A Heart So White (18 page)

"You owe me,"

"I'm gonna get you,"

"I'll see you in hell"), which did nothing to prevent the subsequent kisses and her singing in the room next door as she lay by the side of the lefthanded man, Guillermo by name, to whom she'd said: "Then you get one woman's death on your hands, either her or me."

"I've put my foot in it," said Custardoy the Younger, "but I think it's better to know about things, better to find out about something late than never at all. It happened a long time ago and, anyway, what does it matter how your aunt snuffed it?"

My father had known one death, a real death, the sort that, in fact, cannot be considered part of the normal order of death, as Custardoy had said before. Those who kill themselves seem to die more somehow, and if someone dies by my hand they die still more again. He'd also said: 'Three times is a lot of coincidences," and then corrected himself. I wasn't sure whether to go back to that, whether, if I insisted, he'd end up telling me what had happened or what he'd found out, I knew he would tell me, something, however partial or erroneous, but it's easy to want to know nothing when you still don't know, once you do, you've no choice, he was right, it's better to know about things, but only once you do know them (and I still didn't). It was then that a memory returned to me, one lost since childhood, something tiny and tenuous that could not but be lost, one of those insignificant scenes that return fleetingly as if they were songs or images or the momentary perception in the present of what is past, the memory itself is called into question even as you remember. I was playing on my own with my soldiers in my grandmother's house and she was fanning herself, exactly as she had on so many other Saturday afternoons when my mother would leave me with her. But that time my mother was ill and it was Ranz who came to pick me up just before supper. I'd rarely seen them alone together, my father and my grandmother, my mother was always there mediating or in the middle, but not on that occasion. The doorbell rang as it was growing dark and I heard Ranz's footsteps advancing along the infinite corridor, following the footsteps of the maid to the room where I was sitting with my grandmother, finishing my final game, and she was humming and singing and sometimes laughing at my remarks, as grandmothers do with their grandchildren, on the slightest pretext. Ranz was still young then although he didn't seem so to me, he was a father. He came into the room with his raincoat over his shoulders, and his gloves, which he'd just taken off, in his hands; it was cool, it was springtime, my grandmother always started using her fan before it was strictly necessary, perhaps it was her way of evoking summer, although in fact she fanned herself all the year round. Before Ranz said anything, she asked him: "How's Juana?"

"She seems better," said my father, "but I haven't come straight from home."

"Has the doctor been yet?"

"He hadn't when I left, he said he wouldn't be able to come until later, he might be there now. We can phone if you like." They probably said something more, or perhaps they did phone, but my memory (as I sat across the table from Custardoy) fixed itself on one thing my grandmother said to my father: "I don't know how you can go off about your business when Juana is ill. I don't understand why you don't start praying and crossing your fingers every time your wife gets a cold. You've already lost two, my son." I remembered, or I thought I did, that immediately afterwards my grandmother raised her hand to her mouth, my grandmother covered her mouth for an instant as if to stop the words she'd just said from coming out, words which I'd heard and which, at the time, I took not the slightest notice of, or perhaps I did - as is clear now — only because she covered her mouth to suppress them. My father didn't answer, and it's only now that that gesture made twenty-five or more years before takes on meaning, or rather, it did so about a year ago, while I was sitting opposite Custardoy and thinking about what he'd said: "Three times is a lot of coincidences", only to correct himself, and then I remembered that my grandmother had also said and then regretted saying: "You've already lost two, my son." She'd called Ranz "my son", her son-in-law twice over, her double son-in-law.

I didn't press Custardoy, I didn't want to know more just at that moment, and besides he'd moved on to something else.

"Do you fancy those two?" he said suddenly. He'd turned almost right round now and was looking straight at the two women, who in turn noticed the direct gaze from those wide-set, lashless eyes and lowered their voices, or didn't speak at all for a moment, feeling themselves observed and considered, or perhaps admired sexually. The last words, before their conversation was interrupted or muted, were uttered by the one with her back to us and had reached my ears almost at the same time as Custardoy's question, perhaps they'd heard what he said despite the superimposition, Custardoy had doubtless asked me knowing that they would hear, so that they would know, so that they would be aware of his presence. "I've had enough of blokes," the woman with the white thighs had said. "Do you fancy those two?" Custardoy had said (it's easy enough to be heard, all you have to do is raise your voice). Then they'd held their breath and looked at us, the pause necessary to find out the identity of the person who desires us.

"You're forgetting, I'm a married man now. You can have both of them."

Custardoy took another sip of beer and got up with his cigarettes and lighter in his hand (there was no froth now on his beer). His few steps towards the bar sounded metallic, as if he were wearing tap-dancing shoes or metal tips on the soles or perhaps they were lifts, for it struck me that he did look taller as he walked away.

The two women were already laughing with him when I took my money out of my trouser pocket and placed it on the table and left to go home to Luisa. I didn't say goodbye to Custardoy (or I did so with a gesture of my hand from a distance) nor to the two thirty-something women who would become his strange and frightened intimates after a brief interlude of beer and chewing gum and gin and tonic and ice, and cigarette smoke and peanuts and laughter and a few lines of coke and his tongue in their ear, and also of words that I wouldn't hear, the incomprehensible whisper that persuades us. The mouth is always full, abundance itself.

THAT NIGHT, seeing the world from my pillow with Luisa by my side, as is normal amongst newlyweds, with the television in front of us and in my hands a book I wasn't reading, I told Luisa what Custardoy the Younger had told me and what I hadn't wanted him to tell me. Real togetherness in married couples and indeed in any couple comes from words, not just the words that are spoken - spoken voluntarily - but the words one doesn't keep to oneself - at least not without the intervention of the will. It isn't so much that there are no secrets between two people who share a pillow because that's what they decide - what is serious enough to constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told? - rather it's impossible not to tell, to relate, to comment, to enunciate, as if that were the primordial activity of all couples, at least those who have become couples recently and are still not too lazy to speak to one another. It isn't just that with your head resting on a pillow you tend to remember the past and even your childhood, and that remote and quite insignificant things surface in your memory, come to your tongue, and that all take on a certain value and seem worthy of being recalled out loud; nor that we're disposed to recount our whole life to the person resting their head on our pillow, as if we needed them to be able to
see
us from the very beginning - especially from the beginning, that is, from childhood - and to witness, through our telling, all those years before they knew us and during which time, we now believe, they were waiting for us. Neither is it simply a desire to compare, to find parallels or coincidences, the desire to know where each of you was in all the different eras of your two existences and to fantasize about the unlikely possibility of having met each other before; lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can't bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with their backs turned to each other, without even knowing one another, perhaps not even wanting to. Nor is it that some kind of interrogatory system is established on a daily basis which, out of weariness or routine, neither partner can escape, and so everyone ends up answering the questions. It's rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution. Or perhaps it's just that they spend so much time together (however little time that is amongst modern couples, it still amounts to a lot of time) that the two partners (but in particular the man, who feels guilty if he remains silent) have to make use of whatever they think and whatever occurs to them or happens to them in order to amuse the other person; thus, in the end, there's not a single tiny corner of all the events and thoughts in an individual's life that remains untransmitted, or rather translated matrimonially. The events and thoughts of others are transmitted too, those they've confided to us in private, that's where the expression "pillow talk" comes from, there are no secrets between people who share a bed, the bed is like a confessional. For the sake of love or its essence - telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans - one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past. In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you; so great is the power of the territory delineated by the pillow that it excludes from its bosom everything outside it, and it's a territory which, by its very nature, doesn't allow for anything else to be on it except the two partners, or lovers, who in a sense are alone and for that very reason talk and hide nothing - involuntarily. The pillow is round and soft and often white and after a while that roundness and whiteness become a replacement for the world and its weak wheel.

I talked to Luisa in bed about my conversation and my suspicions, about the violent death (according to Custardoy) of my Aunt Teresa and about the possibility that my father had been married before, a third time that would have been the first, before he married the two sisters, and about which I would otherwise have known nothing. Luisa couldn't understand why I hadn't wanted to ask more questions, women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things, their minds are investigative, gossipy and fickle, they never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, or what might come to light and what might happen, they don't know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word, they need to try things out, they don't look ahead, perhaps they really are always ready to know; in principle they're neither afraid nor distrustful of what might be told to them, they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.

"Why didn't you ask him to tell you more?" she asked me. She was in bed again, as she had been that evening in Havana, only a few days before, but now it was or was going to be the usual night-time routine, like every night, I was under the sheets too, the sheets were still very new (part of our trousseau, I imagined), she wasn't ill now nor was her bra cutting into her, she was wearing a nightshirt that I'd seen her put on only a few minutes before, in our own bedroom, and when she put it on she turned her back to me, still unused to having someone there before her, in a few years' time, perhaps months, she won't even notice that I'm there or, rather, I will be no one.

"I don't know that I want to know more," I replied.

"What do you mean? After what you've told me, I can't wait to find out more."

"Why?"

The television was on with the sound down. An old Jerry Lewis film, dating perhaps from my childhood, but you couldn't hear anything except our voices.

"What do you mean, why? If there's something I don't know about someone in my life, I want to know what it is. Besides, he's year father. And now he's my father-in-law, I'm bound to be interested in what happened to him. All the more if it's something he's been hiding. Are you going to ask him?"

I hesitated for a second. I felt that 1 did want to know, not so much what had happened as whether what Custardoy had said was the truth or just fantasy, rumour. But if it was the truth I wanted, I'd have to go on asking questions.

"I don't think so. If he's never wanted to talk to me about any of this up until now, I'm not going to make him do so at this late stage. Once, not many years ago, I asked him about my aunt and he told me that he didn't want to go back forty years. He almost threw me out of the restaurant we were lunching in."

Luisa laughed. Almost everything made her laugh, she tended to see the funny side of things, even the most tragic or terrible things. Living with her is like living immersed in comedy, that is, in a state of perpetual youth, as it is living with Ranz, perhaps that's why two, or possibly three, women, chose to live with him. Although Luisa really is young and might change over time. She liked my father too, he amused her. Luisa would want to hear what he had to say.

'
I'll
ask him," she said.

"Don't you dare."

"He'd tell me. 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. 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."