A BOOK SO FINE
Javier Marías' work leads us into the world of love, marriage and the secrets partners keep.
When a book begins as A Heart So White does—read the passage below—you know you’ll be reading all of this writer’s work soon enough. Its opening is breathtaking and terrifying, even as the narrator hovers over a dead body in a bloodied bathroom for an entire opening chapter.
“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.”
Imagine, for a moment, that all 279 pages of this novel flow thus, with infinitely long sentences that barrel on—with allusions to the past, presentiments in the present and anxieties about the future, gushing along, albeit in an unhurried torrent—with adjective, relative, adverbial, and conditional clauses sloshing alongside one another in harmony. Marías always trusses up everything with more clarifications (inside parentheses) qualifying something else that must also be said.
Reading Javier Marías can only be compared to my whitewater rafting experience on the Russian River two decades ago. I may have lived to tell the tale but I won’t be sailing down that raft again. I’ll be reading Marías again, however, especially if he’s translated by Margaret Jull Costa whose work I enjoyed tremendously even in the Portuguese novel Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho.
A Heart So White leads us into the world of love, marriage and the secrets partners keep. By the time I had made all the connections to everything that happens inside the world of this novel, it became clear that nothing in life was ever black or white. Marias is a master painter unveiling, chapter by chapter, the chiaroscuro of the human heart. Many dreadful events happen over the course of several decades in this novel, yet it’s hard to not characterize the sins in the story as merely venial.
When I look back at this novel’s story, structure and pacing, its brilliance astounds me and I know I had to have missed many connections along the way. It’s challenging to talk about this book without giving away what happens in a story that begins with the death of a woman who, had she lived, would have altered the life of a certain family in Madrid. (Our narrator would not even exist had that come to pass.)
A Heart So White opens with a horrific event—a family secret whose details are murky—that casts a shadow over the life of Juan, the protagonist in the story. We learn soon enough that he doesn’t know many of the details until after he is married. A grey cloud hovers over his head even as he walks into his marriage, a personal baggage of unhappiness and uncertainty, a family hand-me-down, it seems, a presentiment—the word recurs often in the narrative—that unsettles Juan during his honeymoon.
The day Juan marries Luisa, his father Ranz calls him into a room to advise him. The moments alone were meant to communicate something precious to the son. But what sort of father is he (especially one who has been widowed three times, each time under mysterious circumstances) to offer any advice to his son? It’s ironic and almost laughable but Marias doesn’t let on. Instead, we pay attention to his artful, disingenuous prose and notice that Juan is restless from the moment his father pulls him into the room. Ranz is edgier still.
“I thought that he must want to say something concrete to me, but didn’t know how or wasn’t sure that he wanted to. That was entirely like him, for he often forced others to answer questions he hadn’t even asked or to discuss some subject that he hadn’t mentioned, even if that subject was the one thing on his mind, beneath that striking head of hair white as talcum powder. I knew him too well to help him out.”
By the time Juan, now peevish and annoyed, sees himself out the door to greet people at his wedding reception, his father has told him that Juan should always learn to keep secrets from his wife as much as she should safeguard her own. Is a partnership even possible without the sharing of secrets?
“The world is full of surprises and of secrets. We think we know the people close to us, but time brings with it more things that we don’t know than things we do, comparatively speaking we know less all the time, there’s always a greater area of shadow. Even if the illuminated area grows larger too, the shadows still win.”
Juan thus begins life with Lisa on a strange footing. On his honeymoon, he cannot bear to contemplate how his life has now changed, that he is now shorn of any independence or selfhood. Marriage feels like an affliction.
“Just as an illness changes our state to such an extent that it obliges us sometimes to stop everything and to keep to our beds for an unforeseeable number of days and to see the world only from our pillow, my marriage disrupted my habits and even my beliefs and, more importantly still, my view of the world. Perhaps that was because it became rather late, I was thirty-four years old when I contracted marriage.
Yet it is a beautiful partnership, I thought while reading the novel, for it’s a marriage of two people, professional translators, both, who met while they listened intently to others. Juan and Luisa are matched perfectly, yet in Juan is a greater unease born of too many years in a job that requires many months living alone in different locales in the world. Juan is a translator across four languages for statesmen around the world. Yet, we realize, as the story progresses, that Luisa is the superior listener and interpreter. She possesses the wisdom to know which secrets to share and which to keep to herself and which to ask not to be disclosed. Everything Luisa has learned on the job she deploys in the relationships with her husband, her father-in-law and his friends. She shows her shrewd reading of people even in real life and has Juan’s back in the end.
Every page of this novel is studded with quotable passages. For me, the big perk of reading this book was a brilliant chapter dedicated to what translators do in the high octane world of translating exchanges between world leaders.
When we’re working, we translators and interpreters do nothing but translate and interpret, indiscriminately and almost without a break, for the most part without anyone knowing why something is being translated or for whom it’s being interpreted, more often than not, if it’s a written text, it’s purely for the files and, if it’s a speech, for the few odds and sods who don’t understand the second language we’re translating into anyway.
Translators may make the best listeners in the world, but are they really hearing what is being said? The book tells us that most often the translator is clueless about all that has been exchanged.
The characters in the novel are full of contradictions. They are reliable yet unpredictable. They’re casually corrupt yet unfailingly sincere. A crass womanizer falls deeply and hopelessly in love. The juxtapositions cannot be more thought-provoking. A man who is vicious in his love life is thoughtful and gentle to an aging security guard who has been staring at the same painting for years, for so long, in fact, that he has gone mad. The hand that takes a flame to singe a marital bed knows to save a precious painting from destruction. The man who is an authority on paintings and is a trustworthy judge of their merit doesn’t see much wrong at all in creaming a little money off for himself while selling brilliant fakes.
Halfway through the novel we understand why the novel's title references what Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth says to her husband after he has murdered Duncan and she too has killed the guards by his door:
“My hands are of your color; but I shame
To wear a heart so white”
Lady Macbeth declares that even though she is guilty by association, she feels no guilt at all for her deeds and plans; she ridicules her husband for wallowing in regret. “A heart so white" translates to a pale, weak heart, in the time of Shakespeare. In contrast, in contemporary times, a “white heart” is apparently a sign of purity and innocence in love. Both interpretations work well in this novel and there is a certain kind of love, it seems, that may even justify a crime of passion. By the time, we reach the end, A Heart So White not only makes a clear case for nuance in how we choose to live but also for always hearing with both one’s heart and one’s head.
Can't wait to lay my hands on this book. Thank you.