Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  At the time, though, I still did not know to which category of event my first visit that night to Conde de la Cimera – an unfamiliar street – belonged, I considered leaving and not coming back, it really was bad luck on my part, but then again it was possible that I might come back the next day, today according to the clocks, and whether I did or did not come back, from the moment I left there and as the day advanced, there would soon begin to be no trace of this first or, rather, this unique night. “My presence here will be erased tomorrow,” I thought, “when Marta is well again and recovered: she’ll wash the dirty dishes from our supper and iron her skirts and air the sheets, even those I didn’t use, and she’ll prefer not to remember her folly or her failure. She’ll think of her husband in London and feel comforted and long for his return, she’ll look out of the window for a moment while she tidies up and re-establishes order in the world – in yesterday’s hand one unemptied ashtray – although there is still perhaps a slightly dreamy look in her eyes, growing weaker every moment, a look that belongs to me and to my few kisses, the memory and the temptation and the effect all cancelled out now by malaise or fear or regret. My presence here, so apparent now, will be denied tomorrow with a shake of the head and a turning on of a tap and, for her, it will be as if I had never been here and I won’t have been, because even the time that refuses to pass in the end does pass and is washed away down the drain, and I need only imagine the coming of morning to see myself leaving this house, I might leave it even sooner, when it’s still night, crossing Reina Victoria and walking for a while along General Rodrigo in order to clear my head before hailing a taxi. Perhaps all it needs is for Marta to go to sleep and then I’ll have a reason and an excuse to leave.” Suddenly the bedroom door opened, it had been left ajar so that Marta could hear the child if he woke up and cried. “He never does wake up, whatever happens,” she had said, “but, that way, I feel more relaxed.” I saw the child in his pyjamas leaning in the doorway with his inevitable rabbit and his dummy, he had woken up without crying, possibly sensing the imminent death of his world. He was looking at his mother and looking at me out of the simplicity of the dreams he had not quite abandoned, uttering none of his few, truncated words. Marta didn’t realize he was there – her eyes tight shut, her long lashes – although I made a rapid, alarmed move to do up my shirt which I had not yet taken off, but which she had unbuttoned for me (too many buttons then and now too many to do them all up). Marta Téllez must be very ill indeed not to notice the presence of her son in her bedroom in the middle of the night, or not to sense it, since she wasn’t looking in his direction, nor anywhere else. For a few seconds, I was afraid that, at any moment, the child might enter the room screaming and clamber on to the bed next to his sick mother or burst into tears to attract her attention – her attention was focused entirely on herself and on her disobedient body. He looked at the television and saw Fred MacMurray who, in this scene, as he had been in other scenes for some time now, was accompanied by Barbara Stanwyck, a woman with a cruel, rather disagreeable face. He must have felt disappointed that it was in black and white and that there were no voices, or that it was Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck instead of Tintin and Haddock or one of the other important characters from his cartoon, because his eyes did not remain fixed there, as children’s eyes normally do when they alight on a television screen, instead he looked away at once, back at Marta. I blushed to think that it was my fault he was seeing his mother half-naked – almost half-naked, her bra had slipped off and she had made no attempt to cover herself – although perhaps he was used to it, he was too small for this to be a matter of importance to his parents and, besides, some parents consider it proof of a healthy lack of inhibition to share their own nakedness with the inevitable nakedness of their children, so frequent when they are very young. I still blushed despite this modern thought, however, and very awkwardly scooped up the bra from where it had fallen – it lay on the bed like a cast-off – in order, in a feeble, half-hearted manner, to cover up its owner’s breasts. I did not, in fact, do so, because I realized that any movement, the touch of the fabric on her skin, would wake Marta up if she had gone to sleep or that she would, at any rate, open her eyes, and I thought it better for her not to know that the child had seen us, as long as the child allowed, I mean, as long as he did not cry or climb on to the bed or say anything. He obviously didn’t sleep in a cot or, rather, if he did, the bars must be quite low, just high enough so that he wouldn’t roll out in his sleep, but not high enough to prevent him from getting up if he wanted to. So I remained for a few seconds with that undersized bra in my hand, like a pale, paltry trophy, as if highlighting a conquest I had been unable to make, and which, in fact, was nothing of the sort: at that moment, I saw it as proof of my folly and my failure, and of hers. The child was obviously awake because he was there, standing in the doorway with his eyes wide open, but, in fact, he was still almost asleep, or at least that’s what I told myself. He looked at the bra, attracted by my gesture, and I immediately hid it, screwing it up in the hand I had dropped down to the covers, hiding it behind my back. He probably didn’t quite recognize me, he doubtless remembered my face rather as he remembered those of the childish characters in his videos or the faces of the dogs he dreamed about, except that he hadn’t yet put a name to me, or perhaps he had, my name had been spoken several times by Marta during supper, perhaps he knew it but, in his struggle against sleep, could not quite say it. No words came into his mouth, there was no expression in his eyes, I mean, no recognizable expression, nothing that fitted any of the normal adult terms – perplexity, hope, fear, indifference, confusion, anger; the slight frown was due to his fragile wakefulness, nothing more, at least that’s what I told myself. I got up carefully and went slowly over to him, smiling slightly and saying to him in a very low voice, a whisper: “You must go back to sleep now, Eugenio, it’s very late. Come on, you must go back to bed.” From my great height, I placed a hand on his shoulder – I still had the bra in my other hand, as if it were a used napkin. He allowed me to touch him, and placed his hand on my forearm. Then, he turned obediently and I watched him disappear down the corridor taking short, hurried steps, on his way back to his room. Before going in, he stopped and turned towards me, as if expecting me to accompany him, perhaps he needed a witness to watch him get into bed, to be sure that someone knew where he was when he was asleep. Noiselessly – on tiptoe, I still had my shoes on, I thought that now I would probably not be taking them off – I followed him and stood by the door of the room in which he slept and which was still in darkness, the boy hadn’t switched on the light, perhaps he didn’t know how to, although the blind was raised and the glow of the yellowish, reddish night outside came in through the window – it was not a sash window. When he saw that I was following him, he climbed, still clutching his rabbit, into his bed again, a wooden cot, not a metal one, with the bars lowered as I had imagined. I think I stayed there for some minutes, although I didn’t look at the clock when I left Marta’s bedroom nor afterwards when I went back. I stayed until I was certain that the child had gone back to sleep again and I knew this from his breathing and because I moved closer for a moment to see his face. When I did so, my head bumped against something, though nothing that hurt me, and only then, in the half-light, did I notice that, hanging from the ceiling, out of his reach, were a few toy aeroplanes suspended on long threads. I took a step back and then returned to the door where I stood leaning against the doorframe – as he had done before, not daring to enter his mother’s bedroom – so that I could see them more clearly against the diffuse light. I saw that they were made out of cardboard or metal or were, perhaps, painted models, there were a lot of them and they were all old-fashioned propeller planes that doubtless had their origin in the far-off childhood of the father who was now in London, who would have waited until he had a son in order to get them out and restore them to their proper place, a little boy’s bedroom. I thought I could make out a Spitfire, a Messerschmitt 109,
a Nieuport biplane and a Camel, as well as a Mig Rat, as this Russian plane was known during the Spanish Civil War; and there was a Japanese Zero and a Lancaster too, and possibly a P-51H Mustang with the smiling jaws of a shark painted on the lower part of its snout; and there was a triplane too, it might have been a Fokker, which, if it was red, would be Baron von Richthofen’s: fighters and bombers from the First and Second World Wars all mixed up together, along with some from the Spanish Civil War and others from the Korean War, I had some when I was a child – though not as many, I quite envied him – which was why I recognized them silhouetted against the mottled, yellowish sky in the window, just as I would have recognized them in flight during my childhood had I seen them. With my hand, I had steadied the plane that my head had bumped against: I considered opening the window, it was closed and so there was no breeze, the planes did not move or sway, apart from a very slight toing and froing – a kind of inert, or perhaps impassive, oscillation – inevitable in any light object suspended by a thread: as if above the head and body of the child they were all languidly preparing for some weary night-time foray, tiny, ghostly and impossible, which would, nonetheless, have taken place several times in the past, or perhaps it still anachronistically took place each night, when the child and the husband and Marta were all at last asleep, each one dreaming the weight of the other two. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me,” I thought or, rather, remembered.

  BUT TONIGHT THEY did not sleep, possibly none of them did, at least not well, not straight through, not as they would hope to, the mother, ill and half-naked, lying on the bed watched over by a man whom she knew only superficially, the child with the covers half off (he had got into bed on his own and I didn’t dare rearrange the miniature sheets and blankets and tuck him in properly), and the father, who knows, he would have had supper with someone or other; after hanging up and looking thoughtful – lightly scratching one temple with her forefinger – and a touch envious (she may have had company, but she was still stuck in Conde de la Cimera as she was every night), all Marta had said was: “He told me he’d just had a fantastic meal at an Indian restaurant, the Bombay Brasserie. Do you know it?” Yes, I did know it, I liked it a lot, I had dined in its vast colonial-style rooms on a couple of occasions, a pianist in a dinner jacket sits in the foyer, and there are respectful waiters and maitres d’hotel, and huge ceiling fans winter and summer, it’s a very theatrical place, rather expensive by English standards, but not prohibitively so, a place for friends to meet and celebrate or for business meetings, rather than for intimate, romantic suppers, unless you want to impress an inexperienced young woman or a girl from the working classes, someone likely to feel slightly overwhelmed by the setting and to get absurdly drunk on Indian beer, someone you won’t have to take to any intermediate place before hailing a taxi with tip-up seats and going back to your hotel or your flat, someone with whom there will be no need to speak after the hot, spicy supper, you can merely take her face in your hands and kiss her, undress her, touch her, framing that bought, fragile head in your hands in that gesture so reminiscent of both coronation and strangulation. Marta’s illness was making me think morbid thoughts and although I was breathing easily and felt better standing in the doorway of the boy’s bedroom, watching the aeroplanes in the shadows and vaguely remembering my own remote past, I thought that I really should go back in to the other bedroom, to see how she was and to try and help her, perhaps take off her clothes, this time in order to put her to bed and cover her up and evoke the sleep which, with luck, might have overtaken her during my brief absence, and then I would leave.