Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  No, none of that happened, and thinking about what didn’t happen must be part of my bewitchment, there’s no reason why I should try and shake off these voices and thoughts, I should, instead, get used to them, for as long as I remain watched or haunted or revisited. Deán shot me another rapid, impatient glance as he replied to Téllez with his voice like a rusty sword or lance or suit of armour: “That’s quite enough, this is not the right moment to talk about it. Let’s just leave it, shall we?” And this time there was curiosity in that glance too, as if he had paused to wonder whether this really was the wrong moment. As if he were suddenly considering doing precisely the opposite of what he had just said, because it might suit his purposes to use the presence of a stranger to block or thwart his interlocutors.

  “Just tell me one thing, Eduardo. I need to know where I stand,” said Luisa even more impatiently. “There’s quite a difference between living on your own and living with a child, it’s not something you can just make up as you go along.”

  “Give me a little more time, a few more days won’t hurt you. Perhaps I can arrange it so that I don’t have to travel any more or so that I travel less, I have to discuss it further with Ferran, I don’t know yet. And I don’t know either if I can live with the child on my own, the child belonged to both of us, you see.”

  “Travel, travel … and at the wrong time too,” repeated Téllez, making his dislike of his son-in-law patently obvious. When he said it, he raised one finger as if he were a prophet.

  “Look, Juan,” Deán said to him then, “the fact that I wasn’t at home has nothing to do with it, you know that. No one could have done anything.”

  I had made no effort to find out, but I confess that when I heard that, I felt greatly relieved: I was extremely glad to know that no one could have done anything, since I hadn’t. It was a feeling of retrospective, conditional joy.

  Téllez was sitting with his coffee before him now, he lit his pipe and looked at Deán through the fluctuating flame of the match. It took him time to extinguish it (he didn’t blow on it, he waved it rather feebly in the air) and, meanwhile, he said, without looking at Deán and with his pipe in his mouth, perhaps making an attempt at unintelligibility (he was looking at the disobedient flame, but it was his arched, impish eyebrows that did the looking, rather than his large blue eyes): “That isn’t what I’m reproaching you with, Eduardo, I’m not so unreasonable as to blame you for not having saved her when no salvation was possible, I blame you for the fact that Marta died alone. You don’t even know if you could live alone with the boy, she died alone, with the boy asleep. And the boy was left completely alone, with his mother dead and his father away travelling, just like that. It’s lucky he’s so young.”

  The flame singed his nails just as it went out. As I had thought, Téllez did not know about the circumstances of Marta’s death.

  Deán mumbled something inaudible, perhaps he was counting up to ten as they say people do to postpone their anger and thus diminish it, I’ve never done it, there are some things, on the other hand, that grow worse if postponed. Perhaps he was wondering whether or not to say to his hurtful father-in-law: “Your daughter wasn’t alone, you old fool, nor was your grandson either, Marta made the most of my absence, it suited her down to the ground, who knows how many other times she did just that. But there’s one thing you’re right about, you old fool: all that travelling, and at the wrong time too.” Luisa had lowered her eyes and had smothered any feelings of impatience or urgency, she regretted the impolitic or unwanted turn the conversation had taken because of her, she would know about her sister’s end, her unsolitary end. I knew too, I felt a wave of heat rush over me, I must have blushed a little, I crossed my fingers, luckily no one was looking at me just then, although my blushes could have a reason: it could have been a response to my increasingly obtrusive presence there, indeed, it was due to that in part. Deán did not succumb to temptation, now he too was hiding something from someone and to his own disadvantage, out of pity for the old fool; he gave the sensible or expected reply based on the assumption that Marta had died as her father believed: “No one could have foreseen that, how could any of us have known? She was in perfect health when I left her, I phoned her and I talked to her from London after supper and she was fine then, she didn’t say anything to me, she was just about to put the child to bed, I’ve told you that already. Are you suggesting that I should never ever have gone anywhere, just in case? I imagine that before this happened, you didn’t find it odd or wrong of me to go away, as I did on so many other occasions. Did you never leave your family alone for a few days? Don’t be so absurd. Don’t be so unfair.”

  “I didn’t think anything of it because I didn’t know you had gone.”

  “Well, I doubt very much if, over the last few years, you have been kept informed of all my movements. There was no reason why you should know.”

  “There was no reason why I should know, but she should have known. She couldn’t ask you for help, she couldn’t phone you, could she? You left your London phone number, but we couldn’t find it anywhere, there was no sign of it in the apartment, we looked for it all over, no one could get in touch with you until the following night, that’s one thing, but you hadn’t left it with your friend Ferrán either, why should we believe that you left it with her? You didn’t even bother.” Téllez had used the plural in order to include Luisa, and doubtless Guillermo and María Fernández Vera and the whole Téllez family, who would nevertheless feel sorry for Deán, knowing what they knew, they would never have dreamed of reproaching him. Deán had also resorted to the plural so as not to feel excluded and to feel that he was one of them: “How could any of us have known?” he had said. Téllez paused for a second and then added in a harsh voice, biting on his pipe stem, through gritted teeth: “I dread to think how you spent that day, with your wife dead and you not knowing. I imagine you see those hours of indifference and ignorance in a different light now, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, it must recur again and again in your nightmares.” He stopped, removed his pipe from his mouth and said point-blank and even more scornfully: “Although, of course, you probably weren’t even in London.”

  They had by now completely forgotten about me, at least Téllez had, for he no longer thought it necessary to bring me up to date on earlier events, old people don’t make many distinctions, that is, they don’t tend to consider all the elements of a situation, especially if the situation is an awkward one, only the main ones, and what mattered to him were Deán and Luisa, I was just part of the decor, I had no more reality or importance than the maître d’hotel or the waiters and customers or the crowd of people sheltering from the rain in the restaurant doorway, or the present storm (out of the window I noticed that several people were sheltering beneath a newspaper). And it was only then, when no one was taking any notice of me, not even to give me a sideways glance, that I realized that when I left Conde de la Cimera, I had taken with me not three things but four: the smell, Marta’s bra, the tape from the answering machine and a yellow post-it, doubtless in Deán’s handwriting and not Marta’s, and which I still had in my wallet, in my pocket. And I thought: “Deán won’t put up with this, this time he’ll succumb, he’ll tell him what happened, he won’t stand for someone doubting that he even went to London, he’s going to say: ‘Someone took the piece of paper on which I’d noted down the name of my hotel and the phone number, the same person who was with her all night and who watched her die with his own eyes without telling anyone, the same person who took that piece of paper that you all looked for so eagerly, and who used it twenty-four hours later, the following night, he called me in my hotel room in London and he asked for me, but didn’t dare speak to me when I picked up the phone, what did he want to tell me, what could he tell me then, it came too late to change anything, as did the message I received shortly afterwards when the voice of Ferrán and the voice of Luisa told me that Marta had been dead all that day and the night before or part of it, because the re
st of that night she was alive and had company. Luisa knows, she can tell you, you’re the only one who doesn’t know, Marta’s death wasn’t just horrible, it was ridiculous, they found her half-undressed under the sheets and with her make-up smudged not just by her tears but by someone’s kisses, the man who gave her those kisses must have been horrified, stunned, perplexed, frustrated. Imagining that man’s horror is the one thing that gladdens me.’ That’s what he’s going to say,” I thought, “and I’ll have to get up and go to the toilet with my napkin pressed to my mouth because I can’t bear for him to say it.” I had been on the point of copying down the name of the hotel (the Wilbraham Hotel) and that phone number, I had thought of doing it and had even picked up another post-it for that purpose, I had got my pen out of my jacket pocket and taken the opportunity to put my jacket on and thus prepare myself to leave, but, in the end, I hadn’t written anything down, I had instead kept the post-it, unconsciously, unwittingly, I had stolen it unintentionally, without realizing what I was doing – I had so many other things to think about – when you first get hold of a telephone number, you always feel tempted to dial it at once, and that was why, the following day, no one would have found it, Luisa and Guillermo and María Fernández Vera and, who knows, perhaps the woman with the beige gloves, whom I had met downstairs at the front door, would have looked and searched everywhere, worried sick that they were unable to give this worst and gravest piece of news to Deán, the worst thing that could possibly happen and had happened. They would have spoken several times with Ferrán and it was true that he had no idea where his associate was, I had the proof of that too on my tape, before anything had happened he had left a message for Marta, I know it by heart now like all the others: “Marta, it’s Ferrán. I know Eduardo left for England today, but I’ve just realized that he hasn’t left me a phone number or address or anything, I can’t think why, I told him to be sure to leave it, and the way things are here, we can’t afford not to be able to locate him. Perhaps you’ve got them, or else, if you speak to him, can you tell him to call me at once, at the office or at home. It’s fairly urgent. Thanks.” And she hadn’t called him to give him the phone number that was there then and she hadn’t passed on the message to Deán when he phoned after his excellent supper at the Bombay Brasserie next to the tube station in Gloucester Road – I know it myself – or at least I can’t remember her doing so. Doubtless she had a lot of things to think about too – she was still thinking then – or perhaps, on the contrary, the two mutually incompatible presences, mine and the boy’s, did not allow her to think about anything apart from us, him and me, and getting rid of the boy just for a moment and using that moment to pay me some attention, hoping that the phone wouldn’t ring again, that her son wouldn’t have a tantrum and kick up a fuss, drinking enough wine to seek and to want what she still wasn’t even sure she was seeking or wanting. And all day Deán had been just that, unlocatable, Téllez was right, he was very acute and he knew just where to put the knife in, what would Deán have done during those hours of neglect and ignorance in London, how would he have spent that day believing that someone who was dead was, in fact, alive, he would have spent the early part of the day in meetings, the object of the trip, then he might have gone for a walk in St James’s Park or around Hampstead or Chelsea, perhaps in his free time, he would have bought a present for Marta, if so, she would never have got that present or souvenir or known what journey or absence brought it, if it was a reward for waiting or a message from some new conquest or intended to ease a guilty conscience: it came too late; and so that present never even became a souvenir, it had neither past nor origin, or only in another consciousness and another memory if Deán had decided to give it to someone else when he learned of the death of its intended recipient, to his sister-in-law Luisa or to his brother-in-law’s wife María or perhaps to the woman at the cemetery, the one with the beige gloves, or perhaps to none of them – a brooch, a dress, earrings, a headscarf, a handbag, Eau de Guerlain, who knows what the chosen object was. Deán would perhaps have dined in Sloane Square, close to his hotel, in order not to have to go too far after a tiring day, either alone or in company with colleagues or acquaintances or friends, who knows, then he would have gone back to his room with its sash window and would have looked out at the veteran dark of the London night, at the buildings opposite or at other rooms in the same hotel, most in darkness, staring at the attic bedroom of a black maid getting undressed after her day’s work, removing her cap and her shoes and her stockings and her apron and her uniform, then standing at the sink and washing her face and under her arms, British-fashion. He can’t smell her, but he may already know her smell, perhaps he has already passed her in a corridor or on the stairs, and then the phone would have rung at an hour considered unsuitable in that city, and when Deán picked it up and said “Hello”, I hung up, frightened, standing at a public phone in a self-service restaurant in Madrid, with a guy with long teeth waiting for me to finish. The ringing of the phone in Deán’s hotel room echoes and bounces out across the night to the half-dressed, half-naked maid, and alerts her to the fact that she can be seen, in bra and pants, she takes a few steps over to her window, opens it and peers out for a moment as if to make sure that no one is climbing up towards her – no burglar, for in English there’s a specific word for house thieves, for the intruder I had been the previous night in Marta’s home, in her husband’s home, although I had not entered surreptitiously – and then she closes it and very carefully draws the curtains, no one must see her in the midst of her desolation or fatigue or dejection, or half-dressed or half-naked or sitting at the foot of the bed with the inside-out sleeves of her uniform caught on her wrists, perhaps she had already been seen like that without her realizing it. “And Deán will say more,” I thought, “he’ll say: ‘But his stupefaction and anxiety and panic and bad luck are not enough for me, nor is his momentary horror which will already have passed, I want to meet that man and talk to him and call him to account and tell him what happened because of him, in particular, I want to tell him exactly how I spent that whole day when I thought Marta was still alive and when she was, in fact, dead, and how I feel about that day now when it’s repeated in my nightmares and I hear the voice that says: Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, when I was mortal, and let fall thy pointless lance. Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, let me be lead within thy bosom and at a bloody battle end thy days. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, despair and die.’ That’s what he’s going to say and, if he does say it, I’ll raise both hands to my ears and drop to the floor, or perhaps I’ll raise both hands to my temples, my poor temples, that feel as if they are about to explode, because I won’t be able to bear to hear him say it and to be forced to listen to him.”