Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  Deán was rather a handsome man, he had improved a lot with the years, now that I saw him close to, and now that his face no longer had the pallor I had seen at the cemetery a month before, his hands clutching his temples. I don’t know if it is fair to say what I’m going to say, since, from the very start, I already knew quite a lot about him and had been present at his change of marital status when he still knew nothing about it, but the fact is that he had the face of a widower, though it was difficult to know if he had acquired that face in the last month or if he’d had it for a long time before becoming a widower. (Widows and widowers seem very calm even underneath their despair or sadness, when they feel despair or sadness.) He offered me his left hand, although he wasn’t left-handed and his right hand wasn’t bandaged or immobilized in any way, an idiosyncrasy, a quirk, which made that first contact with him slightly clumsy and difficult and odd, as if that were part of his character, his ever mutable face, the mocking eyebrows, the grave, almond eyes, the cleft chin like that of Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum and Fred MacMurray (though he was thinner than any of them). During the introductions at Téllez’s apartment I was certain that neither he nor his sister-in-law Luisa had noticed me at the funeral and could not therefore recognize me; however, during lunch or while we were waiting for it, I had a sudden moment of doubt while Téllez and his daughter were resolving some domestic matter that was of no interest to Deán or to me and so we sat listening, not saying anything: during those two or three minutes, he looked at me both directly and indirectly as if he knew something about me or, rather, as if one could have no secrets from him, he had the sort of incredulous, expectant eyes that oblige one to go on talking even though no questions have been asked and there is only silence, to explain more than has been asked for, to prove with new arguments something that has not been put in doubt or verbally refuted by anyone, but which one feels to be invalid or that simply won’t wash, all because the other person doesn’t answer, but goes on waiting, like someone at a show who does not participate and wants to be entertained right up until the end. And you are that show, although during the two or three minutes when he looked at me, I was a dumb show at which he cast only the occasional glance, as one does at a television with the sound off. “I can’t understand how Marta could ever have had a lover,” I thought, “especially not that loudmouth Vicente who, according to his own wife Inés, is never discreet, the kind of loudmouth who always ends up spilling the beans, even revealing things that might prejudice or ruin himself. I don’t understand how such a thing could be possible given this husband and his comminatory eyes, from whom no one could hide anything of that nature for very long, unless the relationship between Marta and Vicente was a recent one, a new one, despite the recorded confidences and the verbal, not merely mental, insults, the flesh makes people over-confident and invites abuse, everything becomes creased or stained or crumpled, I would have to listen to that tape again, perhaps I would hear in that man’s voice the impatience that newness brings with it, when what is new fills you with enthusiasm and you can’t do without it. Deán is very sharp and doubtless vengeful, according to Inés, he’s determined to find me and he doesn’t seem the kind of man who would just accept what is given to him or who would not take steps, he seems more the active sort, a schemer, manipulative, persuasive, he’s probably the type to force and bend both events and wills, that look denotes attitudes which, once adopted, become rigid, as well as a wealth of acquired conviction, those incipient, multiple lines that will make his face as craggy as tree bark when he’s older, that slowness and that joint capacity for surprise and for infinite understanding that I now feel and see close to, on the other side of the table, he is the kind of person who knows and measures the consequences of his actions and who knows that everything is possible and, therefore, any wonderment we might feel should last no more than an instant – the instant that precedes infinite comprehension – not even what we might think or do ourselves, cruelty, pity, scorn, melancholy and rage; mockery, rectitude, good faith and self-absorption; vehemence, or perhaps inclemency, everything stripped of the justifications that anyone who paused to think a little would reject or ignore, and then act. This man is far-sighted and prescient, he is alert and takes account of what almost no one takes account of: he takes account of the future and he sees what will happen later on, and that is why when he does something, he believes it to be right. Or perhaps he isn’t like that at all, but quite the opposite, perhaps he has a good sense of mental and verbal rhetoric and, on all occasions, acts without thinking, knowing that, later on, he will find the right argument or judgement to justify what his taste and instinct will have improvised, that is, to explain his actions and his words, knowing that everything can be defended and that any opposing conviction can be refuted, we can always prove ourselves to be right and everything can be told if accompanied by some justification, some excuse or by some attenuating circumstance or even by its mere representation, telling is a form of generosity, anything can happen and be said and be accepted, you can emerge from anything unharmed, or more than that, unscathed, no codes or commandments or laws can be made to stand up, they are always convertible into so much scrap paper, there will always be someone who can say: ‘They don’t apply to me, or not in my case, or not this time, although perhaps the next, if there is a next time.’ Someone who will manage to maintain that and to convince others of it.” His voice was very deep, rusty and hoarse as if it emerged from behind a helmet or had spent centuries meditating upon and storing up each word, he spoke very slowly and that was how he spoke when we were on the second course and he finally made a reference to Marta, to his wife who had died a month before without the benefit of his presence: “I don’t know if you’ve realized, but in a week’s time, it’s Marta’s birthday,” he said. “She would have been thirty-three, she didn’t even manage to make it that far.”

  He said this with his Tartar eyes the colour of beer fixed on Luisa, whose previous words had given rise to his, or had at least meant that his did not seem extemporaneous and merely the product of meditations unrelated to the general conversation which, until that moment, had flowed in a desultory, stop-start fashion with the occasional brief pause, influenced perhaps by my awkward presence and perhaps, too, by the domestic matter that Luisa and her father had begun discussing as soon as we sat down, a matter of a purchase to be made. Or maybe it was a way of trying to avoid or rather postpone what the three of them would doubtless experience as an incessant beating in their thoughts, especially when they got together, and which Deán had no longer been able to avoid mentioning, he had waited until we had ordered and had eaten our first course, and until they had brought us the second (he was eating sole and drinking wine). Up until then, they had not paid me much attention, that is, they had not treated me like a new person in whom it would only be polite to take a minimal interest, not like an equal, but like an employee who has simply joined his paymasters for lunch, because otherwise he would have no lunch, except that they were not going to pay me anything, nor was Téllez, and I would have been perfectly capable of having lunch alone without feeling that it showed any lack of consideration on their part. Perhaps, too, they were overly self-absorbed and too accustomed to talking about their own affairs (it happens in all families) to vary the programme and the tone and the usual erratic agenda of their meetings, perhaps more frequent now than they had ever been, the death of someone temporarily brings together those who are left behind. Luisa had asked her father how much money he wanted to spend on the present he would give – but which she would buy for him that afternoon – to the daughter-in-law and sister-in-law María (María Fernández Vera, I remember all the names), whose birthday it was the following day, that was the kind of conversation they were having, and it was then that Deán said what I have said he said, with his understandable confusion of tenses, first he spoke as if Marta were still alive (“it’s Marta’s birthday”), then he corrected himself when he mentioned how old she would have been, the dea
d abandon their age and thus end up being the youngest if we who go on living and remembering them last a long time, so far only a month longer in this case. Luisa must have had a similar thought, because she was the one who answered first after a silence that acknowledged the pointlessness of avoiding talking about what three people are simultaneously thinking, three people who are in fact four and that fourth a haunted person, although the other three knew nothing about this for they too had perhaps been under a spell ever since they had watched the symbolic earth falling. Téllez left his fish knife and fork crossed on his plate (grilled fish which he had eaten, up until then, with a good appetite); Luisa raised her napkin to her lips and held it there for a few seconds as if she were using it to hold back her tears – rather than anything the mouth itself might emit, vomit or words – before replacing it on her lap, the napkin stained now with lipstick and saliva and the juice from her rare steak (definitely not Irish); first spearing a roast potato with his fork, Deán himself raised his right hand to his forehead and rested his right elbow ostentatiously on the table, as if he had suddenly forgotten all his manners. And when Luisa finally replaced her napkin on her lap – I had a glimpse of her thighs across the table while they remained uncovered, though her skirt was not as short as her sister’s had been, the white napkin covering her open mouth – what she said was this, echoing my own thoughts: “I never imagined that one day I would be older than Marta, that’s one of the things that you know to be impossible from childhood on, even though you might want it sometimes, when your older sister takes your toy away from you or you have a fight with her, and you always lose because you’re the youngest. And yet it is possible. In two years’ time, I’ll already be older than her, if I live that long. It seems incredible.”

  She was still holding her knife in her right hand, a sharp serrated knife with a wooden handle, the sort they sometimes give you in restaurants so that you can cut your meat more easily. She had placed her fork on the plate in order to take up her napkin, and hadn’t picked it up again. She looked like a frightened woman ready to defend herself, wielding that knife with its cutting, serrated edge.

  “Don’t talk such nonsense, my dear, and touch wood,” Téllez said apprehensively. “ ‘If I live that long, if I live that long’, honestly. Haven’t we suffered enough misfortunes?” And turning to me, he added as an explanation (he may have been superstitious, but he was the one who was most conscious of my presence), also hovering between tenses: “Marta is my eldest daughter, Eduardo’s wife. She died very suddenly, just over a month ago.” Despite everything, he believed in luck and that things do not necessarily repeat themselves.

  “I thought I heard something of the sort at the Palace,” I replied, I was the only one who still had both knife and fork in my hands, although, by then, I wasn’t eating either. “I’m so terribly sorry.” And in my mouth that cliché was only too exact and too right (“how that death gladdens me, saddens me, pleases me”). Then I fell silent, I didn’t even ask what she had died of (it had never mattered much to me, and it mattered less all the time), I wanted to say only enough to allow them to go on talking as they had done until then, as if I wasn’t there, as if I were no one, although I had been duly introduced to them, and by my real name which never appears anywhere.