What if

What if is the small verbal opening through which Fabián Martínez and Pilar Talavera turn an acknowledged impossibility into a shared imagined future. Its importance lies in the change it makes possible: a question first invites them to picture a life beyond Pilar’s marriage to Güero Méndez, then gives that picture enough detail to resemble a plan. The escape remains imagined in this passage, but the phrase makes the fantasy an intimate collaboration rather than a private wish.

The phrase as an opening

Fabián begins with What if after Pilar has said that nothing can ever happen between them. He agrees aloud, yet inwardly regards seducing Güero’s wife and taking her away as his assignment. The phrase therefore enters a conversation already divided between her stated refusal and his concealed intention. Rather than directly contradicting her, he offers a hypothetical; its apparent tentativeness lets the two of them approach a forbidden possibility without first declaring it achievable.

The narration calls these words the most powerful in any language. Their power here is not that they settle a choice or make an escape happen. It is that they suspend the present arrangement long enough for another one to be pictured. The repeated question keeps possibility open: each imagined condition can be replaced by another, and the lovers can continue without yet having to answer whether they will act.

From possibility to shared fantasy

The questions begin by revising the past and the present. Fabián and Pilar imagine what might have happened if they had met first, and what life might look like if they were free. Travel gives that freedom destinations—Paris, Rio, and Rome—while the possibility of running away turns it into a life they could begin elsewhere. Their imagining also includes taking enough money to establish that new life, so the fantasy is not limited to romance: it reaches toward the practical means of departure.

These conversations happen in fragments, in moments taken from Güero. The conditions they imagine are therefore sharply unlike the circumstances in which they speak. Their private future has room for travel and choice; their actual conversations must be brief and concealed. The counterfactual form helps them inhabit the difference without resolving it. What if does not erase the existing marriage or make the imagined freedom secure. It lets them rehearse an alternative while remaining inside the constraints from which they hope to escape.

The obligations inside the fantasy

As the two begin supplying details, the imagined escape encounters its most important limit: Pilar will not leave her children behind. They consider how to get away without Güero learning of it, what his bodyguards might mean for the attempt, and where a meeting could take place, but the children are not treated as an incidental obstacle. Her refusal to abandon them shapes which futures can be imagined at all. The fantasy is shared, yet its terms are not simply Fabián’s to set.

The passage also shows the imagined relationship changing what the present means to Pilar. The narration describes her as already unfaithful to Güero in her thoughts and feelings, and notes that private intimacy within the marriage has become mentally associated with Fabián instead. This is presented as a shift in allegiance before the physical details of an affair have occurred. The phrase helps mark that movement: what begins as a hypothetical future has already altered the emotional meaning of her present life.

Planning, alternatives, and the unresolved ending

The narration traces a clear progression: possibility becomes fantasy, fantasy becomes speculation, and speculation becomes planning. The lovers relish working through details, including what they would pack and what they might buy once they were elsewhere. Clothing receives particular attention because both are described as caring about dress. Even this small practical subject lets the escape acquire a texture of everyday life: the imagined future includes not only departure, but the things they might choose for themselves after arriving.

Their more consequential questions concern how to leave and how to meet. They weigh leaving Güero a note against disappearing without one, traveling together against separating before a rendezvous, and a shared flight against taking the same flight independently. One imagined version places them across the aisle on an overnight journey to Paris, with a later meeting at a hotel after the children are settled. Other variations shift the imagined encounter to the plane or to a bar in Rio. Each alternative revises the same desire while testing different ways of managing discovery, separation, and reunion.

The alternatives do not culminate in a confirmed departure. What if remains the engine of the passage, not proof that the plan is carried out. Its repeated use creates intimacy by making the lovers co-authors of an imagined life, while the unsolved questions—especially the children, Güero’s possible knowledge, and the logistics of meeting—keep that life suspended. The phrase thus carries both promise and limitation: it makes escape thinkable, and exposes how much would have to change before thought became action.