there was no need to say anything, but it seemed wrong to stay silent.
‘No, of course he couldn’t,’ she said quickly and slightly defiantly. ‘He couldn’t have thought it while they were taking him to the hospital, because he was unconscious by then and never regained consciousness. Perhaps he thought something like that before, though, while he was being stabbed. I can’t stop imagining that moment, those seconds, from the time the attack began until he stopped trying to defend himself and became unaware of anything, until he lost consciousness and felt nothing, neither despair nor painnor …’ She fumbled briefly for what else he might have felt before he collapsed, half-dead. ‘Or farewell. I had never thought anyone else’s thoughts before, never wondered what another person might be thinking, not even him, it’s not my style, I lack imagination, I don’t have that kind of mind. And yet now I do it almost all the time. Like I say, it’s changed my way of thinking, and it’s as if I don’t recognize myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn’t know me either: he couldn’t have, it would have been beyond him, isn’t that strange? If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I’ve been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I’m not, indefinitely. Do you understand what I mean?’ she added, realizing that what she was saying was pretty abstruse.
It was almost like a mental tongue-twister to me, but I did more or less understand. I thought: ‘This woman is in a very bad way indeed, and who can blame her? Her grief must be immense, and she must spend all day and all night going over and over what happened, imagining her husband’s final conscious moments, wondering what he could have been thinking, when he would probably have had quite enough to do trying to avoid the first knife-thrusts and get away, get free, he probably never gave her so much as a thought, he would have been focused entirely on what he foresaw might be his death and on doing all he could to avoid it, and if anything else crossed his mind it would have been merely his sense of infinite astonishment, incredulity and incomprehension, what’s going on here, how is this possible, what is this man doing and why is he stabbing me, why has he chosen me out of millions and who has he mistaken me for, doesn’t he realizethat I am not the cause of his ills, and how ridiculous, how awful, how stupid to die like this, because of someone else’s mistake or obsession, to die violently and at the hands of a stranger or of someone so secondary in my life that I had barely noticed him until forced to by his intemperance and his disruptive behaviour, by the fact that he increasingly made himself a nuisance and one day even attacked Pablo, to die at the hands of a man who is of even less importance to me than the pharmacist on the corner or the waiter at the café where I have breakfast, someone purely anecdotal, insignificant, as if I suddenly found myself being attacked by the Prudent Young Woman who is also there at the café every morning and with whom I have never exchanged a word, people who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear, or whose absence we don’t notice, this can’t be happening because it’s just too absurd, a stroke of inconceivably bad luck, I won’t even have a chance to tell someone about it, which is the one thing that very slightly makes up for the worst misfortunes, you never know what or who will don the disguise or shape of your unique and individual death, which is always unique
‘No, of course he couldn’t,’ she said quickly and slightly defiantly. ‘He couldn’t have thought it while they were taking him to the hospital, because he was unconscious by then and never regained consciousness. Perhaps he thought something like that before, though, while he was being stabbed. I can’t stop imagining that moment, those seconds, from the time the attack began until he stopped trying to defend himself and became unaware of anything, until he lost consciousness and felt nothing, neither despair nor painnor …’ She fumbled briefly for what else he might have felt before he collapsed, half-dead. ‘Or farewell. I had never thought anyone else’s thoughts before, never wondered what another person might be thinking, not even him, it’s not my style, I lack imagination, I don’t have that kind of mind. And yet now I do it almost all the time. Like I say, it’s changed my way of thinking, and it’s as if I don’t recognize myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn’t know me either: he couldn’t have, it would have been beyond him, isn’t that strange? If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I’ve been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I’m not, indefinitely. Do you understand what I mean?’ she added, realizing that what she was saying was pretty abstruse.
It was almost like a mental tongue-twister to me, but I did more or less understand. I thought: ‘This woman is in a very bad way indeed, and who can blame her? Her grief must be immense, and she must spend all day and all night going over and over what happened, imagining her husband’s final conscious moments, wondering what he could have been thinking, when he would probably have had quite enough to do trying to avoid the first knife-thrusts and get away, get free, he probably never gave her so much as a thought, he would have been focused entirely on what he foresaw might be his death and on doing all he could to avoid it, and if anything else crossed his mind it would have been merely his sense of infinite astonishment, incredulity and incomprehension, what’s going on here, how is this possible, what is this man doing and why is he stabbing me, why has he chosen me out of millions and who has he mistaken me for, doesn’t he realizethat I am not the cause of his ills, and how ridiculous, how awful, how stupid to die like this, because of someone else’s mistake or obsession, to die violently and at the hands of a stranger or of someone so secondary in my life that I had barely noticed him until forced to by his intemperance and his disruptive behaviour, by the fact that he increasingly made himself a nuisance and one day even attacked Pablo, to die at the hands of a man who is of even less importance to me than the pharmacist on the corner or the waiter at the café where I have breakfast, someone purely anecdotal, insignificant, as if I suddenly found myself being attacked by the Prudent Young Woman who is also there at the café every morning and with whom I have never exchanged a word, people who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear, or whose absence we don’t notice, this can’t be happening because it’s just too absurd, a stroke of inconceivably bad luck, I won’t even have a chance to tell someone about it, which is the one thing that very slightly makes up for the worst misfortunes, you never know what or who will don the disguise or shape of your unique and individual death, which is always unique
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