A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  IT WAS LUISA who first put her hand on my shoulder, but I think that 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. I think, however, that I was the one who began it and, until a year ago, at least until the time of our marriage and our honeymoon, I was the one who proposed everything that was subsequently accepted: seeing each other regularly, going out to supper, going to the cinema together, accompanying her to her door, exchanging kisses, changing our shifts in order to spend a few weeks together abroad, occasionally staying the night at her flat (that was what I proposed, but I always ended up leaving after the kisses and lying awake in each other’s arms), looking for a new apartment for the two of us later on, once we’d decided to get married. I think I was also the one who proposed that we should get married, perhaps because I was older, perhaps because I’d never done it before, either getting married or proposing marriage, or rather I’d only once before proposed marriage, half-heartedly and because I’d been given an ultimatum. Luisa eventually accepted, certainly without knowing if she really wanted to or not, or perhaps (purely by chance) knowing it without actually having to think about it, I mean, simply doing it. Since we got married we’ve seen less of each other, which is what people say tends to happen, but in our case this is not due to the general falling away that often accompanies what appears to be an end or a conclusion, but to external and temporary factors, an imbalance in our work timetables: Luisa was less and less prepared to travel and spend her eight weeks abroad, and I, on the other hand, had to continue doing so and even to prolong my stays abroad and increase their number in order to pay for our new home and its unnatural inauguration. For nearly a year, on the other hand, the year prior to our marriage, we’d tried to coincide as much as possible, with her in Madrid when I was in Madrid, with her in London when I was in Geneva, and even, on a couple of occasions, with both of us working in Brussels at the same time. For nearly a year, however, our first year of marriage, I’ve been abroad much more often than I would have wanted and have been unable properly to accustom myself to my married life or to the shared pillow or to the new apartment which, before, belonged to no one, and she’s spent almost all her time in Madrid, organizing the apartment and getting to know my family, especially my father, Ranz. Every time I came back from a trip during this period, I’d find new items of furniture or new curtains and even a new picture and I’d feel strange and have to relearn the domestic itineraries I’d learned on the previous occasion (for example, there’d be an ottoman where before there’d been none). I also noted certain changes in Luisa, very tenuous changes that affected things which, although quite secondary, I nevertheless always noticed: the length of her hair, a pair of gloves, shoulder pads in her jackets, a different colour lipstick, a slight change in the way she walked although she was wearing the same kind of shoes she always wore. Nothing very obvious, but still noticeable after eight weeks’ absence and even more so after another eight. In a way it bothered me to find that these minimal changes had taken place without me, it bothered me not to have been present when they were made, as if the fact that I wasn’t a witness to them (not having seen her after her visit to the hairdresser’s, not having expressed an opinion about the gloves) necessarily excluded any possible influence I could have on them and on our marriage, which is, without a doubt, the state that most influences and alters people, and is, therefore, the state that requires most vigilance in its early stages. It was changing Luisa in the usual ways, just small things at first, as always happens with women when they’re undergoing a process of profound transformation, but I began to have doubts about whether it was in fact me, myself in the context of our marriage, who was dictating that transformation or at least conditioning it. Nor did I like the fact that, here and there, our new apartment, whose possibilities were infinite, began to reveal a taste that was neither exactly Luisa’s nor my own, although I was accustomed to it and had, in part, inherited it. Our new apartment began to bear a faint resemblance, began to be slightly reminiscent of my childhood home, that is, of Ranz, my father’s home, as if he’d made suggestions during his visits or, by his mere presence, had created certain needs, which, since I was not a continuous presence there and Luisa had no very fixed ideas on the subject, had quickly been taken up and fulfilled. My desk, about which I’d given only vague instructions, was almost a replica of the one that my father had ordered, giving very precise instructions twenty-five years before, from a carpenter in Segovia, the famous Fonfrías, whom he’d met in passing one summer: an enormous table, too large for my few tasks, in the form of a rectangular U and crammed with drawers that I had and have no idea how I could possibly fill. When I came back from one of my trips, the shelves, which (although I forgot to mention it) I would have preferred to have painted white, were instead mahogany (only painted, of course, they weren’t actually made of mahogany), and that wasn’t all; my father, Ranz, had gone to the trouble of unpacking the boxes awaiting me and arranging my books as he’d always arranged his, divided by language not subject and, within that division, in chronological order of the author according to their year of birth. As a wedding present he’d given us some money (quite a lot, he was very generous), but shortly afterwards, while I was away, he also gave us two valuable paintings that had always been in his house (a small Martín Rico and an even smaller Boudin) and so they came to be mine, Venice and Trouville, they were both lovely, yet I’d have preferred to continue seeing them where they’d hung for decades and not in the living room of my own home which, with Venice and Trouville there, albeit in miniature (they showed the dry dock at San Trovaso and the beach), inevitably reminded me of the living room in his apartment when I was young. 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 in his entire life neglect his appearance, being always smartly turned out from the morning onwards as if he were off to attend some ceremony, even if he wasn’t actually going out and no one was coming to visit him. He’s always smelled of a mixture of cologne, tobacco and mint, with a suggestion of alcohol and leather, like someone from the colonies. Almost a year ago now, when Luisa and I got married, he looked the image of the vain, smiling, older man, smugly youthful, affecting a mischievous frivolity. 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. Everything about him has always been agreeable, from his superficially passionate nature, to his soberly free-and-easy manner, from his lively gaze (as if everything amused him, or as if he could see the funny side of everything) to his endless cheerful jokes, he’s a man who can be both vehement and jovial. His features are by no means perfect and yet he’s always been considered to be a very handsome man, who’s enjoyed the fact that women like him, but has perhaps grown used to the idea that this would happen only at a distance. 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 most noticeable feature were his extraordinarily alert eyes, sometimes startling in the devotion and fixity of their gaze, as if what they were seeing at any given moment was of extreme importance, worthy not just of being seen but of being scrutinized, of being observed in the most exclusive manner, of being apprehended in order that each captured image could be stored in his memory, like a camera that couldn’t entirely depend upon its mechanical processes to register what it perceived and so had to try extra hard, to make a real effort. 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. However, 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. The other striking feature of Ranz’s face, and the only one that I’ve inherited, was his mouth, which was plump and rather too well-defined, as if it had been added at the last moment and belonged to someone else, slightly out of keeping with his other features, separate from them, a woman’s mouth in a man’s face, as people have so often said of mine, a red, feminine mouth that must come from some unknown great-grandmother or ancestor, some vain woman who didn’t want it to disappear from the earth along with her, and thus it was passed on to us, regardless of our sex. And there was a third characteristic, the thick eyebrows that were always arched, either singly or together, gestures he probably learned in his youth from the primitive actors of the early thirties and which lingered on after that rather like an odd, involuntary quirk, a detail forgotten in the systematic process of obliteration to which time submits us, the obliteration of what we are and what we do. My father would arch his thick eyebrows, at first the colour of straw and later white, for any reason or for no reason at all, as if arching them were the histrionic complement to his extraordinarily precise way of looking.

  He’s always looked at me like that, ever since I was a child and had to look up to him at his great height, unless he crouched down or was sitting or lying. Now we’re more or less the same height, but his eyes still look at me with that slightly ironic tilt of his eyebrows, open like sunshades, and the brilliant fixity of his pupils, black spots on his solar irises, like the two centres of a single target. Or at least that was how he always used to look at me up until a short time ago. That was how he looked at me on the day of my marriage to Luisa, the young wife of the man who was no longer a child but whom he’d known and treated as such for too long to be able to consider him anything else, whilst he’d known her, the bride, only as an adult, or more than that, as a fiancée. I remember that at one point during the reception, he drew me aside, led me out of the room we’d hired in the lovely, old Casino de Madrid in Calle de Alcalá into a small adjoining room, after the signing by the witnesses (false witnesses, testimonial friends, purely decorative). He placed a hand on my shoulder (yes, a hand on my shoulder) while the other guests came and went, until at last we were left on our own. Then he closed the door and sat down in an armchair and I leaned against the table, my arms folded; we were both very dressed up for the wedding, he more than I, even though it had only been a civil wedding. Ranz lit a slim cigarette, the sort he used to smoke when he was in public and which he smoked without inhaling. He raised his eyebrows extravagantly high, so that they formed two peaks, then gave an amused smile and fixed his fervent gaze on my face, which at that moment was higher than his. And he said to me: