Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (18 page)

Solitaire fell silent. Anita knit her brows in unconscious imitation of her boss, she clenched her jaw and lines appeared above her lips. Segurola’s palette was trembling even more than usual, fortunately, the Lone Ranger did not notice and so could not feel irked, although he had perhaps irked himself with his errant, non-obligatory thoughts. Segarra’s bright, optimistic eyes were still very wide, the eyes of one who never quite understands things, and he was growing a little unsteady now, resting one gloved hand on the back of the armchair at his side. Téllez was finally emptying his exhausted pipe, tapping it on the ashtray, and mumbling stiffly: “Things aren’t that bad, it’s just an excess of scruples, there’s no need to torment yourself, Your Majesty, over hypothetical, improbable things like that. Besides, Your Majesty can’t be held responsible for something you know nothing of or for something you only find out about later, they don’t tell Your Majesty everything after all.”

“I should think not,” intervened Anita zealously, “he’s already got far too much on his mind.”

“Really?” said Only the Lonely quickly (although not quickly enough to prevent the young lady’s motherly intervention). “Are
you sure of that, Juanito? A hunter can go out hunting and shoot at a vague shape in the distance. He inadvertently kills a boy sleeping amongst the bushes in the woods, who does not even cry out when the bullet hits him, he dies in his dreams: the hunter does not know what he has done, he may never find out, but it is done all the same: the boy did not just die of his own accord. A driver knocks down a pedestrian one night, he bumps into him, but he’s in a hurry or he’s afraid or he’s drunk, even so, he brakes, slightly uncertain what to do; in his rear-view mirror, he sees his victim stumbling to his feet, it was obviously nothing very serious, he breathes easily again and drives on. After a few days, an internal haemorrhage carries the pedestrian off to his grave, the driver is not told, he may never find out, but the deed is done: the pedestrian did not just die of his own accord. But take another example, even more problematic, more unintended: a doctor phones a sick woman, she’s not at home, but her answering machine is on, he leaves a trivial message, then forgets to press the button that switches off these modern phones” – Only You pointed to the one Anita had in her pocket, and she immediately got it out as if ready to give a demonstration if called upon – “immediately after that (his mind still on the woman), the doctor discusses with his nurse the woman’s terminal condition, although, for the moment, he has decided either to give her new hope or else to say nothing. His kind remarks and those of the nurse are recorded on the patient’s tape, who, when she hears them, chooses not to wait for the pain and for her own slow decline, and takes her life that same night. The doctor may never find out, especially if the woman lives alone and it doesn’t occur to anyone else to listen to the tape. But the deed is done: the sick woman did not die of her illness, she did not die of her own accord.”

“Unless someone takes the tape,” I thought, and this time the thought came much more slowly, “unless someone steals it, the doctor himself or the nurse realizing too late what has happened. Unless their remarks were not made innocently and they were merely feigning pity, unless both of them knew the patient and had something against her, or she was somehow in their way.”

“But the same thing happens to all of us,” protested Téllez,
“and not just to those in the ruling classes, your own examples are proof of that. The only safe option would be never to say or do anything, and even then, inactivity and silence might have the same effects, produce identical results, or, who knows, even worse ones.”

“It does not console me, Juanito, to know that things are just like that, that responsibility can never be clearly assigned,” replied the One and Only, his face betraying clear signs of grief, his mouth suddenly gone dry. “It’s as if you were to say after the death of a friend: ‘Oh well, that’s the way things are, everyone dies in the end,’ that wouldn’t console me either. That doesn’t make a friend’s death bearable, it is quite simply unbearable that one’s friends should die. You recently lost a daughter, forgive me for reminding you of it, and knowing that things are just like that will have been of little comfort to you, of little relief. In my case, what I do or don’t do has more repercussions than what other people do or don’t do, it’s more serious, my errors and mistakes could affect many people, not just a sleeping boy or a pedestrian or a woman under sentence of death. Each one of my acts could set off a chain reaction, have massive consequences, that’s why I’m so filled by doubt. Everything you do affects individuals, whereas I do not deal with people on an individual basis. I am aware, though, that each life is unique and fragile.” He turned towards me, and sat looking at me for a moment without really seeing me, and then added: “It’s unbearable that the people we know should suddenly be relegated to the past.”

Téllez took out his pouch of perfumed tobacco and started to prepare a second pipe as if to conceal his faltering voice by some physical activity. (Perhaps, too, he needed an excuse to lower his eyes.) While he was doing this, he said very slowly, almost languidly: “There’s no need to apologize, Your Majesty. That’s all I think about all the time, you haven’t reminded me of anything. What is truly unbearable is that the person one recalls as part of the future should suddenly become the past. But the only solution to what Your Majesty says is for everything to end and for there to be nothing.”

“Sometimes that doesn’t seem such a bad solution,” replied Solo, and Téllez must have judged that to be too nihilistic a
response for witnesses to hear from such illustrious lips, for he reacted, at once, by trying to change the subject and said: “But let’s return to the business in hand, Your Majesty, if you don’t mind. What aspect of Your Majesty’s real personality would you like to have reflected, apart from these doubts of yours, which I’m not sure would be terribly acceptable? Your Majesty must give Ruibérriz instructions.”

Then the door through which Solus and Anita had entered was flung open, and in came an elderly cleaning woman, somewhat surly and ill-tempered in appearance. She was carrying a feather duster and a broom and was sliding along, rather hunched, on the two dusters on her feet in order not to tread on the floor with the soles of her slippers, so that she advanced very slowly as if she were a skier crossing firm snow with one very long ski pole and one very short. Astonished, we all turned to watch her interminable passing, she had that loose, white hair that makes old women look even older, and conversation was suspended for a minute or two, because she was singing tunelessly under her breath as she continued her rapt progress; until, at last, when the cleaning lady reached his side, Segarra grabbed her arm with one white gloved hand – which seemed suddenly like a claw – and said something to her in a low voice, at the same time pointing to us. The woman jumped, looked at us, raised one hand to her mouth to stifle a silent cry and hurried as quickly as she could over to the first door, the one Téllez and I had entered some time ago. “She looked like a witch,” I thought, “or perhaps a banshee”: that supernatural female figure from Ireland who warns families of the imminent death of one of their members. They say that sometimes she sings a funeral lament while she combs her hair, but more often, one or two nights before the death she is warning them of is to take place, she shouts or moans beneath the windows of the threatened house. The cleaning woman had been humming some unrecognizable tune, she had uttered no cry or moan, neither was it night-time. I thought: “I don’t believe this house is under threat, Téllez and I are the ones who suffered a bereavement a month ago, he lost a member of his family and I one of my lovers. A prediction of the past.” She closed the door behind her, and the last thing we saw was the feather duster that got hooked on the door handle for a moment.

“One night, about a month ago, I couldn’t sleep,” said Solitaire, taking very little notice of the sudden appearance of the banshee. “I got up and I went into another room so as not to bother anyone, I turned the television on and I started watching an old film that had already started, what it was called I don’t know, afterwards, I went to look for that day’s newspaper, but it had already been thrown out, they always throw things away before I’ve finished with them. It was in black and white and featured a very old, very fat Orson Welles, I’m sure you know him, he’s buried in Spain. In fact, it was filmed in Spain, I recognized the walls of Ávila and Calatañazor and Lecumberri and Soria, the church of Santo Domingo, but the action took place in England, and one believed it too, despite seeing all those familiar places, even the Casa de Campo appeared and that fooled one too, it all looked like England, it was very odd, seeing what one knew to be one’s own country and yet believing that it was England on the screen. The film was about two kings, Henry IV and Henry V, the latter when he was still the Prince of Wales, Prince Hal they called him sometimes, a good-for-nothing, a rake, who, while his father lies dying, spends all day drinking, or hanging around whorehouses and taverns with prostitutes and his vile friends, the fat Welles, the oldest of the corrupters, and another man his own age, a man called Poins, with an unpleasant, cynical face, who takes too many liberties with him, he clearly doesn’t know where to draw the line, and the Prince again and again puts Poins in his place as he himself begins to change. The old King is sick and anxious, in one scene, he asks them to place the crown on his pillow and the son, believing that the King has already died, prematurely puts it on his own head. In between there’s another scene in which the King cannot sleep, as was happening to me that same night, luckily in my case it was just a one-off. He hasn’t been able to sleep for days, he stares at the sky out of the window and rebukes sleep, which he reproaches for visiting much poorer homes than his, even the homes of murderers, but scorning his more noble house. “Oh partial sleep,” he says bitterly, and I couldn’t help but identify with him at that moment, watching television in my dressing gown while everyone else was asleep, although I did sometimes identify with the Prince too. In fact, the
King doesn’t appear much in the film at all, at least not in the bit I saw, but it was enough to get an idea of what he’s like, or what he was like. You see how the Prince changes when his father does at last die and he is crowned king, he abjures his past life (his immediately past life, you see, it was the day before yesterday, even yesterday) and he dismisses his companions, he sends poor Welles into exile despite the fact that the old man calls him ‘my sweet boy’, kneeling before him at the coronation ceremony itself, waiting for the promised favours and the postponed joys, postponed until his final decrepitude. “I am not the thing I was,” the new King says to him, when only a few days before he had shared adventures and jokes with him. He disappoints everyone, the old King Henry senses his changed son’s haste, “I stay too long by you, I weary you,” says the dying man. Even so he gives him advice and tells him secrets, he says to him just before he dies: “God knows, my son, by what by-paths and indirect crooked ways I met this crown; how I came by the crown, O God, forgive!” His hands are stained with blood and he has not forgotten it, he was perhaps poor and doubtless a conspirator or a murderer, although, with the years, the dignity of his position has dignified him and, seemingly and superficially, erased all that, just as the Prince ceases to be a dissolute once he becomes a king, as if our actions and personalities were in part determined by people’s perception of us, as if we came to believe that we are different from what we thought we were because chance and the heedless passing of time change our external circumstances and our clothes. Or else it is the by-paths and the indirect crooked ways of our own efforts that change us and we end up believing that it is fate, we end up seeing our life in the light of the latest or most recent event, as if the past had been only a preparation and we only understood it as it moved away from us, as if we understood it all completely at the end. The mother believes she was born to be a mother and the spinster to be single, the murderer to be a murderer and the victim a victim, just as the leader believes that his steps led him from the very beginning to hold sway over other people’s wills, just as one traces the genius back to the child once one knows he is a genius; if he comes to the throne, the king persuades himself that it was his role to be king and, if he doesn’t, that
it was his rôle to be the martyr of the family, and the man who reaches old age ends up seeing his whole life as a slow progress towards that old age: one sees one’s past life as if it were a plot or a mere piece of circumstantial evidence, and then one falsifies and distorts it. Welles doesn’t change in the film, he dies faithful to himself, seeing all the favours and joys postponed once more until beyond death, betrayed and with his heart broken by his sweet boy. (“Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again nor will you see me. Goodbye ardour, goodbye memories.”) Both his face and those of the kings glimpsed during that hour and a half are clear and recognizable, I will always see those faces and hear those words whenever I think of Henry IV and Henry V of England, if I ever do think about them again. I’m not like that, my face and my words mean nothing to anyone, and it’s time for that to change.” The Lone Ranger stopped short as if he had suddenly stopped reading a book, he looked up and added in another tone of voice: “That, I suppose, is the sheer power of the performance, I must see the whole film one day.”

“If you’re interested, sir, it was
Chimes at Midnight
,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The title of the film you saw, sir. It’s
Chimes at Midnight.
”

Only the Lonely looked at me surprised and a touch wary: “And how do you know? Did you see it that night?”

“No, I was watching another film on the other side, but when I changed channels, I saw that they were showing that too. I recognized it at once, I saw it years ago in the cinema.”