Javier Marías was in the movie section at FNAC in Callao and was carefully studying movie titles when I first saw him. It was many years ago. Unmasking him in that corner, alone, cold-blooded, unaware of the speed of the world or even of his interests, impressed me. It was the equivalent of a hidden lighting that could turn on at the most unexpected moment, only when you encountered a legend of your imagination.
Marias wore a hat and a jacket that was a size or two larger, reaching halfway across her hands. I guess I was nervous and looked around to see if anyone else had seen what I saw: The Most Important Writer. This vision wrapped up an impressive week, as he had discovered Javier Cercas, Gonzalo Suárez and David Trueba a few days ago while leaving a restaurant on Calle de los Caños del Peral near Ópera.
My eyes were so dazzled that I had been spying on him for a while when I noticed. I pretended to look at the headlines while he was actually looking at them. He glanced sideways at her once in a while, and if the novelist moved forward, he followed, trying to track down the films he bought and put them back on the shelves. I was with my wife who was starting to find my behavior erratic. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked me. “Shhh,” I said, and with a slight nod of my chin, I showed him where to look: The Most Elegant Novelist.
Half an hour would pass. When he finally chose a few books and paid for them, I sneaked him out of the building. “Come on, come on,” I hastily followed Marta down the escalator after the impersonal Author. If it were up to me, I would have followed him from the Preciados to Sol and perhaps to Calle Mayor and from there to the door of his house in the Plaza de la Villa, but my partner stopped me: “Don’t do it, you idiot, go. Don’t let him go until he’s lost in the crowd. I gave.
That meeting at FNAC, the showcase of sound and style, the adventure of expression, Marias’ All souls, Tomorrow in the battle think of me, Heart too white or black is the return of time.
A few months later, I came across him nonstop as a novel character. It seems there were many ways to become Javier Marías. In this fiction, one of his neighbors invited him to a party at his house and someone asked him to cut a ham. They had to remove the blade: it destroyed the piece. It would come later when Marías told an anecdote at another dinner featuring Alfred Julius Ayer, founder of logical positivism and author of Language, Truth and Logic.
During the World Cup in England in July 1966, his father was 73 years old and Alfred Julius went with him to the opening match between the home team and Uruguay. “They played at Wembley and drew 0-0 with a controversial refereeing by Istvan Zsolt,” said Marías. Ayers returned to the stadium when he faced Argentina in the quarterfinals. The father, who was so ill, made his son promise that he would take the field no matter what if England reached the final. Three hours before the final, the parent died. But Alfred, keeping his promise, put the body in a wheelchair and they saw from the stands, including overtime, that England was the champion. According to Marías, the burial took place a day later,” he said. Other than that, the novel was completely forgettable. Actually, I wrote it. But it did help me declare my deep admiration for an author I stopped reading one day, I guess in order to get close to some of his novels for the first time in the future.