Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

movements or between movement and remark, when I thought ten minutes had passed or at least five. In other parts of the city something, though not much, would be happening, in orderly and disorderly fashion: I could hear the cars some distance away, there was not much traffic in that street, it was called Conde de la Cimera, and what I did know was that there was a hospital very near, called the Hospital de la Luz, where night nurses would be dozing, head resting on one hand, a superficial sleep born to be broken, legs crossed, wearing whitish stockings with lumpy seams, perched on uncomfortable chairs, whilst, beyond, some bespectacled student would be reading pages of law or physics or pharmacy for some pointless exam in the morning, forgetting everything he had learned the moment he emerged from the exam room; and beyond that, further off, in another part of town, at the bottom of the hill in Hermanos Bécquer, a solitary whore would take a few expectant, incredulous steps towards the kerb every time a carslowed down or stopped for the traffic lights: dressed in her best clothes on a cold Tuesday night, in order to be seen from either much too close to or else only from a distance, or perhaps she was a man, a young man dragging the heels of his stilettos because he is still not quite used to them or is ill or tired, his footsteps and his infrequent encounters with men in cars all destined to leave no mark on anyone, or to become superimposed one on the other in his confused, fatalistic, fragile memory. A few lovers would perhaps be saying goodbye to each other, they can’t wait to go back home alone to their own bed, the one rumpled, the other intact, but they still hang back, exchanging kisses at the open front door – he is the one leaving, or she is – while he or she waits for the lift that has remained motionless for a whole hour without anyone calling for it, not since the most noctambular of the other tenants returned home from a discotheque: the kisses of the one who is leaving, standing at the front door of the one who is staying, become confused with those of the day before yesterday and those of the day after tomorrow, there was only ever one memorable first night and it was immediately lost, swallowed up by the weeks and the repetitive months that succeeded it; and somewhere a fight will have broken out, a botde flies or someone slams it down on the table of the person bothering him – grasping the bottle by the neck as if it were the handle of a dagger – and the bottle doesn’t break but the glass table does, although the foam from the beer gushes out like urine; or someone somewhere is committing a murder, or, rather, homicide, since it is unpremeditated, it just happens, an argument and a blow, a cry and the sound of something tearing, a revelation or the sudden realization that one has been deceived, finding out, listening, knowing or seeing, death is sometimes brought on by affirmation and activity, driven away or perhaps postponed by ignorance and tedium and by what is always the best response: “I don’t know, I’m not sure, we’ll have to see.” You have to wait and see and no one knows anything for sure, not even what they do or decide or see or suffer, each moment sooner or later dissolves, its degree of unreality constantly on the increase, everything travelling towards its own dissolution with the passing of the days and even the seconds that appear to sustain things but, in fact, suppress them: the nurse’sdream will vanish along with the student’s vain wakefulness, the tentatively inviting footsteps of the whore, who is possibly a sick young man in disguise, will be scorned or go unnoticed, the lovers’ kisses will be renounced after a few more months or weeks that will bring with them, unannounced, the final night, the bitter, relieved farewell; the glass table top will be replaced, the fight will disperse like the smoke that harboured it that night, even though the person who