Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (23 page)

But Deán did not succumb to temptation then either, he said nothing about that, but remained silent or briefly resumed his inaudible mumbling, as if he were counting up to twenty this time, and then he replied in his calm, rusty voice, or perhaps with the infinite patience we owe to those whom our dead have loved: “Look, Juan, you’ve got it into your head that I’m to blame for what happened. Fine, maybe I am, probably I am partly to blame and anyway there’s no way I could convince you otherwise. I can show you my plane ticket and my receipts from the hotel and from restaurants and from the things I bought in London, but if you prefer to believe that I wasn’t even there and you find that useful, fine, believe it, it’s net going to change anything, except that you’ll have even less respect for me than ever, it doesn’t matter, we probably won’t see much of each other from now on, there won’t be much reason to.
I
don’t matter. I have no idea where Marta put the bit of paper with my address and telephone number on it, perhaps she put it in her handbag and then lost it in the street, perhaps it blew out of the open window and the streetcleaners swept it up, I don’t know. All I know is that I left it with her, but I can’t prove it and there’s no reason why you should believe me, and it’s true that I did forget to leave it with my friend Ferrán. You’re right about one thing though: I won’t forget those hours you talked about. There are certain things that we should be told about immediately so that we do not, for a single second, walk about the world believing something that is utterly mistaken, when the world has utterly changed because of them. It is simply unacceptable to think that everything is carrying on as it was, when, in fact, everything is different, turned upside down, and it’s true that, afterwards, the time we spent in error becomes unbearable to us. How stupid I was, we think, and yet we shouldn’t find
that so very painful. It’s so easy to live in a state of delusion, or to be deceived, indeed, it’s our natural condition: no one is free of it and it certainly doesn’t mean that one is stupid, we should not struggle so hard against it nor should we let it embitter us. And yet, when we do learn the truth, we find it unbearable. The worst thing, what we find hardest, is that the time during which we believed what was not, in fact, true becomes something strange, floating and fictitious, a kind of enchantment or dream that must be suppressed in our memories; suddenly, it’s as if we had not really lived that period of time, as if we had to re-tell the story or re-read a book, and then we think that we would have behaved otherwise or that we would have used the time differently, the time which now passes into a kind of limbo. That can be a source of despair. Besides, sometimes that time doesn’t pass into limbo, but into hell.” (“It’s rather like when we used to go to the cinema as children, to see a double bill with continuous showings,” I thought, “and we’d go into the darkness and start watching a film that was already halfway through and we’d watch it to the end trying to deduce what had happened before, what had brought those characters to the terrible situation in which they found themselves, what offences they had committed that they should end up as enemies, hating each other; then another film would come on and, only afterwards, when the first film was shown again and we saw the beginning that we had missed, did we understand that what we had imagined had no foundation and bore no relation to the missing half. Then we had to erase from our minds not only what we had imagined, but also what we had seen with our own eyes according to our guesswork, a non-existent film or, rather, a distorted version of it. They don’t have cinemas like that any more, but the same thing often happens when we switch on the television at random, except that the beginning doesn’t get shown again and we are left with our partial vision based on surmise and imagination, although we do see the outcome, what would Only You have made of the story of Poins and Falstaff and the Lancastrian Henries, the King and the Prince, what was the strange interpretation or story he came up with that so troubled him during his lonely night of insomnia. I, on the other hand, didn’t see the beginning or the end of the film starring Fred
MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, nor did I hear what they were saying, during that wakeful night, I only saw their words in ghostly subtitles and I paid them no attention, I had to attend to my own story that had only just begun.”) Deán breathed deeply as if to catch his breath or, rather, as if to regulate it again after the almost vehement speech which he had been drawn into after his initial calm, as if his thoughts had served as an antidote to his rage, or a substitute. “So you’re right to think that that day will keep coming back to me, you need have no worries on that score,” he said, “it already does.”

Téllez was smoking his pipe in silence and now he held his son-in-law’s gaze, but Deán could not sustain it once he had stopped speaking: he glanced to one side, his Asiatic eyes searching for the head waiter to ask for the bill – he made the customary gesture of writing in the air – as if he wanted to break up the party or at least pass on to another subject. “He must be biting his tongue,” I thought, “perhaps he’s hoping he can be on his own with Luisa later and unburden himself, since she knows the truth.” Luisa had completely changed her attitude, she seemed remorseful, she didn’t interrupt now or try to make Deán come to a decision, a few more days wouldn’t hurt. It seemed as if Deán’s words had had an effect on Téllez too, he was smoking his pipe meditatively. But his obsession was greater than his understanding: in fact, he was only waiting for the effect of doubt and consideration and, possibly, surprise to dissipate slightly, in order to return to his earlier posture of accusation and resentment, this time even more acerbically. When he saw that Deán was upset and had looked away, he took courage and said: “What matters is that you weren’t there. What matters is that she couldn’t call you, although she probably decided not to bother. She might have met with your frivolity and your indifference. You might have told her that she was being alarmist or was exaggerating and you wouldn’t have lifted a finger, not even to tell us, or a doctor. Who knows? But she knew you. What we do know is that you can’t be relied on,” and he again used the familial plural that excluded the widower, his son-in-law, “There will be little reason to see each other now, that much is true. When my turn comes, you might be in London or in Tampico or in the
Peloponnese, I know that you won’t be anywhere near me. And, please, don’t even consider paying for lunch, they know me here.”

Deán put away the wallet he had got out after gesturing to the waiter. I imagine he’d had enough, sometimes the only way of keeping one’s patience is to withdraw, to stop listening. His sombre expression made the incisions in his woody skin seem deeper, his face would be set like that when he was older. His energetic chin seemed ready for flight, his beer-coloured eyes had a devilish glint in them, the effect, perhaps, of the greenish light from the storm: his eyes were very open, out of dryness or grief. He stood up then, retrieved his raincoat from where he had left it, in the rack above, put it on and plunged his hands into his pockets.

“Since I’m not going to be paying the bill, I see no reason why I should wait. I’m in a hurry. Goodbye, Juan. We’ll talk later, Luisa. Goodbye.”

He had not drunk his coffee, the last phrase had been addressed to me (just barely sufficient not to be considered rude, and I said: “See you”), he kissed Luisa on the cheek (she said: “I’ll see you later on at home” as if that home belonged to both of them now, Téllez said nothing). Deán got as far as the door and said goodbye to the head waiter who had accompanied him there and opened it for him, any relation of Juan Téllez was worth a bit of trouble. Deán turned up the collar of his raincoat before going out into the rain, the people standing there blocked his path, he was obliged to make his way round them. I thought that, had I wanted to, I would not have been able to follow him after lunch, if I decided to follow anyone, I had no alternative but to follow Luisa when we left the restaurant, I didn’t have much to do, I had set aside that week to work with Téllez on the speech for Only the Lonely, the scripts for a television series that I was working on could wait, they probably wouldn’t make the series anyway, but they would still pay me. Téllez had drunk his coffee, cold by now no doubt: he downed it in one, as if it were a shot of vodka. Then he remembered my presence again and offered me a sort of indirect apology: “My daughter was unable to ask for help,” he explained, as if I might not have understood. “The doctors say she could not have been saved. But it breaks my heart to think of her alone in her bed,
dying unconsoled and worried about the boy, who would be left on his own with no one to look after him.” All his malice had vanished along with Deán, as if it were something that had been forced on him. “I just can’t bear it,” he added.

“The odd thing is, Papa (as I’ve told him several times),” said Luisa (this was the first time she had addressed me, she was explaining the situation to me in parenthesis), “she didn’t warn us either. She probably couldn’t call Eduardo in London, but she could have called us, and she didn’t.” It seemed to me that with those words she was trying to throw a lifeline to Deán without betraying her dead sister, doubtless she felt sorry for him. She remained thoughtful and added: “Perhaps she didn’t think she was going to die, perhaps she thought it would simply pass off and she didn’t want to bother anyone so late. Perhaps she didn’t realize, and then it wouldn’t have been so frightening for her. What would be frightening would be to think it and to know it.”

I felt like saying to Téllez: “Believe me, she wasn’t alone in bed, I know. She didn’t die alone, it wasn’t so very horrible because it took her a long time to realize that she was dying and, when she did, she said to me ‘Hold me, hold me, please, hold me’ and I held her, I put my arms around her from behind because she didn’t want me to do anything else, she said ‘Don’t do anything yet, just wait,’ she didn’t want me to move her an inch or to phone anyone. I held her in my arms and I embraced her and at least she was lying against me when she died, close to me, she died protected, supported. Don’t torment yourself so much.”

But I couldn’t say it. Instead I said: “I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have come to lunch with you.”

“No, it’s not your fault,” replied Téllez. “We’re the ones who invited you. The fact is I didn’t have any intention of talking about all that again.” And leaving his smoking pipe in the ashtray, he put his hands to his head. “My poor child,” he said, as if he were Falstaff, and exhaled the smoke from his pipe.

The storm had suddenly stopped. The restaurant doorway was clear.

W
HAT A DISGRACE
it is to me to remember your name, though I may not know your face tomorrow, names don’t change and, when they become fixed in the memory, they are fixed for ever, and nothing and no one can remove them. My head is full of names whose faces I have forgotten or which are merely a blur floating in a landscape, a street, a house, a particular time or screen. Or else, they are the names of places and establishments that seemed to us eternal because they were there when we arrived or were born, a fruiterer’s called La Flor Sevillana, all those cinemas, the Príncipe Alfonso, the María Cristina, the Voy and Cinema X, the Buchholz bookshop near Plaza de la Cibeles or the grocer’s shop that has kept its old sign: Viena Capellanes, the Patisserie Hermanas Liso and the Hotel Atlantic and all those other hotels, the Hotel Londres y de Inglaterra, Oriel, San Trovaso, le Zattere and Halifax, countless names of streets and shops and towns – Calatanazor, Sils, Colmar, Melk and Medina del Campo – the names of the infinite number of actors and actresses seen since childhood and that echo for ever in our memory without our being able to recall their features: Eduardo Ciannelli, Diane Varsi and Bella Darvi, Ivan Triesault and Leora Dana, Guy Delorme, Frank De Kova and Brigid Bazlen, and through them, we can refresh our memory if we happen to see them again on screen, where, years and years ago, we first saw them in those unfading films. Places, on the other hand, have changed, shops have disappeared or have been replaced by banks, and sometimes those that remain are only the slow shadow of their former selves, we look at them from the street, not daring to go in, and, through the window, we vaguely recognize the ancient employees or owners who, when we were children, used to give us sweets and joke with us, we suddenly see them bent and diminished and ruined, with
a life behind them, a life we did not witness, standing at their wooden or marble counters, they make the same gestures only less confidently, more ponderously: they get confused when giving change, their fingers fumble when wrapping things up. I can barely recall the face of a young, blonde maid who I tickled after cunningly pulling her down on to the bed when I was nine or ten and my parents were out, but her name returns instantly: Cati. I can scarcely remember the expression on the face of the cripple who used to get about in a little wheeled cart that he operated with a handle, selling tobacco and chewing-gum and matches at the place where we spent our summer holidays – half a man, his expression was proud and innocent – but his name is still there, crystal-clear, Eliseo. The childish faces, which will no longer be childish, of my more nondescript classmates, or the ones I was never particularly friendly with, are just dim shapes to me, but I can summon up their surnames as if I were hearing Señorita Bernis calling the register: Lambea, Lantero, Reyna, Tatay, Teulón, Vidal. I have no visual memory at all of another, less constant group of boys with whom I was always getting into fights in the summer in the park, but I still remember their long, sonorous surnames: Casalduero, Mazariegos, Villuendas and Ochotorena. I don’t know what the barber looked like who used to go to my grandfather the doctor’s house to give him a shave and to trim his thinning hair, but I know he was called Remigio, I know that for certain. That fierce, bald shoeshine with the huge moustache and sideburns, sitting, watchful, on his box, all dressed in black and with a red scarf round his neck, I know what he was called: Manolete. I don’t recall the name of that small man with the neat little moustache, the owner of a stationer’s, but I do remember his nickname: my brothers and I used to call him “Willem Dekker” after the unctuous, cowardly character whom he resembled, a character in the film
The House of the Seven Hawks
, we used to send him threatening messages signed “The Black Hand” on bits of paper scorched with a magnifying glass: “Your days are numbered, Willem Dekker.” I failed maths one year and the teacher who taught me that summer, of whom I can now see only his striking cranium with the scar he got in the war, his hair carefully combed over it with water from the river, but I
can remember his name perfectly, Victorino, old-fashioned names that no longer exist or are no longer used, names from another age. I can see the face of that other tall, patient, smiling man who used to sell records, the name conjures it up for me: Vicen Vila, which was also the name of his shop. And I can barely recall the ancient porter who every morning for years used to greet me from his lodge with a cheery wave of his hand: but his name was Tom, I remember that.