From An Interview with Javier Marías

JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ
translated by Anne McLean

Javier Marías has a reputation as a bit of an eccentric, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s not just the fact that his place in the country—in Soria, 230 kilometres from Madrid—contains an exact duplicate of everything he uses at home, from the typewriter to the razor; or that he’s always refused to use a computer; or that he communicates with the world only by fax and regular mail. Marías is a king: King Xavier I of Redonda. The process of his coronation is explained in his book Dark Back of Time. In the nineteenth century, a tycoon took possession of Redonda, a tiny uninhabited island in the Caribbean and made his son the king. This son grew up to become the science fiction writer Matthew Phipps Shiel, pen-name M.P. Shiel. When Shiel died in 1947, the island and its title were inherited by writer John Gawsworth. Several inheritances later, Marías, who had written about Gawsworth and Redonda in his novel All Souls, received a call from Jon Wynne-Tyson, a trustee of Gawsworth’s estate, proposing Marías be the next king. The crown has no value but has allowed Marías, following tradition, to grant fictitious titles here and there. Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is Duke of Trémula; J. M. Coetzee is Duke of Deshonra; Alice Munro is Duchess of Ontario.
     Marías, born in Madrid in 1951, was a precocious writer: he published his first two novels, Los dominios del lobo [The Dominions of the Wolf] and Voyage Along the Horizon, at the ages of nineteen and twenty-one respectively. They were parodies, derived from the American movies and adventure novels the young Marías had consumed with passion, and made him the object of a criticism that has stuck with him ever since: not being very Spanish. When El siglo [The Century] was published in 1983, Marías was already a full-fledged writer. Concerning the novels that followed—The Man of Feeling, All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, Dark Back of Time—many clichés could be spouted: “garnered success,” “earned him a place in . . . . ” I’d rather say that for me reading them was an epiphany. I had never heard a voice like that in my language, and for several years post-Franco Spanish literature meant Marías and two other names. Deliberately hybrid and shamelessly anglophile, Marías’s voice opened several doors and freed me of several complexes. It had the best effect an influence can have: it allowed me to do things I’d previously thought were forbidden. Since then I’ve read everything Marías has written, even those works he wasn’t the author of: the first time I read Joseph Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea, for example, it was in Marías’s translation,El espejo del mar, rather than the original.
     The novelist is the son of philosopher Julián Marías (1914–2005). After General Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, many liberal intellectuals suffered persecution under the triumphant fascist regime. Julián Marías was one of them: betrayed by a friend in unclear circumstances, he spent three months in prison and then found himself denied university jobs and not permitted to publish his work. The betrayal, fictionalized, is one of the central themes of Your Face Tomorrow, the singular thirteen-hundred-page mega-novel that Marías published in three volumes between 2002 and 2007, the third volume of which has just appeared in English. Its narrator, Jaime or Jacques or Jack or Jacobo Deza (his name changes during the narration, depending on his interlocutor and other circumstances), is a Spaniard who’s been hired by the British Secret Intelligence Service as part of an extraordinary team: they are people whose talent is to interpret others. That is, people able to know, through the study of another person’s gestures and words, how they will react in the future, what probabilities their blood carries, what their face will be like tomorrow.
     When I asked if I could come and see him in his study in Madrid, it was to talk about this book, which I consider one of the great achievements of contemporary narrative in my language. The first thing he did on my arrival was to show me his Conradian treasures (Conrad is a passion we share)—a framed letter and a couple of signed volumes. Marías is a collector: he has a cigarette case that once belonged to Arthur Conan Doyle, for example; he also has an album of Spanish Football League cards from 1959. Soccer is another enthusiam we have in common—on opposite sides, however, of the great Madrid–Barça rivalry…

JGV:	You’ve got a book of writings on soccer, Salvajes y sentimentales [Savages and Sentimentalists], published in 2000, but I understand an expanded version is coming out.
JM:	Yes, with thirty more articles that have been published since 1999. We’ve just been discussing what I’d like to have on the cover, and I suggested images from an album of football cards of the 1958–1959 league that I collected as a boy but then lost. A couple of years ago, I was able to buy it again, at a good price. They’re very funny cards, very much of their time: the head is a photo of the player, but the body is a caricature. There’s Madrid’s legendary attack: Kopa, Rial, Di Stéfano, Puskas, and Gento. Then there’s Barça’s: Kubala, Czibor, Luis Suárez . . . I don’t know if you’ve heard of any of them, since you’re so young.
JGV:	Well, yeah. Di Stéfano played in Colombia. Puskas and Czibor were part of the extraordinary Hungarian national team that played in the 1954 World Cup, in Germany. I’ve got lots of useless information in my head, and it’s all to do with a magazine that circulated in Colombia before the World Cup in Spain. It was called Copa 82, I collected it, and the magazine had all the history of the World Cups. I ended up knowing some very curious things, like, for example, the Hungarian lineup from 1954. Absurd.
JM:	Well, I really like those cards—because I had them as a boy, of course. I got the album from eBay. I don’t know much about the internet, but a friend found it for me. In one of the new articles for Salvajes y sentimentales, I tell the story of how far I went to include one of the hardest-to-get cards, that of an Atlético de Madrid player called Mendonça. Later he played for Barcelona. In exchange for Mendonça, I had to hand over not just several other cards, but also a photo of my aunt.
JGV:	A photo?
JM:	My aunt was my mother’s sister, but quite a bit younger, and she was very pretty. I liked the photo because . . . well, because she was really pretty. And someone offered to give me a Mendonça card as a trade for quite a few other cards and the photo of my aunt. And I handed her over. In the article I apologize to my aunt, who must be more than eighty by now. “I sold you short,” I said. For a soccer player. And an Atlético player, at that.
JGV:	What’s your current relationship with soccer? Do you go to matches at the stadium? I ask because I suffer from this conflict: my love of the spectacle is as great as my dislike of crowds, especially crowds that sing and shout and insult each other in unison. How do you handle it?
JM:	Well, I haven’t gone to the stadium for years, I always watch the matches on television. More than the unpleasant gangs of hooligans—there are lots of them, more all the time—it’s a matter of time: going out to Chamartín, watching the match, and coming back takes more than four hours altogether. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that much spare time. The last times I went to the stadium was when they used to invite me to the royal box at Real Madrid. At least I didn’t have to stand in line to get in and we were served ham at half-time. I saw Real Madrid beat Barcelona 5–0 from there. Sorry about that.
JGV:	I was just about to ask you where you saw Real Madrid lose to Barcelona 2–6, but I won’t. I remember an article you called “The Weekly Recuperation of Childhood.” A soccer fan is, almost by definition, nostalgic. We get infected by soccer in childhood. How do you relate to your soccer past? What’s your best soccer memory, or worst?
JM:	The best and worst are from childhood, when we experience the game most intensely. Well, this is relative, one turns back into a little boy whenever one watches one’s team play an important match. My best memory is the fifth time we were in the final for the European Cup, I think in 1960: Real Madrid 7–Eintracht Frankfurt 3. And the Germans scored first. I have that game on video, and every once in a while I put it on for some young friend, who’s always flabbergasted. The worst, the European Cup final one or maybe two years later: Benfica 5–Real Madrid 3. And we’d been winning 2–0, if I remember right. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my childhood. I don’t have that match on video.
JGV:	You don’t want to watch it again?
JM:	No way.
JGV:	Are there any soccer equivalents to your signed Conrad books?
JM:	The day when, in the royal box at Madrid, I had the opportunity to say hello to Di Stéfano, the greatest legend of my childhood. He’s my Conrad of soccer.
JGV:	That makes me think of the small tradition of well-read soccer players in Spain. I like to tell the anecdote about Guardiola: minutes before taking the field and winning the 1992 European Cup final, he finished reading Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur. And he said the emotion of the novel helped his play that night.
JM:	Yes, it’s not a very long list, but I remember Marcial, who played for Español and later for Barcelona, who was a big reader and great midfielder; Miguel Ángel, the Madrid goalkeeper; Breitner, the German who played for Madrid, quite well read and politically left-wing. More recently, of course, Guardiola, Valdano, Pardeza (he even writes). And when Emilio Butragueño, one of the great players in the history of Real Madrid, read Salvajes y sentimentales, he liked it so much he asked if he could read everything else I’d written about soccer (alas, there was no more). The same thing happened with Lobo Carrasco, the Barcelona player. And there was a call that means a lot to me from Valdano to congratulate me on an article I wrote about Zidane’s famous goal in the European Cup final against Bayer Leverkusen. He said, “You need to know a lot about soccer to write what you’ve written.” It might be one of the pieces of praise I’m most proud of. And, it only just occurred to me, all those guys are Madrid or Barça players.
JGV:	I asked because writers who are soccer fans tend to recall Camus or Nabokov, their past as goalkeepers, et cetera. Do you think we do that, seeking some sort of absurd justification? After all, writers tend to be relatively individualistic and feel a certain distrust of gregariousness and jingoism.
JM:	Well, yes, there is that. Neither Camus nor Nabokov are ever suspected of literary lightness—in the bad sense of the word lightness—so in some way, by invoking them, we’re saying, “Look, I’m not an idiot or frivolous. I have illustrious predecessors.” It’s true that writers are very individualistic and rarely feel part of a group or a collective. But maybe because of that, the yearning to belong, we allow ourselves to transfer the epic of comradeship to a territory so apparently distant to that of our literary activities.
JGV:	Camus said that everything he knew about morals he’d learned on the soccer pitch. Do you think we sublimate this too much, or is there a bit of truth to the idea of soccer as a metaphor for life?
JM:	There is some truth to it, for me at least. In soccer there is victory and defeat, chance, drama, the unexpected, and twists of fate; there is revenge (or desire to get even), tradition, generosity and egotism, nobility and vileness, arrogance and humility, envy and jealousy, brutal rivalry, struggle, feelings of humiliation and collapse, there is momentary ecstasy (like all ecstasies). Is not all of life at its most vehement contained in that, life at its most alive? And, of course, there is skill and inspiration, but also good and bad luck. What more could you ask for?

(From Brick 85, used by permission of the author)