Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me Read Free Page B

although at the time her little boy was still awake. Her husband had doubtiess asked after the boy, and she had told him that he was about to go to bed; her husband had probably said: “Put him on so that I can say goodnight to him,” because Marta had said: “No, I’d better not, he’s still wide awake and if he talks to you, he’ll get even more excited and there’ll be no getting him to sleep at all.” In my view, that whole discussion was absurd, because the boy, nearly two years old according to his mother, spoke in a rudimentary, barely intelligible manner and Marta had to interpret and translate for him, mothers are the world’s first interpreters and translators, who interpret and then articulate what is not even language, they interpret the child’s expressions, their frantic gesturing and their different ways of crying, when the crying is still inarticulate and cannot be put into words, or excludes or impedes them. Perhaps his father could understand him too, which would explain why he asked to be allowed to speak to him on the phone; to make matters worse, the boy always spoke with a dummy in his mouth. I said to him once, while Marta was in the kitchen for a moment and he and I were left alone in the living-cum-dining room, me sitting at the table with my napkin on my lap, he on the sofa clasping a small toy rabbit, the two of us watching television, he directly and I obliquely: “I can’t understand you with the dummy in your mouth.” And the boy had obediently removed the dummy and, holding it for a moment in his hand, in an almost eloquent gesture (in the other he held the rabbit), he had repeated whatever it was he had said before, although equally unsuccessfully with his mouth unencumbered. The fact that Marta did not allow the boy to speak on the phone made me even more certain that this was a romantic supper, because the boy, in his garbled half-language, might, despite everything, have communicated to his father that a man was there having supper. I soon realized that the boy tended only to pronounce the last part of words with two or more syllables, though not always the whole syllable (instead of“moustache” he said “tache”, instead of “ice cream” he said “scream”: I don’t have a moustache, but a moustachioed mayor had just appeared on the screen; Marta had given me ice cream for supper); even knowing that, it was difficult to decipher, but possibly his father was used to it, his interpretative senses also attuned to that primitive language spoken by only one speaker who, moreover, would soon cease to speak it. The boy still used very few verbs and so barely spoke in sentences, he got by using nouns and the occasional adjective, and he said everything in the same exclamatory tone. He had refused to go to bed while we were having supper or not having supper but waiting for Marta to come back to the table after her comings and goings to the kitchen and her patient solicitude towards the child. His mother had put on a video of a cartoon on the TV in the living room – at the time I didn’t know there was another television in the house – to see if the flickering screen would send him to sleep. But the child remained alert, he had refused to go to bed, for all his ignorance or his precarious knowledge of the world he knew more than I did, and he was watching over his mother and watching over that guest whom he had never before seen in the apartment, he was guarding his father’s place. There were several points in the evening when I would happily have left, I already felt more of an intruder than a guest, and more and more of an intruder the more certain I became that this was a romantic assignation and that the child knew this intuitively – the way cats do – and was trying to impede it with his presence, dead tired and battling against sleep, sitting quietly on the sofa watching a cartoon he didn’t understand, although he did recognize the characters, because