A MAN WHO WASN’T THERE
The clandestine greatness of Javier Marías
Vladimir Nabokov, upbraiding a poet friend for writing a newspaper
column, declared, “I am writing my novel. I do not read the
papers.” Though it wouldn’t have been out of character
for Nabokov to tax the truth for the sake of a memorable line, it
is true that American literary novelists, whether they read the
papers or not, typically do not write for them, except in the book-review
pages. An op-ed by Michael Chabon may pop up now and again, but
it is hard to imagine Philip Roth or even Norman Mailer supplying
a weekly column on politics or current affairs.
In Madrid, however, the Spanish novelist Javier Marías does
just that. Every week for more than a decade, he has addressed a
readership of millions, on politics or art or whatever else might
have caught his eye. Although such a prominent byline may help explain
the success of his fiction in Spain, it doesn’t account for
the five million books of his that are in print in some forty countries
around the world. To an unusual degree, Marías manages to
inhabit not only the popular but also the literary sphere, counting
J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and the late W. G. Sebald among his
admirers. Although Marías’s following in the United
States is still small—his newly published novel, “Your
Face Tomorrow: Volume I, Fever and Spear” (New Directions;
translated by Margaret Jull Costa; $24.95), is only the seventh
of his twenty-eight books to have appeared in translation here—his
name is regularly mentioned during the annual run-up to the announcement
of the Nobel Prize in Literature. So it’s not surprising that
his prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility.
The first page of his novel “Tomorrow in the Battle Think
on Me” (1994), for example, features this excursus on the
misfortune, and humiliation, of sudden death:
Seafood poisoning, a cigarette lit as the person is drifting
off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets or, worse, to a woollen
blanket; a slip in the shower—the back of the head—the
bathroom door locked; a lightning bolt that splits in two a tree
planted in a broad avenue, a tree which, as it falls, crushes or
slices off the head of a passer-by, possibly a foreigner; dying
in your socks, or at the barber’s, still wearing a voluminous
smock, or in a whorehouse or at the dentist’s; or eating fish
and getting a bone stuck in your throat, choking to death like a
child whose mother isn’t there to save him by sticking a finger
down his throat; or dying in the middle of shaving, with one cheek
still covered in foam, half-shaven for all eternity, unless someone
notices and finishes the job off out of aesthetic pity; not to mention
life’s most ignoble, hidden moments that people seldom mention
once they are out of adolescence, simply because they no longer
have an excuse to do so, although, of course, there are always those
who insist on making jokes about them, never very funny jokes.
Into the two hundred and one words of this sentence, resourcefully
translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Marías crams many tiny
triumphs of imagination and elaboration: a slip in the shower enhanced
by a locked door that protects no one; decapitation made oddly worse
for happening on vacation; an incongruous postmortem shave made
comically touching by the phrase “aesthetic pity”—piedad
estética. Just as Marías’s prose teems with
seductions, so, too, do the stories themselves. Take the opening
of his global best-seller (more than a million copies sold to German
readers alone) “A Heart So White” (1992):
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that
one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl any more 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 living 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, paralyzed, 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-splattered 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.
These two twisting sentences, full of qualifications and deferrals
that recall the patient syntax of Henry James, pose a narrative
question that the reader feels compelled to unravel: what made the
girl kill herself so soon after her honeymoon?
Such plotty provocation—an act of violence disclosed up front
whose true significance will not be revealed until the book’s
end—is a hallmark of Marías’s storytelling. In
the opening pages of “The Man of Feeling,” the narrator,
an opera singer, recalls a train journey on which he seduced a married
woman while her husband was in the same compartment (the reader
waits to see how he did it, and what hell he paid for having done
it). In “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me,” a ghostwriter
tells of an affair he almost has with a married woman—almost,
because the woman dies in his arms before she has a chance to be
unfaithful to her husband. How, we wonder, will the narrator handle
this unspeakable situation, particularly given that the woman’s
young son is asleep down the hall?
Even in novels that do not begin with the explosion of a narrative
bomb, Marías usually makes sure that we can hear one ticking.
In the opening lines of “All Souls” (1989), he tells
us:
Of the three, two have died since I left Oxford and the
superstitious thought occurs to me that they were perhaps just waiting
for me to arrive and live out my time there in order to give me
the chance to know them and, now, to speak about them. In other
words—and this is equally superstitious—I may be under
obligation to speak about them.
We are left to wonder who “the three” are, what befell
them, and why the narrator feels an obligation to speak. By the
end of the story, these questions have been answered, but the answers
prove paradoxical, in a way that is typical of Marías’s
work. His narrators take an active role in gathering the truths
behind appearances: like spies, they trail people, on foot, through
cities in America, England, and Spain; they eavesdrop, behind doors,
on balconies, and in toilets for the handicapped; like detectives,
they extract confessions during long conversations, and deliver
the news they have collected. Their reports seem comprehensive but
reveal a concatenation of unexpected outcomes—infidelities
out of which true loves grow, murders that bring about births.
And yet, behind the garrulous presentation of these existential
paradoxes, a silence lingers. After such lavish disclosures, why
is it that the narrators reveal almost nothing about themselves?
Their names, their lives, their feelings, their identities: all
remain concealed or disguised. Usually in first-person narrations,
confessions lead the reader to an understanding of how the storyteller
was changed by events. Think of Nick in “The Great Gatsby,”
of Augie in his adventures, or Holden and Humbert in theirs—to
say any of these names is to conjure an individual whose essence
is laid bare by what he relates. In a Marías novel, if we
learn the narrator’s name at all, to mention it would only
conjure a ghost—it is an alias for someone who remains forever
in hiding. This is an effect that Marías has deliberately
cultivated: he wants the reader actively to wonder who is telling
the stories, perhaps even to conclude that there is really a single
narrator who unites the novels. Not so much a distinct individual
as a distinctive voice, this narrator speaks to us as if from the
lip of a stage, in darkness. The lights never come on. His face
is never revealed.
Born in Madrid in 1951, Marías may have good reason to favor
protagonists who sidestep the act of self-disclosure. Growing up
under the dictatorship of Franco, he assimilated an atmosphere in
which writers were presented with strong disincentives to openness.
Marías was the son of anti-Francoist intellectuals, and his
family endured dictatorial mischief more believably conceived in
Groucho’s kingdom of Freedonia than in the factual realm of
Franco. As Marías told one interviewer:
[My mother] published an anthology titled “España
como preocupación” (“Spain as a Preoccupation”),
with the subtitle “Literary Anthology.” Her name was
Dolores Franco—her surname, which is rather common, being
the same as the dictator’s. Dolores, or Lolita, in Spanish
means literally pain, or pains. The censorship argued that “Spain
as a Preoccupation,” plus Dolores Franco, meaning “pains
Franco,” wouldn’t be accepted.
The treatment of Marías’s father, on the other hand,
lacked any kind of comic dimension. Julián Marías
Aguilera, a disciple of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset, was denounced
by a former friend, who accused him, falsely, of writing for Pravda
and of consorting with Communist leaders. At the time, such a charge,
even if baseless, was often a death sentence. Aguilera eluded that
fate, but he was jailed and, after being released, was banned both
from teaching at a university and from writing for newspapers. With
limited options and a growing family, he looked abroad and obtained
a succession of temporary teaching posts in Puerto Rico and the
United States. Less than a month after the birth of Javier, the
third of four children, a job became available at Wellesley, and
the family moved to Massachusetts. There they lived with the poet
Jorge Guillén, himself a Spanish exile, who had a soft spot
for visiting intellectuals—among them Vladimir Nabokov, who
had lived next door a few years earlier.
This peripatetic period during Javier’s early childhood left
an indelible mark on him—his parents referred to him as “the
American baby.” Although most of his life has been spent in
Spain (despite teaching stints in America and Oxford), this formative,
forced exposure to English put him on the road to a career that
runs parallel to his novelistic existence, as a highly regarded
literary translator. Over the years, Marías has translated
a vast range of American and English writing, including poetry by
John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Frank
O’Hara, and Wallace Stevens; and fiction by Anthony Burgess,
Raymond Carver, Thomas Hardy, J. D. Salinger, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and John Updike. He has also done major translations of classics
such as Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici” and
Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy.”
This work has had an impact on Marías as a writer. On the
most basic level, Marías has made all his narrators in some
sense translators; whether they happen to teach translation theory
or work as interpreters, ghostwriters, or opera singers, each is
giving voice to other people’s stories. These are professions
that fit well with the narrators’ tendency never to reveal
their identities entirely. Marías’s translation work
is also reflected in his method, as he once acknowledged in an interview:
If you rewrite high literature in an acceptable way you’ve
done a lot. Your instrument is more resilient than it was. You can
say that you’re capable of renouncing your own style, adopting
someone else’s, yet the wording is always yours. The common
idea is that the translator is a slave to the original text. But
that’s not true at all in the sense that there is not one
sentence in any language that allows just one translation. You always
have to choose.
This habit of choosing is central to the kind of writer Marías
has become, and explains much of what is unique about his work:
he has made indecision—the space between two alternatives—the
center of his stories. And this indecision is conveyed in the equivocations
and qualifications of the narrative voice.
Although there is ample precedent for the deliberative “I”
in literature, it has tended to be the province of nonfiction. Montaigne,
who introduced his essays by alerting the reader that “I am
myself the matter of my book,” is remembered for his willingness
(“Que sais-je?”) to explore every issue from multiple
sides. Like Montaigne, Marías’s narrators are unembarrassed
to reveal their uncertainties; they choose, but endlessly question
their choices, and often contradict themselves entirely. These conspicuous
reversals, and a related ambivalence about the benefits of storytelling,
are central to Marías’s work:
In my books there is not only the action, the characters,
the story and so forth; there is reflection as well, and often the
action stops. The narrator then makes a series of considerations
and meditations. There is a tradition within the novel form, almost
forgotten now, which embodies what I call literary thinking or literary
thought. It’s a way of thinking which takes place only in
literature—the things you never think of or hit upon unless
you are writing fiction. Unlike philosophical thinking, which demands
an argument without logical flaws and contradictions, literary thinking
allows you to contradict yourself.
“Your Face Tomorrow: Volume I, Fever and Spear,” is
Marías’s most extravagant showcase for “literary
thinking” so far. It also serves as a compelling introduction
to his writing, and is the start of what promises to be a multivolume
work. A second volume, “Baile y Sueño—Dance and
Dream”—is already available in Spain, and Marías
is now writing Volume III. While he has claimed that this will mark
the work’s end, it is worth keeping in mind that he made the
same claim for Volume II when Volume I appeared. Proust announced,
in 1912, that he had finished his multivolume novel, but he continued
adding to it for another decade, and died before the final revisions
had been completed. Even if Marías’s current project
does not reach these extremes, the portion of it that has already
appeared intensifies a growing suspicion that his novels are all,
in a sense, puzzle pieces of a larger whole.
“Fever and Spear” begins with sly, guarded reflections
reminiscent of the opening of “All Souls,” a novel that,
like this one, is set largely in Oxford:
One should never tell anyone anything or give information
or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never
existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having
done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. Telling
is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and
injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and
rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed.
Immediately, we are led to wonder what betrayal the narrator will
reveal. His reluctance to “tell anyone anything” acquires
further menace when we learn that he has worked for the British
Secret Service as an interpreter, a job that involved more than
just translation:
It would be best just to say translator or interpreter of
people: of their behaviour and reactions, of their inclinations
and characters and powers of endurance; of their malleability and
their submissiveness, of their faint or firm wills, their inconstancies,
their limits, their innocence, their lack of scruples and their
resistance; their possible degrees of loyalty or baseness and their
calculable prices and their poisons and their temptations.
By taking in what “behaviour and reactions” silently
betray about people, the narrator is able to report on them to his
bosses.
The narrator—who, it gradually appears, is the narrator of
“All Souls” reprised—comes from Madrid, and is
named Jacques Deza, although, characteristically, he answers to
many cognates of his first name: Jaime, Santiago, Diego, and Yago
(“all forms of the same name”), Jacobo (“the most
pretentious form”), Iago (“the classical form”),
and even Jack (“a phonetic approximation”). Deza narrates
his account at some unspecified time in the future, and explains
how, in early middle age, he came to espionage. It was at a time
of personal difficulty, during “my separation from my wife,
Luisa, when I came back to England so as not to be near her while
she was slowly distancing herself from me.” Living alone in
London and working for the BBC, Deza accepts an invitation to a
party in Oxford hosted by an old friend, Professor Peter Wheeler,
“an eminent and now retired Hispanist and Lusitanist,”
even though he suspects that Wheeler’s motives go beyond filling
him with wine and cheese: “I had already accepted the invitation
with pleasure and made a note of the date and the hour, and then
he added with feigned hesitancy (but without concealing the fact
that it was feigned): ‘Anyway, that fellow Bertram Tupra will
be there.’ ” Deza wonders who Tupra is and why Wheeler
wants them to meet.
At Wheeler’s party, the beginnings of an answer emerge. Initially,
Deza is surprised by Tupra’s apparent plainness, thinking
that he looks “like a well-traveled diplomat . . . or else
a high-ranking civil servant.” And yet, as he observes him
more carefully, Deza discovers more:
His eyes were blue or grey depending on the light and he
had long eyelashes, dense enough to be the envy of any woman and
to be considered highly suspect by any man. His pale eyes had a
mocking quality, even if this was not his intention—and his
eyes were, therefore, expressive even when no expression was required—they
were also rather warm or should I say appreciative, eyes that are
never indifferent to what is there before them and which make anyone
upon whom they fall feel worthy of curiosity, eyes whose very liveliness
gave the immediate impression that they were going to get to the
bottom of whatever being or object or landscape or scene they alighted
upon.
A penetrating gaze, we find, is something that Wheeler has noticed
in Deza, too. Wheeler—a former spy now involved in recruitment—believes
that this makes Deza a good candidate for the Secret Service, in
which, it turns out, Tupra is a senior figure.
After the other guests have left the party, Wheeler starts to question
Deza about them. “What did you think of Beryl?” he asks
about Tupra’s companion. Deza replies, “Rather too many
teeth and too big a jaw, but she’s still rather pretty. Her
smell is the most attractive thing about her, her best feature:
an unusual, pleasant, very sexual smell.” Wheeler stares at
Deza with “a mixture of reproof and mockery”:
“That isn’t what I meant at all. I would never
have dared even to ask myself if you had or hadn’t found Beryl’s
animal humours stimulating, you’ll have to forgive my lack
of curiosity about your proclivities in that area. I meant regarding
Tupra, what impression did you have about her in relation to him,
in her relation to him now. That’s what I want to know, not
if you were aroused by her . . .” he paused for a moment,
“by her secretions.”
When Deza suggests that Tupra and Beryl might be a couple who have
grown bored with each other, Wheeler takes the opportunity to probe:
“Was that what happened with you and Luisa?” Deza deftly
avoids self-revelation: “I or we didn’t let it get that
far. It was something else, something simpler perhaps and certainly
faster. Less cloying. Cleaner perhaps.”
The dialogue between Deza and Wheeler extends deep into the night.
Indeed, Marías pulls off a considerable narrative coup: the
core of the novel is essentially a job interview, a game of conversational
cat and mouse between the old spy and the younger recruit. More
than in any previous novel, Marías places the evasiveness
of his main characters within a conspicuous historical and political
context. Wheeler reveals more about his wartime activities, and
mentions a British propaganda campaign that tried to keep British
subjects from inadvertently disclosing information that could reach
the ears of Nazi spies. However sensible, the campaign had unwanted
effects:
People were suspicious of their neighbour, their relative, their
teacher, their colleague, the shopkeeper, the doctor, their wife,
their husband, and many took advantage of such easy, widespread
suspicions, perfectly understandable given the climate at the time,
to get rid of a hated spouse.
Such stories of distrust and opportunism lead Deza to recall his
father’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, specifically
his denunciation by a former friend as “a collaborator on
the Moscow newspaper, Pravda.” This biographical detail is,
of course, drawn from the life of Marías’s father,
and the direct engagement with Marías’s family history
sends a shiver of recognition through a seasoned Marías reader.
The narrator, hitherto a voice in the dark, takes a step closer
to the light. One cannot help noticing how many of Marías’s
other novels dare us—subtly here, grandly there—to mistake
the narrator for the author himself; in “All Souls,”
the two even share the same birthday.
In this manner, Marías, like W. G. Sebald, collects deposits
of belief in his books; he encourages the reader to risk taking
fiction as fact. But, in fiction, belief is where the fun begins,
whereas in life, Marías seems to be saying, what we believe—and
what is believed about us—is where the trouble begins. At
one point, Deza wonders:
How can someone not see, in the long term, that the person who will
and does end up ruining us will indeed ruin us? How can you not
sense or guess at their plotting, their machinations, their circular
dance, not smell their hostility or breathe their despair, not notice
their slow skulking, their leisurely, languishing waiting, and the
inevitable impatience that they would have had to contain for who
knows how many years? How can I not know today your face tomorrow,
the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face
you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing.
Deza suggests that his remedy for such a betrayal might be to seek
vengeance. He is perplexed to learn that his father does not share
this impulse. But, as his father tells him, they are different kinds
of men: “You do have a tendency to hang on to things, Jacobo,
and it’s sometimes hard for you to let go, you’re not
always good at leaving things behind.”
For a reader coming to the sudden, provisional end of “Fever
and Spear,” there is an unsettling but exhilarating sense
that, while a great betrayal surely lurks down the road, there is
little suggestion of where the next volumes will ultimately lead.
We know that Deza has left his wife (but not why); that he has left
his life in espionage (but not how); that a woman is following him
through the rainy London streets (but not who). Perhaps these questions
will be answered; perhaps they will not. The truest answers may
not arrive in any of the volumes of “Your Face Tomorrow”;
rather, perhaps, they should be sought in the books that precede
them and in those which will follow. After all, the first words
of Deza’s narrative turn out to be an echo of Wheeler’s
parting words to him, when their night of talk has run its course:
“One shouldn’t really ever tell anyone anything.”
The key word is “should”—the conditional mood.
This is the mood in which all Marías’s books take place;
the choice between what might have been and what will always be
is continuously explored. Like Nabokov in his Antiterra, like Faulkner
in his imaginary South, Marías, from book to book but in
one voice, has been mapping a country of his own, a Yoknapatawpha
of the mind, full of tension between the desire to know and the
fear of what knowledge costs. It is an old fear, and one that, in
this age of surveillance, has gained ground. As another of Marías’s
narrators insists, “Listening is the most dangerous thing
of all. . . . Listening means knowing, finding out, knowing everything
there is to know, ears don’t have lids that can close against
the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re
about to hear, it’s always too late.”
WYATT MASON
The New Yorker
14 de noviembre de 2005
