Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías

Author:Javier Marías [Marías, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mystery, Classics, Spanish Literature, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780141199986
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT A DISGRACE it is to me to remember your name, though I may not know your face tomorrow, names don’t change and, when they become fixed in the memory, they are fixed for ever, and nothing and no one can remove them. My head is full of names whose faces I have forgotten or which are merely a blur floating in a landscape, a street, a house, a particular time or screen. Or else, they are the names of places and establishments that seemed to us eternal because they were there when we arrived or were born, a fruiterer’s called La Flor Sevillana, all those cinemas, the Príncipe Alfonso, the María Cristina, the Voy and Cinema X, the Buchholz bookshop near Plaza de la Cibeles or the grocer’s shop that has kept its old sign: Viena Capellanes, the Patisserie Hermanas Liso and the Hotel Atlantic and all those other hotels, the Hotel Londres y de Inglaterra, Oriel, San Trovaso, le Zattere and Halifax, countless names of streets and shops and towns – Calatanazor, Sils, Colmar, Melk and Medina del Campo – the names of the infinite number of actors and actresses seen since childhood and that echo for ever in our memory without our being able to recall their features: Eduardo Ciannelli, Diane Varsi and Bella Darvi, Ivan Triesault and Leora Dana, Guy Delorme, Frank De Kova and Brigid Bazlen, and through them, we can refresh our memory if we happen to see them again on screen, where, years and years ago, we first saw them in those unfading films. Places, on the other hand, have changed, shops have disappeared or have been replaced by banks, and sometimes those that remain are only the slow shadow of their former selves, we look at them from the street, not daring to go in, and, through the window, we vaguely recognize the ancient employees or owners who, when we were children, used to give us sweets and joke with us, we suddenly see them bent and diminished and ruined, with a life behind them, a life we did not witness, standing at their wooden or marble counters, they make the same gestures only less confidently, more ponderously: they get confused when giving change, their fingers fumble when wrapping things up. I can barely recall the face of a young, blonde maid who I tickled after cunningly pulling her down on to the bed when I was nine or ten and my parents were out, but her name returns instantly: Cati. I can scarcely remember the expression on the face of the cripple who used to get about in a little wheeled cart that he operated with a handle, selling tobacco and chewing-gum and matches at the place where we spent our summer holidays – half a man, his expression was proud and innocent – but his name is still there, crystal-clear, Eliseo. The childish faces, which will no longer be childish, of my more nondescript classmates, or the ones I was

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