Artemisa, Rembrandt van Rijn, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (image: www.ibiblio.org)
A human heart appears in the first line of Javier Marías’
novel A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco, 1992), but we’re given no time to discern its color, as
in the second line it’s blown apart by a bullet. In this novel that plays about
with the mystery genre, Marías has immediately delivered a gunshot victim and
her killer - one and the same - leaving only motive as the mystery at the heart
of the book.
The abrupt, violent suicide in the first lines recedes quickly
into the background, remaining a latent presence as the narrative develops. After
all, it’s a trauma that occurred well before the birth of the novel’s narrator,
the thirty-five year old Juan, who recounts it retrospectively only after the
event, unknown to him his whole life, has come to light. Teresa Aguilera, the
victim, had killed herself during a dinner party at home just days after having
returned from her honeymoon with Juan’s father Ranz, who would later go on to
marry Teresa’s own sister, Juan’s mother. Much is packed into the opening of A
Heart So White, not only a glimpse of the complexities and secrets in
Juan’s family but also an implication critical to the themes of the novel, present
in the first line and affirmed again in the chapter’s last line, that Juan may
have preferred never to know this family secret, this awful truth.
From the violent event that anchors the first chapter, the
narrative turns in the second to a relatively innocuous, almost comic incident,
yet given a consideration almost as weighty as that given to Teresa’s suicide. On
his own honeymoon in a hotel in Havana with his wife Luisa, who is suffering
from travel illness, Juan gazes from the room’s balcony at a woman standing on
a corner below, obviously waiting impatiently for someone. When the woman
notices Juan, she begins gesturing and shouting, demanding to know why he’s in
the hotel, hurling epithets, threatening to kill him. An explanation presents
itself moments later: Juan has been mistaken for another, who has appeared on
the balcony next door, visible to the woman though not to Juan. But a seed of
curiosity has been planted, and when the woman joins the unseen man in the room,
Juan strains to listen through the wall to their conversation, overhearing an
ultimatum the woman gives to the man: dispose of the wife who stands between them,
either by divorce or by murder.
Many writers might take this as the initiation of a plot
involving the overheard threat. Marías uses it instead to seed the narrative
with another latent background element, and turns his attention to the resonances
of Juan’s concealment of the incident, to the slight delay his attention to it
causes in his response to Luisa’s waking: “I still find that delay inexplicable
and even then I sincerely regretted it, not because it might have any
consequences, but because of what, in an excess of scruple and zeal, I thought
it might mean.” In Marías’ world of quotidian moral decisions and the
formidable sway of language and silence, Juan’s hesitation and failure to share
with Luisa what he’s overheard, a conversation that she too, we learn later,
has heard herself, amount to an intrusion into the trust established between
them, a disturbance of the “soft white pillow” on which the newlyweds rest
their heads and share their lives. Like a drop of tincture, the incident falls
into the couple’s lives and colors them (not unlike the drop of blood on the
stairs in the first volume of Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow around which
that volume is built; someone could likely write an entire dissertation on the
spots, stains, scars and spreading points of color or flame or contagion in Marías’
works).
A Heart So White takes its title, as do many of Marías’
books, from Shakespeare, in this instance Lady Macbeth’s declaration to her
husband, “I shame to wear a heart so white” after having likened her
blood-stained hands to Macbeth’s color, “as if she wanted to infect him with
her own nonchalance in exchange for infecting herself with the blood shed by
Duncan.” Marías explores this notion of moral contagion through his repeated milking
of words and incidents – from little white lies to murder - to pursue their
resonances and reverberations. Around a constellation of situations, Marías
explores how the spoken and unspoken exert force upon his characters’ lives; the
nature of secrets and withheld information (“What is serious enough to
constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told?”); whether one should
protect loved ones from undisclosed information (as Ranz advises Juan regarding
his marriage to Luisa, “If you ever do have any secrets or if you already have,
don’t tell her”) or whether it’s better to reveal all (as Luisa later advises
Juan, “Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting”); the ways that
language has a hold on the future should one elect to give it attention or not:
the ability to hear what one wants to hear; to keep things unsaid or to voice
them; to act or remain passive; how the very act of telling is a distortion; how
language seems to carry an inherent quality of betrayal.
With a comic literalness, Marías unspools this last motif by
placing Juan, Luisa and other minor characters in professions at the borders of
language and truth: interpretation and translation. In fact, Juan and Luisa’s
relationship is born from a blatant act of linguistic “treason”: when Juan finds
himself assigned to translate between a British and Spanish diplomat with Luisa
assigned as the “net” – an added assurance of accuracy in diplomatic
interpretation – he flirts with and tests her by deliberately mistranslating
the diplomats’ words, leading them away from affairs of state into opining on
aspects of love (a lengthy disquisition on translation and interpretation,
occupying an early section of the novel, must have made for an amusing task for
Marías’ own translator, Margaret Jull Costa).
Marías’ rich exploration of language, silence, revelation,
concealment, lies, and secrets is given added complexity, looking before and
after, by his placing them in context of time and its mitigating or amplifying
effects. References to time permeate the
novel; the same paragraph can contain a plethora of time-related words,
multiple verb tenses and compression of pro- and retrospection that take the
reader, as Jonathan Coe notes in the introduction to my edition, on “a strange,
violent temporal journey.”
Marías’ sentences often indeed feel like a journey, piling up
into extended meditations that can stretch for pages between one character
saying something and another answering, or long, improbable soliloquies. These digressive
philosophical ruminations emerge not only from Marías’ narrator but from other
characters, even minor ones, such that his characters can come off as nearly
interchangeable mouthpieces for some common font of ideas and reflections. Trying
to imagine actual people engaging in the conversations that carry some of these
ideas reveals a blatantly unnatural quality to the thoughts Marías slips into
his character’s mouths or alongside their speech (though not terribly unlike
the manner by which ideas are conveyed in a Shakespeare play). This stylistic device
is something akin to meta-fiction, a means for Marías to drop the pretense of
the realist novel that characters imply persons one might find in the real world,
and to embrace the enterprise of fiction. But far from being mere disembodied
voices, polyphonically enlisted in contributing to a philosophical treatise,
Marías’ characters have flesh – often memorably so, as in his vivid description
of the woman downstairs at the Havana hotel, of a body in a video in which the
face remains outside the camera’s frame, and especially of mouths: of the
painter Custardoy the Younger’s “long teeth,” of Juan’s father Ranz’s face with
its mouth “as if it had been added at the last minute and belonged to someone
else,” of “the moist mouth that is always full and full of abundance” that
belongs to Ranz’s friend Villalobos. Marías constantly reminds readers of
physicality, to the point of emphasizing, even in the first line, the terrible
vulnerability of the body.
Whatever thematic seriousness or ponderous quality might
appear in these long passages that weave themselves into the characters’
thoughts and speech are balanced by Marais’ fondness for humorously toying with
the absurdities of the modern world. In one scene, he backgrounds a heavy
discussion between Juan and Luisa with, on the television in the same room, the
nutty antics in a Jerry Lewis film. In another, as Juan and Luisa dine with Villalobos,
the last comically keeps spilling food on himself (more spots, more stains).
Some of the most humorous parts of the novel come in a section that takes place
when Juan gors to New York to interpret at the U.N. He stays with his friend
Berta, who, involved in a video-dating service, screens a number of men whose alpha-male
pseudonym choices make for a hilarious list (and also make one wonder how A
Heart So White might have differed if written in today’s world of the Internet
instead of in 1992). And while Marías chases down serious themes about
concealment and honesty, his digressions at time bordering on philosophical
essays, his frequent asides take deadpan aim at day-to-day topics: television
and video; the absurd brevity of weekends (“You’re so exhausted that all you
can do is gather strength for the next week”); the pomposity of diplomats and
politicians; the odor problem of open kitchens; America (“a country where they
cosset and mould their bodies, but only their bodies”); the boredom of being a
museum guard. A scene in which Ranz talks a guard at the Prado out of setting
fire to Rembrandt’s “Artemisa” because of the painting’s static refusal to
divulge its secrets is one of the novel's comic
highlights.
One can hardly ask much more from contemporary fiction than
that it bring readers back to the primacy of language and its power, to the
care one must take with words and their repercussions, to the “dangerous” act
of listening. Such attention to the potency of words and silence could almost
lead to obsessing in a brainsickly way over one’s most innocent utterances. In
the end, Marías reveals – in providing the missing motive of the first line –
the dramatic consequences that can result from mishandling a secret (which I’ll
conceal here so as not to spoil it for those who haven’t read the novel), and the
potential of information buried in the past to spread its contagion and emerge
in the future, staining even those unborn at the time of its burial.
But Juan muses at one point, “It’s strange that words don’t
have worse consequences than they do.” In the end, A Heart So White
turns not so much on the matter of zealously guarding one’s words as on
carefully nurturing one’s love, of nudging along one’s trust and care more
attentively. After all, A Heart So White is also a novel about marriage,
that relationship presumably built on mutual trust. “Marriage is a narrative
institution,” says Marías’ narrator, pointing out the conundrum of narrative
and relation, of the gulf of care between the unspoken and spoken: “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 then when you speak.” The novel too, of course, is
a narrative institution; rarely does one come along capable of
provoking so many second thoughts about the way we communicate.
I read A Heart So White for Spanish Literature Month,
hosted by Richard and Stu. Other reviews of the novel include those by Jacqui,
Bellezza, Richard, Tony, and Frances.
