Between Eternities: And Other Writings

by Javier Marías

  What makes Barcelona an even more conceited city than its colleagues is that, surprisingly, and unlike them, it doesn’t even go to the trouble of embarking on the elegant and discreet task of attracting visitors – which, however passive, is still a task. San Sebastián seems to be always dressed up to the nines in case some unexpected visitor should call, mindful that there is always a chance it might be seen; London betrays its chronic nervousness and coquetry in its conservatism and the ban it has imposed on changing anything, like those people who refuse to alter their hairstyle because they once made a memorable conquest while sporting the one they have; New York attracts by cultivating an ever closer resemblance to the preconceived image one has of it, gleaned from the movies; Venice not only never changes a single brick, it spends all its time gazing at itself as if there were nothing else to do in the world, thus redoubling the attention lavished upon it anyway; meanwhile, Barcelona appears somehow unaware of its abilities or else is simply much better at pretending, and that is what makes it the most conceited of cities. This greater presumption consists not only in never even thinking of formally soliciting the admiration or respect of others, but – unlike those other cities – in never even appearing to expect it.

  That is why Barcelona can, at certain moments and in certain ways, seem a lukewarm or even inhospitable city. I have always seen it, rather, as an excessively modest, overly respectful place, possessed of the kind of conceit you can sense, but which barely reveals itself, or so very bashfully that it appears to be receiving any flattering remarks unwillingly, patiently and with a stiff smile, as if it were a trial that has to be endured in order not to appear impolite. Or perhaps its conceit is a purely internal affair: it is far more interested – possibly uniquely so – in securing the devotion of its own offspring, and whether or not this is accompanied by the devotion of visitors is of secondary importance. What could be more conceited than someone who only truly values his own opinion or has such a lofty idea of himself that his own approval is the only approval he wants.

  If one described a person in such terms, they would seem narcissistic or, worse, self-absorbed. And yet the attitude and character of Barcelona is, in my view, neither of those things. It is, I feel, more to do with focus, self-discipline and reserve, like someone immersed in an experiment or some task of great consequence. It is, for example, the only Spanish city (of those I know) that seems to take its own traditions, fiestas and customs perfectly seriously and unironically: on St George’s Day, its inhabitants buy a rose or a book, and on St John’s Night, they eat coca de San Juan (a traditional kind of cake containing candied fruit and pine nuts). And they do this simply because they still think it’s a good thing to do, regardless of whether anyone else knows that they’re doing it, and never in a spirit of parody or exhibitionism or twee folkloricism, as happens almost everywhere else nowadays with celebrations that have their origins in the past.

  This idea of doing things even though no one else knows about them provides a useful measure of the city’s reserved nature. If one of the ways by which one judges the spirit of a place and its preoccupations is by looking at the kind of shops that proliferate there, Madrid – where I was born and still live – is notable for the crazy abundance of ostentatious banks and filthy drinking dives, alternating with bureaucratic buildings, restaurants, cafés, bars and pseudo-taverns, all of them pretty filthy too. It is notable, in short, for the vulgar display of money and of public and street life, the latter in the form of food and drink. In Barcelona, though, one finds a strange proliferation of shops catering for numismatists and philatelists, along with cake shops and grocery stores, which are known there as colmados and in my own city of Madrid by the more anachronistic and visionary term ultramarinos. This speaks of a society of consumers and accumulators, but one that does its consuming and accumulating in private: the cakes are usually taken home, as are any purchases made in the colmados, and collecting is a very personalized form of accumulating, a very private, individualistic form, not to be confused with anyone else’s. One could say that Barcelona is a place in which not everyone aspires to doing and owning the same things, as is generally the case in the rest of Spain, but in doing and owning what really interests them, or more than that, what is unique to them. Not that there is a complete lack of competitive spirit, it simply has its roots in the diverse and the secret, as if Barcelona’s inhabitants were aware that the most enviable things are always those whose nature one cannot quite grasp. This is one of the reasons why they are anything but boastful, because telling others what one has achieved or what one owns will only make it easier for those others to do the same, since they will then know what they’re looking for, which is always the first step to getting anything. To my mind, the behaviour of its citizens can also be attributed to the city, which does not compare itself with others or worry about what they might or might not do; rather, it follows its own course. There is something almost autistic about this attitude, as if the city knew that curiosity about the outside world can also constitute a threat and a danger: after all, it’s very difficult to see without being seen.

  The various barrios of Barcelona are all quite different, but they mostly share that same suspicious, self-sufficient spirit: the elegant houses in the upper part of the city and the Ramblas, Poble Nou and the Ensanche, San Gervasio and Sarrià, the barrio gótico and Gracia. This partly has to do, I think, with something so obvious that no one takes much notice of it: Barcelona is a city on a hill, easy to find one’s way around, but in which the view ahead is constantly being interrupted, thus creating the impression of a compartmentalized city, rather than of a continuous, controllable, predictable space; it seems, instead, a perpetual unknown, a permanent secret. I remember the feeling of expectation and unease I always get when I’m walking up some narrow, unfamiliar street, Castañer, for example, which, absurdly, rises perpendicular to the slopes one knows have every right to be steep, those that go from sea to mountain and from mountain to sea. This hill, like many others, is so steep that, even though you know from experience what awaits you at the top, you nevertheless walk up it as if you were climbing some unknown peak or the scaffold. That’s how it is in Barcelona, you can’t always see where you’re going, in fact, you see very little, and when you do get a glimpse of some expanse, some landscape, it’s the slope of Tibidabo with its excellent observatory which closes off the horizon as if there were nothing beyond, or at any rate nothing more interesting.

  However, it isn’t just the famous boundaries imposed by sea and mountain that make the city an enclosed space; Barcelona simply is a very self-contained place that prefers not to display itself. That is why, even for someone like myself, who lived there for three years and is therefore not a mere visitor, it is a somewhat indecipherable city, although without being hostile or inhospitable. This is not (although it certainly helps) because Barcelonians keep both their houses and their collections away from prying eyes and rarely invite people back, nor because half the population have hanging over them the fictitious cloud of those who believe they have for centuries been the victims of injustice and insults, nor that the other half (especially the Andalusians) behave like those fathers or fathers-in-law up from the country who don’t know where to put themselves or how to spend their time when they visit their urban sons or daughters-in-law, nor what to make of hobbies or pastimes that seem to hark back to a bygone age: mountain-climbing and hiking, dancing the sardana in the middle of the street, or the aforementioned philately and numismatics. In contrast to all this is the frenzied daily life of the streets, which betrays the city’s southernness; a possibly feigned innocence, which, nevertheless, dispels the cloud hanging over the half of the population that feels offended and brings a gleam to their eye; a variety of physical types, which is essential to any large modern city if it is to feel breathable; a pleasure in hobbies and pastimes that look to the future: music, books, handsome restaurants and bars, cocktails, graphic art (it’s a place where you pause to consider t
he signs above the shops).

  What is indecipherable and enigmatic about Barcelona comes more from that all-pervading introspection: the city looks at itself and neither expects anything nor learns anything apart from what it invents; each shop or business premises aspires to being different, and the best way to achieve this is to ignore all the others; the city’s inhabitants establish and jealously guard their respective territories, they avoid mixing or even meeting. I remember saying elsewhere that, however many people you see in the streets of Barcelona (and sometimes you see a lot, although never any bains de foule), one always has the sense, tinged with certainty, that inside those inaccessible houses there must be even more people, occupied perhaps in devouring cakes or arranging and studying the stamps and coins in which the city abounds. The most intriguing aspect, though, is that one should feel obliged to imagine such strange, unlikely activities, because, otherwise, there is only a blank or an empty space in one’s imagination (what the devil are they up to?), populated only by the literary shadows of unscrupulous financiers and scrupulous anarchists intent on their machinations: both of which are ghosts from the past.

  For the visitor, Barcelona, especially at night, is like the shop windows at Christmas for Dickensian children. The lights in the houses don’t illuminate, even dimly, the passer-by looking in from outside; instead they emphasize the darkness in which he stands pondering the hidden worlds whose unfathomable existence those lights proclaim. As I said before, perhaps that is the greatest possible act of conceit: announcing your presence from afar, but being so confident of your own charms that you feel no need to show yourself.

  (1990)

  The Keys of Wisdom

  To judge by the way my former colleagues at Oxford used to race about during the two years I spent there teaching Spanish literature and translation theory, their university must be the most active in the world and the one with the strictest timetables too. Perhaps it’s really a question of geographical distribution, made worse by the size of the city, where almost no distance is great enough to merit taking the car or catching a bus (it seems a waste not to walk everywhere), for in the space of one day, the dons divide their teaching and their knowledge among several colleges and the odd faculty. I think that is why they find themselves obliged to run ceaselessly from one end of the city to the other, which means that when they choose to wear their optional gowns, the city appears to be infested with flocks of low-flying crows, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

  However, most of their work (a great deal of work) is taken up with the so-called ‘tutorials’, the one-to-one classes, usually given in the rooms provided by the don’s particular college. This would make one think that, contrary to what I have said, these teachers lead a very sedentary life and that it must be the students who spend the day running about, not through the streets, but certainly from one set of rooms to another in the bosom of the college to which they belong. The fact is, though, I never saw a single student running, whereas I was often lashed by the tails of my teaching colleagues’ gowns and buffeted by their briefcases as they rushed past. It’s fortunate that they rarely ever wear mortarboards now, otherwise the air would be full of flying slates and the dons would need to hold on to their mortarboards with one hand, and having both hands free is of great importance in Oxford, even if only to be able to cope with the many keys required to open the many doors that a don is obliged to go through during the course of the day. I can still recall my surprise and dismay (I could already imagine the holes that the sheer weight of them would make in my pockets) when, shortly after joining the university, I was handed my own bunch of keys, and I never did learn to tell one from the other: two keys for the Spanish library, another for the street door of the building where I had my office, another two for an intervening door, two more for my office door, three or four to get into the Senior Common Room of the Taylor Institution out of hours, and another three for my pigeonhole or personal mailbox. In order to accommodate them all, I had to evict some of the usual inhabitants of my pockets, such as lighters and pens, and learn the art of opening highly complex double and triple locks while holding several dictionaries.

  Fortunately, I did not have to run as well, since all my activities (lectures, plus some classes hieroglyphically named ‘Prose and Unseen Classes’) took place in the same building, namely the Taylorian or Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. I was therefore spared not just the running about, but also the endless work and occasional upsets that tutorials cause the teaching staff. Not only must the dons conscientiously prepare each one-to-one class without the safety net of a full or half-full class in which it doesn’t matter if some students are bored as long as there are others who are paying or pretending to pay attention, as happens in the rest of the university world, they may also suffer the vexation and humiliation of having a student complain about what he considers to be the deficiencies of the teacher, or even reject out of hand the teacher of a particular subject because he judges him to be inadequate or to know not much more than he knows himself. I remember the righteous anger of one of my French colleagues when his teaching services had been declined by a smug American, the son of a diplomat. This colleague is one of the most astute critics I have ever known, so much so that he has never deigned to publish anything, not wishing, as he often said, ‘to contribute more trash with which to bury literature’. This was doubtless a mixture of overstatement and vanity, since, especially when it comes to producing standard texts, as well as serious erudition and sensible interpretations, much of what Oxford publishes in the field of literature is essential to any student or critic.

  Perhaps, though, the real problem is precisely that lack of silliness combined with a fear of taking intellectual risks. Oxford has a horror of originality: it gives the impression of suffering from an excess of common sense, which, if wielded with great acuity, can easily be used to dismiss any risky theory or interpretation (from Italy or France, for example), at least in the subjects with which I came into contact. On more than one occasion, I witnessed the verbal crucifixion, on the part of my colleagues, of some American, Spanish or even Cambridge-based professor, who had been invited to give a talk to our seminar. True, these crucifixions were carried out with enormous delicacy, as if the pain would be lessened if the nails were hammered in very slowly and by someone wearing silk gloves. The Oxford dialectical method does not consist, as it does at other universities around the world, in an exchange of more or less contrary statements, but in a litany of hesitant and extremely polite but poisonous questions (‘I wonder if …’ is the usual opening gambit) to which no one, however well prepared and composed they might be, will be capable of giving a satisfactory answer. Oxford, then, almost never states, it merely questions, and it does so to perfection.

  This attitude is passed on to the students, who, despite the university’s increasingly open admissions policy, immediately gain a sense that they belong to an intellectual elite. This is why their attitude towards a new lecturer (myself, for example, when I took up my post) is nothing like that of students from other countries, who are absolutely petrified on their first day in class and offer their teacher their brightest smiles (and in America, an apple). On my first day as a teacher at Oxford, I felt I was in the presence of a group of world-weary know-it-alls who, mentally sprawling in their chairs, seemed to be saying: ‘Come on, then, amuse us; let’s see if you have anything new to tell us, something we don’t know already.’ The truth is that, as long as you fulfilled that first and most sacred precept (and that of any form of teaching, namely, ‘to amuse’), Oxford students prove to be as receptive as any others and continue to be among the ablest and most appreciative students any teacher could ask for. Perhaps that is why most of the literature students take up jobs that have nothing to do with their degree, but go into politics or banking, it being a widely held view in English society that anyone who has been exposed to the Oxford method of education is thereby qualified to take on any post of responsibility, even if
he spent his university years scanning sonnets by Góngora and being bored to death by Spain’s post-Civil War novels.

  I spent two years in Oxford as a transient lecturer, but only ten days in Cambridge at a conference on English literature to which I had been invited, and so I cannot judge that town with the same lack of impartiality. At first sight, though, the two places are as alike as two peas in a pod, so much so that this extreme superficial likeness makes one suspect the existence of enormous underlying differences. Nevertheless, it should be said that in Oxford, where one senses an instinctive disdain for graduates from any other university in the world, they treat those who come from Cambridge with an exquisite respect tinged with a deep-seated loathing, as if the Oxonians felt more comfortable with a uniqueness so peculiar that it is best shared between the two of them.

  From the point of view of a continental (or, rather, southern European) writer, Oxford seems to be the exact opposite of the university world I have known: the foresight, common sense, acuity, good manners, fabulous libraries, didactic seriousness, irony, centuries-old rituals, respect for the student, scorn for charlatans, and that bunch of keys are precisely the things that Spanish universities lack. Above all else, though, you can find in Oxford something that is most unusual nowadays, not just in my country, but in almost any other: in a university world dominated by resolute mediocrity and a desire to perpetuate it (thus ensuring jobs for life for the mediocrities who have already been enthroned), it is both surprising and stimulating to find a real appreciation of talent, which, miraculously, is not seen as a danger or a threat. Perhaps that is why Oxford is the only place on the planet (bearing in mind that shared uniqueness I mentioned earlier) where, on one afternoon you can go and hear E. H. Gombrich, the following afternoon P. E. Russell, the next Francis Haskell, the next Isaiah Berlin and the next George Steiner. And if you’re a visitor, you can do all those things, without crowds and for free.