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

bluster. “Oh, I don’t know, anyway, you must have the volume turned down or perhaps you’ve gone out, I don’t understand it, you must have got your sister to look after the boy. Anyway, I’ve just got home and so I only just got your message, honestly, fancy forgetting that Eduardo was going away today, you can’t be very keen to see me, the one nightwhen we could have seen each other at our leisure, without having to resort to a hotel or the car. Shit, if I’d known about it, you could have come over here or I could’ve come over to you for a bit, instead of wasting the whole bloody night as I just have. Marta? Marta? Are you stupid or something, why don’t you pick up the phone?” There was another pause, a slight groan of exasperation, I thought: “It isn’t Deán, but he’s a bully, and rude with it.” The voice went on talking, quickly, irritably, but firmly, it was like the sound of an electric shaver, steady and hurried and monotonous: “Oh well, I don’t know, I don’t think you have gone out, and then there’s the boy, oh well, if you have gone out and you come back soonish, say, before half past three or a quarter to four, call me if you like, I’m not going to bed just yet and, if you want, I could still come over for a while, I’ve had the most ridiculous night, disastrous, I can’t wait to tell you all about the mess I’ve got myself into, it makes no difference if I go to bed a bit later still, I’ll be wrecked tomorrow anyway. Marta? Are you there?” There was a final, infinitesimal pause, the time it took for him to click his sharp tongue disapprovingly again. “Right then, I don’t know, perhaps you’re asleep, if not, we’ll talk tomorrow. But Inés isn’t on duty tomorrow, so there’s no chance of seeing each other. You might have remembered before, honestly, you’re bloody useless you are.”
    He didn’t say goodbye. His voice was hectoring, battering, condescending, he took liberties or was used to being allowed to do so, he was speaking to a dead woman and he didn’t know it. He was speaking angrily, reproachfully, urgently, to a dead woman, in a voice accustomed to tormenting others. Marta would never know, and he would never be able to tell her what had happened to him that night, he wasn’t the only one to whom something both ridiculous and disastrous had happened, it had happened to me as well, and more especially to her. And there would certainly be no chance of their seeing each other, he had no idea how remote that chance was, they would never see each other again either hastily or at their leisure, at a hotel or in the car or anywhere, and that fact momentarily and strangely gladdened me, I felt a glimmer of retrospective or imagined jealousy, as brief and discreet as the red light on the answering machine that flickeredwhen the man hung up, then became a steadfast “ I ”. “So, I was just playing second fiddle,” I thought and I thought it using exactly those words, that expression. And I felt a flash of disappointment when I thought immediately afterwards: “She really had forgotten that her husband was going away on a business trip, it wasn’t a pretext to invite me in his absence, in which case, perhaps she too didn’t seek it or want it; perhaps nothing was planned, or perhaps she just waited to see what would happen.” We had arranged to have supper together that night in a restaurant, then, in the afternoon, she had called me to ask if I would mind having supper at her place instead: she was so distracted lately what with problems and overwork, she said, that she had forgotten that her husband was going to London that day, she had been counting on him being able to look after the boy; then she hadn’t been able to find a babysitter, and she would have to cancel our date altogether unless I was able to have supper there, here, where we did, in fact, have supper, our glasses of wine were still in the living room. The invitation made me feel a bit