Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (11 page)

I reached the cemetery a little early, on a morning of cold, indifferent sunshine, so as not to miss the arrival of the funeral cortege or get lost somewhere in the cemetery. Some cemetery employees – not all of them gravediggers – showed me where the burial was to take place, I walked over there and waited for a few moments, reading the gravestones and epitaphs round about, rehearsing the act I would have to put on as soon as the Deán and Téllez families arrived with the coffin and their flowers and their black clothes. I was wearing dark glasses as has become customary on visits to cemeteries, not so much to conceal one’s tears as to conceal their absence, when they are absent. I noticed that a gravestone had already been drawn aside – the hole or tomb or abyss open to view – as if in readiness to receive a new tenant, they only disturb the dead in order to bring them another dead person whom they surely loved in life, although there is no way of knowing if that gladdens them, seeing again someone they knew when they were younger, or if it saddens them even more to find that person reduced to the same state as themselves and to know that there is one less person in the world to remember them. I looked at the inscription and learned that there lay Marta’s mother, Laura Angulo Hernández, and also her Italian grandmother, Bruna Orati Parenzan, possibly Venetian, and I learned too that Marta had another sister who had died years before – even before her mother and grandmother had died – when she was five years old, according to the dates inscribed there, Gloria Téllez Angulo, born two years before Marta, so the two girls would have known each other, although Marta would barely remember her older sister, just as her son, Eugenio, would barely
remember her as he grew older. I realized that a death notice and a gravestone had taught me far more about Marta or her family than anything she had told me during our three preparatory meetings. Preparatory for what, for a modest party (Irish sirloin steak and wine, one guest) and for her farewell to the world, before my very eyes. In that tomb of women inaugurated by a little girl thirty-one years before, Marta was to occupy the fourth place, preempting her father, perhaps, who would have bought the plot when that first daughter died and would have assumed that he would be the next to lie next to his mother, wife and daughter, those tombs are usually made for four, but not always, sometimes they hold five, and, in that case, there would still be room for him, and when he arrived, he would know who all the inhabitants were. Marta’s name had not yet been inscribed on the gravestone, that comes after the burial.

I left the graveside and whiled the time away reading a kind of riddle on a nearby tomb, dated 1914: “None that speak of me know me,” it said in its ten brief lines (albeit of prose not poetry), “and when they do speak, they slander me; those who know me keep silent and in their silence do not defend me; thus, all speak ill of me until they meet me, but when they meet me they find rest, and they bring me salvation, for I never rest.” It took several readings before I realized that it wasn’t the dead person speaking (León Suárez Alday, 1890–1914, according to the inscription, a young man) but death itself, a strange death bemoaning its bad reputation and the lack of recognition given it by the insolent living, a death resentful of the slanderous remarks and desirous of salvation: weary, rather amicable and, ultimately, resigned. I was in the middle of memorizing the riddle, as if it were a telephone number or a few lines of poetry, when, in the distance, I saw thirty or so people getting out of their cars and slowly approaching behind the bearers, who were walking slightly faster because of the weight they were carrying, one of them had a spent cigarette between his lips which immediately prompted me to light one of my own. The people in the cortege gathered around the open grave, in a ragged semicircle, leaving room for the bearers to manoeuvre, and while a brief prayer was said, the coffin was lowered into the ground with the usual difficulties – squeaks and
bumps and trial runs and hesitations, wood striking stone and the sort of grinding noises you might expect in a quarry, only shriller, like two bricks grating together or a nail that refuses to be driven home, and the occasional workman’s voice giving orders under his breath; and the terrible fear of bruising the body that we will never again set eyes upon – I could see the people in the first row, standing closest to the upper part of the grave, six or seven of whom I could clearly make out from my 1914 tomb, where I stood with my hands folded in front of me, in one hand a cigarette which, from time to time, I raised to my lips; as if León Suárez Alday were an ancestor before whose ancient remains I could ponder and remember and even whisper the most uninhibited, and also the most comforting, words we can ever utter, words addressed to someone who cannot hear us. And although it is true that the first person I looked for was the boy – a pointless exercise, no one takes children of that age to funerals – the first one I noticed was not the man intoning a prayer – a robust, elderly gentleman whom I noticed subsequently – but a woman who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Marta Téllez, obviously her surviving sister, Luisa, who was wearing neither dark glasses nor a veil – you never see veils these days – but was weeping in a strident, continuous, undisguised fashion, although, in fact, she did try to disguise it by lowering her head and covering her face with her two hands, the way people do sometimes when they feel horror or shame and want not to see or be seen, or are the self-confessed victims of depression or malaise or fear or regret. And that gesture, which these victims usually make alone, sitting or lying down in their bedrooms – their face pressed into the pillow, perhaps, the pillow replacing their own two hands, something that hides and protects, or something in which they can find refuge – was being made by this woman standing up, in her immaculate clothes, her hands carefully manicured, in the middle of a cortege of people, and in a cemetery, with her rounded knees visible beneath her unbuttoned overcoat, with her black stockings and her polished high-heeled shoes; on her lips – to which she would automatically have applied make-up, a mechanical gesture performed every day before leaving the house – would be the sickly taste of lipstick mingled with her own salt tears, liquid, involuntary; occasionally
she raised her head and bit her lip – those lips – in a vain attempt to suppress not her grief, but its overly frank manifestation, beyond words, and it was during those moments that I saw her, and although her face was distorted by grief, I could still see the similarity with Marta, because I had seen Marta’s face distorted too, by a different kind of pain, but equally manifest; a younger woman, by two or three years, prettier perhaps or less dissatisfied with her lot, she was single, or a widow, according to the death notice. Perhaps she was crying too because she felt the kind of envy or sense of exile that afflicts children when they are separated from their siblings, when one of them is left: alone with the grandparents while the others go off with their parents on a trip, or when one of them goes to a different school from the one the older children go to, or when they are ill in bed, nestling amongst the pillows with the comics and coloured prints and storybooks by which their world is configured (and above them, their model planes), and they see the others going off to the beach or the river or the park or the cinema and setting out on their bikes, and when they hear the first gusts of laughter and the summery sound of bicycle bells, they feel like a prisoner or perhaps an exile, this is largely because children lack any vision of the future, for them only the present exists – not the unwholesome, rugged, fragmented yesterday nor the diaphanous, flat tomorrow – in this, they resemble animals and certain women, and that child suddenly sees his bed as the place where he will have to stay for ever and from which he will, for an indefinite period, have to listen to the wheels moving off across the gravel and to the bright, superfluous ringing of bicycle bells by his brothers and sisters for whom time doesn’t count, not even the present. Perhaps Luisa Téllez also felt that Gloria and Marta, the sister with whom she would never have played and the sister with whom she would have played, were reunited now in the earth with their mother and their grandmother, in a stable, feminine, kindly world where they would no longer worry over a yes or a no, where they would no longer weary themselves over a perhaps or a maybe, in a world in which time didn’t count – a haunted or, perhaps, enchanted world – which it was not yet time for her to enter, a world from which she was literally exiled and in whose common dwelling place
there would certainly be no room when her turn came; and while the earth fell symbolically once more upon that grave, she remained with her father and her brother amongst the inconstant living, and perhaps, one day, with a husband who has not yet appeared – the vague figure of a husband – in a world of men, a world configured by comics and coloured prints and storybooks (and, above them, their model planes), a world that is still, undeniably, the victim of time.

And there was the father, Juan Téllez, who had spoken a few brief, almost inaudible words, presumably a prayer in which he himself would not believe at his age, how difficult it is entirely to discard the superficial customs and beliefs of those who precede us, which we sometimes emulate throughout our whole life – another life – out of superstition and respect for them, the forms and effects of things take longer to disappear and be forgotten than do their causes and contents. He had been led stumbling to the grave, helped by his surviving daughter and his daughter-in-law as if he were a condemned man being led to the scaffold and lacking the strength to climb the steps or as if he were walking in snow, just managing to extricate one foot, only to plunge back in again at every step. But then he had recovered his composure and had puffed out his convex chest, taken a bluish handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, not the tears from his eyes, for there were none, although he did also dab at one dry cheek and at his forehead, as if to soothe a rash. He had spoken his words with a mixture of gravity and reluctance, as if he were fully aware of the solemnity of the moment but, at the same time, wanted to have done with it as soon as possible and to go back home and lie down, perhaps there was a touch of shame mingled with his grief (that
was
a horrible death, a ridiculous death), although the likelihood was that no one had told him about the real circumstances, about his daughter’s half-naked, dishevelled appearance when they found her, that there was clear evidence that a man had been in the apartment, not Deán or anyone, but me, who, for them, was no one. They would simply have told him: “Marta died while Eduardo was away.” And he would have raised his mottled hands to his face, seeking refuge in them. “She would have died anyway, even if she hadn’t been
alone,” they would have added in order not to alienate him still further from his son-in-law, or as if the knowledge that something was inevitable might make it easier to accept. (She hadn’t been alone, I knew that and doubtless so did they.) They may not even have told him the cause, if they knew it, a cerebral embolism, a myocardial infarction, an aortic aneurysm, a meningococcal infection of the adrenal glands, an overdose of something, an internal haemorrhage, I don’t quite know which ailments kill most swiftly and unerringly and I don’t really care to know what killed Marta, he may not even have asked for explanations nor would it have occurred to anyone to think of having an autopsy done, he would simply have taken in the news and hidden his face and prepared himself for the burial of a second of his offspring and for a goodbye, goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn, life is unique and fragile. One assumes, though, that now, while earth fell for the fourth time upon a female person in that tomb, he would be remembering those who lay there and whom he had not seen for many years, his Italian mother, Bruna, who never quite mastered the harsher tongue of her adopted country and who taught her son Juan her own softer language; his wife Laura whom he had loved or not loved, whom he had idolized or hurt, or perhaps both things, first one and then the other or both at the same time, as is usually the case; and his daughter Gloria, who was the first to die, in an accident perhaps, drowned in a river or after breaking her neck in a fall one summer, or perhaps struck down by one of those swift, impatient illnesses that so effortlessly carry off the young – because the young put up no resistance – not even allowing them time to accumulate a few memories or desires or to learn about the strange workings of time, as if that were the way illnesses got their own back for the interminable struggle they have with all the adults who resist them so fiercely, though not so with Marta, who died as meekly as a child. And the father will already have begun to see that second daughter, whom he had seen only recently (and for whom he had later left a message), tinged with the colours of reminiscence and of the rugged past, and he would perhaps be thinking that his own existence had now become even more precarious. He had white hair and large blue eyes and arched, impish eyebrows and very smooth skin
for his age, whatever that was; he was a tall, robust man, an
excelentísirno
, a figure who would fill a room and whose wavering bulk immediately attracted one’s attention, his voluminous thorax making the women on either side of him seem smaller than they were, the slenderness of his legs and the slight swaying that afflicted him even when at rest reminding one rather of a spinning top, he wore a black armband on the sleeve of his overcoat as proof of his strong, old-fashioned sense of occasion, his black shoes as polished and shiny as those of his surviving daughter, small feet for a man of his height, the feet of a retired dancer and the face of a gargoyle, his dry, astonished eyes staring down into the grave or hole or abyss, watching as the symbolic earth fell, and remembering, spellbound, his two girls, the one who had never grown beyond childhood and the one who had at first been younger but later much older, assimilated into the tomb now by that other daughter whom they never saw grow up or grow old or change or become disaffected or a source of anxiety, both now shared the same sad fate, obedient and silent. I saw that one of Juan Téllez’s shoelaces had come undone and that he had not noticed.