‘As it happens, there is something I’d like to tell you about, Eduardo, if you don’t mind. Some things don’t matter so much to me, but I don’t like to leave unfinished any commission or order you gave me. Now, I know you revoked your commission regarding the Doctor’ — I think I chose that pedantic word ‘revoked’ to give my words a more solemn tone — ‘but I feel you should know what I’ve found out recently. It chimes so completely with your own information, with your suspicions, that I really have to tell you —’
Muriel raised the hand holding the pipe and brought me up short, an imperious, prohibitive gesture. He pointed the bowl at me, I could see the glowing embers: as if he were showing me a red light.
‘Stop right there, young De Vere. What did I also say? I said that I couldn’t prevent you from continuing your investigations on your own account, if that’s what you wanted. I was wrong to reveal my doubts to you and alert you to them, that was a weakness on my part, and then, once activated, there’s no way of deactivating that alert. But I warned you that if you did continue, then you mustn’t come telling me or anyone else what you had learned. If the Doctor has confessed to you or you’ve discovered something on your own account, keep it to yourself. And best take it to the grave with you, although that, I realize, is a lot to ask. With me at least, though, keep schtum. I refuse to hear it. I don’t want to know.’
I was standing up, since he hadn’t asked me to take a seat. By then, it’s true, I didn’t need to be asked, because I was perfectly at home there. But he had probably only summoned me to inform me that I could keep my job, not to chat or to discourse on anything. I decided to insist; one always does when faced by a refusal, at least once. A regrettable habit shared by most of us.
‘But you did want to know at the time, enough to get me involved. You were tormented by uncertainty and unable simply to ignore the matter, as I suggested you should. I remember you saying to me: “I need either to have in my possession or to acquire some clue … some way of orienting myself that will allow me to say: ‘That’s a downright lie’ or ‘Oh dear, it must be true’.” You found the accusations so disturbing, so discouraging, base and stupid. “More incongruous than grave,” you said. Well, it turns out that what I’ve learned is both those things. And not just in the past either, there may be some murky business in the present too. You can’t ignore it now, just when I’ve found the clue that will give you the orientation you wanted.’
Muriel got up and came over to me. He folded his arms sternly as he had when he opened his bedroom door to Beatriz, when he appeared in the doorway in his white pyjamas and dark dressing gown. He looked at me, too, rather as he’d looked at her, the poor woman standing there in her nightdress. Any affection he may have felt for me had vanished from his blue eye; now there was only irritation, a little festering anger and even a slight hint of scorn, the scorn due to anyone who tries to impose his will. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to tell him what I knew.
‘Of course I can ignore it, why shouldn’t I? So what if, at one point, I sought your involvement? I’ve told you already, I’ve changed my mind. I owe the Doctor a great deal and he has just saved Beatriz yet again. He’s a very old friend and I don’t want to lose him, nor for my view of him to become further tarnished, it was tarnished enough by what that other person told me. I wish she never had. I can still pretend it never happened and, as you suggested, ignore what she said. I don’t need orientation, I don’t need any clues, because when I cancelled your mission, I’d already decided to tell myself: “It’s a lie or should be.” We lose far too many people in a lifetime, they either drift away or die, and it doesn’t make sense to get rid of those who are left. So what if he committed some vile deed in the past or took advantage of someone or other? Here, during a very long dictatorship, almost everyone did at some point. So what? We just have to accept that this is a grubby country, very grubby. For decades we’ve rubbed along together, what else could we do, and we’ve been obliged to get to know each other. Many of those who behaved badly then, behaved well in other circumstances. Things can change a lot over the years, it’s very hard to behave badly all the time, as it is to behave well. Who hasn’t committed some vile deed (not political, but personal), and who hasn’t also performed acts of great kindness? It wasn’t like that forty years ago, there were no half-measures then. But this is 1980, and those forty years have mixed everything up far more than we think, and you can’t go back to those long-lost days. Contrary to what some may think, time didn’t stop then, but continued to flow, however hard the franquistas tried to make it stop. Anyone who was a bastard in 1940 probably remained a bastard, but he also had the chance to temper his bastardly nature and to become something more. Revenge has its sell-by date, evil grows wearisome, hatred gets boring after a while, except among the real fanatics, and even then … We all need a break from those things. People go to the bar and talk and joke, and in the midst of the laughter none of us feels or believes ourselves to be evil, even if we’re telling the sort of cruel jokes we Spaniards tend to tell. No one is seamless or all of a piece, or very few of us are: even Franco loved the cinema, just like you and me; he probably genuinely empathized with the characters’ many vicissitudes. While he was watching a film, he probably stopped making decisions and stopped plotting; he was perhaps completely engrossed during those ninety minutes, in a parenthesis from normal life. Needless to say, that’s the worst possible example, but I’ve only seen the Doctor in normal life, and that’s all I know of him. I’ve seen him curing my children and saving Beatriz and being kind and attentive to me. I’ve seen him laughing, having fun, joking. So I don’t care what he did or didn’t do all those years ago before I knew him. He has been and still is something more than that to me, Juan. That’s all I have to say.’
He unfolded his arms and retreated a few steps, as if he had finished his lesson or his warning. I couldn’t force what I knew on him. Well, I could, I only had to say a few words, spoken in wretched haste: ‘The Doctor abused various women and blackmailed their husbands or fathers, he threatened to send them to prison or the firing squad if they didn’t agree to his demands.’ You can’t help but hear, and auditory stains cannot be cleaned up, unlike sexual stains, which can all be washed away. I was so emboldened by the situation that I was even tempted, for a fraction of a second, to say the unthinkable: ‘Did you know that, for quite some time now, the Doctor has been screwing Beatriz?’ (That disrespectful verb would once again have escaped my lips, because it was the right word to use.) I had done the same thing, although it had only been once and, besides, and this I will never know, it might not have bothered Muriel that I had screwed her or that she’d been screwed by Van Vechten or Arranz or who knows who else, perhaps someone outside Madrid. And I could have let slip other equally swift words, to lend more weight to the information: ‘They meet in an ultra-Catholic place, which apparently has links to Pinochet and his followers.’ But you don’t say such puerile things, not even when you’re twenty-three. Not to someone you admire and respect and are fond of, not to someone who has, moreover, forbidden you to tell him anything and insists that he doesn’t want to know, someone who has resolved to renounce all passing curiosity. And so I asked two questions, one after the other, and understood from his response that he considered these puerile too:
‘But what about justice, Eduardo? What about what actually happened, what took place?’ He had probably forgotten the comments he had made to me once about that last expression.