A Heart So White by Javier Marías
JAVIER MARÍAS
A Heart So White
Translated by MARGARET JULL COSTA,
with an introduction by JONATHAN COE
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction by JONATHAN COE
Dedication
Epigraph
A Heart So White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
Margaret Jull Costa is the translator of many Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, among them Javier Marías, Bernardo Atxaga, Fernando Pessoa and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many awards, most recently the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey.
Jonathan Coe has written many novels, including The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club and The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of Like a Fiery Elephant, a critical biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson.
For Julia Altares
despite Julia Altares
and for Lola Manera of Havana,
in memoriam
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME
‘Marías is one of the best contemporary writers’ J. M. Coetzee
‘It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out … When you take up a Marías novel, or even a short story, you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar’ Wendy Lesser, The New York Times
‘He has something of W. G. Sebald’s sense of consciousness in flux … but he is sharper about people and sexual attachment’ Marina Warner, Guardian
‘Javier Marías is a novelist with style … His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world’ Margaret Drabble
‘No wonder W. G. Sebald spoke of him as a “twin writer”: their narrators are commonly in states of malaise or fever; their narratives are interested in those same patterns of association that exhaust all possibilities; their prose exerts an almost opium effect over the reader as time slows down, expands or is still’ Sarah Emily Miano, Guardian
‘His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility’ Wyatt Mason, New Yorker
‘Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length’ Scotsman
My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear A Heart So White.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Introduction
I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.
This was Javier Marías’s response to an online interviewer who asked him, ‘What is the purpose of writing?’, and it not only provides an unexpectedly lucid answer to that intimidating question, it also directly illuminates Marías’s own practice, and that of A Heart So White in particular. For this is a novel which asks the profoundest, most unsettling questions about knowledge itself: about human curiosity, about the keeping of secrets, about our need to know the truth and our (sometimes equally pressing) need not to know it; and about language, too – for knowledge can only be imparted in words, and words, as writers know only too well, are slippery, unreliable, and have a tendency to falsify the very truths they are meant to impart.
Most novelists have a ‘breakthrough’ book, the one that introduces them to a wider public: in the case of Marías it was All Souls (Todas las almas), published in 1989. Offering up the simple pleasures of traditional fiction rather more willingly than some of Marías’s subsequent work, it tells the story of a Spanish academic who comes to Oxford and has an affair with a fellow-tutor, and has some points of contact with the ‘campus novel’ genre so beloved of Anglo-Saxon comic writers. A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco) followed in 1992, hard on the heels of that success, but there is not much sense here of a writer compromising himself in order to accommodate a larger, less specialized readership. The wisp of a plot can be summarized in a few words – newlywed translator learns the deadly secret behind his father’s three marriages – but it is a more opaque, demanding work than its predecessor. The novel’s long, looping opening sentence sets the agenda at once:
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. (p.3)
Notice, first of all, what a strange, violent temporal journey we make while negotiating the jumble of tenses in that sentence. We start (‘I did not want to know’) at some unspecified point in the past, then (‘have since come to know’) move forward, then (‘when she wasn’t a girl anymore’) rewind even further into the past and then (‘hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon’) locate ourselves a little more exactly within this timeframe, and so on. Any promise of a conventionally linear narrative is immediately shattered, and we are already made aware, subliminally, of one of the novel’s major themes: the evanescence of human experience, the fact that everything belongs to the past as soon as it has happened, the fact that ‘everything is constantly in the process of being lost’.
This might, of course, easily be described as a Proustian theme, and indeed the length and complexity of Marías’s sentences have evoked stylistic comparisons with Proust, as well as with Henry James and Thomas Bernhard. But we would do well to remember that, earlier in his career, Marías had a distinguished parallel life as a translator, and probably his most celebrated translation was his Spanish rendering of Tristram Shandy. Because he is not the most obviously humorous of novelists, it might be tempting to downplay the extent of Marías’s affinities with Laurence Sterne: but they seem to me just as strong as his links with the great twentieth-century European writers. Like Sterne, Marías is prey to a radical scepticism about the novel’s capacity to render the complexity of subjective human experience in anything other than the crudest, most approximate way. Like Sterne, too, he is possessed by the notion that some of the smallest and most fleeting events in our lives are also the most significant; that these events occupy a space in our memories which seems quite out of proportion to their original duration; and that writers must therefore develop ever more inventive strategies that will give such transient but momentous events their narrative due.
There the resemblance more or less ends: for Marías, unlike Sterne, inclines towards narrative subversions which are po-faced rather than zany or farcical. One of his methods, for instance, is a highly distinctive form of repetition. Many novelists are scared of repetition, assuming that readers will take it for laziness or carelessness. Marías, on the other hand, realizes that our th
What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. (p.28)
Almost two hundred and fifty pages later, when the narrator has overheard a crucial conversation between his wife and his father, and has at last become privy to his father’s secrets, he writes:
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (p.272)
Among other things, there is a certain rueful world-weariness about this technique: one of the things Marías is trying to tell the reader, it seems, is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marías novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change. The precedent, again, might come from Sterne, although again Marías expresses the idea calmly and regretfully, with little of Sterne’s cavorting humour.
The notion that ‘what we experience is identical to what we never try’ has another consequence: not for Marías’s characters, this time, but for his literary aesthetic. It makes him sceptical of the line dividing fiction from non-fiction: a scepticism he shares with many other European writers poised on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two obvious examples might be Milan Kundera (whose books were, as our narrator is somewhat tiredly aware, highly fashionable at the time when A Heart So White was written) and W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Marías likes to include photographs in his fictions (there are photographs in both All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow), leaving the reader with nagging uncertainties as to whether they are real or fake. And, like Sebald, he is just as interested – more interested, it might be argued – in reflection and analysis than he is in narration. A typical Marías sentence might begin with the description of an event, but this act of telling will rapidly morph into something discursive.
This is more than just a stylistic tic: it is part of Marías’s deadly serious attempt to keep the novel, as a form, alive and evolving. To put it crudely, for the first few centuries of its existence, one of the great virtues of the novel was assumed to be that it collapsed the distinction between the general and the particular: reading the story of one individual errant knight by the name of Don Quixote, you also knew that you were reading the story of every man and woman (including yourself) who had ever suffered from delusions and thwarted dreams. Modernism swept that certainty aside, and called into question the novel’s authority, its claim to be able to speak for every reader equally, irrespective of culture, politics or gender. After the modernist revolution, most novelists blithely carried on as before, as if it had never taken place, but a handful of writers have since applied themselves to the task of rebuilding things – recalibrating the novel’s relationship between the general and the particular – and Marías’s lithe, unreliable sentences are among his contributions to this enterprise. They insist on reminding us that the relationship between the two is liquid, slippery, and in a constant state of flux.
Even punctuation has its part to play. Marías rarely – if ever – uses colons or semi-colons mid-sentence, instead entrusting the frail and vulnerable comma with the task of keeping up a barrier between what is particular and what is general, and then relishing the inevitable breakdown, the inevitable seepage between the two. Opening A Heart So White at random, I quickly chance upon the following example:
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. (p.137)
Most writers would have put something stronger – a colon or a dash – between ‘men in general’ and ‘women have more’. We are moving swiftly, after all, from a character’s individual perception (‘I couldn’t tell’), to a broad and lofty generalization (‘women have more of a community feeling’): two quite different modes of discourse. But by separating them only with a comma, Marías doesn’t allow his readers any space to pause, or reflect, as they negotiate the transition. In fact, we soon become so accustomed to the smooth but convoluted rhythms of his prose that we stop noticing how often these transitions take place, how frequently and seamlessly he carries us from a narrative mode to a discursive one. In this respect, Marías’s novels are best viewed as part stories, part essays: one of their greatest achievements being to make us see that there can essentially be no difference between the two forms.
But perhaps this analysis risks making A Heart So White sound too dry. Readers daunted by Marías’s sentences, or by his commitment to the legacies of high modernism, should rest assured that there is one other, more readily loveable characteristic to be found in his work, a characteristic without which no novelist, in fact, is worth his or her salt: a healthy streak of narrative vulgarity. The novel begins with a bloody and dramatic suicide. Murder, or the threat of murder, is central to the plot. If it is not a whodunnit, exactly, it is certainly a why-did-she-do-it, or a what-did-he-do. (Just as, by the same token, Marías’s epic trilogy Your Face Tomorrow can be enjoyed as a series of spy novels, if the reader so chooses.) Pop culture references abound, and our cerebral narrator also turns out to be a big fan of Jerry Lewis and Family Feud. In short, he likes a good story too, and however much it might sometimes feel that he’s trying to disguise it, he knows how to tell one. I cannot help feeling that it is this quality – just as much as Javier Marías’s own searching and omnipresent intelligence – that makes A Heart So White a novel to treasure.
Jonathan Coe, 2012
A HEART SO WHITE
I DID NOT WANT to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. When they heard the shot, some five minutes after the girl had left the table, her father didn’t get up at once, but stayed there for a few seconds, paralysed, his mouth still full of food, not daring to chew or swallow, far less to spit the food out on to his plate; and when he finally did get up and run to the bathroom, those who followed him noticed that when he discovered the blood-spattered body of his daughter and clutched his head in his hands, he kept passing the mouthful of meat from one cheek to the other, still not knowing what to do with it. He was carrying his napkin in one hand and he didn’t let go of it until, after a few moments, he noticed the bra that had been flung into the bidet and he covered it with the one piece of cloth that he had to hand or rather in his hand and which his lips had sullied, as if he were more ashamed of the sight of her underwear than of her fallen, half-naked body with which, until only a short time before, the article of underwear had been in contact: the same body that had been sitting at the table, that had walked down the corridor, that had stood there. Before that, with an automatic gesture, the father had turned off the tap in the basin, the co