Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (2 page)

I looked at the walls of the bedroom which I had not even glanced at when I first entered it, because I had been looking at the woman who, before, had been by turns vivacious or shy and who was now in a bad way, the woman who had led me there by the hand. There was a full-length mirror opposite the bed like in a hotel room (they were a couple who liked to look at themselves before going out into the street, before going to bed). The rest of the room, on the other hand, was a domestic bedroom, for two people, there were telltale signs left by a husband on the table on my side of the bed (she had immediately gravitated towards the half she occupied each night and each morning – something beyond dispute, mechanical): a calculator, a letter opener, a sleep mask given out by some airline to shut out the glare of the ocean, a few coins, a dirty ashtray and a radio alarm, in the lower compartment there was a carton of cigarettes of which only one pack remained, a bottle of extremely virile Loewe cologne that someone must have given him as a present, possibly Marta herself on the occasion of a recent birthday, two novels, also presents (or perhaps not, but I couldn’t imagine myself ever buying them), a tube of Redoxon, an empty glass he hadn’t had time to put away before leaving on his trip, a magazine supplement listing the television programmes, programmes he would not see, for he was away that night. The television was at the foot of the bed, beside the mirror, they were people who liked their comforts, for a moment it occurred to me to use the remote control to switch it
on, but the remote control was on the other bedside table, on Marta’s side, and I would have to walk around the bed again or bother her by stretching my arm above her head, what would she be thinking about now, if it was just depression or fear that had gripped her. I stretched out my arm and picked up the remote control, she didn’t notice even though the rolled-up sleeve of my shirt brushed her hair. On the left-hand wall, there was a reproduction of a rather kitsch painting by Bartolomeo da Venezia that I happen to know well, it’s in Frankfurt, it depicts a woman with rather straggly ringlets and wearing a laurel wreath, a circlet and a diadem on her forehead, she is holding a bunch of small flowers in her raised hand and has one (rather flat) breast exposed; to the right, there were fitted wardrobes painted white like the walls. Inside would be the clothes that her husband hadn’t taken with him on his trip, most of them, it was a short trip according to what his wife Marta had told me during supper, to London. There were also two chairs with clothes draped over them, the clothes were perhaps dirty or newly washed and still unironed, Marta’s bedside lamp did not cast enough light on them for me to see. On one of the chairs I saw some men’s clothing, a jacket slung over the chairback as if the chair were a clothes hanger, a pair of trousers with a large-buckled belt (the zip was open, as it always is on trousers that have not been put away), a couple of pale, unbuttoned shirts, the husband had only recently been in that room, that morning he would have got up from that very place, from the pillow I was now leaning against, and he would have decided to change his trousers, he was in a hurry, maybe Marta had refused to iron them for him. Those clothes were still breathing. On the other chair there were women’s clothes, I saw a pair of dark stockings and two of Marta’s skirts, they weren’t like the skirt she was still wearing, they were smarter, perhaps she’d been trying them on, unable to decide, until a minute before I had knocked at the door, one never knows what to wear for romantic assignations (I had had no such problems, I wasn’t even sure if it was a romantic assignation and my wardrobe tends to be rather monotonous anyway). In the posture she had adopted, the chosen skirt was now horribly creased, Marta was doubled up, I could see that she was squeezing her thumbs with her fingers and had drawn up
her legs as if trying to use that pressure to calm her stomach and her chest, as if trying to contain them, that posture revealed her knickers and, in turn, part of her buttocks, they were very small knickers. Out of a sudden sense of modesty and to avoid her skirt becoming still more creased, I thought perhaps I should smooth it and pull it down, but I couldn’t help liking what I saw and it was doubtful that I would go on seeing it – seeing any more of it – if she did not get any better, and, besides, Marta had possibly expected those creases, they had begun to appear already, as usually happens on those first nights, which are no respecters of the clothes you take off or of those you leave on, although there is a certain respect for the new, unknown body: perhaps that was why she hadn’t ironed any of the clothes draped over the chairs, because she knew that the next day she would have to iron the skirt she put on tonight, which one, which is the most flattering, the night on which she would receive me, in such cases everything becomes creased or stained or crumpled and momentarily unusable.

Before switching on the television, I turned the sound down with the remote control, and, just as I had intended, a voiceless image appeared and Marta did not notice, even though the room immediately grew brighter. A subtitled Fred MacMurray appeared on the screen, it was an old movie on late at night. I flicked through the channels and returned to MacMurray in black and white, to his rather unintelligent face. And at that point, I could no longer keep myself from thinking, although no one ever thinks very much or in the order in which those thoughts are later retold or written down: “What am I doing here?” I thought. “I’m in an unfamiliar house, in the bedroom of a man I’ve never seen, a man I only know by his first name, which his wife has mentioned – naturally and irritatingly – several times throughout the evening. It’s also her bedroom which is why I’m here, watching over her illness after having removed some of her clothes and having touched her, I do know her, although not very well, I’ve only known her for two weeks, this is the third time I’ve seen her in my whole life. Her husband phoned a couple of hours ago when I was already having supper in his house, he called to say that he’d arrived safely in London, that he’d dined extremely well at the
Bombay Brasserie and that he was in his hotel room getting ready to go to bed, he had work to do the following morning, he’s away on a short business trip.” And his wife Marta didn’t tell him that I was there, here, having supper. That made me almost certain that this was a romantic supper, although at the time her little boy was still awake. Her husband had doubtiess asked after the boy, and she had told him that he was about to go to bed; her husband had probably said: “Put him on so that I can say goodnight to him,” because Marta had said: “No, I’d better not, he’s still wide awake and if he talks to you, he’ll get even more excited and there’ll be no getting him to sleep at all.” In my view, that whole discussion was absurd, because the boy, nearly two years old according to his mother, spoke in a rudimentary, barely intelligible manner and Marta had to interpret and translate for him, mothers are the world’s first interpreters and translators, who interpret and then articulate what is not even language, they interpret the child’s expressions, their frantic gesturing and their different ways of crying, when the crying is still inarticulate and cannot be put into words, or excludes or impedes them. Perhaps his father could understand him too, which would explain why he asked to be allowed to speak to him on the phone; to make matters worse, the boy always spoke with a dummy in his mouth. I said to him once, while Marta was in the kitchen for a moment and he and I were left alone in the living-cum-dining room, me sitting at the table with my napkin on my lap, he on the sofa clasping a small toy rabbit, the two of us watching television, he directly and I obliquely: “I can’t understand you with the dummy in your mouth.” And the boy had obediently removed the dummy and, holding it for a moment in his hand, in an almost eloquent gesture (in the other he held the rabbit), he had repeated whatever it was he had said before, although equally unsuccessfully with his mouth unencumbered. The fact that Marta did not allow the boy to speak on the phone made me even more certain that this was a romantic supper, because the boy, in his garbled half-language, might, despite everything, have communicated to his father that a man was there having supper. I soon realized that the boy tended only to pronounce the last part of words with two or more syllables, though not always the whole syllable (instead of
“moustache” he said “tache”, instead of “ice cream” he said “scream”: I don’t have a moustache, but a moustachioed mayor had just appeared on the screen; Marta had given me ice cream for supper); even knowing that, it was difficult to decipher, but possibly his father was used to it, his interpretative senses also attuned to that primitive language spoken by only one speaker who, moreover, would soon cease to speak it. The boy still used very few verbs and so barely spoke in sentences, he got by using nouns and the occasional adjective, and he said everything in the same exclamatory tone. He had refused to go to bed while we were having supper or not having supper but waiting for Marta to come back to the table after her comings and goings to the kitchen and her patient solicitude towards the child. His mother had put on a video of a cartoon on the TV in the living room – at the time I didn’t know there was another television in the house – to see if the flickering screen would send him to sleep. But the child remained alert, he had refused to go to bed, for all his ignorance or his precarious knowledge of the world he knew more than I did, and he was watching over his mother and watching over that guest whom he had never before seen in the apartment, he was guarding his father’s place. There were several points in the evening when I would happily have left, I already felt more of an intruder than a guest, and more and more of an intruder the more certain I became that this was a romantic assignation and that the child knew this intuitively – the way cats do – and was trying to impede it with his presence, dead tired and battling against sleep, sitting quietly on the sofa watching a cartoon he didn’t understand, although he did recognize the characters, because sometimes he would point at the screen and, despite the dummy, I was able to understand what he was saying because I could see what he was seeing: “Titin!” he would say, “Cap’n!” and his mother would stop talking to me for a second and turn her attention to him and translate or reinforce what he had said, so that not one of his incipient, admirable words would remain uncelebrated, unechoed: “Yes, sweetheart, it’s Tintin and the Captain.” When I was little, I used to read Tintin in large-format books, nowadays, children watch him moving and hear him speaking in a ridiculous voice, so I couldn’t help but be distracted from the fragmentary
conversation and from that much-interrupted supper, I not only recognized the characters, but their adventures too, the Black Island, and I could not help but follow them out of the corner of my eye from my place at the table.

It was the child’s refusal to go to bed that finally convinced me of what awaited me (if he did finally go to sleep and if that was what I wanted). It was his vigilance and his instinctive distrust that betrayed the mother, more so even than her silence when she spoke on the phone to London (her silence regarding my presence there) or the fact that she was too smartly dressed, too made up and too flushed for someone merely having supper at home at the end of the day (or perhaps she was just very hyped up). The revelation of one’s fear gives ideas to the person causing that fear or to the person who could cause it, the preventative measures taken against what has not yet happened cause it to happen, suspicions decide what was as yet unresolved and set it in motion, apprehension and expectation force the ever-deepening cavities that they create to be filled, something has to happen if we want to dissipate that fear and the best thing to do is to let it run its course. The child was accusing his mother by his irritating reluctance to go to sleep and the mother was accusing herself by her tolerance of him (it’s best to try and have supper in peace, she would be thinking, would have been thinking since the evening began; if the boy has a tantrum, we’re sunk), and both those things completely undermined the pretence that is always necessary on first nights, the pretence that allows us to say or believe later on that no one sought or wanted anything: I never sought it, I never wanted it. I too felt accused, not only by the child’s efforts to avoid giving in to sleep, but also by his attitude and the way he looked at me: he had mostly kept his distance, he regarded me with a mixture of incredulity and a need or a desire for trust, the latter was particularly noticeable when he spoke to me in his blunt, solitary syllables, almost always enigmatic, in a voice that was unexpectedly loud in someone of his size. He had not shown me many things and he wouldn’t let me hold his rabbit. “The child is right, he’s right to do that,” I thought, “because as soon as he goes to sleep, I will occupy the place usually occupied by his father, albeit only for a while. He senses that and wants to protect that place which
is also a guarantee of his place, but because he is ignorant of the world and does not know that he knows anything, he has smoothed my path with his transparent fear, he has given me all the
signs
I might not otherwise have seen: he, despite everything and despite knowing nothing, knows his mother better than I do, she is the world he knows best and for him she holds no mysteries. Thanks to him I will not hesitate to act, if I choose to act.” Gradually, overwhelmed by sleep, he had slumped further down in his seat and had ended up lying on the sofa, too tiny for that large piece of furniture – like an ant in an empty matchbox, except that an ant moves – and he had continued watching his video with his cheek resting on the cushions, his dummy in his mouth like a reminder or a superfluous emblem of his extreme youth, his legs drawn up as if he were going to sleep or about to go to sleep, his eyes still wide open though, he wouldn’t let himself close them not even for a moment, from where she was sitting, his mother peered across every now and then to see if her son had finally succumbed as she hoped he would, the poor woman wanted to be rid of him even though he was her whole life, the poor woman wanted to be alone with me for a while, not for long, just for a while (but I say “poor woman” now, I didn’t think it then, perhaps I should have). I asked no questions and I made no comment because I did not want to appear impatient or lacking in feeling and, besides, she herself informed me quite naturally every time she leaned back again: “Oh dear, his eyes are still like soup plates, I’m afraid.” Although he had been quiet, the child’s presence had dominated the whole evening. He was a tranquil, apparently good-humoured child and he really was very little trouble, but there was no way he was going to leave us on our own, there was no way he was going to disappear and go alone to his room, there was no way he was going to lose sight of his mother, who was now lying in the same position as her son had on the vast sofa while he battled against tiredness, except that she was battling against illness or fear or depression or regret and she did not look tiny lying there on her own double bed nor was she alone, for I was by her side, holding the remote control in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. “Do you want me to go?” I asked. “No, wait a moment, I’m sure it’ll pass, don’t leave me,”
replied Marta Téllez and when she did so, she turned her face towards me, at least that was her intention, she couldn’t have seen me because she didn’t turn her head quite enough, what she did see was the television screen and Fred MacMurray’s foolish face which I was beginning to associate with that of the absent husband while I thought about him and about what had happened, or what, until then, had not happened but had been planned. Why did he not phone now, sleepless in London, it would be a relief if the phone rang and she picked it up and explained to her husband in her enfeebled voice that she was feeling really ill and didn’t know what was wrong with her. He would take charge then, even though he was far away, and I would be free of all responsibility (the responsibility of one who merely chances to be there, nothing more), I would cease to be a witness, he could call a doctor or a neighbour (he would know them, they were his neighbours not mine), or a sister or a sister-in-law, so that they could be startled from their sleep and in the middle of the night go to his house to help his sick wife. And meanwhile I would leave, I would come back another night if the opportunity arose, when there would be no need for preliminaries or preambles, I could visit her tomorrow at the same time, late at night, when the child would be certain to have gone to bed. I couldn’t go waking people up, but her husband could.