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

the intervention of one’s will, or perhaps one’s will does intervene by simply stepping aside, perhaps it suddenly grows tired and, by its withdrawal, brings our death, not wanting to want any more, not wanting anything, not even to get better, not even to leave behind the illness and the pain in which it finds shelter, for want of all the other things that illness and pain have driven out or perhaps usurped, because as long as they are there, you can still say not yet, not yet, and you can still go on thinking and you can still go on saying goodbye. Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again, nor will you see me. And goodbye ardour, goodbye memories.”
    I obeyed, I waited, I did nothing and I phoned no one, I just returned to my place on the bed, which was not really my place, though it was mine that night, I lay down by her side again and then, without turning round and without looking at me, she said: “Hold me, hold me, please, hold me,” meaning that she wanted me to put my arms around her, so I did, I put my arms around her from behind, my shirt was still unbuttoned and my chest came into contact with her hot, smooth skin, my arms went around her arms, covering them, four hands and four arms now in a double embrace, and that was clearly still not enough, while the film on TV proceeded soundlessly, in silence, oblivious to us, I thought that one day I would have to see it properly, in black and white. She had said “please”, our vocabulary is so deeply embedded in us that we never forget our manners, we never, for a moment, relinquish our language and our way of speaking, not even in time of desperation or in moments of anger, whatever happens, even when we are dying. I remained like that for a while, lying on her bed with my arms around her as I had not planned to and yet, at the same time, as I had known I would, it was what I had been waitingfor from the moment I entered the apartment and from before then, ever since we arranged to meet and she asked or suggested that we should meet at her place. This was something else, though, a different, unexpected kind of embrace, and now I was certain of what until then I had not even allowed myself to think, or to know that I was thinking: I knew that this was not something that would pass and I thought that it might well be final, I knew that it was not due to regret or depression or fear and that it was imminent: I thought – she’s dying in my arms; I thought that and, suddenly, I had no hopes of ever leaving her, as if she had infected me with her desire for immobility and stillness, or perhaps with her desire for death, not yet, not yet, but then again, I can’t take any more, I can’t take it. And it may well be that she couldn’t take it any more, that she couldn’t stand it, because a few minutes later – one, two, three or four – I heard her say something else, she said: “Oh God, the child” and she made a sudden, slight movement, almost certainly imperceptible to anyone watching us, but I noticed it because I was so close to her, it was like an impulse from her brain that her body only registered as the faintest flicker, a cold, fleeting reflex, as if it were the tremor, not entirely physical, that you experience in dreams when you think you’re falling, falling over a precipice or plummeting earthwards, your leg kicks out as it misses its footing and tries to halt the feeling of descent and weight and vertigo – a lift hurtling downwards – of falling and gravity and mass – a plane crashing, a body leaping from a bridge into the river – as if, just at that moment, Marta had felt an impulse to get up and go and find the boy, but had only managed it in her thoughts, in that tremor. And after another minute – and five; or six – I noticed that she was lying very still, even though she was already still, that is, she lay even stiller and I noticed the change in her temperature and I no longer felt the tension in her