‘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.