Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  Before switching on the television, I turned the sound down with the remote control, and, just as I had intended, a voiceless image appeared and Marta did not notice, even though the room immediately grew brighter. A subtitled Fred MacMurray appeared on the screen, it was an old movie on late at night. I flicked through the channels and returned to MacMurray in black and white, to his rather unintelligent face. And at that point, I could no longer keep myself from thinking, although no one ever thinks very much or in the order in which those thoughts are later retold or written down: “What am I doing here?” I thought. “I’m in an unfamiliar house, in the bedroom of a man I’ve never seen, a man I only know by his first name, which his wife has mentioned – naturally and irritatingly – several times throughout the evening. It’s also her bedroom which is why I’m here, watching over her illness after having removed some of her clothes and having touched her, I do know her, although not very well, I’ve only known her for two weeks, this is the third time I’ve seen her in my whole life. Her husband phoned a couple of hours ago when I was already having supper in his house, he called to say that he’d arrived safely in London, that he’d dined extremely well at the Bombay Brasserie and that he was in his hotel room getting ready to go to bed, he had work to do the following morning, he’s away on a short business trip.” And his wife Marta didn’t tell him that I was there, here, having supper. That made me almost certain that this was a romantic supper, although at the time her little boy was still awake. Her husband had doubtiess asked after the boy, and she had told him that he was about to go to bed; her husband had probably said: “Put him on so that I can say goodnight to him,” because Marta had said: “No, I’d better not, he’s still wide awake and if he talks to you, he’ll get even more excited and there’ll be no getting him to sleep at all.” In my view, that whole discussion was absurd, because the boy, nearly two years old according to his mother, spoke in a rudimentary, barely intelligible manner and Marta had to interpret and translate for him, mothers are the world’s first interpreters and translators, who interpret and then articulate what is not even language, they interpret the child’s expressions, their frantic gesturing and their different ways of crying, when the crying is still inarticulate and cannot be put into words, or excludes or impedes them. Perhaps his father could understand him too, which would explain why he asked to be allowed to speak to him on the phone; to make matters worse, the boy always spoke with a dummy in his mouth. I said to him once, while Marta was in the kitchen for a moment and he and I were left alone in the living-cum-dining room, me sitting at the table with my napkin on my lap, he on the sofa clasping a small toy rabbit, the two of us watching television, he directly and I obliquely: “I can’t understand you with the dummy in your mouth.” And the boy had obediently removed the dummy and, holding it for a moment in his hand, in an almost eloquent gesture (in the other he held the rabbit), he had repeated whatever it was he had said before, although equally unsuccessfully with his mouth unencumbered. The fact that Marta did not allow the boy to speak on the phone made me even more certain that this was a romantic supper, because the boy, in his garbled half-language, might, despite everything, have communicated to his father that a man was there having supper. I soon realized that the boy tended only to pronounce the last part of words with two or more syllables, though not always the whole syllable (instead of “moustache” he said “tache”, instead of “ice cream” he said “scream”: I don’t have a moustache, but a moustachioed mayor had just appeared on the screen; Marta had given me ice cream for supper); even knowing that, it was difficult to decipher, but possibly his father was used to it, his interpretative senses also attuned to that primitive language spoken by only one speaker who, moreover, would soon cease to speak it. The boy still used very few verbs and so barely spoke in sentences, he got by using nouns and the occasional adjective, and he said everything in the same exclamatory tone. He had refused to go to bed while we were having supper or not having supper but waiting for Marta to come back to the table after her comings and goings to the kitchen and her patient solicitude towards the child. His mother had put on a video of a cartoon on the TV in the living room – at the time I didn’t know there was another television in the house – to see if the flickering screen would send him to sleep. But the child remained alert, he had refused to go to bed, for all his ignorance or his precarious knowledge of the world he knew more than I did, and he was watching over his mother and watching over that guest whom he had never before seen in the apartment, he was guarding his father’s place. There were several points in the evening when I would happily have left, I already felt more of an intruder than a guest, and more and more of an intruder the more certain I became that this was a romantic assignation and that the child knew this intuitively – the way cats do – and was trying to impede it with his presence, dead tired and battling against sleep, sitting quietly on the sofa watching a cartoon he didn’t understand, although he did recognize the characters, because sometimes he would point at the screen and, despite the dummy, I was able to understand what he was saying because I could see what he was seeing: “Titin!” he would say, “Cap’n!” and his mother would stop talking to me for a second and turn her attention to him and translate or reinforce what he had said, so that not one of his incipient, admirable words would remain uncelebrated, unechoed: “Yes, sweetheart, it’s Tintin and the Captain.” When I was little, I used to read Tintin in large-format books, nowadays, children watch him moving and hear him speaking in a ridiculous voice, so I couldn’t help but be distracted from the fragmentary conversation and from that much-interrupted supper, I not only recognized the characters, but their adventures too, the Black Island, and I could not help but follow them out of the corner of my eye from my place at the table.

  It was the child’s refusal to go to bed that finally convinced me of what awaited me (if he did finally go to sleep and if that was what I wanted). It was his vigilance and his instinctive distrust that betrayed the mother, more so even than her silence when she spoke on the phone to London (her silence regarding my presence there) or the fact that she was too smartly dressed, too made up and too flushed for someone merely having supper at home at the end of the day (or perhaps she was just very hyped up). The revelation of one’s fear gives ideas to the person causing that fear or to the person who could cause it, the preventative measures taken against what has not yet happened cause it to happen, suspicions decide what was as yet unresolved and set it in motion, apprehension and expectation force the ever-deepening cavities that they create to be filled, something has to happen if we want to dissipate that fear and the best thing to do is to let it run its course. The child was accusing his mother by his irritating reluctance to go to sleep and the mother was accusing herself by her tolerance of him (it’s best to try and have supper in peace, she would be thinking, would have been thinking since the evening began; if the boy has a tantrum, we’re sunk), and both those things completely undermined the pretence that is always necessary on first nights, the pretence that allows us to say or believe later on that no one sought or wanted anything: I never sought it, I never wanted it. I too felt accused, not only by the child’s efforts to avoid giving in to sleep, but also by his attitude and the way he looked at me: he had mostly kept his distance, he regarded me with a mixture of incredulity and a need or a desire for trust, the latter was particularly noticeable when he spoke to me in his blunt, solitary syllables, almost always enigmatic, in a voice that was unexpectedly loud in someone of his size. He had not shown me many things and he wouldn’t let me hold his rabbit. “The child is right, he’s right to do that,” I thought, “because as soon as he goes to sleep, I will occupy the place usually occupied by his father, albeit only for a while. He senses that and wants to protect that place which is also a guarantee of his place, but because he is ignorant of the world and does not know that he knows anything, he has smoothed my path with his transparent fear, he has given me all the signs I might not otherwise have se
en: he, despite everything and despite knowing nothing, knows his mother better than I do, she is the world he knows best and for him she holds no mysteries. Thanks to him I will not hesitate to act, if I choose to act.” Gradually, overwhelmed by sleep, he had slumped further down in his seat and had ended up lying on the sofa, too tiny for that large piece of furniture – like an ant in an empty matchbox, except that an ant moves – and he had continued watching his video with his cheek resting on the cushions, his dummy in his mouth like a reminder or a superfluous emblem of his extreme youth, his legs drawn up as if he were going to sleep or about to go to sleep, his eyes still wide open though, he wouldn’t let himself close them not even for a moment, from where she was sitting, his mother peered across every now and then to see if her son had finally succumbed as she hoped he would, the poor woman wanted to be rid of him even though he was her whole life, the poor woman wanted to be alone with me for a while, not for long, just for a while (but I say “poor woman” now, I didn’t think it then, perhaps I should have). I asked no questions and I made no comment because I did not want to appear impatient or lacking in feeling and, besides, she herself informed me quite naturally every time she leaned back again: “Oh dear, his eyes are still like soup plates, I’m afraid.” Although he had been quiet, the child’s presence had dominated the whole evening. He was a tranquil, apparently good-humoured child and he really was very little trouble, but there was no way he was going to leave us on our own, there was no way he was going to disappear and go alone to his room, there was no way he was going to lose sight of his mother, who was now lying in the same position as her son had on the vast sofa while he battled against tiredness, except that she was battling against illness or fear or depression or regret and she did not look tiny lying there on her own double bed nor was she alone, for I was by her side, holding the remote control in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. “Do you want me to go?” I asked. “No, wait a moment, I’m sure it’ll pass, don’t leave me,” replied Marta Téllez and when she did so, she turned her face towards me, at least that was her intention, she couldn’t have seen me because she didn’t turn her head quite enough, what she did see was the television screen and Fred MacMurray’s foolish face which I was beginning to associate with that of the absent husband while I thought about him and about what had happened, or what, until then, had not happened but had been planned. Why did he not phone now, sleepless in London, it would be a relief if the phone rang and she picked it up and explained to her husband in her enfeebled voice that she was feeling really ill and didn’t know what was wrong with her. He would take charge then, even though he was far away, and I would be free of all responsibility (the responsibility of one who merely chances to be there, nothing more), I would cease to be a witness, he could call a doctor or a neighbour (he would know them, they were his neighbours not mine), or a sister or a sister-in-law, so that they could be startled from their sleep and in the middle of the night go to his house to help his sick wife. And meanwhile I would leave, I would come back another night if the opportunity arose, when there would be no need for preliminaries or preambles, I could visit her tomorrow at the same time, late at night, when the child would be certain to have gone to bed. I couldn’t go waking people up, but her husband could.

  “Do you want to phone your husband?” I asked Marta. “It might make you feel better to talk to him and to let him know that you’re not well.” We can’t bear those close to us not to know about our troubles, we can’t bear them to continue to believe that we are more or less happy when, suddenly, we are not, there are four or five people in everybody’s life who must be informed immediately of whatever is happening to us, we can’t bear them to go on believing what is no longer true, not for a minute, for them to believe that we are married when we have just been widowed or that we still have parents when we have suddenly become orphans, that we have company when that company has just left, or are in good health when we have suddenly fallen ill. That they should think us still alive when we are dead. But that was a strange night, especially for Marta Téllez, doubtless the strangest night of her whole existence. Marta turned her face more now, I saw it full on, as she would have seen mine, for some time now I had seen only the back of her neck, growing ever damper with sweat, ever more rigid, the crisscrossing threads of hair growing ever more matted, as if becoming impregnated with mud; and her smooth, bare back. When she turned round, I saw that her eyes were screwed so tight shut that it was unlikely she could see anything, her eyes almost supplanted by her long lashes, I don’t know if the strangeness of the look which I could only guess at was due to her having momentarily forgotten about me and to her failure to recognize me or my question or my remark, or perhaps to the fact that she had never felt what she was feeling then. I suppose she was dying without my realizing it, dying is a new experience for everyone. “You’re mad,” she said, “how can I possibly phone him, he’d kill me.” When she turned, her bra, which she had been holding in place – intentionally or not – with her arms or armpits, dropped on to the mattress. Her breasts remained uncovered but she did nothing to cover them: I suppose she was dying and I didn’t realize it. And she added, proving that she hadn’t forgotten about me and that she knew what I was talking about: “You’ve switched the television on, poor thing, you must be bored, turn the sound up if you like, what are you watching?” While she was saying this (though she said it as if she were talking to herself) she placed one hand on my leg, the suggestion of a caress she could not complete; then she removed it to return to her previous position, with her back to me, curled up like a little girl, or like her little boy who was sleeping in his room at last with no thought for me and for her, probably in a cot, I don’t know if two-year-olds still run the risk of rolling out of bed in the night on to the floor if they sleep in a bed like grown-ups, or if they sleep in cots where they’re safe. “It’s an old Fred MacMurray film,” I replied (she was younger than me, I wondered if she would know who Fred MacMurray was), “but I’m not really watching it.” In London, her husband would also be asleep, oblivious to her and ignorant of my existence, why did he not wake up, anxious, why did he not guess what was happening, why did he not call her in Madrid, seeking consolation, only to be greeted here by a voice filled by an even greater anxiety, one that would make him forget his own, why did he not save us? In the middle of the night, though, everything was in order for all the other possible people or characters behind with the news: for the child, close at hand, unaware of the world beneath his own roof, and for the father far off on that island where usually one sleeps so soundly; for the sisters-in-law or sisters who would be dreaming of the abstract future in this city that is never still and where it is always hard to sleep – more a giving in, never a habit; for some overworked, exhausted doctor who might perhaps have saved a life if someone had dragged him from his nightmares that night; for the neighbours in that same building who would be growing increasingly desperate, thinking in their sleep of the next morning coming ever closer, with less and less time before they had to wake up and look at themselves in the mirror and clean their teeth and turn on the radio, another day, how dreadful, another day, how fortunate. Only for me and for Marta were things not in order, I was not oblivious or immersed in sleep and it was already very late, before, I said that it all happened very fast and I know that it did, but remembering it is as slow as witnessing it was, I had the feeling that time was passing and yet only very slowly according to the clocks (the clock on Marta’s bedside table, the watch on my wrist), I wanted to let it pass unhurriedly before each new remark I uttered or each new movement I made, but I couldn’t manage it, barely a minute passed between my remarks and my movements or between movement and remark, when I thought ten minutes had passed or at least five. In other parts of the city something, though not much, would be happening, in orderly and disorderly fashion: I could hear the cars some distance away, there was not much traffic in that street, it was called Conde de la Cimera, and what I did know was that
there was a hospital very near, called the Hospital de la Luz, where night nurses would be dozing, head resting on one hand, a superficial sleep born to be broken, legs crossed, wearing whitish stockings with lumpy seams, perched on uncomfortable chairs, whilst, beyond, some bespectacled student would be reading pages of law or physics or pharmacy for some pointless exam in the morning, forgetting everything he had learned the moment he emerged from the exam room; and beyond that, further off, in another part of town, at the bottom of the hill in Hermanos Bécquer, a solitary whore would take a few expectant, incredulous steps towards the kerb every time a car slowed down or stopped for the traffic lights: dressed in her best clothes on a cold Tuesday night, in order to be seen from either much too close to or else only from a distance, or perhaps she was a man, a young man dragging the heels of his stilettos because he is still not quite used to them or is ill or tired, his footsteps and his infrequent encounters with men in cars all destined to leave no mark on anyone, or to become superimposed one on the other in his confused, fatalistic, fragile memory. A few lovers would perhaps be saying goodbye to each other, they can’t wait to go back home alone to their own bed, the one rumpled, the other intact, but they still hang back, exchanging kisses at the open front door – he is the one leaving, or she is – while he or she waits for the lift that has remained motionless for a whole hour without anyone calling for it, not since the most noctambular of the other tenants returned home from a discotheque: the kisses of the one who is leaving, standing at the front door of the one who is staying, become confused with those of the day before yesterday and those of the day after tomorrow, there was only ever one memorable first night and it was immediately lost, swallowed up by the weeks and the repetitive months that succeeded it; and somewhere a fight will have broken out, a botde flies or someone slams it down on the table of the person bothering him – grasping the bottle by the neck as if it were the handle of a dagger – and the bottle doesn’t break but the glass table does, although the foam from the beer gushes out like urine; or someone somewhere is committing a murder, or, rather, homicide, since it is unpremeditated, it just happens, an argument and a blow, a cry and the sound of something tearing, a revelation or the sudden realization that one has been deceived, finding out, listening, knowing or seeing, death is sometimes brought on by affirmation and activity, driven away or perhaps postponed by ignorance and tedium and by what is always the best response: “I don’t know, I’m not sure, we’ll have to see.” You have to wait and see and no one knows anything for sure, not even what they do or decide or see or suffer, each moment sooner or later dissolves, its degree of unreality constantly on the increase, everything travelling towards its own dissolution with the passing of the days and even the seconds that appear to sustain things but, in fact, suppress them: the nurse’s dream will vanish along with the student’s vain wakefulness, the tentatively inviting footsteps of the whore, who is possibly a sick young man in disguise, will be scorned or go unnoticed, the lovers’ kisses will be renounced after a few more months or weeks that will bring with them, unannounced, the final night, the bitter, relieved farewell; the glass table top will be replaced, the fight will disperse like the smoke that harboured it that night, even though the person who started it may continue to make trouble; and, as if it was just another insignificant, superfluous tie or link, the murder or homicide is simply lumped in with all the crimes – there are so many others – that have been forgotten and of which no record remains and with those currently being planned and of which there will be a record, even though that too will eventually disappear. And things will happen in London and all over the world about which neither I nor Marta will have any knowledge, in that respect we will be alike, it’s an hour earlier there, perhaps her husband isn’t sleeping on the island either, but spending a sleepless night staring out of his wintry hotel window – a sash window, in the Wilbraham Hotel – at the buildings opposite, or at other rooms in the same hotel which forms a right angle with its two rear wings that are invisible from the street, Wilbraham Place, most are in darkness, staring at that room where, in the afternoon, he saw a black maid remaking the beds of those who have left, in preparation for those who have not yet arrived, or perhaps he can see her now in her own attic room – those rooms are on the top floor, the narrowest rooms with the lowest ceilings, and are reserved for the employees who have no home of their own – getting undressed after her day’s work, removing her cap and her shoes and her stockings and her apron and her uniform, then standing at the sink and washing her face and under her arms, he too can see a half-dressed, half-naked woman, but, unlike me, he hasn’t touched her or embraced her, he has nothing to do with that woman who, before going to bed, has a perfunctory wash, British-fashion, at the wretched sink of one of those English rooms whose tenants have to go out into the corridor to use a bathroom shared with other people on the same floor. I don’t know, I’m not sure, we’ll have to see, or, rather, we’ll never know, the dead Marta will never know what happened to her husband in London that night while she lay dying beside me, when he comes home she won’t be here to listen to him, to listen to the story, possibly fictitious, that he has decided to tell her. Everything is travelling towards its own dissolution and is lost and few things leave any trace, especially if they are never repeated, if they happen only once and never recur, the same happens with those things that install themselves too comfortably and recur day after day, again and again, they leave no trace either.