Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  And now I was there at the traffic lights which had turned red again, looking at the gnarled trees along the Castellana – although it was autumn, they still had their leaves, and were perhaps gnarled by decades of storms – and at the prostitute who was standing guard outside the pink and green building of an insurance company, and, as I peered at that woman whose name I thought might be Celia Ruiz Comendador, I suddenly found myself giving credence to a purely hypothetical situation and the hypothesis that occurred to me was that, if the information was correct and one night Ruibérriz had, with his own eyes, seen Celia working as a prostitute, he would have been quite capable of hiring her for the night and would have done so confidently and blithely. Only afterwards would he have felt some concern, as sincere as it was insincere, Ruibérriz doesn’t take anything very seriously, nothing matters very much to him, or perhaps it is simply that he sees life as a comedy. And if it was her and she bore the same name – because a face is not enough, it grows old and can change and can be made up to look different – if it was Celia and Ruibérriz had hired her and had spent the night with her, then there would have been established between the two men – between him and me, between us – a relationship that our languages no longer reflect, but that certain dead languages do. Whenever I learn of sexual infidelities or I am a witness to changes of partner or to second marriages – also when I see prostitutes in the street as I pass in my car or in a taxi or walking – I always remember my time as a student of English, when I learned of the existence of an ancient verb, no longer in use, an Anglo-Saxon verb that has not survived and which, besides, I cannot quite remember, I heard a teacher mention it once in class, and its meaning, which I do remember, remained fixed in my mind for ever, although not its form. The word describes the relationship or kinship acquired by two or more men who have lain with or slept with the same woman, even if that happened at different times and bearing in mind the different faces of that woman whose name remains the same through all time. The verb probably bore the prefix ġe·, which originally meant “together” and, in Anglo-Saxon, can denote “comradeship” or “conjunction” or “companionship”, as in certain nouns which I haven’t forgotten, ġe·fēra, “travelling companion”, or ġe·sweoster, “sisters”. I suppose it must be something like our own common prefixes “co-”, “com-” or “con-” that appear so often in, for example, “co-worker”, “companion”, “consort”, “compatriot”, “co-conspirator” and “confidant”, and that verb, which has now disappeared and which I no longer remember, was perhaps ġe·licgan, since licgan means “to lie” in the sense of “to lie with someone”, “to fornicate”, and thus the translation and the idea would, therefore, be something like “co-fornicate” or, rather, “co-fuck”, if the word were rather cruder. Although it may be that the word used to convey the idea was not a verb but a noun, perhaps ġe·brd-guma, which would translate as “co-bridegroom”, or perhaps ġe·for·liġer, “co-fornication”, who knows, and I’m afraid I never will know now, since when I wanted to confirm my memory and recover the word as well as the idea and I phoned my former teacher to ask him, he claimed he couldn’t remember; I consulted my old Anglo-Saxon grammar and found nothing in it nor in the glossary attached, perhaps my memory invented it; and so, whenever the occasion arises, I merely ponder on the possibilities that come to mind. Whether it existed or not, though, that mediaeval verb or noun was useful and interesting, dizzying too in a way, and dizzy was what I felt when I saw the prostitute and it occurred to me that, if her name was Celia Ruiz Comendador and if the hypothesis were correct, I would be related Anglo-Saxon-style to a lot of other men besides Ruibérriz de Torres. Both men and women are often ignorant of that relationship or link, and its most tangible, visible manifestation is disease, to which those who come afterwards are more exposed, the later they come, the more exposed they are, perhaps that is why virgins were so highly prized in the rather remote past. And that unwanted relationship can prove troublesome or humiliating or hateful when you suspect or know of its existence, having that relationship with someone often leads people to hate each other and even kill each other, it is both rare and commonplace, perhaps the verb described what was principally a bond of hatred, which is why it has not survived in the language that developed from it nor in any others, a connection based on rivalry and unease and jealousy and drops of blood, a network with multiple spurs or tributaries that might lead on into infinity and which we no longer wish to designate or give houseroom to in our language, even though we conceive of it in our thoughts and in our actions, another bothersome reminder, the co-fornicators or co-fuckers; of course, the opposite is also possible and there may be certain sexual relationships with another man or woman that provide a certain degree of prestige and ennoble those who begin or contract or acquire those relationships, those who come afterwards, who receive not only the disease but also the aura, probably more nowadays than at any other time, or at least more publicly, I did not feel ennobled by that hypothesis, but then I had come before.

  The woman took a few expectant, incredulous steps towards the kerb when she saw me stop at the traffic lights, with the lights on green again and my engine running (she couldn’t see me or know how dizzy I felt), doubtless she thought she should come a little closer and allow me to have a better look before I decided, perhaps during the whole of that cold Tuesday night she had not yet made a single visit to a flat or to a car, her footsteps and her visits destined to leave no mark on anyone, or to become superimposed one on the other in her confused, fatalistic, fragile memory. And then I felt it was unfair – how can I put it, humiliating – to make her risk stepping out into the road to reach my car window. I checked that no one was coming up on my right and I parked the car by the pavement, just beyond the bus shelter beneath which she or the colleagues she alternated with would stand when it rained – number 16 and number 61 – almost turning into the nearside lane of the Paseo de la Castellana, stopping right on the corner; and before realizing what my intention was, she quickened her step and raised one arm as if to detain me with that gesture, as if fearful of losing a client out of indecision or pride or as if that were her usual way of hailing a taxi. I still kept the engine running, although I wasn’t sure whether or not I would say anything to her or invite her to get into the car, it didn’t just depend on her name. I watched the approach of her strong, gleaming, silky legs and automatically wound down the passenger window. Then she bent over to see my face and to talk to me, she bent over and immediately leaned an elbow on the lowered window, perhaps a trick to stop you immediately winding it up again if you changed your mind. She looked at me unblinking, as if she had never seen me before, although it seemed to me that she was holding her breath: if it was Celia, she was perhaps preparing her first sentence or reply as well as a distorted tone of voice, or a different way of speaking from her normal one, she was playing for time. The face was Celia’s face, which I know so well, and at the same time it wasn’t, I mean, she wore her hair in a calculatedly dishevelled style, with artificial curls and blonde highlights, that Celia would never have dreamed of adopting and I had never seen her wear make-up like that either, her lips were painted blood-red and outlined rather too boldly, her eyelashes were undeniably false and she had extended her eyeliner right into the corners of her eyes, making them look more almond-shaped, more striking. Her clothes weren’t Celia’s clothes either, the too-short skirt, the too-tight top, only the raincoat could have been hers because, when I saw it in a better light and closer to, I saw that it wasn’t a raincoat but a mac like the one Celia used to wear sometimes, the high heels could have been Celia’s too on the nights we used to go out partying. Still leaning on my window, she shot a couple of rapid glances to her right to check on two other prostitutes, whom we could both now see from the corner, standing on the steps of an imposing doorway in the Castellana, doubtless awaiting the result of our transaction, if we didn’t reach an agreement, they might be in with a chance, or so they thought. One of them was gazing up
at the trees in the avenue – the foliage – as if she were attracted by the gentle, unchoreographed swaying of the branches or rather of the leaves, there was nothing but breeze and clouds. From that distance, they looked less pretty or less colourful.

  “Get in,” I said and opened the door, forcing her to move away from the window for a moment. I didn’t quite know how to address her, so I just said what I would have said to Celia if I had met her alone in the street at that hour. I was the driver or the man with the large hands and hard, clumsy fingers on the wheel – my fingers are like piano keys – who was inviting her to get into the car from my seat, the passenger door flung open, I was the one who was telling her what she should do, I was the one giving the orders, it wasn’t like that with Celia. But a deal had not yet been reached.

  “Hey, hang on, hang on. First, where are we going and, second, have you got the readies?” she said, taking a step back – one of her heels dragged along the ground – and placing one hand on her hip. I heard the jangle of bracelets when she made that gesture, it was a noise that Celia had made sometimes, only less obtrusively, she never used to wear quite so many, or perhaps they just fitted more tightly.

  “Let’s take a drive around here to begin with, and don’t worry, I’m ready for anything. Go on, take a few, perhaps you’ll be nicer to me then,” I replied, and I took out a few notes from my trouser pocket, I had quite a lot of cash on me. There would be no worries on that score, that’s what I meant to say and that is what she understood. As I reached out my hand holding the fan of notes, it occurred to me that, if she wasn’t Celia, I was being rather imprudent: it was like inviting her to rob me somehow – what people call the “the kiss of sleep” – we want to have whatever we can see and is within our grasp. But she still looked too much like Celia for me to feel distrustful or to decide that it wasn’t her. Anyway, it was her, even if it wasn’t.

  “Well, I’ll just take this and this for the moment, for the drive, all right?” she said, selecting two notes as if they were playing cards, she did so very carefully and as if asking my permission. She put them in her handbag. “Then we’ll talk about it, if you want to go any further, well, Barajas Airport is one thing, Guadalajara is quite another. And if you want to go to Barcelona, then you’d better stop off at a cashpoint first.”

  “Come on, get in,” I said, patting the empty seat on my right. A cloud of dust flew up.

  She got in and closed the door, as we drove off, I saw that the other two prostitutes were sitting on the steps, their opportunity lost, it would be cold on the stone steps, waiting there in their short short skirts, it had rained earlier on and the ground wasn’t quite dry. Celia’s skirt was so short that, once she was seated by my side, it looked as if she wasn’t wearing one, I saw the part of her thighs not covered by her black elasticated stockings – she wasn’t wearing a suspender belt – I saw a fringe of very white skin, too white for my taste, it was autumn. I began to drive away from the area, up the Castellana.

  “Hey, where are you going?” she said. “It’s best if we go up one of the back streets.” She meant Fortuny and Marqués de Riscal and Monte Esquinza and Jenner and Fernando el Santo, quiet streets with hardly any traffic, streets occupied by the embassies of rich countries, surrounded by black railings and private gardens with smooth, well-mown lawns, streets lined with trees, peaceful night and day, near where I spent my childhood, when the two buses, which are now long and red, the 16 and the 61 – I had picked up the false Celia or Celia herself at that very bus stop – were, respectively, a double decker and a tram running on rails, sections of which you can still see, like fragments of fossils in the asphalt along its old route, both were blue, the tram and the double decker that I used to catch to and from school: they still have the same number, that is, the same name, the 16 and the 61. A car can stop and switch off its engine for a while in those streets without the lights from other cars constantly dazzling its occupants, you can sniff and chat and lick, and boys can snatch a cigarette before going into class, they are the most foreign of streets and the freest.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t be long. And I’ll drop you back on your corner or wherever you want, you won’t have to get a taxi. I imagine taxis don’t always want to pick you up.” It was a rather old-fashioned remark, potentially offensive if she wasn’t Celia. “I just fancy driving for a while without any traffic.”

  “Fine, you’re in charge,” she said, “Tell me when you get tired, but don’t take too long or I’ll start feeling like a taxi-driver’s girlfriend being taken for a ride, only with the meter running.”

  Her last words made me laugh a little the way Celia used to make me laugh once I’d got over my fit of enthusiasm or weakness and I merely found her amusing. It’s true, some young taxi drivers on Friday and Saturday nights do have their girlfriend by their side, they have to work and it’s the only way they can go out together and see each other, the girls have enormous patience, either that or they’re terribly in love or desperate. They can’t even talk very much, with a passenger always behind them, watching the backs of their necks – especially hers if the passenger is a lonely, desperate man – and possibly listening to their conversation.

  I drove in silence down the familiar Paseo de la Castellana, some places are just as they were, though not many, the Castellana Hilton isn’t called that any more, but for me it’s still the Hilton, there’s the brash sign for the House of Ming, both the place and the name were mysterious, forbidden things to me when I was a child, and then Chamartín, the Real Madrid stadium that also evokes names that have not been erased and never will be, whole line-ups that I still know by heart, and sometimes the faces that I knew from the cigarette cards I used as swaps in the game of heads or tails I played daily with one of my brothers: Molowny, Lesmes, Rial and Kopa, the fat man Puskas, Velázquez, Santisteban and Zárraga, players whose faces I wouldn’t recognize now if ever I saw them, but their names persist, and Velázquez was a genius.

  I drove in silence because I was looking at the prostitute out of the corner of my eye to see if I had the same feeling I would have had when I used to drive a tired Celia home, as I had on so many nights when we went home together. I wanted to see her full face, to get a good look at her and to study her features, but there would be time for that and, besides, faces are deceptive, sometimes you can rely more on the emotions and feelings provoked by those faces, as well as on the involuntary gestures made by the other person, the rhythm of their breathing, the way they clear their throat or make a certain gesture or mispronounce a certain word, a particular cliché they use, their smell – the smell of the dead lingers when nothing else remains of them – the way they walk or the way they cross their legs, their impatiently drumming fingers or the way they rub their thumb back and forth beneath their lower lip; and their laugh, that would certainly unmask anyone who was pretending to be someone else, a person’s laugh is almost unmistakable, and I wondered if I should run the risk of trying to provoke into laughter the prostitute I had picked up in my car, because that might force me to decide if I was right or wrong.

  I drove in silence, too, because I was wondering why, if it was Celia, she would be walking the streets, she couldn’t need the money that badly, perhaps she was frivolous enough and enough of an adventurist – an eminently Soviet word that, “adventurist”, someone who always wants to be able to say: “I’ve tried that” – or perhaps it was revenge, a reprisal that would have begun to take shape when Ruibérriz’s friends had seen her in those two different bars or when Ruibérriz himself had hired her that night he saw her, a vengeance that could be fully realized now, if I was I and she was she, she might have her doubts about me too, we barely notice the changes that take place in ourselves, I’m not aware of it in myself, even though those changes might be profound and serious ones. And what other form could that revenge take, I asked myself silently, but that of plunging me tumultuously into relationships with strangers I would never know about – I would never know who they were
or how many – nor would she, unless she kept count and noted them down in her diary and asked them their names, which they would refuse to give her.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the prostitute when we reached the end of the Castellana, as I was turning round to drive back in the opposite direction.

  “Victoria,” she lied, assuming she was Celia and perhaps even if she wasn’t. But if she was Celia, then she lied deliberately, ironically, maliciously, even mockingly, because that is the female version of my own name. She took some chewing-gum out of her handbag, the car smelled of mint. “And you?”

  “Javier,” I lied in turn, realizing that I would have done so either way, whether she was Victoria or my Celia who was no longer mine.

  “Not another Javier,” she remarked, “Madrid’s full of them or perhaps it’s just the name you’d all like to have, I don’t know what’s got into you all.”

  “All who?” I asked. “Your customers?”