Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (27 page)

“No, of course not,” I said, laughing. But I don’t know if that was enough, now that I had introduced the fear into her mind; women know that all they ever get from men are mere concessions – a voluntary surrender of their power, a temporary truce in their authoritarianism – which they can withdraw at any moment.

“Then why ask if it frightens me to get into a car with a complete stranger when that’s just what I’ve done with you?” The sudden intrusion of fear had startled her, she was trying to shake it off before it took hold. She put the chewing-gum back in her mouth, she had been right not to throw it away. “You’re just trying to wind me up, you’re a stranger too, you know.”

Why was she stating the obvious if I was I and she was Victoria, I wondered. Now I could see her face full on, badly lit by the yellowish light from a low street lamp, half-blocked or filtered by the branches, it was Celia’s face but not her name. Celia was twenty-five then and Victoria seemed rather older, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, as if she were a short-term portent of a future Celia who had not yet come into being, an augury of the first lines on her face and of the weariness and panic in her eyes, a prediction of her ruined life or perhaps just a bad patch she was going through, her make-up too heavily applied for such a young young woman and the clothes that did not so much cover up as emphasize, her breasts accentuated and pushed up by the white body she was wearing, her legs bare underneath the tiny skirt crumpled by all that sitting in the passenger seats of indistinguishable nighttime cars, and perhaps, later on, kneeling down or even crouching
on all fours, her expression frightened or sour according to the moment, any friendliness suppressed or deliberately put on; I had enjoyed being with that woman for a time and I still did, I liked her shiny mac and her constant chewing and her bad manners, her eyes still wearing the dusky night and wearing fear too, fear of my hands and my desires and my imminent orders, what a disgrace it is to me to remember your name, even though I may not know your face today, still less tomorrow. I put my frightening hand on her thigh, I touched the strip of skin between stocking and skirt and stroked it.

“Am I?” I said, and with the other hand I took her chin and turned her face towards me, forcing her to look at me. She instinctively lowered her eyes and I said: “Look at me, don’t you know me? Tell me you don’t know me.” She pulled away from my hand with a movement of her chin and said: “Listen, what is it with you? I’ve never seen you before in my life. Now you really are frightening me. Look, I can’t be expected to remember everyone, but I’m sure I’ve never been with you before, and, at this rate, I don’t know if I’ll bother. What’s got into you?”

“How can you be so sure? How do you know you haven’t been with me? You yourself just said that it isn’t easy to remember everyone, for someone like you the faces must all get mixed up, or you probably do your best not to look at them, not to see them and then you can always imagine that you’re with the same man, with your boyfriend, or your husband, you’re probably married or have been.”

“Do you think I’d be here if I was married? You must be mad. Besides, you’re quite wrong, we make sure we get a good look at you all, front and back, to make sure we don’t go with you again if you turn nasty or if things get ugly. The first time you go with a bloke, anything can happen to you, but the second time there’s nothing to it. You can see right away what a bloke is after. So come on, tell me what it is you want and let’s be done with it.” The tone of that last phrase was again conciliatory, despite the impatient words.

“Are things getting ugly between us?” I said.

“Well, you’re doing a pretty good job of it, talking about fear and asking me if you frighten me and if I know you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

There was a silence. She took the opportunity to remove her mac – another conciliatory gesture – she didn’t just throw it on to the back seat, she folded it up and laid it down carefully, as if she were at the cinema. She wasn’t wearing a bra, Celia always did.

“Look,” she said, “we’re all a bit paranoid around here at the moment. About a month ago, someone killed a young boy who got picked up in Hermanos Bécquer, just where you picked me up. That’s why the transvestites don’t use that corner any more, they think it’s bad luck, and so they’ve given the corner to us. Until something happens to one of us, of course, then we’ll clear off too, we’re a superstitious lot when it comes to territory. He was ever so young, delicate, girlish, not like those great lumps,” and she jerked her thumb backwards as I had done before. “He really did look like a girl. He’d only been here a short time, he’d just arrived from some village outside Malaga. He got into a Golf like this one, except it was white, he came to one of these streets to suck the bastard off, and the following morning they found him lying on the pavement with his head caved in and his mouth full of cum. He’d only just learned to walk in high heels, the poor thing, he must have been about eighteen. And what happens? The following night, we have to go out again and forget all about that, because, otherwise, we just wouldn’t go out, we wouldn’t and neither would they. So I’m really not in the mood for all these questions about whether I get frightened and whether or not I know you, do you understand?”

It couldn’t be Celia, I thought; Ruibérriz or his friends must have seen this prostitute, Victoria, who looked so much like her, and must have wanted to think that it was her, and perhaps they even imagined that they had paid for sex with Celia, if they had done so with Victoria. She couldn’t have changed that much in other respects, it couldn’t be her; unless she was playing her part brilliantly, inventing gruesome stories to frighten me and worry me even more, so that I would want to rescue her from that life and from all those dangers by returning to her side, so that she wouldn’t have to be here or anywhere or on that unlucky corner on Hermanos Bécquer (she herself had said: “Do you think I’d be here if I was married? You must be mad.”). I hadn’t read anything
in the newspapers about a young transvestite being found in the street with his head caved in, I usually notice items like that because of my work. Celia did tend to embellish stories a bit and she was something of a liar, but she never went that far and she didn’t normally invent misfortunes, she was optimistic and proud by nature. Nevertheless, I thought, if she was Celia, she would, by then, have spent some time working as a prostitute and would, therefore, be a prostitute, she would know that world and wouldn’t have to invent anything, and that would explain her sour demeanour, her blunt vocabulary and her harsher way of speaking, it’s easy to pick these things up.
She wouldn’t, in fact, be pretending.
How could I possibly have any doubts, how could I possibly not be sure if I was with my wife or with a prostitute (with my wife who had become a prostitute or with a prostitute who felt like my former wife), I had lived with her for three years and known her for a year before that, I had woken up and gone to bed with her every day, I had seen her from every angle and I knew all her gestures and I had heard her talk for hours on end in every possible mood – once I used to gaze into her eyes as she lay with her head on the pillow – it was only four or five months since I last saw her, although people can change a lot in that time if that time is in some way anomalous, a time of illness or suffering or denial of what came before. I was sorry suddenly that she didn’t have some scar or mark or easily visible mole, had that been the case I would have taken her home and undressed her, even at the risk of finding out her identity for certain. Or perhaps I just didn’t remember those identifying marks on her body, we forget and never really notice anything very much, why remember if nothing is as it is, because nothing stays still, nothing lasts, nothing endures or is repeated or stops or persists, and the only solution to that is for everything to end and for there to be nothing, a solution which, at times, the Only One considered no bad thing, or so he had nihilistically said; and, on the other hand, everything is continually travelling on, everything is connected, some things drag other things along with them, all oblivious to each other, everything is travelling slowly towards its own dissolution the moment it occurs and even while it is occurring, and even while you’re waiting for it to happen and it still hasn’t, and you
remember as being past something that is still in the future and perhaps won’t even happen, you remember what has not been. Everything moves on apart from names, true or false, that remain for ever engraved on our memories as they do on gravestones, León Suárez Alday or Marta Téllez Angulo, they would have put Marta’s name on the gravestone by now, and it would be no different from that 1914 headstone. I would have known that Victoria was Celia if Victoria had replied “Celia” when I had asked her what her name was, and I might then have answered “Victor” when she asked me mine. And in that case, we would have recognized each other and perhaps embraced and we would not have gone to that street beneath the still-leafy trees and a yellow street lamp, but to our former home, which is now hers alone, or to my new home, and none of this would be happening in my car and she would not be frightened of me.

“Of course, I understand. I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you know the boy well?”

“No, I’d seen him around a few times, I’d had the odd chat with him. He used to drag his high heels as if he were clinging on to his shoes with his feet, he wasn’t used to it or perhaps he was ill, he seemed very fragile and somehow not quite with it. He was very sweet, very shy, very polite, he always said ‘thank you’ when he asked you something.” Victoria remained thoughtful for a moment and stroked the end of one eyebrow with her index finger, as Celia Ruiz Comendador used to do when, in the middle of an argument or a story, she would stop to think about what she was going to say next, or when she was searching for the right word. The coincidence, however, did not strike me as important just then. “He was the sort of person that you don’t really expect to live very long. You can spot them a mile off, they seem surplus to requirements, as if the world couldn’t bear them and was in a hurry to get rid of them. But then it would be best if they weren’t born at all. Because the fact is that they are born and there they are, and it’s horrible when people you know die, even if you don’t know them that well, it’s hard to grasp that someone who did exist doesn’t any more. At least I think it is. He called himself Franny, I suppose his real name was Francisco. What a way to die.” Victoria turned her face to the street, revealing the back of her neck, she sat
looking out at the pavement in Fortuny where we were parked, perhaps she was imagining the shattered skull of the young transvestite on that very pavement or somewhere nearby. “A horrible death, a ridiculous death,” I thought, “his head between someone’s thighs the moment before he died, the dying man’s scorn for his own death. How awful, now I’ll have to remember the name of someone whose face I don’t even know: Franny,” or at least that’s how I imagined it would be written. Then I too fell silent while I sat thinking, leaning one elbow on the steering wheel and rubbing my thumb back and forth beneath my lower lip. But it was only a brief silence. Perhaps we were being watched from far off, from the dark lodge outside the German embassy.

“Do you fancy going in the back for a bit?” I said to put an end to her thoughts and to stop her making that gesture with her index finger. I put one hand on her shoulder, then I stroked the back of her neck. “You’ve still got to earn your money,” I said, pointing to her handbag.

She looked at me and removed the chewing-gum from her mouth. This time she opened the window and threw it out on to the pavement.

I
T
’
S TIRING HAVING
always to move in the shadows, having to watch without being seen, doing one’s best not to be discovered, just as it’s tiring having to keep to oneself a secret or a mystery, how wearisome clandestinity is, constantly having to bear in mind that not all your close friends can be privy to the same information, that you have to hide one thing from one friend and something else from another, something the first friend already knows about, you invent complex stories for one woman and, in order not to betray yourself later, you have to fix the details of those stories for ever in your memory, as if you really had experienced them, to another newer woman friend you tell the truth about everything apart from certain innocuous, but embarrassing facts about yourself: the fact that you can happily spend hours in front of the television watching soccer or mindless quiz shows, that you still read comics even though you’re now an adult, that you would happily lie down on the floor and play heads or tails – if you had someone else to play with, that you’re hooked on gambling, that you fancy an actress you know to be odious and even offensive, and that you wake up in the morning in a foul mood and the first thing you do is light up a cigarette, that you fantasize about a particular sexual practice most people consider abnormal and which you dare not suggest to her. You don’t always conceal these things out of self-interest or fear or because you really have committed some misdemeanour, it’s not always a defence, often, it’s to avoid upsetting or hurting someone or spoiling the fun, sometimes it’s just common courtesy, it isn’t polite or civilized to tell everyone everything, let alone reveal our obsessions and our shortcomings; sometimes it’s our origins that we falsify or suppress, because most of us would have preferred at least one of our ancestors to have been somehow different, people
hide away their parents and their grandparents and their siblings, their husbands or their wives and sometimes even the children who most closely resemble or take after their spouse, they silence some part of their own life, they detest their youth or their childhood or their mature years, in every biography there is some outrageous, desolate or sinister episode, one episode or many – or even everything – that it would be best other people did not know about, something that it is best to lie about even to oneself. We are ashamed of far too many things, of our appearance and of past beliefs, of our ingenuousness and ignorance, of the submission or pride we once displayed, of our transigence and intransigence, of all the many things we proposed or said without conviction, of having fallen in love with whoever it was we fell in love with and of having been a friend of whoever it was we were friends with, our lives are often a continuous betrayal and denial of what came before, we twist and distort everything as time passes, and yet we are still aware, however much we deceive ourselves, that we are the keepers of secrets and mysteries, however trivial. How tiring having always to move in the shadows or, even more difficult, in the half-light, which is never the same, always changing, every person has his light areas and his dark areas, they change according to what he knows and to what day it is and who he’s talking to and what he wants, we are constantly saying to ourselves: “I am not the thing I was, I have turned away my former self.” As if we had managed to convince ourselves that we are different from the person we believed ourselves to be, merely because chance and the heedless passage of time change our physical circumstances and our clothes, as Solo said that morning, when he was struggling to express his disordered ideas. And he had added: “Or perhaps it is the by-paths and the indirect crooked ways of our own efforts that change us and we end up believing that it is fate, we end up seeing our life in the light of the latest or most recent event, as if the past had been only a preparation and that we understood it only as it moved away from us, as if we understood it all completely at the end.” But it is also true that as time passes and we become older, we hide less and recover more of what was once suppressed, and that happens only out of weariness and memory loss or because of the nearness
of our own end, clandestinity and secrecy and shadow demand an infallible memory, remembering who knows what and who doesn’t, what you have to hide from whom, and which of those people knows about each and every setback, each poisonous step, each error and effort and scruple and the dark back of time. Sometimes you read about someone confessing to a crime they committed forty years ago, people who have always led a decent life suddenly hand themselves over to the police or reveal, in private, a secret that is destroying them, and the naïve and the vengeful and the moralizers believe that these people have been overcome by remorse or by a desire for expiation or by a tormented conscience, when they have merely been overcome or motivated by weariness and a desire to be whole, by their inability to continue lying or keeping silent, to go on remembering what they experienced and did as well as what they imagined, to go on remembering their transformed or invented lives as well as those they actually lived, to forget what really happened and to replace it with a fiction. Sometimes it is only the weariness brought on by the shadow that impels one to tell all the facts, the way someone hiding will suddenly reveal himself, either the pursuer or the pursued, simply in order to bring the game to an end and to step free from what has become a kind of enchantment. The way I allowed Luisa to see me that afternoon after following her when she left the restaurant, or not exactly, after we had both accompanied Téllez to the door of his house, the three of us walked there because it was so close, she and I flanking that figure tottering along on tiny feet more appropriate to a retired dancer, bobbing like a marker buoy, luckily less so than he had been at the cemetery, although on that occasion it wasn’t just his age and weight that unbalanced him. And there we all said goodbye, we watched the father open the door of the old lift and sit down on the bench so as to rest on his brief, vertical trajectory, he disappeared skywards in his wooden box like a sedentary god hoisted aloft, and then Luisa Téllez said to me: “Right, see you then” and I said “Yes, see you” or something of the sort, we both assumed that we would see each other again during the rest of that week when I would be coming to work for Téllez in his apartment.