Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (43 page)

be no reason why he should even remember her. And besides, I hadn’t done anything, no one had, a mere accident, a misfortune. There was her scarf still on the seat, still wet. It still smelled of her, of her black hair (“The smell of the dead lingers when nothing else remains of them. It lingers for as long as their bodies remain and afterwards too, once they are out of sight and buried and disappeared: let me be lead within thy bosom, let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, bloody and guilty”). I put it in my overcoat pocket. I still have it.” Deán fell silent and then added: “That was what happened to me, do you understand?”

“We are so easily infected, we can be convinced of anything, we can always prove ourselves to be right and everything can be told if accompanied by some justification, some excuse or by some attenuating circumstance or even by its mere representation, telling is a form of generosity, anything can happen and be said and be accepted, you can emerge from anything unharmed, or more than that, unscathed. No one does anything convinced of its injustice, not at least at the moment they do it, it’s the same with telling a story, what a strange mission or task that is, 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, mere memory, nothing. But, in fact, the person telling the story always tells it later on, which allows him to add things if he wants, to distance himself: ‘I have turned away my former self, I am not the thing I was nor the person I was, I neither know nor recognize myself. I did not seek it, I did not want it.’ And, in turn, the person listening can listen to the end and even then give what is always the best answer: “I don’t know, I’m not sure, we’ll see.’ ”

“I think so. What happened then?” I said. “I should be going, I really must be going.”

Deán had not moved for some time. When I asked him this, he adjusted the knot on his tie and began slowly to roll down his shirtsleeves, as if he were preparing to put on his jacket, as if he were the one who had to leave. I was the one who had to go. “I’m going to go,” I thought, “I’ve heard what he has to say and I won’t forget it.”

“I got off at traffic lights a long way from where the accident had occurred, in an area with more traffic. There was no one else on the bus now, I saw that there wasn’t out of the corner of my eye during the second that the lower deck appeared before me, between the last steps on the staircase and my leap down into the street. I stood on the pavement, the conductor probably didn’t even realize that someone else had just got off the bus at the wrong spot. I quickly found a taxi and went back to the hotel, it had stopped raining during the journey, the wind had dropped too, and I had sobered up after those Indian cocktails. I went up to my room, there had been no messages. I turned the television on and I watched for a few moments, switching channels, I barely understood what they were saying, so I got up from the bed and opened the window and I leaned on the window sill and, despite the cold, I looked out of it for a long time, I don’t know how long (“Deán looks out of his wintry hotel window through the veteran dark of the London night at the buildings opposite, or at other rooms in the same hotel, most are in darkness, staring at the brightly lit attic room of a black maid getting undressed after her day’s work, removing her cap and her shoes and her stockings and her apron and her uniform, then standing at the sink and washing her face and under her arms, he too can see a half-dressed and half-naked woman, but, unlike me, he has not touched her or embraced her, he has nothing to do with that woman who, before going to bed, has a perfunctory wash, British-fashion, at the wretched sink of one of those English rooms whose tenants have to go out into the corridor to use a bathroom shared with other people on the same floor. Deán cannot smell her at her distant, high window but he might still know her smell, perhaps he has already passed her in that corridor or on the stairs with his already poisonous footsteps, the day before or that evening. He hears the phone ringing in his room, it echoes and bounces out across the night to that half-dressed, half-naked maid and alerts her to the fact that she can be seen, in bra and pants, she takes a few steps over to her window, opens it and peers out for a moment as if to make sure that no one is climbing up towards her, and then she closes it and very carefully draws the curtains, no one must see her in the midst of her desolation or fatigue or exhaustion, or
half-dressed or half-naked or sitting at the foot of the bed with the inside-out sleeves of her uniform still caught on her wrists, perhaps she had already been seen like that without her realizing it, while she was combing her hair and singing some unidentifiable song or a dirge, like a young banshee, the sing-song hum of weary, much-maligned death proffering a prediction about the past, time passes heedlessly. I don’t know any of this, I don’t know it for a fact, we’ll see or, rather, we will never know, the dead Marta will never know what happened to her husband in London that night while she lay dying beside me, when he comes home bearing gifts, she won’t be there to listen to him, to listen to the story that he has decided to tell her, possibly fictitious and very different from the one I have heard. The dead person who haunts and watches and revisits him is different from my dead person, the person who lives in his thoughts as mine does in mine like an incessant beating, awake or asleep, his unfortunate wife and his unfortunate lover mingled and both lodged in our heads for lack of anywhere more comfortable, struggling against their own dissolution and seeking embodiment in the one thing that remains to them if they are to preserve their validity and maintain contact, the repetition or infinite reverberation of what they once did or what happened one day: infinite, but ever wearier and more tenuous. And his dead woman, like mine, belongs to the very recent past and was neither powerful nor an enemy, yet her unreality grows apace”). Until the phone rang,” said Deán, “and they told me the news. Some twenty hours had passed. 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’s so easy to live in a state of delusion, indeed, it is our natural condition,” I thought again, “and we really shouldn’t find that so very painful: you’ll go on hearing Vicente’s electric-shaver voice, you’ll go on seeing him”).”

“I’m going to go now,” this time I said it. I had used that verb before in that house, but never quite that, I had never said to anyone “I’m off, I had never said that.

When I was putting on my scarf and raincoat in the hall, I glanced surreptitiously down the corridor at the open door of
the child’s darkened bedroom, I couldn’t believe that Deán would keep him. Tomorrow, I would have to phone the woman who was now both older and younger sister, I looked at my watch, it wasn’t that late, perhaps I would be justified in calling her that same night when I got home, in taking one still-innocent step, after all, I might be the vague figure of the husband who has not yet arrived and who would form part of her world amongst the inconstant living. And that child could come and live with us, I couldn’t believe that Deán would keep him. In that event, his planes would come with him too, although they belonged to his father’s far-off childhood, I had never had that many, I quite envied him, fighters and bombers from the First and Second World Wars all mixed up together, some from the Korean War and others that had attacked or defended Madrid, years and years ago, during our Civil War. When things come to an end they have a number and the world then depends on its storytellers, but only for a short time and not entirely, they never fully emerge from the shadows, other people are never quite done and there is always someone for whom the mystery continues. That boy will never know what happened, his father and his aunt will hide it from him, I will too, and it doesn’t really matter because so many things happen without anyone realizing or remembering, everything is forgotten or invalidated. And how little remains of each individual in time, useless as slippery snow, how little trace remains of anything, and how much of that little is never talked about, and, afterwards, one remembers only a tiny fraction of what was said, and then only briefly: while we travel slowly towards our dissolution merely in order to traverse the back or reverse side of time, where one can no longer keep thinking or keep saying goodbye: “Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again, nor will you see me. And goodbye ardour, goodbye memories.”

January 1994