Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  As yet, though, I was still there, and, again, I was delaying leaving, as if my presence could remedy something that was entirely irremediable; as if I had qualms about abandoning Marta and leaving her alone on our wedding night – for how long? but I never sought it, I never wanted it; as if as long as I was there things still had some meaning, a thread of continuity, the silken thread, she’s dead, but the scene begun when she was alive continues, I am still in her bedroom and that makes her death seem less definitive because I was also there when she was alive, I know how it all happened and I myself have become the thread: her shoes, forever empty now, and her creased skirts, which will never now be ironed, can still be explained, they still have a story, a meaning, because I was a witness to the fact that she wore them, that she had them on – her high-heeled shoes, rather too high for wearing at home, even for the benefit of a guest, a near stranger – and I saw how she pushed them off with her own feet when she got to the bedroom and how she suddenly diminished in height, which made her seem somehow more carnal, more placid, I can tell the story and I can therefore explain the transition from life to death, which is a way of both prolonging that life and of accepting that death: if someone has been present at both things, or perhaps I should say states, if the person dying does not die alone and if whoever is with the person can give witness to the fact that the dead person was not always dead, but was once alive. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck were still speaking in subtitles as if nothing had happened, and then the phone rang and I panicked. The panic was not instantaneous, it happened in two stages, because, for a second, I wanted to believe that the first ring had issued from the screen, but phones had a different ring then and, besides, there wasn’t a phone in that particular scene and so neither MacMurray nor Stanwyck turned round to look at it or to pick it up, the way I immediately turned towards Marta’s bedside table, the phone in Marta’s bedroom was ringing at three o’clock in the morning. “It’s not possible,” I thought, “I haven’t spoken to her husband, I called him but I didn’t speak to him and nobody knows what has happened, I didn’t say anything to the porter, not a thing.” And more thoughts thronged in as they do in moments of stress: “Perhaps he dreamed about it in his bed in London, intuited or guessed what had happened, and woke up filled with despair and jealousy and loneliness and regret and preferred to call in order to allay his night sweats and to calm himself, even at the risk of waking her up and possibly the child too.” It didn’t occur to me to close the bedroom door in order to avoid the latter happening, and at the third ring, out of sheer panic and to stop the strident ringing, I picked up the phone, but I didn’t say hello or anything and only then, with the receiver in my hand but not to my ear – as if that contact might betray me – I realized that the answering machine was on – I saw a red light vibrate and flicker – and that it would have answered for me and for her. And when I realized that, I immediately hung up, in response to my growing panic when I heard a man’s voice say: “Marta?” and again: “Marta?” That was when I hung up and stood absolutely still, holding my breath, as if someone had seen me, I took three steps towards the door and then I did carefully close it, out of panic and so as not to wake the child, and I prepared myself for the renewed ringing that would not be long in coming, and indeed was not, one, two, three, four, and then the answering machine cut in, I couldn’t hear the recorded voice, I didn’t know if it was her voice recorded when she was still alive or that of her husband who was far away. Then the beep sounded, I checked with my finger that the volume was up high and I heard the man’s voice again, I heard everything he said: “Marta?” he began again. “Marta, are you there?” And this question was impatient or, more than that, irritated. “Did we get cut off before? Are you listening?” There was a pause and some annoyed tutting. “Are you there? What are you playing at? Are you out? When I phoned you just now, you hung up on me! Oh, for Christ’s sake, pick up the bloody phone!” There was another second’s wait, Deán seemed rather foul-mouthed to me, he began to bluster. “Oh, I don’t know, anyway, you must have the volume turned down or perhaps you’ve gone out, I don’t understand it, you must have got your sister to look after the boy. Anyway, I’ve just got home and so I only just got your message, honestly, fancy forgetting that Eduardo was going away today, you can’t be very keen to see me, the one night when we could have seen each other at our leisure, without having to resort to a hotel or the car. Shit, if I’d known about it, you could have come over here or I could’ve come over to you for a bit, instead of wasting the whole bloody night as I just have. Marta? Marta? Are you stupid or something, why don’t you pick up the phone?” There was another pause, a slight groan of exasperation, I thought: “It isn’t Deán, but he’s a bully, and rude with it.” The voice went on talking, quickly, irritably, but firmly, it was like the sound of an electric shaver, steady and hurried and monotonous: “Oh well, I don’t know, I don’t think you have gone out, and then there’s the boy, oh well, if you have gone out and you come back soonish, say, before half past three or a quarter to four, call me if you like, I’m not going to bed just yet and, if you want, I could still come over for a while, I’ve had the most ridiculous night, disastrous, I can’t wait to tell you all about the mess I’ve got myself into, it makes no difference if I go to bed a bit later still, I’ll be wrecked tomorrow anyway. Marta? Are you there?” There was a final, infinitesimal pause, the time it took for him to click his sharp tongue disapprovingly again. “Right then, I don’t know, perhaps you’re asleep, if not, we’ll talk tomorrow. But Inés isn’t on duty tomorrow, so there’s no chance of seeing each other. You might have remembered before, honestly, you’re bloody useless you are.”

  He didn’t say goodbye. His voice was hectoring, battering, condescending, he took liberties or was used to being allowed to do so, he was speaking to a dead woman and he didn’t know it. He was speaking angrily, reproachfully, urgently, to a dead woman, in a voice accustomed to tormenting others. Marta would never know, and he would never be able to tell her what had happened to him that night, he wasn’t the only one to whom something both ridiculous and disastrous had happened, it had happened to me as well, and more especially to her. And there would certainly be no chance of their seeing each other, he had no idea how remote that chance was, they would never see each other again either hastily or at their leisure, at a hotel or in the car or anywhere, and that fact momentarily and strangely gladdened me, I felt a glimmer of retrospective or imagined jealousy, as brief and discreet as the red light on the answering machine that flickered when the man hung up, then became a steadfast “I”. “So, I was just playing second fiddle,” I thought and I thought it using exactly those words, that expression. And I felt a flash of disappointment when I thought immediately afterwards: “She really had forgotten that her husband was going away on a business trip, it wasn’t a pretext to invite me in his absence, in which case, perhaps she too didn’t seek it or want it; perhaps nothing was planned, or perhaps she just waited to see what would happen.” We had arranged to have supper together that night in a restaurant, then, in the afternoon, she had called me to ask if I would mind having supper at her place instead: she was so distracted lately what with problems and overwork, she said, that she had forgotten that her husband was going to London that day, she had been counting on him being able to look after the boy; then she hadn’t been able to find a babysitter, and she would have to cancel our date altogether unless I was able to have supper there, here, where we did, in fact, have supper, our glasses of wine were still in the living room. The invitation made me feel a bit awkward, I suggested leaving it for another day, I didn’t want to complicate things for her; she insisted that I wasn’t complicating anything, she had some freshly bought Irish sirloin steak in the freezer, she said, and she asked if I liked meat. I had arrogantly taken that as an initial indication of her romantic interest in me. Now I learned that she had first tried to locate the man with the electric voice who hadn’t got Marta’s message until three o’c
lock this morning, a message left when, it must have been after Inés, whoever she was, presumably the man’s wife, had gone on duty – on duty as what? – she wasn’t on duty tomorrow, but today she was, she can’t have gone out very early, possibly a nurse, a pharmacist, a policewoman, a magistrate. “If Marta had been able to get in touch with him, she would certainly have called me back to cancel our supper and my first visit to Conde de la Cimera, she would not have welcomed me but him, he would have been the one here now, which would have made much more sense, with him it would not have taken so long to get started; perhaps on another occasion my place in the bed had also been his, perhaps it wasn’t always Deán’s place, but occasionally his and tonight mine, there’s no point in regretting one’s bad luck, it’s all the same, even though we choose to forget that and refuse to think about it so that we can continue to be active and to act without knowing, to decide without knowing and to take those poisonous steps; it’s all the same, walking down a particular street or getting into a car at the invitation of the driver who, from his seat at the wheel, pushes open the passenger door for us, taking a plane or picking up the phone, going out to supper or staying in our hotel staring distractedly out of the sash window, celebrating a birthday and growing up and going on having birthdays and getting called up, initiating a kiss that leads to other kisses that will force us to linger and for which we will be called to account, asking for or accepting a job, watching the growing storm without bothering to seek shelter, drinking a beer and looking at the women sitting on their stools at the bar, it’s all the same, and every one of those things can bring in its train knives and broken glass, illness and malaise and fear, bayonets and depression and regret, the tree struck by lightning and the fishbone in the throat; as well as the fighter plane at one’s back and the barber’s blunder; the broken high heels and the large hands pressing on your temples, my poor temples, the lit cigarette and the back of the neck averted and damp with sweat, the creased skirts and the undersized bra and then the naked breast, a woman tucked up in bed apparently sleeping and a child who dreams in blissful ignorance beneath his inherited scene of aerial combat. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, when I was mortal; and let fall thy lance.” I again stood looking at her and thought, addressing my thoughts to her: “How many other phone calls did you make today or, rather, yesterday, when you realized that your husband was going away and leaving you free? How many other men would you have preferred to me, how many others did you call to come and keep you company and celebrate your night of singledom or widowhood? You were too late for all of them. Perhaps the only person left was the person you hardly knew, the one you already had a date with, a date made days before, unthinkingly, not realizing that you couldn’t waste on him that particular night on which you had forgotten you would be free; perhaps you had to make do with me, once you had gone through your address book and had dialled number after number from this same telephone that still rings for you by this bed, the people who don’t yet know that you have died in this bed and that you died in my arms still keep calling and will go on calling until someone tells them that they can cross out your number, there’s no point phoning Marta Téllez, because she won’t answer, the now useless number that must be forgotten by all those who once made an effort to remember it, including myself, by those who dialled it without even thinking, like that man whose electric-shaver voice has been recorded so that anyone in this room can listen to it, anyone except the person it was intended for; or perhaps I’m being unfair and I was only the second on the list, poor Marta, the one who might have displaced that insistent first choice if the night had truly been a first night, the first of many others that would have led us to linger at my door in order to exchange the insatiable kisses of lovers saying goodbye, the first of many others that no longer wait in the future, but will sleep now for ever in my unsleeping consciousness, the consciousness that gives due consideration to what happens and doesn’t happen, to the facts and to the failures, to what cannot be undone and to broken promises, to the chosen and to the rejected, to what recurs and to what is lost, as if it were all the same: error, effort, scruples, the dark back of time. “How many other calls like that would you have made during your now completed lifetime, of which I only came to know the end but not the whole story? I’ll never know. Although I will try to remember, on the reverse side of time along which you are already travelling.”

  I put aside such thoughts. I had avoided looking in the full-length mirror until then, but then I saw myself, my eyes seemed sleepy and apathetic, they felt sore and so I rubbed them with my hands, what they revealed was indifference. I could still recognize myself, my appearance had not changed as Marta’s had; I even had my jacket on, it wasn’t hard for me to remember the man who had arrived at that house as a supper guest some hours before, a few hours, too many hours. I had to leave there without further delay, I suddenly had the feeling of being caught in a spider’s web, in a state of stupefaction, in a state of doubt that had gone unrecognized by my tireless consciousness. I was in my stocking feet and, like that, I could neither act nor decide anything, I put my shoes on and tied the laces, resting the soles on the edge of the bed, I was no longer careful. I glanced around me without looking properly at anything, I did only two things before leaving the room: I opened the lid of the answering machine, removed the tiny tape and put it in my jacket pocket, I believe that when I did so, I thought two things (or perhaps I only thought those things later on and, at the time, I acted purely mechanically): Deán probably didn’t know anything with any certainty, because there would be no ignoring that and certainty is not something that should be forced on anyone, there should always be room or space for doubt; and if Deán did already know, then it was best that the possibility should remain open that the person who had had supper with Marta that night was that other man and not me; and if Deán found and listened to that tape, the other man would be out of the running. (The first thought was considerate or perhaps kind and a little false; the second was prudent, not that anyone would know anything about me, not a thing, I thought again.) The second thing I did was still more mechanical, entirely stripped of solemnity, intention, meaning, in fact, it didn’t make any sense at all: I deposited the briefest of kisses on Marta’s forehead, I barely brushed it with my lips and then withdrew. I left the bedroom without turning off the television, leaving MacMurray and Stanwyck there for a while, for as long as they lasted – like solitary, momentary witnesses, silent but subtitled, of the two states of Marta Téllez, of her life and of her death, and of the change from one to the other. I didn’t turn the light out either, I could no longer think about what would be best or most convenient for me or for her or for Deán or for the boy, I was exhausted, I left everything as it was. Then I walked down the corridor with my shoes on, not worrying whether I made any noise or not, I was sure that nothing would wake the boy. I went into the living room, picked up the bottle and the two wine glasses and took them into the kitchen, I saw the apron that Marta had put on to fry the meat. I washed the glasses with my own hands, placing them upside down on the draining board to dry, I emptied what remained in the bottle down the sink – very little: we drank in order to seek and to want; Château Malartic, though I know nothing about wine – and I threw the bottle in the bin, where I saw the ice-cream carton, potato peelings, torn-up bits of paper, a slightly bloodstained piece of cotton wool, the fat from that Irish meat that I had enjoyed, the leftovers that had been placed there by the dead woman when she was still alive, such a short time ago, the fat from the meat and the hands were the same now, dead, discarded meat, both undergoing a subtle transformation. “My overcoat, my scarf and my gloves,” I thought, where had Marta put them after she had opened the door to me? Next to the front door there was a built-in wardrobe, I went over there, opened it and, when I did so, a light went on, the way the light goes on when you open a fridge. There they were, carefully placed on a hanger, the blue scarf folded over the left shoulder of my darker blue overcoat, the co
llar still turned up the way I always wear it, my black gloves protruding a little from the left pocket, just enough to see that they were there and wouldn’t be forgotten, but not so much that they might inadvertently fall to the floor. She was a careful woman, she knew how to look after other people’s things. I took them out of the cupboard and put them on, the scarf first, then the overcoat, although not the leather gloves, I might still need my hands free. For a moment, I studied the other clothes, in three different sizes, Deán had an expensive pale blue raincoat, he was obviously very tall, how odd that he hadn’t taken it with him to London; Marta had several coats, zipped inside a plastic cover was a fur coat, whether real or fake I don’t know; a diminutive anorak and a diminutive navy blue overcoat with gold buttons dangled high above the floor of the cupboard and so they would remain until they grew a few sizes; on the upper shelf there were hats, almost no one wears hats these days, amongst them I noticed a pith helmet and I couldn’t help picking it up, it seemed quite old, with its leather chin strap and its worn green lining bearing a very old, cracked label on which the maker’s name was still legible: “Teobaldo Disegni” and underneath: “Avenue de France 4” and underneath that: “Tunis”. Where had it come from, it must belong to Deán’s father or to Marta’s, they must have inherited it, as the boy had inherited the hanging fleet of aircraft from his father’s childhood. I put the pith helmet on and went in search of a mirror in which I could look at myself, I found one in the bathroom and I had to smile when I saw myself, a colonial in winter wearing scarf and overcoat, my smile didn’t last long though, the boy, in all that time I hadn’t wanted to think about him, I mean, concentrate my thoughts on him, but I knew, I knew it intuitively right from the start, I knew the three possibilities available to me and I knew which one I would choose. I took off the pith helmet, returned it to its place and closed the cupboard (the light went out). I could stay there and take care of the child until someone turned up, that made no sense, I might as well keep phoning Deán until I got through, or call the porter or a neighbour, and thus betray myself and Marta too. I could take him with me, I could keep him with me until his mother’s body was found, and then return him later, I could always do so anonymously, deposit him the next day, or the following day, a few yards from the front door and then just go, I could even leave him at the porter’s lodge and then run off, and meanwhile what, twenty-four or even forty-eight hours spent in the company of a miniature fury, he might not even want to come with me or to leave the house, I would have to wake him up and get him dressed in the middle of the night and prevent him going in to see his mother, he would probably cry and kick and hurl himself to the floor, I would feel like a kidnapper, it was absurd. Lastly, I could just leave him: I had to leave him, there was no real alternative. The child would go on sleeping until he woke, then he would call out for his mother or perhaps get up on his own and go and look for her; he would climb on to her bed, he would start shaking the body, motionless under the covers, doubtless not much different from any morning; he would protest at her indifference, he would shout, he would have a tantrum, he wouldn’t understand, a child that age doesn’t know what death is, he wouldn’t even be able to think: “She’s dead, Mama is dead,” neither the concept nor the word would enter his head, nor would the word “life”, neither thing exists for him, what a blessing. After a while, he would grow tired and watch the television (perhaps I should leave the one in the living room switched on too, in case he wanted to watch it and so that he wouldn’t have to stay in the bedroom next to the body) or he would get up and go about his business – toys, food, he would be hungry – or he would cry endlessly and very loudly, children have superhuman lungs, they can cry for hours, so much so that one of the neighbours would hear him and ring the doorbell, although neighbours don’t much care what goes on as long as it doesn’t bother them. Someone was bound to turn up in the morning anyway, a child minder, a cleaning lady, her sister, or Deán would phone again between business deals and no one would answer, not even the answering machine, the tape was in my jacket pocket; and then he would get worried and would make enquiries, he would set things in motion. One thought remained after thinking all this: the child would be hungry. I went to the fridge and I decided to prepare him something to eat as if I were putting out food for a pet I was leaving behind while I went away for a couple of days on a trip: there was ham, chocolate, fruit, I peeled two mandarins to make it easier for him to eat, salami, I took off the skin, I didn’t want him to choke, his mother wouldn’t be there to put her finger down his throat to save him; I cut up some cheese, removed the rind and washed the knife; in a small cupboard I found biscuits and a bag of pine nuts, I opened the bag and put everything together on one plate (if I opened a yoghurt it might go off). It was an absurd meal, a crazy mixture, but the important thing was that he should have something to eat if the person who looked after the flat was late in arriving. And to drink, I took a carton of fruit juice out of the fridge, filled a glass and placed it beside the plate, I put everything on the kitchen table, with a stool nearby, the child would easily be able to reach it, two-year-olds are great climbers. All of that would betray my presence, that is, someone’s presence, but that didn’t matter now.