I decided to start the year, again, with Javier Marías. I started last year with
Thus Bad Begins and I started 2018 with
Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 3 and I started 2017 with
Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1 and while I didn't technically start 2016 with
The Infatuations I started it very early in the year and finished that book on January 11, 2016, so I feel like that's close enough and we can declare this a 5-year tradition.
When I read A Heart So White last year I had the sense that I should go back and read all Marías' books in order rather than in the haphazard way I have been doing to better pick up on the recurring themes, names, words. Maybe 2021 will be the year I do that.
The recurring words are, in a way, what led me to this book (though I would have found my way to it eventually). I found my copy at my regular thrift shop and when I saw the title on the spine, before I noticed the author's name, I thought, "I know that phrase." In fact, the phrase "Tomorrow in the battle think on me," comes from Richard III (several Marías titles come from Shakespeare), but where I know it from is
Your Face Tomorrow. Imagine my delight when I got to page 166 of
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me to a new chapter, which opened thus, "What a disgrace it is to me to remember your name, though I may not know your face tomorrow..."
Like
A Heart So White and
Your Face Tomorrow and
The Infatuations,
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me features a Luisa. As in several of Marías' books, the reader doesn't learn the narrator's name until well into the book: page 182 for his first name and page 232 (out of 311) for his full name. This time, I managed not to read the back cover at all (which, of course, reveals it) so I was as in the dark as I wanted to be. Several - perhaps all? - of Marías narrators are borderline creeps. I don't think he has a single book where the narrator doesn't secretly follow someone to a point that is beyond any kind of acceptability. But this narrator, the one in
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, might be the creepiest of all. And yet, somehow sympathetic.
While reading
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, at some point I thought, "This is the best one: this one has it all, and in just 311 pages too." In retrospect, I'm not sure if I actually prefer it to
Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, which I declared as my favorite at some point, but I do think this is a good book to start with.
Reading Marías is such an intense experience that of course it seeps out into your thinking and your everyday life. Yesterday, I tweeted about an old man I met in the Peneda-Gerês National Park in northern Portugal back in 2012. I was traveling on my own - it was my first truly solo international trip - and I stopped for a couple nights at the Hotel Águas do Gerês, a hotel in a small village within the park. Manuel was there with his wife and 4 or 5 other family members - siblings or inlaws - from their generation. They were spending 2 weeks at the hotel on a sort of health retreat, where they took the waters daily and went on little walks and were fed a special macrobiotic meal with barley water instead of coffee. It seems like something from a century earlier now that I type it out, but that's what they were doing. I don't remember which meal it was, but I was sitting alone at a table next to their large group table and Manuel was at the end near me and we struck up a conversation. He was the only member of his party who spoke English, though I did talk to some of the others with him as a translator. He was a retired air traffic controller and he had a son who was about my age or a little bit older, who was also an air traffic controller. I can't remember if we made the plan then or later, but he invited me to go out with him on a hike to a lookout point the following day. I had taken the bus to the village (I was a very different kind of traveler then! Mainly, I guess, I was a poorer one) and had no means of really getting around the park, so I was excited to actually get out into the park. We met after breakfast the following and drove a short way out of town and partway up a hill to a parking area and then walked up together to the Miradouro da Fraga Negra. Back at the hotel, he invited me to have lunch with his whole family, though the restaurant served me a regular meal not their macrobiotic one. I think I left that afternoon and moved on to Braga. I gave Manuel my email address and in the intervening years, usually around the holidays, we've exchanged occasional very short emails. (His English is pretty limited and my Portuguese is non-existent, and what is there to say, really, anyway?) As I wrote yesterday (when he sent me a funny cat picture that someone he knew had posted on Facebook), I'm cheered every time I receive one of these messages, partly just to know Manuel is still around in the world.
One of the themes in
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a concept of the time after someone has died but before those who knew that person know that she has died. Marías describes it as sort of unreal or enchanted, when a person is out and about in the world, not knowing that their world has in fact changed because someone important in their lives has died; a husband who for a full day does not know he is actually a widower. Of course, my whole world won't change when Manuel isn't in the world anymore, but it's likely I'll be in the dark for quite a while. Between messages, how am I to know he's still in the world? And if the next message never comes, how am I to know that he's not? I'm someone to him, but I'm no one to anyone else who knows him. His wife and her sister and some others of the party who were there in Peneda-Gerês may remember the young American woman Manuel invited to join them for a meal, but they surely don't remember my name if they remember me at all. If, in fact, they are still alive in the world.
