odd photo around the house — ordinary photos, of course, not artistic ones — but only a few. I certainly didn’t have any videos of her. Without thinking, I glanced up at the balcony from which I had observed Viana. There were no lights on in any of the balconies or rooms. Nor, therefore, in the room belonging to Inès and Viana. I wasn’t there on our balcony now, no one was.

Viana was again immersed in thought, although now he had removed his foot from the water and placed it again — with the tip of the sock wet and dark — on the grass. I began to think that perhaps he didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken, and again I considered saying goodnight and going up to my room, yes, I suddenly wanted to go up and see again the image of Luisa asleep — not dead — wrapped in her sheet; one shoulder might have come uncovered. But once begun, conversations can’t be abandoned just like that. They can’t be left hanging, by taking advantage of a distraction or a silence, unless one of the two people involved is angry. Viana didn’t seem angry, although his alert eyes did seem even more alert and more intense; it was hard to tell what colour they were in the light cast by the moon on the water: I think they were brown. No, he didn’t seem angry, just slightly self-absorbed. He was saying something, not in a whisper now, but as if muttering.

‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ I asked.

‘No, it’s not that I think she’ll have an accident,’ he replied, his voice suddenly too loud, as if he had miscalculated the shift in tone between talking to himself and talking to someone else.

‘Lower your voice,’ I said, alarmed, although there was no reason to feel alarmed, it was unlikely anyone would hear us. I again glanced at the balconies, but they all still lay in darkness; no one had woken up.

Startled by my order, Viana immediately lowered his voice, but he wasn’t startled enough not to continue what he had begun to say so loudly. ‘I said it’s not that I think she might have an accident. But she’ll definitely die before me, if you see what I mean.’

I looked at Viana’s face, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was gazing up at the sky, at the moon, avoiding my eye. We were on an island.

‘Why are you so sure of that if she isn’t ill? You’re much older than her. The normal thing would be for you to die before her.’

Viana laughed again and, stretching his leg out still further, dipped his whole stockinged foot into the water this time and began to move it slowly, heavily around, more heavily than before because now his whole foot — that fat, obese foot — was submerged.

‘Normal,’ he said, laughing. ‘Normal,’ he repeated. ‘Nothing is normal between her and me. Or rather, nothing is normal as regards my relationship with her, and never has been. I’ve known her since she was a child. Don’t you see, I adore her.’

‘Yes, I see that. It’s obvious that you adore her. I adore my wife, Luisa, as well,’ I added, in order to counter what he clearly considered to be the extraordinary nature of his adoration of Inès. ‘But we’re more or less the same age, and so it’s difficult to know which of us will die first.’

‘You adore her? Don’t make me laugh. You don’t even own a camera. You’re not even much interested in remembering her exactly as she was — were you to lose her — in being able to see her again when it will no longer be possible for you to look at her.’

This time, fat Viana’s remark did bother me a little, I found it impertinent. I noticed this because there was something wounded and involuntary about my ensuing silence, and something fearful too, as if suddenly I no longer dared to ask him anything and as if, from that moment, I had no option but to listen to whatever he chose to tell me. It was as if that abrupt, indelicate remark had taken over the conversation entirely. And I realised that my fear came also from his use of the past tense. He had said ‘exactly as she was’ when referring to Luisa, when he should have said ‘exactly as she is’. I decided to leave him and go back up to our room. I wanted to see Luisa and to sleep by her side, to lie down and reclaim my space in the double bed that would doubtless be identical to the one shared by Inès and Viana, modern hotel rooms being all the same. I could simply bring the conversation to a close. I was feeling rather angry. However, the silence lasted only a few seconds because Viana continued talking, without this pause I have made, writing, and it was too late then not to continue listening to him.

‘What you say is very true, but it hardly takes a genius to work that out. It’s actually quite hard to know who will die first, it’s tantamount to wanting to know the order of our dying. And to know that, you have to be a part of that order, if you know what I mean. Not to disrupt it, that would be impossible, but to be a part of it. Listen, when I said that I adore Inès, I meant it literally. I adore her. It’s not just a turn of phrase, a meaningless, common-or-garden expression that you and I can share, for example. What you call “adore” has nothing whatever to do with what I mean by “adore”, we share the word because there is no other, but not the thing described. I adore her and have adored her ever since I first met her, and I know that I’ll continue to adore her for many years to come. That’s why it can’t last much longer, because that feeling has been the same inside me for too many years now, without variation or attenuation. There will be no variation on my part, it will become unbearable, it already is, and because, one day, it will all become unbearable to me, she will have to die before me, when I can no longer stand my adoration of her. One day, I’ll have to kill her, don’t you see?’

Having said that, Viana lifted his dripping foot out of the water and rested it carefully and distastefully on the grass, the sodden silk sock out of the water.

‘You’ll catch cold,’ I said. ‘You’d better take off your sock.’

Viana did as I suggested and immediately removed the drenched sock, mechanically, indifferently. For a few seconds, he held it, still distastefully, between two fingers and then draped it over the back of his lounger, where it began to drip (the smell of wet cloth). Now he had one bare foot: the other was still covered by a pale blue sock and a rabidly red moccasin. The bare foot was wet and the covered foot very dry. I found it hard to look away from the former, but I think that fixing my gaze on something was a way of deceiving my ears, of pretending that what mattered were Viana’s feet and not what he had said, that one day he would have to kill Inès. I preferred to think he hadn’t said that.

‘What are you saying?’ I didn’t want to continue the conversation, but I said precisely the words that obliged him to do so: ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Crazy? What I’m going to tell you now is, in my view, totally logical,’ replied Viana and he again smoothed his non-existent hair. ‘I’ve known Inès since she was a child, since she was seven years old. Now she’s twenty-three. She’s the daughter of a couple who were great friends of mine until five years ago, but who no longer are — it’s perfectly normal, they’re furious that their eighteen-year-old daughter went off to live with a friend of theirs whom they’d always liked and respected, and now they want nothing more to do with me, and not even, almost, with her. I often used to go to their house and I’d see Inès, and I adored her. She adored me, too, but in a different way, of course. She couldn’t know at the time, but I knew at once, and I decided to prepare myself, to wait eleven years until she came of age, I didn’t want to act in haste and ruin everything, and during the last few months of that period, I was the one who had to hold her back. It’s what people call “fixation”, and what I call “adoration”. Not that it was easy, mind, even girls of twelve or thirteen have boys chasing after them, absurd boys who want to play at being adults from early on. They lack all self-control and can cause the girls great harm. I worked out that by the time she was eighteen, I would be nearly fifty, and so I took good care of myself, for her sake, I took enormous care of myself, although I couldn’t do anything about my weight — your metabolism changes as you get older — nor about my baldness, there’s still no satisfactory remedy for that, and as I’m sure you’ll agree, a toupee is too undignified, so I had to rule that out. But I spent eleven years going to gyms and eating healthily and having check-ups every three months — because I have an absolute horror of operations; avoiding other women, avoiding diseases; and, of course, preparing myself mentally: listening to the same records she listened to, learning games, watching loads of TV, children’s programmes and years of ads, I know all the jingles by heart. As for reading matter, well, you can imagine, first I read comics, then adventure books, a few romantic novels, Spanish literature when she was studying that at school, as well as Catalan literature, Manelic and the wolf and all that, and I still read whatever she happens to be reading, American writers mainly, there are hundreds of them. I’ve played a lot of tennis and squash, done a bit of skiing and, on weekends, I’ve often had to travel to Madrid or San Sebastián just so that she could go to the races, and here we’ve been to all the fiestas in all the villages to see the horses and their riders. You may also have noticed my motorcycle. When I had to, I learned the names and heights of every basketball player, although now she’s lost interest in the game. And you’ve seen how I dress, although, of course, in summer, anything goes.’ And Viana made an eloquent gesture with his right hand, as if taking in his whole outfit. ‘Do you see what I’m saying: all these years, I’ve led a parallel existence to my own (I’m a lawyer, by the way, specialising in divorce), first a childhood existence then an adolescent one — I was the king of video games — and since I couldn’t go to the cinema with her, I’d go on my own to see all those teenage films about thugs and extraterrestrials. I’ve led a parallel existence, but one that lacks all continuity, because it’s incredibly hard to keep up to date, young people’s fads change all the time. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You said that you and your wife are about the same age, so your field of reference will be the same or very similar. You’ll have listened to the same songs at the same time, you’ll have seen the same films and read the same books, followed the same fashions, you’ll remember the same events and have experienced them with the same intensity and in the same years. It’s easy for you. Just imagine if it wasn’t like that, imagine the long silences in your conversations. And the worst thing would be having to explain everything, every reference, every allusion, every joke about your own past or your own age, your own time. You might as well not bother. I’ve had a long wait and, what’s more, I’ve had to reject my own past and create — as far as possible — another one that coincides with hers, with what will become her past.’

Viana paused for a moment, very briefly, as if a fly had brushed past him. It was night, our eyes were accustomed now to the darkness and to the light from the water. We were on an island, I had no watch. Luisa was sleeping and Inès was sleeping too, each in her respective room and double bed, perhaps lying diagonally across the bed because neither Viana nor I was by her side. Maybe they missed us in their sleep. Or maybe not, maybe they felt relieved.

‘But all that efforts over now, it no longer matters. What matters is my adoration, my immutable adoration. That’s so identical to what it was sixteen years ago that I can’t see it changing in the near future. And it would be disastrous if it did change. I’ve been devoted to her for too long now, devoted to her growing up, to her education, I couldn’t live any other way. For her, though, it’s different. She’s fulfilled her childhood dream, her childhood fixation — five years ago, she was as happy or even happier than I was when she came to live with me, because my house had been entirely designed around her and there was nothing she wanted that she didn’t have. But her character is still developing, she’s still very dependent on novelty, she’s drawn to the outside world, she’s looking around to see what else there is, what awaits her beyond me, and she’s a little tired, I think. Not just of me, but also of our strange, anomalous situation, she misses having a conventional life, misses the close relationship she had with her parents. Don’t think I don’t understand that, on the contrary, I foresaw it would happen, but the fact that I understand doesn’t help one iota. We all have our own life to lead, and we only have the one life, and none of us is prepared not to live that life according to our own desires — apart from those who have no desires, they’re the majority actually. People can say what they like, and speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance and resignation, but it’s all false: the norm is for people to think they desire whatever comes their way, whatever happens to them, what they achieve as they go along or what’s given to them, and they have no original desires. But whether those desires are preconceived or not, we each care about our own life and, compared with that, the lives of others matter only insofar as they’re interwoven with and form part of our own life, and insofar as disposing of those lives without consideration or scruple could end up affecting our own; there are, after all, laws, and punishment might follow. My adoration is excessive — that’s what makes it adoration. The length of time I had to wait was excessive too. And now I continue to wait, but the nature of that waiting has been turned on its head. Before, I was waiting to gain something, now all I can expect is for all this to end. Before, I was waiting to be given a gift, now I expect only loss. Before, I was waiting for growth, now I expect decay. Not just mine, you understand, but hers too, and that’s something I’m not prepared for. You’re probably thinking that I’m making too many assumptions, that nothing is entirely foreseeable; as I said before, the order of our dying is equally unforeseeable. You’re probably thinking that life is unforeseeable too, and that maybe Inès won’t tire of me or leave me. You’re thinking that I might be wrong to fear the passing of time, that perhaps she and I will grow old together, as you suggested earlier and as you’re convinced that you and your wife will, because I heard what you said, your words weren’t lost on me. But if that were the case, if all those years together did lie ahead of us, my adoration would still lead me to the same situation. Or do you imagine that I could allow my adoration to die? Do you think I could watch her age and deteriorate without resorting to the sole remedy that exists, namely, that she should die first? Do you imagine that, having known her as a seven-year-old (a seven-year-old), I could bear to see Inès in her forties, much less her fifties, with no trace of childhood left? Don’t be absurd. It’s like asking some particularly long-lived father to endure and celebrate the old age of his own children. Parents refuse to see their children transformed into old people, they hate them and jump over them and see only their grandchildren, if they have any. Time is always opposed to what it originated — to what is.’

Viana buried his face in his hands, as I’d seen him do from above, from the balcony, but not from down here, by the pool. And I saw then that this gesture had nothing to do with suppressed laughter, but with a kind of panic that nevertheless failed to negate a certain serenity. Perhaps he had to make that gesture precisely in order to cling on to his serenity. I again glanced up at my balcony and at the other balconies, but all still lay in silence, dark and empty, as if beyond the balconies, beyond the windows and net curtains, inside the repeated and identical rooms, no one was sleeping, no Luisa, no Inès, no one. But I knew they were sleeping and that the world was sleeping, its weak wheel stopped. Viana and I were merely the product of its inertia for as long as we were speaking. He went on speaking, his face still covered:

‘That’s why time offers no solution,’ he said. ‘Rather than allow my adoration to die, I would rather kill her, you understand; and rather than allow her to leave me, rather than allow my adoration to continue, without its object, I would also rather kill her. That, from my point of view, is perfectly logical. That’s why I know what I will have to do one day, possibly far off in the future, I’ll delay it for as long as possible, but it’s only a matter of time. Just in case, though, you see, I video her every day.’

‘Haven’t you ever considered killing yourself?’ I blurted out. I had been listening to him not because I wanted to, but because I had the feeling there was nothing else I could do and that the best way of not taking part in the conversation was to say nothing, to behave as if I were the mere repository of his confidences, without offering any objections or advice, without refuting or agreeing or being shocked. But it seemed to me harder and harder to bring this conversation to a close, the path it had taken was interminable, or so it seemed. My eyes felt itchy. I wished Luisa’s sheets would slide off and wake her up, that she would notice my absence and, like me, go out onto the balcony. That she would see me down below, by the swimming pool, in the feeble glow cast by the moon on the water, and summon me upstairs, that she would say my name and rescue me from this conversation with Viana; all she had to do was call. What a drag, I thought, as I sat listening to him, I’ll have to read the newspapers closely from now on and each time there’s a headline about a woman who has died at the hands of a man I’ll have to read the whole article until I find their names, now I’ll always fear that Inès could be the dead woman and Viana the man who killed her. Although it might all be lies, here on this island, while the women are sleeping.

‘Kill myself? That wouldn’t be right,’ answered Viana, removing his hands from his face. He looked at me with an expression more of amusement than surprise, and the corners of his mouth almost lifted in a smile, or so it seemed to me in the darkness.

‘It would be much less right — if I’ve understood you correctly — for you to kill her just so that you can continue to adore her on tape once she’s dead.’

‘No, you don’t understand: it would be right for me to kill her for the reasons I’ve explained, no one willingly gives up his way of life if he has a fairly good idea of how he wants to live it, and I do, which is unusual. And, how can I put it, murder is a very male practice, just as execution is, but not suicide, which is as common among women as it is among men. Earlier, I mentioned that she had a glimmering of what lies beyond me, but the fact is that beyond me there is nothing. As far as she’s concerned, there is nothing; she may not realise that, but she should. And if I were to kill myself, then that wouldn’t be the case — and really beyond me there must be nothing, don’t you see?’

Viana’s foot appeared to have dried off, but, hanging on the back of the lounger, the sock was still dripping rapidly onto the grass. I felt as if I could feel its dampness on my own shod feet, I could imagine what it would be like to put that wet sock on. I took off my left shoe so as to scratch the sole of that foot with my black moccasin, the one on my right foot.

‘Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t you afraid I’ll report you? Or talk to Inès in the morning?’

Viana interlaced his fingers behind his neck and leaned back on his lounger, and his bald head touched the wet sock. He reacted at once and sat up again, as one does when a fly brushes one’s skin. He put on the red moccasin he had taken off some time before, when I was still standing on our balcony, and this somehow dissipated any air of helplessness he might have had, and it occurred to me suddenly that the conversation might end.

‘You can’t report intentions,’ he said. ‘We leave for Barcelona tomorrow, you and I will never see each other again, we leave early, there’ll be no time to go to the beach. Tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten all about this, you won’t want to remember, you won’t take it seriously or remember me or this moment, you won’t try to find out anything. You won’t ask about us at the hotel, to check that Inès and I left together, that we paid the bill, that nothing happened in the night, when you were the only person awake, talking to me. You won’t even tell your wife what we talked about, why trouble her with it, because deep down you don’t want to believe me, you’ll manage, don’t worry.’ Viana hesitated for a moment, then went on: ‘You may not think so, but if you were to warn Inès, you would simply accelerate the process, and I would have to kill her tomorrow, do you understand?’

He hesitated again, paused, looked up at the sky, at the moon, and down at the water, then repeated that gesture of panic, covering his face, and continued speaking. ‘And who’s to say that you’d be able to speak to her tomorrow, who’s to say that I haven’t already killed her, tonight, a while ago, before I came down here, who’s to say that she isn’t already dead and that’s why I’m talking to you now, anyone can die at any moment, they taught us that at school, we’ve all known it ever since we were children, we all have our place in the order of dying, you yourself left your own wife sleeping, but how do you know she hasn’t died while you’ve been down here talking to me, perhaps she’s dying at this very moment, you wouldn’t have time to reach her, not even if you ran. How do you know it’s not Inès who has died at my hands, and that’s why I shaved off my moustache, a while ago, before you came down, before I came down? Or Inès and your wife? How do you know that both of them haven’t died, while they were sleeping?’

I didn’t believe him. Inès’ ideal beauty would be resting, her eight rings on the bedside table, her voluminous breasts safely under the sheets, her breathing regular, her identical lips half-open like a child’s, her hairless pubis leaving a slight stain, that strange nocturnal secretion women make. Luisa was asleep, I had seen her, her fine-featured, open, and as yet unlined face, her restless eyes moving beneath her eyelids, as if they couldn’t get used to not doing at night what they did during the day, unlike Inès’ eyes, which would probably be quite still now, during the sleep she needed to maintain her immutable beauty. Both were sleeping, that’s why they didn’t wake up or come out onto the balcony, Luisa hadn’t died in my absence, however long that had been — I’d forgotten my watch. Instinctively, I glanced up towards the rooms, towards my balcony, towards all the balconies, and on one of them, I saw a figure wrapped in a sheet toga and heard it call to me twice, saying my name, as mothers say their children’s names. I stood up. On Inès’ balcony, though, whichever it was, there was no one.

(1990)