Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

by Javier Marías

  What happened on those two nights remains etched on my memory, everything leaves a mark.

  I wasn’t sure whether to phone Celia or not, it was very late and if she was at home, she would probably be asleep, I hadn’t heard anything from her, except indirectly, in about four or five months, and I preferred it that way, I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me, how could I explain my abrupt change of mind and that sudden impulse to call her without telling her everything that had happened to me, without telling her that the reason for my inopportune phone call was that I thought I had been with her until shortly before, that I had opened the door of my car to her and had given her money in the street, that I had taken her to a deserted place so that she could earn that money: to tell her that I thought I had fucked her; she would take me for a madman, if she answered at all. And yet it’s very hard to resist making a phone call once you have considered doing so, just as the moment you get hold of a telephone number, you always feel tempted to dial it at once, that number that had been my number until not so very long ago. It was after three o’clock in the morning and the Spitfires, fired upon and pursued by the Messerschmitts, were hurtling across the screen as I picked up the phone and dialled the number, not allowing myself any further hesitations. If Celia answered, I would at least know that she was not Victoria and was not in danger, she wouldn’t have had time yet to escape the hands of the doctor and return home, and, besides, her night might not yet have ended; but it would be worse if she didn’t answer, my feelings of disquiet would grow and for two reasons, out of two fears: that Celia was indeed Victoria and that something bad might have happened to her, something so bad that one day she would appear to me on sleepless nights, or in my dreams, to tell me what then she could only tell me in dreams: “That wretched Celia, thy wife, that never slept a quiet hour with thee, now fills thy sleep with perturbations.” Or fills it with spells and curses for having let her leave my life and for having left her that night too, when I could have brought her home under another name and thus saved her. It was a mistake to phone her, but I phoned her anyway: I heard the first ring, a second and then a third, it was still not too late to hang up and remain with my doubts unresolved. The answering machine clicked on and I heard her recorded voice: “Hello, this is 549 6001. I’m not home right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, please do so after the long tone. Thank you.” She addressed the caller as “tú”, the way young people do these days, she was young, so was Víctoria. I heard two or three beeps left by previous calls and then the long tone, and I decided to speak out of pure fear, unlike that other time when I had dialled my old number while I was sitting at the foot of the bed getting undressed, one weary, melancholy night. “Celia,” I said, “are you there?”, answering machines often lie. “It’s me, Víctor, are you in? I don’t know, perhaps you’re asleep and you’ve got the volume on the phone turned down low,” I was in the middle of saying what I hoped would be the case when that wish was granted and the non-recorded voice of Celia interrupted me, she was at home and had picked up the phone when she heard my voice, so she wasn’t Víctoria, and not yet, not yet, I thought at once, not yet, because she was still alive. “Víctor, have you any idea what time it is?” she said. “Not yet,” I thought, just as the time had not yet come for the pilot of that supermarine Spitfire Mk XII who could still see the world from up on high and was still fleeing. She sounded wide awake, I know what her voice sounds like when she’s been asleep, just as I remember her sleeping face bare of make-up, the question seemed more of a formal reproach than a real one, I hadn’t dragged her from sleep, that much was certain. “What’s wrong?” she added. I hadn’t prepared any likely excuse, how could I, if I didn’t have one, and the state of excitement I was in had left me dumbstruck, so I said, just to gain time: “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. Can I come up and see you for a moment?” “Now?” she replied. “Are you mad? Do you know what time it is?” “Yes, I do,” I said, “but it’s urgent. You weren’t asleep were you? You don’t sound as if you’ve been asleep.” There was a brief silence and before answering, she said: “Hang on a second,” it might be the second required to reach for an ashtray if she had lit a cigarette, although I didn’t hear the lighter, which you usually can down the phone, some smokers you can even hear inhaling. “No, I wasn’t asleep, but you can’t come over now.” “Why not? It won’t take long, really.” Celia fell silent for a moment, I heard her give an exasperated sigh. “Víctor,” she said, and I knew then, because when people call you by your name, you know they are not going to give you what you want, “do you realize what you’re saying. For months you’ve been avoiding me, for months we haven’t seen or spoken to each other, and suddenly you ring me up at half past three in the morning and want to come over. You’ve got a nerve!” That sort of remark always disarms people, “You’ve got a nerve!”, she was right, I didn’t say anything, I looked at my watch, it wasn’t, in fact, half past, and then she added gratuitously, she did it simply to annoy me because I wasn’t going to insist, she didn’t need to tell me: “Anyway, you can’t come over now, I’ve got someone with me.” “Oh, right,” I said, like an idiot. Celia let the phrase take effect, it isn’t the same imagining what happened before or after as knowing about it when it’s actually happening; then she spoke again, in a friendlier tone: “Call me tomorrow, late morning, and we can talk about whatever it is then. If you like, we can have lunch. All right? Call me tomorrow.” Then it was my turn to say something simply to annoy her: “Tomorrow will be too late.” And I hung up without saying goodbye. I was quite calm for a moment, I saw a pilot with a clipped moustache gazing up at the skies and saying: “Mitch! They can’t take the Spitfires, Mitch! They can’t take them!” He looked like David Niven to me and he was addressing someone who was dead; then the planes set off towards a sun crisscrossed with clouds and that quote from Churchill’s came up on the screen, the battle was over and I changed channels again, suddenly curious or in a hurry now to know what the battle was in the other film and what the film was, in colour, historical, featuring ghosts and kings, but I found that it too had ended, I would never know. In its place, a few rachitic girls were doing some sort of gymnastics that involved twirling long, floating ribbons, with a commentary provided by a couple of hard-to-please lesbians who found fault with everything. I looked and listened for a few moments (I looked at the girls and I listened to the lesbians) then I returned to the aerial-combat channel, where, to my horror, a religious broadcast had just begun (I don’t know the calendar of saints’ days, so I don’t know what it was they were celebrating) and a few hideous members of the faithful flock were standing in a church belting out “The Lord is my Shepherd” and other pontifical ballads. I turned off the television and looked for the newspaper to find out about the two films of which I had caught fragments, but the cleaning lady had already thrown it out, she had come that day in my absence and she always throws everything out too soon, as happens with Solitaire at the Palace and which irks him greatly, as I learned much later on. And that was when my brief moment of calm came to an end, it lasted little more than a moment, because my brain rarely rests and is constantly coming up with ideas and schemes: “If Victoria wasn’t Celia and Celia had company,” I thought, “both Celia and Victoria are making me the subject of that verb and the object of that ancient relationship, and I, in turn, have made her the co-fornicator of the prostitute Victoria who so closely resembles her, both verb and noun must apply to women too.” And I suppose it was that feeling of being made a double subject, a double ġe·brd-guma, both at the same time – a disquieting feeling – that made me think further, and that new thought was worse still and completely undermined the partially calming effect of my phone call, calming only in respect of my two fears: Celia had picked up the phone and was, therefore, at home, but before I began to leave my message on the answering machine, there had been two or three beeps, indicating previous phone calls, so it was likely that when Celia picked up the phone,
she had just come in through the door with her companion and would not even have had time to listen to those previous messages. It was again possible, therefore, that Celia was Victoria and that she and the doctor – a married man – had decided to go back to her place and had arrived at that very moment, shortly after I got home, perhaps after driving around the traffic-free city or after a brief halt in a quiet street, the man no longer in a hurry. And if that was the case, if her companion or the doctor was with her now, the danger was not yet over, not for Celia or for Victoria, not yet, not yet, but who knows, tomorrow or in a while, “Those who know me keep silent and in their silence they do not defend me”. I couldn’t phone her again, because now anything was possible and that is the price of uncertainty, it would have been ridiculous and I would have deserved her anger and her insults. In my present state, it made no sense my trying to sleep, I had to let some time pass, at least the time it would take for a fuck, or two simultaneous fucks, more or less the same amount of time, a fuck doesn’t, in fact, take very long, half an hour, an hour with preliminaries, less than that with a whore with whom there are no preliminaries, perhaps more with a lover, longer still with someone new or if it’s the first time, with Marta Téllez everything went on far too long, that’s why I never came to form that relationship or link with Deán or with the gross, despotic Vicente, I don’t have that link with them, or so I believe, although I do have the understandable feeling of having acquired it that night, it wasn’t by choice that I did not acquire it or do not have it, nor ever will, it was not Marta’s choice or mine.

  I decided to go out again and go for a walk, to wander around for a while to distract myself and to tire my body out and at least not be in a bedroom while the others were, the other two or four. The city is never empty, but at that time of the damp night there were very few passers-by, two or three individuals who looked as if they had just got out of prison, the men hosing down the streets, who talk in loud voices as if no one else were sleeping and waste a lot of water, everything was still wet from the storm and it looked like it could easily rain again; the occasional ragged, itinerant old woman, a small group of noisy men and women who had doubtless been celebrating something at a nightclub or a discotheque, a stag night, a lottery prize, a birthday. I walked quite far, over to the west side of the city, not an area I like, in Calle de la Princesa and, later, down Quintana, I heard footsteps behind me, I heard them for three blocks along two different streets, for too long a time and over too great a distance for me not to wonder about it, whoever it was would be watching the back of my neck and was perhaps following me in order to mug me in the shadows, it was a night of fears and apprehensions, but nothing would happen as long as I could still hear them and they did not speed up, I didn’t want to start running, so at the beginning of the fourth block I gave them the chance to overtake me, assuming they were the footsteps of someone inoffensive unable to walk any faster, I stopped to look in a bookshop window, I took out my glasses and put them on and, as I did so, I watched out of the corner of my eye, alertly awaiting his arrival, I heard the poisonous footsteps approaching and it was not yet, not yet, and still not yet: they passed by and, quite openly this time – for now I was the one looking at the back of his neck – I watched the figure moving off, a middle-aged man, to judge by his gait and the camelhair coat he was wearing, that was all I could make out in the darkness, I smoothed down my raincoat and put away my glasses. I headed south-west, Rosales, Bailén, I like that area better, Rosales was the site of the Montaña barracks where, all those years ago, the third day of our war was so fiercely fought, now there’s an Egyptian temple there. And it was just as I reached Plaza de Oriente that I saw two horses coming in the opposite direction, keeping as close to the pavement as possible so as not to get in the way of the few cars that passed. There were two horses, a stallion and a mare, and one rider, the man, wearing high boots, was riding the bay, whilst the dapple-grey mare, which was also saddled up, rode alongside, occasionally dropping back a little, they were moving along at walking pace, phlegmatic, Andalusian riding horses, their eight hooves echoed on the gleaming road, an ancient sound, hooves in the city, almost unknown in these arrogant times that have exiled these beasts which have accompanied man throughout his history, even during my childhood it was quite common to hear them, pulling rag-and-bone carts or the covered wagons of tradesmen, or carrying mounted policemen dressed in those long, sinister cloaks that made them look like Russians and concealed their elongated, rubber truncheons, or bearing some wealthy horseman back from his riding school. Animals were a common sight to people in the cities then, I even remember seeing cows crammed into basements, as a small boy, I was just the right height to see them through the barred windows of those dairies that gave off a penetrating smell, the smell of cow and horse and mule and donkey, the smell of manure, a familiar smell. That’s why it seemed so odd to be standing in the Plaza de Oriente opposite the Palacio Real in which no one lives and to see those enormous horses, I felt something akin to wonder, despite the fact that I often go to the races on Sundays, but seeing horses parading round the paddock and then running round the track as part of a spectacle is not the same as encountering them in the middle of the city, on asphalt, next to the very pavement you’re walking along, gigantic, lustrous and yet incomprehensible creatures with broad necks and muscular trunks and limbs, they have long memories and once they get into certain habits, these can be hard to eradicate, they know how to find their own way home when their masters are lost and they have an infallible instinct for distinguishing friend from foe, whether near to or far away, they would never confuse inoffensive footsteps with poisonous ones, they can sense danger before it even appears and before we have even imagined it. It was much too late for those horses to be out in the street riding past the Plaza de Oriente, it’s true that a couple of times before, years ago, I had seen the occasional horse pass by at night or during the day in that area, but never towards dawn – or perhaps it was simply that I had never been in Calle Bailén in the early hours – perhaps they were horses from the Royal Palace and belonged to the king even though he doesn’t live there, or they might be from the nearby Palacio de Liria, at any rate, they were definitely aristocratic horses. I watched, astonished, as they passed me, there they were so tall and immemorial, a stallion with a rider and a riderless mare in the night, there was a distant rumble of thunder and the mare started, though not the stallion, she made as if to rear up, she almost stood up on her hind legs for a moment like a monster, her two front legs raised as if she were about to fall on me and strike my head with those fantastic hooves and crush me beneath the weight of her immense body, a horrible death, a ridiculous death. The threat was shortlived, the horseman calmed her down immediately, with a word, a single movement. Many people, even the English themselves, believe the origin of their word “nightmare” to be simply that, a night mare, but it isn’t so, that was another thing I looked into in my younger days, the word “mare” has two origins depending on whether it’s on its own or combined with the word “night”, when it refers to a horse it comes from the Anglo Saxon “mēre”, which simply means “mare”, whilst in the word “nightmare” its origin is, if I remember rightly, mara which means “incubus”, the malign spirit or demon or goblin that squatted or lay on the sleeping person, crushing their chest and creating the oppressive sense of nightmare, occasionally engaging in carnal commerce with him or her, although if it’s with a man, the spirit is female and is called a succubus and lies underneath, and if it’s with a woman, it’s male, an incubus, and lies on top: let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, let me be lead within thy bosom and weigh thee down to ruin, shame and death, perhaps the Irish banshee, who used to announce imminent death with her moans and cries and canticles, had once been that kind of spirit, during my walk, I had seen a ragged, wandering old woman, perhaps she was a banshee who was not yet sure which home to go to that night in order to intone her lament, perhaps she would make her way towards what was once my
home, I didn’t live there now and so was safe, but Celia wasn’t safe, because that was still her home and she wasn’t alone there now, she had told me so, she was engaged in carnal commerce with someone. I thought all this very rapidly while the stallion and the mare were moving off, leaving in their wake their penetrating smell and taking with them, until who knows when, that childhood noise, superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it’s an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is a sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.