Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me Read online

  That wasn’t how it was. When I went back into the room again, she looked up at me with her dull, clenched eyes, she was still hunched and unmoving, the only change being that now she was hiding her nakedness with her arms as if she were ashamed or cold. “Do you want to get under the covers? You’ll get cold like that,” I said. “No, please don’t move me, don’t move me an inch,” she said, adding at once: “Where were you?” “I went to the bathroom. You’re not getting any better, you know, we ought to do something, I’m going to call an ambulance.” But she still insisted that she did not want to be moved or bothered or distracted (“No, don’t do anything yet, don’t do anything, just wait”), nor did she want voices or movement around her, as if she were so full of foreboding that she preferred everything about her to be in a state of utter paralysis and preferred to remain in the situation and posture that at least allowed her to go on living rather than risk any variation, however minimal, that might upset the temporary and precarious stability – her already frightening stillness – that was filling her with panic. That is the effect panic has, which is why it is so often the downfall of those who experience it, for it makes them believe that they are somehow safe inside the evil or the danger. The soldier who stays in his trench barely breathing, scarcely moving, even though he knows that the trench will soon come under attack; the pedestrian who feels unable to run away when he hears footsteps behind him at dead of night along a dark, deserted street; the prostitute who doesn’t call for help after getting into a car whose doors lock automatically, and realizes that she should never have got in beside that man with the large hands (perhaps she doesn’t ask for help because she doesn’t believe she has a right to it); the foreigner who sees the tree split in two by lightning and falling towards him, but doesn’t move out of the way, he merely observes its slow fall on to the broad avenue; the man who watches another man walk over to his table with a knife in his hand and doesn’t move or defend himself because he believes deep down that this cannot really be happening to him and that the knife will not plunge into his belly, the knife cannot be destined for his skin and his guts; or the pilot who watched as the enemy fighter managed to tuck in behind him, but made no last attempt to escape from the enemy’s sights by some feat of acrobatics, certain that, although everything was in the other man’s favour, he would, nonetheless, miss the target because this time he was the target. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword.” Marta must be conscious of every second, mentally counting each one as it passed, aware of the continuity which gives us not only life, but the sense of being alive, the thing that makes us think and say to ourselves: “I’m still thinking or I’m still speaking or I’m still reading or I’m still watching a film and therefore I must be alive; I turn the page of a newspaper or take another sip of my beer or do another clue in the crossword, I’m still looking at things, noticing details – a Japanese man, an air hostess – and that means that the plane in which I’m travelling has not yet fallen from the skies, I’m smoking a cigarette and it’s the same one I was smoking a few seconds ago and I know that I will manage to finish it and light the next one, thus everything continues and I can do nothing about it, since I’m not in a mood to kill myself nor do I want to, nor am I going to; this man with the large hands is stroking my throat, he’s not pressing that hard yet: even though he’s stroking me more roughly now, hurting me a bit, I can still feel his hard, clumsy fingers on my cheekbones and on my temples, my poor temples – his fingers are like piano keys; and I can still hear the steps of that person in the shadows waiting to mug me, but perhaps I’m wrong and they’re the footsteps of some inoffensive person who simply can’t walk any faster and therefore overtake me, perhaps I should give him the chance to do so and take out my glasses and pause and look in a shop window, but then I might stop hearing them, and what saves me is the fact that I can still hear those footsteps; and I’m still here in my trench with my bayonet fixed, the bayonet I will soon have to use if I don’t want to be run through by that of my enemy: but not yet, not yet, and as long as it is not yet, the trench hides and protects me, even though we’re in open country and I can feel the cold air on my ears not quite covered by my helmet; and that knife that approaches me in someone else’s hand has still not reached its destination and I’m still sitting at my table and nothing has yet been torn or pierced, and, contrary to appearances, I will still take another sip of beer, and another and another; since that tree has not yet fallen and won’t fall even though it’s been snapped in two and is falling, it won’t fall on me, its branches won’t slice off my head, it’s not possible, I’m just a visitor to this city, I simply happened to be walking along this avenue, I might so easily not have done so; and I can still see the world from on high, from my Supermarine Spitfire, and I still have no sense of descent and weight and vertigo, of falling and gravity and mass which I will have when the Messerschmitt at my back, who has me in his sights, opens fire on me and hits home: but not yet, not yet, and as long as it is not yet, I can go on thinking about the battle and looking at the landscape and making plans for the future; and I, poor Marta, can still see the glare from the television that continues to broadcast and the warmth of this man who has lain down beside me again and keeps me company. As long as he is by my side, I won’t die: let him stay here and do nothing, I don’t want him to talk or to phone anyone, I don’t want anything to change, just let him warm me a little and hold me, I need to be still in order not to die, if each second is identical to the previous second, it makes no sense that I should be the one to change, that the lights should still be lit here and in the street and that the television should still be broadcasting – an old Fred MacMurray film – while I lie dying. I can’t cease to exist while everything and everyone remains here and alive and while, on the screen, another story follows its course. It doesn’t make sense that my skirts should remain alive on that chair if I’m not going to put them on again, or that my books should continue to breathe on the shelves if I’m not going to look at them any more, my earrings and necklaces and rings waiting in their box for their turn which will never come; the new toothbrush that I bought just this afternoon will have to be thrown away because I’ve already used it now, and all the little objects that one collects throughout one’s life will be thrown away one by one or perhaps shared out, and there are so many of them, it’s unbelievable how many things each of us owns, how much stuff we accumulate in our homes, that’s why no one ever makes an inventory of their possessions, not unless they’re going to make a will, that is, not unless they’re already contemplating those objects’ imminent neglect and redundancy. I haven’t made a will, I haven’t got much to leave and I’ve never given much thought to death, which it seems does come and it comes in a single moment that upends and touches everything, what was useful and formed part of someone’s history becomes, in that one moment, useless and devoid of history, from now on, nobody will know why or how or when that picture or that dress was bought or who gave me that brooch, where and from whom that bag or that scarf came, what journey or what absence brought it, if it was a reward for waiting or a message from some new conquest or intended to ease a guilty conscience; everything that had meaning and history loses it in a single moment and my belongings lie there inert, suddenly incapable of revealing their past and their origins; and someone will make a pile of them and, before bundling them up or perhaps putting them in plastic bags, my sisters or my women friends might decide to keep something as a souvenir or a spoil, or to hang on to a particular brooch so that my son can give it to some woman when he’s grown up, a woman who has probably not even been born yet. And there’ll be other things that no one will want because they are only of use to me: my tweezers, or my opened bottle of cologne, my underwear and my dressing gown and my sponge, my shoes and the wicker chairs that Eduardo hates, my lotions and medicines, my sunglasses, my notebooks and index cards and my cuttings and all the books that only I read, my collection of shells and my old records, the dol
l I’ve kept since I was a child, my toy lion, they might even have to pay someone to take them away, there are no longer eager, obliging rag-and-bone men as there were in my childhood, they wouldn’t turn their nose up at anything and would drive through the streets holding up the traffic, car drivers then were still prepared to slow down for their mule-drawn carts, it seems incredible that I should have seen that, not so very long ago, I’m still young and it wasn’t that long ago, the carts that grew to impossible heights as they picked things up and loaded them on until the carts were as tall as one of those open-topped double deckers you see in London, except that here the buses were blue and drove on the right; and as the pile of things grew higher, the swaying of the cart drawn by a single, weary mule became more pronounced – a rocking motion – and it seemed that all that plundered detritus – defunct fridges and cardboard boxes and crates, a rolled-up bedside rug and a sagging, broken-down chair – was constantly on the point of toppling over, unseating the gypsy girl who invariably crowned the pile, acting like a counterbalance, or as if she were an emblem or Our Lady of rag-and-bone men, a rather grubby girl, often blonde, sitting with her back to the load, with her legs dangling over the edge of the cart, and from her perch or peak, she would look back at the world and at us in our school uniforms as we overtook her, and we, in turn, clutching our files and chewing our gum, watched her from the top deck of the buses that took us to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. We regarded each other with mutual envy, the adventurous life and the life of timetables, the outdoor life and the easy life, and I always wondered how she managed to avoid the branches of the trees that stuck out over the pavements and knocked against the high windows as if in protest at our speed, as if wanting to reach through the windows and scratch us: she had no protection and was alone, perched up high, suspended in the air, but I imagine that her cart moved slowly enough to give her time to see them and to duck down, or to grasp them and hold them back with one grimy hand that protruded from the long sleeve of a torn, woollen, zip-up cardigan. It isn’t just the minuscule history of objects that will disappear in that single moment, it’s also everything I know and have learned, all my memories and everything I’ve ever seen – the double-decker bus and the rag-and-bone men’s carts and the gypsy girl and the thousand and one things that passed before my eyes and are of no importance to anyone else – my memories which, like so many of my belongings, are only of use to me and become useless if I die, what disappears is not only who I am but who I have been, not only me, poor Marta, but my whole memory, a ragged, discontinuous, never-completed, ever-changing scrap of fabric, but, at the same time, woven with such patience and such extreme care, undulating and variable as my shot-silk skirts, fragile as my silk blouses that tear so easily, I haven’t worn those skirts for ages, I got tired of them, and it’s odd that this should all happen in a moment, why this moment and not another, why not the previous moment or the next one, why today, this month, this week, a Tuesday in January or a Sunday in September, unpleasant months and days about which one has no choice, what decides that what was in motion should just stop, without the intervention of one’s will, or perhaps one’s will does intervene by simply stepping aside, perhaps it suddenly grows tired and, by its withdrawal, brings our death, not wanting to want any more, not wanting anything, not even to get better, not even to leave behind the illness and the pain in which it finds shelter, for want of all the other things that illness and pain have driven out or perhaps usurped, because as long as they are there, you can still say not yet, not yet, and you can still go on thinking and you can still go on saying goodbye. Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again, nor will you see me. And goodbye ardour, goodbye memories.”

  I obeyed, I waited, I did nothing and I phoned no one, I just returned to my place on the bed, which was not really my place, though it was mine that night, I lay down by her side again and then, without turning round and without looking at me, she said: “Hold me, hold me, please, hold me,” meaning that she wanted me to put my arms around her, so I did, I put my arms around her from behind, my shirt was still unbuttoned and my chest came into contact with her hot, smooth skin, my arms went around her arms, covering them, four hands and four arms now in a double embrace, and that was clearly still not enough, while the film on TV proceeded soundlessly, in silence, oblivious to us, I thought that one day I would have to see it properly, in black and white. She had said “please”, our vocabulary is so deeply embedded in us that we never forget our manners, we never, for a moment, relinquish our language and our way of speaking, not even in time of desperation or in moments of anger, whatever happens, even when we are dying. I remained like that for a while, lying on her bed with my arms around her as I had not planned to and yet, at the same time, as I had known I would, it was what I had been waiting for from the moment I entered the apartment and from before then, ever since we arranged to meet and she asked or suggested that we should meet at her place. This was something else, though, a different, unexpected kind of embrace, and now I was certain of what until then I had not even allowed myself to think, or to know that I was thinking: I knew that this was not something that would pass and I thought that it might well be final, I knew that it was not due to regret or depression or fear and that it was imminent: I thought – she’s dying in my arms; I thought that and, suddenly, I had no hopes of ever leaving her, as if she had infected me with her desire for immobility and stillness, or perhaps with her desire for death, not yet, not yet, but then again, I can’t take any more, I can’t take it. And it may well be that she couldn’t take it any more, that she couldn’t stand it, because a few minutes later – one, two, three or four – I heard her say something else, she said: “Oh God, the child” and she made a sudden, slight movement, almost certainly imperceptible to anyone watching us, but I noticed it because I was so close to her, it was like an impulse from her brain that her body only registered as the faintest flicker, a cold, fleeting reflex, as if it were the tremor, not entirely physical, that you experience in dreams when you think you’re falling, falling over a precipice or plummeting earthwards, your leg kicks out as it misses its footing and tries to halt the feeling of descent and weight and vertigo – a lift hurtling downwards – of falling and gravity and mass – a plane crashing, a body leaping from a bridge into the river – as if, just at that moment, Marta had felt an impulse to get up and go and find the boy, but had only managed it in her thoughts, in that tremor. And after another minute – and five; or six – I noticed that she was lying very still, even though she was already still, that is, she lay even stiller and I noticed the change in her temperature and I no longer felt the tension in her body, pressed against me, as if she were pushing back hard, as if she wanted to find refuge inside my body, to flee from what her own body was suffering: an inhuman transformation, an unknown state of mind (the mystery): she was pressing her back against my chest and her bottom against my belly and the back of her thighs against the front of mine, the bloody, muddy back of her neck against my throat and her left cheek against my right cheek, jaw against jaw, and my temples, her temples, my poor temples and her poor temples, her arms beneath mine as if one embrace were not enough, and even the soles of her bare feet against my shoes, resting on them, she laddered her stockings on my shoelaces – her dark stockings that came to mid-thigh and which I had not removed because I liked that old-fashioned image – all her energies thrown back and against me, invading me, we were glued together like Siamese twins who had been born joined the whole length of our bodies, so that we would never see each other except out of the corner of one eye, she with her back to me, pushing, pushing, almost crushing me, until all that stopped and she lay still or stiller, there was no pressure of any kind, not even that of leaning against me, and instead I felt the sweat on my back, as if a pair of supernatural hands had embraced me from in front while I was embracing her, and had rested on my shirt leaving yellowish, watery marks on it, leaving the cloth stuck to my skin. I kn
ew at once that she had died, but I spoke to her and I said: “Marta,” and I said her name again, adding: “Can you hear me?” and then I said to myself: “She’s dead,” I said, “this woman has died and I’m here and I saw it and I could do nothing to stop it, and now it’s too late to phone anyone, too late for anyone to share what I saw.” And although I said that to myself and I knew it to be true, I felt in no hurry to move away or to withdraw the embrace that she had requested, because I found it or, rather, the contact with her recumbent, averted, half-naked body pleasant and the mere fact that she had died did not instantly change that: she was still there, her dead body identical to her living body, only more peaceful, quieter and perhaps softer, no longer tormented, but in repose, and I could see again out of the corner of my eye her long lashes and her half-open mouth that were still the same, identical, her tangled eyelashes and her infinite mouth that had chatted and eaten and drunk, and smiled and laughed and smoked, that had kissed me and was still kissable. For how long? “We are both still here, in the same position and occupying the same space, I can still feel her; nothing has changed and yet everything has changed, I know that and I cannot grasp it. I don’t know why I am alive and she is dead, I don’t know what either of those words means any more. I no longer have any clear understanding of those two terms.” And only after some seconds – or possibly minutes, one, two, or three – I carefully removed myself from her, as if I did not want to wake her or as if I might hurt her by moving away, and had I spoken to someone – someone who would have been a witness there with me – I would have done so in a low voice or in a conspiratorial whisper, born of the respect that the mystery always imposes on us if, that is, there is no grief or tears, because if there is, there is no silence, or else it comes only later. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword: despair and die.”