A Heart So White by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page A

room for more than a few seconds, unless they've paused on their way somewhere else, the bathroom or the fridge. Even if it's very hot. It was very hot. The man's voice went on, more calmly now and perhaps, because of that, no longer in a whisper, but still in the artificial tone of a singer saving his voice even in an argument; he had an extremely sharp voice when he spoke normally too, it shook, like the voice of a preacher or a gondolier.
    "I'm your only hope, Miriam. I have been for a year now and no one can live without hope. Do you think you're going to find another man that easily? No one in the colony, that's for sure, no one's going to want to poke around anywhere 1've already been."
    "Guillermo, you one real bastard," she said.
    "Think what you like, it's up to you."
    A brisk exchange of words, Miriam perhaps accompanying her words with some new gesture of her expressive arm. And then silence fell again, the silence or pause required for the person doing the insulting to retreat and ingratiate him or herself, though without withdrawing the insult or apologizing, when the abuse is mutual it dissolves of its own accord, the way it does in quarrels between brothers and sisters when they're still young. Or else it accumulates, until the next time. Miriam must have been thinking. She must have been thinking about something she knew only too well and had thought about on innumerable occasions and which I was thinking about even though I knew nothing about the situation nor what had gone on before. I was thinking that the man, Guillermo, was right, he held all the cards. I was thinking that Miriam's only option was to go on waiting and to do her best to make herself ever more indispensable to him, by whatever means, however fraudulent, and to try to pressurize him as little as possible and certainly not order or demand the violent death of the wife lying ill in Spain, who knew nothing about what happened every time her husband, the diplomat or industrialist or, perhaps, businessman, went to Havana on business or on a mission. I thought Miriam might well be right in her suspicions and complaints, that it was all a lie and there was no wife in Spain, or perhaps there was but she was in perfect health and unaware that for an unknown mulatto woman on another continent she was a dying woman whose death was awaited with expectation and desire, a woman whose death was perhaps prayed for and, worse still, anticipated or hastened in thought and word, in that city on the other side of the world.
    I didn't know whose side to take, because when you're privy to an argument (even if you don't actually witness it, but only hear it: when you're privy to
anything
and get to know something about it) it's almost impossible to remain totally impartial, to feel neither sympathy nor antipathy, animosity or pity for one of the contenders, or for a third party of whom they speak, that's the curse of the person who does the seeing or listening. I realized that, given the impossibility of knowing the truth, I had no idea which side to take, not that I've always considered that to be a deciding factor when it comes to taking sides about things or people. Perhaps the man had ensnared Miriam with false promises that became increasingly untenable, but it was just as likely that he hadn't done so at all, and that she, on the other hand, was merely using Guillermo to escape from her isolation and poverty, from Cuba, to better herself, to get married or rather to be married to him, so as not to have to go on occupying her own place in life but to occupy someone else's instead, most people only move in order to give up their own position in the world and to usurp that of another, and for one reason only, to forget about themselves and to bury what they were, we all at some time grow unutterably weary of being who we are and who we were. I wondered how long Guillermo had been married. I'd only been married for two weeks and the last thing I wanted was for