Javier Marías on secrecy and reflection

By CATHARINE MORRIS

In
his recent review of the The Infatuations, Javier
Marías’s metaphysical murder mystery, Adam Thirlwell described Marías’s prose
as “sensual and philosophical, simultaneously . . . . His narrators can
drift for giant lengths, and yet still re-emerge, calmly, on to the same stage,
transformed by their reflections”. He went on to say that Marías’s
“acrobatics between paragraphs or chapters can only be coarsely
paraphrased”. So it was with interest that we gathered to hear Marías interviewed by James Runcie at the Southbank last week.
What would he say about his own acrobatics?

The
first thing he revealed was that he began The Infatuations with only a
vague premiss: he was interested in the idea of a woman who would stay with a
man who had caused her great harm. Doing so might be a strange kind of justice,
a compensation, he said; she might wordlessly be saying: “you must make up for
this by being by my side for ever . . . and my very presence will remind you
all the time of what you have done”.

His
next step was to consider what the man’s crime might have been. Then he
recalled something a friend had told him – for years she had observed a
particular couple in a café every day. But one day the couple stopped coming;
the man had been killed. The Infatuations duly begins: “The last time I
saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw
him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while
I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met . . .”. The “absolute
fiction” starts 25 or 30 pages in, depending on whether you are reading in
English or Spanish.

Like
much of Marías’s fiction (and a speech he wrote for the Spanish Academy),
The Infatuations addresses the impossibility of knowing anything or
anyone with absolute certainty. Narrating is something we do all the time, said
Marías; someone says “How are you?” and you reply – perhaps with an account of
your journey to work. “But even that small thing is very difficult to tell . .
. . You had one point of view; others had a different one . . . . It even
happens with history. It’s almost impossible to tell these things with
accuracy. [But] fiction does that.”

If
he had to say what The Infatuations was about, he’d say that it was about
secrecy and the convenience of secrecy, how "civilized" secrets can be. He
recalled a line from his novel A Heart So White (1992): “ears don’t have
lids that can close against the words”. “If you told me that you had killed a
woman in the park last night, I’d probably wish you hadn’t told me . . . . I
might think ‘James seems like a nice man. I don’t want him in prison, not
immediately at least' . . . .”

Moving
swiftly on, Runcie observed that the narrative of The Infatuations was
full of reflection – he referred to a passage in which a single conversation is
revisited again and again. “There are all kinds of novelists”, said Marías.
“Some perceive what is normally almost imperceptible and see the meaning in it
. . . . Say you spend the whole evening arguing with somebody . . . . It is very
likely that what remains in your memory is a small detail, a gesture or a look.
That’s what the novels pick up.”

Marías’s
narrators tend also to make a lot of literary references – to Balzac, Dumas and
Shakespeare, for example – but it is not in a metaliterary way, said Marías;
it’s “more in the way we all do it: ‘I’ve seen this film and I talk about it' .
. . ”. So the sequence in The Infatuations in which the narrator’s
lover relays the plot of Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert – in which a
man mistakenly buried after the Battle of Eylau returns to Paris years later to
pick up where he left off – was not included for the sake of it; the story is
something you might dwell on naturally: “My own father died seven years ago”,
said Marías. “[Say] the dead came back five or seven years later . . . . We
inherited some money. Probably we’ve spent it by now . . . . And what about the
house? . . . It could really be a great misfortune if they came back . . . ”.

More on Marías’s interview to come tomorrow . . . .