Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (19 page)

“Ah well, I’ll have to have them show it to me or lend me the video. Note it down, Anita. And what film were you watching? Couldn’t you sleep either? It was about a month ago, as I said.”

I looked at Téllez, but I noticed no particular reaction on his part, doubtless he was sleeping that night and could not identify it by the television programmes being shown. He had recovered from his moment of grief, he had lit his second pipe and seemed comfortable there, pleased to pass the morning like that, although it was growing steadily colder. It was a bit like being at school, like when the boys got together in the playground during break when
I was a child, and the one who had seen a film would describe it to the others and make them want to see it or, rather, his telling of the story made it up to them for not having seen it, it’s a kind of act of generosity, telling someone something. Only You was the leader of the class.

“I don’t know the name of the film I saw, I turned on when it had already started and I didn’t have a newspaper to hand. I wasn’t at home.” And I don’t know why I added that, I could easily not have said it, perhaps I wanted to be generous. I didn’t say that I had watched it with the sound turned down.

“Well, it seems rather late not to be at home,” said the Only One, half-smiling. “What do you make of our friend here, Anita? A bit of a nightbird, eh?”

Anita instinctively touched the ladder in her stocking as if to cover the flesh that it revealed. She caught a thread with her nail and made the ladder even worse, that stocking was ready to become a cast-off. We all pretended that we hadn’t noticed, and she said: “Oh, good heavens,” though it wasn’t clear if this was a comment on her ruined silk stockings or on the euphemistic insinuation that I was a nightbird.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Solo went on, “I think I’ve made myself pretty clear, eh, Ruibérriz? You will work over the next few days in constant contact with Juanito, in his apartment if that suits, so that he can watch over and control everything and give you instructions, he’s known me since for ever. And if we’re happy with the work, you can be sure that you’ll get more,” he added, as if he were offering me a really cushy number. He was doubtless ignorant of the low fees paid by the Palace. He stood up and those of us still sitting immediately copied him, Anita and I swiftly, Téllez slowly or with difficulty; Segarra again stood to attention and Segurola laid down his tools, holding his paint brush and palette in his fallen hands, any possibility of being able to continue his work being over. Solus was leaving, but first, he indicated Juanito’s foot: “Juanito,” he said, “don’t forget that shoelace, you’ll trip over.”

Téllez looked down again, this time a touch despairingly, he would clearly be incapable of tying it himself, not even with his
foot raised. I grasped the situation in an instant: it would take Segarra ages to reach us and he was even less capable of bending down than Téllez was; you couldn’t rely on Segurola, perhaps he didn’t even have permission to leave his corner and approach Solitaire, he looked like a man in exile or immured; young, conscientious Anita would have been perfect for the job, but if she crouched or knelt down the buttons of her jacket might pop off and her stockings fall down. It was up to the Lone Ranger or myself. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and I saw that he made no move to help. That was to be expected. I didn’t hesitate.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tie it,” I said and although I seemed to be saying it to Téllez, I was really saying it to Only the Lonely, as if there had been a genuine chance that he might take on the job.

“No, no,” protested Téllez, with relief or possibly gratitude. There was no need for me to speak to him, I won him over with my own unsolicited gesture.

I knelt down and picked up the two ends of the shoelace which were of uneven length; I tied it using a double knot, as if he were a child and I were Luisa, his daughter, in the cemetery, with whom I felt identified for a moment, or perhaps twinned. Everyone watched the brief operation while it was being carried out, like a group of surgeons watching the master surgeon as he removes the bullet. I knelt down before Marta Téllez’s old father just as the old Orson Welles or, rather, Falstaff had fallen on his knees before the new King, who because he was now king had ceased to be what he had always been until then, his sweet boy.

“There you are,” I said, getting up and instinctively blowing on my fingers. Téllez stood looking down at the neatly tied shoelace for a moment.

“It might be a bit tight now,” he said, “but it’s better like that.”

In a reflex act of imitation Only You also blew on his band-aided fingers. And then I couldn’t help asking him, even at the risk of proving irksome at the very last: “What are those band-aids for, sir?” I asked him.

The One and Only raised his two index fingers as if he were about to give the signal for the music to start, and he looked
at them, amused, as if recalling some past joke. The half-smile returned to his lips and he said: “Now that would be telling.”

And again we all briefly laughed.

N
EEDLESS TO SAY
, Solo’s vague desires not only exceeded my provisional powers, they were doubtless also only a passing fancy provoked, quite randomly, by “partial sleep” who does not always elude or visit the same houses, and by the late-night television schedule. He had seen only part of that film and had experienced a feeling of instantaneous, primitive jealousy, forgetting or not realizing that the two medieval Henries of Lancaster had benefited from the passing of the centuries which had, by itself, made them into fictitious beings, objects of representation, nothing more, not even objects of investigation or study, leaving them clear and recognizable in a way that a person never is, but in a way that personages can be. He was still a person, although, unlike most mortals, he could be almost certain that, posthumously, he would cross that frontier that almost no one crosses: and people are voluble and unstable and fragile and easily distracted from their own affairs, thus betraying or blurring their character, they have only to glance in the other direction and the portrait is ruined, or rather you have to falsify it and anticipate the death of the person being painted, painting him as if he could no longer change because he was no longer alive and would never again grumble about anything, like Marta Téllez, whom I perceived more and more as someone who had always been dead, she has been dead so much longer than the time that I knew her when she was alive, when I saw her and talked to her and kissed her: for me, she was only alive for three days, and I was a witness to her breathing during a few hours of those three days. And even though that wasn’t actually true: any dead life lasts longer than an inconstant lived life, and that applies not only to her dead life, which arrived prematurely, but to all the living who have been in the world and who endure longer as dead people, once they are part of the past,
providing there is still someone alive to remember them. And when she said “Hold me”, she must have believed that she had been born to die rather young and married and a mother, perhaps she saw all her steps up until that moment, all her early days, as an itinerary that was at last comprehensible, that led to that night with me, a night of unconsummated infidelity. And I, in turn, would see her as someone who had appeared in my life merely in order to die by my side and to provoke in me this state of enchantment, what a strange mission or task that was, to appear and disappear just so that I would take different steps than those I would otherwise have taken – the thread of continuity uninterrupted, my silken thread still intact but with no guide – so that I would feel concerned about a child and look for a death notice and attend a funeral, pretending I was visiting a tomb dated 1914 and listen again and again to a tape (“You can’t be that keen to see me, if you want, I could still come over for a while, the guy sounds rather nice, he’s never exactly been a man of letters, don’t get too excited,
povero me
, we can’t afford not to be able to locate him, so we’ll do whatever you say, we could see each other on Monday or Tuesday, hi, it’s me, could one of you save me a slice of ham, please, please”; and that crying), so that I would become involved aimlessly and surreptitiously in the lives of strangers, as if I were a spy who doesn’t even know what it is he has to find out – if there is anything to find out – and, at the same time, risks exposing his own secret to the very people he should conceal it from, not that they are aware he has a secret that affects them; so that I can keep my secret for a while longer and write the words that Solus will say to the world even though I am no one, even though I barely belong to the world, although perhaps that is entirely appropriate, that those words attributable to his person should come from the most obscure and anonymous subject in his kingdom, so that they can truly become his words; or, rather, from his most obscure and pseudonymous subject, since he believed me to be Ruibérriz de Torres, that was my name. What a strange mission or task Marta Téllez’s was, to appear and disappear just so that I would take those steps towards her old father’s apartment and make his existence a little less precarious, make him feel useful, even, for a week or so, like someone with responsibilities of state,
so that I would breathe life into one of the soon-to-be-dead who nevertheless survives his own children. If Marta were alive, I would not be going through the vast, old-fashioned portals of a house in the Salamanca district of Madrid, nor would I be going up in a lift with pretentious, ancient, wooden doors and an anachronistic bench on which to sit, nor ringing the doorbell on several successive days, I would not be spending the mornings in a large study full of books and pictures, jumbled and alive, sitting at a borrowed table before my own portable typewriter which I had transported there on the first day, a typewriter I rarely use now, with an older man who keeps hopeful guard in the room next door, an affable man, glad perhaps to have another presence in the house besides that of a maid of a kind one no longer sees, in uniform with an apron, but no cap, and who is doubtless the person who ties his rebellious shoelaces each morning. I would not be on the receiving end of the trumped-up visits or pretences at supervision of that old man who, on the pretext of fetching a book or looking for a letter, prowls around the study whistling a tune and invariably asks me: “So, how’s it going? Getting on all right? Do you need anything?” in the hope that I will ask him a question or let him read the last lines of the speech I have written so that he can give his approval or suggest emendations in his role as an old and privileged connoisseur of the Lone Ranger’s psyche. (And then, from time to time, he goes into the kitchen to grind some coffee.) And I would not be meeting Luisa, Luisa Téllez, the surviving daughter and sister, who arrived late on the second morning of whistling and work in order to pick up her father, nor Eduardo Deán, the son-in-law, the husband, the widower, who arrived shortly afterwards to go out and have lunch with them, that is, with us, or else, I would have met them in other circumstances (“Would you like to join us?”, it had been Téllez’s suggestion, and I said “Yes, why not,” not waiting to be asked again, not making them insist, which they might not have done anyway). Nor would I be going into a restaurant with them, the father the first to go through the door, as fathers and Italian men always are, they won’t let a woman go into any public place ahead of them because, first, they have to test the water (at that moment, bottles might fly or knives flash, men fight even in the most unsuitable places for a brawl), then Luisa Téllez,
then me, to whom Deán gave way with a gesture that was half-paternalistic and half an indication of vague social superiority (or perhaps it was the false deference with which such people treat mere wageslaves), you fool – I thought, addressing him mentally as “tú” (any mental insult demands the use of the informal “tú”) – you don’t know that your wife died in my arms while you were in London, you fool, you still don’t know, and then, ashamed, I corrected myself: sometimes my mental reactions are too aggressive, too masculine.

Deán was rather a handsome man, he had improved a lot with the years, now that I saw him close to, and now that his face no longer had the pallor I had seen at the cemetery a month before, his hands clutching his temples. I don’t know if it is fair to say what I’m going to say, since, from the very start, I already knew quite a lot about him and had been present at his change of marital status when he still knew nothing about it, but the fact is that he had the face of a widower, though it was difficult to know if he had acquired that face in the last month or if he’d had it for a long time before becoming a widower. (Widows and widowers seem very calm even underneath their despair or sadness, when they feel despair or sadness.) He offered me his left hand, although he wasn’t left-handed and his right hand wasn’t bandaged or immobilized in any way, an idiosyncrasy, a quirk, which made that first contact with him slightly clumsy and difficult and odd, as if that were part of his character, his ever mutable face, the mocking eyebrows, the grave, almond eyes, the cleft chin like that of Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum and Fred MacMurray (though he was thinner than any of them). During the introductions at Téllez’s apartment I was certain that neither he nor his sister-in-law Luisa had noticed me at the funeral and could not therefore recognize me; however, during lunch or while we were waiting for it, I had a sudden moment of doubt while Téllez and his daughter were resolving some domestic matter that was of no interest to Deán or to me and so we sat listening, not saying anything: during those two or three minutes, he looked at me both directly and indirectly as if he knew something about me or, rather, as if one could have no secrets from him, he had the sort of incredulous, expectant eyes that oblige one to go on talking even though no questions
have been asked and there is only silence, to explain more than has been asked for, to prove with new arguments something that has not been put in doubt or verbally refuted by anyone, but which one feels to be invalid or that simply won’t wash, all because the other person doesn’t answer, but goes on waiting, like someone at a show who does not participate and wants to be entertained right up until the end. And you are that show, although during the two or three minutes when he looked at me, I was a dumb show at which he cast only the occasional glance, as one does at a television with the sound off. “I can’t understand how Marta could ever have had a lover,” I thought, “especially not that loudmouth Vicente who, according to his own wife Inés, is never discreet, the kind of loudmouth who always ends up spilling the beans, even revealing things that might prejudice or ruin himself. I don’t understand how such a thing could be possible given this husband and his comminatory eyes, from whom no one could hide anything of that nature for very long, unless the relationship between Marta and Vicente was a recent one, a new one, despite the recorded confidences and the verbal, not merely mental, insults, the flesh makes people over-confident and invites abuse, everything becomes creased or stained or crumpled, I would have to listen to that tape again, perhaps I would hear in that man’s voice the impatience that newness brings with it, when what is new fills you with enthusiasm and you can’t do without it. Deán is very sharp and doubtless vengeful, according to Inés, he’s determined to find me and he doesn’t seem the kind of man who would just accept what is given to him or who would not take steps, he seems more the active sort, a schemer, manipulative, persuasive, he’s probably the type to force and bend both events and wills, that look denotes attitudes which, once adopted, become rigid, as well as a wealth of acquired conviction, those incipient, multiple lines that will make his face as craggy as tree bark when he’s older, that slowness and that joint capacity for surprise and for infinite understanding that I now feel and see close to, on the other side of the table, he is the kind of person who knows and measures the consequences of his actions and who knows that everything is possible and, therefore, any wonderment we might feel should last no more than an instant – the instant that precedes infinite
comprehension – not even what we might think or do ourselves, cruelty, pity, scorn, melancholy and rage; mockery, rectitude, good faith and self-absorption; vehemence, or perhaps inclemency, everything stripped of the justifications that anyone who paused to think a little would reject or ignore, and then act. This man is far-sighted and prescient, he is alert and takes account of what almost no one takes account of: he takes account of the future and he sees what will happen later on, and that is why when he does something, he believes it to be right. Or perhaps he isn’t like that at all, but quite the opposite, perhaps he has a good sense of mental and verbal rhetoric and, on all occasions, acts without thinking, knowing that, later on, he will find the right argument or judgement to justify what his taste and instinct will have improvised, that is, to explain his actions and his words, knowing that everything can be defended and that any opposing conviction can be refuted, 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 codes or commandments or laws can be made to stand up, they are always convertible into so much scrap paper, there will always be someone who can say: ‘They don’t apply to me, or not in my case, or not this time, although perhaps the next, if there is a next time.’ Someone who will manage to maintain that and to convince others of it.” His voice was very deep, rusty and hoarse as if it emerged from behind a helmet or had spent centuries meditating upon and storing up each word, he spoke very slowly and that was how he spoke when we were on the second course and he finally made a reference to Marta, to his wife who had died a month before without the benefit of his presence: “I don’t know if you’ve realized, but in a week’s time, it’s Marta’s birthday,” he said. “She would have been thirty-three, she didn’t even manage to make it that far.”