Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  “Of course, I understand. I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you know the boy well?”

  “No, I’d seen him around a few times, I’d had the odd chat with him. He used to drag his high heels as if he were clinging on to his shoes with his feet, he wasn’t used to it or perhaps he was ill, he seemed very fragile and somehow not quite with it. He was very sweet, very shy, very polite, he always said ‘thank you’ when he asked you something.” Victoria remained thoughtful for a moment and stroked the end of one eyebrow with her index finger, as Celia Ruiz Comendador used to do when, in the middle of an argument or a story, she would stop to think about what she was going to say next, or when she was searching for the right word. The coincidence, however, did not strike me as important just then. “He was the sort of person that you don’t really expect to live very long. You can spot them a mile off, they seem surplus to requirements, as if the world couldn’t bear them and was in a hurry to get rid of them. But then it would be best if they weren’t born at all. Because the fact is that they are born and there they are, and it’s horrible when people you know die, even if you don’t know them that well, it’s hard to grasp that someone who did exist doesn’t any more. At least I think it is. He called himself Franny, I suppose his real name was Francisco. What a way to die.” Victoria turned her face to the street, revealing the back of her neck, she sat looking out at the pavement in Fortuny where we were parked, perhaps she was imagining the shattered skull of the young transvestite on that very pavement or somewhere nearby. “A horrible death, a ridiculous death,” I thought, “his head between someone’s thighs the moment before he died, the dying man’s scorn for his own death. How awful, now I’ll have to remember the name of someone whose face I don’t even know: Franny,” or at least that’s how I imagined it would be written. Then I too fell silent while I sat thinking, leaning one elbow on the steering wheel and rubbing my thumb back and forth beneath my lower lip. But it was only a brief silence. Perhaps we were being watched from far off, from the dark lodge outside the German embassy.

  “Do you fancy going in the back for a bit?” I said to put an end to her thoughts and to stop her making that gesture with her index finger. I put one hand on her shoulder, then I stroked the back of her neck. “You’ve still got to earn your money,” I said, pointing to her handbag.

  She looked at me and removed the chewing-gum from her mouth. This time she opened the window and threw it out on to the pavement.

  IT’S TIRING HAVING always to move in the shadows, having to watch without being seen, doing one’s best not to be discovered, just as it’s tiring having to keep to oneself a secret or a mystery, how wearisome clandestinity is, constantly having to bear in mind that not all your close friends can be privy to the same information, that you have to hide one thing from one friend and something else from another, something the first friend already knows about, you invent complex stories for one woman and, in order not to betray yourself later, you have to fix the details of those stories for ever in your memory, as if you really had experienced them, to another newer woman friend you tell the truth about everything apart from certain innocuous, but embarrassing facts about yourself: the fact that you can happily spend hours in front of the television watching soccer or mindless quiz shows, that you still read comics even though you’re now an adult, that you would happily lie down on the floor and play heads or tails – if you had someone else to play with, that you’re hooked on gambling, that you fancy an actress you know to be odious and even offensive, and that you wake up in the morning in a foul mood and the first thing you do is light up a cigarette, that you fantasize about a particular sexual practice most people consider abnormal and which you dare not suggest to her. You don’t always conceal these things out of self-interest or fear or because you really have committed some misdemeanour, it’s not always a defence, often, it’s to avoid upsetting or hurting someone or spoiling the fun, sometimes it’s just common courtesy, it isn’t polite or civilized to tell everyone everything, let alone reveal our obsessions and our shortcomings; sometimes it’s our origins that we falsify or suppress, because most of us would have preferred at least one of our ancestors to have been somehow different, people hide away their parents and their grandparents and their siblings, their husbands or their wives and sometimes even the children who most closely resemble or take after their spouse, they silence some part of their own life, they detest their youth or their childhood or their mature years, in every biography there is some outrageous, desolate or sinister episode, one episode or many – or even everything – that it would be best other people did not know about, something that it is best to lie about even to oneself. We are ashamed of far too many things, of our appearance and of past beliefs, of our ingenuousness and ignorance, of the submission or pride we once displayed, of our transigence and intransigence, of all the many things we proposed or said without conviction, of having fallen in love with whoever it was we fell in love with and of having been a friend of whoever it was we were friends with, our lives are often a continuous betrayal and denial of what came before, we twist and distort everything as time passes, and yet we are still aware, however much we deceive ourselves, that we are the keepers of secrets and mysteries, however trivial. How tiring having always to move in the shadows or, even more difficult, in the half-light, which is never the same, always changing, every person has his light areas and his dark areas, they change according to what he knows and to what day it is and who he’s talking to and what he wants, we are constantly saying to ourselves: “I am not the thing I was, I have turned away my former self.” As if we had managed to convince ourselves that we are different from the person we believed ourselves to be, merely because chance and the heedless passage of time change our physical circumstances and our clothes, as Solo said that morning, when he was struggling to express his disordered ideas. And he had added: “Or perhaps 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 that we understood it only as it moved away from us, as if we understood it all completely at the end.” But it is also true that as time passes and we become older, we hide less and recover more of what was once suppressed, and that happens only out of weariness and memory loss or because of the nearness of our own end, clandestinity and secrecy and shadow demand an infallible memory, remembering who knows what and who doesn’t, what you have to hide from whom, and which of those people knows about each and every setback, each poisonous step, each error and effort and scruple and the dark back of time. Sometimes you read about someone confessing to a crime they committed forty years ago, people who have always led a decent life suddenly hand themselves over to the police or reveal, in private, a secret that is destroying them, and the naïve and the vengeful and the moralizers believe that these people have been overcome by remorse or by a desire for expiation or by a tormented conscience, when they have merely been overcome or motivated by weariness and a desire to be whole, by their inability to continue lying or keeping silent, to go on remembering what they experienced and did as well as what they imagined, to go on remembering their transformed or invented lives as well as those they actually lived, to forget what really happened and to replace it with a fiction. Sometimes it is only the weariness brought on by the shadow that impels one to tell all the facts, the way someone hiding will suddenly reveal himself, either the pursuer or the pursued, simply in order to bring the game to an end and to step free from what has become a kind of enchantment. The way I allowed Luisa to see me that afternoon after following her when she left the restaurant, or not exactly, after we had both accompanied Téllez to the door of his house, the three of us walked there because it was so close, she and I flanking that figure tottering along on tiny feet more appropriate to a retired dancer, bobbing like a marker buoy, luckily less so than he had been at the cemetery, although on that occasion it was
n’t just his age and weight that unbalanced him. And there we all said goodbye, we watched the father open the door of the old lift and sit down on the bench so as to rest on his brief, vertical trajectory, he disappeared skywards in his wooden box like a sedentary god hoisted aloft, and then Luisa Téllez said to me: “Right, see you then” and I said “Yes, see you” or something of the sort, we both assumed that we would see each other again during the rest of that week when I would be coming to work for Téllez in his apartment.

  She set off in one direction and I made as if to go in the other, but after taking a few steps, I stopped and turned round and, watching her move off, her back to me, her legs so like those of her sister Marta – or perhaps it was the way she walked rather than her actual calves – I decided to follow her for a while, until I got bored or tired. She strode confidently along for a couple of blocks, as if she knew exactly where she was going, but without being in any particular hurry, and only when she turned down Velazquez did she slacken her pace and begin to drift momentarily towards certain shop windows – one heel at a slight angle, the ground was wet – like someone merely locating where a place is and resolving to have a better look at it another day, then gradually the pauses became longer – her heels straight, the ground still wet – until, at last, she went into a clothes shop, and then I remembered that she had been charged with buying a birthday present for her sister-in-law, María Fernández Vera, on Téllez’s behalf. I gingerly stopped outside the same shop and from one corner of the shop window I peered inside, especially when I saw that Luisa had her back to the street while she was talking to the assistant. Then she went over to the skirt rail and stood there looking at the skirts and touching them, still accompanied by the assistant – one of those young women who don’t allow a customer time to think and are constantly trying to anticipate their tastes, she kept holding up skirts to which Luisa said no with a shake of her head – until at last Luisa chose one and disappeared into a changing room. She was careless or perhaps trusting, she left her handbag outside on what was more of a table than a glass counter. After a couple of minutes, she reappeared with the skirt on, still tucking in her blouse. It didn’t really suit her, it was too long, and the colour was rather bland, her own skirt suited her better. She took a few steps forward and then back while she looked at herself in the mirror – the ticket still dangling – she looked at herself from the side, from the back, I could see from her face that she had decided against it, so I withdrew from my spying position and went off and stood perusing a nearby newsstand, waiting for Luisa to come out, I was forced into buying a foreign newspaper that didn’t interest me in the least. She looked at her watch once she was out in the street again, perhaps she was killing time before another appointment, a skirt didn’t seem a very suitable present for Téllez to give his daughter-in-law, it would be obvious that he hadn’t bought it himself, although perhaps that didn’t matter. Luisa continued on down Velázquez, and when she reached the corner of Lista or, rather, Ortega y Gasset (the street changed its name ages ago, but the old name prevails and, unfortunately for the philosopher, that’s the one it’s still known by), she went into a department store, large and diverse enough for me to follow her and observe her from a distance without being seen, if I was careful. I watched her walk through the book section, she picked up a book, quickly read the blurb on the back or the inside flap and returned it to its pile, she didn’t even leaf through it (they mostly have new books in these places and a lot are wrapped in cellophane, which is a real drag), finally, she decided on one, I couldn’t see what at first, and went over to the record department, I kept my distance, with my back to her, pretending to be poring over the videos, looking round every now and then in case she should leave without my noticing. In a moment of panic (she suddenly glanced over to where I was standing), I selected a video at random as if I were about to buy it, to give the appearance of doing something: an absurd gesture, it didn’t matter what I was doing as long as she didn’t find me out, or even if she did find me out. But Luisa was in no hurry or else was still looking for a present and, after a few moments, she walked off with her book but no record towards the food section, I followed after with my video in my hand and stationed myself by the magazines and started flicking through them, watching her out of the corner of my eye, still keeping behind her at all times, it’s the one invariable rule when following someone. And then I thought that she must be intending to return home soon, or to Deán’s home (to someone’s home, whichever it was), because she took out two large tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream from the freezer where they were on display, when she opened the transparent glass door I saw her figure momentarily enveloped in the cold air, during the few moments it took her to choose the flavours, a cloud of cold air that seemed to make her blush. If she delayed going home, they would melt, it was the same ice cream that Marta had offered me at that supper at home and now Luisa was buying it too, or perhaps it was Eugenio who liked the ice cream and both sisters bought it for him – Marta had used it as a quick dessert, she hadn’t known she was going to have a visitor until that evening. Ice cream in winter for such a small child, it didn’t seem likely, I thought, correcting myself, not that I have much idea what children of that age or any other age eat, although Luisa would have to start finding out since she had offered to take care of him. That was when I wondered about the boy, who would he be with all that time, at that age – this I do know – they can’t be left alone for a minute unless they’re asleep, like that night in Conde de la Cimera when I went away and left him truly alone, nothing had happened to him. Perhaps his aunt and uncle were taking care of him for a while, María Fernández Vera and the brother Guillermo, while Deán and Luisa were having lunch with Téllez to discuss the child’s future, a discussion I had partly prevented by my presence. Luisa also picked up a packet of good-quality sausages and some beer, Mexican beer, perhaps she was going to improvise a supper with those meagre ingredients, but not with me. She went over to the desk to pay, I followed, still making sure I kept out of sight, I went over to the section she had just left, I too chose a tub of ice cream from the freezer, I too was enveloped in the cold air, and then I immediately went to join the queue at the checkout so as not to be separated from her by too many other customers – luckily there was only one other customer between us – otherwise I might have lost sight of her on the way out. The guy between us wasn’t very tall, so I could still see her. I was standing very close to her, I had a clear view of the back of her neck (fortunately, she didn’t suddenly turn round). Then I saw the title of the book she had chosen, Lolita, an excellent choice, but, at the time, it seemed a little strange to me and not a particularly suitable present for her sister-in-law. Only when I was hurriedly paying for my ice cream and my video did I realize what I was buying, having chosen it blindly, 101 Dalmatians, a cartoon, it didn’t interest me in the least, but I didn’t have time to run back and change it. Once out in the street, Luisa Téllez walked down Lista in the direction of the Castellana and, before she reached Serrano, she turned down another street and entered a clothes shop with large windows, much too exposed if I wanted to spy on her. I could wait in a nearby bar, but I preferred to watch her, so I decided to walk up and down outside the shop, glancing in as I passed, but without stopping, as if I were a character in a film repeatedly entering and leaving the field of vision, crossing the screen from one side to the other, that’s how she would see me if, by chance, she noticed me, the first time she saw me would, for her, be the first time that I was casually strolling down that busy street, stranger things happen. The pavement was slightly uneven there and a puddle had formed, I had to avoid it each time I passed and, each time I did so, I took advantage of that brief pause to glance inside the shop, Luisa was talking to the idle shop assistants and was touching and looking at everything, she probably couldn’t make up her mind. She picked up another skirt and a sort of elegant T-shirt (I saw how elegant it was later on) and went into the changing room, again leaving her hand
bag and her shopping bag behind, the women stood around yawning, their arms folded, waiting for her to re-emerge, there were no other customers on that afternoon of changeable weather, the assistants were wearing clothes from their own shop, which, I suddenly realized, was Emporio Armani. I was just beginning to get tired of walking up and down like that (I paused now and then) when Luisa emerged from the changing room wearing the T-shirt and the skirt, the skirt was quite short and deep red in colour and it suited her perfectly, even better than the one she had been wearing. I rapidly moved out of visual range and waited more than a minute before walking past again and, when I finally did, I caught Luisa in the middle of a double manoeuvre: she was turning to go back into the changing room, having looked at herself in the mirror and, on her way, she began taking off the elegant cream-coloured T-shirt. I glimpsed her bra, her arms in the air with the sleeves of the blouse turned inside out, I saw her smooth, clean armpits. I couldn’t help but stop and stare and, as I did so, I stepped in the puddle with my right foot, soaking my shoe, I could feel the water in my sock and on my skin, horrible, such an unpleasant sensation. When I looked up, Luisa had disappeared into the changing room, but now I knew for certain that she was the woman I had seen undressing and looking out of the window of Marta’s bedroom the night after my visit, Marta’s sister, Luisa Téllez, who had perhaps also seen me as she looked out, while I stood there next to my taxi, pretending to be waiting for someone and thinking, for a second, that the silhouette in the window could be Marta still alive. I had thought that, knowing it to be impossible. One sister had ice cream already at home and the other was buying it now; one had an Armani top that I had helped to remove and the other was trying one on now, before my very eyes. I was still under the spell, I thought, or the spell was still working. But perhaps she was buying this new top for her sister-in-law, on behalf of Téllez, a father-in-law with money, he must have acquired it during the Franco era. I saw Luisa pay with a credit card (each article of clothing in a separate bag), and I moved out of the way so that I could follow her when she came out of the shop: she went back down Ortega y Gasset or Lista and walked as far as the Castellana, that avenue which is like a river flowing through the city, forming a long frontier with straight tree-lined quays, there are no meanders and no water, just asphalt, and the pavements or quays are not raised up. One of those trees had been blown over in the storm, it had been cut off at its base and the ground was scattered with splinters, the storm glimpsed from the restaurant must have been extremely violent, with almost hurricane-force winds, unless the tree had fallen over some days before and had still not been removed, the branches had not yet been sawn off, in Madrid imperfections are never corrected immediately. However it happened, it had fallen towards the pavement, not towards the road – the river – which is always full of cars, it could have killed some passer-by. We weren’t far from Hermanos Bécquer, that is, from the corner of the Castellana where, nearly two years before, I had picked up Victoria and then deposited her back there afterwards, late into the night, that’s what she had wanted, to be left: where I had met her, so I did. Once we had climbed back into the front seats of my car and before turning on the engine again, I wondered whether I should offer her a bit more money and invite her to come back to my place until morning: if she was Celia she would be embarrassed or saddened, if she was Victoria she would be delighted to accept, a whole Tuesday night with the meter running, it probably didn’t happen that often, it’s probably considered to be a real stroke of luck. I didn’t suggest it though, perhaps, again, because I did not want to be absolutely certain, and perhaps so as not to have to remember her figure in my bedroom, it is harder to rid oneself of ghosts that have been in your own rooms.