While Maria Was Sleeping

Maria Dolz sits in the same Madrid cafe every morning and watches an attractive couple, clearly in love, have breakfast there every day. The routine gives her pleasure and some kind of small daily mooring. One day the couple, Luisa and Miguel Deverne, are no longer there and Maria discovers that the gruesome newspaper photo of the fatally stabbed businessman on the pavement, lying in a pool of blood, is none other than Miguel. She learns that he has been killed by a mentally ill, homeless man, Vazquez Can­­ella, who had got it into his head, as one story went, that Deverne was resp­onsible for Canella’s daughters’ involvement in an international prostitution ring. Several months later, Maria sees Luisa come in to the cafe with her children and goes up to her to offer her condolences. And in Luisa’s home that same day she meets the ‘virile and handsome’ Juan Diaz-Varela, the dead man’s best friend, now dedicated to helping his widow come to terms with her loss and assist her in the process of recovery.

It is at this point that any sensible reviewer has to stop talking about elements of the plot, leaving readers to discover the fiendish corkscrew turns of the narrative. Javier Marias’s latest novel, The Infatuations, returns us to the territory of his second and third works of fiction, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me: heterosexual desire; deception and betrayal; the provisional nature of appearances, indeed, of truth; the morality, or otherwise, of love.

As Maria finds out more about the killing, and as she gets romantically involved with Diaz-Varela, albeit in a rather one-sided way, nothing rem­ains stable or con­­tained in the initial state that she, and we, the readers, perceived it to be; not the apparently motiveless murder, not Diaz-Varela’s self-abnegating friendship with Luisa, not even Maria’s own feelings. The skin of appearances is peeled back, time after time, to show us what lies beneath; yet, this layer too turns out to be another kind of skin, a mask, not the real tangle of nerves and muscles and arteries that you expected to be exposed.

So it proceeds like a thriller but the nodal points of revelations are interspe­rsed with the rigorous and exhaustive par­sing of these uncoverings. Take, for example, the long meditation on the und­esirability of the dead returning to the land of the living, for the purposes of which Diaz-Varela brings in Balzac’s nov­ella, Le Colonel Chabert. He argues, “We see quite clearly [in Balzac’s story] that, with the passing of time, what has been should continue to have been, to exist only in the past, as is always or alm­ost always the case, that is how life is int­ended to be, so that there is no undoing what is done...the dead must stay where they are and nothing can be corrected.” The Balzac story is used not only as an illustration but also a justification: we will discover the explosive ramificati­ons of this foray into literary criticism for the story in which Maria finds herself.

Because all of Marias’s narrators, incl­uding Maria Dolz, are endowed with hypercogitative (and hypereloquent) int­e­riorities, all these discursive and radically verbose digressions may seem irrelevant, but don’t be fooled: the most lethal of stealth currents are hidden away in the great wash of words. Here is the great brilliance of Marias’s prose. The long runs of his glorious sentences, reproducing with great fidelity the fluid movements of thought, are mesmerising in their rhythm—I’m often reminded of the music of Steve Reich and John Adams—but suddenly in the middle of the entra­ncement Marias will have a knife flick open, transforming the hypnotism to something entirely different.

But this is not all that the prose achieves. At one point, Maria observes, “...it’s extr­aordinary how, after so many centuries of ceaseless talking, we still don’t know when people are telling us the truth”. Like all other novels by Marias, this book, then, enacts its own premise, both the ‘ceaseless talking’ and the uncertainty about truth-telling, in the way truths have proved elusive, illusive and shape-shifting for Maria and readers. The novel as epistemological enquiry—how do we know what we know?—is not new but Marias gives his version of the theory of knowledge a characteristic twist: can we ever know? The metaphysical thriller has never been so exciting as in Marias’s hands; no living writer does it with grea­ter bravura skill.

And while we are on the prose, the lau­rel given to translator Gregory Rabassa by Marquez—‘The greatest living Latin American wri­ter in the English langu­age’—should sur­ely now crown Mar­garet Jull Costa, whose translations from the Spanish and Portuguese form some of the most brilliant reading of our times?