Javier Marias often writes sentences that are full paragraphs, and while some require me to read them several times over for clarity, others make me reach for my pen to record them in a journal I keep for exquisite quotes.
"Look," I said, "people who keep secrets for a long time don't always do so out of shame or in order to protect themselves, sometimes it's to protect others, or to preserve a friendship, or a love affair, or a marriage, to make life more tolerable for their children or to shield them from some fear, of which they usually have many. Maybe they simply don't want to add to the world a story they wished had never happened. Not talking about it is like erasing it, forgetting it a little, denying it, not telling a story can be a small favour one does to the world. You have to respect that. You might not want to know everything about me, later on, as time goes by, you might not want to, and I won't want to know everything about you either."
This is, perhaps, a strange thing to say to one's new bride. But it gives an indication of the depth of secrets contained within Juan's story. From the very beginning, when Teresa who would have been his aunt had she not shot herself in the breast before Juan was born, there is a sort of veil which covers everything. "Why did she kill herself?" we ask ourselves, filled with apprehension as we read to the end of the book. "Why are there so many secrets the couples keep from one another?" For each of the couples in this novel have a relationship within which something is hidden.
On his honeymoon in Havana, Juan overhears a woman named Miriam arguing with her lover in the hotel room next door. She is told that his wife is dying, and Miriam says that has been the case for a very long time. And then she asks Guillermo to kill his wife. "If you don't kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman's death on your hands, either her or me."
Perhaps equally tragic was the relationship of Juan's friend, who desperately seeks love through a dating service. Each person sends a letter, and often an accompanying video of himself, to the person with whom a potential match is made. But, the man responding to Berta's letter will only be satisfied with a video showing all of her personal parts; he makes it quite clear that he will sleep with her only if she is attractive. How tragic to me that she responded to his request, so great was her need for relationship.
Threats and empty promises, wounding one another through lies and deceit, these are how Marias' couples seem to interact.
The lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth appear throughout the novel, for it is from one particular phrase that it takes its name.
"She (Lady Macbeth) likens herself to him, thus trying to liken him to her, to her heart so white: it's not so much that she shares his guilt (of murder) at that moment as that she tries to make him share her irremediable innocence, her cowardice."
Yet, can one partner cover another's guilt? Conversely, does one's guilt shade another's heart so white? This is the struggle which Juan faces as he uncovers his personal history involving a father who has been married three times, and not one wife is still alive.
"It was simply a matter of accepting the belief or superstition that what one doesn't say doesn't exist. And it's true that the only things never translated are those never spoken or expressed."
A Heart So White won the Dublin IMPAC prize for the best novel published worldwide in English in 1997. Find other thoughts from JacquiWine's Journal, A Little Blog of Books, and Tony's Reading List.