A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  The truth is that almost no one ever mentioned Teresa Aguilera, and that “almost” has become superfluous since the death of my Cuban grandmother, the only one who did occasionally talk about her, as if without meaning to or as if she couldn’t help it, although in her house Teresa was still very much a visible presence, in the form of a posthumous portrait in oils based on a photograph. And in my house too, that is, in my father’s house, there used to be and still is the black-and-white photograph that served as the model, at which Ranz and Juana would now and then give a passing glance. That photograph shows Teresa with a trusting, serious face, a pretty woman with fine eyebrows, as if drawn in with a single stroke, a slight dimple in her chin – like a notch, a shadow – her dark hair caught back and with a centre parting emphasizing what used to be called a widow’s peak, she has a long neck, a large, feminine mouth (but quite different from my father’s or mine), her eyes are very dark too and very wide-set, they look frankly at the camera, she’s wearing discreet earrings, mother-of-pearl perhaps and, despite her extreme youth, she’s wearing lipstick, as nice girls did at the time when she was young and alive. Her skin is very pale, her fingers interlaced, her arms resting on a table, perhaps a dining table rather than a desk, although you can’t see enough to know for sure and the background is very blurred, perhaps it’s a studio photograph. She’s wearing a short-sleeved blouse, it may have been spring or summer, she must be about twenty, perhaps less, she may not yet have known Ranz or may just have met him. She was single then. There’s something about her which now reminds me of Luisa, despite having looked at that photograph for many years before Luisa even existed, every year of my life except for the last two. This may be due to the fact that one tends to see the person one loves and with whom one shares one’s life in everything. But they share the same trusting expression, Teresa in her portrait and Luisa in person now, as if they were afraid of nothing and as if nothing could ever harm them, that’s the case with Luisa, at least when she’s awake; when she’s asleep her face is more vulnerable and her body seems more open to danger. Luisa is so trusting that the first night we spent together she dreamed, she told me, of pieces of gold. She woke up in the middle of the night, disturbed by my presence, and looked at me a little strangely, stroked my cheek with her nails and said: “I was dreaming of pieces of gold, they were extraordinarily bright and shaped like fingernails.” Only someone very innocent could dream such a dream and, more to the point, then tell someone about it. When I’ve looked at the photo of Teresa in my father’s house since meeting Luisa and sleeping with her, I’ve often thought that Teresa Aguilera could have dreamed of those gleaming pieces of gold on her wedding night. I don’t know when they took that photograph of Teresa and probably no one knew for certain: it’s very small, set in a wooden frame, on a shelf, and since she died no one would have looked at it save very infrequently, the way people look at the china or the ornaments or even the paintings in houses and stop looking at them with any attention or pleasure once they’ve become part of the daily landscape. Since my mother’s death, her photograph, a larger one, is there too, in my father’s house, and there’s a portrait of her as well, though not a posthumous one, which Custardoy the Elder painted when I was still a child. Of the two sisters my mother, Juana, looks the jollier one, although they are somewhat alike, the neck and the shape of the face and the chin are all identical. My mother is smiling in both the photograph and the painting, in both she’s already older than her elder sister in the small photograph, in fact older than Teresa ever was, for by virtue of her death she came to be the younger sister in a way, now even I’m older than she was; premature death has a rejuvenating quality. My mother smiles almost the way she used to laugh; she laughed easily, like my grandmother; as I’ve already said, the two of them often used to roar with laughter when they were together.

  But I didn’t know until a few months ago that my aunt, who could never have been my aunt, had killed herself shortly after returning from her honeymoon with my own father, and it was Custardoy the Younger who told me so. He’s three years older than I am and I’ve known him since childhood, when three years seems a lot, although then I avoided him as much as possible and I’ve come to tolerate him only as an adult. The friendship or business relationship between our fathers sometimes brought us together, although he was always closer to the adults, more interested in their world, as if impatient to form part of it and to act independently, I remember him as a child old before his time or a frustrated adult, a man condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumed him. It wasn’t that he took part in the adults’ conversations, he was devoid of pedantry – he just listened – it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter, like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him; it’s a common experience amongst the dying too. He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity. When he came to our house and had to wait in my company for his father’s visit with mine to be over, he’d go over to the balcony window and turn his back on me for fifteen or twenty minutes or half an hour at a time, ignoring the various games I ingenuously proposed to him. But despite his immobility, there was nothing contemplative or peaceful about his standing figure or about the bony hands with which he parted the lace curtains then gripped them, like a man only recently taken captive accustoming himself to the feel of the bars, as if he still couldn’t quite believe in their existence. I’d carry on playing behind his back, trying not to be noticed, feeling intimidated in my own bedroom, not even looking at his shaven neck, still less at his eyes, the eyes of a man who envied the outside world and longed to be able to see it and to act independently. Custardoy did achieve a measure of independence, at least in so far as his father taught him the trade very early on, the trade of copyist and possibly forger of paintings, and he was paid for some of the work commissioned from him in his studio. That’s why Custardoy the Younger had more money than most boys his age and enjoyed an unusual autonomy, for he gradually began earning his own living; he was interested in life in the streets, not at school, at thirteen he already went with prostitutes and I was always a little afraid of him – not so much because he was three years older than me, which meant that he invariably got the better of me during our occasional quarrels, when the tension in him grew so great he’d finally explode – as because of his character, which was crude and rough, but also cold, even in fights. Whenever he fought with me, however much resistance I put up before giving in, I always noticed the complete lack of passion or rage in him, nothing but cold violence and a will to dominate. Although I sometimes visited him in his father’s studio, which is now his, I never actually saw him working, neither on his own paintings, which have met with no success at all, nor on one of his perfect copies, from which he makes his money along with commissioned portraits, technically excellent but very conventional: perhaps all those hours sitting still, confined, wielding a paintbrush, concentrating on tiny details and staring at a canvas, explain his permanent state of tension and his desire to be many. Ever since he was a boy, he’s never concealed his exploits, especially his sexual exploits (during my adolescence and even before that I learned almost everything I knew about sex from him), and sometimes I wonder if the fondness my father has shown for him in recent years, since the death of Custardoy the Elder, isn’t in some way related to those stories he tells. As restless men grow older the more they want to go on living, and if their own faculties no longer allow them to do so fully, then they seek out
the company of those who can bring them news of an existence beyond their grasp and thus prolong their life vicariously. My father probably enjoys listening to him. I know of prostitutes who, after spending a night with Custardoy the Younger, have left, terrified, and have always refused to talk about what happened, even if he’d taken two of them to bed and they could therefore encourage and console each other, for, even as a very young man, Custardoy’s desire to be many has meant that one person was never enough for him and he’s long favoured having his women in twos. With the years, Custardoy has grown more discreet and, as far as I know, has never explained what he does to provoke such fear, but perhaps he has in private to my father, who for him is a kind of godfather. My father probably enjoys listening to him. The fact is that they’ve been seeing each other regularly for years now, once a week. Custardoy visits Ranz or they go out to supper together and perhaps go on to some old-fashioned bar or keep each other company on some errand or visit some third party, me, for example, or, in my absence, Luisa, the new daughter-in-law. My father presumably finds Custardoy entertaining. Now almost forty, Custardoy sports a pigtail on his once closeshaven neck, the kind favoured by pirates or bullfighters, and his sideburns are a little too long for the times and very noticeable anyway since they’re curly and much darker than his straight, blondish hair; perhaps he wears his hair like that, I mean, the pigtail and the sideburns, so as not to feel out of place in the archaically bohemian milieu of night-owl painters, although at the same time he dresses conventionally and with extreme correctness – he always wears a tie – he aspires to elegance in the way he dresses. He wears a moustache for a few months and then shaves it off for another few months, either out of irresolvable doubt or perhaps it’s just his way of seeming to be more than one person. As he’s got older, his face has brought out to the full what was already hinted at when he was a child and even more so when he was an adolescent: his face is like his character, crude and rough and cold, with a broad forehead and receding hair, a slightly hooked nose and long teeth that light up his face when he smiles in a way that is friendly but never warm, and his eyes are very dark and large and quite wide-set and almost lashless, and it’s those last two factors that make his leering gaze so unbearable, the gaze he bestows on the women he picks up or buys and on the men who are his rivals and on the world that flows past now with him very much a part of it, the most turbulent part.

  He was the one who, some months ago, nearly a year now, shortly after my return from my honeymoon in Havana and Mexico and New Orleans and Miami, told me what had really happened to my Aunt Teresa nearly forty years before. I was going to visit my father at home, to say hello to him after my return and tell him about my trip, when I bumped into Custardoy the Younger in the doorway, his slim silhouette motionless in the twilight.

  “He’s not in,” he said. “He had to go out.” And he indicated with his eyes that he meant Ranz. “He asked me to wait a few minutes for you to let you know. He got a phone call from an American from some museum or other and had to rush off. He’ll call you tonight or tomorrow. Why don’t you and I go and have a drink together?”

  Custardoy the Younger took my arm and we walked off. I noticed the cold hand and the iron grip that had been all too familiar to me from childhood onwards; as a boy and now as a man he’d always been extremely strong, a sinewy, concentrated strength. The last time I’d seen him had been some weeks before, on my now distant wedding day, to which he’d been invited by Ranz, not by me, Ranz had invited several people and I had no reason to object, neither to the others nor to Custardoy. I hadn’t had time to talk to him then, he’d simply congratulated me when he arrived at the Casino with his amiable, slightly scornful smile, and afterwards, during the party, I saw him from afar looking eagerly about him, like the familiar presence he was. He looked avidly at everything, at women and at certain men – shy men; wherever he went his eyes gripped just as his hands did. He didn’t have a moustache that day, but now, some weeks later, it had almost, but not quite, grown back again. He’d let it grow during my time away with Luisa. In the Balmoral he ordered a beer, he never drank anything else which was why his slimness was beginning to give way to a beer gut (always concealed by his tie). For a while he talked to me about money, then about my father, who, he thought, seemed to be in good spirits, then again about how much money he was earning, as if the last thing in the world he was interested in was my new marital status, he didn’t ask me anything, either about the trip, my work or my future trips to Geneva or London or even Brussels, he couldn’t have known about them, he would have to have asked, but he didn’t. Since my father had gone out, I wanted to get back home to Luisa and perhaps go out to the cinema, I’ve never had much to say to Custardoy. My father must have had to go out because someone had called him from Malibu or Boston or Baltimore, they rarely called him now, although his critical eye and his knowledge were as sharp as ever, possibly even sharper; people rarely consult old men unless it’s about something very important, someone was probably passing through Madrid and had no one to have supper with, he probably thought they wanted him to give his opinion on something, some painting that had been unearthed, some deal in Madrid. I made as if to leave but Custardoy placed his hand on my arm again – his hand was like a weight – and stopped me.

  “Stay a little longer,” he said to me. “You still haven’t told me anything about that pretty wife of yours.”

  “They’re all pretty as far as you’re concerned. Besides, there’s not much to tell.”

  Custardoy was flicking his lighter on and off. He was smiling, showing his long teeth, and watching the flame appear and disappear. For the moment he wasn’t looking at me, or only very briefly out of the corner of one of his wide-set eyes, which were otherwise busy checking out the clientele.

  “I presume she must have something special for you to get married after all these years, you’re no spring chicken. She must have bewitched you. People only get married when they’ve no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn’t bear to lose. It’s always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness. Come on, tell me what your particular madness is. Tell me what it is she does to you.”

  Custardoy was vulgar and a little childish, as if his endless childhood wait to reach manhood had left something of that childhood forever linked to it. He talked too freely, although with me, he reined himself in slightly, when he was with me on his own, that is, I mean, he kept his lax, brutal terminology to a minimum and softened its tone. With any other friend he’d have asked him straight out to describe his wife’s cunt or quim and to tell him if she was a good fuck, difficult words to translate but words which, fortunately, are never used in the international organizations I work for; I merited a certain degree of circumlocution.

  “You’d have to pay me first,” I said, trying to make a joke out of his remark.

  “All right, I’ll pay, how much do you want? Let’s see, another whisky to start with.”

  “I don’t want another whisky, I don’t even want this one. Stop hassling me.”

  Custardoy had put his hand in his pocket, he’s one of those men who carry notes loose in their trouser pockets, as do I, to tell the truth.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, we won’t. To your health and to that of your lady.” And he took a sip of his beer. Licking his lips, he scanned the room: there were two women of about thirty talking at the bar, one of them, the one facing us (but possibly both of them), was showing her thighs, either intentionally or unintentionally. Her thighs were too brown for the time of year, an artificial mulatto brown, brown from her visits to the swimming pool or, more likely, from some fake tanning lotion. Then Custardoy fixed me with his lashless, naked eyes and added: “Anyway, I hope you have better luck than your father, not, touch wood, that I want to be a jinx or anything. He’s got quite a record, worse than Bluebeard’s, it’s just as well he hasn’t continued in the same vein, he’s getti
ng on a bit.”