the King of Redonda is dead
The most elaborate plans are for what happens if she passes away at Balmoral, where she spends three months of the year. This will trigger an initial wave of Scottish ritual. First, the Queen’s body will lie at rest in her smallest palace, at Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh, where she is traditionally guarded by the Royal Company of Archers, who wear eagle feathers in their bonnets.
As those kilted soldiers bore her coffin into the Palace of Holyroodhouse on Sunday, all according to plan, another monarch passed away somewhat unexpectedly: Xavier I, King of Redonda. He was 70 years old.
“I have never said that I am the king of Redonda or signed anything other than my name, Javier Marías. I have never been monarchic. I am rather a republican,” Javier Marías told the Paris Review in a 2006 interview. “I said that if something this novelistic intrudes in my life and I don’t accept it, I should not be considered a novelist. So I accepted.” Redonda, an uninhabited island near Antigua, has a long-disputed kingship that has been jokingly passed down among artists and writers. Marías, one of Spain’s preeminent novelists, received the title in the nineties from Jon Wynne-Tyson, and used it to grant his friends silly peerages (John Ashbery the “Duke of Convexo,” Alice Munro the “Duchess of Ontario,” &c.) and start a small imprint, Reino de Redonda, that publishes some of his translations and various other works.
Marías began translating and writing at a young age, with his debut novel at 20 and his translation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy at 25. His last novel, Tomás Nevinson, came out in Spanish last year. Under-read in the U.S. but widely translated throughout the world, he claims to have “adopted Laurence Sterne’s motto ever since I translated his Tristram Shandy […] ‘I progress — as I digress.’ Many of the things that look like mere digressions in my novels happen to be an important part of the story, afterwards.”
A couple weeks ago, I finished the largest of Marías’s fictional digressions: Tu rostro mañana (translated into English as Your Face Tomorrow), published in three volumes from 2002 to 2007. One of the most memorable books I have read in a long time, it is a sprawling discourse on the perils of language, dressed up as a spy novel. Its protagonist, Jacques Deza, has a knack for interpreting people, and is recruited by a nameless organization whose function he does not fully understand. The book unfolds through Deza’s musings, recollections, and his startling experiences with the organization.
From its opening salvo—“One should never tell anyone anything”—to its end, Your Face Tomorrow enacts and examines the paradox of speaking when one should remain silent. If we truly wished to avoid being misinterpreted, to avoid our words giving something away or breaking someone’s trust or exposing ourselves to humiliation and danger, we would always strive to be silent. And yet we do the opposite: gossiping, confiding, conjecturing, disclosing, fabricating, writing novels and weekly newsletters. “To fall silent,” muses Deza early in the book, “yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death, and I least of all[.]” In Deza’s world of espionage and murky organizations, the stakes of misinterpreting are heightened with the possibility of real-world hurt: “People are ceaselessly relating and narrating without even realising that they are, and quite unaware of the uncontrollable mechanisms of treachery, misunderstanding and chaos they are setting in motion and which could prove disastrous.”
Throughout the book, Deza recalls conversations with his father, Juan, and his mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler, both of whom were involved in the Spanish Civil War. The two men are based on Marías’s own father, Julián, an anti-Francoist philosopher who was nearly executed after the War; and Sir Peter Russell, an Iberian scholar and former intelligence officer. In an afterword, Marías acknowledges that “without [their] borrowed lives this book would not have existed. May they both rest now, in the fiction of these pages as well.”
Just as Your Face Tomorrow conjures a perilous future set in motion by the heedless loquacity of the present, it also suggests a past that runs riverlike beneath language, unaffected by our sayings and doings but integral to understanding them. A metafictional treatise on speaking and silence, Your Face Tomorrow is also an elegy for the past of Deza’s father, which Deza values as a time when people knew to keep quiet.
Though Your Face Tomorrow runs to some 1500 pages, Marías himself seems to share this nostalgia for a more taciturn era. In a 2018 interview, Marías offered an admittedly “unfair generalization” that “20, 25 years ago […] there was a different way of being in the world. There was a sense of modesty in a way, you could say a sobriety, that seems to have been lost in the last 20 years or so.”
Marías spent those 20 years writing a weekly column for El País, which he would compose on a typewriter and, after the obsolescence of fax machines, submit as a photo via WhatsApp. I have only read some of the over 900 pieces, but mostly they are cantankerous observations of this perceived decline of modesty. Reading through several, about the ineptitude of government (“the disdainful, timid, inept air of Rajoy”), odd personal anecdotes (“Ethan Hawke, que me instó a ver su película sobre Chet Baker, y el cordialísimo Chris Noth, famoso como ‘Mr Big’”), and cultural grievances (“the fatalism of statistics”; “las trolas que cuentan algunos guías”), I find that the nostalgia which dazzles in the dialogism of his novels becomes tedious in the univocal genre of punditry. Mourning his death, the El País editorial board gently characterized his column as “sus discrepancias con el tiempo presente”—his disagreements with the present time.
Hoping to find the winding, glimmering erudition of Your Face Tomorrow, I find instead the gripes of a man adrift in a time he finds unsuitable. But even in his more bizarre columns, there is that elegiac tone to the grievances, a feeling found in his fiction, not just that the past is gone, but that it is scorned. That the present resents it and obscures it while also ceaselessly banishing itself into its depths:
“Todo va tan rápido, y hay tal necesidad de amnesia y de pasar en seguida a otra cosa, que se corre el riesgo de que las mayores felonías queden sepultadas. No por el paso del tiempo, como fue la norma, sino por impaciencia y porque los ciudadanos de este bobo siglo precisan de novedades continuas, como los niños hiperactivos.”
“Everything goes so fast, and there’s such a need for amnesia and for moving on immediately to something else, that it runs the risk of the greatest felonies being buried. Not by the passage of time, as was the norm, but rather by impatience and because the citizens of this silly century require continuous novelties, like hyperactive children.”
Upon news of the Queen’s death, some “citizens of this silly century,” many of them monarchists and right-wing types, insisted that the Queen represented a kind of duty and gravity now rare in the world. Trump Advisor Stephen Miller, for instance, lamented that “Queen Elizabeth was our last link to a lost age of magic and glory, radiating our world with light.” Repulsed by such a notion, I have been trying to figure out what differentiates the nostalgia of an old novelist like Marías from the nostalgia of British monarchists and American fantasists that the Queen’s death unleashed.
The title of Your Face Tomorrow comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II: “What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name! or to know thy face to-morrow!” One recurring motif of the book is the scene in Henry V where Hal goes incognito among his soldiers, unrecognized without his finery. In a conversation Deza has with Wheeler, the old man explains that
Kings of old were shameless creatures, but at least Shakespeare’s kings did not entirely deceive themselves: they knew their hands were stained with blood and they did not forget how they came to wear the crown, apart from murders and betrayals and plots (perhaps they were too human). Ceremony, Jacobo, that’s all. Changing, limitless, general ceremony. As well as secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence. But never speaking, never talking, never using words, however exquisite or captivating they might be. Because that, deep down, is within the grasp of any beggar, any outcast, any poor wretch, any one of the dispossessed. In that regard, they only differ from the king in the insignificant and ameliorable matter of perfection and degree.
Marías’s characters are not nostalgic for a monarchically mysterious world, knowing too well the horrors that obscures; that the reserve of royalty is a mitigation of risks on their dominion, a way of codifying a bloodied past with silent spectacle. Even Marías himself, when pressed by the interviewer in 2018 to elaborate on the “dignified” time of 20 years ago, added, “Yeah, more dignified and more modest. Of course, much worse, too.”
In his fiction, his interviews, and even some of his weekly columns, Marías seems to be nostalgic for the past as the past. For the reality of the past, for the acknowledgment of it. Not as something that still lingers about us like dust, like Faulkner’s aphorism that “The past is never dead,” but something gone, inaccessible, badly understood, unfairly condemned by the present. Later in his talk with Deza, Wheeler
looked down for a second, and still had his eyes fixed on the grass, or perhaps beyond that, on the earth beneath the grass, or beyond that, on the invisible earth beneath the earth, then added after a brief pause: ‘The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.’
Russell and Marías’s father can “rest now, in the fiction of these pages” of Marías’s work, but it makes no difference to them. And now makes no difference to Marías. The past is the silence, or what the silence must consider. The future is the ruin we talk our way toward. The present is a bobo siglo. The dead are irrevocable. What can one do but write?
Marías: “I don’t write to gain time: I write in order to lose it, to feel it, to feel it pass.” And so it passes, and has passed, and so has he, into the invisible earth beneath the earth.
ben tapeworm