Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (20 page)

He said this with his Tartar eyes the colour of beer fixed on Luisa, whose previous words had given rise to his, or had at least meant that his did not seem extemporaneous and merely the
product of meditations unrelated to the general conversation which, until that moment, had flowed in a desultory, stop-start fashion with the occasional brief pause, influenced perhaps by my awkward presence and perhaps, too, by the domestic matter that Luisa and her father had begun discussing as soon as we sat down, a matter of a purchase to be made. Or maybe it was a way of trying to avoid or rather postpone what the three of them would doubtless experience as an incessant beating in their thoughts, especially when they got together, and which Deán had no longer been able to avoid mentioning, he had waited until we had ordered and had eaten our first course, and until they had brought us the second (he was eating sole and drinking wine). Up until then, they had not paid me much attention, that is, they had not treated me like a new person in whom it would only be polite to take a minimal interest, not like an equal, but like an employee who has simply joined his paymasters for lunch, because otherwise he would have no lunch, except that they were not going to pay me anything, nor was Téllez, and I would have been perfectly capable of having lunch alone without feeling that it showed any lack of consideration on their part. Perhaps, too, they were overly self-absorbed and too accustomed to talking about their own affairs (it happens in all families) to vary the programme and the tone and the usual erratic agenda of their meetings, perhaps more frequent now than they had ever been, the death of someone temporarily brings together those who are left behind. Luisa had asked her father how much money he wanted to spend on the present he would give – but which she would buy for him that afternoon – to the daughter-in-law and sister-in-law María (María Fernández Vera, I remember all the names), whose birthday it was the following day, that was the kind of conversation they were having, and it was then that Deán said what I have said he said, with his understandable confusion of tenses, first he spoke as if Marta were still alive (“it’s Marta’s birthday”), then he corrected himself when he mentioned how old she would have been, the dead abandon their age and thus end up being the youngest if we who go on living and remembering them last a long time, so far only a month longer in this case. Luisa must have had a similar thought, because she was the one who answered first after a silence that
acknowledged the pointlessness of avoiding talking about what three people are simultaneously thinking, three people who are in fact four and that fourth a haunted person, although the other three knew nothing about this for they too had perhaps been under a spell ever since they had watched the symbolic earth falling. Téllez left his fish knife and fork crossed on his plate (grilled fish which he had eaten, up until then, with a good appetite); Luisa raised her napkin to her lips and held it there for a few seconds as if she were using it to hold back her tears – rather than anything the mouth itself might emit, vomit or words – before replacing it on her lap, the napkin stained now with lipstick and saliva and the juice from her rare steak (definitely not Irish); first spearing a roast potato with his fork, Deán himself raised his right hand to his forehead and rested his right elbow ostentatiously on the table, as if he had suddenly forgotten all his manners. And when Luisa finally replaced her napkin on her lap – I had a glimpse of her thighs across the table while they remained uncovered, though her skirt was not as short as her sister’s had been, the white napkin covering her open mouth – what she said was this, echoing my own thoughts: “I never imagined that one day I would be older than Marta, that’s one of the things that you know to be impossible from childhood on, even though you might want it sometimes, when your older sister takes your toy away from you or you have a fight with her, and you always lose because you’re the youngest. And yet it is possible. In two years’ time, I’ll already be older than her, if I live that long. It seems incredible.”

She was still holding her knife in her right hand, a sharp serrated knife with a wooden handle, the sort they sometimes give you in restaurants so that you can cut your meat more easily. She had placed her fork on the plate in order to take up her napkin, and hadn’t picked it up again. She looked like a frightened woman ready to defend herself, wielding that knife with its cutting, serrated edge.

“Don’t talk such nonsense, my dear, and touch wood,” Téllez said apprehensively. “ ‘If I live that long, if I live that long’, honestly. Haven’t we suffered enough misfortunes?” And turning to me, he added as an explanation (he may have been superstitious, but
he was the one who was most conscious of my presence), also hovering between tenses: “Marta is my eldest daughter, Eduardo’s wife. She died very suddenly, just over a month ago.” Despite everything, he believed in luck and that things do not necessarily repeat themselves.

“I thought I heard something of the sort at the Palace,” I replied, I was the only one who still had both knife and fork in my hands, although, by then, I wasn’t eating either. “I’m so terribly sorry.” And in my mouth that cliché was only too exact and too right (“how that death gladdens me, saddens me, pleases me”). Then I fell silent, I didn’t even ask what she had died of (it had never mattered much to me, and it mattered less all the time), I wanted to say only enough to allow them to go on talking as they had done until then, as if I wasn’t there, as if I were no one, although I had been duly introduced to them, and by my real name which never appears anywhere.

Deán finished the white wine in his glass and refilled it, still with his elbow leaning on the table and his forehead resting on his hand. But it was Luisa who spoke again, and she said (not without first touching wood as her father had recommended: I noticed her mechanically touch the table beneath the cloth like someone linking a word to an action, it was a normal gesture, customary in her, she was superstitious too, perhaps it was her Italian inheritance, although, in Italy, people tend to touch iron).

“I still remember the parties we went to as adolescents, where I always had a terrible time and all because of her: she would forbid me to like any boy until she had chosen one. ‘Just wait until I’ve decided,’ she would say to me as we stood outside the front door of the house where the party was being held. ‘You just wait, all right? Otherwise, we don’t go in,’ she used to say, and only when I’d said: ‘Yes, all right, but be quick’ would we ring the doorbell. Because she was the eldest she had a kind of right to first refusal, and I let her get away with it. Then, during the party, she would take her time deciding, she would dance with a few boys before telling me which one she had chosen, and I would be on tenterhooks, afraid that what nearly always happened would happen, that she would end up choosing the boy I most liked. I’m convinced that she often tried to guess who I liked just so that she
could choose him and then, when I protested, she would accuse me of being a copycat, of always choosing the boys that she liked best. And then she would dance with him all evening. I tried hard to hide my preferences, but it was no good, she knew me too well, she always homed in on the right one, and so, when we were older, we stopped going to the same parties. That’s the way she was,” said Luisa, a distant look in her eyes, the eyes of someone plunging effortlessly into her memory, “although the fact is she would have had first choice anyway, she had a bigger bust than me then and had much more success with boys than I had.”

I couldn’t help glancing swiftly at Luisa Téllez’s bust, calculating its size. Perhaps her sister Marta’s bra had not been a size too small, perhaps her breasts had always been on the large side. “How can I possibly be ogling Luisa Téllez’s bust and thighs?” I thought. I know it’s normal behaviour for me and for many other men, regardless of the circumstances, however sad or even tragic, we can’t resist looking at something that is visually attractive, not without making a superhuman effort, but just then it made me feel like a complete scoundrel – in adolescent-speak: a “perv” – yet, nevertheless, I continued visually to measure her bust – surreptitiously, it was a matter of moments – with such veiled, hypocritical eyes that I immediately lowered them to my plate and ate another mouthful, the first at the table to eat since Deán’s mention of the approaching birthday of someone who would not in fact be there to celebrate. She hadn’t had the chance to decide whether or not she liked me first, Luisa hadn’t seen me before, her voice did not strike me as being the same one which, for all eternity, would say on my answering machine, unless I erased the tape: “… so, make sure you call me tomorrow and tell me all about it. The guy sounds rather nice, but you can never tell. Frankly, I don’t know how you’ve got the nerve. Anyway, talk to you later, and good luck.” I hadn’t really wanted to think about it, but perhaps I was “the guy”, that message must have been the penultimate or rather the last (the penultimate would have been erased by the super-imposition of the electric voice that I had heard directly and which Marta never heard) before I rang the doorbell and came through the door; it’s possible that having finally decided that she was going to see me, Marta had had time to talk to a friend or to her
sister about it: “I’ve got a date with a guy I hardly know, and he’s coming over for supper; Eduardo’s in London, I don’t quite know what will happen, but you never know” with the same excitement she used to feel as an adolescent, before a party (“Just wait until I’ve decided” and only then ring the doorbell), perhaps Marta had, in turn, left that message on her friend’s or sister’s answering machine, a message that had, in turn, been replied to while she dashed out, at the last minute, to a nearby supermarket, leaving the child alone for a moment as I had left him alone most of one night, in order to buy the Haagen-Dazs ice cream for dessert: perhaps, for example. She might not have said “the guy” but my name, even my surname, she might have managed to speak to the friend or the sister without any intervening answering machine and to have talked about me (but then they would have known my name, and Luisa clearly didn’t recognize it when her father introduced us, perhaps she wouldn’t even remember it now), to have speculated and commented, I met him at a cocktail party and we arranged to meet for coffee the next day, he knows all kinds of people, he’s divorced, he writes scripts and things, that’s what I usually say I do and, at first, I don’t say anything about my role as ghostwriter, although I don’t conceal the fact if the subject happens to come up, I know that people find my stories about it amusing. That night, too, Marta had hesitated or exercised her right of first refusal, she had called Vicente but he hadn’t been in, she had certainly called him and possibly someone else, I had probably been an ill-fated second best, and that was the only reason she had died before my eyes and in my arms. I’ve already said that I don’t care about the medical causes of her death, nor was I interested in reconstructing what had happened the day before our meeting nor the process that had brought us together, nor to find out about her history or that of her family or that of her jaded marriage, nor to relive vicariously what had been interrupted or, rather, cancelled, I’m a passive kind of person who almost never seeks or wants anything or isn’t aware that he’s seeking or wanting anything, the sort of person things just happen to, you don’t even have to move for everything to become horribly complicated, for things to happen, for there to be anger and litigation, you only have to breathe in this world, the slightest
in-breath or out-breath like the minimal swaying inevitable in all light objects hanging by a thread, our veiled and neutral gaze like the inert oscillation of toy aeroplanes suspended from a ceiling, and that always end up going into battle because of that minimal tremor or pulsation. And if, now, I was taking a few steps, it was with no very definite aim, I didn’t even want to decipher that tape which I had listened to so often, because it simply wasn’t possible: that message could have been for Deán and not for Marta, perhaps “the guy” was someone with whom Deán was going to do a deal that required great daring and perhaps she hadn’t spoken about me to anyone and no one in the world knew that I had been chosen for that night, not to go to bed with her, but to accompany her in her death. What I was seeking perhaps – this occurred to me while I was chewing the mouthful of food and dragging my hypocritical gaze away from Luisa’s bust – what I wanted perhaps was something absurd but understandable, perhaps I wanted to convert my unjustified presence that night into something more deserved and formal, even though it was after the fact and I was, therefore, playing dirty, a more plausible way of altering the facts than any other, seeing one’s past life as if it were a plot or a mere piece of circumstantial evidence, 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: as if I thought that it wasn’t right or fair that she should have said her goodbyes beside someone she barely knew, who was there merely in order not to let the opportunity of a romantic evening slip by, and that it would be fairer if that no one eventually ended up becoming
someone
to those who were close to her, if, in virtue of her death and what it brought in its train, I ended up being indispensable or important or even useful in the life of one of her loved ones, or else saved them from something. And yet I had had an initial opportunity at the time, I thought, had I stayed in the apartment in Conde de la Cimera, I could have guaranteed the safety of Eugenio who was left there alone with a corpse, but I had not done so. I could also have phoned again, I could have persisted with the melodious night porter at the Wilbraham Hotel in London and warned Mr Ballesteros, I could have let him know what she would have wanted him to know the moment she
realized that she was dying, we can’t bear those close to us not to know about our troubles, there are four or five people in everybody’s life who must be informed immediately of whatever is happening to us, we can’t bear them to think us still alive when we are dead. I had not done that either, to protect myself from possible anger and to protect her, who had said to me at the start: “You’re mad, how can I possibly phone him, he’d kill me,” but it doesn’t make much sense protecting a dead woman from being killed when she’s already dead and, besides, I hadn’t even managed to save her reputation, they knew that I had been there that night, that is, that a man had been there. I had not done so. Filling the father’s empty days for a while wasn’t much of a contribution, but it was all I had managed up until then.