Dark Back of Time by Javier Marias

Author:Javier Marias [Marias, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95105-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Graham’s detailed account of the 31st day of December, 1922, in Mexico City, offers excellent proof that, however hard one tries, the events immediately prior to the final event, the catastrophe, have no reason to be perforce significant or even of any interest whatsoever. When someone dies unexpectedly, we try to reconstruct what they said the last time we saw them, as if this could somehow save them; we try to remember the final day, once we know it was final, with an effort we would never make had it been only the penultimate, or just any ordinary day of the many forgotten days of lost time, and so we deceive ourselves, shining on the occasion a light that did not belong to it, not its own light but that of the ending; death, with its suspended brilliance, illuminates whatever came before it (“Put out the light, and then put out the light”), even what was shadowy or grey, in and of itself, and unimportant, never intended or hoped or planned to leave a trace of any kind and was already fading away. Unforeseen or premature death contaminates what preceded it, shooting out its retrospective flames which change everything; what was no more than the day before yesterday is suddenly transformed into “the final years,” in the standard phrase of articles and biographies, which often speak of the deceased “during his final years,” as if anyone could have anticipated that; and some anodyne yesterday is stylized by the blade of repetition that chisels and idealizes and fixes it forever in our minds, because all at once it has acquired the ominous status of the day before the end, which in its own moment it did not have. We try to confer solemnity on what turned out to be the last thing, in most cases a charlatan, fictitious, inculcated, borrowed solemnity, as if it tormented us to think that we might, in our ignorance, lose some word or gaze or gesture of farewell, or to accept that the other person’s death caught us off guard, preventing us from seizing the final stretch of his life and being its attentive witnesses, before the metamorphosis. Our awareness of not having intuited this farewell—of not knowing that it was one—weighs on us, if we were convinced we’d see the other person at least once more, though he was already ill and we were afraid he wouldn’t last much longer. And we struggle to remember signals, signs, cruel ironies, unnoticed omens of what happened next, and that calms us, like seeing a film a second time or rereading a book and then taking note of the premonitions or forewarnings of its denouement, now that we know what it is and there is no one who can change it.

Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to evoke the last time I saw Aliocha Coll or even to know with any certainty when it was; he was a friend who committed suicide quite a while after that last time

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