A Heart So White (19 page)

On TV Jerry Lewis was busy hoovering. The hoover was like a puppy that kept jumping up at him.

"And what if it's something that can't be told?"

"What do you mean? Everything can be told. It's just a matter of starting, one word follows another."

"Something that shouldn't be told. Something whose moment has passed. Every time has its own stories and if you let the moment pass, then sometimes it's best to keep silent forever. All things have their rime, when that's passed, they lose their timeliness."

"I don't believe in things whose time has passed, it's all there waiting for us to call it back. Besides, everyone likes to tell their story, even people who haven't got one. Even though the stories may differ, the meaning's the same."

I turned round slightly to look her in the face. She was going to be there forever, at my side, at least that's the idea, forming part of my story, in my bed which is not my bed but ours, or perhaps hers and, if she were ever to go away one day, I'd be prepared to await her return patiently. When I moved, I brushed her breast with my arm, her breast was bare beneath the light fabric, almost visible through it. I left my arm where it was, so that she'd have to move to break the contact.

"Look," I said, "people who keep secrets for a long time don't always do so out of shame or in order to protect themselves, sometimes it's to protect others, or to preserve a friendship, or a love affair, or a marriage, to make life more tolerable for their children or to shield them from some fear, of which they usually have many. Maybe they simply don't want to add to the world a story they wished had never happened. Not talking about it is like erasing it, forgetting it a little, denying it, not telling a story can be a small favour one does to the world. You have to respect that. You might not want to know everything about me, later on, as time goes by, you might not want to, and I won't want to know everything about you either. You wouldn't want a son of ours to know everything about us. About us when we were separate, for example, before we met. Not even we know everything about each other, neither before, when we were apart nor now, when we're together."

With a perfectly natural gesture, Luisa moved away a little, that is, she removed her breast from where my arm had been, there was no contact now. She picked up a cigarette from her bedside table, lit it, took two rapid puffs and tried to remove the ash that had not yet formed, suddenly she seemed a bit upset, rather serious, which was unlike her. It was the first time there'd been any mention of a child, neither of us had ever talked about this plan until then, it was too soon, and now this first mention hadn't been part of a plan, but hypothetical, in order to illustrate something else. Without looking at me, she said:

"I'd certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me, like Guillermo, that man in the hotel in Havana." She said this without looking at me and she said it quickly.

"So you heard that?"

"Of course I did, I was there just like you, how could I help but hear it?"

"I wasn't sure, you were half-asleep and feverish, that's why I never said anything to you."

"But if you thought I hadn't heard, why didn't you tell me the next day either? You could have told me then, since you tell me everything else. Or perhaps you don't, in fact, tell me everything."

Luisa had suddenly become angry, but I couldn't tell if it was because I hadn't told her what I acknowledged I'd heard or if her anger was aimed at Guillermo, or perhaps at Miriam, or even at men in general, women have more of a community feeling than we do and often get angry with all men at the same time. She might also have been angry because that first mention of a child had been only hypothetical and made merely in passing and hadn't been expressed as a proposition or a desire.

She picked up the remote control and flicked through the other channels only to return to the original programme. Jerry Lewis was attempting to eat some spaghetti. He started turning the fork round and round and now his whole arm was swathed in pasta. He was looking at it in amazement and biting at it. I laughed like a child, I had in fact seen that film as a child.

"What did you think of Guillermo?" I asked. "What do you think he'll do?" Now we could have the conversation that neither Luisa nor I had wanted to have at the time, because of her feverish state. Maybe everything does await its moment of restitution, but nothing comes back in quite the same way in which it would have happened but didn't. It didn't matter now, she'd put it in brutal, frivolous terms, she'd said: "I'd certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me." I still hadn't answered that, between people who talk about everything and talk nonstop, it's so easy not to reply to things you don't want to reply to, the words become superimposed, the ideas don't last, they disappear, although sometimes they come back, if one of you insists.

'The worst thing is that he won't do anything," Luisa said. "It'll all go on as it has up until now, with Miriam waiting and his wife dying, if she really is ill or if she really does exist, as Miriam was quite right to doubt."

"I don't know that she's ill, but I'm sure she exists," I said. "That man is definitely married," I declared.

Luisa wasn't looking at me now, she was looking at Jerry Lewis and was still annoyed. She's younger than me, she may not have seen the film when she was a child. I felt like turning the sound up but I didn't, that would have put an end to the conversation. Besides, she had the remote control in one hand and in the other her half-smoked cigarette. It was quite hot, but not that hot: I noticed that the skin between her breasts was damp, slightly shiny with sweat.

"It makes no difference, even if she died he wouldn't do anything, he still wouldn't bring that woman from Havana over here."

"Why not? You didn't see her. I did. She was pretty."

"I'm sure she is, but she's also a woman who gives him a lot of trouble, he's well aware of that. Here or there, as lover or wife, she always would give him trouble. All her interests lie outside herself, she's totally dependent on the other person, there are still plenty of women around like that, no one's yet taught them to do anything other than to think about themselves in relation to another." Luisa paused for a moment, but then went on, as if she regretted using the verb "teach". "It may be that it isn't a question of teaching, simply of heredity, they're born bored with themselves, I've known lots of women like that. They spend half their lives waiting, then nothing happens or they treat what does happen with utter indifference, then they spend the other half of their lives remembering and brooding over what seemed so little to them or which was, in fact, nothing. That's the way our grandmothers were and the way our mothers still are. With Miriam there's no future gain, only what there is now, which will gradually diminish anyway, so why change anything? Less pretty, less desire, more repetition. That woman's played all her cards, she didn't even start with a very good hand, she holds no surprises, she's given all she's got to give. You only get married if you expect there to be a few surprises, some gain, some improvement. Well, not always." She remained silent for a second and then added: "I really pity her."

"She may not have any more to give, but, on the other hand, she could cease to be a burden, that's the future gain there might be with her. She'd cease to be a burden if Guillermo were to marry her one day. Some men are like that too, you know."

"Like what?"

"Bored with themselves, only able to think about themselves in relation to another, to a woman. That kind of man likes women who give him trouble, it helps to pass the time, it amuses him, justifies his existence, just as it does for the women who cause all the trouble."

"Guillermo isn't like that," Luisa asserted (both of us are much given to making such assertions).

This time she did look at me, albeit out of the corner of her eye, a distrustful look — an inherited distrust — or so it seemed to me. A question hung in the air, possible, even probable or obligatory, a question that either she could ask or I could: "Why did you marry me?" Or rather "Why do you think I married you?"

"Custardoy asked me this afternoon why I married you." That was my way of both asking and not asking the question.

Luisa realized that she was expected to say: "And what did you tell him?" She could also remain silent, she's as sensitive to words as I am, we share the same profession, although she works less now. She remained silent for the moment and again flicked through the channels with the remote control, this took a matter of seconds, then stopped again, returning to Jerry Lewis, who was dancing now with an elegantly suited man in an enormous empty room. I recognized and remembered the man at once, it was George Raft, who over many years specialized in gangster roles and was a brilliant dancer of boleros and rumbas, and had appeared in the famous film
Scarface
. Jerry Lewis had cast doubt on his true identity ("Come on now, you're not George Raft, you may look like him, but you're not him really, though I bet you'd love to be") and had made him dance a bolero to prove that he could dance like George Raft and therefore was George Raft. Their arms about each other, the two men danced in the dark, in the middle of the empty room, their two figures lit by a spotlight. It was a scene that was both comic and strange. To dance like someone in order to prove to a doubting partner that one is that someone. That scene was in colour and the others had been in black and white, perhaps this wasn't a film at all but a retrospective of the comic's work. When they stopped dancing and shyly separated, I remember that Lewis said to Raft, as if he were doing him a big favour: "All right, I believe you, you
are
the real Raft" (but we still had the sound down and I couldn't hear it now, the words were a memory from my inexact childhood). Luisa didn't say: "And what did you tell him?" but:

"And did you answer him?"

"No. He only wanted to know about what we got up to in bed, that's what he was really asking me."

"And you didn't answer him."

"No."

Luisa burst out laughing, her good humour suddenly restored.

"But that's the sort of conversation schoolboys have," she said, still laughing.

I think I blushed a little, in fact, I blushed for Custardoy, not for myself, they hardly knew each other then and that's why, in her presence, I felt responsible for Custardoy, who was my friend, an old friend, well, not exactly, but you feel responsible for everything that might embarrass you and almost anything can embarrass you before the object of your love (when you first begin to love them), which is also why we're capable of betraying anyone, because, above all, you betray your own past, or whatever one hates or denies in that past (she was not in that past, the person who saves us and improves us, the person who ennobles us, or at least so we believe while we love her).

"That's why I didn't want to get involved," I said.

"What a pity," she said. "If you had, you could now be telling me what you'd told him."

Now I was the one who didn't feel like laughing, people are so often out of step with each other by a matter of seconds. But laughter can usually wait.

I felt uncomfortable, ashamed. I remained silent. Why tell her? Then I said:

"So you don't think Guillermo will ever kill his sick wife." I returned to Havana and to the topic that had made Luisa so serious. I wanted her to go back to being serious.

"Of course he won't kill her, of course he won't," she replied with confidence. "No one kills anyone because someone else asks them to, someone who might then leave them. Otherwise he'd have done it already, difficult things always seem possible if you think about them a little, but they become impossible if you think about them too much. Do you know what'll happen? The man will stop going to Cuba one day and they'll forget about each other. He'll stay married to his wife for the rest of his life, whether she's ill or not, and if she is ill, he'll do whatever he can to make her better. She's his guarantee. He'll go on having mistresses, doing his best to find ones who don't give him any trouble. Married women, for example."

"Is that what you'd like?"

"No, that's what I think will happen."

"And what about her?"

"She's less easy to predict. She might meet another man soon afterwards and the time she spends with him will seem little or nothing. She might well kill herself as she said she would, when she sees that he isn't coming back. She might just wait and remember. Whatever happens, she's done for. Things will never work out the way she wants them to."

"They say that people who talk about killing themselves never do."

'That's stupid. It takes all sorts."

I took the remote control from her. I put down on the bedside table the book I'd been holding in my hands, without reading a line. The book was
Pnin
by Nabokov. I never did finish it, although I was really enjoying it.

"And what about my father and my aunt? Now, according to Custardoy, it turns out that she killed herself."

"If you want to know if she gave any prior warning, you're going to have to ask him. Are you sure you don't want me to?"

I hesitated a little before replying, then said:

"No." I thought for a while longer and said: "I don't think so. I'll have to think about it."

I turned the sound up on the Jerry Lewis retrospective. Luisa turned out the light on her side and turned over as if she was going to sleep.

"I'll switch off the light in a minute," I said to her.

"The light doesn't bother me. But can you tum the sound down on the television?"

Jerry Lewis was now sitting in a cinema before the film began, holding a bag of popcorn in one hand. When he applauded all the popcorn fell on the head of a staid, white-haired lady sitting in front of him. "Oh, madam," he was saying, "my popcorn's fallen in your hair, allow me to remove it," and in fifteen seconds he destroyed the woman's carefully coiffed hair. "Just sit still a moment," he said to her whilst he rumpled and manhandled her hair, turning it into the hair of a bacchante. "Well," he said reproachfully, "just look at the state of your hair." I laughed out loud, I'd never seen that sketch when I was a child, I was sure of it, it was the first time that I'd seen or heard it.