A Heart So White (2 page)

The truth is that if, in recent times, I've wanted to know about what happened all those years ago, it's precisely because of my marriage (in fact, I did not want to know, but I have since come to know about it). Ever since I contracted matrimony (the verb has fallen into disuse, but is both highly graphic and useful) I've been filled by all kinds of presentiments of disaster, rather as you are when you contract an illness, the sort of illness from which you never know with any certainty when you will recover. The expression "to change one's marital status or state", which is normally used quite casually and so means very little, is the one that most adequately describes my case and, contrary to the general custom, I give it great weight. 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 came rather late, I was thirty-four years old when I contracted marriage.

The principal and the most common problem at the beginning of any fairly conventional marriage is that, regardless of how fragile an institution marriage is nowadays and regardless of the facilities for disengagement available to the contracting parties, you traditionally experience an unpleasant sense of having arrived and, therefore, of having reached an end, or rather (since the days continue implacably to pass and there is no end), that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. I know that this feeling is both pernicious and erroneous and that giving in to it or accepting it is the reason why so many promising marriages collapse no sooner have they begun. I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you're tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built. I know all that but, nevertheless, when I got married, even during the honeymoon itself (we went to Miami, New Orleans and Mexico, then on to Havana), I experienced two unpleasant feelings, and I still wonder if the second was and is just a fantasy, invented or dreamt up to mitigate or combat the first. That first feeling of unease is the one I've already mentioned, the one which—judging by what one hears, by the kind of jokes made at the expense of those getting married and by the many gloomy proverbs about it in my own language — must be common to all newlyweds (especially men) at the beginning of something which, incomprehensibly, you feel and experience as if it were an ending. This unease is summed up in a particularly terrifying phrase: "Now what?" and I have no idea what other people do to overcome it.

As with an illness, this "change of state" is unpredictable, it disrupts everything, or rather prevents things from going on as they did before: it means, for example, that after going out to supper or to the cinema, we can no longer go our separate ways, each to his or her own home, I can no longer drive up in my car or in a taxi to Luisa's door and drop her off and then, once I've done so, drive off alone to my own apartment along the half- empty, hosed-down streets, still thinking about her and about the future. Now that we're married, when we leave the cinema our steps head off in the same direction (the echoes out of time with each other, because now there are four feet walking along), but not because I've chosen to accompany her or not even because I usually do so and it seems the correct and polite thing to do, but because now our feet never hesitate outside on the damp pavement, they don't deliberate or change their mind, there's no room for regret or even choice: now there's no doubt but that we're going to the same place, whether we want to or not this particular night, or perhaps it was only last night that I didn't want to.

On our honeymoon, when this change of state came about (and to say that it "came about" makes it sound too gradual, for it's a violent change, one that barely gives you time to catch your breath), I realized that I found it very difficult to think about her and utterly impossible to think about the future, which is one of the greatest conceivable pleasures known to anyone, if not the daily salvation of us all; to allow oneself to think vague thoughts, to let one's thoughts drift over what will or might happen, to wonder without too much exactitude or intensity what will become of us tomorrow or in five years' time, to wonder about things we cannot foresee. On my honeymoon it was as if the future had disappeared and there was no abstract future at all, which is the only future that matters because the present can neither taint it nor assimilate it. That change, then, means that nothing can continue as before, especially if, as usually happens, the change has been preceded and foreshadowed by a joint effort, whose main visible manifestation is the unnatural process of creating a home for you both, a home that had no prior existence for either of you, but which must, unnaturally, be inaugurated by you both. In that particular custom or practice, which is, I believe, widespread, lies the proof that, when they contract matrimony, the contracting parties are, in fact, demanding of each other an act of mutual suppression or obliteration, the suppression of what each of them was and of what each of them fell in love with or perhaps simply perceived as being potentially advantageous, since falling in love doesn't always happen before marriage, sometimes it happens afterwards and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. It can't. The obliteration of each of the parties, of the person they knew, spent time with and loved, involves the disappearance of their respective homes, or is somehow symbolized by that. So two people who had been used to living their own lives and being in their own homes, used to waking up alone and often going to bed alone, find themselves suddenly artificially joined in their sleeping and waking, and in their steps along the half-empty streets heading in one direction only or going up together in the lift, no longer with one as host and the other as guest, no longer with one going to pick up the other or the latter coming down to meet the former, waiting below in the car or in a taxi, instead neither has any choice, they have a few rooms and a lift and a front door that once belonged to neither of them but which now belong to both, with one pillow for which they will be obliged to battle in their sleep and from which, like the invalid, they will also end up seeing the world.

As I said before, this initial feeling of unease came upon me on the first leg of our honeymoon, in Miami, which is a hideous place but has excellent beaches for newlyweds, and got worse in New Orleans and in Mexico and worse still in Havana, and for nearly a year now, since we returned from that trip and inaugurated our home together in that extremely unnatural way, it's continued to grow or rather has become lodged inside me, perhaps inside us both. But the second feeling of unease only appeared in full force towards the end of the trip, that is, only in Havana, where, in a sense, I come from, or, to be more precise, where a quarter of me comes from, for it was there that my maternal grandmother (the mother of Teresa and Juana Aguilera) was born and from there that she came to Madrid as a little girl. It happened in the hotel where we were spending three nights (we didn't have that much money and our stays in each city were only brief), one afternoon when Luisa was taken ill while we were out walking, indeed so ill that we interrupted our walk and came back to the room at once, so that she could lie down. She was shivering and felt slightly nauseous. She literally couldn't stand up. No doubt something she'd eaten had disagreed with her, but we didn't know that for certain then and I immediately wondered if perhaps she'd caught something in Mexico, one of those illnesses to which Europeans are so susceptible, something serious like amoebic dysentery. The unspoken presentiments of disaster that had accompanied me since the wedding ceremony took different forms and one of them (the least hidden, that is, not left entirely unspoken), was the threat of an illness or sudden death overtaking the person with whom I was going to share my life as well as both the concrete and the abstract future, despite my impression that the latter was no more and that my life was already half over; as, perhaps, was our life together. We didn't want to call a doctor immediately in case it passed off of its own accord, and I put her to bed (in our hotel bed, our marriage bed) and left her to go to sleep, as if that might make her better. And she did appear to fall asleep and I remained silent so that she could rest and the best way of keeping silent without growing bored or being tempted to make some noise or speak to her was to go out on to the balcony and watch the outside world, watch the people of Havana passing by, observe how they moved, how they dressed, and listen to the murmur of their voices in the distance. But although I was looking out, my thoughts were still directed inwards, behind me, to the bed that Luisa was lying diagonally across, and so nothing in the outside world really held my attention. I was looking out rather like someone arriving at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was in bed, ill, behind me, watched over by her husband.

Nevertheless, after a few moments of this looking without seeing, I did pick out one particular person. I picked her out because, during all that time, unlike the others, she hadn't moved or shifted or disappeared from my field of vision, but had stayed on the same spot. She was a woman who, from a distance, looked about thirty and was wearing a yellow blouse with a scoop neck, a white skirt and white high-heeled shoes, and she carried a large black handbag over one arm, like the handbags women in Madrid used to carry when I was a child, big handbags carried over the arm, not over the shoulder the way they carry them now. She was waiting for someone, her attitude was unmistakably that of someone waiting, because every now and then she would walk up and down, just one or two steps, and on the last step she would — quickly, lightly — drag her heel along the ground, in a gesture of suppressed impatience. She didn't lean against the wall, as people who are waiting usually do, to avoid getting in the way of the other people who are passing by and not waiting; she stood in the middle of the pavement, never going beyond those three measured steps that always returned her to the same spot, and so she frequently collided with passers-by; one passer-by said something to her and she responded angrily and threatened him with her voluminous bag. Every now and then she would look behind her, bending one leg and smoothing her tight skirt with one hand, as if fearing that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, or perhaps she was simply adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them. She didn't look at her watch, she wasn't wearing one, perhaps she was being guided by the hotel clock, somewhere above my head, invisible to me, with rapid glances I hadn't noticed. Perhaps the hotel didn't have a clock facing on to the street and she had no idea of the time. She looked like a mulatto, but from where I was standing, I couldn't be sure.

Suddenly night fell, almost without warning, as happens in the tropics, and although the number of pedestrians didn't instantly diminish, the loss of light made her seem more solitary to me, more alone and more condemned to wait in vain. The person she was supposed to meet would never arrive. She was standing with her arms crossed, her elbows cupped in her hands, as if, with every second that passed, her arms weighed more heavily, or perhaps it was her handbag that was growing heavier. She had strong legs, strong enough to withstand the wait, legs that seemed to dig into the pavement with their thin, high, stiletto heels, but her legs were so strong, so striking, that they became one with her heels and it was her legs that dug solidly in — like a knife in wet wood — every time she returned to her chosen spot after that minimal movement to right or left. Her heels stuck out over the backs of her shoes. I heard a slight murmur, or perhaps a moan, coming from the bed behind me, from Luisa, who was ill, from my new wife, about whom I was so concerned, who was my chosen task. But I didn't turn my head, because it was a moan made as she slept, one quickly learns to distinguish the sounds made in their sleep by the person one sleeps with. At that moment the woman in the street looked up at the third floor where I was standing and, I think, noticed me for the first time. She peered up as if she were myopic or as if she were looking through grubby contact lenses and she seemed disconcerted, staring up at me, then looking away slightly, then screwing up her eyes to see better and again staring and looking away. Then she raised one arm, the arm without the handbag, in a gesture that neither greeted nor beckoned, I mean it wasn't the way one would beckon to a stranger, it was a gesture of appropriation and recognition, finished off by a swift flourish of the fingers: it was as if, with that gesture of the arm and that rapid flutter of fingers, she was not so much trying to attract my attention as to grab hold of me. She shouted something I couldn't hear because of the distance and I was sure that she was shouting at me. From the movement of her lips I could only make out the first word, and that word was "Hey!', uttered with great indignation, as was the rest of the phrase that failed to reach my ears. As she spoke, she started walking, in order to get nearer, and to do so she had to cross the street and traverse the broad esplanade which, on our side of the road, separated the hotel from the pavement, distancing and protecting it a little from the traffic. When she took more than the few repetitive steps she'd ventured during her wait, I noticed that she walked slowly and with difficulty, as if she were unaccustomed to wearing high heels, or as if her strong legs weren't used to them, or as if her handbag threw her off balance or as if she were dizzy. She walked rather in the way Luisa had walked after being taken ill, when she came into the room and fell on to the bed, where I had then half-undressed her and covered her up (tucking her in despite the heat). But in that uneasy gait of hers you could sense a certain grace too, albeit absent at that moment: when she was barefoot, the mulatto woman would walk elegantly, her skirt would float about her, dashing itself rhythmically against her thighs. My room was in darkness, no one had put on the light when night fell. Luisa was ill and asleep, I hadn't moved from the balcony, I was watching the people of the city and then that woman, who was still stumbling towards me, still shouting words which, now, I could hear: