The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others do, is to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it’s too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all. For the person who returns, there is no greater misfortune than to discover that he is surplus to requirements, that his presence isn’t wanted, that he is disturbing the universe, that he constitutes a hindrance to his loved ones, who don’t know what to do with him. [Marías, El Enamoramientos, p. 134-135]
From the very first sentence of this novel, the reader finds themselves in the frustrating yet enchanted position of listening in on the thoughts of a woman whose infatuation is, in turn, infatuated with someone else. Compounding this frustration and enchantment for English readers is the immaculate translation from the Spanish which has preserved the long sentences and florid structures native to that language. Some readers are turned off by this tension–enchanted by the exotic ideas of love and death while frustrated by the inner life of someone with whom they may not be able to empathize and who uses what seems like entirely too many words to make a point. But if you can put aside your preconceived notions about these things, you are in for an amazing story.
As before, I won’t attempt a review as I’m not very good at such things. I will list a few more thoughts I feel are important for me, personally, to remember from this novel and put them into the context of my spiritual journey.
Marías principally instructs us about the memory of the dead in the mind of the living. As the main idea, quoted above, is revisited towards the end of the novel as things finally take shape I can’t help but imagine the parallel with the Biblical description of the new Christian life: “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” [Gal. 2:20, NIV] When we look at our lives as believers, we can’t help but think this is very similar to the idea Díaz-Varela shares with María. As believers, it is at best inconvenient when our “old” man surfaces and attempts to take charge of our thoughts and actions as before. The old man is “disturbing the universe” and we often “don’t know what to do with him.”
I don’t want to spoil the book too much, so I’ll continue with my metaphor. When we first become Christians, we often feel like Luisa:
I miss him all the time, you see. I miss him when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I dream and throughout the whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.
We see evidence of our former habits and thought patterns everywhere. We cannot escape them, and for some the cost of setting them aside is too great. It is too overwhelming, and the initial conversion period is often both the most joyous and yet most arduous phase of the Christian life. After some time, however, the grip of the old man who has died will resemble María’s thoughtful reflection on her infatuations’ new lives:
She won’t feel like that now, she will have freed herself from his corpse, from her dead husband, his ghost, who has been kind enough not to come back. She has someone there before her now, and they can use each other to hide their own fate, as lovers do, according to a line I vaguely remember, a line of poetry I read in my adolescence. Her bed will no longer be sad or woeful, a living body will enter it each night, a body whose weight I know well and once greatly enjoyed.
As our life with Christ replaces our infatuation with ourselves, we are freed from captivity even to the ghost of the old man.
I felt The Infatuations to be a wonderfully fitting capstone to my 2013 resolution. It was a wonderfully complex, yet accessible book. And if you can remember the story, the lessons will not evade you. Thank you Marías.