Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

Javier Marías

TOMORROW
IN THE
BATTLE THINK ON ME

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages, in fifty-two countries, and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for
A Heart So White.
He is also a highly practiced translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne, and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States, and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

A VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2013

Translation copyright
© 1996
by Margaret Jull Costa

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Spain as
Manana en la batailla piensa en mi
by Editorial Alfaguara S. A., Barcelona, in 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Javier Marías. This translation originally published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press, London, in 1996, and subsequently published by Penguin Books, Ltd., London, in 2012.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-95106-9

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Katya Mezhibovskaya
Cover photograph © Lenny Jordan / Millennium Images, UK

v3.1

N
O ONE EVER EXPECTS
that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember. No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments, even though this happens all the time, nor does it ever occur to us that someone entirely unforeseen might die beside us. The facts or the circumstances of a death are often concealed: it is common for both the living and the dying – assuming that they have time to realize they are dying – to feel embarrassed by the form and appearance of that death, embarrassed too by its cause. Seafood poisoning, a cigarette lit as the person is drifting off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets or, worse, to a woollen blanket; a slip in the shower – the back of the head – the bathroom door locked; a lightning bolt that splits in two a tree planted in a broad avenue, a tree which, as it falls, crushes or slices off the head of a passer-by, possibly a foreigner; dying in your socks, or at the barber’s, still wearing a voluminous smock, or in a whorehouse or at the dentist’s; or eating fish and getting a bone stuck in your throat, choking to death like a child whose mother isn’t there to save him by sticking a finger down his throat; or dying in the middle of shaving, with one cheek still covered in foam, half-shaven for all eternity, unless someone notices and finishes the job off out of aesthetic pity; not to mention life’s most ignoble, hidden moments that people seldom mention once they are out of adolescence, simply because they no longer have an excuse to do so, although, of course, there are always those who insist on making jokes about them, never very funny jokes. What a terrible way to die, people say about certain deaths; what a ridiculous way to die, people say, amidst loud
enemym at last deceased or about some remote figure, someone who once insulted us or who has long since inhabited the past, a Roman emperor, a great-grandfather, or even some powerful person in whose grotesque death one sees only the still-vital, still-human justice which, deep down, we hope will be dealt out to everyone, including ourselves. How that death gladdens me, saddens me, pleases me. Sometimes the trigger for hilarity is merely the fact that it is a stranger’s death, about whose inevitably risible misfortune we read in the newspapers, poor thing, people say, laughing, death as a performance or a show to be reviewed, all the stories that we read or hear or are told as if they were mere theatre, there is always a degree of unreality about the things other people tell us, it’s as if nothing ever really happened, not even the things that happen to us, things we cannot forget. No, not even what we cannot forget.

There is a degree of unreality about what has happened to me and which is still not over, or perhaps I should use a different tense – the classic storytelling tense – and say, instead, what
happened
to me, even though it is still not over. Maybe now, when I tell it, I’ll find myself laughing. I have my doubts though; it is not yet remote enough and my dead person has not long inhabited the past, she was neither powerful nor an enemy, and I cannot really say that she was a stranger either, although I knew very little about her when she died in my arms – now, on the other hand, I know more. Fortunately, she was not naked, at least not entirely, we were in the process of undressing, of undressing each other as one tends to do the first time it happens, that is, on those first nights that have all the appearance of being unforeseen, or which you pretend to yourself were unpremeditated in order to save your modesty, so that later on, you can experience a feeling of inevitability and thus shrug off any possible guilt, people believe in predestination and the intervention of fate, when it suits them. It is as if, when it comes to the point, everyone wanted to say: “I never sought it, I never wanted it,” when things turn out badly or depress you, or when you regret something, or end up hurting someone. I neither sought nor wanted it, I should say now that I know she is dead, and that, even though she hardly knew me, she died in my arms inopportunely – undeservedly too, for I was not
the one who should have been at her side. No one would believe me if I said it, not that that matters much, since I am the person doing the telling and people can either choose to listen to me or not. Now, however, whilst I can say that I never sought it, never wanted it, she cannot say that or anything else, she cannot contradict me, the last thing she said was: “Oh God, the child.” The first thing she had said was: “I don’t feel well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I mean that was the first thing she said once the process of undressing had been interrupted, we were already in her bedroom, half-lying down, half-dressed and half-undressed. She suddenly withdrew from me and covered my lips with her hand as if not wanting to make the transition from kissing my lips to not kissing them until she had replaced this with some other affectionate gesture or touch, she pushed me gently with the back of her hand and then turned over and lay on her side, facing away from me, and when I asked her: “What’s up?”, that is what she replied: “I don’t feel well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” That was when I first saw the back of her neck, which I had never seen before, with her hair slightly lifted (as it is in certain nineteenth-century portraits of women) and somewhat tangled and sweaty, and yet it wasn’t hot in the room, an old-fashioned neck traversed by striations or threads of black, sticky hair, like half-dried blood, or perhaps mud, like the neck of someone who slipped in the shower, but still had time to turn off the tap. It all happened very fast and there was no time to do anything. There wasn’t time to call a doctor (and what doctor could you call at three o’clock in the morning? doctors don’t even do house calls at lunchtimes these days) or to call a neighbour (and which neighbour, I didn’t know them, I wasn’t in my own house and had never before been in that house which I had entered as a guest and where I was now an intruder, I had never even been in that street before, hardly ever been in that part of town, and then only a long time ago) or call her husband (and how could I, of all people, phone her husband, besides, he was away and I didn’t even know his full name), or wake up the child (and what would be the point of waking the child, when it had taken so long to get him to sleep), or even to try and help her myself, her illness came on very suddenly, at first, I thought or we thought that the meal, with all
its interruptions, had disagreed with her, or I thought that perhaps she was already becoming depressed by or beginning to regret what had happened, or had felt suddenly afraid, those three things often take the form of malaise and illness, fear and depression and regret, especially if the latter coincides with the acts that provoke it, all at once, a yes and a no and a perhaps and, meanwhile, everything has moved on or is gone, the misery of not knowing what to do and of having to act regardless, because one has to fill up the insistent time that continues to pass without waiting for us, we move more slowly: having to decide without knowing, having to act without knowing and yet foreseeing, and that is the greatest and most common of misfortunes, foreseeing what will come afterwards, it is a misfortune generally perceived as quite a minor one, yet experienced by everyone every day. It is something you get used to, we take little notice of it. She felt ill, I hardly dare write her name – Marta, that was her name, and her surname was Téllez – she said that she felt sick and I asked her: “But what do you mean, in your stomach or in your head?” “I don’t know, I feel absolutely deathly, I just feel horribly queasy all over, all over my body.” That body that was now in my hands, the hands that touch everything, the hands that squeeze or caress or explore or even strike (I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, don’t hold it against me), the sometimes mechanical gestures of hands feeling their way over a body about which they are still undecided as to whether or not it pleases them, and then suddenly that body feels sick, that most diffuse of malaises, all over her body, as she put it, and she had also said, “I feel absolutely deathly,” she had not meant it literally, but as a figure of speech. She did not think she was dying, nor did I, besides, she had said: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I kept asking questions because that is a way of avoiding having to do anything, and not only asking questions, for talking and telling all avoid the kisses and the blows and having to take steps, putting an end to the waiting, and what could I do, especially at first, when according to the rules of what should and shouldn’t happen – rules that are, at times, broken – it should have been only a passing phase. “Do you actually feel like being sick?” She didn’t reply in words, she shook her head, the back of her neck with its threads of hair like half-dried blood or mud, as if it
were too much of an effort to speak. I got off the bed and walked round it and knelt down by her side so that I could see her face, I put a hand on her forearm (touch consoles, the hand of the doctor). She had her eyes tight shut at that moment – long lashes – as if the light from the table lamp hurt her eyes, the lamp we had not as yet switched off (although I was thinking of doing so shortly, before she became ill I had wondered whether to switch it off now or later: I wanted to see, I had still not seen that new body that was sure to please me, so I had not switched it off). I left the lamp on, now it might be useful to us in view of her sudden indisposition, her sudden illness or depression or fear or regret. “Do you want me to call a doctor?” and I thought of those unlikely accident and emergency numbers, the phantasmagoria of the telephone book. She shook her head again. “Where does it hurt you?” I asked and she feebly indicated a vague area comprising her chest and her stomach and below, in fact her whole body apart from her head and her extremities. Her stomach was uncovered now, her chest less so, she was still wearing (although the hook was undone) her strapless bra, a vestige of summer, like the top half of a bikini, it was slightly too small for her, perhaps she had put on an older, smaller bra precisely because she was expecting me that night and because, despite appearances and despite the carefully engineered coincidences that had led us to that double bed, it had all in fact been premeditated (I know that some women wear their bra a size too small on purpose, to give them more uplift). I was the one who had undone her bra, but it had not come off, Marta was gripping it now with her arms or armpits, perhaps unintentionally. “Is it passing off a bit?” “No, I don’t know, I don’t think so,” she said, in a voice that was now not merely diminished, but distorted by pain or, rather, by anxiety, because I don’t actually know that she was in any pain. “Wait a bit, I can hardly speak,” she added – being ill makes you lazy – but nevertheless she did say something else, she wasn’t so ill that she had forgotten about me, she was considerate regardless of the circumstances and even though she was dying, in my brief acquaintance with her she had struck me as being a considerate person (but then we didn’t know that she was dying): “Poor thing,” she said, “you weren’t expecting this. What an awful
evening.” I hadn’t been expecting anything, or perhaps I had, the same thing that she had been expecting. The evening hadn’t been awful up until then, perhaps a touch boring, and I don’t know if she sensed what was about to happen to her or if she was referring to the excessively long wait we had had, because the child had not wanted to go to sleep. I got up, walked back around the bed and lay down on the side I had occupied before, on the left side, thinking (again I saw the nape of her motionless, striated neck, hunched as if she were cold): “Perhaps I should just wait and not ask her anything for a while, just leave her to be quiet and see if it passes off, not force her to answer questions or try and assess every few seconds if she’s a little better or a little worse, thinking about an illness only intensifies it, so does watching it too closely.”