Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías

poet, poor Vicente Aleixandre, who lived nearby. And I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t checked that the windows and the balcony doors were all shut. “What if the child should have a fall tomorrow?” I thought. “Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow! And fall thy edgeless sword.” But there was nothing I could do now, I couldn’t go back into that flat whose door had been opened to me hours before by someone who would never again open it to anyone, and for which, for a short while, I had felt responsible, as if I were its owner, everything seems as nothing once it is over. I couldn’t even phone, no one would answer, not even the answering machine, I had the tape in my jacket pocket. In the middle of that yellowish, reddish night, I looked from one side of the street to the other, two cars passed, I couldn’t decide whether to wait or to try another street, to walk on down General Rodrigo, the fog doesn’t really tempt one to walk, I could see my breath in the air. I put my hands in my trouser pockets and pulled out something which I did not recognize by its touch as one does one’s own things: a piece of clothing, a bra, a size smaller than it should be, I had shoved it in my pocket without thinking when I followed the boy to his room, after he had appeared in his mother’s bedroom, I had put it away so that he wouldn’t see it. I sniffed it briefly in the middle of the street, the crumpled white fabric in my stiff black glove, the smell of a good, but slightly acrid cologne. The smell of the dead lingers when nothing else remains of them. It lingers for as long as their bodies remain and afterwards too, once they are out of sight and buried and disappeared. It lingers in their homes as long as these remain unaired, and on their clothes which will not be washed again because they won’t get dirty any more and because they become their repositories; it clings to dressing gowns, shawls, sheets, to the clothes that for days and sometimes months and weeks and years hang unmoving, ignorant, on their hangers, waiting in vain to be chosen, to come into contact with the onehuman skin they knew, so faithful. Those were the three things that remained of my fatal visit: that smell, the bra, the tape, and on the tape, voices. I looked around, the winter night lit by many street lamps, the kiosk in darkness, behind me the back of the poet’s neck. No cars passed, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The cold air felt good.

 
    I MET EDUARDO DEÁN a month later, although I had seen him before, not only with a moustache and in a photo and in his own home, but also without a moustache and in the flesh and at the cemetery, and not quite so young. A memorable face. We did not meet entirely by chance, chance had nothing to do with my presence at the funeral, which I had read about in the newspapers. For two days I watched for the dawn editions, leafing through magazines as I waited for the bundles of newspapers to arrive just after midnight, and I studied the way the newsagent sliced through the flat plastic ribbon securing them, and I was the first to take a paper from the pile and pay for it at the counter, before hurrying back to the café next to the kiosk and, having ordered a Coca-Cola, turning nervously to the page where you find the births and the weather reports, as well as the obituaries, birthdays, minor prizes, ridiculous honorary-degree ceremonies (no one can resist a mortar-board with a tassel), the lottery results, the chess problem, the crossword and even a complicated anagrammatic puzzle called the “revoltigrama”, and, most important of all, the section entitled “Deaths in Madrid”, an alphabetical list giving the full name (the person’s given name and their two surnames) to which is appended a number, the person’s age at the moment when they ceased to have an age, the age at which the deceased came to a halt, fixed in tiny print, for most people it is their first, insignificant and only appearance in