Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (4 page)

B
UT TONIGHT THEY
did not sleep, possibly none of them did, at least not well, not straight through, not as they would hope to, the mother, ill and half-naked, lying on the bed watched over by a man whom she knew only superficially, the child with the covers half off (he had got into bed on his own and I didn’t dare rearrange the miniature sheets and blankets and tuck him in properly), and the father, who knows, he would have had supper with someone or other; after hanging up and looking thoughtful – lightly scratching one temple with her forefinger – and a touch envious (she may have had company, but she was still stuck in Conde de la Cimera as she was every night), all Marta had said was: “He told me he’d just had a fantastic meal at an Indian restaurant, the Bombay Brasserie. Do you know it?” Yes, I did know it, I liked it a lot, I had dined in its vast colonial-style rooms on a couple of occasions, a pianist in a dinner jacket sits in the foyer, and there are respectful waiters and maitres d’hotel, and huge ceiling fans winter and summer, it’s a very theatrical place, rather expensive by English standards, but not prohibitively so, a place for friends to meet and celebrate or for business meetings, rather than for intimate, romantic suppers, unless you want to impress an inexperienced young woman or a girl from the working classes, someone likely to feel slightly overwhelmed by the setting and to get absurdly drunk on Indian beer, someone you won’t have to take to any intermediate place before hailing a taxi with tip-up seats and going back to your hotel or your flat, someone with whom there will be no need to speak after the hot, spicy supper, you can merely take her face in your hands and kiss her, undress her, touch her, framing that bought, fragile head in your hands in that gesture so reminiscent of both coronation and strangulation. Marta’s illness was making me think morbid thoughts
and although I was breathing easily and felt better standing in the doorway of the boy’s bedroom, watching the aeroplanes in the shadows and vaguely remembering my own remote past, I thought that I really should go back in to the other bedroom, to see how she was and to try and help her, perhaps take off her clothes, this time in order to put her to bed and cover her up and evoke the sleep which, with luck, might have overtaken her during my brief absence, and then I would leave.

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 doll 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.”