Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  Deán finished the white wine in his glass and refilled it, still with his elbow leaning on the table and his forehead resting on his hand. But it was Luisa who spoke again, and she said (not without first touching wood as her father had recommended: I noticed her mechanically touch the table beneath the cloth like someone linking a word to an action, it was a normal gesture, customary in her, she was superstitious too, perhaps it was her Italian inheritance, although, in Italy, people tend to touch iron).

  “I still remember the parties we went to as adolescents, where I always had a terrible time and all because of her: she would forbid me to like any boy until she had chosen one. ‘Just wait until I’ve decided,’ she would say to me as we stood outside the front door of the house where the party was being held. ‘You just wait, all right? Otherwise, we don’t go in,’ she used to say, and only when I’d said: ‘Yes, all right, but be quick’ would we ring the doorbell. Because she was the eldest she had a kind of right to first refusal, and I let her get away with it. Then, during the party, she would take her time deciding, she would dance with a few boys before telling me which one she had chosen, and I would be on tenterhooks, afraid that what nearly always happened would happen, that she would end up choosing the boy I most liked. I’m convinced that she often tried to guess who I liked just so that she could choose him and then, when I protested, she would accuse me of being a copycat, of always choosing the boys that she liked best. And then she would dance with him all evening. I tried hard to hide my preferences, but it was no good, she knew me too well, she always homed in on the right one, and so, when we were older, we stopped going to the same parties. That’s the way she was,” said Luisa, a distant look in her eyes, the eyes of someone plunging effortlessly into her memory, “although the fact is she would have had first choice anyway, she had a bigger bust than me then and had much more success with boys than I had.”

  I couldn’t help glancing swiftly at Luisa Téllez’s bust, calculating its size. Perhaps her sister Marta’s bra had not been a size too small, perhaps her breasts had always been on the large side. “How can I possibly be ogling Luisa Téllez’s bust and thighs?” I thought. I know it’s normal behaviour for me and for many other men, regardless of the circumstances, however sad or even tragic, we can’t resist looking at something that is visually attractive, not without making a superhuman effort, but just then it made me feel like a complete scoundrel – in adolescent-speak: a “perv” – yet, nevertheless, I continued visually to measure her bust – surreptitiously, it was a matter of moments – with such veiled, hypocritical eyes that I immediately lowered them to my plate and ate another mouthful, the first at the table to eat since Deán’s mention of the approaching birthday of someone who would not in fact be there to celebrate. She hadn’t had the chance to decide whether or not she liked me first, Luisa hadn’t seen me before, her voice did not strike me as being the same one which, for all eternity, would say on my answering machine, unless I erased the tape: “… so, make sure you call me tomorrow and tell me all about it. The guy sounds rather nice, but you can never tell. Frankly, I don’t know how you’ve got the nerve. Anyway, talk to you later, and good luck.” I hadn’t really wanted to think about it, but perhaps I was “the guy”, that message must have been the penultimate or rather the last (the penultimate would have been erased by the super-imposition of the electric voice that I had heard directly and which Marta never heard) before I rang the doorbell and came through the door; it’s possible that having finally decided that she was going to see me, Marta had had time to talk to a friend or to her sister about it: “I’ve got a date with a guy I hardly know, and he’s coming over for supper; Eduardo’s in London, I don’t quite know what will happen, but you never know” with the same excitement she used to feel as an adolescent, before a party (“Just wait until I’ve decided” and only then ring the doorbell), perhaps Marta had, in turn, left that message on her friend’s or sister’s answering machine, a message that had, in turn, been replied to while she dashed out, at the last minute, to a nearby supermarket, leaving the child alone for a moment as I had left him alone most of one night, in order to buy the Haagen-Dazs ice cream for dessert: perhaps, for example. She might not have said “the guy” but my name, even my surname, she might have managed to speak to the friend or the sister without any intervening answering machine and to have talked about me (but then they would have known my name, and Luisa clearly didn’t recognize it when her father introduced us, perhaps she wouldn’t even remember it now), to have speculated and commented, I met him at a cocktail party and we arranged to meet for coffee the next day, he knows all kinds of people, he’s divorced, he writes scripts and things, that’s what I usually say I do and, at first, I don’t say anything about my role as ghostwriter, although I don’t conceal the fact if the subject happens to come up, I know that people find my stories about it amusing. That night, too, Marta had hesitated or exercised her right of first refusal, she had called Vicente but he hadn’t been in, she had certainly called him and possibly someone else, I had probably been an ill-fated second best, and that was the only reason she had died before my eyes and in my arms. I’ve already said that I don’t care about the medical causes of her death, nor was I interested in reconstructing what had happened the day before our meeting nor the process that had brought us together, nor to find out about her history or that of her family or that of her jaded marriage, nor to relive vicariously what had been interrupted or, rather, cancelled, I’m a passive kind of person who almost never seeks or wants anything or isn’t aware that he’s seeking or wanting anything, the sort of person things just happen to, you don’t even have to move for everything to become horribly complicated, for things to happen, for there to be anger and litigation, you only have to breathe in this world, the slightest in-breath or out-breath like the minimal swaying inevitable in all light objects hanging by a thread, our veiled and neutral gaze like the inert oscillation of toy aeroplanes suspended from a ceiling, and that always end up going into battle because of that minimal tremor or pulsation. And if, now, I was taking a few steps, it was with no very definite aim, I didn’t even want to decipher that tape which I had listened to so often, because it simply wasn’t possible: that message could have been for Deán and not for Marta, perhaps “the guy” was someone with whom Deán was going to do a deal that required great daring and perhaps she hadn’t spoken about me to anyone and no one in the world knew that I had been chosen for that night, not to go to bed with her, but to accompany her in her death. What I was seeking perhaps – this occurred to me while I was chewing the mouthful of food and dragging my hypocritical gaze away from Luisa’s bust – what I wanted perhaps was something absurd but understandable, perhaps I wanted to convert my unjustified presence that night into something more deserved and formal, even though it was after the fact and I was, therefore, playing dirty, a more plausible way of altering the facts than any other, seeing one’s past life as if it were a plot or a mere piece of circumstantial evidence, 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: as if I thought that it wasn’t right or fair that she should have said her goodbyes beside someone she barely knew, who was there merely in order not to let the opportunity of a romantic evening slip by, and that it would be fairer if that no one eventually ended up becoming someone to those who were close to her, if, in virtue of her death and what it brought in its train, I ended up being indispensable or important or even useful in the life of one of her loved ones, or else saved them from something. And yet I had had an initial opportunity at the time, I thought, had I stayed in the apartment in Conde de la Cimera, I could have guaranteed the safety of Eugenio who was left there alone with a corpse, but I had not done so. I could also have phoned again, I could have persisted with the melodious night porter at the Wilbraham Hotel in London and warned Mr Ballesteros, I could have let him know what she would have wanted him to know the moment she real
ized that she was dying, we can’t bear those close to us not to know about our troubles, 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 think us still alive when we are dead. I had not done that either, to protect myself from possible anger and to protect her, who had said to me at the start: “You’re mad, how can I possibly phone him, he’d kill me,” but it doesn’t make much sense protecting a dead woman from being killed when she’s already dead and, besides, I hadn’t even managed to save her reputation, they knew that I had been there that night, that is, that a man had been there. I had not done so. Filling the father’s empty days for a while wasn’t much of a contribution, but it was all I had managed up until then.

  “Honestly, the things you girls come out with,” said Téllez, and he too took another furtive mouthful of his fish, he was still hungry, but then he crossed his knife and fork on his plate again as if he did not dare to go on eating. He obviously didn’t like his daughters to talk about their busts, even though they were adolescent busts that belonged firmly in the past now and could therefore easily be made the subject of a joke: doubtless, for him, his daughters did not have such things as breasts, no more than had the daughter called Gloria who had lived so briefly, I think he blushed a little, although in older people it is difficult to distinguish blushing from overheating, not that they often blush. He had said “you girls” as if Luisa were a chance individual representative at the table of what had always been a collective, his daughters, as if Luisa’s remark could easily have been made or subscribed to by her sister, it’s hard to get used to the idea that someone will never again comment on anything. “You all have such a coarse vision of things. Coffee, please,” he added, raising a finger at a passing waiter laden with trays who took no notice of him. “Do any of you want pudding? I’m going to skip it.” That plural “you” was different: it included me, the two other men at the table.

  We were in a restaurant where he was a familiar face, it was close to where he lived, he was used to getting prompt service. He shot a look of irritation at the waiter, took out his pipe and tapped it on the palm of his hand; as soon as the head waiter saw that gesture, he approached solicitously, addressing him as “Don Juan”: “Didn’t you enjoy the fish, Don Juan?” he said.

  “Yes, yes, but I haven’t much appetite, and I don’t think the others have either, you can clear all this away now. I’d like a coffee. What about you?” I noticed that he used the informal plural “vosotros” which included me, he would soon be addressing me as “tú”.

  Just then, the head waiter turned towards the window, a moment before there was a loud clap of thunder – as if he had sensed it – and it began to rain heavily just as it had a month or more before, although not quite as it had then, this time it was raining faster and more furiously, as if the rain had to make the most of the brief time allotted to it or as if it were an air raid being fought off by artillery. In the space of about half a minute, people from the street had crammed into the doorway of the restaurant, men and women and children were running to find shelter from what was falling from the sky, again, like the men, women and children of the 1930s in this same city which was, at the time, under siege, who were also running to find shelter from what was falling from the sky and from the shells fired from the outskirts, from Angeles or Garabitas hill, the so-called “obuses” or mortar bombs that traced a parabola and fell on the main telephone exchange or on the square alongside when their aim went wrong (in the quirky black humour of the time, the place was renamed Ouch Square), or on the vast Café Negresco that was completely destroyed and strewn with corpses, yet the next day, people, simultaneously unperturbed and resigned, went and ordered their glass of hot malted milk at the neighbouring café, La Granja del Henar, in Calle de Alcalá opposite the start of the Gran Vía, knowing that the same thing could easily happen there, the suburbs and the sky became the biggest threat to pedestrians, who consequently sought out the pavements that were not in the firing line, just as those caught in the storm did now, for the wind was driving the rain hard, and the shells were more likely to hit one or other pavement according to which hill they were being fired from, two and a half years in the life of those besieging and those besieged, two and a half years of running down these streets, hands clutching hats and berets and caps, skirts flying and stockings laddered or no stockings at all, in this city which, ever since, has never lost that sense of living and being like an island.

  The head waiter took a personal note of the order; tied around his waist, in the manner of French waiters, he wore a kind of white sheet (rather than an apron) that almost reached his feet, a white cloth over his black uniform, that way it didn’t matter if he got dirty. The four of us sat watching the rain for a moment.

  “It won’t last, but we might as well order a dessert,” said Deán, “though I’ll have to rush off afterwards.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” said Luisa, “we haven’t discussed Eugenio yet.”

  “I know, perhaps we should put it off for another occasion,” replied Deán in his slow way, shooting me an angry glance – either deliberately or involuntarily – like a finger pointing, then another more tempered glance at Téllez, who understood what was meant and looked away and stroked his, as yet, unlit pipe. Maybe that was the reason they had arranged to have lunch, to talk about the boy, whatever that meant (another domestic matter) and Téllez’s invitation, and especially my acceptance of it, had made the meeting pointless. Téllez looked like someone who knows he has put his foot in it and would prefer not to have his attention drawn to it, I kept my gaze neutral as if none of it had anything to do with me.

  “It’s very simple, Eduardo,” replied Luisa, “now that Papa is here, just tell me what you’ve decided and then he can say what he thinks too, I’d rather we all talked about it together so that there are no misunderstandings. I can’t spend my whole life going back and forth from my apartment to yours, and neglecting both. If you want me to have him for the moment, tell me and be done with it, or if you’d prefer to have him, then I’ll help you to get that organized, although it won’t be easy with your workload and with all the travelling you do. What I can’t do is to keep coming and going like some sort of messenger, I’ve been doing that for more than a month now.”

  “Or like one of these modern-day girlfriends,” intervened Téllez, thinking he would not now be punished for a faux pas committed out of courtesy. “Isn’t that why people get married nowadays, because they get tired of getting up in one apartment and having to cross the city and pretend that they’ve just got up in their own? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway, that marriage survives as an institution thanks to people constantly forgetting their toothbrush or being too lazy to buy a second one, people never used to sleep in other people’s houses, it’s not at all a good thing.” And he wagged his index finger from side to side as if he knew for certain that all three of us were in the habit of doing just that. “Luisa’s right, Eduardo. Let her take care of things, it will be easier for her to organize it all from her own apartment and according to her timetable. At least for now, until you see how the land lies, until you sort yourself out, or decide to get married again, you’re still young and maybe, one day, someone will tire of staying over at your place and not having their own toothbrush to hand in the morning.” And again it was Téllez who noticed my presence or took it into account, for he added politely, so that I could understand what they were talking about: “My daughter Marta left a son, my grandson Eugenio. He’s only little, two years old. Eduardo has a very hectic lifestyle and Luisa is offering to look after the boy. Eduardo travels a lot and often at the wrong time too.”

  There was no reason why I should have understood that last malevolent remark, but I did understand it and it was, perhaps, strange that I did not ask what was meant. Or perhaps not. I was being discreet to the point of invisibility, being accustomed to disappearing into the background, accustomed to ceasing t
o be someone comes in handy sometimes, it’s a form of flattery: the withdrawal of one person leaves the remaining members of the group feeling more relaxed, feeling that they have taken his place and thereby profited. “So,” I thought, “Téllez can be spiteful – with Deán anyway – beneath that peaceable, absent-minded, slightly boring and ingenuous exterior, a figure who would fill a room.” Perhaps it was that false ingenuousness so common amongst old people, which allows them to say or do whatever they like without anyone reproaching them or taking any notice, they pretend to be a member of the “soon-to-be-dead” so as to appear unthreatening, as if they had no desires, no expectations, when the truth is that no one ever ceases to be immersed in life as long as they have a consciousness and a few memories to ponder, more than that, it is a person’s memories that make every living being dangerous and full of desires and expectations, it’s impossible not to relocate your memories in the future, that is, not merely to note them down in the credit column, in the past, but also in the debit column, in what is still to come, there are certain things that one simply cannot believe will not reoccur, you can never discount the possibility that what once was will be again, if you were absolutely certain that you had made love for the very last time, you would put an end to your consciousness and to your memories, and commit suicide: perhaps, for example, immediately after making love for that last time. The living also believe that what has never happened can still happen, they believe in the most dramatic and most unlikely reversals of fortune, the sort of thing that happens in history and in stories, they believe that a traitor or beggar or murderer can become king and the head of the emperor fall beneath the blade, that a great beauty can love a monster or that the man who killed her beloved and brought about her ruin can succeed in seducing her, they believe that lost battles can be won, that the dead never really leave but watch over us or appear to us as ghosts who can influence events, that the youngest of three sisters could, one day, be the eldest: perhaps, for example. With whom would Marta Téllez have made love for the last time, with Deán the uptight or with Vicente the exasperated, not with me, at any rate, not that she would have known that it was the last time, it would never have occurred to her, whoever it was, she would not have endowed it with any particular significance or solemnity or even passion or affection, when she was alone again, dazed or sleepy, she would have showered if she had been with Vicente in a hotel or in the car, to rid herself of the smell of obscenity left by the other person, just as it took time to get rid of Marta’s smell from my shirt and my body, even though I had a bath in the morning, hers was a smell of metamorphosis; and she would have simply washed herself in the bidet and then, back in bed, turned over, thinking only that she had lost half an hour’s sleep, if she was with Deán in that bedroom that I now knew, the full-length mirror, the television on, the tube of Redoxon and an eye mask from some plane trip, the trousers and skirts draped over the chair and left unironed that night or any other night. And in both cases, she would have gone to sleep a little later with all thought finally banished, her mind a blank, whilst if she had known what one almost never knows and what she did not know, she would never have been able to get to sleep, indeed, she would have urged her husband or her lover to continue, to overturn that verdict without delay and to prove at once that it was not the last time, but had she managed to persuade one or the other, had she forced them to stay awake and to take her in their arms again, after a while, she would have found that that last time had come round again and had passed, and that is how time passes, constantly subjected to these ineffectual and contradictory struggles of ours, we allow ourselves to be impatient and to wish that the things we long for, but which are postponed or delayed, would happen at once, even though everything seems as nothing and to have happened too fast once it does happen and is over, repeating each beloved act brings us a little nearer to its end, and the worst thing is that not repeating it brings us closer too, everything is travelling slowly towards its own dissolution in the midst of our vain accelerations and our fictitious delays and only the last time is the last time. On the night that she entertained me, Marta Téllez must have thought that she would sleep with at least one other man during her lifetime, certainly while we were walking together towards the bedroom (she leading me by the hand, both of us slightly unsteady on our feet, the Chateau Malartic) and when I began to undress her and, mechanically, to explore her with my fingers and we gave each other kisses that we might just as well have spared ourselves, for then I would have no need to remember them. She would have been almost certain what was going to happen, she would in fact have gone to bed with me, I think (she would have made it in time), if the boy had gone to sleep earlier and I had made my first move less hesitantly or less tardily – that first gesture that you can sense in the air and that can undeniably speed things up or slow them down, like clouds condensing just before the peal of thunder: the fury and then the haste – there had been no sense of significance or solemnity or passion between us either, perhaps a slight touch of obscenity and some incipient affection, there wasn’t time for anything more, but what was going to happen did not happen, what took place instead was her metamorphosis. And if the boy had taken even longer to get to sleep or if hesitation had won the day and I had not dared to make that move that can so easily not be made, even though you have long since sensed its presence, then I would have left Conde de la Cimera after a little more conversation and a liqueur and a few jokes and she would have been left alone to take a shower to wash away the smell of expectation. She would have sat down at the foot of the bed, neither smiling nor laughing, after putting away the plates and putting to bed the child who would have calmed down as soon as I had disappeared, she would have removed the elegant Armani top, pulling it over her head, and she would have been left with the inside-out sleeves caught on her wrists, and would have sat like that for a few seconds as if exhausted by the effort or by her day’s work – the desolate gesture of someone who can’t stop thinking and who gets undressed gradually in order to think or ponder between items of clothing, and needs those pauses – or perhaps because of the smell of frustrated expectations that she can still smell on herself; she would have taken off the cream-coloured top, which I had helped her take off, with the television turned on, staring indifferently at Fred MacMurray’s coarse, salacious face or she would perhaps have turned to the channel that the Lone Ranger chanced upon during his sleepless night, the channel showing Chimes at Midnight, with Spain pretending to be England, in the early hours the whole world is in black and white; later she would have stood under the shower perhaps wondering whether she should call Vicente again and leave him another message: “If I’d managed to get in touch with you, you could have come over for a bit, instead of me wasting the whole bloody night. If you come back soon, say, before half past two or quarter to three, call me if you like, I’m not going to bed just yet and you could still come over for a while if you wanted to, I’ve had the most ridiculous night, disastrous, I’ll tell you later about the mess I’ve got myself into, I don’t mind going to bed a bit later still, I’ll be wrecked tomorrow anyway. I should have remembered before; honestly, I’m useless.” No, she wouldn’t have said that, only a man is capable of describing as “disastrous” a night that has not come up to expectations, a night when he had expected to have a fuck, but hadn’t, when he didn’t get his rocks off or dip his wick, as Ruibérriz de Torres would say, standing at some bar. She wouldn’t confess to him that she had invited someone else to the apartment, someone to replace him since he wasn’t in when she had phoned, on the contrary, she would have immediately erased all trace of my presence and of the supper, and her night-time message intended for Vicente’s ears would have been (she would have thought it out while she was in the shower): “I can’t sleep, I don’t know what’s wrong. Since you weren’t in, I went to bed early and I just can’t get off, I even had some wine to make me sleepy, it must be because I’m so angry with myself for not having remembered before today that Ed
uardo wouldn’t be here. Call me when you get in, even if it’s late. I want to see you. Besides, at this rate, you won’t be waking me up. If you’re not too tired, come over.” But who knows, perhaps she would never have made that call after her shower, in her dressing gown or towel, perhaps she would not have emerged from the shower at all, but would have slipped over out of frustration or too much thinking or over-tiredness and would have struck the back of her neck whilst still having time, as she fell, to turn off the tap in one last instinctive or desperate movement, to lie on the tiles, drenched and crumpled, drenched and naked, with her neck broken, the back of her neck, which would look, after a while, as if stained with half-dried blood, like striations or strands of black, sticky hair or mud, although no one would have seen it, because I would not have been there: now this is a horrible death, unable to call for help all night, the boy at last deep asleep and the telephone too far away, if only I’d bought a mobile; this is a ridiculous death, there could be nothing more ridiculous than having an accident in my own house on a night when my husband is away on a trip and when the guest who might have saved me has gone, such bad luck, and naked too, so unfortunate, everything can be ridiculous or tragic according to who is doing the telling or how they tell it, and who will tell others about my death or will it be retold several times by everyone who knows me, one to the other, in every possible manner. And she would have had those rapid thoughts only as she was falling, because perhaps Marta Téllez would have died anyway and would have died immediately with no time for feelings of malaise or fear or depression or regret. That did not happen, but a different death, no less horrible and no less ridiculous, with a stranger beside me, just as we were about to have it off, how awful, how embarrassing, how can I describe it in those terms, what isn’t coarse or elevated or funny or sad when it happens can be sad or funny or elevated or coarse when you tell it, the world depends on its storytellers and I have a witness to my own death and I don’t know how he will have taken it; but perhaps he won’t talk, perhaps he won’t tell the story, in fact, it doesn’t matter how he does it – the first one, the source – stories do not belong only to those who were present or to those who invent them, once a story has been told, it’s anyone’s, it becomes common currency, it gets twisted and distorted, no story is told the same way twice or in quite the same words, not even if the same person tells the story twice, not even if there is only ever one storyteller, and what will my narrator or witness have thought of my own inopportune death, the fact is he didn’t save me despite not having left me, despite remaining by my side, he didn’t save me even though he was here, no one can save me.