Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  Luisa lay down on the bed again, once she had fulfilled her final duty of the day, a duty for which she had preferred to remain sitting up – it’s difficult to tell someone about a death and to console a widower from a supine position – afterwards, she watched television for a long time until, inexplicably, sleep crept over her and, even then, she still had strength enough to get up and start to undress, without my help or anyone else’s – how is it possible to sleep after the death of a loved one, and yet one always does – she went over to the window and stood there to take her sweater off, she crossed her arms, gripped the lower edges of the sweater and then pulled it up and off in a single movement – affording a momentary glimpse of her armpits – so that only the inside-out sleeves of the sweater remained on her arms or caught on her wrists. Her silhouette remained frozen 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 as if, only after taking off the sweater – she was standing just behind the blinds to do this – had she looked through the blinds and seen something or someone, perhaps me with my taxi behind me?

  “He’s looking for you,” she said, when she had finished telling me all the details I knew nothing about or about which I had only conjectured, “and I’ll have to tell him that I’ve found you.”

  “I know,” I said, and then I told her what I had chanced to overhear as I left the cemetery, I admitted to her that I had been there that morning when I had seen her for the first time and I repeated to her the words I had overheard from people who were, I told her, strangers to me: I didn’t feel able to tell her the news if she didn’t know it already, I wanted her to find out as I had, from the tape, although, in fact, I had heard it live. “Have they found out who the bloke was yet?” a man walking ahead of me had asked, that’s what he had said; and the woman by his side had replied: “No, not yet, but they’ve only just started looking and, apparently, Eduardo is determined to find him.” They were not complete strangers, their names were Vicente and Ines, and I had been on the point of becoming his co-fornicator.

  There was no one else left in the restaurant, I had already paid, the owners were kind enough to pretend that they were closing the till and doing their accounts. We had eaten everything they had put in front of us barely noticing what it was, Luisa mechanically raised a napkin to her lips one last time, she had left it on the table after dessert, which already seemed an age ago, she had not wanted coffee but had ordered a pear liqueur instead.

  “Yes,” she said, “I imagine everyone knew, apart, luckily, from my father. I just hope he never finds out.”

  “Before you talk to your brother-in-law, I’d like you to hear the tape,” I said. “There’s something on it which you may not know about, and which he certainly doesn’t. In fact, that’s why I took it. Would you mind if we went up to my apartment for a moment? Then I’ll take you home in a taxi.” I paused and added: “You know me a bit better now.”

  “And may get to know me even better,” I thought.

  Luisa looked at me hard, frowning, as if she had heard my thoughts, she seemed to be struggling with a mixture of curiosity, tiredness and distrust – telling a story is very tiring – the two latter feelings were the weaker ones. She did actually look like Marta, especially when her face was not contorted as it had been at the funeral. She was younger – although, one day, she will be older – prettier perhaps and less dissatisfied with her lot. She said: “All right, but let’s go now, let’s get it over with.”

  I knew and know that tape by heart, but for her, it would be the first time she had listened to it. She didn’t want anything to drink at home, I asked her to wait in the living room a moment while I went into my bedroom to change my shoes and socks at last, with a feeling of immeasurable relief. She sat down in the armchair that I usually sit in to read and smoke and think, she perched on the edge, leaving her overcoat draped any old how over one of the arms, like someone anxious to leave a place the moment they arrive. She was perched on the edge like that from the start, but she leaned forward still more – as if shocked – when she heard the first steady, precipitate, monotonous voice saying: “Marta? Marta, are you there? Did we get cut off before. Hello.” There was a pause and an irritated clicking of the tongue. “Hello? What are you playing at? Are you out? When I phoned you just now, you hung up on me. Oh, for Christ’s sake, pick up the bloody phone”; and when the tormenting electric-shaver voice had concluded its message, I stopped the tape and she said, addressing both me and herself: “That’s Vicente Mena, a friend, well, a former boyfriend of my sister’s. She was with him for a while before she met Eduardo, they remained friends, they often go out together, the four of them, he and his wife, Inés, and Eduardo and Marta. I knew nothing about this, Marta never talked to me about it, she never said that they’d started seeing each other again like that, and he’s such a horrible man.” She fell silent for a moment. She had inadvertently used the present tense, “they often go out together, the four of them,” it takes us a while to get used to employing the past tense about the people who are close to us and who die, it takes us time to notice the difference. She was scratching her temple with one finger and she added pensively: “Perhaps they never really broke it off, how stupid.”

  “What shift would his wife be working?” I asked, to satisfy a secondary curiosity of mine, I might not be able to satisfy the major ones I could feel rising up inside me. “What does she do?”

  “I’m not sure, I don’t know them that well, I think she works at the courts,” replied Luisa and then I played the tape with its second message, the beginning of which had been cut off, “… so”, a voice was saying, the voice of the woman I now knew to be Luisa, because I had spent a whole evening hearing her voice, in a variety of tones, “make sure you call me tomorrow and tell me all about it,” and Luisa closed her eyes and said: “That’s me, returning the message she had left for me that afternoon, telling me about her imminent encounter with you. It seems such a long time ago now.”

  I stopped the tape.

  “How come she told you about that but not about Vicente?”

  “Well, she wasn’t getting on very well with Eduardo, she had her fantasies, I had no idea that they were also realities, not until now: Vicente Mena, after all this time, how stupid,” she repeated incredulously, disapprovingly. “Besides we’ve always told each other everything, or almost everything, she probably only told me about the fantasies and not the realities.” “I’m a fantasy,” I thought, “or I was before I went to Conde de la Cimera. And perhaps afterwards too, perhaps I was an incubus and a ghost, and still am.” “Although it may not make much sense to you, we didn’t judge each other, we didn’t even advise each other, we just listened. With some people you always think that whatever they do is fine, you’re just always on their side.” Luisa was, without realizing it, still scratching her temple. “Marta, tell Eduardo that it’s common to say ‘we’ll get back to you’, he should say ‘we’ll return your call’,” the end of the old man’s message, flirting with self-pity at the end, “povero me”, he said. “That’s my father, poor him, poor him indeed,” said Luisa. “He got on very well with Marta, she paid him more attention than I do, she used to listen to his stories about ancient quarrels with colleagues and about his little intrigues and privileges at Court. He would have been on the phone to her about you instantly, several times a day, it’s a real event for him to have someone working at his apartment for a few days; that’s why he wanted us to meet you, so that then it would be easier for us to imagine him in your company and we would be better placed to comment when he talked about it later on. Well, to me, not to Eduardo.” She didn’t realize the impossibility of Téllez ever having spoken about me to Marta, because I would never have wanted to meet Téllez if Marta hadn’t died. “Marta, it’s Ferrán,” was the next message, and Luisa said nothing ab
out it, it contained nothing new, she listened in silence and I didn’t stop the tape, the next message or rather the end of it came on, the voice saying: “Anyway we’ll do whatever you say, whatever you want. You decide.” Now I was sure that it was not the same voice as before and therefore not Luisa’s voice, although women’s voices tend to be more alike than men’s. Luisa asked me to rewind the tape so that she could hear it again, and then she said: “I don’t know who that is, I don’t recognize the voice, it’s not a voice I know. I’ve never heard it before.”

  “So you don’t know who it’s for, Deán or Marta?”

  “How could I?”

  “Now it’s my turn, this one’s me,” I told her quickly before the start of another incomplete message, the message I was ashamed of: “If you like, we can get together on Monday or Tuesday. Otherwise, we’ll have to leave it for next week. From Wednesday onwards, I’m up to my eyes.” How could I have said “I’m up to my eyes”, I sounded such a phoney, I thought again glumly, any courtship looks pathetic when viewed from outside or in retrospect, now I was doing exactly that, and, worse, I was possibly engaged in another courtship, and thus incapable of seeing my words and my present attitude from outside or, indeed, from inside or in retrospect, sometimes we weigh each word in accordance with our, as yet, unknown intentions. “It all seems such a long time ago.” I didn’t stop the tape, Luisa let my deferential voice pass without comment, and then that electric buzz came on again: “Eduardo, hi, it’s me. Listen don’t wait for me to start supper,” and so on until he asked them to save him a slice of ham and said an abrupt goodbye: “Right then, see you later,” he said.

  “That’s Vicente Mena too,” said Luisa, “The four of them often go out together or with other people.” And again she used the present tense which had been inappropriate for a whole month now.

  I stopped the tape and said: “There’s one more. Listen.”

  And then that strident, continuous, undisguised weeping emerged from the tape, a weeping that has nothing to do with words or even thoughts, because it stops them or excludes them rather than replaces them – it impedes them – the grieving voice that could say only one intelligible thing: “… please … please … please …” and it was saying that not so much as a genuine plea intended to have some effect, but more as a conjuration, ritual, superstitious words, empty of meaning, spoken either to overcome or to fend off a threat, an immodest, almost malign weeping, not so very different from the more sober weeping of the female ghost who had uttered a curse with her pale lips as if she were reading something out in a low voice, while her cheeks streamed with tears: “That wretched Ann, thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee, now fills thy sleep with perturbations.” And it was only when I heard that for the umpteenth time, but also for the first time with someone by my side listening to it too, that it occurred to me that that child’s voice, that infantilized woman’s voice could be that of Marta herself, who knows, perhaps she had called Deán some time ago while she was away on a trip and had pleaded to him in her absence – perhaps he had been at home, sitting next to the phone, listening to her crying, but not picking up the receiver – she had left her tearful plea on the answering machine, a plea incorporated into her weeping as if it were just another of its possible modes, she had recorded her grief which was now being listened to by her sister and a stranger – possibly the vague, inconstant husband who had not yet arrived for that sister – just as Celia once left me three messages, one after the other, and by the end of the last one, she could barely speak or breathe. And I did not dare return her call, it was best not to.

  “Who is it? Who’s that?” Luisa asked me, frightened. It was an absurd question, provoked by confusion and by the infectious desolation of the voice, I couldn’t possibly know who it was, even though I was the temporary and accidental owner of the tape (the thief or repository), and had listened to it so many times.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said, “I thought perhaps you might know. Who is this woman pleading with, Deán or Marta?” And again I gave expression to my doubts.

  “I don’t know. Him, I suppose. I hope,” said Luisa. She was troubled, more even than when she had heard the first message from Vicente Mena with its grotesque revelation. She was scratching her forehead harder now, it was a gesture intended to indicate a calm she did not feel, or to keep a hold on herself. She reconsidered and added: “But I only think that because it’s a woman’s voice doing the pleading. I don’t actually know.”

  I hesitated before mentioning what had just occurred to me that instant, and before I had even decided to do so, I had already done it, before knowing if I was right to do so or if I wanted to infect Luisa with the way of thinking that has become normal in me, dictated by the spell I am under and which is like an incessant beating in my thoughts (time does not wait for us): “Could it be Marta?”

  “Marta?” Luisa started, for those of us who live alone, it is not easy to imagine ourselves ringing our own number or other people ringing theirs. But I haven’t always lived alone.

  “Yes, couldn’t it be Marta’s voice? It could be for Deán that message or, rather, that call, she doesn’t actually leave any message.”

  “Play it again, will you,” she said. She sat back in my chair, no longer perched on the edge, she didn’t seem so impatient to leave now, her eyes wide open, her eyes still wearing the dusky night, it was odd to see my armchair occupied by another person, a woman, it was nice. I rewound the tape and we listened to it again, the pleading, tearful voice so distorted that it was impossible to know who it was, if it was someone known to us, to me or her or both of us (we had only Marta and the child in common, and now Deán and Téllez as well), I wouldn’t have recognized my own voice in that desperate state. “I don’t know, it could be her, I don’t think so though, it could be anyone, it could be the woman who phoned before, the one who said ‘You decide’.”

  “Do you know anything about Deán’s life?” I asked and the truth is that I asked that question less out of personal curiosity and more in order to endorse the questions that Luisa would be asking herself. I felt no curiosity, I did not want to know anything more about Marta, she was dead and curiosity does not affect the dead, it is not a feeling that touches them, despite all those films and novels and biographies that are investigations into precisely that, the lives of those who are no longer living, it’s just a hobby, you cannot talk to the dead and that’s all there is to it. I did not want to know anything more about Deán either (though I probably would want to know more about Luisa, but that was perfectly possible and would not now present any difficulties). Basically, I knew that once I had found out what there was to find out (if there was anything), I would still not simply be able to resume my normal life and activities, as if the link established between Marta Téllez and myself would never be broken, or would take too long to be severed, far too long, leaving me perhaps for ever haunted. Or perhaps I just wanted to tell someone what I had already told once, that night, to Luisa during supper, telling a story as repayment of a debt, albeit symbolic and not demanded or required by anyone, no one can demand to know something when they are ignorant of its very existence and to hear of it from a person they do not know, something that they do not know has happened or is happening, they cannot, therefore, demand that it should be revealed to them or should stop. Until only a few hours ago, Luisa Téllez did not even know I existed. It is the person telling the story who decides to tell it or even impose it on another, the person who opts for revelation or betrayal, the person who decides when to tell, and that usually happens when the weariness brought on by the silence and the shadow becomes too great, sometimes it is the only thing that drives people to recount facts that no one has asked for and that no one expects, it has nothing to do with guilt or bad conscience or regret, no one does anything if they feel an utter wretch at the moment they do it, if they feel the need to do it, disquiet and fear come later, but not to any significant degree, disquiet or fear are more common than
regret, tiredness even more so.