A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

  “No one knows why she killed herself,” he replied, his mouth still full, but quite unruffled, as if he were confronting a battery of questions in class. He gulped some wine to help him wash the cheese down. “Even your father doesn’t know, or so he said. When he got to his father-in-law’s house, he was as shocked as any of the other people present or as any of those who arrived later, his pain even greater. He said everything was going fine, that there’d been no disagreement between them, that they were very happy. It was inexplicable and he could offer no explanation. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual when they parted that morning, they’d said goodbye with a few vaguely amorous words, as on any other day, the kind of conventional words you two might well say to each other tonight or tomorrow. If that’s true, he must have been in a state of constant torment all these years. Obviously your mother was an enormous help. Perhaps Ranz also had to ascertain if your Aunt Teresa had led some kind of double life and had a suicidal side to her he knew nothing about, such things do happen. If he did find out anything, I imagine he kept quiet about it. Though I can’t really say.” The professor dabbed at his lips, this time with more reason, to wipe the crisp crumbs of toast and the soft remains of the Brie from the corners of his mouth.

  “You’ve got some on your lapel too,” Luisa pointed out.

  The professor looked down with displeasure and surprise. It was a very expensive Gigli lapel. He dabbed at it clumsily, Luisa moistened one corner of her napkin with water and went to his aid, she moistened the napkin just as I had moistened the corner of a towel in the bathroom of the hotel in Havana in order to cool her face, her throat, the back of her neck (her long, dishevelled hair had clung to her skin and a few stray hairs lay across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her).

  “Do you think it will leave a mark?” the professor asked. He was a vain man, distinguished-looking despite his broad face.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll find out soon enough,” said the professor and with his middle finger he gave the expensive, besmirched lapel of his Romeo Gigli suit a disdainful flick. He spread some more Camembert (not on his lapel but on another piece of toast, he was mixing up a lot of different flavours), drank some more wine and went on, without losing his thread: “As for the first wife, I don’t know much about her, except that she was Cuban, like your grandmother. As you know, Ranz lived in Havana for a while. For a year or two, around 1950, he had a minor post in the Embassy there. Was it cultural attaché perhaps? Do you happen to know? Anyway, knowing him as I do, I’ve always thought he must have been something like artistic advisor to Batista. Has he never told you anything about all this?”

  The professor was expecting some firm statement from me, such as I’d provided about Segovia. But I had no idea that my father had once lived in Cuba. For a year or two.

  “Who’s Batista?” asked Luisa. She’s young and forgetful and doesn’t have a very good memory for things, except when it comes to translating.

  “I don’t know,” I said answering Villalobos, not her. “I had no idea he’d lived in Cuba.”

  “I suppose that’s another of those things you weren’t ever interested in,” said the professor. “Oh well. That was where he married his first wife and I think he met your mother and your aunt there too, they were spending a few months in Havana with your grandmother on a trip she made to sort out something to do with a legacy or perhaps because she wanted to revisit her childhood haunts before she got too old, I can’t say, bearing in mind that this was all gleaned from scraps of conversation I overheard from my parents years back, conversations not intended for my ears.” Professor Villalobos was making excuses. He was no longer telling the story with his previous gusto, it irritated him to be unsure about his facts, he hated incompleteness and inexactitude, he could never have written anything but monographs, never anything biographical, biographies never end. He popped a truffle in his mouth, they’d brought them with our coffee. At least I think he did, the movement was so abrupt (he popped it into his mouth as if it were a pill) and he hadn’t finished with the cheese yet, it all seemed too much of a mixture to me. I only know that the plate now had one truffle missing. “Whatever the reason, she took the girls with her, to keep her company, for three months or so. Your father only met her briefly there, his courtship of your aunt began some time later, of course, and by then he was a widower and had returned to Madrid. It seems he was a good-looking chap, well, he still is, the sad but merry widower, irresistible, he had a small moustache at the time, it seems he didn’t shave it off until his third wedding and then he never let it grow again, out of superstition perhaps. But I know almost nothing about his first wife.” The professor seemed troubled by the fact that he’d failed to foresee this topic of conversation and make sure he was better informed. Perhaps he couldn’t have been any better informed. “You know how it is, you tend to say little or nothing about the dead to the people who’ve replaced them, you couldn’t keep on talking to your family or to acquaintances about someone who was a stranger to them, who, when viewed in retrospect, had occupied the place of your Aunt Teresa. There are two ways of looking at things, don’t you think? From the perspective of the future and from the perspective of the past and things can look very different depending on which view you choose. Anyway, as I was saying: I imagine that everyone knew about her, but no one bothered to mention her, with some people it would have been better if they’d never existed; although there was no alternative when your aunt killed herself, for a short time it was inevitable that people would remember her, he becoming a widower for the second time. She wouldn’t have shared the same fate when your mother took her place, you don’t forget a sister, however inconvenient a role she played, but you do forget a foreigner and a stranger. They were different times then.” The professor almost sighed.

  “There’s always been a portrait of my aunt in my parents’ house,” I pointed out, in large part I think to console Villalobos; if he didn’t have all the facts to hand, it might at least please him to be found right in his conjectures.

  “Of course,” he said, as if giving no importance to having guessed correctly (though it was evident he was delighted). He pushed away his cheese plate with his forearm, he must have been full to bursting by then. But no, he reached for another truffle and ordered a coffee for himself. When he pushed away the plate he wiped the sleeve of his suit on the greasy edge of the plate. He was sitting with his arms folded on the table now, but still managed to look elegant.

  “And what did she die of?” asked Luisa.

  “Who?” replied the professor.

  “His first wife,” I said, and when I said that, I think Luisa realized that I was saying something else too, something like “OK” or “Go ahead” or “You win” or “Go on, then.” But if I was saying that, I was saying it to her, not to Villalobos.

  “You must forgive me, chaps, but I don’t know much about that either.” He was suffering agonies now and still knocking back the wine. I thought he was about to change the subject, unaccustomed as he was to having to say “I don’t know” so many times in succession. He apologized again: “My friendship with your father is, let us say, more academic than personal, although we have great personal respect for each other as well. I learned all these things from my father, who died years ago now, but I’ve never talked to Ranz about it.”

  “You mean you weren’t interested?” I said. I couldn’t resist repaying his impertinence. It was unfair but, after all, he’d addressed no fewer than three such remarks to me.

  The professor peered at me through his glasses with a mixture of distaste and pity, but, like all his other reactions, it was a paternalistic distaste. The look of pity, though, was professorial.

  “I was a good deal more interested than you were, you ninny.” The insult was so antiquated, venial and didactic, it almost made me laugh, and I noticed that it had the same effect on Luisa. “But I know where the boundaries are in any relatio
nships. With your father I talk about Villanueva and Villalpando,” said Villalobos, “but I don’t suppose you even know who they are.”

  “I don’t,” said Luisa.

  “You will,” said the professor, as if she were some impatient student he would deal with after the class. “As I was saying: I don’t really know how his first wife died. I don’t even know her name. It happened in Cuba, that I do know. And then, but don’t quote me on this, because I’m not even sure that I did hear this, I have an idea that she died in a fire. It’s a very vague idea that I could just have picked up from some film that was showing at the time, when I was a boy and people were still talking about your father and his double widowhood. You’re a lot younger than me, so it won’t have happened to you yet, but there comes a time when one confuses what one has seen with what people have told you, what one has witnessed with what one knows, what happened to one with what one has read; in fact, it’s a miracle that, normally speaking, we can distinguish between them, and it’s odd, because all the stories that you hear and see throughout your lifetime, what with the cinema, television, the theatre, newspapers, novels, they all accumulate and could easily become confused. It’s astonishing that most people do know what happened to them. What is impossible to distinguish is what happened to others and the things they tell us about themselves as if they were fictitious or real but remote, the reality of people we don’t know or the reality of the past. Let’s just say that, except in certain extreme cases, one’s own memory still remains quite safe, untouched, you remember what you yourself have seen and heard in a different way to how you remember books or films, but the difference is less marked when it comes to what others have seen and heard and witnessed and known and then told us about. And then, of course, there are the things you invent.”

  Professor Villalobos was no longer making excuses, he was speechifying. He was changing the subject, he’d grown tired of the earlier topic of conversation. He was stirring his coffee with a new spoon. After eating all that food, he’d added saccharin. He was not a fat man but he wasn’t thin either. He asked a passing waiter for a cigar. “A cigar,” he said, although he said it in French.

  “I get all the speeches I’ve ever translated muddled up. I can’t remember a thing about them,” I said to flatter him and to try and make up a little for my earlier unjustifiable cheek.

  “What sort of fire?” Luisa wasn’t going to let him change the subject just yet.

  “I don’t know,” said the professor, “I don’t even know if there was one. Around the time that your aunt died and people used to talk about her more, I developed a fear that our house would burn down during the night and I used to have difficulty sleeping, it’s quite a normal childhood fear, at least it was in my time, but I associate it with having seen or heard of someone being burned in their bed while they were asleep. I associate that image in turn with the death of your father’s first wife, but I don’t know why, I don’t remember anyone saying anything, at least nothing concrete, about that death, which, unlike your aunt’s death, happened a long way away. It may have been some scene I saw in a film that was set in the tropics, it made an impression on me and I just associated the two ideas, Cuba and fire, fire and the Cuban wife. A lot of films were set in the tropics in my day, it was fashionable, I suppose after the Second World War people liked to see and think about places that had been far from the battlefields, places like the Caribbean, the Amazon.”

  Professor Villalobos was now definitively changing the subject, not without difficulty, doubtless he was bored with our company. It seemed that he had lost his fear of fire, for the waiter brought him a box of cigars. He chose one without hesitation (he knew the different brands), he didn’t bother to smell it (he was an educated man, he wasn’t wearing any rings), he put it in his mouth – the moist mouth which is always full and is abundance itself – and allowed the waiter to hold an immense flame much too near his face. The cigar smelled bad, but then I don’t smoke cigars. The professor took a few puffs and, while he did so, his eyes grew absent again, his mind plunged in dark thoughts. He didn’t seem insincere then either, when he grew depressed and silent he looked a little like that English actor, who committed suicide some years ago in Barcelona, where Villalobos lived, his name was George Sanders, a great actor. Perhaps he’d again recalled that he was unhappy and that his unhappiness wasn’t just something someone had told him about, something he’d read, something he’d invented, nor anything to do with any intrigue.

  “Yes, the Amazon,” he said, cigar in hand. The end of the cigar glowed red.

  THAT NIGHT Luisa and I talked when we got back to the apartment, albeit only briefly and only once we were in bed, after two silent taxi rides. But there’s no point in saying anything further about that night, I should speak instead about another night not long after that, or, which comes to the same thing, a night not long ago, on the day of my return from the city of Geneva, having (almost) completed my eight weeks of work, three weeks after the night about which there’s no point in saying anything further. Or perhaps there is, since it was then that we reached an agreement. Or then again, perhaps there isn’t, since what happened three weeks later was a mixture of agreement and chance, of chance and agreement, of a perhaps and a maybe.

  I brought forward my return by twenty-four hours. I had, in fact, miscalculated at the start, forgetting to include a public holiday in Switzerland, thanks to which my work finished on the Thursday and not the Friday of the eighth week. But I only realized this on the Monday and, that same day, I changed my ticket from Saturday to Friday. I spoke to Luisa on the phone that night and on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night, but not on Thursday night, and I said nothing on any of those nights about my change of plans, I suppose I wanted to give her a little surprise, I suppose I wanted to see what the apartment would look like when she wasn’t expecting me, to see what she was doing, what she was like without me there, where she was, what time she got back home, who, if anyone, she was with or who she was entertaining, who was standing on the corner outside. I wanted to dispel the suspicion once and for all. However much you dislike having suspicions, they sometimes come back even when you dismiss them, they do so with less and less force when you live with someone, but they do so whether you’ve asked the question and received the reply, “It wasn’t me”, or whether you’ve kept silence, what you want is for them to diminish in strength. That was the chance element.

  The agreement came about because it seemed that the moment had come for me to know what all the insinuations of the previous nine months had meant, ever since our wedding though not before, not since our first meeting. To sum up, my own father had started it all on the wedding day itself, in the old Casino de Madrid, a few hours after the ceremony, when he drew me aside and asked me the question I’d been asking myself the whole of the previous night, during which I’d barely slept, the question I had perhaps begun to dismiss during the ceremony. But I hadn’t succeeded, then or subsequently, and my unease continued to grow throughout the honeymoon, in Miami and New Orleans and Mexico, and in particular in Havana. Perhaps if Luisa hadn’t fallen ill that day my presentiments of disaster would have disappeared along with my sense of the unnaturalness of our setting up a new home, which seems more natural to me with every day that passes, I’m even beginning to forget about the apartment which I once had all to myself. Not even a year ago now. The agreement came about on that night about which I should say nothing further, but about which I will just say one thing more. When we got back to the apartment after leaving Professor Villalobos at the door of his overnight hotel (he wasn’t rich or expert enough to go on to a night club where people dance very close, or perhaps, by then, he was too immersed in his own unhappiness), Luisa said to me in the dark (she said it to me with her head on the pillow, it was a single bed with a duvet, but wide enough to hold two people who don’t mind being close): “Do you still not want to know? Do you still not want me to ask your father?” I’m afraid I answered her with another
suspicion: “You mean you haven’t asked him already? You see enough of each other.” Luisa didn’t get angry, we all understand that such suspicions exist. “No, of course not,” she said, with no offence in her voice. “And I won’t, not if you don’t want me to. He’s my father-in-law and I’m very fond of him, but he’s your father. Just tell me what you want me to do.” There was a silence. She didn’t press me. She waited. She was waiting. We couldn’t see each other. There were no sheets. Our bodies were just touching. What she was clear about was that it had to be her, not me, who asked Ranz, not so much because she was so sure that he’d confide in her, but because she was sure he wouldn’t confide in me at all. “He’d tell me,” she’d said once, when the light was on and we were in our own bed. “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.” And then she’d added, quite rightly and proudly: “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.” And she’d gone further, she’d said with ingenuous optimism: “Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another.”

  Everything can be told, even what you don’t want to know about and don’t ask about and yet listen to when it is told.

  To her still invisible face I said: “Yes, perhaps you should ask him.” I noticed that she noticed a touch of hesitancy in my voice and, doubtless because of that, she said: “Do you want to be there, or shall I just tell you about it later?” “I don’t know,” I said, “perhaps he wouldn’t want to talk if I was there.” Luisa touched me on the shoulder as if she could see me (she knows my shoulders, she knows my body). She replied: “If he wants to tell me I don’t think he’d hold back because of that. I’ll do it the way you want, Juan.” She called me by my name, even though she wasn’t insulting me, or angry with me, nor did it seem that she was about to leave me. Perhaps she anticipated that if she was going to have to tell me what Ranz told her, then she might have to give me some bad news. No unequivocal words left my mouth, words like “OK” or “Go ahead” or “You win” or “Go on then”, instead I said: “I don’t know, there’s no hurry, I’ll have to think about it.” “Well, let me know,” she said and withdrew her hand from my shoulder in order to go to sleep. We were literally sharing one pillow between us and that night we said nothing more.