A Heart So White (Vintage International)

by Javier Marías

Just as an illness changes our state to such an extent that it obliges us sometimes to stop everything and to keep to our beds for an unforeseeable number of days and to see the world only from our pillow, my marriage disrupted my habits and even my beliefs and, more importantly still, my view of the world.

Just as an illness changes our state to such an extent that it obliges us sometimes to stop everything and to keep to our beds for an unforeseeable number of days and to see the world only from our pillow, my marriage disrupted my habits and even my beliefs and, more importantly still, my view of the world.

That’s the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there’s no way it can be recovered. The day we didn’t spend together we never will have spent together, what someone was going to say to us over the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of that lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you.

in our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours.

We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.

most people only move in order to give up their own position in the world and to usurp that of another, and for one reason only, to forget about themselves and to bury what they were, we all at some time grow unutterably weary of being who we are and who we were.

one’s children are the most obliged of all to love one.

Everyone obliges everyone else, not so much to do something they don’t want to do, but rather to do something they’re not sure they want to do, because hardly anyone ever knows what they don’t want, still less what they do want, there’s no way of knowing that. If no one ever obliged anyone to do anything, the world would grind to a halt, we’d all just float around in a state of global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely.

‘The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,’ Shakespeare said and I sometimes think that that’s all people are, paintings, asleep today and dead tomorrow.

But, of course, we still have to do it in a way which they believe they’ve chosen, just as couples get together believing that both have chosen to do so, with their eyes wide open. It’s not just that one of them has been obliged to do so by the other – or persuaded to do so if you prefer – it’s that, at some point in the long process that brought them together, both of them have been obliged, don’t you think, and are then obliged to stay together for some time, even until death. Sometimes they’re obliged by some external factor or by someone who’s no longer in their lives, the past obliges them, their own discontent, their own history, their own wretched biography obliges them.

It’s always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only really feel supported or backed up when, as the latter verb itself indicates, there’s someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does, and at times, that someone places a hand on our shoulder, a hand to calm us and also to hold us. That’s how most married people and most couples sleep or think they sleep, the two turn to the same side when they say goodnight, so that one has his or her back to the other throughout the whole night and feels backed up by the other person, and in the middle of the night, when he or she wakes up startled from a nightmare, or is unable to get to sleep, or is suffering from a fever or feels alone and abandoned in the darkness, they have only to turn round and see before them the face of the person protecting them, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on their shoulder to calm them, or to hold them, or even to cling to them.

“My hands are of your colour,” she says to Macbeth, “but I shame to wear a heart so white”, as if she wished to infect him with her own nonchalance in exchange for infecting herself with the blood shed by Duncan, unless “white” here means “pale and fearful” or “cowardly”.

His most noticeable feature were his extraordinarily alert eyes, sometimes startling in the devotion and fixity of their gaze, as if what they were seeing at any given moment was of extreme importance, worthy not just of being seen but of being scrutinized, of being observed in the most exclusive manner, of being apprehended in order that each captured image could be stored in his memory, like a camera that couldn’t entirely depend upon its mechanical processes to register what it perceived and so had to try extra hard, to make a real effort.

The random, inconsequential steps you take one night can, after enough time or enough of the abstract future has elapsed, end up carrying you into some unavoidable situation and, confronted by that situation, we sometimes ask ourselves with incredulous excitement: ‘What if I hadn’t gone into that bar? What if I hadn’t gone

Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn’t yet been born or doesn’t know that they’ll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death.

We think we know the people close to us, but time brings with it more things that we don’t know than things we do, comparatively speaking we know less all the time, there’s always a greater area of shadow. Even if the illuminated area grows larger too, the shadows still win. I imagine you and Luisa have your secrets.” He remained silent for a few seconds and, seeing that I didn’t respond, added: “But, of course, you can only know about yours, because if you knew about hers they wouldn’t be secrets.”

There’s a writer called Clerk or Lewis who wrote about himself after the death of his wife, and he began by saying: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

it’s odd how the features of those who no longer see us and whom we can no longer see become blurred, out of anger or absence or attrition, or how they become usurped by their photographs fixed for ever on a particular day,

sometimes the very people who warn us against certain ideas end up putting those ideas in our heads, they give them to us precisely because they warn us about them and make us think about things that would never have occurred to us otherwise.

deaths enrich those who weren’t rich and never could have become rich on their own, widows and daughters, or sometimes perhaps all that’s left is a stationer’s shop that simply imprisons the daughter and solves nothing.

people

suddenly wanted to know what happened next in a Rembrandt painting that he didn’t understand. (No one understands it, there’s a world of difference between Artemisa and Sophonisba, the difference between drinking the ashes of a dead man and drinking death, between celebrating life and dying, between prolonging life and killing oneself). It was absurd, but Ranz still kept trying to reason with him: “But you know that’s not possible, Mateu,” he said. “The three figures are painted, can’t you see that? Painted. You’ve seen plenty of films and this isn’t a film. You must see that there’s no way you’ll ever see them looking any different. This is a painting, a painting.”

Almost everyone feels ashamed of their youth, it isn’t true that we feel nostalgia for it, rather we banish it or flee from it and, with varying degrees of ease or difficulty, we confine our origins to the sphere of bad dreams or novels, or to what never existed. Our youth is something hidden, a secret to those who never knew us when we were young.

it’s difficult to doubt something you’ve known since infancy, it takes a long time before you begin to question it.

for by virtue of her death she came to be the younger sister in a way, now even I’m older than she was; premature death has a rejuvenating quality.

It wasn’t that he took part in the adults’ conversations, he was devoid of pedantry – he just listened – it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter, like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him; it’s a common experience amongst the dying too. He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity.

It’s always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness. Come on, tell me what your particular madness is. Tell me what it is she does to you.” Custardoy was vulgar and a little childish, as if his endless childhood wait to reach manhood had left something of that childhood forever linked to it.

there are people who’ve been in the world for years and years and about whom no one remembers anything, as if in the end they’d never existed

I would have preferred not to know, although once you know about something, it’s difficult to know whether you wanted to know about it or would have preferred to remain in ignorance.

it’s not fair the way families don’t tell their children things,

he’s never had any talent for invention, in all his stories he’s always kept close to the facts or to what actually happened to him, perhaps that’s why he has to experience things and live out his doubleness, because then he can talk about them afterwards, that’s his way of being able to conceive of the inconceivable;

you can’t be punished for intentions, failed attacks are often not even spoken of, they’re even denied by the intended victims, because everything goes on as before, the air is the same, there’s no wound to the skin, there’s no change in the flesh, no tear, the pillow pressed down on no one’s face is inoffensive, and afterwards everything is exactly the same as before because the mere accumulation of events and the blow that strikes no one and the attempt at suffocation that suffocates no one are not enough in themselves to change things or relationships, neither is repetition or insistence or a frustrated attack or a threat, that aggravates the situation but it doesn’t change anything, reality can’t be summed up like that, they’re just the same as the grasping gestures that Miriam made and her words

It was then that a memory returned to me, one lost since childhood, something tiny and tenuous that could not but be lost, one of those insignificant scenes that return fleetingly as if they were songs or images or the momentary perception in the present of what is past, the memory itself is called into question even as you remember.

The mouth is always full, abundance itself.

lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can’t bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with their backs turned to each other, without even knowing one another, perhaps not even wanting to.

It’s rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution.

For the sake of love or its essence – telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans – one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past.

women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things, their minds are investigative, gossipy and fickle, they never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, or what might come to light and what might happen, they don’t know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word, they need to try things out, they don’t look ahead, perhaps they really are always ready to know; in principle they’re neither afraid nor distrustful of what might be told to them, they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.

Almost everything made her laugh, she tended to see the funny side of things, even the most tragic or terrible things.

Every time has its own stories and if you let the moment pass, then sometimes it’s best to keep silent forever. All things have their time, when that’s passed, they lose their timeliness.”

Maybe they simply don’t want to add to the world a story they wished had never happened.

Maybe everything does await its moment of restitution, but nothing comes back in quite the same way in which it would have happened but didn’t.

“Bored with themselves, only able to think about themselves in relation to another, to a woman. That kind of man likes women who give him trouble, it helps to pass the time, it amuses him, justifies his existence, just as it does for the women who cause all the trouble.”

but you feel responsible for everything that might embarrass you and almost anything can embarrass you before the object of your love (when you first begin to love them), which is also why we’re capable of betraying anyone, because, above all, you betray your own past, or whatever one hates or denies in that past

difficult things always seem possible if you think about them a little, but they become impossible if you think about them too much.

You accept misfortunes gladly because you know you can tell those five people about them afterwards.

because one could accept an outsider passing judgement on actions that are never seen in their entirety and are transient, but not on words, which are both legible and permanent

During those days of waiting she was nervous but also cheerful and affectionate towards me in the way women are when they’re nursing some illusion,

“That’s why the perfect state is one of waiting and ignorance but, of course, if I knew that state was going to last for ever then I wouldn’t enjoy it.

You see, you watch a video the way you watch television, with impunity. We never look so closely or brazenly at anyone in the flesh, because in any other circumstance we know that the other person will also be watching us, or that they might see us watching them on the sly. It’s an infernal invention, it’s put an end to transience, to the possibility of deceiving oneself and describing the way things happened differently from how they actually did happen. They’ve put an end to memory, which was imperfect and open to manipulation, selective and variable. Now that you can’t remember something at your leisure once it’s been recorded, how can you remember something that you know you can see again, exactly as it happened, in slow motion if you like? How can you possibly alter it?”