A Heart So White Read online

  JAVIER MARÍAS

  A Heart So White

  Translated by MARGARET JULL COSTA,

  with an introduction by JONATHAN COE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction by JONATHAN COE

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Heart So White

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

  Margaret Jull Costa is the translator of many Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, among them Javier Marías, Bernardo Atxaga, Fernando Pessoa and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many awards, most recently the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey.

  Jonathan Coe has written many novels, including The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club and The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of Like a Fiery Elephant, a critical biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson.

  For Julia Altares

  despite Julia Altares

  and for Lola Manera of Havana,

  in memoriam

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME

  ‘Marías is one of the best contemporary writers’ J. M. Coetzee

  ‘It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out … When you take up a Marías novel, or even a short story, you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar’ Wendy Lesser, The New York Times

  ‘He has something of W. G. Sebald’s sense of consciousness in flux … but he is sharper about people and sexual attachment’ Marina Warner, Guardian

  ‘Javier Marías is a novelist with style … His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world’ Margaret Drabble

  ‘No wonder W. G. Sebald spoke of him as a “twin writer”: their narrators are commonly in states of malaise or fever; their narratives are interested in those same patterns of association that exhaust all possibilities; their prose exerts an almost opium effect over the reader as time slows down, expands or is still’ Sarah Emily Miano, Guardian

  ‘His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility’ Wyatt Mason, New Yorker

  ‘Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length’ Scotsman

  My hands are of your colour; but I shame

  To wear A Heart So White.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Introduction

  I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.

  This was Javier Marías’s response to an online interviewer who asked him, ‘What is the purpose of writing?’, and it not only provides an unexpectedly lucid answer to that intimidating question, it also directly illuminates Marías’s own practice, and that of A Heart So White in particular. For this is a novel which asks the profoundest, most unsettling questions about knowledge itself: about human curiosity, about the keeping of secrets, about our need to know the truth and our (sometimes equally pressing) need not to know it; and about language, too – for knowledge can only be imparted in words, and words, as writers know only too well, are slippery, unreliable, and have a tendency to falsify the very truths they are meant to impart.

  Most novelists have a ‘breakthrough’ book, the one that introduces them to a wider public: in the case of Marías it was All Souls (Todas las almas), published in 1989. Offering up the simple pleasures of traditional fiction rather more willingly than some of Marías’s subsequent work, it tells the story of a Spanish academic who comes to Oxford and has an affair with a fellow-tutor, and has some points of contact with the ‘campus novel’ genre so beloved of Anglo-Saxon comic writers. A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco) followed in 1992, hard on the heels of that success, but there is not much sense here of a writer compromising himself in order to accommodate a larger, less specialized readership. The wisp of a plot can be summarized in a few words – newlywed translator learns the deadly secret behind his father’s three marriages – but it is a more opaque, demanding work than its predecessor. The novel’s long, looping opening sentence sets the agenda at once:

  I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. (p.3)

  Notice, first of all, what a strange, violent temporal journey we make while negotiating the jumble of tenses in that sentence. We start (‘I did not want to know’) at some unspecified point in the past, then (‘have since come to know’) move forward, then (‘when she wasn’t a girl anymore’) rewind even further into the past and then (‘hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon’) locate ourselves a little more exactly within this timeframe, and so on. Any promise of a conventionally linear narrative is immediately shattered, and we are already made aware, subliminally, of one of the novel’s major themes: the evanescence of human experience, the fact that everything belongs to the past as soon as it has happened, the fact that ‘everything is constantly in the process of being lost’.

  This might, of course, easily be described as a Proustian theme, and indeed the length and complexity of Marías’s sentences have evoked stylistic comparisons with Proust, as well as with Henry James and Thomas Bernhard. But we would do well to remember that, earlier in his career, Marías had a distinguished parallel life as a translator, and probably his most celebrated translation was his Spanish rendering of Tristram Shandy. Because he is not the most obviously humorous of novelists, it might be tempting to downplay the extent of Marías’s affinities with Laurence Sterne: but they seem to me just as strong as his links with the great twentieth-century European writers. Like Sterne, Marías is prey to a radical scepticism about the novel’s capacity to render the complexity of subjective human experience in anything other than the crudest, most approximate way. Like Sterne, too, he is possessed by the notion that some of the smallest and most fleeting events in our lives are also the most significant; that these events occupy a space in our memories which seems quite out of proportion to their original duration; and that writers must therefore develop ever more inventive strategies that will give such transient but momentous events their narrative due.

  There the resemblance more or less ends: for Marías, unlike Sterne, inclines towards narrative subversions which are po-faced rather than zany or farcical. One of his methods, for instance, is a highly distinctive form of repetition. Many novelists are scared of repetition, assuming that readers will take it for laziness or carelessness. Marías, on the other hand, realizes that our
thought processes are often repetitious, and he wants to render this quality as scrupulously as possible. Thus we will find the narrator of A Heart So White reflecting that,

  What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. (p.28)

  Almost two hundred and fifty pages later, when the narrator has overheard a crucial conversation between his wife and his father, and has at last become privy to his father’s secrets, he writes:

  Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (p.272)

  Among other things, there is a certain rueful world-weariness about this technique: one of the things Marías is trying to tell the reader, it seems, is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marías novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change. The precedent, again, might come from Sterne, although again Marías expresses the idea calmly and regretfully, with little of Sterne’s cavorting humour.

  The notion that ‘what we experience is identical to what we never try’ has another consequence: not for Marías’s characters, this time, but for his literary aesthetic. It makes him sceptical of the line dividing fiction from non-fiction: a scepticism he shares with many other European writers poised on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two obvious examples might be Milan Kundera (whose books were, as our narrator is somewhat tiredly aware, highly fashionable at the time when A Heart So White was written) and W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Marías likes to include photographs in his fictions (there are photographs in both All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow), leaving the reader with nagging uncertainties as to whether they are real or fake. And, like Sebald, he is just as interested – more interested, it might be argued – in reflection and analysis than he is in narration. A typical Marías sentence might begin with the description of an event, but this act of telling will rapidly morph into something discursive.

  This is more than just a stylistic tic: it is part of Marías’s deadly serious attempt to keep the novel, as a form, alive and evolving. To put it crudely, for the first few centuries of its existence, one of the great virtues of the novel was assumed to be that it collapsed the distinction between the general and the particular: reading the story of one individual errant knight by the name of Don Quixote, you also knew that you were reading the story of every man and woman (including yourself) who had ever suffered from delusions and thwarted dreams. Modernism swept that certainty aside, and called into question the novel’s authority, its claim to be able to speak for every reader equally, irrespective of culture, politics or gender. After the modernist revolution, most novelists blithely carried on as before, as if it had never taken place, but a handful of writers have since applied themselves to the task of rebuilding things – recalibrating the novel’s relationship between the general and the particular – and Marías’s lithe, unreliable sentences are among his contributions to this enterprise. They insist on reminding us that the relationship between the two is liquid, slippery, and in a constant state of flux.

  Even punctuation has its part to play. Marías rarely – if ever – uses colons or semi-colons mid-sentence, instead entrusting the frail and vulnerable comma with the task of keeping up a barrier between what is particular and what is general, and then relishing the inevitable breakdown, the inevitable seepage between the two. Opening A Heart So White at random, I quickly chance upon the following example:

  Luisa had suddenly become angry, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t told her what I acknowledged I’d heard or if her anger was aimed at Guillermo, or perhaps at Miriam, or even at men in general, women have more of a community feeling than we do and often get angry with all men at the same time. (p.137)

  Most writers would have put something stronger – a colon or a dash – between ‘men in general’ and ‘women have more’. We are moving swiftly, after all, from a character’s individual perception (‘I couldn’t tell’), to a broad and lofty generalization (‘women have more of a community feeling’): two quite different modes of discourse. But by separating them only with a comma, Marías doesn’t allow his readers any space to pause, or reflect, as they negotiate the transition. In fact, we soon become so accustomed to the smooth but convoluted rhythms of his prose that we stop noticing how often these transitions take place, how frequently and seamlessly he carries us from a narrative mode to a discursive one. In this respect, Marías’s novels are best viewed as part stories, part essays: one of their greatest achievements being to make us see that there can essentially be no difference between the two forms.

  But perhaps this analysis risks making A Heart So White sound too dry. Readers daunted by Marías’s sentences, or by his commitment to the legacies of high modernism, should rest assured that there is one other, more readily loveable characteristic to be found in his work, a characteristic without which no novelist, in fact, is worth his or her salt: a healthy streak of narrative vulgarity. The novel begins with a bloody and dramatic suicide. Murder, or the threat of murder, is central to the plot. If it is not a whodunnit, exactly, it is certainly a why-did-she-do-it, or a what-did-he-do. (Just as, by the same token, Marías’s epic trilogy Your Face Tomorrow can be enjoyed as a series of spy novels, if the reader so chooses.) Pop culture references abound, and our cerebral narrator also turns out to be a big fan of Jerry Lewis and Family Feud. In short, he likes a good story too, and however much it might sometimes feel that he’s trying to disguise it, he knows how to tell one. I cannot help feeling that it is this quality – just as much as Javier Marías’s own searching and omnipresent intelligence – that makes A Heart So White a novel to treasure.

  Jonathan Coe, 2012

  A HEART SO WHITE

  I DID NOT WANT to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. When they heard the shot, some five minutes after the girl had left the table, her father didn’t get up at once, but stayed there for a few seconds, paralysed, his mouth still full of food, not daring to chew or swallow, far less to spit the food out on to his plate; and when he finally did get up and run to the bathroom, those who followed him noticed that when he discovered the blood-spattered body of his daughter and clutched his head in his hands, he kept passing the mouthful of meat from one cheek to the other, still not knowing what to do with it. He was carrying his napkin in one hand and he didn’t let go of it until, after a few moments, he noticed the bra that had been flung into the bidet and he covered it with the one piece of cloth that he had to hand or rather in his hand and which his lips had sullied, as if he were more ashamed of the sight of her underwear than of her fallen, half-naked body with which, until only a short time before, the article of underwear had been in contact: the same body that had been sitting at the table, that had walked down the corridor, that had stood there. Before that, with an automatic gesture, the father had turned off the tap in the basin, the
cold tap, which had been turned full on. His daughter must have been crying when she stood before the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and felt for her heart with the gun, because, as she lay stretched out on the cold floor of the huge bathroom, her eyes were still full of tears, tears no one had noticed during lunch and that could not possibly have welled up once she’d fallen to the floor dead. Contrary to her custom and contrary to the general custom, she hadn’t bolted the door, which made her father think (but only briefly and almost without thinking it, as he finally managed to swallow) that perhaps his daughter, while she was crying, had been expecting, wanting someone to open the door and to stop her doing what she’d done, not by force, but by their mere presence, by looking at her naked, living body or by placing a hand on her shoulder. But no one else (apart from her this time, and because she was no longer a little girl) went to the bathroom during lunch. The breast that hadn’t taken the full impact of the blast was clearly visible, maternal and white and still firm, and everyone instinctively looked at that breast, more than anything in order to avoid looking at the other, which no longer existed or was now nothing but blood. It had been many years since her father had seen that breast, not since its transformation, not since it began to be maternal, and for that reason, he felt not only frightened but troubled too. The other girl, her sister, who had seen the changes wrought by adolescence and possibly later too, was the first to touch her, with a towel (her own pale blue towel, which was the one she usually picked up), with which she began to wipe the tears from her sister’s face, tears mingled with sweat and water, because before the tap had been turned off, the jet of water had been splashing against the basin and drops had fallen on to her sister’s face, her white breast, her crumpled skirt, as she lay on the floor. She also made hasty attempts to staunch the blood as if that might make her sister better, but the towel became immediately drenched and useless, it too became tainted with blood. Instead of leaving it to soak up more blood and to cover her sister’s chest, she withdrew it when she saw how red the towel had become (it was her own towel after all) and left it draped over the edge of the bath and it hung there dripping. She kept talking, but all she could say, over and over, was her sister’s name. One of the guests couldn’t help glancing at himself in the mirror, from a distance, and quickly smoothing his hair, it was just a moment, but time enough for him to notice that the mirror’s surface was also splashed with blood and water (but not with sweat) as was anything reflected in it, including his own face looking back at him. He was standing on the threshold, like the other two guests, not daring to go in, as if despite the abandonment of all social niceties, they considered that only members of the family had the right to do so. The three guests merely peered round the door, leaning forwards slightly the way adults do when they speak to children, not going any further out of distaste or respect, possibly out of distaste, despite the fact that one of them (the one who’d looked at himself in the mirror) was a doctor and the normal thing would have been for him to step confidently forward and examine the girl’s body or, at the very least, to kneel down and place two fingers on the pulse in her neck. He didn’t do so, not even when the father, who was growing ever paler and more distressed, turned to him and, pointing to his daughter’s body, said “Doctor” in an imploring but utterly unemphatic tone, immediately turning his back on him again, without waiting to see if the doctor would respond to his appeal. He turned his back not only on him and on the others but also on his daughters, the one still alive and the one he still couldn’t bring himself to believe was dead and, with his elbows resting on the edge of the sink and his forehead cupped in his hands, he began to vomit up everything he’d eaten including the piece of meat he’d just swallowed whole without even chewing it. His son, the girls’ brother, who was considerably younger than the two daughters, went over to him, but all he could do to help was to seize the tails of his father’s jacket, as if to hold him down and keep him steady as he retched, but to those watching it seemed more as if he were seeking help from his father at a time when the latter couldn’t give it to him. Someone could be heard whistling quietly. The boy from the shop – who sometimes didn’t deliver their order until lunchtime and who, when the shot was first heard, had been busily unpacking the boxes he’d brought – also stuck his head round the door, still whistling, the way boys often do as they walk along, but he stopped at once (he was the same age as the youngest son) when he saw the pair of low-heeled shoes cast aside or just half-off at the heel, the skirt hitched up and stained with blood – her thighs stained too – for from where he was standing that was all he could see of the fallen daughter. As he could neither ask what had happened nor push his way past, and since no one took any notice of him and he had no way of finding out whether or not there were any empties to be taken back, he resumed his whistling (this time to dispel his fear or to lessen the shock) and went back into the kitchen, assuming that sooner or later the maid would reappear, the one who normally gave him his orders and who was neither where she was supposed to be nor with the others in the corridor, unlike the cook, who, being an associate member of the family, had one foot in the bathroom and one foot out and was wiping her hands on her apron or perhaps making the sign of the cross. The maid who, at the precise moment when the shot rang out, had been setting down on the marble table in the scullery the empty dishes she’d just brought through and had thus confused the noise of the shot with the clatter she herself was making, had since been arranging on another dish, with enormous care but little skill – the errand boy meanwhile was making just as much noise unpacking his boxes – the ice-cream cake she’d been told to buy that morning because there would be guests for lunch; and once the cake was ready and duly arrayed on the plate, and when she judged that the people in the dining room would have finished their second course, she’d carried it through and placed it on the table on which, much to her bewilderment, there were still bits of meat on the plates and knives and forks and napkins scattered randomly about the tablecloth, and not a single guest (there was only one absolutely clean plate, as if one of them, the eldest daughter, had eaten more quickly than the others and had even wiped her plate clean, or rather hadn’t even served herself with any meat). She realized then that, as usual, she’d made the mistake of taking in the dessert before she’d cleared the plates away and laid new ones, but she didn’t dare collect the dirty ones and pile them up in case the absent guests hadn’t finished with them and would want to resume their eating (perhaps she should have brought in some fruit as well). Since she had orders not to wander about the house during mealtimes and to restrict herself to running between the kitchen and the dining room so as not to bother or distract anyone, she didn’t dare join in the murmured conversation of the group gathered round the bathroom door, why they were there she still didn’t know, and so she stood and waited, her hands behind her back and her back against the sideboard, looking anxiously at the cake she’d just left in the centre of the abandoned table and wondering if, given the heat, she shouldn’t instead return it immediately to the fridge. She sang quietly to herself, picked up a fallen salt cellar and poured wine into an empty glass, the glass belonging to the doctor’s wife, who tended to drink quickly. After a few minutes watching while the cake began to soften, and still unable to make a decision, she heard the front doorbell go, and since one of her duties was to answer the door, she adjusted her cap, straightened her apron, checked that her stockings weren’t twisted and went out into the corridor. She glanced quickly to her left, at the group whose murmured comments and exclamations she’d listened to intrigued, but she didn’t pause or approach them and walked off to the right, as was her duty. When she opened the door she was met by a fading trail of laughter and by a strong smell of cologne (the landing was in darkness) which emanated either from the eldest son of the family or from the new brother-in-law, who’d recently returned from his honeymoon, for the two had arrived together, perhaps having met in the street or downstairs at the street door (they�
��d doubtless come for coffee, although no one had made any yet). Infected by their gaiety, the maid almost laughed too, but stood to one side to let them pass and just had time to see how the expressions on their faces changed at once and how they rushed down the corridor towards the crowd standing round the bathroom door. The husband, the brother-in-law, ran behind, his face terribly pale, one hand on the brother’s shoulder, as if trying to prevent him from seeing what he might see, or as if to hold on to him. This time the maid didn’t go back into the dining room, she followed them, quickening her step as if by assimilation, and when she reached the bathroom door, she again noticed, even more strongly this time, the smell of good cologne emanating from one or both of the gentlemen, as if a bottle of it had been smashed or as if one of them had suddenly begun to sweat and the smell was thus accentuated. She stayed there, without going in, along with the cook and the guests, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, that the boy from the shop was walking, still whistling, from the kitchen into the dining room, doubtless looking for her; but she was too frightened to call out to him or to scold him or to pay him any attention at all. The boy, who’d already seen quite enough, no doubt hung about for a good while in the dining room and then left without saying goodbye or taking with him the empty bottles, because hours later, when the melted cake was finally cleared away, wrapped in paper and thrown into the wastebin, a large part of it was found to be missing, although none of the guests had eaten any, and the wine glass belonging to the doctor’s wife was once again empty. Everyone said how unlucky for Ranz, the brother-in-law, the husband, my father, being widowed for a second time.