A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  “You didn’t tell him I followed him, did you?” I asked Berta. “No, I didn’t, but I might tell him later on, if you don’t mind. But I did talk to him about you, about our conjectures and suppositions.” “And what did he say?” “Nothing, he just laughed.” “So you talked about me, then?” “Well, I told him a bit, after all we had thrown you out on to the street in order that he could come up, it’s only logical he should feel some curiosity about the person he was inconveniencing.” Berta’s reply seemed exculpatory when there was no need to be. Unless my question had sounded somewhat accusing because of the “then” with which I’d closed it, converting it into a statement of fact. Berta didn’t want to talk, she kept replying to my questions, but without any enthusiasm, just so as not to be rude or to make it up to me a little for my nocturnal wanderings. Her dressing gown had fallen open slightly, I could see part of her breasts through the opening, and the shape of them through the silk, just then I would like to have seen those breasts I hadn’t wanted to film, an extemporary desire. She was dressed provocatively. She was a friend. I didn’t insist.

  “Right, I’m going to go to bed, it’s late,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ll be going to bed in a minute,” she replied. “I just want to tidy up a bit.”

  She lied to me just as, later, on the other side of the ocean, I would lie to Luisa, when I didn’t want to go to bed so that I could watch Custardoy from the window. There was nothing to tidy up, apart from a bottle of Eau de Guerlain on the table and the opened box. I picked up my book, my record and the newspaper in order to take them to my room. I still had my raincoat on.

  “Goodnight,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Berta said.

  She stayed where she was, lying on the sofa in front of the canned laughter on television, tired, with her feet up and her dressing gown half open, perhaps with her thoughts on a new concrete future which the night could not yet take away from her. Or perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all: I went to the bathroom for a moment and while I was cleaning my teeth and the water from the tap blotted out all other sounds, I thought I could hear her singing abstractedly to herself, with the pauses you’d expect a person to make who is in fact singing without realizing it, while they’re having a wash or caressing someone by their side, even though Berta wasn’t having a wash (she perhaps wanted to hold on to the smell of “Bill”) and there was no one by her side. And what she was singing was in English, it was this: “In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you,” the beginning of a well-known song from perhaps fifteen years ago. I didn’t go into the living room again that night. I went straight from the bathroom to my bedroom. I got undressed and got into the bed that had no particular smell, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep for ages, so I prepared myself for insomnia. I’d left the door ajar as usual, so that the air could come in (in New York, on the lower floors of buildings, you always keep windows that open on to streets closed). And then, when I was more awake than at any other moment in the whole night and there was no sound at all, I heard again, very low, as if through a wall, the voice of “Bill” or the voice of Guillermo, the vibrato voice of a gondolier, the saw-like voice that repeated its cutting phrases in English from the screen. The result was very sombre.

  “That’s how it is. If your breasts and your cunt and your leg persuade me that it’s worth running the risk. If you’re still interested in me. Perhaps you don’t want to go on with this. You probably think I’m being too direct. Brutal. Cruel. I’m not cruel. I just can’t afford to waste any time. I can’t waste any time.”

  EIGHT WEEKS ISN’T a very long time, but it’s longer than it seems if you add to that another period of eight weeks which is separated from that initial eight weeks by another eleven or twelve. My next eight-week stint was a trip to Geneva in February, it was also my last. I’d like it to stay that way for a while, there’s no sense in Luisa and I being married if we’re going to spend so much time apart, so that I’m not there to witness the changes wrought by marriage or grow accustomed to them, and to harbour suspicions that I must later dismiss. I wonder if I’m changing too, I can’t say I’ve noticed, I suppose I must be, since Luisa changes in superficial ways (shoulder pads, hairstyle, gloves, lipstick), the apartment changes, the apartment whose unnatural inauguration now seems ages ago, work changes, my workload has increased whilst hers has diminished, indeed almost dried up completely (she’s looking for a permanent post in Madrid): since my stay in New York until my return from Geneva, that is, from mid-September to almost the end of March, she’s made only one work-related trip, and it didn’t last weeks but days, a trip to London, to stand in for our celebrated high-ranking politician’s official translator, who’d been careless enough to catch chicken pox off his children (the leading politician now has his own exclusive interpreter, a post snapped up by an intriguer – though an interpreter of real genius, let it be said – of uncertain nomenclature, for, having obtained the post, he is now known by his two surnames, De la Cuesta y de la Casa), who (the leading politician not the interpreter with chicken pox, who’d been denied entry because of the risk of infection) was making a lightning visit to convey his regrets to his recently deposed colleague and to talk to her successors about what our representatives say they always talk to the British about: Gibraltar, the IRA and ETA. Luisa doesn’t go in for telling incredible stories, nor do I require her to do so, and she said little about the interview, to me that is, since one assumes that interpreters, official or not (but it’s more common amongst consecutive than amongst simultaneous translators, I do both types of work, but I’m very much the exception, not that I often work as a consecutive translator, for consecutive translators hate simultaneous translators and simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators), never breathe a word about what was said inside a room, they’re all principled people who would never betray a secret. But she could have told me. “It was extremely dull,” she said, referring to the conversation that had taken place in the official residence which the British leader was about to abandon in a few days’ time: she was surrounded by half-full packing cases. “It was as if he saw her now as an old friend stripped of all responsibilities and power and she was feeling much too sad to attend to his pressing problems, it must have filled her with a kind of advance nostalgia.” There was only one moment reminiscent of the personal conversation into which I’d guided them the day I met Luisa. It seems that the British politician had quoted from Shakespeare again, again from Macbeth, which must have been her constant reading matter, either that or she saw it performed repeatedly. She said: “Do you remember what Macbeth says that he heard when he murdered Duncan? It’s very famous.” “I can’t say that I do, perhaps you could refresh my memory …” our representative had said by way of an excuse. “Macbeth thinks he heard a voice crying out: ‘Macbeth does murder Sleep, the innocent Sleep’. Well,” she added, “that’s how I felt about my sudden removal from power, murdered while I slept, I was innocent sleep, content to rest surrounded by my friends, by people watching over me, but it was those same friends who, like Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor, stabbed me while I slept. One’s friends are one’s worst enemies, my friend,” she warned our leader, rather unnecessarily, since he’s left behind him a path strewn with ex-friends. “Never trust the people closest to you, those whom you always thought never needed to be obliged to love you. And never go to sleep, years of security seduce one into it, one gets used to feeling safe. I fell asleep for an instant feeling perfectly safe and you see what happened.” And with an expressive gesture, the ex-leading politician indicated the open boxes round about her, as if they were a manifestation of opprobrium or were the drops of blood spilled in her murder. Shortly afterwards, her ex-colleague from Spain left her to go and speak to her successor, that is, with her Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor.