Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  I left the graveside and whiled the time away reading a kind of riddle on a nearby tomb, dated 1914: “None that speak of me know me,” it said in its ten brief lines (albeit of prose not poetry), “and when they do speak, they slander me; those who know me keep silent and in their silence do not defend me; thus, all speak ill of me until they meet me, but when they meet me they find rest, and they bring me salvation, for I never rest.” It took several readings before I realized that it wasn’t the dead person speaking (León Suárez Alday, 1890–1914, according to the inscription, a young man) but death itself, a strange death bemoaning its bad reputation and the lack of recognition given it by the insolent living, a death resentful of the slanderous remarks and desirous of salvation: weary, rather amicable and, ultimately, resigned. I was in the middle of memorizing the riddle, as if it were a telephone number or a few lines of poetry, when, in the distance, I saw thirty or so people getting out of their cars and slowly approaching behind the bearers, who were walking slightly faster because of the weight they were carrying, one of them had a spent cigarette between his lips which immediately prompted me to light one of my own. The people in the cortege gathered around the open grave, in a ragged semicircle, leaving room for the bearers to manoeuvre, and while a brief prayer was said, the coffin was lowered into the ground with the usual difficulties – squeaks and bumps and trial runs and hesitations, wood striking stone and the sort of grinding noises you might expect in a quarry, only shriller, like two bricks grating together or a nail that refuses to be driven home, and the occasional workman’s voice giving orders under his breath; and the terrible fear of bruising the body that we will never again set eyes upon – I could see the people in the first row, standing closest to the upper part of the grave, six or seven of whom I could clearly make out from my 1914 tomb, where I stood with my hands folded in front of me, in one hand a cigarette which, from time to time, I raised to my lips; as if León Suárez Alday were an ancestor before whose ancient remains I could ponder and remember and even whisper the most uninhibited, and also the most comforting, words we can ever utter, words addressed to someone who cannot hear us. And although it is true that the first person I looked for was the boy – a pointless exercise, no one takes children of that age to funerals – the first one I noticed was not the man intoning a prayer – a robust, elderly gentleman whom I noticed subsequently – but a woman who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Marta Téllez, obviously her surviving sister, Luisa, who was wearing neither dark glasses nor a veil – you never see veils these days – but was weeping in a strident, continuous, undisguised fashion, although, in fact, she did try to disguise it by lowering her head and covering her face with her two hands, the way people do sometimes when they feel horror or shame and want not to see or be seen, or are the self-confessed victims of depression or malaise or fear or regret. And that gesture, which these victims usually make alone, sitting or lying down in their bedrooms – their face pressed into the pillow, perhaps, the pillow replacing their own two hands, something that hides and protects, or something in which they can find refuge – was being made by this woman standing up, in her immaculate clothes, her hands carefully manicured, in the middle of a cortege of people, and in a cemetery, with her rounded knees visible beneath her unbuttoned overcoat, with her black stockings and her polished high-heeled shoes; on her lips – to which she would automatically have applied make-up, a mechanical gesture performed every day before leaving the house – would be the sickly taste of lipstick mingled with her own salt tears, liquid, involuntary; occasionally she raised her head and bit her lip – those lips – in a vain attempt to suppress not her grief, but its overly frank manifestation, beyond words, and it was during those moments that I saw her, and although her face was distorted by grief, I could still see the similarity with Marta, because I had seen Marta’s face distorted too, by a different kind of pain, but equally manifest; a younger woman, by two or three years, prettier perhaps or less dissatisfied with her lot, she was single, or a widow, according to the death notice. Perhaps she was crying too because she felt the kind of envy or sense of exile that afflicts children when they are separated from their siblings, when one of them is left: alone with the grandparents while the others go off with their parents on a trip, or when one of them goes to a different school from the one the older children go to, or when they are ill in bed, nestling amongst the pillows with the comics and coloured prints and storybooks by which their world is configured (and above them, their model planes), and they see the others going off to the beach or the river or the park or the cinema and setting out on their bikes, and when they hear the first gusts of laughter and the summery sound of bicycle bells, they feel like a prisoner or perhaps an exile, this is largely because children lack any vision of the future, for them only the present exists – not the unwholesome, rugged, fragmented yesterday nor the diaphanous, flat tomorrow – in this, they resemble animals and certain women, and that child suddenly sees his bed as the place where he will have to stay for ever and from which he will, for an indefinite period, have to listen to the wheels moving off across the gravel and to the bright, superfluous ringing of bicycle bells by his brothers and sisters for whom time doesn’t count, not even the present. Perhaps Luisa Téllez also felt that Gloria and Marta, the sister with whom she would never have played and the sister with whom she would have played, were reunited now in the earth with their mother and their grandmother, in a stable, feminine, kindly world where they would no longer worry over a yes or a no, where they would no longer weary themselves over a perhaps or a maybe, in a world in which time didn’t count – a haunted or, perhaps, enchanted world – which it was not yet time for her to enter, a world from which she was literally exiled and in whose common dwelling place there would certainly be no room when her turn came; and while the earth fell symbolically once more upon that grave, she remained with her father and her brother amongst the inconstant living, and perhaps, one day, with a husband who has not yet appeared – the vague figure of a husband – in a world of men, a world configured by comics and coloured prints and storybooks (and, above them, their model planes), a world that is still, undeniably, the victim of time.

  And there was the father, Juan Téllez, who had spoken a few brief, almost inaudible words, presumably a prayer in which he himself would not believe at his age, how difficult it is entirely to discard the superficial customs and beliefs of those who precede us, which we sometimes emulate throughout our whole life – another life – out of superstition and respect for them, the forms and effects of things take longer to disappear and be forgotten than do their causes and contents. He had been led stumbling to the grave, helped by his surviving daughter and his daughter-in-law as if he were a condemned man being led to the scaffold and lacking the strength to climb the steps or as if he were walking in snow, just managing to extricate one foot, only to plunge back in again at every step. But then he had recovered his composure and had puffed out his convex chest, taken a bluish handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, not the tears from his eyes, for there were none, although he did also dab at one dry cheek and at his forehead, as if to soothe a rash. He had spoken his words with a mixture of gravity and reluctance, as if he were fully aware of the solemnity of the moment but, at the same time, wanted to have done with it as soon as possible and to go back home and lie down, perhaps there was a touch of shame mingled with his grief (that was a horrible death, a ridiculous death), although the likelihood was that no one had told him about the real circumstances, about his daughter’s half-naked, dishevelled appearance when they found her, that there was clear evidence that a man had been in the apartment, not Deán or anyone, but me, who, for them, was no one. They would simply have told him: “Marta died while Eduardo was away.” And he would have raised his mottled hands to his face, seeking refuge in them. “She would have died anyway, even if she hadn’t been alone,” they would have added in order not to alienate him still further from his son-in
-law, or as if the knowledge that something was inevitable might make it easier to accept. (She hadn’t been alone, I knew that and doubtless so did they.) They may not even have told him the cause, if they knew it, a cerebral embolism, a myocardial infarction, an aortic aneurysm, a meningococcal infection of the adrenal glands, an overdose of something, an internal haemorrhage, I don’t quite know which ailments kill most swiftly and unerringly and I don’t really care to know what killed Marta, he may not even have asked for explanations nor would it have occurred to anyone to think of having an autopsy done, he would simply have taken in the news and hidden his face and prepared himself for the burial of a second of his offspring and for a goodbye, goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn, life is unique and fragile. One assumes, though, that now, while earth fell for the fourth time upon a female person in that tomb, he would be remembering those who lay there and whom he had not seen for many years, his Italian mother, Bruna, who never quite mastered the harsher tongue of her adopted country and who taught her son Juan her own softer language; his wife Laura whom he had loved or not loved, whom he had idolized or hurt, or perhaps both things, first one and then the other or both at the same time, as is usually the case; and his daughter Gloria, who was the first to die, in an accident perhaps, drowned in a river or after breaking her neck in a fall one summer, or perhaps struck down by one of those swift, impatient illnesses that so effortlessly carry off the young – because the young put up no resistance – not even allowing them time to accumulate a few memories or desires or to learn about the strange workings of time, as if that were the way illnesses got their own back for the interminable struggle they have with all the adults who resist them so fiercely, though not so with Marta, who died as meekly as a child. And the father will already have begun to see that second daughter, whom he had seen only recently (and for whom he had later left a message), tinged with the colours of reminiscence and of the rugged past, and he would perhaps be thinking that his own existence had now become even more precarious. He had white hair and large blue eyes and arched, impish eyebrows and very smooth skin for his age, whatever that was; he was a tall, robust man, an excelentísirno, a figure who would fill a room and whose wavering bulk immediately attracted one’s attention, his voluminous thorax making the women on either side of him seem smaller than they were, the slenderness of his legs and the slight swaying that afflicted him even when at rest reminding one rather of a spinning top, he wore a black armband on the sleeve of his overcoat as proof of his strong, old-fashioned sense of occasion, his black shoes as polished and shiny as those of his surviving daughter, small feet for a man of his height, the feet of a retired dancer and the face of a gargoyle, his dry, astonished eyes staring down into the grave or hole or abyss, watching as the symbolic earth fell, and remembering, spellbound, his two girls, the one who had never grown beyond childhood and the one who had at first been younger but later much older, assimilated into the tomb now by that other daughter whom they never saw grow up or grow old or change or become disaffected or a source of anxiety, both now shared the same sad fate, obedient and silent. I saw that one of Juan Téllez’s shoelaces had come undone and that he had not noticed.

  To his right was the woman who was, doubtless, his daughter-in-law, María Fernández Vera by name, she was wearing dark glasses and a look of social piety on her face, a look, that is, not so much of grief as of irritation, not so much of contagious fear as of annoyance at having her daily routine disrupted and her family diminished, shorn of one of its members, and her husband, therefore, plunged into gloom, for who knows how intolerably long; the person holding her arm as if begging her forgiveness or pleading for help – as if asking her to have pity on him – must be Guillermo, Luisa and Marta’s only brother and slightly less than a brother to the child Gloria, whom he would not have known and about whom perhaps he might never even have enquired. He too was wearing dark glasses, his face was pale and gaunt and his shoulders slumped, he looked very young – perhaps he was only recently married – despite his visibly receding hair which he would not have inherited from his father but from the men on his mother’s side of the family, the crania of uncles or older cousins who might, in fact, be there in the second row. I couldn’t see any similarity with Marta nor for that matter with Luisa, as if parents always put less attention and effort into the engendering of their youngest children and grew more negligent when it came to transmitting family likenesses, leaving the task in the hands of some capricious ancestor who, spotting a chance to perpetuate his features on earth, intervenes and bestows them on the, as yet, unborn child, or, even better, at the very moment the child is being conceived. He seemed a pusillanimous young man, but it’s foolish to say such a thing having seen someone only at the moment when their sister is being buried and when they have their eyes cast down; and yet he did seem lost, he really did seem frightened by the sudden revelation of his own death, doubtless for the first time in his life, clinging to the arm of his erect and more powerful wife the way little boys hang on to their mother’s arm when they are crossing the road, and while the symbolic earth fell upon his dead female relatives, she did not squeeze his hand consolingly, she distantly, impatiently tolerated it – one elbow sticking out – perhaps she was simply bored. The newlywed’s shoes were bespattered with mud, he must have stepped in a puddle in the cemetery.

  And there too was Deán, whose memorable face I recognized at once, even though he no longer had a moustache as he had on his wedding day and even though the passing years had left their mark on him and had given him character and strength. He had his hands thrust in the pockets of the pale blue raincoat he had neglected to take with him to London and which I had seen hanging up in his house: it was a good-quality raincoat, but he must be cold. He wasn’t wearing dark glasses, he wasn’t crying and his eyes were not staring in astonishment. He was a very tall, thin man – or perhaps not, perhaps he just looked as if he were – with a long face in keeping with his height and the energetic jawline of a comic-strip hero or of some cleft-chinned actor, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum or even Fred MacMurray, although Deán’s face was anything but foolish, and he was utterly unlike either the prince of laughter or the prince of unadulterated evil, Grant and Mitchum. He had thin lips, visible albeit colourless, or of the same colour as his skin, his face marked with lines and threads which would, in time, become wrinkles – or perhaps they already had – like superficial cuts in a lump of wood (one day his face would be like the scarred surface of a school desk). His very straight brown hair was carefully parted on the left, perhaps simply combed through with water the way children did in days gone by, a child of his time which must have been more or less my time too, habits that are never lost and which remain unaffected by our age or by the years. At that moment – although I would have sworn it would be the same at any moment – it was a grave, meditative, serene face, that is, one of those all-accepting faces, a face from which one could expect anything, any transformation or contortion, as if his face were in a constant state of expectation and indecision, one moment expressing cruelty and the next pity, then derision and later melancholy, followed up by anger, yet without ever really expressing any of those emotions fully, the sort of face which, in normal circumstances, seems potent and enigmatic, due perhaps to the contradictory nature of the features rather than to any actual intention: raised, mocking eyebrows, candid eyes that indicate rectitude and good faith and a certain degree of introversion; a large, straight nose as if it were pure bone from bridge to tip, but with dilated nostrils suggesting vehemence, or even perhaps inclemency; the thin, tense mouth of the tireless plotter, of the anticipator – his lips like taut ribbons – but denoting also slowness and a capacity for surprise and an infinite capacity for understanding; his insubordinate chin now cast down, an edgeless sword; slightly pointed ears as if they were on permanent alert, tuned to hear what was left unspoken in the distance. They had picked up nothing from London, not the rustle of those sheets which I had not touched or the clatter of plate
s during our supper at home or the clink of glasses filled with Chateau Malartic, not the rattle of death or the boom of anxiety, the creak of malaise or depression or the buzz of fear and regret, or the sing-song hum of weary and much-maligned death, once known and encountered. Perhaps his ears had been filled by other London noises, by the rustle of sheets and the clatter of plates and the clink of glasses, by the shrillness of the traffic and the boom of the tall buses, the screech of the night-time bustle and the reverberating chatter in various languages at the Indian restaurant, by the echo of other, possibly mortal, sing-song voices. “I never sought it, I never wanted it,” I said to him, though addressing only myself from my 1914 grave, and at that point, Deán glanced up for a moment and looked across at me standing there with my cigarette, watching him. Although he looked straight at me, his thoughtful expression remained unchanged, and I could see his eyes, the colour of beer, their gaze candid, but almond-shaped like a Tartar’s eyes. I don’t think he actually saw me then, his eyes looked at me, but did not rest on me, it was as if they merely skirted round or passed over me, and immediately returned to the grave or hole or abyss with what I judged to be anxiety, as if Deán, with his long, strange face, was feeling both serious and somewhat uncomfortable, as if he had landed up at a party that had nothing whatever to do with him because it was a purely female occasion, a necessary intruder but, ultimately, mere decoration, the husband of the new arrival in whose honour – or rather in whose memory, since he was the widower – everyone there was gathered together, no more than thirty, we do not, in fact, know that many people. Deán was someone who would remain for ever outside that tomb of blood relations, someone who would probably remarry and, then, those five years of marriage and cohabitation would be represented and recalled, above all, by the existence of the boy Eugenio, both now and later, when, with the passing of time, he was no longer a child, and less so by Marta Téllez, who would gradually diminish in importance and grow shadowy in her swift journey towards dissolution (how little remains of each individual, how little is recorded, and how much of that little is never talked about). Deán was so like the photo I had seen of him, he even began to bite his lower lip as he had on that nuptial occasion in black and white, when he looked at the camera. And while the symbolic earth fell upon his wife Marta Téllez, I saw him suddenly take his hands out of his raincoat pockets and raise them to his temples – his poor temples; his legs buckled and he seemed about to fall flat on his face, and he would have fallen – he staggered, skidded towards the grave for a moment – if several hands and the sound of alarmed voices had not sustained him: someone grabbed him by the back of his neck – the back of his neck – someone else plucked at his good-quality raincoat, and the woman by his side gripped his arm while he remained for a moment with one knee on the ground, all that remained of his equilibrium, his knee like a knife loosely impaled in a piece of wood and his hands clutching his temples, incapable of reaching out in order to break his fall had he fallen face forwards: “Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow; and fall thy edgeless sword.” He was helped to his feet, he brushed down his raincoat, rubbed his knee, smoothed back his hair a little with one hand, put his hands in his pockets again, and recovered his thoughtful expression which, now, seemed more like a look of bereavement or perhaps embarrassment. Seeing him falter, the gravedigger had paused with his spade in the air, already laden with earth, and for those few seconds during which the recent widower interrupted the silence of the ceremony, that figure remained there, paralysed, as if he were the statue of a worker or perhaps a miner, his spade aloft, his wide trousers, his short boots, a scarf round his neck and an old-fashioned cap on his head. He could have been mistaken for a stoker, although no one stokes boilers any more, his thick white socks had slipped down into his boots. And when Deán had recovered, the gravedigger finally tossed the spadeful of earth into the hole. But he had lost direction and rhythm during that moment of suspense and a few specks from that spadeful of earth besmirched Deán – his raincoat – who, since getting to his feet, was standing somewhat nearer the edge of the abyss and felt its touch. Juan Téllez gave a sideways glance, a look of evident annoyance, though whether it was directed at Deán or at the gravedigger, I don’t know.