— You were in love with both of them, Diana says, with an echo of retrospective pity in her voice.
— No, Nula says, with the fresh light that they projected over the world.
— Isn’t that basically the same thing? Diana says.
After a thoughtful silence, Nula responds with certainty:
— Yes, but only partly.
That same night he learned the reason, which was much more simple than he’d imagined, behind the four symmetrical points on the four streets of their block that had become so popular recently: Riera had a lover, Cristina, around the corner from his office, and the morning when Nula had followed Lucía from the city center and had seen her peer into the garden of his own house, Lucía, who suspected what was happening, hadn’t known exactly where, halfway down one of the two parallel streets, her husband’s new lover lived, having only heard a couple of vague allusions to it from her husband. She wanted to know who she was and what she was like — every one of Riera’s new lovers, despite the reciprocal liberty that she enjoyed, but which she’d never make use of, could represent a new problem — and when she peered curiously into the apartment building where Nula and his mother lived it was because her calculations suggested that her husband’s lover might live there. After she’d turned the corner and had glanced furtively into the office to verify that Riera was still there, she’d continued around the corner and had walked the half block to the next house, the symmetrical point relative to La India’s apartment, whose features coincided with what she knew about Cristina. Stopping outside the half-open door, to show that she considered herself justified to the privilege, she’d adopted an ostentatious and defiant posture, and when this didn’t yield any results she kept walking and went into her house: Nula had clearly heard the metallic sound that the key made as it turned in the lock. When he saw her the second time, in the evening, sat down at her table in the pastry shop on the corner, and followed her on her walk around the block under the darkness of the trees, he could tell, though he hadn’t solved the enigma, that Lucía was making the same circuit as before and that her walk around the block coincided with the hours, at midday and in the evening, when her husband usually finished work and left the office. In fact, there was nothing mysterious about any of it, and his mistake, as occurs, meanwhile, with almost every mystery, was the result of insufficient information. But the biggest shock came when Riera told him that while he’d been sitting with Lucía at the table next to the window, he, Riera, had passed by in his car with Cristina and had seen them together, and he’d recognized him immediately when he saw him in the waiting room, and because Nula had given him his address on the medical form, Riera, after closing the office at twelve thirty, had gone to see where he lived. He told him this last detail that first night, laughing, after Lucía had gone to bed, saying that he hadn’t wanted to charge him the visit because he didn’t really consider him a patient: on the one hand, it would have felt like he was taking advantage of him, and on the other, he preferred not to mix the exercise of his profession with his private life. He’d been surprised to see him in the waiting room, but he’d understood immediately what was happening: whenever he had an affair with a married woman, he, too, always felt the irresistible urge to see the husband up close and, if the husband was an upright person, to befriend him even. When Cristina’s husband, an electrical engineer who was doing an eight-month course in California, came back at the end of the year, he’d invite them over for dinner one night, if his relationship with Cristina was still going on, an intimate dinner, just the four of them, Cristina, Lucía, Cristina’s husband, and him, Riera, and even five of them, if Nula wanted to come too. Riera accompanied that false declaration, as in other situations and with other declarations, with an open, juvenile, and slightly degenerate laugh that, as Nula saw on several occasions, seemed to open, as they say, every door for him. While he listened to him talk, Nula thought of Lucía, asleep in the large white bed, or possibly listening to him too from the bedroom, through the half-open glass door that led to the garden, and after a while he realized that he was staying so long because he wanted to delay as much as possible the moment when, after accompanying him to the door, Riera would lock it behind him, go back to the bedroom, and lie down naked next to her. But when Riera suggested that it was getting late, because he had to go in early the next day, and Nula got up to leave, Lucía’s sleepy and smiling face appeared in the half-open door, and in a playful voice pleaded,
Come find me tomorrow afternoon; we could get something to drink, like the other day.