A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  “You’re forgetting, I’m a married man now. You can have both of them.”

  Custardoy took another sip of beer and got up with his cigarettes and lighter in his hand (there was no froth now on his beer). His few steps towards the bar sounded metallic, as if he were wearing tap-dancing shoes or metal tips on the soles or perhaps they were lifts, for it struck me that he did look taller as he walked away.

  The two women were already laughing with him when I took my money out of my trouser pocket and placed it on the table and left to go home to Luisa. I didn’t say goodbye to Custardoy (or I did so with a gesture of my hand from a distance) nor to the two thirty-something women who would become his strange and frightened intimates after a brief interlude of beer and chewing gum and gin and tonic and ice, and cigarette smoke and peanuts and laughter and a few lines of coke and his tongue in their ear, and also of words that I wouldn’t hear, the incomprehensible whisper that persuades us. The mouth is always full, abundance itself.

  THAT NIGHT, seeing the world from my pillow with Luisa by my side, as is normal amongst newlyweds, with the television in front of us and in my hands a book I wasn’t reading, I told Luisa what Custardoy the Younger had told me and what I hadn’t wanted him to tell me. Real togetherness in married couples and indeed in any couple comes from words, not just the words that are spoken – spoken voluntarily – but the words one doesn’t keep to oneself – at least not without the intervention of the will. It isn’t so much that there are no secrets between two people who share a pillow because that’s what they decide – what is serious enough to constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told? – rather it’s impossible not to tell, to relate, to comment, to enunciate, as if that were the primordial activity of all couples, at least those who have become couples recently and are still not too lazy to speak to one another. It isn’t just that with your head resting on a pillow you tend to remember the past and even your childhood, and that remote and quite insignificant things surface in your memory, come to your tongue, and that all take on a certain value and seem worthy of being recalled out loud; nor that we’re disposed to recount our whole life to the person resting their head on our pillow, as if we needed them to be able to see us from the very beginning – especially from the beginning, that is, from childhood – and to witness, through our telling, all those years before they knew us and during which time, we now believe, they were waiting for us. Neither is it simply a desire to compare, to find parallels or coincidences, the desire to know where each of you was in all the different eras of your two existences and to fantasize about the unlikely possibility of having met each other before; lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can’t bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with their backs turned to each other, without even knowing one another, perhaps not even wanting to. Nor is it that some kind of interrogatory system is established on a daily basis which, out of weariness or routine, neither partner can escape, and so everyone ends up answering the questions. It’s rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution. Or perhaps it’s just that they spend so much time together (however little time that is amongst modern couples, it still amounts to a lot of time) that the two partners (but in particular the man, who feels guilty if he remains silent) have to make use of whatever they think and whatever occurs to them or happens to them in order to amuse the other person; thus, in the end, there’s not a single tiny corner of all the events and thoughts in an individual’s life that remains untransmitted, or rather translated matrimonially. The events and thoughts of others are transmitted too, those they’ve confided to us in private, that’s where the expression “pillow talk” comes from, there are no secrets between people who share a bed, the bed is like a confessional. For the sake of love or its essence – telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans – one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past. In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you; so great is the power of the territory delineated by the pillow that it excludes from its bosom everything outside it, and it’s a territory which, by its very nature, doesn’t allow for anything else to be on it except the two partners, or lovers, who in a sense are alone and for that very reason talk and hide nothing – involuntarily. The pillow is round and soft and often white and after a while that roundness and whiteness become a replacement for the world and its weak wheel.

  I talked to Luisa in bed about my conversation and my suspicions, about the violent death (according to Custardoy) of my Aunt Teresa and about the possibility that my father had been married before, a third time that would have been the first, before he married the two sisters, and about which I would otherwise have known nothing. Luisa couldn’t understand why I hadn’t wanted to ask more questions, women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things, their minds are investigative, gossipy and fickle, they never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, or what might come to light and what might happen, they don’t know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word, they need to try things out, they don’t look ahead, perhaps they really are always ready to know; in principle they’re neither afraid nor distrustful of what might be told to them, they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.

  “Why didn’t you ask him to tell you more?” she asked me. She was in bed again, as she had been that evening in Havana, only a few days before, but now it was or was going to be the usual night-time routine, like every night, I was under the sheets too, the sheets were still very new (part of our trousseau, I imagined), she wasn’t ill now nor was her bra cutting into her, she was wearing a nightshirt that I’d seen her put on only a few minutes before, in our own bedroom, and when she put it on she turned her back to me, still unused to having someone there before her, in a few years’ time, perhaps months, she won’t even notice that I’m there or, rather, I will be no one.

  “I don’t know that I want to know more,” I replied.

  “What do you mean? After what you’ve told me, I can’t wait to find out more.”

  “Why?”

  The television was on with the sound down. An old Jerry Lewis film, dating perhaps from my childhood, but you couldn’t hear anything except our voices.

  “What do you mean, why? If there’s something I don’t know about someone in my life, I want to know what it is. Besides, he’s year father. And now he’s my father-in-law, I’m bound to be interested in what happened to him. All the more if it’s something he’s been hiding. Are you going to ask him?”

  I hesitated for a second. I felt that I did want to know, not so much what had happened as whether what Custardoy had said was the truth or just fantasy, rumour. But if it was the truth I wanted, I’d have to go on asking questions.

  “I don’t think so. If he’s never wanted to talk to me about any of this up until now, I’m not going to make him do so at this late stage. Once, not many years ago, I asked him about my aunt and he told me that he didn’t want to go back forty years. He almost threw me out of the restaurant we were lunching in.”

  Luisa laughed. Almost everything made her laugh, she tended to see
the funny side of things, even the most tragic or terrible things. Living with her is like living immersed in comedy, that is, in a state of perpetual youth, as it is living with Ranz, perhaps that’s why two, or possibly three, women chose to live with him Although Luisa really is young and might change over time. She liked my father too, he amused her. Luisa would want to hear what he had to say.

  “I’ll ask him,” she said.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “He’d tell me. Who knows, maybe he’s been waiting all these years for someone like me to appear in your life, someone who could act as an intermediary between you. Fathers and sons are so awkward with each other. Perhaps he’s never told you his story because he didn’t know how to or because you’ve never asked him the right questions. I’d know how to get the story out of him.”

  On TV Jerry Lewis was busy hoovering. The hoover was like a puppy that kept jumping up at him.

  “And what if it’s something that can’t be told?”

  “What do you mean? Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another.”

  “Something that shouldn’t be told. Something whose moment has passed. Every time has its own stories and if you let the moment pass, then sometimes it’s best to keep silent forever. All things have their time, when that’s passed, they lose their timeliness.”

  “I don’t believe in things whose time has passed, it’s all there waiting for us to call it back. Besides, everyone likes to tell their story, even people who haven’t got one. Even though the stories may differ, the meaning’s the same.”

  I turned round slightly to look her in the face. She was going to be there forever, at my side, at least that’s the idea, forming part of my story, in my bed which is not my bed but ours, or perhaps hers and, if she were ever to go away one day, I’d be prepared to await her return patiently. When I moved, I brushed her breast with my arm, her breast was bare beneath the light fabric, almost visible through it. I left my arm where it was, so that she’d have to move to break the contact.

  “Look,” I said, “people who keep secrets for a long time don’t always do so out of shame or in order to protect themselves, sometimes it’s to protect others, or to preserve a friendship, or a love affair, or a marriage, to make life more tolerable for their children or to shield them from some fear, of which they usually have many. Maybe they simply don’t want to add to the world a story they wished had never happened. Not talking about it is like erasing it, forgetting it a little, denying it, not telling a story can be a small favour one does to the world. You have to respect that. You might not want to know everything about me, later on, as time goes by, you might not want to, and I won’t want to know everything about you either. You wouldn’t want a son of ours to know everything about us. About us when we were separate, for example, before we met. Not even we know everything about each other, neither before, when we were apart nor now, when we’re together.”

  With a perfectly natural gesture, Luisa moved away a little, that is, she removed her breast from where my arm had been, there was no contact now. She picked up a cigarette from her bedside table, lit it, took two rapid puffs and tried to remove the ash that had not yet formed, suddenly she seemed a bit upset, rather serious, which was unlike her. It was the first time there’d been any mention of a child, neither of us had ever talked about this plan until then, it was too soon, and now this first mention hadn’t been part of a plan, but hypothetical, in order to illustrate something else. Without looking at me, she said:

  “I’d certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me, like Guillermo, that man in the hotel in Havana.” She said this without looking at me and she said it quickly.

  “So you heard that?”

  “Of course I did, I was there just like you, how could I help but hear it?”

  “I wasn’t sure, you were half-asleep and feverish, that’s why I never said anything to you.”

  “But if you thought I hadn’t heard, why didn’t you tell me the next day either? You could have told me then, since you tell me everything else. Or perhaps you don’t, in fact, tell me everything.”

  Luisa had suddenly become angry, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t told her what I acknowledged I’d heard or if her anger was aimed at Guillermo, or perhaps at Miriam, or even at men in general, women have more of a community feeling than we do and often get angry with all men at the same time. She might also have been angry because that first mention of a child had been only hypothetical and made merely in passing and hadn’t been expressed as a proposition or a desire.

  She picked up the remote control and flicked through the other channels only to return to the original programme. Jerry Lewis was attempting to eat some spaghetti. He started turning the fork round and round and now his whole arm was swathed in pasta. He was looking at it in amazement and biting at it. I laughed like a child, I had, in fact, seen that film as a child.

  “What did you think of Guillermo?” I asked. “What do you think he’ll do?” Now we could have the conversation that neither Luisa nor I had wanted to have at the time, because of her feverish state. Maybe everything does await its moment of restitution, but nothing comes back in quite the same way in which it would have happened but didn’t. It didn’t matter now, she’d put it in brutal, frivolous terms, she’d said: “I’d certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me.” I still hadn’t answered that, between people who talk about everything and talk nonstop, it’s so easy not to reply to things you don’t want to reply to, the words become superimposed, the ideas don’t last, they disappear, although sometimes they come back, if one of you insists.

  “The worst thing is that he won’t do anything,” Luisa said. “It’ll all go on as it has up until now, with Miriam waiting and his wife dying, if she really is ill or if she really does exist, as Miriam was quite right to doubt.”

  “I don’t know that she’s ill, but I’m sure she exists,” I said. “That man is definitely married,” I declared.

  Luisa wasn’t looking at me now, she was looking at Jerry Lewis and was still annoyed. She’s younger than me, she may not have seen the film when she was a child. I felt like turning the sound up but I didn’t, that would have put an end to the conversation. Besides, she had the remote control in one hand and in the other her half-smoked cigarette. It was quite hot, but not that hot: I noticed that the skin between her breasts was damp, slightly shiny with sweat.

  “It makes no difference, even if she died he wouldn’t do anything, he still wouldn’t bring that woman from Havana over here.”

  “Why not? You didn’t see her. I did. She was pretty.”

  “I’m sure she is, but she’s also a woman who gives him a lot of trouble, he’s well aware of that. Here or there, as lover or wife, she always would give him trouble. All her interests lie outside herself, she’s totally dependent on the other person, there are still plenty of women around like that, no one’s yet taught them to do anything other than to think about themselves in relation to another.” Luisa paused for a moment, but then went on, as if she regretted using the verb “teach”. “It may be that it isn’t a question of teaching, simply of heredity, they’re born bored with themselves, I’ve known lots of women like that. They spend half their lives waiting, then nothing happens or they treat what does happen with utter indifference, then they spend the other half of their lives remembering and brooding over what seemed so little to them or which was, in fact, nothing. That’s the way our grandmothers were and the way our mothers still are. With Miriam there’s no future gain, only what there is now, which will gradually diminish anyway, so why change anything? Less pretty, less desire, more repetition. That woman’s played all her cards, she didn’t even start with a very good hand, she holds no surprises, she’s given all she’s got to give. You only get married if you expect there to be a few surprises, some gain, some improvement. Well, not always.” She remained silent for a second and then added: “I really pity he
r.”

  “She may not have any more to give, but, on the other hand, she could cease to be a burden, that’s the future gain there might be with her. She’d cease to be a burden if Guillermo were to marry her one day. Some men are like that too, you know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bored with themselves, only able to think about themselves in relation to another, to a woman. That kind of man likes women who give him trouble, it helps to pass the time, it amuses him, justifies his existence, just as it does for the women who cause all the trouble.”

  “Guillermo isn’t like that,” Luisa asserted (both of us are much given to making such assertions).

  This time she did look at me, albeit out of the corner of her eye, a distrustful look – an inherited distrust – or so it seemed to me. A question hung in the air, possible, even probable or obligatory, a question that either she could ask or I could: “Why did you marry me?” Or rather “Why do you think I married you?”

  “Custardoy asked me this afternoon why I married you.” That was my way of both asking and not asking the question.

  Luisa realized that she was expected to say: “And what did you tell him?” She could also remain silent, she’s as sensitive to words as I am, we share the same profession, although she works less now. She remained silent for the moment and again flicked through the channels with the remote control, this took a matter of seconds, then stopped again, returning to Jerry Lewis, who was dancing now with an elegantly suited man in an enormous empty room. I recognized and remembered the man at once, it was George Raft, who over many years specialized in gangster roles and was a brilliant dancer of boleros and rumbas, and had appeared in the famous film Scarface. Jerry Lewis had cast doubt on his true identity (“Come on now, you’re not George Raft, you may look like him, but you’re not him really, though I bet you’d love to be”) and had made him dance a bolero to prove that he could dance like George Raft and therefore was George Raft. Their arms about each other, the two men danced in the dark, in the middle of the empty room, their two figures lit by a spotlight. It was a scene that was both comic and strange. To dance like someone in order to prove to a doubting partner that one is that someone. That scene was in colour and the others had been in black and white, perhaps this wasn’t a film at all but a retrospective of the comic’s work. When they stopped dancing and shyly separated, I remember that Lewis said to Raft, as if he were doing him a big favour: “All right, I believe you, you are the real Raft” (but we still had the sound down and I couldn’t hear it now, the words were a memory from my inexact childhood). Luisa didn’t say: “And what did you tell him?” but: