A Heart So White (Vintage International)

by Javier Marías

everything had its weight, even foolish things, though not death, and certainly not death by suicide, like the death of the person who would have been and yet never could have been my Aunt Teresa and was only ever Teresa Aguilera, whom I’ve gradually come to know about, though never from her younger sister, my mother, who was almost entirely silent during my childhood and my adolescence and who subsequently died and was thus silent for ever, but from more distant, incidental people and, finally, from Ranz, who was the husband of both sisters as well as of a foreign woman to whom I’m not related.

Ever since I contracted matrimony (the verb has fallen into disuse, but is both highly graphic and useful) I’ve been filled by all kinds of presentiments of disaster, rather as you are when you contract an illness, the sort of illness from which you never know with any certainty when you will recover. The expression “to change one’s marital status or state”, which is normally used quite casually and so means very little, is the one that most adequately describes my case and, contrary to the general custom, I give it great weight. 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. Perhaps that was because it came rather late, I was thirty-four years old when I contracted marriage.

The principal and the most common problem at the beginning of any fairly conventional marriage is that, regardless of how fragile an institution marriage is nowadays and regardless of the facilities for disengagement available to the contracting parties, you traditionally experience an unpleasant sense of having arrived and, therefore, of having reached an end, or rather (since the days continue implacably to pass and there is no end), that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. I know that this feeling is both pernicious and erroneous and that giving in to it or accepting it is the reason why so many promising marriages collapse no sooner have they begun. I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you’re tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built.

unease is summed up in a particularly terrifying phrase: “Now what?” and I have no idea what other people do to overcome it.

I realized that I found it very difficult to think about her and utterly impossible to think about the future, which is one of the greatest conceivable pleasures known to anyone, if not the daily salvation of us all; to allow oneself to think vague thoughts, to let one’s thoughts drift over what will or might happen, to wonder without too much exactitude or intensity what will become of us tomorrow or in five years’ time, to wonder about things we cannot foresee.

it was as if the future had disappeared and there was no abstract future at all, which is the only future that matters because the present can neither taint it nor assimilate it.

That change, then, means that nothing can continue as before, especially if, as usually happens, the change has been preceded and foreshadowed by a joint effort, whose main visible manifestation is the unnatural process of creating a home for you both, a home that had no prior existence for either of you, but which must, unnaturally, be inaugurated by you both. In that particular custom or practice, which is, I believe, widespread, lies the proof that, when they contract matrimony, the contracting parties are, in fact, demanding of each other an act of mutual suppression or obliteration, the suppression of what each of them was and of what each of them fell in love with or perhaps simply perceiv...

I was looking out rather like someone arriving at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was in bed, ill, behind me, watched over by her husband.

“Hey! What you doin’ up there?” I was surprised when I understood what she was saying, but not so much because she was saying it to me as because of the way she said it, confidently, furiously, like someone ready to settle accounts with the person closest to them or the person they love, who is a source of endless irritation. It wasn’t because she felt she’d been being watched by a stranger from the balcony of a hotel intended for foreigners and had come to reproach me for having observed with impunity her fruitless wait, but because, when she looked up, she’d suddenly recognized in me the person for whom she’d been waiting for who knows how long, certainly since long before I’d first spotted her.

All her anger dissolved in an instant and she realized what had happened – that was the worst part – that she realized she’d have to go on waiting, perhaps on the same spot she’d been before, not beneath the balconies, she’d have to return to her original place on the other side of the street beyond the esplanade, to perform that same swift, furious dragging of her sharp heel after every two or three steps, three blows with an axe followed by a stab, or a stab followed by three blows with an axe.

(her long, dishevelled hair clung to her skin and a few stray hairs lay across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her).

I was impatient because I was aware that what I didn’t hear now I never would hear; there would be no instant replay, as there can be when you listen to a tape or watch a video and can press the rewind button, rather, any whisper not apprehended or understood there and then would be lost for ever. 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. But even if we were together that day or at home when that person phoned or we dared to speak to them, overcoming our fear and forgetting the risks involved, even then, none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we’d remained silent. Even the most indelible things are of fixed duration, just like the things that leave no trace or never even happen, and if we’re far-sighted enough to note down or record or film those things, a...

Their conversation was almost routine, it probably only varied in the details, Miriam and the man must have had that conversation hundreds of times. But for me it was new.

He had the same accent as me but his voice was very different. Mine is deep and his was sharp, almost shrill amidst the murmurs. It didn’t seem the right voice for such a hairy man, more like that of a crooner, who makes no effort at all to vary his natural or artificial timbre when he speaks, it would harm his singing voice. His voice sounded like a saw.

The man’s voice went on, more calmly now and perhaps, because of that, no longer in a whisper, but still in the artificial tone of a singer saving his voice even in an argument; he had an extremely sharp voice when he spoke normally too, it shook, like the voice of a preacher or a gondolier.

silence fell again, the silence or pause required for the person doing the insulting to retreat and ingratiate him or herself, though without withdrawing the insult or apologizing, when the abuse is mutual it dissolves of its own accord, the way it does in quarrels between brothers and sisters when they’re still young. Or else it accumulates, until the next time.

I thought Miriam might well be right in her suspicions and complaints, that it was all a lie and there was no wife in Spain, or perhaps there was but she was in perfect health and unaware that for an unknown mulatto woman on another continent she was a dying woman whose death was awaited with expectation and desire, a woman whose death was perhaps prayed for and, worse still, anticipated or hastened in thought and word, in that city on the other side of the world.

I didn’t know whose side to take, because when you’re privy to an argument (even if you don’t actually witness it, but only hear it: when you’re privy to anything and get to know something about it) it’s almost impossible to remain totally impartial, to feel neither sympathy nor antipathy, animosity or pity for one of the contenders, or for a third party of whom they speak, that’s the curse of the person who does the seeing or listening.

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.

Luisa was closing her eyes to ensure that I wouldn’t make her share in my impressions regarding Guillermo and Miriam and his ailing Spanish wife, nor would she make me share in hers. It wasn’t out of dishonesty or lack of comradeship nor out of a desire for concealment. It was simply a matter of accepting the belief or superstition that what one doesn’t say doesn’t exist. And it’s true that the only things never translated are those never spoken or expressed.

The moon was mellow and there wasn’t a breath of wind. We were on an island, in a distant corner of the world whence, in a quarter part, I originated; both Madrid, the place in which our relationship had taken shape and where we would live together, and our marriage, seemed far, far away, and it was as if being far from the place that had brought us together had the effect, while on honeymoon, of slightly forcing us apart, perhaps that sense of distance came from our refusal to share what was a secret to neither of us, but which was, nonetheless, becoming a secret by virtue of our not sharing it.

All the women used to sing it in those days, days that are not so very long ago, maids sang it first thing in the morning as they yawned and stretched, ladies of the house and mothers sang it a little later on, as they were getting ready to go out shopping or perform some unnecessary errand, all of them united and made equal by that continuous, communal song occasionally accompanied by the whistling of young boys not yet at school and who, therefore, still participated in the world of women in which they moved: the delivery boys with their bikes and their heavy boxes, sick children in beds scattered with comics and coloured prints and storybooks, working children and idle children, whistling and envying one another.

That song was sung all the time every day, by joyful voices and sorrowful voices, voices that were strident and downcast, dark-haired and melodious, tuneless and blonde, in every state of mind and in every circumstance, regardless of what was going on in the houses, unjudged by anyone: it was sung by a maid while she watched an ice-cream cake melting in my grandparents’ house, when they were not yet my grandparents because I hadn’t even been born, nor was there even a possibility of my being born; whistled by a boy on that same day in that same house as he walked down the corridor to the bathroom where, only shortly before, a woman full of fear and drenched in tears and water had also perhaps hummed some tune.

you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can’t even remember it when someone requires you to.

I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would burn itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.

the task of the translator or interpreter of speeches and reports is boring in the extreme, both because of the identical and fundamentally incomprehensible jargon universally used by all parliamentarians, delegates, ministers, politicians, deputies, ambassadors, experts and representatives of all kinds from every nation in the world, and because of the unvaryingly turgid nature of all their speeches, appeals, protests, harangues and reports. People who have never done this kind of work might think it must be fun or, at the very least, interesting and varied, or more than that, they might even think that in a sense one is at the heart of world decisions with firsthand access to highly detailed and important information about every aspect of the lives of different races, political information, urban and agricultural information, information about armaments, cattle-raising, ecclesiastical matters, physical, linguistic, military and Olympic information, information about police matters and tourism, chemistry and propaganda, sex and television and viruses, sports and banking and cars, hydraulics and war studies and ecology and local customs.

The truth is that the translations are the only fully functioning element in these organizations, which are, in fact, gripped by a veritable translatorial fever, somewhat morbid and unhealthy, for every word pronounced (in session or assembly) and every scrap of paper sent, whatever the subject, whoever it is, in principle, addressed to or whatever its objective (even if it’s highly confidential), is immediately translated into several languages, just in case.

When we’re working, we translators and interpreters do nothing but translate and interpret, indiscriminately and almost without a break, for the most part without anyone knowing why something is being translated or for whom it’s being interpreted, more often than not, if it’s a written text, it’s purely for the files and, if it’s a speech, for the few odds and sods who don’t understand the second language we’re translating into anyway. Some idiot has only to fire off some idiotic remark to one of these organizations for it to be instantly translated into all six official languages, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Everything gets turned into French and into Arabic, into Chinese and Russian, be it the foolish thoughts of some enthusiast on the sidelines or some other idiot’s bright idea.

It’s odd how, deep down, all assembly members have more confidence in what they hear through their headphones, that is, through the interpreters, than in what they hear (the same thing only more coherently expressed) directly from the speaker, even if they’re perfectly capable of understanding the speaker’s own language.

“People love one in large measure because they’re obliged to. That happens in personal relationships too, don’t you think? How many couples are there who are only in a couple because one of the two, and only one, insisted that they become a couple and obliged the other one to love him or her?” “Obliged or persuaded?” asked the Spanish politician,

A lot of people were still convinced that they loved him, and why? Because before, for decades, they’d been obliged to do so. Love is a habit.”

I didn’t at all like the turn the conversation was taking, and it was all my fault. Good grief, I thought (but I would like to have said so to Luisa), these democratic politicians all have dictatorial longings, for them any achievement and any form of consensus will always only be the pale realization of a deeply totalitarian desire, the desire for unanimity, for everyone to be in agreement, and the closer they get to this partial realization of an impossible totality, the greater their euphoria, although it will never be enough; they extol the plurality of ideas, but in fact to them it’s just a curse and a nuisance.

I wonder if anyone has ever loved me without being obliged to, even my children – well, one’s children are the most obliged of all to love one. It’s always been like that, but I also wonder if it isn’t the same for everyone. You see, I don’t believe in those stories you see on television, people who unproblematically meet and fall in love, both of them free agents, both of them available, neither one of them with any doubts or regrets. I don’t think that ever happens, ever, not even amongst the very young. Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations. 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. All people really want to do is to sleep, the thought of future regrets would paralyse us, imagining the consequences of acts we haven’t even committed is always dreadful, that’s why we politicians are so necessary, we’re here in order to take the decisions that others would never take, immobilized as they are by their doubts and their lack of will. We listen to their fear. ‘The sleeping and the dead are but as...

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.

I can’t help but realize (or perhaps remember) that also behind us, at our backs, is the person urging us on, the person who whispers in our ear, perhaps without our even seeing him, his tongue at once his weapon and his instrument, like the drop of rain that falls from the eaves after the storm, always on to the same spot so that the earth becomes softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel. Not like a drip from a tap that disappears down the plughole without leaving the slightest trace in the basin, or like a drop of blood that can be instantly soaked up by whatever is to hand, a cloth or a bandage or a towel or sometimes even water, or if the only thing that is to hand is the hand of the person losing the blood, assuming that person is still conscious and the wound not self-inflicted, the hand raised to stomach or breast to stop up the hole. The tongue in the ear is also the kiss that most easily persuades the person who appears reluctant to be kissed, sometimes it isn’t the eyes or the fingers or the lips that overcome resistance, but simply the tongue that probes and disarms, whispers and kisses, that almost obliges. Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.

even if Lady Macbeth had plunged the knife again into the chest of the murdered Duncan, not even then would she have killed him or contributed to his murder, it was already done. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she says to Macbeth, knowing that for her it’s true, literally true. She likens herself to him, thus trying to liken him to her, to her heart so white: it’s not so much that she shares his guilt at that moment as that she tries to make him share her irremediable innocence, her cowardice. An instigation is nothing but words, translatable, ownerless words that are passed from voice to voice and from language to language and from century to century, always the same, provoking people again and again to the same act for as long as there have been people and languages and ears in the world to hear them. The same actions that no one is even sure they want to see carried out, the actions that are always involuntary, no longer dependent on words once they’ve been carried out, rather they sweep them away and remain cut off from any “before” or “after”, isolated and irreversible, whilst words can be reiterated and retracted, repeated and rectified, words can be denied and we can deny that we said them, words can be twisted and forgotten. One is guilty only of having heard them, which is unavoidable, and although the law doesn’t exonerate the person who spoke, the person who speaks, that person knows that, in fact, he’s done nothing, even if he did oblige the other per...

I was the one who first began to oblige her (to oblige her to love me), although that task is never one-sided and never constant, and its efficacy depends in good measure on the person obliged occasionally taking over the role of obliger.

A rocking chair arrived, again without my knowledge, a piece of furniture much favoured by my Cuban grandmother, his mother-in-law, when she came to visit us during my childhood and which, once she was dead, my father had appropriated, not so much so that he could sit there rocking on his own, as to provide a backdrop against which to strike original poses during the gatherings of couples and friends which he often held at home.

Not so much so that he could sit there rocking. Not so much so that he could sit there rocking on his own, not that anyone can ever possibly know what anyone else does when they’re alone. But my father would never have rocked, on the contrary, he would have seen it as a kind of private shirking of his duty, as a confirmation of what he’d always tried or rather always managed to avoid doing: becoming old.

Ranz, my father, is thirty-five years older than me, but he’s never been old, not even now. He’s spent his whole life postponing that state, leaving it for later on or perhaps denying all knowledge of it, and although one can do little about the evolution of one’s appearance or one’s gaze (one can, perhaps, do slightly more about the former), he’s someone in whose attitude or spirit I’ve never noticed the passing of the years, never the slightest change, never a hint in him of the heaviness and fatigue that gradually appeared in my mother as I grew up, nor was there any dimming of the light in his eyes, the light which the glasses my mother sometimes wore when her eyes were tired would unexpectedly extinguish in hers, nor did he seem vulnerable to the setbacks and upsets that mark the existences of all individuals, nor did he once ...

For as long as I can remember, he’s always worn his overcoat over his shoulders, he never puts his arms in the sleeves, as if he were both defying the cold and demonstrating his firm belief in a compendium of external details that produced, as their end result, an elegant, or at least, self-confident man. Until a year ago he still had almost all his hair, white and thick and extremely well-groomed with a parting on the right (a very precise parting like that of a little boy), with not a hint of yellow, a head that was fleecy, even polar white and which emerged very erect from immaculately ironed shirts and brightly coloured ties in agreeable combinations.

Up until only a year ago, anyone who met him (and Luisa met him for the first time only shortly before that) would certainly have seen in him a former ladykiller, rather faded but defiant in the face of his declining powers, or perhaps the reverse, a purely theoretical Don Juan whose powers were therefore unspent, someone who’d had all the necessary qualities for the intense life of the gallant and who, nevertheless, because of certain declared fidelities or for lack of any real opportunity or even for lack of daring, had never burned his fingers by putting them to the test; someone who, just as he had with old age, had postponed putting his seductions into practice, perhaps in order not to hurt anyone. (But we children know nothing about our parents, or it takes us a very long time to become interested.)

His eyes flattered what they looked upon. They were very pale in colour without a hint of blue in them, of a brown so pale that, by dint of that extreme paleness, they gained in clarity and brilliance, when the light fell directly on them they were almost the colour of white wine when the wine is not too young and, in the shadows or at night, they were almost the colour of vinegar, liquid eyes, more like the eyes of a bird of prey than of a cat, who are the creatures most likely to have eyes that colour.

his eyes were not as still or as perplexing as those other eyes, they were mobile and glittering, fringed by long, dark eyelashes that took the edge off the rapidity and tension of their constant shiftings. They regarded things with respect and fixity and, at the same time, missed nothing else that was happening in the room or in the street, they were like the eyes of an experienced viewer of paintings who doesn’t need a second glance to know what’s in the background of a painting, instead his all-embracing eyes – had they also happened to be skilled in drawing – would have been capable of instantly reproducing the whole composition, after just one glance.

From tomorrow onwards, and I imagine for many years to come, I’ll no longer experience the desire to see Luisa, because I’ll see her the moment I open my eyes. There’ll be no wondering what she’ll look like today or what she’ll be wearing, because I’ll see her face the moment I wake and maybe even watch her getting dressed. She might even dress the way I want her to, if I tell her my preferences. From tomorrow onwards, there’ll be no more of the small unknowns that have filled my days for nearly a year now, or have meant that my days were lived in the best way possible, that is, in a state of vague expectation and ignorance. I’ll know too much, I’ll know more than I want to know about Luisa, I’ll be confronted by what I find interesting about her and what I don’t find interesting, there’ll be no possibility of selection or choice, the minimal, tenuous daily choice involved in arranging a date, meeting, standing watching at the doors of a cinema or searching amongst the tables of a restaurant, or getting dressed up and going out to see the other person.

I don’t know if I want to see how she puts on her tights and how she adjusts them at the waist and the groin or to know how much time she spends in the bathroom in the morning, if she puts cream on her face before going to bed or what mood she’s in when she wakes up and sees me at her side. At night, I don’t think I want to find her already under the sheets in her nightdress or pyjamas, I’d rather take off her street clothes, strip her of her daytime appearance, not of the appearance she’ll have taken on before my eyes, alone in our bedroom, perhaps turning her back to me. I don’t think I want that intermediate phase, just as I probably don’t wish to know that much about her faults, nor be obliged to be fully informed of any faults that may surface with the passing of the months and years, but of which other people who see her, who see us, will know nothing. I also don’t think that I want to speak about us, to say we went or we’re going to buy a piano or we’re going to have a baby or we’ve got a cat. We may have children, I don’t know if I want them or not, although I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea.

the most important things in life are always done for reasons of logic and out of a desire to experience them or, which comes down to the same thing, because they’re inevitable. 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 to that party? What if I hadn’t answered the phone that Tuesday? What if I hadn’t accepted that job on that particular Monday?’ We ask ourselves these things naively, believing for an instant (but only for an instant) that in that case we would never have met Luisa and we wouldn’t be poised on the brink of this unavoidable but logical situation, which, precisely because it is unavoidable and logical, we can suddenly no longer tell if we want it or if it terrifies us, we cannot know if we want what, up until today, we seemed to want.

So many lives and deaths have their enigmatic origin in something no one notices or remembers, in the beer we decided to drink after first having wondered if we had time, in the good mood that made us be nice to someone we’d just been introduced to – not knowing that she’d just been yelling at someone or hurting them – in the cake we were going to buy on the way to lunch at our parents’ house but didn’t, in our desire to listen to a voice regardless of what it might say, in the risky phone call that we made anyway, in our unsatisfied wish to stay at home. Going out, talking, doing, moving, looking and hearing and being seen all place us at constant risk, not even closeting ourselves at home and sitting very still can save us from the consequences, from those logical and unavoidable situations, from what is today imminent and from what, almost a year ago, or even four or ten or one hundred years ago, or even yesterday, is so unexpected.

The world is full of surprises and of secrets. 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.

Everyone knows that mothers cry and feel something like grief when their offspring marry, perhaps my father was feeling his own particular happiness and also the grief that my mother would have felt, my dead mother. A vicarious grief, a vicarious fear, a grief and a fear that came from another person whose face we’d both slightly forgotten, 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, my mother, for example, isn’t wearing her glasses, the reading glasses she tended to wear rather too often in her latter years, she’s remained fixed in the picture I’ve chosen of her when she was twenty-eight years old, a woman younger than I am now, her face calm and a slightly resigned look in her eyes, which she did not, I think, normally have, her eyes were usually smiling like those of my Havana-born grandmother, her mother.