Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (37 page)

“That’s what insomnia’s like,” I said, knowing what she meant, “thoughts take precedence over tiredness or sleep, and if you do manage to get to sleep, you don’t so much dream as think.”

“Well, it’s never happened to me,” said Anita. She was a very healthy young woman, I wasn’t surprised that Only the Lonely liked having her by his side.

“But surely he takes something, there are sleeping pills he could take, he must have a battalion of doctors ready to prescribe them for him.”

“He tried Oasin, do you know it? Oasin Relax, I suppose the name comes from oasis.” I knew a tranquillizer called Oasil Relax, I imagined that was what she meant. “But it’s too weak and had no effect whatsoever. Now they’ve prescribed him some drops
from Italy that work better, EN or NE they’re called, I don’t know what the name means, they help him get off to sleep quickly enough, but then he doesn’t sleep through. So no one knows how long this is going to go on for.” The expression “he doesn’t sleep through” was almost maternal.

“He mentioned something about it, I believe, on the day we were there,” I said. “And what does he think about? Has he made any comment? Not that he doesn’t have plenty to worry about, but then he always has had.”

“He says he thinks about himself, that he has doubts. We’re all a bit worried about that.”

“Doubts? What about?”

Señorita Anita grew impatient again, she had quite a temper: “Doubts, dammit, doubts, what does it matter what they’re about? Isn’t that enough?”

“It seems quite enough to me, especially for someone in his position. What does he do when he can’t sleep? Does he catch up on work? He should try not to worry about it, I say that because I’ve suffered from occasional bouts of insomnia for years now.”

“Oh sure, so you’d have him up working all hours too, would you?” She said this in the same tone that Only You had used when addressing the painter Segurola, Anita was a victim of mimetism, it was only natural that she should be. “No, he tries to rest even though he can’t sleep, he lies down and puts his feet up, he reads, watches television, although not all the channels broadcast after midnight; he throws dice to see if he can bore himself to sleep.”

“Dice?”

“Yes, dice.” And Señorita Anita made a gesture as if shaking a pair of dice, blowing on her fist as if she were in Las Vegas, she must have seen a lot of movies, Las Vegas, Ascot. “Come on, give me my hat back,” she said. “I’m going to dab it with a bit of water. Honestly, what a bummer.” If she allowed herself this expression, it was obviously because she had forgotten that I was responsible for that particular bummer.

I handed it back to her in order to get rid of it, but there was no way I was going to let her ask for some water: “You’ll spoil it if you get it wet,” I said.

“Hey, let’s go down to the paddock, the horses came out ages ago,” said Ruibérriz, momentarily interrupting the unstoppable torrent of talk from Lali.

We barely had time to see the horses parade round, we had to run to place our bets, there was a queue at all the windows, the race track was packed like everywhere in Madrid always is, it’s a city of crowds. The two women were staring stupefied and uncomprehending at the screens showing the prices.

“Hey, Ani,” her friend said to her, “wasn’t it in the fourth race that you were supposed to put that big bet on for him?”

“You’re right, it’s lucky you remembered, this is the fourth race, isn’t it?” replied Anita. She hurriedly opened her handbag (she had painted fingernails), took out a piece of paper with a few numbers written on it, along with a thick wad of notes. They looked like new notes, fresh from the Mint, they still had a band around them (before the Civil War, they were made in England: Bradbury and Wilkinson of London were the people commissioned to do it, I’ve seen notes dating from the time of the Republic and they were in perfect condition; before the Civil War, the race track was in the Castellana, not outside the city as it is nowadays and as it has been for decades, it’s an old and honoured place now, La Zarzuela). It was an enormous sum of money, it’s hard to judge how much when the notes have never even been folded. That was no amateur bet, it came from someone who has a tip from a very good source and wants to win a bit of money to set himself up for the year. I felt rather ridiculous holding the two miserable notes I had earmarked for my bet, now it was the turn of Ruibérriz and me to look like beginners. I let her go ahead of me, out of normal politeness and because it suited me to do so.

“All this on number 9, to win,” said Anita to the man at the window. “And I’d like to put this on number 9, the same thing.” And she gave him another large note, separately, doubtless her own bet.

I looked at the price of the horse or rather the mare: Condesa de Montoro, it wasn’t amongst the favourites and the odds were still high, but, at this rate, we would soon lower them. Anita, inexpert in these matters, should have made her own bet first. I took out a third note and bet the same amount on a horse that
wasn’t number 9, so as not to be too obvious. But with the notes I had out already I unhesitatingly imitated Anita.

“I’m going to copy you,” I said.

Ruibérriz missed none of this, despite the continuing torrent of words in his ear. He simply let Lali talk and then followed our example, four notes, he bet double what I did, and the price was already reflecting our injections of confidence.

The two young women put their tickets away very carefully in their handbags, they looked at each other, laughing excitedly, covering their mouths with their hands. Anita said to me: “You trust me then, do you?”

“Of course, or rather I trust the friend you’re placing the bet for, you don’t risk sums of money like that willy nilly. Who is he, an expert on the horses?”

“Very much so,” she replied.

“And why doesn’t he come to the races himself?”

“He can’t always manage it, but sometimes he does.”

Solitary games of dice, risky bets, I didn’t want to link the two things: if we won, it was definitely a hot tip, that is, a scam that not even Ruibérriz was in on. I preferred not to associate the Only One with fraudulent practices, but those crisp new notes …

As soon as we returned to the grandstand, we again lost our binoculars to the two young women. The mist hadn’t lifted but it hadn’t got any worse either. The mass of spectators was blurred and looked even more like a mass, there were no edges to anyone, there was still a few minutes before the start of the fourth race, the horses were entering the boxes, I noticed that Condesa’s rider was a deep red smudge, his hat too, that would help me follow his trail, doomed as I was by my own unending gallantry to watch with the naked eye. We would dump the women for the fifth race, we had had quite enough of seeing nothing.

“Did you manage to get the video for him?” I asked Anita suddenly.

“Who for? What video?” she replied and her surprise or confusion seemed genuine.

“For your boss. That film we talked about, don’t you remember? He was telling us about the sleepless night he’d had about a month earlier, he’d been watching television, he saw a film that
had already begun,
Chimes at Midnight
, I was the one who told him the title. He had only caught the second half and he said that he’d like to see the whole thing one day, he was very impressed, he watched it to the end, he was telling us about it.”

“Ah yes.” Anita finally understood what I was talking about. “The fact is I haven’t done anything about it, we’ve been so worried about him not sleeping that we haven’t had time to think about things like that, you know how it is, there are always a thousand and one other matters to deal with, and when he’s feeling down, well, you can imagine, no one even thinks about anything else.” Sometimes she used a plural which was not the royal “we”, but a rather modest “we” into which she dissolved, one that included a lot of people, doubtless the family and Segurola and Segarra, perhaps also the woman with the feather duster and the broom who had slowly traversed the room on her dustered feet, humming, the old banshee. “And he hasn’t asked me about it again either,” she added, as if justifying herself. She remained thoughtful for a moment and then said: “Although he can’t have forgotten about it completely, because, it’s odd, yes, now I remember: that was the first time he mentioned ‘partial sleep’ and he’s often used that expression recently, ‘Our friend partial sleep failed to visit me again last night, Anita,’ he’s said to me on a couple of mornings. How was it in the film, can you remember?”

“Well, that’s all it was I think. The old King, Henry IV, can’t rest and he inveighs against sleep, who visits so many other places but not his palace, who bestows herself on the humble and the evil and even on animals,” I don’t actually remember that last category, but I thought I might include it since we were at the race track, “and yet refuses to bless his crowned and ailing head. The King is dying and eventually he does die, tormented by his past and by the future in which he will not participate. And that’s what he says to sleep: ‘thou, O partial sleep’. That’s all, as far as I can remember, the fact is I remember more of what your boss said the other day than of the film itself, I saw it years ago.”

Anita pursed her lips again, biting the inside of her cheek, looking very thoughtful.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “that may be what it is. It’s probably that film that’s to blame for his present insomnia. Perhaps I should get
him the video so that he can see the whole thing, that way he’ll have the whole story and can stop thinking about it, I suppose.”

“Maybe, who knows. It’s worth a try.”

“Anyway, thanks for reminding me, it had gone completely out of my head. What did you say it was called?” And she quickly took out of her handbag the same piece of paper on which she had noted down the numbers for her bets. “Can you hold my hat for a moment, please.”

“I think you wrote it down the other day,” I said, once more taking charge of the infamous hat.

“God knows where that’s got to. Now what was it again?”

“Look, it’s
Chimes at Midnight.
” I repeated again. “It was filmed here in Spain, some of it in Madrid. It won’t be difficult to find, the television company must have a copy of it.”

“There they go,” shouted Lali and she immediately began to cheer. “Come on, Condesa de Montoro, come on.” It was too long a name to be shouted out, she should have just called it Condesa.

Señorita Anita hastily stuffed the piece of paper back into her handbag and shut it before she had time to write down the title, then she raised my binoculars to her pretty, painted eyes. She too began to urge on the mare, but she, rather inaccurately, called it Montoro.

“Come on, Montoro, whip him,” she said. She must be a fan of wrestling or boxing.

I couldn’t see a thing, but even so I couldn’t not watch the race, not so much because of the amount of money I’d bet on it as out of curiosity: I wanted to know if the friend’s tip was a good one, perhaps she had been given the tip by a rather shady boyfriend of hers, she was just the kind of healthy young woman who often goes for good-for-nothings, a way of balancing her own honest, open character. The four of us stood up, I glanced at Ruibérriz and he made a gesture indicating that he had no idea what was happening either, his binoculars were also in the hands of the fair sex, that’s how men used to refer to women when it offended no one, when there still were things that caused offence. At the beginning of the final straight, I managed to make out the dark red stain of our jockey’s shirt, all the horses were still
bunched together, apart from two or three who had dropped back and had no chance of winning, the Condesa wasn’t amongst them. You could see the breath of thousands of spectators, which did nothing to help the already difficult visibility. Suddenly there was a collision and a fall, two riders rolled to the ground and covered their heads as soon as they had come to a stop, their brightly coloured caps sent flying, one of the horses rode on riderless, the other one slipped on the turf with its front legs spreadeagled as if it were skiing over slippery, compacted snow, a third took fright and gave a few hesitantly artistic steps before rearing up like a monster and wheeling round, like that horse in Calle Bailén two and a half years before, when I was out on a night-time walk, thinking about Víctoria and Celia and their carnal commerce, and perhaps my own.
Mēre. Mara.
The others speeded up so as to leave the collision behind them as quickly as possible and not become entangled in it, at that moment the race was split, every mount rode away from there as fast as it could, some moving away from the rails, others towards them, most lost their impetus or were reined in or held back. The horse bearing the dark red stain on its back was the only one that kept straight on without swerving, a path opened up along which she advanced unopposed, galloping smoothly onwards, the jockey didn’t even have to use the whip. “Come on, Condesa, come on,” I surprised myself thinking, I don’t usually shout in public places.

“Come on, Montoro, come on,” Anita was yelling at the top of her voice. “Yes, yes, yes,” she repeated excitedly. I reckoned there would be no disqualifications, despite that fall and possible irregularities. If the race was fixed, it had been done in an extremely risky manner.

The young women were leaping joyfully in the air, they embraced each other three times, they shouted “Hooray for number 9!” Lali dropped Ruibérriz’s binoculars and didn’t even realize she had, he picked them up ruefully, one lens was broken. He didn’t say anything, though, he was obviously overjoyed, he never leaves any game emptyhanded, and today was no exception. In the distance, I saw the Admiral tearing up his tickets with obvious annoyance, as was the incredulous philosopher who had arrived by then, everyone was tearing up their tickets. But not
us, I was pretty much set up for that month, especially as I was unlikely to be paid for the speech.

“Right, goodbye then, we’re off now, we’re in a bit of a hurry. Nice to see you, Señor Ruibérriz de Torres, Señor Francés. And thanks for your company,” said Señorita Anita, hastily saying goodbye to us both at the same time. They were in a hurry to get their money, I imagine that for that amount of money, they’d need to show some proof of identity, I don’t know, I’ve never won that much. Perhaps they wouldn’t even stay for the fifth race, the friend or good-for-nothing would be waiting for them in order to celebrate their win. We weren’t of any interest to them now. She gave me back my binoculars, I returned her hat which was the same colour as the winning jockey’s shirt. I watched her walk away, watched her nice legs with their plump thighs, her short skirt revealed where they began, she had sustained no runs in her tights at the races. She hadn’t, in the end, written down the name of the film, she would forget again, the Only One wouldn’t get to see it all the way through and so would keep remembering it, and continue to be bothered by vexatious bouts of insomnia.