The person he was most interested in was Pérez Nuix, despite his growing distance from that group to which he had belonged in another age, so remote and so different. I wasn't sure whether this was because he had heard so much from Tupra about her qualities ('That very competent half-Spanish girl of his,' he had said of her when I had still not met her, 'I can never remember her name, but he says that, with time, she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough.' And he had added as if remembering another such case: 'That's one of the difficulties, most of them get fed up and leave') or because he occasionally thought I might get together with her and thus leave behind me my sentimental daze and my occasional sexual toings and froings, far less frequent than he imagined, the old tend to deem anyone whom they believe to be still virile, and therefore still young, as promiscuous-I mean truly and successfully so. Wheeler could see that the months were passing and that the situation with Luisa had still not been sorted out, as he would have preferred-there wasn't so much as a flicker, not even a tremor, even of the kind that leaves the doors more firmly shut than before; because even if they only open a crack, there is still a slight fluster of agitation-and so from his distance, fumblingly, not to say blindly, with a touch of ingenuousness and respectful paternalism, he would act as a very tentative matchmaker whenever a female name cropped up in our conversations, and that of Patricia Pérez Nuix was, inevitably, the most persistent and enduring.
'Do you get on well with her? Are you, would you say, comrades?' he asked me once. 'Contrary to what is generally believed, the best relationship you can have with the opposite sex is one of comradeship, it's the best way to make conquests and it lasts longer too.' On another occasion, he questioned me about her abilities: 'Do you find her talk interesting, her view of things, the details she picks up on? Is she as good as Tupra says she is? Do you have fun with her?' And on a third occasion, he was even more direct or more curious: 'Is the girl pretty? Apart from her youth, I mean. Do you find her attractive?'
And I had answered every time, without alacrity but with due deference: 'Yes, the beginnings of comradeship, I mean it could happen. But it's early days for that, we haven't found ourselves yet in a situation where we could unequivocally help each other, get each other out of a difficulty or a dilemma, because those are the kinds of things that create comradeship. Or long habit, and the unremarked passage of time.' And then: 'Yes, she is good, she's sharp and perceptive; she's subtle too, but never overembellishes, she doesn't invent or show off; and she's certainly fun, I don't get irritated or bored when I have to interpret alongside her, I'm always glad and willing to listen to her.' And later: 'Yes, she is rather pretty, but not too pretty. And she's funny and physical and she laughs easily, which is so often the most attractive thing about women. I don't know that I find her so attractive that I'd go to the kind of bother I might have once or actually take a step in that direction, but I certainly wouldn't turn up my nose if the opportunity happened to arise.' I remember that I resorted to Spanish for the whole of that last sentence, well, there isn't any real equivalent in other languages for 'no hacer ascos,' although 'to turn up your nose at something' comes close, and I added: 'It's just a hypothesis: it's not something I think about, not something I'm considering doing. Besides, it would be inappropriate, she's much younger than me. In theory, she's not someone I could ever aspire to.'
Wheeler responded with genuine bemusement:
'Really? Since when have you set such limits on yourself? Or put obstacles in your way? I think I'm right in saying that you're younger than Tupra, and as far as I know, he doesn't set limits on himself or put obstacles in his way in that or any other field.'
He could have been speaking in general or making a specific reference to the liaison between Tupra and Pérez Nuix about which I had so many suspicions. This was another piece of information to back up those suspicions.
'We're not all alike, Peter,' I replied. And the older men get, the more unlike we become, don't you think? You should know. Tupra and I are very different. We probably always were, right from childhood.'
He paid no attention to this remark, however, or else took it as a joke.
'Oh, come now. You're not going to persuade me that you've suddenly gone all shy, Jacobo. Or that you've developed a complex about your age and with it all kinds of scruples. What do ten or twenty years matter? Once someone becomes an adult, that's it, and things even out very quickly from then on. It's a point from which there's no return, I'm pleased to say, although there are some people who never achieve adulthood, not in how they live their lives or intellectually-in fact, there are more and more such people, they're real pests, I can't abide them, and yet shops, hotels and offices, even hospitals and banks, are full of them. It's a deliberate ploy, fostered by the societies we live in. For reasons I can't understand, they choose to create irresponsible people. It's incomprehensible. It's as if they set out to create people with a handicap. How old is this bright young thing?'
'Twenty-seven at most, I would say. Certainly not much less.'
'She's a grown woman, then, she'll already have crossed Conrad's shadow line, or will be about to do so. It's the age at which life takes charge of you, if you haven't already taken charge of it yourself. The line that separates the closed from the open, the written from the blank page: it's when possibilities begin to run out, because the ones you discard become ever more irrecoverable, and more so with each day you live through. Each date a shadow, or a memory, which comes to the same thing.'
'Yes, that would be so in Conrad's day, Peter. Now, at twenty-seven, most people feel as if they're only just starting, with the doors of life flung open and real life as yet unbegun and eternally waiting. People graduate from the school of irresponsibility at a much later age now. If, as you say, they ever do.'
'Be that as it may, your age will be a matter of indifference to that girl, if you interest her or she takes a liking to you. And if she has such a keen eye as you and Tupra say, she won't have fallen asleep in puberty or childhood, she won't have dug herself in, but will be fully incorporated into the world, she'll have scrambled aboard as quickly as she could, perhaps obliged by circumstance. And if she's as acute as all that, she won't be the kind of girl who likes very young men. They'll seem too transparent, overly decipherable, she'll have read their whole story even with the book closed.' Wheeler paused for a long time, the kind of pause that announced he was weary of talking, he tired very quickly on the phone, in the hand of an old man even a phone weighs heavy, and his arm would find it tiring to hold. Before saying goodbye, he added: 'You and Tupra are not so very different, Jacobo. Well, you are different, but not as much as you think, or as you would like. And you ought not to spend so much time alone there in London, I've told you before, even though you have more to do now and are busier. It's not the same thing.'
And there she was before me, that bright and not-too-pretty young woman, in my apartment, at night, on my sofa, with her dog, a run in her tights, and drinking too much wine, all in order to ask me a favor, and outside I could see the steady, comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that it alone seemed to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears, it was as if it were excluding clear skies for good and discounting the possibility of any other weather ever appearing in the sky-or even the idea of its own absence, just like embraces when they are given willingly and with feeling and just like repugnance when repugnance is the only thing that still exists between those same two people who once embraced; the one before and the other afterwards, things almost always happen in that order and not the other way round. There was young Pérez Nuix, probably the best of us-there was no need to allow any more time to pass before saying so-the one who saw most and the most gifted of our group in the building with no name, the one who took the biggest risks and saw most deeply, more than Tupra and more than me and much more than Mulryan and Rendel, I wondered if she would guess or know what my reactions and my response would be when she finally asked me straight out what she had come to ask me after her long walk, drenched despite her umbrella. And I thought she would doubtless have made her measurements, her calculations and her prognostications, and that she would probably know what I still did not know about myself-perhaps she had her own kind of prescience; I must tread very carefully and sidestep her predictions, or deliberately prove them wrong, but that would be difficult, because she was also capable of foreseeing when and how I would intentionally and far-sightedly sidestep the predictions I had foreseen. We could end up cancelling each other out and our conversation would then lack both truth and meaning, as was the case with everything we did. When two equal forces meet, that is the time to lay down one's weapons: when the spear is thrown to one side and the shield is lowered and laid on the grass, the sword is stuck into the ground and the helmet hung on its hilt. I should just relax and try not to get ahead of myself or act against my own best interests; I should try not to be artificial, but drink a little more of my wine calmly and unconcernedly, knowing that in the end I could answer either 'Yes' or 'No' and still direct the conversation.