A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  But, however tidy a sum of money Ranz may have earned and added to, thanks to Malibu, Boston and Baltimore, Zurich, Montevideo and The Hague, to certain personal favours and to more discreet services rendered to vendors, even perhaps to expert advice he may have given to Custardoy the Elder and occasionally to Custardoy the Younger, his one extravagance and the basis of his fortune, as I’ve already said, has been his personal collection of drawings and paintings and the odd sculpture, although I don’t yet know, nor will I know for the moment, how much the fruits of his extravagance, his fortune, are worth (1 hope that when he dies he leaves a very precise and expert appraisal). He’s never wanted to get rid of anything, not of his supposed copies nor of his guaranteed originals, and in that one must recognize, despite his minor acts of corruption, the sincerity of his vocation and his real passion for painting. When you think about it, giving us the tiny Boudin and Martin Rico for our wedding must have cost him dear, even though he’ll still see them in our home. When he was working at the Prado I remember his enormous concern over any accident or loss, over the slightest deterioration or imperfection in a work, as well as concern for the museum guards, who, he used to say, should be paid a fortune and kept extremely happy, since they were responsible not only for the safety and care but also for the very existence of the paintings. He used to say that “Las Meninas” is still in existence thanks to the benevolence and the day-to-day mercy of the guards, who could, if they chose to, destroy it at any moment, which was why you had to keep them proud and happy and in a satisfactory emotional state. On various pretexts (it wasn’t his job, it wasn’t anyone’s job), he took it upon himself to find out how things were with the guards, if they were feeling contented or upset, if they were overwhelmed by debts and just getting by, if their wives or husbands (the staff are mixed) were treating them well or beating them up, if their children were a cause of happiness or were young psychopaths driving them crazy, he was forever asking questions and looking after them all in order to safeguard the works of the masters, to protect them from the guards’ possible rages or furies or resentments. My father was keenly aware that any man or woman who spends the day shut up in a room, always seeing the same paintings, for hours and hours every morning and on some afternoons, just sitting on a stool doing nothing but watch the visitors and watch the canvases (they’re even forbidden to do crosswords), could easily go mad, become a menace or develop a mortal hatred for those paintings. For that reason he took it on himself, during the years he spent in the Prado, to change the postings of the guards every month, so that they would at least only see the same paintings for thirty days at a time and their hatred might thereby be assuaged, or the target of that hatred changed before it was too late. The other thing he was very conscious of was this: the risk of punishment and of being sent to prison wouldn’t deter a guard if, one morning, he decided to destroy “Las Meninas”, “Las Meninas” would then be as thoroughly destroyed as the Bremen Dürers – assuming, of course, that they were destroyed by the bombs – since there’d be no guard to prevent their destruction, for the guard himself would be doing the destroying, with all the time in the world to carry out his fell deed and no one to stop him apart from himself. The loss would be irretrievable, there would be no way of restoring the painting.

  On one occasion Ranz left his office at around closing time, when most of the visitors had gone, and he found an old guard called Mateu (who’d worked there for twenty-five years) playing with a disposable lighter and the edge of a Rembrandt, with the lower left edge of the painting entitled “Artemisa”, dated 1634, to be precise, the only authenticated Rembrandt in the Prado, in which the above-named Artemisa, who looks very like Saskia, Rembrandt’s wife and frequent model, is looking out of the corner of her eye at an intricate goblet being held out to her by a young servant girl kneeling down, with her back almost turned to us. The scene has been interpreted in two ways, as being either Artemisa, Queen of Halicamassus, who is on the point of drinking the contents of a goblet containing the ashes of Mausolus, her dead husband, for whom she’d had a tomb built which went on to become one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (hence the word “mausoleum”), or Sophonisba, the daughter of the Carthaginian Hasdrubal, who, in order to avoid falling into the hands of Scipio and his men, had laid formal claim to her, asked her new husband, Masinissa, for a cup of poison as a wedding present, a cup which, according to the story, was procured for her in the name of endangered fidelity, despite the fact that Sophonisba had not been his wife alone and had been married before to another, to Syphax, the chief of the Numidians, from whom, in fact, her second husband (the above-named Masinissa), another sacker of cities, had just stolen her during the chaotic capture of Cirta, modern-day Constantine, in Algeria. So, standing in front of the painting, it’s difficult to know if Artemisa is about to drink marital ashes in honour of Mausolus or if Sophonisba is about to drink marital poison to protect the honour of Masinissa; although, given the sideways glance of both women, it looks more as if one or the other were, in fact, considering ingesting some adulterous potion. Whatever the true subject of the painting, in the background there is the head of an old woman who’s much more interested in the goblet than she is in the servant girl or in Artemisa herself (if the subject is Sophonisba, it’s possible that it was the old woman who placed the poison in it), you can’t see her very well at all, the background is veiled in an overly mysterious or overly murky penumbra, and the figure of Sophonisba is so luminous and takes up so much space that it makes the old woman seem even more obscure.

  At that time, there were no automatic fire alarms in the Prado, but there were fire extinguishers. My father wrenched the nearest one off the wall and, although he didn’t know how to use it, he held it behind his back, concealing it as best he could (it weighed a ton and was a most conspicuous colour), then went slowly over to Mateu, who had by then scorched one corner of the picture frame and was now holding the flame very close to the canvas, moving it up and down and from corner to corner, as if he wanted to light up the whole painting, the servant girl and the old woman and Artemisa and the goblet, as well as a bedside table on which there are a few written pages (possibly Scipio’s formal claim) and on which Sophonisba is leaning her rather plump left hand.

  “What are you doing, Mateu?” my father said to him calmly. “Are you trying to get a better look at the painting?”

  Mateu didn’t turn round, he recognized my father’s voice at once and knew perfectly well that, every day, when Ranz finished work, he used to take a random stroll around a few rooms just to make sure that they were still intact.

  “No,” he replied in a neutral, dispassionate tone, “I’m thinking of burning it.”

  My father said that he could have struck Mateu’s arm and made him drop the lighter, thus rendering it harmless, and then deftly kicked it away. But his hands were occupied by the fire extinguisher behind his back and, besides, the mere possibility of failing and making the guard even angrier convinced him not to try his luck. He thought that perhaps it was best to divert him from using the flame (thus igniting bituminous substances) until the non-refillable lighter had run out of fuel, but that could take a long time (if, by some misfortune, the lighter had only been bought recently). He also thought of shouting for help, someone would appear, Mateu would be arrested and the fire wouldn’t spread to the other paintings, but in that case it would be goodbye to the one authentic Rembrandt in the Prado, goodbye to Sophonisba and Artemisa, and even to Mausolus and Masinissa and to Saskia and Syphax. He asked him another question.

  “But, Mateu, do you really dislike it that much?”

  “I’m fed up with that fat woman,” replied Mateu. Mateu was referring to Sophonisba. “I don’t like that fat woman with the pearls,” he insisted. (And it’s true that Artemisa is fat and, in the Rembrandt, is wearing a string of pearls around her neck and her forehead). “The little servant girl holding out the goblet to her looks prettier, but you can’t see her face properly.”
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br />   My father couldn’t resist giving a mocking, or rather, a surprised and logical reply:

  “Of course,” he said, “it was painted like that, with the fat one facing us and the servant girl with her back to us.”

  The pyromaniac, Mateu, flicked the lighter off for a few seconds, but didn’t remove it from the canvas, and after those few seconds had passed he lit it again and held it close to the painting. He wasn’t looking at Ranz.

  “That’s the worst thing,” he said, “that it’s fixed like that for ever and now we’ll never know what happened next. You see, Señor Ranz, there’s no way of seeing the girl’s face or of knowing what that old woman is doing in the background, all you can see is that fat trout with her two necklaces who never actually picks up the goblet. I wish she’d just bloody well drink it and give me a chance to look at the girl, if she’d turn round that is.”

  Mateu, a man who knew what painting was about, a man of sixty who’d spent twenty-five of those years in the Prado, suddenly wanted to know what happened next in a Rembrandt painting that he didn’t understand. (No one understands it, there’s a world of difference between Artemisa and Sophonisba, the difference between drinking the ashes of a dead man and drinking death, between celebrating life and dying, between prolonging life and killing oneself). It was absurd, but Ranz still kept trying to reason with him:

  “But you know that’s not possible, Mateu,” he said. “The three figures are painted, can’t you see that? Painted. You’ve seen plenty of films and this isn’t a film. You must see that there’s no way you’ll ever see them looking any different. This is a painting, a painting.”

  “That’s why I’m going to do away with it,” said Mateu, again caressing the canvas with the flame from the lighter.

  “Besides,” added my father trying to distract him and out of a desire for exactitude (my father is a pedant), “what she’s wearing on her forehead isn’t a necklace, but a diadem, even if it is made out of pearls.”

  But Mateu paid no attention to this. He mechanically blew a few specks of dust from his uniform.

  Holding the fire extinguisher behind him was killing Ranz’s wrists, so he gave up trying to hide it and instead held it in his arms as if it were a baby, it’s bright crimson casing clearly visible. Mateu noticed the fire extinguisher.

  “Now look here, what do you think you’re doing with that,” he said reproachfully to my father. “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to take them off the wall?”

  Mateu had at last turned round when he heard the noise caused by my father’s clumsy handling of the fire extinguisher, which in its journey from behind his back to his arms had bumped against the floor causing splinters to fly, but my father didn’t dare take advantage of that moment of alarm. It made him think though.

  “It’s OK, Mateu,” he said. “I’m taking it away with me because it needs mending, it doesn’t work.” And he took the opportunity, with great relief, to place it on the floor. He took out the cherry-red silk handkerchief adorning his jacket pocket and mopped his brow; the handkerchief was pleasant to the touch and to the eye, ornamental rather than of any practical use, the red matched the fire extinguisher.

  “Like I said, I’m going to do away with it,” repeated Mateu, and he made a threatening gesture with the lighter in Saskia’s direction.

  “The painting’s worth a lot of money, Mateu. It’s worth millions,” Ranz said to him, in an attempt to see if the mention of money would bring him back to his senses.

  But the guard went on playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off and on again, and opted for scorching the frame a little more, a very fine, antique frame.

  “That just makes matters worse,” he replied scornfully. “Bloody hell, to top it all, the great fat cow is worth millions.”

  The fine frame was turning black. My father thought that perhaps now was the moment to mention prison, but immediately dismissed the idea. He thought for a moment, and then for another, and finally changed his tactics. He suddenly picked up the fire extinguisher from the floor and said:

  “You know, you’re quite right, Mateu, you’re absolutely right. But don’t burn it because then you might set fire to the other paintings. Let me deal with it. I’ll throw this fire extinguisher at it, it weighs a ton. All I have to do is drop this ton weight on the fat cow and that’ll be that.”

  Ranz lifted the fire extinguisher and held it above his head with his two hands like a weightlifter, ready to hurl it violently at Sophonisba or Artemisa.

  Mateu became very serious at that point.

  “Look here,” Mateu said to him solemnly, “what do you think you’re doing? You’ll damage the painting.”

  “I’ll ruin it,” said Ranz. There was a moment’s hesitation, my father with his arms in the air, holding aloft the bright red fire extinguisher, Mateu with the lighter in his hand still lit, the flame still flickering. He looked at my father, then at the painting. Ranz couldn’t hold the weight much longer. Then Mateu flicked off the lighter, put it in his pocket, spread his arms wide like a wrestler and said to him threateningly:

  “Now you hold still, eh? And don’t make me do anything I might regret.”

  Mateu wasn’t dismissed because my father didn’t tell anyone about the episode. Nor did the guard denounce him for having threatened to destroy the Rembrandt with a faulty fire extinguisher. No one else noticed the scorch mark on the frame (apart from Mateu’s bribed replacement and one indiscreet visitor who was advised not to ask any questions), and shortly afterwards it was changed for one very similar, though not antique. According to Ranz, if Mateu had been a zealous guard for twenty-five years, there was no reason why he shouldn’t continue to be so once he was over his momentary attack of rage. More than that, he attributed his action and his attack to the lack of action and attacks by other people, and took as proof of his trustworthiness the fact that, when he saw the painting he bore a grudge against threatened by someone else, someone who was, moreover, his superior, his sense of responsibility as a guard had prevailed over his sincere desire to bum Artemisa. He was immediately transferred to another room containing work by primitive painters, whose figures are less rotund and less likely to irritate (and some are palinschematic, that is, the surface or space they inhabit illustrates a complete story). For the rest, my father merely showed more interest than ever in Mateu’s life, talking encouragingly to him about his imminent retirement and never taking his eyes off him during the parties that were held twice a year for all the museum staff, on a day when the museum was closed, usually in the large Velázquez room. All the employees and their respective families, from the director (who made only a token appearance for a minute or two and proffered a limp handshake) to the cleaning women (who were the people who made the most noise and had the most fun because they’d have to stay on afterwards and clear up the mess), would gather together to eat and drink and converse (though “converse” is not quite the word for it) and generally disport themselves in a sort of biannual beanfeast which was my father’s idea, basing himself on the model of or the reasoning behind Carnival, in order to keep the guards happy and to allow them to relax and loosen up a bit in the very place where, on other days of the year, they’d have to be on guard. He himself took care to serve only food and drink which, if spilled, couldn’t ruin or damage the paintings, and that way all kinds of excesses and abuses were allowable: as a child, I myself saw lemonade spilt on “Las Meninas” and meringue smeared over “The Surrender of Breda”.

  FOR MANY YEARS, as a child and later too, as an adolescent and as a very young man, when I was still gazing with irresolute eyes at the girl in the stationer’s, all I knew was that, before Ranz married my mother, he’d been married to my mother’s older sister, that he married Teresa Aguilera before he married her sister, Juana, the two girls that my grandmother used to refer to sometimes when she was telling anecdotes about the past, or rather she’d just say “the girls” to differentiate them from their brothers, whom she called “the boys�
�. It isn’t just that children take a long time to show any interest in the people their parents were before they knew them (in general that interest arises only when the children reach the age their parents were when they did, in fact, first enter their lives, or when they in turn have children and, through them, remember themselves as children and wonder, perplexed, about the tutelary figures whom they now resemble), it’s also that parents become accustomed to arousing no curiosity and to keeping quiet about themselves to their children, silencing the people they were or have perhaps forgotten. Almost everyone feels ashamed of their youth, it isn’t true that we feel nostalgia for it, rather we banish it or flee from it and, with varying degrees of ease or difficulty, we confine our origins to the sphere of bad dreams or novels, or to what never existed. Our youth is something hidden, a secret to those who never knew us when we were young.

  Ranz and my mother never hid the fact that Ranz had been married to the woman who would have been my Aunt Teresa had she lived (or rather would not have been), it had been an extremely brief marriage about which I knew only that it had been terminated by her early death, but, on the other hand, for many years I didn’t know (nor did I ask) the reason for that death, and for many more years I thought I did know in essence, but I was wrong; when I did finally ask they lied, which is another of the things parents become accustomed to, lying to their children about their forgotten youth. They told me about some illness, that was all, for many years they spoke only of an illness, and it’s difficult to doubt something you’ve known since infancy, it takes a long time before you begin to question it. Consequently, my idea of that brief marriage was that it had been an understandable mistake, in the eyes at least of a child or an adolescent, who would prefer to think of his parents being together as an inevitability, in order to justify his own existence and, therefore, his belief in his own inevitability and justification for living (I’m referring to lazy, normal children, the ones who don’t go to school if they’ve got a bit of a temperature, the ones who don’t have to deliver groceries by bike every morning). It was only a very vague idea and I explained the mistake by telling myself that Ranz could have believed that he loved one sister, the elder sister, when in fact he loved the other one, the younger sister, perhaps too young when they first met for my father to take her seriously. Perhaps that’s what I was told, it’s possible, by my mother or rather by my grandmother, I don’t remember now, a brief and perhaps deceitful reply to a childish question; Ranz, of course, never talked to me about such things. It was easy enough too for another factor to appear in a child’s imagination, a compassionate one: consoling the widower, replacing the sister, easing the husband’s despair, taking the dead woman’s place. My mother might have married my father a little out of pity, so that he wouldn’t be alone; or perhaps not, she might have loved him secretly from the start and have secretly desired the disappearance of the obstacle, her sister Teresa. And when that happened, she might have been glad of her disappearance, at least in that respect. Ranz had never told me anything. Some years ago, when I was already a grown man, I tried to ask him about it and he treated me as if I were still a child. “What’s it got to do with you?” he said, and changed the subject. When I insisted (we were at a restaurant, La Dorada) he got up to go to the toilet and said to me teasingly, giving me his most brilliant smile: “Listen, I don’t feel like talking about the distant past, it’s in bad taste and reminds one how old one is. If you’re going to continue in the same vein, I think it would be best if, by the time I came back, you’d left the table. I want to eat in peace, today, not on some other day forty years ago.” He told me to leave as if we were at home and I was a little boy who could be sent to his room, he didn’t even consider the possibility of getting angry or that he should be the one to leave the restaurant.