Javier Marías | Cuando fui mortal (When I Was Mortal) / 2000

coincidence and contradiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Javier Marías Cuando fui mortal (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa as When I Was Mortal (New York: New Directions, 2000).

 

Although, as the author makes clear in his brief Foreword, the stories of When I Was Mortal were culled from many sources and written often on consignment with specific requirements, there is an odd continuity between the twelve short works of this book. All but two concern death, and in one of those two in which a death does not occur ("Unfinished Figures") it is imminent. Seven of the deaths are murders, primarily of spouses and sexual partners. Ghosts haunt two of these works (the title story "When I Was Mortal" and the last tale of the book, "No More Loves") and a seeming ghost is central to the best tale of the volume, "Spear Blood." 

     

     The narrator or onlooker is more or less a voyeur in seven of the tales, and even when the subject of observation is merely a horserace, as in "Broken Binoculars," there is throughout the story a sense of voyeurism as two men at the track share a single pair of binoculars in order the watch the races and the possible entrance of one of the gentleman's employer. Illness stalks the characters of four of these stories, and in two of them ("Everything Bad Comes Back" and "Fewer Scruples") figures central to the story commit suicide. Two of the stories deal with homosexuality. One might simply chalk all these commonalities up to the author's interests, his major themes, his preoccupations. But the continuities between stories—although the works themselves are superficially unlinked—continue. Two tales contain a character named Custardoy, and in two side by side tales ("Fewer Scruples" and "Spear Blood") figures visit the same street, Torpedero Tucumán. In two stories central figures are bodyguards, one who plots the death of his employer and the other whose charge manages to kill herself despite his protection. In these same two stories characters wear cowboy hats in connection with sex. And two of the book's characters die at the age of 39. Even within tales, coincidences and continuities abound: in the first story of the book, "The Night Doctor," the narrator leaves a party to accompany a woman to her home, where she is being visited by a late night Spanish doctor, only to return back to the home of his host, to whom the same doctor later appears. In "The Italian Legacy" two of the narrator's Italian friends living in Paris (a character in the first story was also an Italian friend living in Paris) marry husbands who upon traveling become suddenly ill, recover, and change (or promise to change) into violent personalities.

    I mention all of these not for any thematic intention on the author's part, but because they lend this assortment of tales a kind of strange magic, a subliminal linking that forces the reader to look more carefully at individuals, events, objects. The story central to the book, expanded from its original form, is, indeed, a kind of detective story which requires exactly this sort of attention to detail that Marías seems to ask of the reader. In "Spear Blood" the narrator's friend from childhood is found dead—the very day after he has dined with him—in his own bed with a spear plunged through his body. Next to him lay a nearly naked South American woman, who evidently was speared previous to the friend, Dorta. The weapon was Dorta's, brought back from a trip to Kenya. But the police cannot determine the identity of other victim nor have they any leads on the murderer himself; they can only presume that the woman was a prostitute brought home by the victim, who was murdered by a jealous husband or pimp. But the narrator, who knows his friend well and, indeed (as we gradually discover through the course of the story) has an abiding love for him, cannot believe this version of the murder—primarily because his friend was a confirmed homosexual who eschewed all sexual relations with women. Incredulous as the events seem, the narrator becomes fascinated by the existence of this woman, going so far as to ask the detective for a photograph of her dead body. Without further evidence, the police stick to their version and the case is allowed to be forgotten.  One night, however, as the narrator is enjoying an evening at a local restaurant, he spots a woman who appears in every detail to be the same as the one in his photograph—she even smokes the same Indonesian cigarettes as had his dead friend; however, in the photograph he as primarily studied her exposed breasts, and he now realizes he must see her breasts to determine if it is actually the same woman. He follows her and her companion to a bordello. Without giving away the plot, the result—if one has attended to all the small details of the story—is as inevitable as an adventure of Sherlock Holmes.

     Not all the tales in this volume are as brilliantly plotted and crafted as is "Spear Blood," but all are marvelously mysterious and clouded in suspense. And Marías's suspenseful style of numerous run-on sentences compounded into ongoing streams of excited phrases marked by commas, comes across in Margaret Jull Costa's excellent translation. One can hardly wait for New Directions to publish, as they have promised, several of this Spaniard's novels.

 

Los Angeles, 2000