The Infatuations by Javier Marías Page B

being burned or perhaps choking to death, and then I’m assailed by the dreadful idea of all the people who would have heard the siren on the police car that arrived to arrest the gorrilla or of the ambulance that went to help Miguel in the street and take him to hospital, they would have listened to it distractedly or even irritably, thinking, “Why do they have to make such a racket?” – you know the kind of thing, it’s what we all say – “Why so loud, it can’t be that urgent.” We almost never ask ourselves what very real misfortune they’re rushing to, it’s justanother familiar city sound, a sound with no specific content, a mere nuisance, empty of meaning. Before, when there weren’t so many of them and they didn’t make so much noise, we never suspected the drivers of turning on their sirens for no reason, just so that they could drive faster and make the other cars get out of the way, people used to stand on their balcony to see what was going on and even assumed that there would be a report in the next day’s newspaper. No one rushes out on to their balcony now, we all just wait for the siren to go away and remove from our auditory field the ill or injured or wounded or perhaps dying person, so that they’ll stop bothering us and stop setting our nerves on edge. I don’t actually stand on the balcony either, but during the weeks immediately following Miguel’s death, I couldn’t resist rushing over there or going to the window and trying to spot the police car or ambulance and follow it with my eyes for as long as I could, but you can’t usually see them from the house, only hear them, and so, after a while, I gave up, and yet still, every time I hear a siren, I stop what I’m doing and look up and listen until it’s gone; I listen to it as if it were someone moaning or pleading with me, as if each siren were saying: “Please, I’m a gravely wounded man, fighting for my life, and it’s not my fault, I haven’t done anything to make someone stab me like this, I just got out of my car as I have on many other days and suddenly felt a sharp pain in my back, then another and another and another in other parts of my body, I don’t even know how many, and then I realized that I was bleeding profusely and was going to die even though I wasn’t ready to and even though I’d done nothing to deserve it. Let me through, I beg you, you can’t be in anywhere near as much of a hurry as me, and if there is a chance I can be saved, I have to get to the hospital quickly. Today’s my birthday, and my wife has no idea what’s happened, she’s sitting in a restaurant waiting to celebrate,she’s probably bought me a gift, a surprise, don’t let her find me dead.”’
    Luisa stopped and took another sip of port, it was a mechanical gesture really, because there was only a tiny drop left in her glass. Her eyes no longer had an absent look, rather, they were very bright and alert, as if her imaginings, far from distracting her, had given her a momentary burst of energy, made her feel more part of the real world, even if that real world existed only in the past. I hardly knew her, but my feeling was that she found her present life so bewildering that she felt much more vulnerable and powerless now than when she placed herself back in the past, as she had done just now, even in that most painful and final of moments. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes looked lovely lit up like that; she had one eye visibly larger than the other, but that didn’t spoil her looks in the least, her eyes were filled with a new intensity and vitality when she put herself in the shoes of the dying Desvern. Even in the midst of her suffering, she was still almost pretty, especially when she was happy, as she had been on the mornings when I used to see her at the café.
    ‘But he couldn’t possibly have thought any of that, if what they said in the newspapers was right,’ I pointed out. I didn’t know what else to say or perhaps