The note was from Dato, who asked me to go to his room without fail, as soon as I got back to the hotel, regardless of the lateness of the hour. It was half past two and I was utterly exhausted, and the benefits of uncertainty had run their course: now I needed to know, and so I went up to Dato's room. I have rarely seen a man in such a state of contained anxiety as Dato, the former stockbroker with the eighteenth-century hands, in the early hours of that morning. He had been smoking while he waited for me — the ashtray was overflowing— and he was wearing a burgundy red silk dressing gown, although underneath he still had on his shirt and trousers; he had shoes on too, brown shoes (with laces). He looked me up and down several times, doubtless because I was looking absolutely terrible. But it was also as if he were looking at me for the first time and with new eyes, perhaps as I imagine I would have looked at Noguera four years ago if he had been introduced to me then as the future husband of my girlfriend Berta.
"I trust you will turn up in a more presentable state for the rendezvous I have been asked to make for you tomorrow morning. Would you like something to drink?" And with that, he placed one hand on the handle of the small fridge or minibar in his room. He didn't even give me time to shake my head. "No, I suspect not, given your condition. Some mishap?"
I looked down at my jacket.
"I didn't have a chance to change, but it was nothing very serious. What's wrong?"
"You probably know that better than I do. It looks as if you're going to relieve me completely of my role as companion, perhaps deprive me of a job as well." The man speaking was no longer the indispensable and circumspect Dato, the silent presence at our suppers and conversations and walks and shopping expeditions, he was once again the man I had met on his own in the hotel bar: lively, frivolous, disrespectful, although now he was not smiling (he was simultaneously vivacious and somber).
"What do you mean? What are you talking about? Why weren't you all there at the theater?"
Dato lit another cigarette and immediately tapped it with one finger to get rid of some as yet nonexistent ash. He was agitated, but, as I said, still very contained.
"I don't know, not that it matters. I have no idea what's going on, for the first time in many years, I simply don't know. But don't concern yourself on my account, there's no real danger of my losing my job. On the contrary, I will probably prove to be even more essential, now I'll just have the other half to take care of. As I told you once before, dealing with a married couple is like dealing with one very contradictory and forgetful person. Now it will be different, perhaps easier, a man alone and without contradictions," and he said again: "a man alone."
I said nothing. Dato was smoking. Suddenly, his face lit up (slightly) and his protuberant gums appeared:
"Unless, of course, I am wrong to assume that I know what your intentions are. If tomorrow, when you go to your rendezvous, you merely have a bit of fun, enjoy yourself and then leave things as they are, as they have always been…that, if you will allow me, is what I would recommend. It would be for the best, not perhaps for Natalia or for you, but certainly for me and for Señor Manur. And probably for the two of you as well, although I doubt that you'll believe me."
"What appointment are you talking about? Can you just tell me what you're talking about? Where's Natalia?"
On this occasion, despite once again making the mistake of asking more than one question at a time, Dato answered all of them.
"Natalia is in her room, sleeping with Señor Manur. The reason I asked you to come and see me is to give you a message from her. She told me to reserve a room in this hotel," as he spoke, he picked up a card from the table with two fingers and handed it to me, "and she wants you to go there with her at five o'clock tomorrow afternoon. She won't be able to see you before, I mean, at breakfast and everything. I presume it is a romantic assignation," and he did not make the slightest pause between this comment and what he went on to say, as if he wanted his first comment to be heard, but to go unnoticed. "She also told me to congratulate you on your performance tonight. She is sure, she says, that it was a great success. She is very sorry that she could not be there."
I looked at the name and address of the hotel. It was in the same street, almost opposite I seemed to remember — a modest place, as if it had been the first one that Natalia Manur had seen when she walked out of our hotel.
"Thank you," I said. Then I hesitated: "Listen, Dato, I assume Señor Manur doesn't know anything about this."
Dato stubbed out his cigarette without finishing it, with an air of irritation and with a despair that was still new.
"What do you think? You spoke to him this morning, you met him, didn't you? That had never happened before."
"What had never happened before?"
"I told you that Natalia Manur had no lovers."
Before Dato I was incapable of blushing.
"You told me that you only kept Señor Manur informed of what you knew and nothing else, and that you didn't know if she had or had ever had any lovers. Tomorrow, on the other hand," I still did not blush, "tomorrow she might have a lover, about whom you will be informed. I don't know if you intend telling Manur, but it seems to me that, with a man like him, there is a great difference between telling him before and telling him afterwards."
Dato took his pack of cigarettes out of his dressing gown pocket and, with those slenderest of fingers, which looked as flammable as the paper or the match, he lit another one.
"My dear sir, you don't seem to understand, or perhaps you are actually going to do what I have advised you to do, but which I am assuming you won't. If Natalia Manur goes to that rendezvous tomorrow and you go too, if you do not restrict yourself, as I have suggested, to having a bit of fun and being more or less satisfied with that, then there will be no need for me to say anything that night to Señor Manur. She won't come back and he will know that she won't come back. I don't know at what point in the small hours he will give in and admit it (that is when he will come to me), but he will have understood before day breaks. It is only right that this time, when it is for real, that she should not have to put up with his scenes. I will do that." He fell silent for a moment and breathed the smoke from his cigarette out through his nostrils, as if he were trying to disguise a sigh. Then he said: "Don't you see? You have been chosen."
I have heard nothing more of Dato since that stay in Madrid, I have not even been able to imagine his face during the four years that have passed between the events I am recounting and this morning. Today I can see him clearly again, although I know that, over the next few days, his mysterious, ageless features will inevitably fade again. I can clearly see his curly hair and his bulging eyes, his tiny hands and his rubbery gums, his lace-up shoes and his burgundy red silk dressing gown (I can see especially those minute hands that will no longer pick up the change from bills paid for by his mistress, and, who knows, perhaps it was the very disinterestedness of that gesture that tipped the balance in her favor at that point). I can see too his scornful expression when, as I was leaving the room and turned to ask him why he did not try to stop that rendezvous, that inauguration, why he favored Natalia Manur over her husband, he replied in a hoarse, rusty voice, half-concealed by a mouthful of unexhaled smoke:
"It's hard to know whom one favors by an action or by an omission, but one can also tire of having no preferences at all."