‘What on earth has he been told about this dubious friend of his — or, rather, this friend who suddenly appears to be dubious — what can he have said or done?’ I wondered, or thought. ‘After half a life of utter clarity.’ Or perhaps that isn’t what I thought, but only how I remember it now that I’m no longer young and am more or less the same age as Muriel was then or perhaps older; it’s impossible to recover the inexperience of your inexperienced youth once you’ve moved on considerably; once you’ve understood something, it’s impossible to not understand what you once didn’t understand, ignorance doesn’t return, not even when you want to describe a time during which you either basked in or were the victim of ignorance, and never trust anyone who tells you something with a falsely innocent look on his face, feigning the lost innocence of childhood or adolescence or youth, or who adopts the gaze — the icy, frozen gaze — of the child he no longer is, and the same is true of the old man who speaks out of the years of his maturity rather than out of the old age that now dominates his entire vision of the world, his knowledge of other people and of himself; even the dead — could they speak or whisper — would distort the truth, putting themselves in the shoes of the foolish, unfinished living beings they once were, pretending they hadn’t yet entered the realm of death and metamorphosis and had no knowledge of what they had once been capable of doing and saying, given that they have done and said everything and there is no possibility now of surprise or emendation or improvisation, that account is closed, never to be opened again … ‘He said, “No one would readily admit to something like that”, so it must be something very murky, some very dirty linen indeed, but what? Some “spiteful, devious person”, yes, he said that too, and I assumed he meant a woman, although those two adjectives could easily be applied to a man as well, after all, why not, and yet when he said them, I instantly imagined a woman as the source of the information … He’s wondering whether or not to tell me what it’s about, this thing he has so painfully discovered. He’s afraid that if he confides in me, it will seem still more real or more certain, that the more he speaks about it, the more validity he’ll be giving it, the more he’ll be condemning his friend, and it’s only natural that he would prefer not to do that. But nor can he dismiss out of hand what he has heard, or perhaps the matter so worries and troubles him that he can no longer keep it to himself, it stalks his thoughts day and night, but he doesn’t know who he can speak to about it without making the matter seem even more significant, even more serious. Perhaps he sees me as the least important of his acquaintances, precisely because of my youth, my inexperience and my complete inability to move in his world of the fully adult. And if I were to decide to blab about it, my voice lacks weight and credibility. That’s why he has chosen me, because of my insignificance,’ I thought. ‘Telling me is the closest he can get to telling no one. He’ll feel safer with me than with anyone else, I can be dismissed and never seen again, I can almost be cancelled out, sooner or later I will be a mere empty space. That means I can also inquire, probe, draw him out. I have no resonance, I bring no consequences.’
‘I can’t really give you an opinion, Don Eduardo, I mean, Eduardo,’ I said, correcting myself, and that ‘Eduardo’ grated on my ears, sounded horribly disrespectful, ‘if you don’t tell me a little more. You asked what I would do, but since I don’t know what the problem is, I can’t really answer. And since you say that even if you went to see your friend, you still couldn’t be certain he would tell you the truth, that he would deny the whole thing and that his No would be of no use to you … Well, I really don’t know what you should do. Put pressure on the person who told you the story, try to get them to withdraw it, to retract? Although it seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that someone would go back on what he’d said once he’d taken the step of uncovering something ugly that showed someone else in such a bad light? You could try to glean more through third parties, to test out the truth of what you’ve been told. Only you can know if that would work, it often doesn’t. It seems to me that it all depends on what that something is, and how far it can coexist with your friendship and how far you can live with the shadow it casts. As I said, you could just forget it, suppress it, let it go. If it’s impossible to know the truth, then I suppose we’re at liberty to decide for ourselves what the truth is.’
The maritime eye regarded me differently, curiously, with perhaps a touch of suspicion, as if Muriel had not expected such pragmatism from me, we tend to assume that youth is all vehemence and intransigence, hating uncertainty and awkward compromises, as having an element of fanaticism in its search for any truth, however small and circumstantial that might be.
‘It’s always impossible to know the truth. One never can,’ he said. ‘The truth is a category —’ He broke off; he was thinking about what he was saying while he was saying it, this was not a sentence he had worked out beforehand; or else he was remembering it as if it were a quotation. ‘The truth is a category that remains in suspension while we’re alive.’ He pondered this phrase for a few seconds, gazing up at the ceiling, as though expecting to see it appear there, like the words and names that teachers of old used to write so painstakingly on the blackboard. ‘While we’re alive,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, it’s illusory to go in pursuit of the truth, a waste of time and a source of conflict, sheer folly. And yet we can’t not do it. Or, rather, we can’t help wondering about it, knowing that it does exist and is to be found in a place and a time to which we have no access. I realize that I’ll probably never know for sure if that friend did or didn’t do what I’ve been told he did. But I also know that the truth will be one of two things, or rather three: he either did it or didn’t do it or he did something in between, something not as black as I’ve been told and not as white as he would describe it to me. The fact that I’m doomed not to find out doesn’t mean that the truth doesn’t exist. The worst thing is that, by this stage, even the person concerned may not know what the truth is. When many years or even not so many years have passed, people tell the facts as it suits them to and come to believe their own version, their own distorted view of the facts. They often erase them altogether, banish them, blow them away like a piece of thistledown’ — he made a gesture with his fingers as if he were holding a thistle head, but he did not blow — ‘they convince themselves that nothing happened or that their role in events was quite different from what it actually was. There are cases of genuine amnesia or honest distortion, in which the person lying is not lying or at least not consciously. Sometimes not even the perpetrator of an act can dispel our doubts; he’s simply incapable of telling the truth. It’s all a blur, he can’t remember, he muddles things up or simply doesn’t know. And yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth, there is. Something happened or didn’t happen, and if it did happen, it did so in a certain way, that is how it took place. Notice that expression “to take place”, which we use as a synonym of “happen” and “occur”. It’s curiously appropriate and exact, because that is precisely what happens with the truth, it has a place and there it stays; and it has a time and it stays there too. It remains locked up inside that time and place and there’s no way we can undo that lock, we can’t travel back to either time or place in order to get a glimpse of their contents. All we’re left with are guesses and approximations, it becomes a matter of encircling the truth and trying to make out its shape in the distance or through veils and mists, but we never can, it’s just a ridiculous waste of time … And yet, and yet …’