Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page A

it to some woman when he’s grown up, a woman who has probably not even been born yet. And there’ll be other things that no one will want because they are only of use to me: my tweezers, or my opened bottle of cologne, my underwear and my dressing gown and my sponge, my shoes and the wicker chairs that Eduardo hates, my lotions and medicines, my sunglasses, my notebooks and index cards and my cuttings and all the books that only I read, my collection of shells and my old records, the doll I’ve kept since I was a child, my toy lion, they might even have to pay someone to take them away, there are no longer eager, obliging rag-and-bone men as there were in my childhood, they wouldn’t turn their nose up at anything and would drive through the streets holding up the traffic, car drivers then were still prepared to slow down for their mule-drawn carts, it seems incredible that I should have seen that, not so very long ago, I’m still young and it wasn’t that long ago, the carts that grew to impossibleheights as they picked things up and loaded them on until the carts were as tall as one of those open-topped double deckers you see in London, except that here the buses were blue and drove on the right; and as the pile of things grew higher, the swaying of the cart drawn by a single, weary mule became more pronounced – a rocking motion – and it seemed that all that plundered detritus – defunct fridges and cardboard boxes and crates, a rolled-up bedside rug and a sagging, broken-down chair – was constantly on the point of toppling over, unseating the gypsy girl who invariably crowned the pile, acting like a counterbalance, or as if she were an emblem or Our Lady of rag-and-bone men, a rather grubby girl, often blonde, sitting with her back to the load, with her legs dangling over the edge of the cart, and from her perch or peak, she would look back at the world and at us in our school uniforms as we overtook her, and we, in turn, clutching our files and chewing our gum, watched her from the top deck of the buses that took us to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. We regarded each other with mutual envy, the adventurous life and the life of timetables, the outdoor life and the easy life, and I always wondered how she managed to avoid the branches of the trees that stuck out over the pavements and knocked against the high windows as if in protest at our speed, as if wanting to reach through the windows and scratch us: she had no protection and was alone, perched up high, suspended in the air, but I imagine that her cart moved slowly enough to give her time to see them and to duck down, or to grasp them and hold them back with one grimy hand that protruded from the long sleeve of a torn, woollen, zip-up cardigan. It isn’t just the minuscule history of objects that will disappear in that single moment, it’s also everything I know and have learned, all my memories and everything I’ve ever seen – the double-decker bus and the rag-and-bone men’s carts and the gypsy girl and the thousand and one things that passed before my eyes and are of no importance to anyone else – my memories which, like so many of my belongings, are only of use to me and become useless if I die, what disappears is not only who I am but who I have been, not only me, poor Marta, but my whole memory, a ragged, discontinuous, never-completed, ever-changing scrap of fabric, but, at the same time, woven withsuch patience and such extreme care, undulating and variable as my shot-silk skirts, fragile as my silk blouses that tear so easily, I haven’t worn those skirts for ages, I got tired of them, and it’s odd that this should all happen in a moment, why this moment and not another, why not the previous moment or the next one, why today, this month, this week, a Tuesday in January or a Sunday in September, unpleasant months and days about which one has no choice, what decides that what was in motion should just stop, without