A Heart So White by Javier Marías

for them. But, of course, we still have to do it in a way which they believe they've chosen, just as couples get together believing that both have chosen to do so, with their eyes wide open. It's not just that one of them has been obliged to do so by the other — or persuaded to do so if you prefer — it's that, at some point in the long process that brought them together, both of them have been obliged, don't you think, and are then obliged to stay together for some time, even until death. Sometimes they're obliged by some external factor or by someone who's no longer in their lives, the past obliges them, their own discontent, their own history, their own wretched biography obliges them. Or even things they know nothing about or which are beyond their comprehension, the part of our inheritance we all carry within us and of which we're all ignorant, who knows when that whole process actually began . . ."
    While I was translating this long meditation (I didn't bother to translate the "Hmm" and I began with "I wonder if anyone" in order to make the dialogue between them more coherent), the woman kept pausing while she was speaking to look at the floor with a modest, absent smile, a little embarrassed perhaps, her hands splayed out, resting on her thighs, the way women of a certain age with nothing much to do often sit to watch the afternoon pass by, although she did have things to do and it was still only the morning. And while I was translating her speech, almost simultaneously, and wondering where that quotation from Shakespeare came from ("The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures," she'd said and as I heard the words leave her painted lips, I'd hesitated over whether to translate "the sleeping" as "the sleepers" and "pictures" as "portraits"), and I was wondering too if our politician would be capable of thoroughly understanding such a long speech, of not getting lost, of coming up with a suitable reply, I could feel Luisa's head growing closer to mine, closer to the back of my neck, as if she'd shifted her position or bent forwards a little in order to hear the two versions more clearly, unconcerned about keeping a distance, that is, the short distance that now separated her from me, and which now, with that movement forward (a forward movement of her face: nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks), had grown still shorter, so that I could almost hear her light breathing by my ear, her slightly troubled, rapid breathing almost brushing my ear, the lobe of my ear, as if it were a whisper so quiet that it lacked any message or meaning, as if her breathing, or the act of whispering itself, was all that was to be transmitted, that and perhaps the slight stirring of her breast, that didn't brush against me but which I could feel was much closer now, almost touching, unfamiliar. It's always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only really feel supported or backed up when, as the latter verb itself indicates, there's someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does, and at times, that someone places a hand on our shoulder, a hand to calm us and also to hold us. That's how most married people and most couples sleep or think they sleep, the two turn to the same side when they say goodnight, so that one has his or her back to the other throughout the whole night and feels backed up by the other person, and in the middle of the night, when he or she wakes up startled from a nightmare, or is unable to get to sleep, or is suffering from a fever or feels alone and abandoned in the darkness, they have only to turn round and see before them the face of the person protecting them, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on their shoulder