Corazón tan blanco

"I have not wanted to know, but I have come to learn that one of the girls, when she was no longer a girl and had not long returned from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood before the mirror, opened her blouse, took off her bra and searched for her heart with the tip of the gun..."

So begins this masterful novel by Javier Marías. But "that was a long time ago," the narrator adds: now it is he who is newly married, to Luisa, and on his own honeymoon in Havana, he sees from the balcony of his hotel an unknown woman waiting in the street who, for a few seconds, mistakes him for the person she has arranged to meet. From then on the narrator feels a growing and inexplicable unease ("premonitions of disaster") about his newly begun marriage, and he suspects that the explanation may lie in the past, and therefore in his own origins, since his father, Ranz, had to marry three times so that he could be born. Far from being an investigator, the narrator of this novel is, on the contrary, a man who prefers not to know, aware of how dangerous it is to listen and of the fact that, once things have been heard, they can no longer be forgotten.