A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  The woman had a Caribbean accent, presumably Cuban, although my grandmother remains my only real reference point (the Cubans are not assiduous visitors to international congresses) and she’d left Cuba in 1898 at a very early age along with the rest of her family and, according to what she said when she spoke of her childhood, there was a tremendous variety of accents on the island; she, for example, could distinguish someone from the province of Oriente, someone from Havana and someone from Matanzas. The man, on the other hand, had the same accent as me, a Spaniard from Spain or rather from Madrid, neutral, correct, like the accent they used to use for dubbing films, the accent I still have. 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.

  “I’m not bein’ impatient, I been patient a long time and still she don’t die. You make her suffer you say, but you never tell her about me and that telephone never rings. How I know she really dyin’? How I know it not one big lie? I never see her, I never been to Spain, for all I know, you not even married and this is all one big story you make up. Sometimes I think you don’t even got a wife.”

  “Oh, really. And what about my papers and the photos?” said the man. 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.

  “What I know about photographs? Could be your sister, could be some other person, could be your lover. You could have other lover and me. And don’t talk to me about papers. I don’t trust you no more. Your wife she been goin’ to die every day tomorrow for one year now. Either she die pronto or you better leave me.”

  That’s more or less what they said, as far as I can remember and transcribe it. Luisa seemed to be dozing and I’d sat down at the foot of the bed, my feet on the floor, my back straight, not leaning against anything, watching over her, my body slightly tensed so as not to make any noise (the springs, my breathing, my clothes). I could see myself in the mirror on the wall, that is, I could if I wanted to, because when you listen very intently you don’t see anything, as if any sense strained to breaking point excludes the use of all the others. Had I looked I would also have seen the shape of Luisa beneath the sheets, curled up behind me, or rather, only her body, which, since she was lying down, was all that appeared in the field of vision of the half-length mirror. To see more of her, her head, I would have had to stand up. After Miriam’s last words (though it may simply have been that I now had enough information to imagine what I couldn’t see or hear) I thought I heard her get up angrily and walk once or twice around the room, doubtless identical to ours (as if she wanted to leave but was still unable to do so, still waiting for something, for her own anger to pass), because I heard the creak of floorboards: if I was right, she must have taken her shoes off, for I didn’t hear the tap of high heels but the pad of bare heels and toes, perhaps she was naked, perhaps both of them had got undressed during the period when I could still hear nothing, perhaps they’d begun their embraces and then interrupted or abandoned them in order to speak in the exasperated tones that were normal and habitual to them. A couple, I thought, who depend and feed on the obstacles in their lives, a couple who will fall apart when there are none, unless they’re driven apart first by those same wearisome, stubborn obstacles, which, nevertheless, they will still have to feed and tend and do their best to eternalize, if they’ve already reached the point of being unable to do without you and without me, that is, one without the other.

  “Do you really want me to leave you?”

  There was no reply or perhaps he just didn’t wait long enough for one, because then, more steadily this time but still in that wounding whisper, the saw-like voice went on:

  “Tell me, is that what you really want? You don’t want me to phone you any more when I come here? You don’t want to know that I’ve arrived, that I’m here, and when? Do you want two months and then three months and then another two months to go by without seeing me or knowing anything about me, not even if my wife has died?”

  The man must have got up too (from the bed or from an armchair, I don’t know) and gone over to where she was standing, probably not naked, only barefoot, no one stands naked in the middle of a room for more than a few seconds, unless they’ve paused on their way somewhere else, the bathroom or the fridge. Even if it’s very hot. It was very hot. 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.

  “I’m your only hope, Miriam. I have been for a year now and no one can live without hope. Do you think you’re going to find another man that easily? No one in the colony, that’s for sure, no one’s going to want to poke around anywhere I’ve already been.”

  “Guillermo, you one real bastard,” she said.

  “Think what you like, it’s up to you.”

  A brisk exchange of words, Miriam perhaps accompanying her words with some new gesture of her expressive arm. And then 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. Miriam must have been thinking. She must have been thinking about something she knew only too well and had thought about on innumerable occasions and which I was thinking about even though I knew nothing about the situation nor what had gone on before. I was thinking that the man, Guillermo, was right, he held all the cards. I was thinking that Miriam’s only option was to go on waiting and to do her best to make herself ever more indispensable to him, by whatever means, however fraudulent, and to try to pressurize him as little as possible and certainly not order or demand the violent death of the wife lying ill in Spain, who knew nothing about what happened every time her husband, the diplomat or industrialist or, perhaps, businessman, went to Havana on business or on a mission. 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. I realized that, given the impossibility of knowing the truth, I had no idea which side to take, not that I’ve always considered that to be a deciding factor when it comes to taking sides about things or people. Perhaps the man had ensnared Miriam with false promises that became increasingly untenable, but it was just as likely that he hadn’t done so at all, and that she, on the other hand, was merely using Guillermo to escape from her isolation and poverty, from Cuba, to better herself, to get married or rather to be married to him, so as not to have to go on occupying her own place in life but to occupy someone else’s instead, 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 unutterab
ly weary of being who we are and who we were. I wondered how long Guillermo had been married. I’d only been married for two weeks and the last thing I wanted was for Luisa to die, on the contrary, it was precisely the fear of that, provoked by her brief illness, that had been worrying me only a short time before. What I heard through the wall did nothing to calm me or to dispel the feeling of unease which, as I’ve explained, had been haunting me in various guises ever since the wedding ceremony. That overheard conversation was intensifying my sense of impending doom and I suddenly looked at myself in the dimly lit mirror on the wall opposite (the only light was some way off), at my figure sitting in the half-dark, with my shirtsleeves rolled up, still young if I took a benevolent or retrospective view, willing to recognize in myself the person I had been up until then, but almost middle-aged if I took a long-term or pessimistic view, imagining what I would be like in the not so distant future. In the room next door, beyond the shadowy mirror, was another man for whom I’d been mistaken by a woman in the street and who, therefore, possibly bore some resemblance to me, he might be a little older and, for that reason, it could be assumed that he’d been married longer than I had, long enough, I thought, to desire the death of his wife, to push her towards death, as he’d put it. At some time in his life, whenever that was, he must have gone on honeymoon too, he must have had the same feeling I now had of something that was simultaneously beginning and ending, he must have risked his concrete future and lost his abstract future, until he too felt forced to seek out some hope of his own on the island of Cuba, where he often went on business. Miriam was also his hope, someone to think about, someone to worry about and to fear for and someone, perhaps, to be afraid of (I couldn’t forget that grasping, claw-like gesture, when it had been directed at me, “You’re mine”, “I’ll get you”, “Come here”, “You owe me”, “I kill you”). I looked at myself in the mirror and sat up a little, so that I could see my face more clearly in the distant light of the lamp on the bedside table and so that my features would look less sombre, less shadowy, less bereft of a past, less cadaverous; and as I did so, Luisa’s head, more brightly lit because nearer the lamp, also came into the mirror’s field of vision and I saw then that her eyes were open, her gaze somehow absent, her thumb brushing her lips, stroking them, a gesture typical of someone listening, or rather typical of her when she’s listening. When she saw that I was watching her in the mirror, she immediately closed her eyes and stopped moving her thumb, as if she wanted me to continue to believe that she was asleep, as if she didn’t want to give rise to any conversation between us, either now or later, about what both of us – I now realized – had overheard between our compatriot Guillermo and the light-skinned mulatto Miriam. She must, I thought, feel the same unease I was feeling, only more intensely, in double measure (a woman aspiring to the role of wife, a wife aspiring to the role of corpse), so much so that she preferred each of us to listen separately, alone, not together, and to keep to ourselves, unexpressed, the thoughts and feelings aroused by the conversation next door and the situation it implied, and to know nothing of what the other thought or felt, even though those thoughts or feelings might well be the same. That aroused the sudden suspicion in me that perhaps, contrary to appearances (she’d seemed so happy during the ceremony, had given me unreserved proof of her excitement, she was enjoying the trip so much, she’d been so angry that her indisposition forced her to miss an afternoon’s sightseeing in Havana), she also felt threatened by and concerned about the loss of her future, or by its sudden arrival. There was no dishonesty between us and so whatever we said, whatever we might say or argue about or reproach ourselves with (whatever might one day cast its shadow over us), wasn’t going to disappear of its own accord or be swallowed up by silence, but would be given its due weight, would influence whatever happened afterwards, whatever that might be (we still had half a lifetime to spend together); and just as I’d abstained from putting into words what I’m putting into words now (my presentiments since the wedding), I realized that 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.

  While I was immersed in these reflections (only briefly) and having spent some seconds (very long seconds, possibly minutes) looking at Luisa’s head in the mirror and seeing that she was now keeping her eyes firmly shut, when before they had been open and thoughtful, I temporarily lost concentration, lost all sense of time (I was too busy looking to listen), or perhaps Guillermo and Miriam were still silent and were taking advantage of that pause to effect a wordless reconciliation, or else they’d dropped their voices so much that they were no longer speaking in those sharp murmurs, but in whispers that were completely inaudible from my side of the wall. I began listening again and, for a while, I heard nothing, there was nothing to hear, I even wondered if, during those few moments of distraction, they had, in fact, left the room without my noticing, had decided, perhaps, to call a truce and go downstairs to eat something, maybe they’d originally met in order to do just that and had had no intention of meeting upstairs at all. I couldn’t help thinking that their wordless reconciliation, if that’s what it was, would necessarily have been a sexual one, because sometimes where there’s mutual dishonesty one can only find reconciliation through sex, and that perhaps they would be standing up, fully clothed, in the middle of that room identical to mine, where they would have been standing before Miriam had said the final words I’d heard her say: “Guillermo, you one real bastard”, which she would have said barefoot. Those strong legs of hers, I thought, could survive any amount of standing, any attack, without weakening or retreating or looking for support, just as they’d waited in the street, stabbing the pavement like knives, she would no longer be worried about recalcitrant creases in her skirt, always assuming she still had it on of course, perhaps the skirt would be all in creases by now and her bag at last put aside, or perhaps her skirt would be draped over a chair. I don’t know, there wasn’t a sound, not even the sound of breathing, and that’s why, very carefully, but in fact not that carefully since I knew Luisa was awake and, besides, would certainly continue pretending to be asleep, I got up from the foot of the bed and went out on to the balcony again. By then it was night-time according to the clocks as well and the people of Havana would be having supper, the streets I could see from the hotel were almost empty, it was just as well that Miriam wasn’t still out there waiting, abandoned by everyone. 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. The moon was still mellow. Perhaps, I thought, leaning on the balcony rail, you can only desire or hasten the death of someone so close to you from afar. Perhaps doing it from a distance, planning it from a distance, makes it all into a game, a fantasy, and in fantasies everything’s allowed. Not so with facts, from which there’s no going back, no possible amendment, only concealment. And when it comes to overheard words there isn’t even that; with luck, there’s only a final forgetting.

  Suddenly, from the balcony, through the doors rather than through the wall, through their balcony doors which had remained ajar and ours which had remained open and where I was now leaning on the balustrade, I again clearly heard Miriam’s voice and now she wasn’t talking but sin
ging to herself and what she sang was this:

  “Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake’s gonna eat me up, yen yen yen.”

  She stopped almost as suddenly as she’d started and with no change of tone (no hint of exasperation either) she said to Guillermo:

  “You must kill her.”

  “All right, all right, I will, but for the moment just keep doing that with your hand,” he said. But that didn’t upset or worry or shock me (though I don’t know how Luisa felt) because he said it like a weary mother who says the first thing that comes into her head, if it will satisfy an importunate child wanting the impossible. More than that, his reply confirmed to me that if the woman in Spain did exist, Guillermo wouldn’t harm her and that the only person certain to get hurt in that situation, that affair, was Miriam. It confirmed to me that Guillermo was lying (lying about something) and I imagined that Luisa, accustomed, as I was, to translating and picking up the least tremor in someone’s voice and the sincerity or otherwise of the speaker, would also have realized and would have felt relieved not for Miriam but for the sick wife.

  And Miriam – who would not at that point have picked up on Guillermo’s insincerity or would have decided to drop the matter and not give it any importance or allow herself to be taken in once more or simply give up for a while on her most cherished dream – started singing to herself again and I knew what she would sing. More time had passed than I thought, I thought, it wasn’t possible, there hadn’t been enough time for them to have had their regulation act of silent sexual reconciliation that would have brought them peace. But that’s what must have happened, because it seemed now that the two of them were quietly recumbent, Miriam was even somewhat abstracted, singing abstractedly to herself, breaking off every now and then the way people do when they sing softly without even realizing that they are, while they’re having a wash or caressing the person at their side (a child they’re singing to). And what she sang was this: