Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me Page 8

  I MET EDUARDO DEÁN a month later, although I had seen him before, not only with a moustache and in a photo and in his own home, but also without a moustache and in the flesh and at the cemetery, and not quite so young. A memorable face. We did not meet entirely by chance, chance had nothing to do with my presence at the funeral, which I had read about in the newspapers. For two days I watched for the dawn editions, leafing through magazines as I waited for the bundles of newspapers to arrive just after midnight, and I studied the way the newsagent sliced through the flat plastic ribbon securing them, and I was the first to take a paper from the pile and pay for it at the counter, before hurrying back to the café next to the kiosk and, having ordered a Coca-Cola, turning nervously to the page where you find the births and the weather reports, as well as the obituaries, birthdays, minor prizes, ridiculous honorary-degree ceremonies (no one can resist a mortar-board with a tassel), the lottery results, the chess problem, the crossword and even a complicated anagrammatic puzzle called the “revoltigrama”, and, most important of all, the section entitled “Deaths in Madrid”, an alphabetical list giving the full name (the person’s given name and their two surnames) to which is appended a number, the person’s age at the moment when they ceased to have an age, the age at which the deceased came to a halt, fixed in tiny print, for most people it is their first, insignificant and only appearance in the press, as if, apart from a random age and a name, they had never been anything. The list is fairly long – about sixty people – I’d never it read before and it’s quite consoling to see that, generally speaking, most of those listed were quite advanced in years, people tend to live to a good age; 74, 90, 71, 60, 62, 80, 65, 81, 80, 84, 66, 91, 92, 90, almost all the nonagenarians are women, and fewer women than men die each day, or so it seems from the records. The first day only three of the deceased were under forty-five, they were all men and one of them was a foreigner called Reinhold Müller, 40, what could have happened to him? Marta didn’t appear, so presumably she hadn’t yet been found, or else the news hadn’t arrived in time, newspapers go to press much earlier than people believe. By then, about twenty hours had elapsed since I had left the apartment. If someone had gone there in the morning, there would have been plenty of time to call a doctor, for the latter to fill out a death certificate, for someone to tell Deán in London, even for him to fly back, in times of misfortune, in cases of emergency, everything is made easy, if someone stands imploringly at an airline counter and says: “My wife has died, my son is all alone,” the company will instantly find him a seat on the next flight out, in order not to be dubbed “hardhearted”. But none of that had apparently happened, because Marta Téllez’s name, along with her second surname which I did not know, and her age when she died – 33, 35, 32, 34? – did not appear in the list. Perhaps the shock, perhaps the sadness of it all had meant that no one had thought to comply with the formalities. But people always call a doctor, so that he can certify and confirm what everyone thinks (so that he can provide verification with his warm, infallible doctor’s hand trained to recognize and identify death), to confirm what I both thought and knew when I lay at Marta’s back, holding her in my arms. What if I had been mistaken and she hadn’t died? I’m not a doctor. And what if she had merely lost consciousness and then recovered it in the morning and life had carried on as normal, her little boy packed off to nursery school and she back at her work, my night-time visit relegated to the world of mad escapades and bad dreams, everything tidied away and the sheets changed, even though I had never actually slipped between them? It’s curious how easily one’s thoughts are drawn to the improbable, allowing themselves that momentary lapse, finding rest or relief in fantasy and superstition, blithely capable of denying the facts and turning back the clock, even if only for an instant. It’s curious how it all seems so like a dream.

  It was nearly one o’clock in the cafeteria-cum-supermarket, the place was packed with people having supper and shopping, and in England it was still an hour earlier. I got up and went over to the telephone, luckily it was a card phone and I had a card on me, I took out the piece of paper with the number of the Wilbraham Hotel on it that I had kept in my wallet, and when I heard the porter’s voice (the same one, he was obviously on permanent night duty) I asked him for Señor Ballesteros. This time he didn’t hesitate, he said to me: “Just a moment please.”

  He didn’t ask if I knew the room number or anything, instead he added it himself, as if broadcasting his actions and his thoughts (“Ballesteros. Fifty-Two. Right …” he said, pronouncing the surname as if it had only one “1”), and I suddenly heard the extension ringing, which took me by surprise, I wasn’t prepared for that, nor, immediately afterwards, to hear a new voice saying: “Hello”. I couldn’t tell from that one word if the voice was Spanish or British (or, if it was Spanish, whether or not he had a good English accent), because I hung up as soon as I heard it. “Good God,” I thought, “the man’s still in England, he obviously doesn’t know anything yet, but anyone who had gone to the house would have done exactly what I did, they would have looked for and found Deán’s London address and phone number and he would, therefore, already have been informed. Presumably, then, he knows nothing about it, unless, that is, he’s taken it all with remarkable calm. If the child is in good hands, he may have decided to fly back tomorrow. No, he can’t possibly know, or perhaps he’s only just been told and there’s nothing he can do. Perhaps he’s still sitting in tears in his foreign hotel room and will be unable to sleep tonight.”

  “Excuse me, have you done?”

  I turned round and saw a man with very long teeth (so long that his mouth must have been permanently ajar) and well dressed, by conventional standards, in a camel coat: as is usual in these cases, he had a rather plebeian way of speaking. I removed my card and stood to one side, then I returned to my table, paid for my Coca-Cola and left; and that was when I returned to Conde de la Cimera in a taxi. It wasn’t a long visit, but rather longer than I had envisaged. I asked the taxi driver to wait and I got out thinking that it would only take a matter of seconds, I stood by the side of the car and looked up, but what I saw did nothing to allay my fears: the lights I had left on were still lit, although it was hard to remember if they were exactly the same ones or if there had been some change. I had only glanced briefly up at them from that position when I left, I hadn’t lingered, being then too shocked and fearful and tired; and if they were the same lights, it was very likely that no one had gone into that house all day and that the corpse was still there, undergoing its slow transformation, half-naked beneath the sheets, in the same position in which I had left it, or perhaps uncovered now, having been pulled about by an impatient, uncomprehending, desperate child (“I should have covered her face,” I thought, “but it wouldn’t have done any good”). And the child would still be there too, perhaps he had eaten everything I had left out for him and would be hungry again, no, for a small stomach I had left a fair amount of food, a mish-mash, a “revoltigrama”. I didn’t know what to do. I was standing there once more in my overcoat and my gloves, at my side sat a silent taxi driver who had decided to turn off the engine once he saw that my wait was going to be longer than planned. By then, more lights had gone on in the building, but my eyes were fixed on those of the apartment I knew, as if I were looking through a telescope. I felt more distressed than I had on the previous night, more than I had when I left there at dawn. I knew what had taken place and, at the same time, it seemed to me nonsensical and ridiculous that it should have taken place at all, nothing that happens has ever completely happened until you tell someone, until it is spoken about and known about, until then, it is still possible to convert those events into mere thought or memory – the slow journey towards unreality begun the very instant they occurred – and the consolation of uncertainty, which is itself also retrospective. I hadn’t said anything, perhaps the boy had. Everything was as normal in the street, a group of drunken students passed by, garrulous and hideously dressed, one of them b
umped against me with his shoulder, he didn’t apologize. I was still gazing up at the fifth floor of that fourteen-storey building, trying to make sense of the light visible through the blinds on the balcony doors, the balcony on to which the living room opened, the glass doors were apparently closed, but it was impossible to know from below if it really was closed, or just pushed to.

  “Why don’t you use the entry phone and call up and tell them to come down?”

  The taxi driver had assumed that I was there to pick somebody up and he was getting impatient, I had told him to keep the meter running, I wouldn’t be long.

  “No, it’s too late, people will be sleeping,” I said. “If no one comes down in the next five minutes, then they’re obviously not coming. We’ll just wait a little bit longer.”

  I knew that no one would come down, whoever the hypothetical subject of those sentences was, the taxi driver’s and mine. The subject of his sentence was doubtless female, the subject of mine genderless, purely fictitious, although he would imagine it to be a young girl or an adulteress, someone who is dependent on others and who can never be sure that they will be free to come down. Marta would not come down nor would the child. I didn’t have a very clear idea of where the rooms were (you rarely do from outside a building), but I imagined that Marta’s bedroom corresponded to the window to the right of the balcony from where I was standing and where a light was still lit just as I had left it, assuming it was as I had left it. Suddenly, the taxi driver turned on the engine and I looked round at him, he had noticed before I had that someone was coming out of the front door, which was a few feet away from me, otherwise he would not have been able to see; he had just taken it for granted that the young woman coming out was the person I was expecting. She wasn’t, although she was the same young woman with whom I had had an earlier late-night encounter, the one who could not be bothered to get out her key to open the door for me. I could get a better look at her now that I could see her from a distance and without a companion: she had brown hair and brown eyes, she was wearing a pearl necklace, high-heeled shoes, dark stockings, and she was walking gracefully along, despite the short, tight skirt visible beneath her leather coat which she wore unbuttoned, she was obviously in the habit of walking with her feet turned out, for she had a slightly centrifugal gait. She looked at the taxi, then she looked at me, she gave a slight nod of recognition, like a nod of agreement, then she crossed the street and – without removing the beige gloves, which did not match her coat – she took out of her handbag a key with which she opened the door of a parked car. I watched her throw her handbag on to the back seat and get in (she carried her bag in her hand as if it were a briefcase). As with most women drivers, there was a flash of leg as she got in and closed the door, then she wound down the window. The taxi driver switched off his engine again and automatically wound his window down too, in order to get a better look at the young woman. She turned on the ignition and, out of the corner of my eye, I watched her turning the steering wheel hard. I saw her stick her head out of the window to check that, as she drew away, she wasn’t going to hit the car in front; her view was obstructed, so I made a beckoning gesture with my hand, twice, as if to say: “It’s all right, you’re clear.” The car swung out and, as she passed me, the woman smiled and reciprocated with another gesture, halfway between goodbye and thank you. She was a pretty woman and not, apparently, in the least conceited, perhaps she wasn’t the one with the key to the apartment, but the man whom I had heard her tell to piss off. Perhaps she had gone up with him to his apartment after that argument in the doorway and had not left until twenty hours later, until that moment when she met me again in the same spot – as if I had not moved during the long hours of wasted saliva, wasted on words and kisses, and the further hours of pointless, laborious dreams – although this time I was outside the building and, to all appearances, waiting for someone, with a taxi at my orders. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing the same clothes or not, the night before I had only noticed her gloves.

  That was when I looked up again, first at the bedroom window, then at the balcony, then back again at the window, because behind the blinds of that window I saw the silhouetted figure of a woman taking off a jersey or a long-sleeved top or something, for at the moment I spotted her she was crossing her arms in order to grip the bottom edges of the jersey and pull it up over her head in a single movement – I caught a glimpse of her armpits – in such a way that she was left with only the inside-out sleeves on her arms or caught on her wrists. The silhouette remained there for a few seconds as if exhausted by the effort or by her day’s work – the desolate gesture of someone who can’t stop thinking and who gets undressed gradually and needs those pauses in order to ruminate or ponder between items of clothing – or as if she had looked out of the window and seen something or someone – perhaps me with my taxi behind me – only after emerging from the sweater that she had just taken off. Then she removed both sleeves from her wrists with a final tug, gave a half-turn and walked away, far enough off for me not to be able to see her any more, although I thought I could still make out her distorted shadow folding up the jersey, perhaps to change it for another cleaner, fresher one. Then she switched off the light and, assuming that was the bedroom I was familiar with, the light she had switched off must be the one on the bedside table which I had hesitated whether to leave on or not – I wanted to be able to see – and so it stayed on until after my departure. I wasn’t completely sure, but when I saw the figure, I felt relief as well as shock, because someone was in the apartment and that someone might be Marta, Marta still alive. It couldn’t be Marta, but again I allowed myself to think that, just for a moment. And if it wasn’t her, why was that woman in her bedroom, more than that, why was she getting changed or undressed there as if she were about to go to bed, and where was Marta, where was her body, perhaps moved into another room for the wake, or removed from the apartment altogether and taken to the morgue. And in her bedroom there was a friend, a sister-in-law, a sister, who had stayed behind so that the child would not have to spend another night alone until Deán came back the following day, how could Deán not have come back once he knew about her death? Although it would make more sense to have taken the child to sleep somewhere else, what would his aunts have told him, they would have asked him to be patient, they would have deceived him (“Mama’s gone on a journey, in a plane”). (And for ever after, the boy would view his miniature planes quite differently: for ever after, until he forgot.) Behind the balcony everything remained the same, and I was sure now that the light did belong to the apartment, to the living-cum-dining room where we had eaten supper and where the boy had watched his videos of Tintin and Haddock, only twenty-four hours ago according to the clocks. There was no point in my staying any longer.

  “So, shall we go?”

  I don’t know why I felt I had to explain to the taxi driver:

  “Yes, they won’t be coming down now, they’ve gone to bed.”

  “Out of luck, eh?” he said, in understanding tones. What did he know about what was or wasn’t lucky in this case?

  I went back home with my early edition of the newspaper, feeling not in the least bit sleepy. The previous night I had gone to bed as soon as I got back, overcome by the need for temporary oblivion, stronger than any past or present distress and stronger than my concern for the child. I had left the apartment and there was nothing more I could do (or I had decided to do nothing more when I left), I slept for eight solid hours, I don’t even remember dreaming, although my first thought when I woke up was simple and unequivocal: “The child,” you always spend more time thinking about the living than you do about the dead, even when we hardly know the former and the latter were our whole life until only a month ago or the day before yesterday or tonight (but Marta Téllez wasn’t my whole life, she might perhaps be Deán’s). Now, on the other hand, the relative tranquillity of believing that there was a female personage who would take charge of the flat both cleared my head and left me
incapable of thinking about anything else, or of distracting myself with books, television or videos, my backlog of work or my record player. Everything was in suspense but I didn’t know until when, or what had to happen before life could start again: I wanted to know, and I wanted to know soon, if they had found the body and if the child was safe, that was all, in theory, I felt no curiosity beyond that, then. And yet I foresaw that once I had found that out, I would still not be able to get back to my daily life and activities, as if the link established between Marta Téllez and myself would never break, or might take a while to do so. At the same time, I didn’t know in what way it might perpetuate itself, she would have nothing more to say, you can have no further contact with the dead. There is an English verb, “to haunt” and a French verb, “hanter” which are closely related and more or less untranslatable in Spanish, they both describe what ghosts do to the places and people they frequent or watch over or revisit; depending on the context, the first can also mean “to bewitch”, in the magical sense of the word, in the sense of “enchantment”, the etymology is uncertain, but it seems that both come from other verbs in Anglo-Saxon and Old French meaning “to dwell”, “to inhabit”, “to live in” permanently (dictionaries are as distracting as maps). Perhaps the link was merely that, a kind of enchantment or haunting, which, when you think about it, is just another name for the curse of memory, for the fact that events and people recur and reappear indefinitely and never entirely go away, they may never completely leave or abandon us, and, after a certain point, they live in or inhabit our minds, awake and asleep, they lodge there for lack of anywhere more comfortable, struggling against their own dissolution and wanting to find embodiment in the one thing left to them that can preserve some validity and contact, the repetition or infinite resonance of what they once did or of one particular event: infinite, but increasingly weary and tenuous. I had become the connecting thread.