Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  “Really?” said Only the Lonely quickly (although not quickly enough to prevent the young lady’s motherly intervention). “Are you sure of that, Juanito? A hunter can go out hunting and shoot at a vague shape in the distance. He inadvertently kills a boy sleeping amongst the bushes in the woods, who does not even cry out when the bullet hits him, he dies in his dreams: the hunter does not know what he has done, he may never find out, but it is done all the same: the boy did not just die of his own accord. A driver knocks down a pedestrian one night, he bumps into him, but he’s in a hurry or he’s afraid or he’s drunk, even so, he brakes, slightly uncertain what to do; in his rear-view mirror, he sees his victim stumbling to his feet, it was obviously nothing very serious, he breathes easily again and drives on. After a few days, an internal haemorrhage carries the pedestrian off to his grave, the driver is not told, he may never find out, but the deed is done: the pedestrian did not just die of his own accord. But take another example, even more problematic, more unintended: a doctor phones a sick woman, she’s not at home, but her answering machine is on, he leaves a trivial message, then forgets to press the button that switches off these modern phones” – Only You pointed to the one Anita had in her pocket, and she immediately got it out as if ready to give a demonstration if called upon – “immediately after that (his mind still on the woman), the doctor discusses with his nurse the woman’s terminal condition, although, for the moment, he has decided either to give her new hope or else to say nothing. His kind remarks and those of the nurse are recorded on the patient’s tape, who, when she hears them, chooses not to wait for the pain and for her own slow decline, and takes her life that same night. The doctor may never find out, especially if the woman lives alone and it doesn’t occur to anyone else to listen to the tape. But the deed is done: the sick woman did not die of her illness, she did not die of her own accord.”

  “Unless someone takes the tape,” I thought, and this time the thought came much more slowly, “unless someone steals it, the doctor himself or the nurse realizing too late what has happened. Unless their remarks were not made innocently and they were merely feigning pity, unless both of them knew the patient and had something against her, or she was somehow in their way.”

  “But the same thing happens to all of us,” protested Téllez, “and not just to those in the ruling classes, your own examples are proof of that. The only safe option would be never to say or do anything, and even then, inactivity and silence might have the same effects, produce identical results, or, who knows, even worse ones.”

  “It does not console me, Juanito, to know that things are just like that, that responsibility can never be clearly assigned,” replied the One and Only, his face betraying clear signs of grief, his mouth suddenly gone dry. “It’s as if you were to say after the death of a friend: ‘Oh well, that’s the way things are, everyone dies in the end,’ that wouldn’t console me either. That doesn’t make a friend’s death bearable, it is quite simply unbearable that one’s friends should die. You recently lost a daughter, forgive me for reminding you of it, and knowing that things are just like that will have been of little comfort to you, of little relief. In my case, what I do or don’t do has more repercussions than what other people do or don’t do, it’s more serious, my errors and mistakes could affect many people, not just a sleeping boy or a pedestrian or a woman under sentence of death. Each one of my acts could set off a chain reaction, have massive consequences, that’s why I’m so filled by doubt. Everything you do affects individuals, whereas I do not deal with people on an individual basis. I am aware, though, that each life is unique and fragile.” He turned towards me, and sat looking at me for a moment without really seeing me, and then added: “It’s unbearable that the people we know should suddenly be relegated to the past.”

  Téllez took out his pouch of perfumed tobacco and started to prepare a second pipe as if to conceal his faltering voice by some physical activity. (Perhaps, too, he needed an excuse to lower his eyes.) While he was doing this, he said very slowly, almost languidly: “There’s no need to apologize, Your Majesty. That’s all I think about all the time, you haven’t reminded me of anything. What is truly unbearable is that the person one recalls as part of the future should suddenly become the past. But the only solution to what Your Majesty says is for everything to end and for there to be nothing.”

  “Sometimes that doesn’t seem such a bad solution,” replied Solo, and Téllez must have judged that to be too nihilistic a response for witnesses to hear from such illustrious lips, for he reacted, at once, by trying to change the subject and said: “But let’s return to the business in hand, Your Majesty, if you don’t mind. What aspect of Your Majesty’s real personality would you like to have reflected, apart from these doubts of yours, which I’m not sure would be terribly acceptable? Your Majesty must give Ruibérriz instructions.”

  Then the door through which Solus and Anita had entered was flung open, and in came an elderly cleaning woman, somewhat surly and ill-tempered in appearance. She was carrying a feather duster and a broom and was sliding along, rather hunched, on the two dusters on her feet in order not to tread on the floor with the soles of her slippers, so that she advanced very slowly as if she were a skier crossing firm snow with one very long ski pole and one very short. Astonished, we all turned to watch her interminable passing, she had that loose, white hair that makes old women look even older, and conversation was suspended for a minute or two, because she was singing tunelessly under her breath as she continued her rapt progress; until, at last, when the cleaning lady reached his side, Segarra grabbed her arm with one white gloved hand – which seemed suddenly like a claw – and said something to her in a low voice, at the same time pointing to us. The woman jumped, looked at us, raised one hand to her mouth to stifle a silent cry and hurried as quickly as she could over to the first door, the one Téllez and I had entered some time ago. “She looked like a witch,” I thought, “or perhaps a banshee”: that supernatural female figure from Ireland who warns families of the imminent death of one of their members. They say that sometimes she sings a funeral lament while she combs her hair, but more often, one or two nights before the death she is warning them of is to take place, she shouts or moans beneath the windows of the threatened house. The cleaning woman had been humming some unrecognizable tune, she had uttered no cry or moan, neither was it night-time. I thought: “I don’t believe this house is under threat, Téllez and I are the ones who suffered a bereavement a month ago, he lost a member of his family and I one of my lovers. A prediction of the past.” She closed the door behind her, and the last thing we saw was the feather duster that got hooked on the door handle for a moment.

  “One night, about a month ago, I couldn’t sleep,” said Solitaire, taking very little notice of the sudden appearance of the banshee. “I got up and I went into another room so as not to bother anyone, I turned the television on and I started watching an old film that had already started, what it was called I don’t know, afterwards, I went to look for that day’s newspaper, but it had already been thrown out, they always throw things away before I’ve finished with them. It was in black and white and featured a very old, very fat Orson Welles, I’m sure you know him, he’s buried in Spain. In fact, it was filmed in Spain, I recognized the walls of Ávila and Calatañazor and Lecumberri and Soria, the church of Santo Domingo, but the action took place in England, and one believed it too, despite seeing all those familiar places, even the Casa de Campo appeared and that fooled one too, it all looked like England, it was very odd, seeing what one knew to be one’s own country and yet believing that it was England on the screen. The film was about two kings, Henry IV and Henry V, the latter when he was still the Prince of Wales, Prince Hal they called him sometimes, a good-for-nothing, a rake, who, while his father lies dying, spends all day drinking, or hanging around whorehouses and taverns with prostitutes and his vile friends, the fat Welles, the oldest of the corrupters, and another man his own age, a man called Poins, wit
h an unpleasant, cynical face, who takes too many liberties with him, he clearly doesn’t know where to draw the line, and the Prince again and again puts Poins in his place as he himself begins to change. The old King is sick and anxious, in one scene, he asks them to place the crown on his pillow and the son, believing that the King has already died, prematurely puts it on his own head. In between there’s another scene in which the King cannot sleep, as was happening to me that same night, luckily in my case it was just a one-off. He hasn’t been able to sleep for days, he stares at the sky out of the window and rebukes sleep, which he reproaches for visiting much poorer homes than his, even the homes of murderers, but scorning his more noble house. “Oh partial sleep,” he says bitterly, and I couldn’t help but identify with him at that moment, watching television in my dressing gown while everyone else was asleep, although I did sometimes identify with the Prince too. In fact, the King doesn’t appear much in the film at all, at least not in the bit I saw, but it was enough to get an idea of what he’s like, or what he was like. You see how the Prince changes when his father does at last die and he is crowned king, he abjures his past life (his immediately past life, you see, it was the day before yesterday, even yesterday) and he dismisses his companions, he sends poor Welles into exile despite the fact that the old man calls him ‘my sweet boy’, kneeling before him at the coronation ceremony itself, waiting for the promised favours and the postponed joys, postponed until his final decrepitude. “I am not the thing I was,” the new King says to him, when only a few days before he had shared adventures and jokes with him. He disappoints everyone, the old King Henry senses his changed son’s haste, “I stay too long by you, I weary you,” says the dying man. Even so he gives him advice and tells him secrets, he says to him just before he dies: “God knows, my son, by what by-paths and indirect crooked ways I met this crown; how I came by the crown, O God, forgive!” His hands are stained with blood and he has not forgotten it, he was perhaps poor and doubtless a conspirator or a murderer, although, with the years, the dignity of his position has dignified him and, seemingly and superficially, erased all that, just as the Prince ceases to be a dissolute once he becomes a king, as if our actions and personalities were in part determined by people’s perception of us, as if we came to believe that we are different from what we thought we were because chance and the heedless passing of time change our external circumstances and our clothes. Or else it is the by-paths and the indirect crooked ways of our own efforts that change us and we end up believing that it is fate, we end up seeing our life in the light of the latest or most recent event, as if the past had been only a preparation and we only understood it as it moved away from us, as if we understood it all completely at the end. The mother believes she was born to be a mother and the spinster to be single, the murderer to be a murderer and the victim a victim, just as the leader believes that his steps led him from the very beginning to hold sway over other people’s wills, just as one traces the genius back to the child once one knows he is a genius; if he comes to the throne, the king persuades himself that it was his role to be king and, if he doesn’t, that it was his rôle to be the martyr of the family, and the man who reaches old age ends up seeing his whole life as a slow progress towards that old age: one sees one’s past life as if it were a plot or a mere piece of circumstantial evidence, and then one falsifies and distorts it. Welles doesn’t change in the film, he dies faithful to himself, seeing all the favours and joys postponed once more until beyond death, betrayed and with his heart broken by his sweet boy. (“Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again nor will you see me. Goodbye ardour, goodbye memories.”) Both his face and those of the kings glimpsed during that hour and a half are clear and recognizable, I will always see those faces and hear those words whenever I think of Henry IV and Henry V of England, if I ever do think about them again. I’m not like that, my face and my words mean nothing to anyone, and it’s time for that to change.” The Lone Ranger stopped short as if he had suddenly stopped reading a book, he looked up and added in another tone of voice: “That, I suppose, is the sheer power of the performance, I must see the whole film one day.”

  “If you’re interested, sir, it was Chimes at Midnight,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The title of the film you saw, sir. It’s Chimes at Midnight.”

  Only the Lonely looked at me surprised and a touch wary: “And how do you know? Did you see it that night?”

  “No, I was watching another film on the other side, but when I changed channels, I saw that they were showing that too. I recognized it at once, I saw it years ago in the cinema.”

  “Ah well, I’ll have to have them show it to me or lend me the video. Note it down, Anita. And what film were you watching? Couldn’t you sleep either? It was about a month ago, as I said.”

  I looked at Téllez, but I noticed no particular reaction on his part, doubtless he was sleeping that night and could not identify it by the television programmes being shown. He had recovered from his moment of grief, he had lit his second pipe and seemed comfortable there, pleased to pass the morning like that, although it was growing steadily colder. It was a bit like being at school, like when the boys got together in the playground during break when I was a child, and the one who had seen a film would describe it to the others and make them want to see it or, rather, his telling of the story made it up to them for not having seen it, it’s a kind of act of generosity, telling someone something. Only You was the leader of the class.

  “I don’t know the name of the film I saw, I turned on when it had already started and I didn’t have a newspaper to hand. I wasn’t at home.” And I don’t know why I added that, I could easily not have said it, perhaps I wanted to be generous. I didn’t say that I had watched it with the sound turned down.

  “Well, it seems rather late not to be at home,” said the Only One, half-smiling. “What do you make of our friend here, Anita? A bit of a nightbird, eh?”

  Anita instinctively touched the ladder in her stocking as if to cover the flesh that it revealed. She caught a thread with her nail and made the ladder even worse, that stocking was ready to become a cast-off. We all pretended that we hadn’t noticed, and she said: “Oh, good heavens,” though it wasn’t clear if this was a comment on her ruined silk stockings or on the euphemistic insinuation that I was a nightbird.

  “Anyway, as I was saying,” Solo went on, “I think I’ve made myself pretty clear, eh, Ruibérriz? You will work over the next few days in constant contact with Juanito, in his apartment if that suits, so that he can watch over and control everything and give you instructions, he’s known me since for ever. And if we’re happy with the work, you can be sure that you’ll get more,” he added, as if he were offering me a really cushy number. He was doubtless ignorant of the low fees paid by the Palace. He stood up and those of us still sitting immediately copied him, Anita and I swiftly, Téllez slowly or with difficulty; Segarra again stood to attention and Segurola laid down his tools, holding his paint brush and palette in his fallen hands, any possibility of being able to continue his work being over. Solus was leaving, but first, he indicated Juanito’s foot: “Juanito,” he said, “don’t forget that shoelace, you’ll trip over.”

  Téllez looked down again, this time a touch despairingly, he would clearly be incapable of tying it himself, not even with his foot raised. I grasped the situation in an instant: it would take Segarra ages to reach us and he was even less capable of bending down than Téllez was; you couldn’t rely on Segurola, perhaps he didn’t even have permission to leave his corner and approach Solitaire, he looked like a man in exile or immured; young, conscientious Anita would have been perfect for the job, but if she crouched or knelt down the buttons of her jacket might pop off and her stockings fall down. It was up to the Lone Ranger or myself. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and I saw that he made no move to help. That was to be expected. I didn’t hesitate.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tie it,
” I said and although I seemed to be saying it to Téllez, I was really saying it to Only the Lonely, as if there had been a genuine chance that he might take on the job.

  “No, no,” protested Téllez, with relief or possibly gratitude. There was no need for me to speak to him, I won him over with my own unsolicited gesture.

  I knelt down and picked up the two ends of the shoelace which were of uneven length; I tied it using a double knot, as if he were a child and I were Luisa, his daughter, in the cemetery, with whom I felt identified for a moment, or perhaps twinned. Everyone watched the brief operation while it was being carried out, like a group of surgeons watching the master surgeon as he removes the bullet. I knelt down before Marta Téllez’s old father just as the old Orson Welles or, rather, Falstaff had fallen on his knees before the new King, who because he was now king had ceased to be what he had always been until then, his sweet boy.

  “There you are,” I said, getting up and instinctively blowing on my fingers. Téllez stood looking down at the neatly tied shoelace for a moment.

  “It might be a bit tight now,” he said, “but it’s better like that.”

  In a reflex act of imitation Only You also blew on his band-aided fingers. And then I couldn’t help asking him, even at the risk of proving irksome at the very last: “What are those band-aids for, sir?” I asked him.

  The One and Only raised his two index fingers as if he were about to give the signal for the music to start, and he looked at them, amused, as if recalling some past joke. The half-smile returned to his lips and he said: “Now that would be telling.”

  And again we all briefly laughed.

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, Solo’s vague desires not only exceeded my provisional powers, they were doubtless also only a passing fancy provoked, quite randomly, by “partial sleep” who does not always elude or visit the same houses, and by the late-night television schedule. He had seen only part of that film and had experienced a feeling of instantaneous, primitive jealousy, forgetting or not realizing that the two medieval Henries of Lancaster had benefited from the passing of the centuries which had, by itself, made them into fictitious beings, objects of representation, nothing more, not even objects of investigation or study, leaving them clear and recognizable in a way that a person never is, but in a way that personages can be. He was still a person, although, unlike most mortals, he could be almost certain that, posthumously, he would cross that frontier that almost no one crosses: and people are voluble and unstable and fragile and easily distracted from their own affairs, thus betraying or blurring their character, they have only to glance in the other direction and the portrait is ruined, or rather you have to falsify it and anticipate the death of the person being painted, painting him as if he could no longer change because he was no longer alive and would never again grumble about anything, like Marta Téllez, whom I perceived more and more as someone who had always been dead, she has been dead so much longer than the time that I knew her when she was alive, when I saw her and talked to her and kissed her: for me, she was only alive for three days, and I was a witness to her breathing during a few hours of those three days. And even though that wasn’t actually true: any dead life lasts longer than an inconstant lived life, and that applies not only to her dead life, which arrived prematurely, but to all the living who have been in the world and who endure longer as dead people, once they are part of the past, providing there is still someone alive to remember them. And when she said “Hold me”, she must have believed that she had been born to die rather young and married and a mother, perhaps she saw all her steps up until that moment, all her early days, as an itinerary that was at last comprehensible, that led to that night with me, a night of unconsummated infidelity. And I, in turn, would see her as someone who had appeared in my life merely in order to die by my side and to provoke in me this state of enchantment, what a strange mission or task that was, to appear and disappear just so that I would take different steps than those I would otherwise have taken – the thread of continuity uninterrupted, my silken thread still intact but with no guide – so that I would feel concerned about a child and look for a death notice and attend a funeral, pretending I was visiting a tomb dated 1914 and listen again and again to a tape (“You can’t be that keen to see me, if you want, I could still come over for a while, the guy sounds rather nice, he’s never exactly been a man of letters, don’t get too excited, povero me, we can’t afford not to be able to locate him, so we’ll do whatever you say, we could see each other on Monday or Tuesday, hi, it’s me, could one of you save me a slice of ham, please, please”; and that crying), so that I would become involved aimlessly and surreptitiously in the lives of strangers, as if I were a spy who doesn’t even know what it is he has to find out – if there is anything to find out – and, at the same time, risks exposing his own secret to the very people he should conceal it from, not that they are aware he has a secret that affects them; so that I can keep my secret for a while longer and write the words that Solus will say to the world even though I am no one, even though I barely belong to the world, although perhaps that is entirely appropriate, that those words attributable to his person should come from the most obscure and anonymous subject in his kingdom, so that they can truly become his words; or, rather, from his most obscure and pseudonymous subject, since he believed me to be Ruibérriz de Torres, that was my name. What a strange mission or task Marta Téllez’s was, to appear and disappear just so that I would take those steps towards her old father’s apartment and make his existence a little less precarious, make him feel useful, even, for a week or so, like someone with responsibilities of state, so that I would breathe life into one of the soon-to-be-dead who nevertheless survives his own children. If Marta were alive, I would not be going through the vast, old-fashioned portals of a house in the Salamanca district of Madrid, nor would I be going up in a lift with pretentious, ancient, wooden doors and an anachronistic bench on which to sit, nor ringing the doorbell on several successive days, I would not be spending the mornings in a large study full of books and pictures, jumbled and alive, sitting at a borrowed table before my own portable typewriter which I had transported there on the first day, a typewriter I rarely use now, with an older man who keeps hopeful guard in the room next door, an affable man, glad perhaps to have another presence in the house besides that of a maid of a kind one no longer sees, in uniform with an apron, but no cap, and who is doubtless the person who ties his rebellious shoelaces each morning. I would not be on the receiving end of the trumped-up visits or pretences at supervision of that old man who, on the pretext of fetching a book or looking for a letter, prowls around the study whistling a tune and invariably asks me: “So, how’s it going? Getting on all right? Do you need anything?” in the hope that I will ask him a question or let him read the last lines of the speech I have written so that he can give his approval or suggest emendations in his role as an old and privileged connoisseur of the Lone Ranger’s psyche. (And then, from time to time, he goes into the kitchen to grind some coffee.) And I would not be meeting Luisa, Luisa Téllez, the surviving daughter and sister, who arrived late on the second morning of whistling and work in order to pick up her father, nor Eduardo Deán, the son-in-law, the husband, the widower, who arrived shortly afterwards to go out and have lunch with them, that is, with us, or else, I would have met them in other circumstances (“Would you like to join us?”, it had been Téllez’s suggestion, and I said “Yes, why not,” not waiting to be asked again, not making them insist, which they might not have done anyway). Nor would I be going into a restaurant with them, the father the first to go through the door, as fathers and Italian men always are, they won’t let a woman go into any public place ahead of them because, first, they have to test the water (at that moment, bottles might fly or knives flash, men fight even in the most unsuitable places for a brawl), then Luisa Téllez, then me, to whom Deán gave way with a gesture that was half-paternalistic and half an indication of vague social superiority (or perhaps it was the false
deference with which such people treat mere wageslaves), you fool – I thought, addressing him mentally as “tú” (any mental insult demands the use of the informal “tú”) – you don’t know that your wife died in my arms while you were in London, you fool, you still don’t know, and then, ashamed, I corrected myself: sometimes my mental reactions are too aggressive, too masculine.