Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías Page A

the press, as if, apart from a random age and a name, they had never been anything. The list is fairly long – about sixty people – I’d never it read before and it’s quite consoling to see that, generally speaking, most of those listed were quite advanced in years, people tend to live to a good age; 74, 90, 71, 60, 62, 80, 65, 81, 80, 84, 66, 91, 92, 90, almost all the nonagenarians are women, and fewer women than men die each day, or so it seems from therecords. The first day only three of the deceased were under forty-five, they were all men and one of them was a foreigner called Reinhold Müller, 40, what could have happened to him? Marta didn’t appear, so presumably she hadn’t yet been found, or else the news hadn’t arrived in time, newspapers go to press much earlier than people believe. By then, about twenty hours had elapsed since I had left the apartment. If someone had gone there in the morning, there would have been plenty of time to call a doctor, for the latter to fill out a death certificate, for someone to tell Deán in London, even for him to fly back, in times of misfortune, in cases of emergency, everything is made easy, if someone stands imploringly at an airline counter and says: “My wife has died, my son is all alone,” the company will instantly find him a seat on the next flight out, in order not to be dubbed “hardhearted”. But none of that had apparently happened, because Marta Téllez’s name, along with her second surname which I did not know, and her age when she died – 33, 35, 32, 34? – did not appear in the list. Perhaps the shock, perhaps the sadness of it all had meant that no one had thought to comply with the formalities. But people always call a doctor, so that he can certify and confirm what everyone thinks (so that he can provide verification with his warm, infallible doctor’s hand trained to recognize and identify death), to confirm what I both thought and knew when I lay at Marta’s back, holding her in my arms. What if I had been mistaken and she hadn’t died? I’m not a doctor. And what if she had merely lost consciousness and then recovered it in the morning and life had carried on as normal, her little boy packed off to nursery school and she back at her work, my night-time visit relegated to the world of mad escapades and bad dreams, everything tidied away and the sheets changed, even though I had never actually slipped between them? It’s curious how easily one’s thoughts are drawn to the improbable, allowing themselves that momentary lapse, finding rest or relief in fantasy and superstition, blithely capable of denying the facts and turning back the clock, even if only for an instant. It’s curious how it all seems so like a dream.
    It was nearly one o’clock in the cafeteria-cum-supermarket, the place was packed with people having supper and shopping, and in England it was still an hour earlier. I got up and went over to thetelephone, luckily it was a card phone and I had a card on me, I took out the piece of paper with the number of the Wilbraham Hotel on it that I had kept in my wallet, and when I heard the porter’s voice (the same one, he was obviously on permanent night duty) I asked him for Señor Ballesteros. This time he didn’t hesitate, he said to me: “Just a moment please.”
    He didn’t ask if I knew the room number or anything, instead he added it himself, as if broadcasting his actions and his thoughts (“Ballesteros. Fifty-Two. Right …” he said, pronouncing the surname as if it had only one “1”), and I suddenly heard the extension ringing, which took me by surprise, I wasn’t prepared for that, nor, immediately afterwards, to hear a new voice saying: “Hello”. I couldn’t tell from that one word if the voice was Spanish or British (or, if it was Spanish, whether or not he had a good English accent), because I hung up as soon as I heard it. “Good God,” I thought, “the man’s still in England, he obviously