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

number anyway, in case several days passed, not that they would, that was impossible, too long a silence, suddenly the idea terrified me: someone would come, and soon, Marta went to work and would have to leave the child with someone, she couldn’t possibly take him with her to the university, she would have arranged for the child to be looked after by a child minder or a friend or a sister or her mother, unless, another terrifying thought occurred to me, unless she left the child at a nursery and took him there herself before going to her classes. And then what would happen, tomorrow no one would take him, or perhaps tomorrow Marta didn’t even have any classes or only in the afternoon and no one would come to the house until then, she hadn’t seemedworried about having to get up early in the morning, and had remarked that she had some classes in the mornings and others in the afternoon, and not every day of the week, which days though, or were they just tutorial times when she had to be there in the morning or the afternoon, I couldn’t remember, when someone has died and can no longer repeat anything, you wish you had listened more carefully to each and every word, other people’s timetables, no one ever pays much attention to them, mere preliminaries. I decided to go into the living room, I took off my shoes and went on tiptoe, I wondered if I should close the door of the child’s bedroom as I passed by, but the door might creak and wake him up, so I continued on, barefoot and on tiptoe, my shoes hooked over the middle and index fingers of one hand, like the villain in a cartoon or a silent movie, still making the floorboards creak despite all my efforts not to. Once in the living room, I closed the door and put my shoes back on – I didn’t tie the shoelaces, already thinking about the return journey, because I would have to go back – there were the bottle and the wine glasses, the only things that Marta hadn’t tidied away, she was particular about such things, and the wine had been left not by accident, but because we were still drinking a little of it as we sat on the sofa that had been occupied and finally vacated by the boy, after eating our Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream and before we kissed and moved into the bedroom. That hadn’t happened so very long ago, now that it was all over: everything seems as nothing to us, everything becomes compressed and seems as nothing to us once it is over, then we always feel that we were not given enough time. Next to the telephone in the living room there were a few yellow post-its stuck to the table – three or four had notes scribbled on them – along with the little rectangular block from which they came; on one of them was what I was looking for, it said: “Eduardo” and underneath that: “Wilbraham Hotel”, and underneath that: “Wilbraham Place” and underneath that: “4471/730 8296”. I tore off another post-it from the block and I started copying it all out with the pen I took from my jacket as I was putting it on (the time for me to leave was drawing closer), it was where I had left it, on the back of the chair that had served as a clothes hanger. I didn’t, in fact, copy outthe information, when you first get hold of a telephone number, you always feel tempted to dial it at once, I had the London number of that Eduardo whose surname I still didn’t know, but in his own house it shouldn’t be a problem to find out what his surname was, I looked around, on the coffee table I saw a few letters which I had had no reason to notice before and so hadn’t, it was probably the day’s mail that had arrived after his departure and would have been allowed to accumulate there until his return, except that now he would have to return very soon and nothing would accumulate. “Eduardo Deán”, said two of the three envelopes and the other said even more, an envelope from a bank with his two surnames on it, and if I called London there would be no problem