Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  I walked over to the kerb, trying to spot a taxi coming from either direction, I crossed the road and crossed back again, two cars passed and then a taxi that screeched to a halt, I was lucky, I gave my old address to the taxi driver, I hadn’t been there or asked someone to take me there for a long time, though for three years that had been the norm, and when I found myself at the door I had entered on so many nights and left on so many days over a period of three years, I realized that I still had the keys on my key ring and I still had them with me – I took them out, some habits are hard to eradicate. If she hadn’t changed the locks, I could go into the apartment, I could open the street door and take that familiar lift up to the fourth floor and I could even open the door to the right and see with my own eyes that nothing bad had happened that night, that no banshee had been prowling around, that Celia Ruiz Comendador was still alive and was safe in her bed, accompanied or alone – perhaps that was all Deán would have wanted to know, had he suspected something in far-off London; an hour and a half had passed since I went out into the street, time enough for a fuck or even two, if they were very impatient, it was what classical authors called the “conticinio”, a Latin word meaning the time of night when, by mutual agreement, everything keeps silent – there was that prefix “con-” again – although, in Madrid, that time of night does not exist, perhaps Celia had had company and was now alone, perhaps the doctor or whoever it was – the incubus – had left after the fuck, we male spirits don’t tend to hang around to see the effect of our actions. And if he hadn’t gone, I would at last be able to resolve my doubts about Celia and Victoria, I would see the man and I would see whether or not he was that fair-haired, balding man, or if he was someone else, a lover and, therefore, a co-bridegroom, whichever of them he was, he would get a terrible fright: the man who was still her husband bursting in, in the middle of the night, using his own key, surprising him in bed with the woman who was still, bureaucratically speaking, the other man’s wife, for a few seconds the lover or customer would fear a scene worthy of a melodrama or a tragedy, covering himself with the sheets, he would glance at my raincoat pocket to see if I was about to take out a gun, a death more ridiculous than horrible. It was tempting to try it, for all kinds of reasons, serious and frivolous. I stood on the opposite pavement and looked up at what I knew to be the windows of the apartment, my own windows until not so very long ago, the bedroom window, the living-room windows, one of which was, in fact, a door that opened on to a large terrace, we often used to have supper out there in summer, during three summers of marriage. Everything was in darkness, perhaps Celia had made some changes since my departure and had moved the bedroom to the back, where it looked out on to a courtyard. There were no signs of life, it was the home of people either sleeping or dead, all was still, there was no one removing or putting on some article of clothing. I hesitated, not far off I heard the sound of breaking glass and urgent, muffled voices, someone was breaking into a shop, shortly afterwards, the alarm sounded, not that it stopped the glass shattering or the thieves ransacking the shop, everyone knows that, in Madrid, alarms go off of their own accord and no one takes any notice of them, they’re useless, it must have been happening a few blocks away. The alarm stopped ringing and there was another roll of thunder, so close this time that it immediately started to rain, fat drops falling on the dead leaves and the damp ground, on the mud like half-dried blood or black, sticky hair, there was no one else in the street seeking refuge but me, the thieves were farther off and would have finished their job, I crossed over and took shelter in the doorway, once I was there, I couldn’t resist trying my old key in the lock, it met with no resistance. And then, no need to think about the steps you have taken a thousand times, they almost take themselves or you do so mechanically, the lift, it was always on one of the upper floors, never downstairs, someone always arrived after the last of the people going out had left, some nightbird or myself and Celia, she was so young and loved going out at night, we came in and went out together, a real marriage. Now I went up alone, excitedly, my heart in my mouth, and at the same time, I felt amused, surreptitious behaviour is at once a source of diversion and anxiety, and when I put the key in the lock of the front door, I did so with great care to avoid making any noise, like a cat burglar who scales walls and sneaks in, that is what I was at that moment, although I wasn’t going to make off with anything, only knowledge, and only in order to calm my mind with that knowledge that she was alive and was herself and no one else. But what if she wasn’t alive, and what if she wasn’t herself. If she wasn’t alive, there would be no reason to walk on tiptoe, on the contrary, I would have to turn on all the lights and clutch my head in my hands and cry out in pain and remorse, try to revive her with my kisses, collapse in despair, I would have to call a doctor, call the neighbours, call her parents and the police, and explain my whole story. There wasn’t a sound, not even once I was inside, I carefully closed the door behind me, I knew that door well, I had come in on other occasions when Celia was already asleep, some nights when we hadn’t gone out together and I had come back late. I could walk in the dark in that house, it had once been mine and I knew the distances and I knew where the furniture was, the obstacles, where there was a corner and where something stuck out, I even knew which bit of the corridor would creak underfoot. I walked down that corridor and went into the living room, it was lighter there with the light coming in from outside, the street lamps, the odd neon sign, the sky which always provides some light even when it’s overcast and wild, the noise of the storm would drown my footsteps, she or they would be unlikely to hear them above the thunderclaps and above the rain beating down on roofs and terraces and trees and on the fallen leaves and on the ground. It might also be that the clamour would wake her up or wake both of them up, independent of my inaudible, inoffensive footsteps and of the sense of someone being there which one has even when asleep, though not when dead. I was the incubus and the ghost come to disturb their dreams or to discover her body, it was me and it was no one, perhaps not so very inoffensive. My things were no longer there, I used to use part of the living room as my office sometimes, so as not to spend too many hours in the same room when the work piled up, I kept the scripts in my study and my commissioned speeches in one corner of the living room, which was quite spacious, the table I had installed there was gone, as, of course, were my typewriter, my papers, my pen, my ashtray and my reference books, none of which were necessary there now. In the semidarkness, everything else looked identical, Celia hadn’t made any changes, perhaps she didn’t have enough money to make the changes she would like to make. When we go back to a very familiar place, the intervening time becomes compressed or is even erased and cancelled out for a moment as if we had never left, it is that unchanging space that allows us to travel in time. I felt like sitting down in my armchair and smoking a cigarette and reading a book. But I couldn’t do that, because I still didn’t know and I was becoming increasingly agitated, my apprehension and my nocturnal fears were growing, as was my urgent need to find out and my fear of finding out and my desire for peace, I needed to untangle my associations and my ideas, to dispel my superstitions. And then I got up the courage to go over to the white sliding doors which led from the living room to the bedroom, when we went to bed, we always used to close them, even though there was never anyone else there but us, a gesture of intimacy and modesty towards the world that could not see us, and so we would cut ourselves off from the rest of the apartment to sleep or to lie in each other’s arms with our eyes open. That was how the doors were now, closed, it was perfectly normal that Celia should keep that habit, whether alone or accompanied, it would be odder if the doctor or lover had closed them again after him, after leaving the bedroom, leaving behind him a cast-off, his work. That made me think that nothing could have happened and that gave me the courage to put my hands on the handles and very slowly to open the doors a crack, I looked through it, putting my eye to the crack, I could see nothing, it was darker in the bed
room, Celia had closed the blinds, taking advantage of my absence, she liked them closed and I liked them open, so eventually we reached an agreement, a compromise, we had them down but with the slats slightly open so that the morning light would not hurt her eyes and so that I would be able to tell if it was day or not when I woke up, I often wake up during the night, I never sleep very well or right through. I pulled the handles harder and kept on pulling until the doors were completely open, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do that, but I did it, one’s actions move faster than one’s will, a yes and a no and a perhaps and, meanwhile, everything has moved on or is gone, you have to fill up the insistent time that continues to pass without waiting for us, we move more slowly, and thus the moment arrives when we can no longer keep saying: “I don’t know, I’m not sure, we’ll see.” I wanted to find Celia alone in the bed as if we had never separated or turned our backs on each other, to see her sleeping face that I remember so well, her left arm under the pillow, that’s how she sleeps, breathing peacefully. There was no reaction, I heard nothing, I waited for the feeble light from the living room, which was the light from the stormy sky and the rain-flailed street, to dimly illumine the interior of the bedroom and for my eyes to get used to the darkness so that I could discern something. I saw the white stain of the sheets, that was the first thing I managed to recognize, as she or they would have seen the pale stain of my raincoat if they had woken up at that moment and peered into the space before them. Much later, I stood like that at the door of a child’s bedroom, but he had already seen me and had moved from wakefulness into sleep, not vice versa. And when my eyes had got more accustomed to the darkness, I was able to make out two figures in the double bed, two shapes beneath the sheets, Celia lay on the right-hand side and on the side that had been mine lay not me but another man, the same places occupied by different people, it’s common enough, not only during our own allotted time span and in conscious or deliberate or imposed substitutions or usurpations, but also throughout the centuries of unchanging space, the houses of those who leave or die are occupied by the living or by the new arrivals, their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their beds, people who forget or have no idea what happened in those places, perhaps before they were born or were merely children with useless time on their hands. So many things happen without anyone realizing or remembering. So few things are recorded, fleeting thoughts and actions, plans and desires, secret doubts, daydreams, acts of cruelty and insults, words spoken and heard and later denied or misunderstood or distorted, promises made and then overlooked, even by those to whom they were made, everything is forgotten or invalidated, whatever is done alone or not written down, along with everything that is done not alone but in company, how little remains of each individual, how little trace remains of anything, and how much of that little is never talked about, and afterwards, one remembers only a tiny fraction of what was said, and then only briefly, the individual memory is not passed on and is, anyway, of no interest to the person receiving it, who is busy forging his or her own memories. All time is useless, not only that of the child, for all time is the same, however much happens, however much enthusiasm or pain one feels, it only lasts an instant, then it is lost and everything is as slippery as compacted snow, like the sleep being enjoyed now, at this moment, by Celia and the man occupying my place in the bed. That sleep vanished for ever before my eyes, although I was not the one to make it vanish, despite my being there: a flash of lightning followed by an even louder clap of thunder than before suddenly lit up the apartment, lit up the living room and the bedroom and my spectral figure standing there motionless in my raincoat, my arms outspread, holding open the white doors; it lit up the bed on which the two figures or shapes simultaneously and abruptly sat up or awoke, both wrenched from sleep, and Celia cried out like that king terrified by the visions he had seen, her eyes very wide and her hands over her ears, protecting them from the noise of the thunder or of her own cries. And I looked only at her, her naked torso like that of Marta Téllez, her firm, white breasts in which I had lost all interest until that night, when I thought she might also be Victoria of Hermanos Bécquer. The pale light showed me all that, as well as the clothes piled on a chair, his doubtless mingling with hers, removed at the same time, perhaps she had removed his and he hers. I didn’t see the man, I didn’t see his face, only the stain he made in the darkness, white like the sheets, I didn’t see if he was the fair-haired, balding doctor or some other man I had never seen or glimpsed or someone I knew or a friend, Ruibérriz de Torres, for example. (Or Deán or Vicente, it would be another two and a half years before I knew their names and heard their voices and recognized their faces.) It could have been me. The brightness faded before I could see him, worse, I must have cried out too – perhaps shaking my fists in the air like someone crying out for vengeance, not that I deserved any vengeance – then I closed the doors, turned in terror and ran through the darkness of the living room and along the corridor – frightened of myself and of the effect I had had. I knew the terrain and there was no reason why I should collide with anything, even though I was fleeing like a soul being carried off by the Devil, as they used to say in my language, I could reach the front door before they had grasped the physical reality of the man in the raincoat who had spied on them from the doorway of their bedroom in the middle of the storm, and could recover from the panic of their awakenings, perhaps they would assume that they had shared a common nightmare, the same husband or incubus visiting them and oppressing them and finally tearing them, terrified, from sleep. They would not pursue me, they were naked, at least from the waist up, that much I had seen in the lightning flash. They were barefoot. I could and did reach the lift that was still waiting on that floor, I travelled down in it and crossed the hall and pressed the button and rushed out into the street lashed by the torrential rain that drenched me in a matter of seconds, and I ran and thought with relief that, although not alone, Celia was still alive and I would never know whether or not she was also Victoria. But while I was fleeing and going down in the lift and rushing out into the street and getting soaked and running away, my main thought was quite different, what I was thinking was: “How little remains of me in that apartment, how little trace remains of anything.” The trees shook their branches like furious citizens in a popular uprising.

  I CROSSED THE CASTELLANA behind Luisa, I had already spent a good while staring at her legs and I no longer felt like a scoundrel or ashamed to be looking at them, perhaps because I did so at my leisure, unhypocritically and without witnesses, perhaps because, as I followed her, I could not do or want anything else, what more could I want? She went down the street full of embassies in which, during the day, there are no parked cars with people inside them, nor are there transvestites waiting patiently and fatalistically on benches, she walked four blocks, moving from one side of the street to the other, and on the fifth block, she went in through the door of the house she had been heading for, from the way she walked it was clear that she knew where she was going from the moment she left the shop, preferring a zigzag route to the strait and narrow, a way of making a familiar route more interesting. It was the most modest and neglected doorway in a good street, an expensive area, and so was not, therefore, particularly modest or particularly neglected, just a little run-down, in need of renovation. There were no bars nearby where I could sit and wait and watch for her to come out, however long that took, perhaps it was her own apartment and she would not emerge for the rest of the day, although it didn’t seem like that to me from the way she had gone in, you’re usually already feeling for your keys in your pocket, or in your handbag if you’re a woman, I suppose, if you’re Luisa or Marta Téllez. I remembered Luisa’s last words to Deán in the restaurant, “I’ll see you at home,” I had assumed she meant Conde de la Cimera, in fact it was ambiguous, “home” could also be Luisa’s home which this perhaps was. I decided to wait, I set myself a limit of half an hour which I knew would stretch to three-quarters of an hour if necessary, I moved a litt
le further from the door, I leaned on a corner so as not to be too obvious and so that I could disappear in an instant, I lit a cigarette and started reading the foreign newspaper I had bought, it was La Repubblica, at least I could understand it, Italian and Spanish being related languages, and I let my thoughts drift. And I waited. I waited.