Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (26 page)

“Don’t worry, we won’t be long. And I’ll drop you back on your corner or wherever you want, you won’t have to get a taxi. I imagine taxis don’t always want to pick you up.” It was a rather old-fashioned remark, potentially offensive if she wasn’t Celia. “I just fancy driving for a while without any traffic.”

“Fine, you’re in charge,” she said, “Tell me when you get tired, but don’t take too long or I’ll start feeling like a taxi-driver’s girlfriend being taken for a ride, only with the meter running.”

Her last words made me laugh a little the way Celia used to make me laugh once I’d got over my fit of enthusiasm or weakness and I merely found her amusing. It’s true, some young taxi drivers on Friday and Saturday nights do have their girlfriend by their side, they have to work and it’s the only way they can go out together and see each other, the girls have enormous patience, either that or they’re terribly in love or desperate. They can’t even talk very much, with a passenger always behind them, watching the backs of their necks – especially hers if the passenger is a lonely, desperate man – and possibly listening to their conversation.

I drove in silence down the familiar Paseo de la Castellana, some places are just as they were, though not many, the Castellana Hilton isn’t called that any more, but for me it’s still the Hilton, there’s the brash sign for the House of Ming, both the place and the name were mysterious, forbidden things to me when I was a child, and then Chamartín, the Real Madrid stadium that also evokes names that have not been erased and never will be, whole line-ups that I still know by heart, and sometimes the faces that I knew from the cigarette cards I used as swaps in the game of heads or tails I played daily with one of my brothers: Molowny, Lesmes, Rial and Kopa, the fat man Puskas, Velázquez, Santisteban and Zárraga, players whose faces I wouldn’t recognize now if ever I saw them, but their names persist, and Velázquez was a genius.

I drove in silence because I was looking at the prostitute out of the corner of my eye to see if I had the same feeling I would have had when I used to drive a tired Celia home, as I had on so many nights when we went home together. I wanted to see her full face, to get a good look at her and to study her features, but there would be time for that and, besides, faces are deceptive, sometimes you can rely more on the emotions and feelings provoked by those faces, as well as on the involuntary gestures made by the other person, the rhythm of their breathing, the way they clear their throat or make a certain gesture or mispronounce a certain word, a particular cliché they use, their smell – the smell of the dead lingers when nothing else remains of them – the way they walk or
the way they cross their legs, their impatiently drumming fingers or the way they rub their thumb back and forth beneath their lower lip; and their laugh, that would certainly unmask anyone who was pretending to be someone else, a person’s laugh is almost unmistakable, and I wondered if I should run the risk of trying to provoke into laughter the prostitute I had picked up in my car, because that might force me to decide if I was right or wrong.

I drove in silence, too, because I was wondering why, if it was Celia, she would be walking the streets, she couldn’t need the money that badly, perhaps she was frivolous enough and enough of an adventurist – an eminently Soviet word that, “adventurist”, someone who always wants to be able to say: “I’ve tried that” – or perhaps it was revenge, a reprisal that would have begun to take shape when Ruibérriz’s friends had seen her in those two different bars or when Ruibérriz himself had hired her that night he saw her, a vengeance that could be fully realized now, if I was I and she was she, she might have her doubts about me too, we barely notice the changes that take place in ourselves, I’m not aware of it in myself, even though those changes might be profound and serious ones. And what other form could that revenge take, I asked myself silently, but that of plunging me tumultuously into relationships with strangers I would never know about – I would never know who they were or how many – nor would she, unless she kept count and noted them down in her diary and asked them their names, which they would refuse to give her.

“What’s your name?” I asked the prostitute when we reached the end of the Castellana, as I was turning round to drive back in the opposite direction.

“Victoria,” she lied, assuming she was Celia and perhaps even if she wasn’t. But if she was Celia, then she lied deliberately, ironically, maliciously, even mockingly, because that is the female version of my own name. She took some chewing-gum out of her handbag, the car smelled of mint. “And you?”

“Javier,” I lied in turn, realizing that I would have done so either way, whether she was Victoria or my Celia who was no longer mine.

“Not another Javier,” she remarked, “Madrid’s full of them or perhaps it’s just the name you’d all like to have, I don’t know what’s got into you all.”

“All who?” I asked. “Your customers?”

“Blokes in general, blokes, or do you think the only men I know are customers?”

She had a surliness that Celia neither had nor has, if it was her, she was putting on a pretty good act, or perhaps she had been working for a long enough period of time – possibly more than a month or two months, I had managed not to see or speak to her for about four or five – to pick up a few of the mannerisms. It also occurred to me that she might be irritated by my prompt payment, paying in advance as well: she might be wondering if I had picked her up because of the resemblance and as a one-off or if I had always gone with prostitutes and she had known nothing about it while we were married.

“Not at all, no, I’m sorry. I imagine you have a family too.”

“Somewhere around, I never see them, so don’t ask me about them.” And she went on in a resentful tone, her eyes still wearing the dusky night: “Listen, I know lots of people.”

“I’m sure you do, I’m sorry,” I said.

Conversation was not easy, perhaps it would be best to remain silent. One moment, I would feel certain that she was Celia and that we could, therefore, cut the pretence and talk about everything or simply about what we always used to talk about or could question each other openly, and the next I would be sure that it couldn’t possibly be her and that it was just one of those extraordinary resemblances which nevertheless do sometimes happen, as if it was Celia but with another life or history, the same person who had been swapped while in her cradle, as occurs in children’s stories or in the tragedies of kings, the same physical appearance but with a different memory and a different name and a different past in which I would not have existed, perhaps the past of a gypsy child perched on top of a pile of shabby, useless objects on a cart drawn by a mule, Our Lady of the rag-and-bone men, bumping against the branches of the gnarled trees and watching the bourgeois little girls chewing gum on the top floor of a double decker bus (but she was too young to have seen them). Although such a complicated explanation wasn’t strictly necessary, there’s a very thin dividing line and everything is subject to vast upheavals – the reverse side of time, its dark back – you see it in life as well as
in novels and plays and films, writers or wise beggars and kings without a kingdom or enslaved, princes shut up in towers and suffocated with a pillow, suicidal bankers and beauties changed into monsters, their faces scarred by vitriol or by a knife, noblemen drowned in huge earthenware vats of sickly sweet wine and the idols of millions strung up by their feet like pigs or dragged through the streets by a horse, deserters made into gods and criminals into saints, great wits reduced to the condition of obtuse drunks, and crippled kings who seduce the most beautiful of women, sidestepping their hatred or even transforming it; and lovers who murder the person they love. It’s a very fine knife-edge, one false move and you could topple over on to the side you’re trying to escape from, because the blade will cut you anyway and you’ll end up falling one way or the other soon enough: all you have to do is to start walking or even just stay right where you are.

“So, how are you enjoying the driving?” Victoria asked, after another silence. “Are you in training for Formula 1 or are you still thinking about where you want us to go? Do you want me to look at the map? You’re probably lost.” And she opened the glove compartment to emphasize her remark with a gesture.

“Don’t be in such a hurry, I’ve paid you for this time,” I said curtly and slammed the glove compartment shut again. “And don’t complain, you’re better off sitting in here than freezing to death on that corner. How long had you been waiting there?”

“That’s none of your business, I don’t talk about my work. If I have to talk about it as well as do it, you can forget it.” She was chewing vigorously on her gum and I wound down my window a little to get rid of the smell of mint which had become mingled with that of her own pleasant perfume, not Celia’s usual one.

“Fine, so you don’t want to talk about your work or about your family or about anything: that’s what happens when you get the money upfront without having to work for it.”

“It isn’t that,” she replied, “if you like, I’ll give it back to you and you can hand it over when we’ve finished. But it isn’t my job to teach you things, just stick to the rules, OK?”

“You’re here to do whatever I tell you to do.” I surprised myself when I said that, to Victoria or to Celia, it didn’t matter
which. We men have an ability to frighten women by a mere inflection of our voice or a few cold, threatening words, our hands are stronger and have maintained their grip for centuries. It’s all bravado.

“All right, all right, don’t go all stroppy on me,” she said in a conciliatory tone. I calmed down when I heard her say “don’t go all stroppy on me”, it sounded rather cosy.

“You’re the one who’s been stroppy ever since you got into the car. God knows what went on between you and your previous client.” It seemed to me that we were sliding into some absurd conjugal or adolescent argument. I added at once: “Sorry, I forgot, you don’t like talking about your work, the lady likes to keep her professional secrets.”

“I shouldn’t think you want to talk about yours either,” retorted Victoria. “Come on, what do you do?”

“I don’t mind talking about it. I’m a television producer,” I lied again, although I was on safe ground, because I know several and I could easily play the part of one for the benefit of a prostitute. I waited for her to ask what programmes I had made or to provide her with some proof, but she didn’t believe me, so she didn’t do either of those things (perhaps she didn’t believe me because she was Celia, and in that case she would know the truth).

“At this time of night you can be whatever you like,” she said, “As you yourself said, we’re just here to please you men.”

I decided to drive down the quiet, diplomatic streets that she had suggested in the first place, to find a space to park the car. I found it in Fortuny, not far from the German embassy, which appeared to be deserted at that hour, there was no light on in the lodge, perhaps the guard could see better like that at night, and it ensured that
he
wouldn’t be seen. We passed two very obvious transvestites on the corner of Eduardo Dato, they were sitting on a still-damp wooden bench beneath the trees, surrounded by piles of fallen yellow leaves, as if they had frightened away a road sweeper in the middle of his work.

“How do you girls get on with them?” I asked Victoria, switching off the engine and indicating the transvestites with my thumb. Now we had both resorted to a depersonalizing plural form – “you men”, “you girls”.

“There you go again,” she said. But this time she did give me an answer, she had to erase the impression of sourness, however minimally, you can’t establish physical contact with someone in a sour atmosphere, however negotiated and codified and paid for that contact is: “Well, although we work the same area, we don’t clash. They have this corner, but if, one night, neither of them turns up, we can use it, and then, if they turn up later on, we leave. They don’t cause any problems, it’s the customers who cause the problems.”

“What, you mean we get stroppy?”

“Some of you guys are really frightening,” replied Victoria. “Some of you are real bastards.”

“Do I frighten you?” I asked stupidly, because, when I said it, I was conscious that neither of the two possible replies would please me. I couldn’t frighten her if she was Celia, but she was behaving as if she wasn’t. I, on the other hand, was behaving like myself, leaving aside a few white lies, although perhaps even that wasn’t necessary either.

“Not at the moment, no, but who knows what you’ll do,” she said, as a kind of medium term, as if she had guessed my fleeting thought, or perhaps it wasn’t that. “What do you want, a blow job?” and as she said that, she removed the chewing-gum from her mouth and held it between her fingers, uncertain whether to throw it away or not. That tiny blob would hold the imprint of her teeth, that’s how they make a definitive identification of a corpse, if they can find the deceased’s dentist.

“Doesn’t it frighten you getting into a car with a complete stranger again and again?” I asked, and now I was asking out of genuine concern for Celia and also for Victoria, although less for Victoria. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

“Of course it frightens me, but I try not to think about it. Why do you ask, should I be afraid of you?” There was a touch of alarm in her voice, I saw that she was looking at my hands which were still resting on the wheel. Suddenly, every trace of sarcasm had gone, the idea of fear and my insistent questioning had made her feel afraid. How easy it is to introduce a possibility or a fear or an idea into the mind of another person, we are so easily infected, we can be convinced of anything, sometimes all it takes is a nod to
achieve your aims, to pretend that you know something, or to suspect another person’s suspicions about us and, out of fear, reveal ourselves without meaning to and reveal what we had intended to keep secret. Celia or Victoria was afraid of me now and I could understand that in Victoria, but how could Celia possibly be afraid of me? Or perhaps she could, if she suspected that I suspected her of avenging herself on me by imposing on me all those non-blood relationships, and without my consent or my knowledge. But how can there be consent? Perhaps she was going to make me become related to myself, Javier and Victor, and then there would be consent.