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

pass in the end does pass and is washed away down the drain, and I need only imagine the coming of morning to see myself leaving this house, I might leave it even sooner, when it’s still night, crossing Reina Victoria and walking for a while along General Rodrigo in order to clear my head before hailing a taxi. Perhaps all it needs is for Marta to go to sleep and then I’ll have a reason and an excuse to leave.” Suddenly the bedroom door opened, it had been left ajar so that Martacould hear the child if he woke up and cried. “He never does wake up, whatever happens,” she had said, “but, that way, I feel more relaxed.” I saw the child in his pyjamas leaning in the doorway with his inevitable rabbit and his dummy, he had woken up without crying, possibly sensing the imminent death of his world. He was looking at his mother and looking at me out of the simplicity of the dreams he had not quite abandoned, uttering none of his few, truncated words. Marta didn’t realize he was there – her eyes tight shut, her long lashes – although I made a rapid, alarmed move to do up my shirt which I had not yet taken off, but which she had unbuttoned for me (too many buttons then and now too many to do them all up). Marta Téllez must be very ill indeed not to notice the presence of her son in her bedroom in the middle of the night, or not to sense it, since she wasn’t looking in his direction, nor anywhere else. For a few seconds, I was afraid that, at any moment, the child might enter the room screaming and clamber on to the bed next to his sick mother or burst into tears to attract her attention – her attention was focused entirely on herself and on her disobedient body. He looked at the television and saw Fred MacMurray who, in this scene, as he had been in other scenes for some time now, was accompanied by Barbara Stanwyck, a woman with a cruel, rather disagreeable face. He must have felt disappointed that it was in black and white and that there were no voices, or that it was Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck instead of Tintin and Haddock or one of the other important characters from his cartoon, because his eyes did not remain fixed there, as children’s eyes normally do when they alight on a television screen, instead he looked away at once, back at Marta. I blushed to think that it was my fault he was seeing his mother half-naked – almost half-naked, her bra had slipped off and she had made no attempt to cover herself – although perhaps he was used to it, he was too small for this to be a matter of importance to his parents and, besides, some parents consider it proof of a healthy lack of inhibition to share their own nakedness with the inevitable nakedness of their children, so frequent when they are very young. I still blushed despite this modern thought, however, and very awkwardly scooped up the bra from where it had fallen – it lay on the bed like a cast-off – in order, in a feeble, half-heartedmanner, to cover up its owner’s breasts. I did not, in fact, do so, because I realized that any movement, the touch of the fabric on her skin, would wake Marta up if she had gone to sleep or that she would, at any rate, open her eyes, and I thought it better for her not to know that the child had seen us, as long as the child allowed, I mean, as long as he did not cry or climb on to the bed or say anything. He obviously didn’t sleep in a cot or, rather, if he did, the bars must be quite low, just high enough so that he wouldn’t roll out in his sleep, but not high enough to prevent him from getting up if he wanted to. So I remained for a few seconds with that undersized bra in my hand, like a pale, paltry trophy, as if highlighting a conquest I had been unable to make, and which, in fact, was nothing of the sort: at that moment, I saw it as proof of my folly and my failure, and of hers. The child was obviously awake because he was there, standing in the doorway with his eyes wide open, but, in fact, he