While the women are sleeping by Javier Marias

Grasping for logic

The main character and Alberto each try to apply their logical perspective onto the other person in order to make sense of the situation and of their world. The main character is grasping for logical explanation of why Alberto relentlessly films Ines’s body every day. This leads Alberto to explain that he is trying to capture her last day. Which causes the main character to question his logic that she will be the one to die first as she is apparently in good health and least 30 years younger. Alberto explain his obsession with Ines can not last for ever and so she must be killed. The main character counters the logic of the argument by explaining how this can’t be true because of how unlikely it is that he would share information in which he is a guilty and for which he would be able to alert someone and stop him before Alberto could act. Alberto counter attacks by explaining that they are leaving tomorrow, that the main character will choose to disbelieve him, and that Ines may already be dead, same as it’s possible that his wife who he has left sleeping in her hotel room may have died. The main character calms himself by drawing a parallel between both wives, and reassures himself with the fact that as he knows he is wife is alive and asleep in their room, Ines must be alive and asleep in her room. Then when his wife comes out on the room terrace and call him, he notices that there is no one on Ines’s terrace. This makes him doubt his logic and what he felt certain of just moments ago. Alberto could of killed Ines already.

The passive partner, the child

The main character who hides behind the hat to watch the couple and later who refuses to believe that Alberto may kill Ines can be seen as passive. We cannot imagine that his wife would react the same way if she had heard the story. Then in the end of the story the main character describes Luisa as calling down to him like a mother saying their child’s name, same as he had described Alberto saying Ines’s name twice as mother’s do, earlier on in the story. Ines is the passive one in this couple. She barely moves, barely talks, and seems only preoccupied in preening herself as Albero requires of.

Perspective

Two couples, one couple watching Alberto and Ines, Alberto watching Ines, Ines watching herself. The main character watching through the fibers of the sun hat and Alberto watching behind the lense of a video camera and Ines investigating her own body through a mirror. The story is about logic and perspective. Ines is so taken in with Alberto’s obsession of her beauty that she cannot see that his feelings are unhealthy and potentially dangerous.Alberto must kill Ines to save her from aging to ensure that his passion for her will not wane. The main character who warns no one that Alberto plans to kill Ines because it refutes what he thinks is logical and thus he refuses believe it. Each character caught so deeply in their own perspective that no one can influence the other enough to save Ines, not even Ines herself.

While the women are sleeping by Javier Marias