The Infatuations Read Online Free PDF

that someone is going to take your life, and in the most brutal manner. Because, in a way, her life has been taken from her too. At least that’s how it will be for a long time, years probably, if you ever do recover from something like that, which I doubt. Such a stupid death, so unlucky, one of those deaths where you couldspend your whole life thinking: “Why did it have to happen to him, why me, when there are millions of other people in the city?” I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really love Saverio any more, but if something like that happened to him, I’m not sure I could go on. It wouldn’t be the sense of loss so much as the feeling that I had somehow been marked out, as if someone had set my course for me and that there was no way of changing it, do you know what I mean?’ Beatriz was married to a cocky, parasitical Italian guy she could barely stand, but whom she put up with because of the kids, and also because she had a lover who filled her days with his salacious phone calls and the prospect of the occasional sporadic encounter, not that there were many of those, since both of them were married with children. And one of our authors filled her nocturnal imaginings, although not, it should be said, stout Cortezo or Garay Fontina, who was repulsive both physically and personally.
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    And then she told me or, rather, started to tell me, astonished by my evident confusion and exclamations of ignorance, because it was getting late and her position at the publishing house was even more precarious than mine and she didn’t want to run any risks, as it was, Garay Fontina had taken against her and frequently complained about her to Eugeni.
    ‘Didn’t you read about it in the newspapers? There was even a photo of the poor man, all bloody and lying on the ground. I can’t remember the exact date, but if you look on the Internet, you’re sure to find it. His name was Deverne, apparently he was a member of the film distribution family, you know, “Deverne Films presents”, you’ll have seen it thousands of times at the cinema. You’ll find everything you need to know there. It was just horrible. Such terrible bad luck. Enough to make you despair. I don’t think I’d ever get over it if I washis wife. She must be out of her mind with grief.’ That was when I found out his name or, if you like, his stage name.
    That night, I typed in ‘Deverne Murder’ on my computer and the item came up at once, drawn from the local news sections of two or three Madrid papers. His real surname was Desvern, and it occurred to me that perhaps his family had changed it at some point for business purposes, to make it easier to pronounce for speakers of Castilian and possibly so that Catalan speakers would not immediately associate them with the town of Sant Just Desvern, a place I happened to know because several Barcelona publishing houses have their warehouses there. And perhaps also to give the appearance of being a French film distributor, because when the company was founded – in the 1960s or even earlier – everyone would still have been familiar with Jules Verne, and everything French was considered chic, not like now with that President who looks like Louis de Funès with hair. I learned, too, that the Deverne family used to own several large cinemas in the centre of Madrid and that, perhaps because such cinemas have been gradually disappearing, to be replaced by shopping malls, the company had diversified and now specialized in property development, not just in Madrid, but elsewhere too. So Miguel Desvern must have been even richer than I thought. I found it even more incomprehensible that he should have breakfasted nearly every morning in a café that was well within my more modest means. The incident had occurred on the last day that I saw him there, which is how I knew that his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only. In a