Doppelgängers, ghosts, and philosophical riddles about the nature of identity make up Javier Marías’ new collection of short fictions.
“This is my life and my death, where there is nothing.”
So ends “The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga,” the earliest of the ten stories that comprise While the Women Are Sleeping, the supremely entertaining new collection by venerable Spanish author Javier Marías. Written when Marías was just fourteen, and narrated by a dead man, the precocious story is preoccupied with a theme that comes up throughout the book: the impossibility of escaping life in death, and vice versa. For Marías, there is no significant distinction between the living and the dead—ghosts don’t so much haunt these stories as populate them alongside their mortal counterparts. The dead want what the living want—to be reunited with a lover, to be read a story—and when one of them is fed up with the indignities of death (life?) he posts a letter of resignation. The beyond turns out to be no more mysterious than life, the differences between the two seem negligible.
Not that there aren’t plenty of mysteries here. “He devoted his whole life to trying to resolve an enigma,” begins one story. This is a popular pursuit among Marías’ characters. A schoolteacher becomes obsessed with finding out why that ghost keeps resigning every night; a businessman meets his doppelgänger and ends up futilely trying to outsmart his own reflection. Many of these enigmas remain unsolved at story’s end. In another doppelgänger story, “Lord Rendall’s Song,” the narrator watches his double commit murder, but the identities of perpetrator, victim, and witness are all called into question. In the title story, another murder looms over the proceedings, but the narrator wonders if it has already happened, or if it will happen at all.
As a result of this resistance to resolution, some of these stories can feel unfinished. But most of them tantalize with the promise of secrets hidden within. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is mentioned with admiration in “A Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps,” wherein a woman solves the mystery of a ghost’s identity through deduction; this is fitting, because many of these stories are like mysteries without a solution.
Marías understands, as did Jorge Luis Borges and Ernest Hemingway, that the most rewarding revelations in fiction are the result of left-out details. Borges wrote stories that got the reader’s imagination going by suggesting a possibility or a perspective, and Marías is also content to render the outline of a world and allow us to fill in the rest. “Lord Rendall’s Song” portrays what Marías calls “a vertiginous mise en abîme” and ends inconclusively, with a line that echoes the ending of Borges’ own reflection on reflexivity, “Borges and I.” The result is a haunting philosophical riddle about the nature of identity. Another logical game, “Isaac’s Journey,” plays with notions of fate and prophecy.
Borges’ influence is further evident in Marías’ textual inventions. “Lord Rendall’s Song” is attributed to an English author whom, in an Author’s Note, Marías admits to having invented. “An Epigram of Fealty” hinges on an apocryphal pamphlet containing three unpublished Dylan Thomas poems. But these stories aren’t cold postmodern exercises: Marías’ tales are imbued with a healthy and often amusing sense of their own improbability. In “One Night of Love,” the narrator begins receiving letters that may or may not be coming from beyond the grave. At one point, the mysterious letter writer states that she cannot go on living in a state of uncertainty. The narrator repeats these words incredulously: “That’s what she said, go on living.”
The narrator of the title story says of someone else, “He had the virtue, one that is becoming increasingly rare, of believing that everything is important, or, rather, that everything that comes from oneself has the virtue of knowing itself to be unique.” Many of Marías’ characters share this virtue. In the final story, “What the Butler Said,” mechanical trouble strands the narrator—Javier Marías—on an elevator with the domestic servant of a wealthy American. “Marías” panics but the butler calmly passes the time by relating his experiences with his employer’s Spanish wife, a woman the butler despises. He reveals to “Marías,” a complete stranger, some rather compromising details relating to his tenure under this mistress—his hobby of practicing black magic on her being the least of them. As the narrator becomes more and more uncomfortable, he starts pounding on the elevator door with greater intensity, hoping to be delivered from the situation. But the butler either remains oblivious or doesn’t care. He has something to say, and appreciates the uniqueness of his story even if no one else does.
So, why does the butler hate his mistress? One reason is revealed in the course of his monologue. She gave birth to a child with a serious birth defect. The little girl was not expected to live more than a few months. During this time the mother refused to so much as visit the baby’s room. She treated her daughter “as if she had already ceased to exist before she died.” And that seems to be what disturbs the butler: that this girl was assigned to the ranks of the dead from the beginning of her life. Unlike his mistress, the butler understands that death is not another world; it is an aspect of our world that exists alongside life. Sometimes the dead even walk among us.
