Javier Marias: Dark Back of Time

Or it may happen that the ending survives me, as almost everything that arises from us or accompanies us or that we bring about survives us; our intentions last longer than we do. We set too many things in motion and then leave them, and their inertia, weak as it is, outlives us: the words that replace us and that someone occasionally remembers or passes on, not always confessing to their provenance; the letters smoothed flat, the bent photographs, the notes written on yellow paper, left for a woman who will sleep alone in the aftermath of wakeful caresses because we leave in the middle of the night like a scoundrel who is just passing through; the objects and furniture that served us and that we allowed into our homes — a red chair, a pen, an image of India, a toy soldier made of lead, a comb — the books we write but also those we buy and read only once or that remain closed on the shelf to the last and then carry on somewhere else with their life of waiting, hoping for other eyes more avid or more placid than ours; the clothes that will go on hanging among mothballs because someone may insist on keeping them, for sentimental reasons — though I don’t know if there are mothballs anymore — the fabrics fading and languishing in their airlessness, each day more oblivious to the forms that gave them meaning, the scent of those forms; the songs that will go on being sung when we do not sing or hum or listen to them; the streets that shelter us as if they were endless hallways and chambers that pay no attention to their ephemeral and inconstant residents; the footsteps that cannot be replicated, that leave no trace on asphalt or are quickly erased on dirt, those footsteps don’t stay behind but depart with us or even before us in their harmlessness or their venom; the medicines, our hurried scrawl, the cherished photos we display, which no longer look back at us, the pillow, our jacket hanging from the back of a chair, a pith helmet brought back from Tunisia in the 1930s aboard the ship Ciudad de Cádiz , it belongs to my father and still has its chin strap, and the Hindu lieutenant made of painted wood that I’ve just brought home with some hesitation, that figurine will also outlast me, or may. And the narratives we invent, which will be appropriated by others who, in speaking of our past existence, gone and never known, will render us fictitious. Even our gestures will continue to be made by someone who inherited them or saw them and was unknowingly mimetic or repeated them on purpose to invoke us and create a strange, momentary and vicarious illusion of our life; and perhaps there will remain, isolated in another person, certain of our traits which we will have transmitted involuntarily, as affectation or unconscious curse, because features can bring luck or misfortune, the eyes verging on Oriental and the mouth as if sketched on with a pencil—“beaky lip, beaky lip”—the chin almost cleft, the broad hands, a cigarette in the left one; I’ll leave no feature to anyone. We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

I am going to commit a number of affronts here because I will speak, among other things, of several dead men, real ones, whom I did not know, thereby becoming a kind of unexpected and distant posterity for them; I will be the memory of them though I have never seen them and they could not have foreseen me in their time, now gone: I will be their ghost. Most of them never set foot in my country and didn’t know my language, though one did, a man of whose death I have no record, Hugh Oloff de Wet, who was in Madrid the year I was born in Madrid, and long before that had been on the point of dying before a firing squad here. He had also killed people here, and in other places, before then and after. And there is someone else who, on the contrary, was born in my own house, in the same bed, I imagine, that I would be born in much later.

It is always said that behind every novel lies an episode, however pallid or tenuous or intermittent, in the life or reality of the author, though it may have been transfigured. This is said as if in distrust of the imagination and the inventive faculties, and also as if readers and critics needed something to hang onto, to keep from falling prey either to the strange vertigo of that which is absolutely invented and without experience or basis — as if they did not want to feel the horror of something that appears to exist as we read it, that breathes and whispers and sometimes even persuades, yet has never been — or to the ultimate absurdity of taking seriously what is only a representation, as if they were struggling against the lurking awareness that reading novels is a childish pastime, or at least inappropriate to the adult life that is always gaining on us.

Among my novels, there is one that granted its readers this consolation or alibi in greater measure than the others, and not only that but also invited them to suspect that whatever was recounted in it had its counterpart in my life, though I don’t know if that life, in its turn, is part of reality or not; perhaps it won’t be if I tell it and I’m already telling part of it. In any case, this novel, entitled Todas las almas or, in English, All Souls , lent itself to the almost absolute identification of its nameless narrator with its named author, Javier Marías, also author of the present narrative in which narrator and author do coincide and I no longer know if there is one of us or two, at least while I’m writing.

Todas las almas was first published by a company whose name is best forgotten in March or April of 1989, eight years ago now (March is the month that appears in the book, but Eduardo Mendoza generously presented it in the famous Madrid bar Chicote on April 7th, a very notable day for other reasons as well), and a simple glance at the author’s bio on the inside flap of the first edition yielded the information that I had taught at Oxford University for two academic years, between 1983 and 1985, just like the Spanish narrator of the book, though it mentions no dates. And it’s true that the narrator held the very position I held in my own life or history, of which I have retained some memory, but like many other elements of this and other novels I’ve written that was only a loan from author to character. Little of what is recounted in the book coincides with what I experienced or learned in Oxford, or only the most incidental things that have no effect on the course of events: the muffled atmosphere of that reserved and aloof city and its atemporal professors who harbor so many illusions about their occupation and so few about their lot in life (their perennially usufructuary spirit); the very orderly if dimly-lit antiquarian book stores that I — every bookseller’s dream come true — visited with gloved hands and eyes on the alert; the baleful and preoccupied beggars, great numbers of whom move through the streets in the evening, seething over some remote or imagined insult, with never a destination or goal or apology; the frantically pealing bells of the neighboring and perpetually empty churches of St. Giles and St. Aloysius, still stolidly calling out to the faithful of other, more credulous centuries, souls who no longer exist but who, because of those bells, may not have died; the derelict Didcot train station in its yellowish night of languid streetlamps that seemed ready to bid a final farewell with every flicker of their resigned, exhausted insomnia; a young, fair-haired woman there, in a raincoat and pearl necklace, smoking a cigarette and tapping out with her English feet in their low heels and buckles the remembered rhythm of a music no one else on that platform of nocturnal stragglers could hear; the daylight suspended for hours in the spring, making the wan sky come to a halt or persevere; a gypsyish flowerseller who stood across from my house on Sunday mornings in her leather jacket and high boots and long tresses that looked as if they were made of black rubber, I called her Jane in my book while her name in life was Anne, Anne Joseph, and she lived in nearby Reading with its famous gaol and was married to a Mr. Hyde, Anne Joseph Hyde at the age of nineteen, whether it rained or snowed or the wind lashed at her humble, foil-wrapped flowers and she had to pull her zipper all the way up and tuck in her chin, she was there, and she must be thirty-one years old now, if she’s still there, or in the city of Reading with Hyde; and the very ancient and frail porter with the diaphanous gaze who wished everyone a good day from his lodge at the Taylorian where I worked and taught my classes, I called him Will in the book, in whose pages I often spoke to him though I never did in life, in which he was named Tom, or never beyond an occasional cheerful greeting, and now I’ve learned that Tom has died and therefore they both have died, Tom and Will; it’s strange to have had a closer acquaintance with the porter named Will who never existed, or not in flesh and blood, and to feel greater sadness at his death, merely represented in paper and ink — or not even that, because the end of the novel specifies that “Will, the ancient porter … is still alive”—than at the death of the real Tom whose real name wasn’t Tom, either, but Walter, as I now see in a letter written by him on June 5, 1984, when I was there and sometimes encountered him, his blue eyes full of wonder and one jovial hand raised, at his post at the Taylorian which by then was only honorific: he was allowed to sit in the lodge sometimes so he would feel useful and not lose the thread of continuity, so he could play at still being a porter; in old age as in childhood we are deceived and we play and things are hidden from us, or perhaps that happens at any age. He signs the letter “Walter Thomas (Tom),” the other name in parentheses in case the professor he was writing the letter to didn’t recognize his real given and family names, the masters are often unaware of the family names of those who serve them, or who only stand and wait, as in Milton’s line. Tom writes without commas, in a hand that is quite steady and very legible for his age, and says he has spent seventy-three years as an Oxford porter and for that reason has recently participated in three morning radio talk shows broadcast by a local station, and a year before that appeared on a television program entitled Return to Oxford (“many of the professors were very pleased said I was very good”). “I’m starting to get a little old 93,” he adds, and explains how after serving for three years in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, he was a porter at Queen’s College and then for a long time after that at All Souls — All Souls itself (and I never knew that until now), or Todas las almas as the book was called in Spanish in a literal and inexact translation — from where he retired at the age of seventy. He mentions Sir Arthur Bryant, whose manservant he was at Queen’s and who was always telling him he should write a book. “He’s dead now,” he says of the historian who surely never bothered to write the history of Tom, “but he was a man it was a pleasure to work for,” he observes with the docility of one who was always a servant and perhaps because of that felt himself to be replaceable and secondary, not even a witness. “Good luck professor,” that’s how Tom takes his leave, Tom whom the recipient of the letter now made public calls “the most obliging man in Europe.” “Good luck professor,” is therefore also how the gentle and proud porter Will takes his leave of me, Will whom I invented or made up and who assigned me different names in his continuous travels through time — Dr. Magill and Dr. Myer and Mr. Brome, and Dr. Ashmore-Jones and Mr. Renner and Dr. Nott, and Mr. Trevor and Mr. Branshaw — for none of what I now know about Tom contradicts or refutes my fictional Will, who spent each day believing he was in a different year of his long life and for him, therefore, all of time was present or had returned and nothing was past or lost time that cannot be reproduced. He reproduced it without effort of will and so, to his good fortune, none of it was ambiguous to him. Who knows what living year of his journeyings he was in when death caught up to him, from what youthful or mature or elderly moment of his long existence he thought he was departing, what miserable or happy day. Perhaps his wife was still alive for Will on the day that brought his fragile body to a halt, his wife who had died long before in real time, our time, which he had abandoned, and perhaps he thought he was making a widow of the person whose widower he had been for so many years. I was told about Tom’s death by his nephew John, also a porter at the Taylorian who no doubt inherited the post, though the inheritance didn’t extend to his looks: John was a tall, corpulent man with his hair parted down the middle and the doughty moustache of an old-fashioned boxer, apparently tolerant of the weaknesses of others but with an excess of questionable humor, as I will describe later. He left his job not long ago: his Uncle Tom was spared the distress.