Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí was published by Anagrama in 1994 (English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 1996), and its opening is among the most memorable in contemporary fiction: the narrator, Víctor, has gone home with a married woman, Marta, for what will be their first sexual encounter. Before anything happens, Marta feels unwell. Within minutes, she is dead — a sudden, inexplicable death that leaves Víctor alone in a stranger’s apartment with a corpse and a sleeping child.
What follows is a meditation on guilt without crime. Víctor has done nothing wrong — he did not cause Marta’s death, he could not have prevented it — but he is implicated in it nonetheless, simply by being present. He must decide what to do: call an ambulance? Wake the sleeping child? Leave quietly and pretend he was never there? Each choice carries moral weight, and Marías explores the ramifications with characteristic thoroughness, following each possible action to its consequences through long, spiraling sentences that refuse to simplify.
The title — from Shakespeare’s Richard III, where the ghosts of the murdered curse their killer with the words “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, / And fall thy edgeless sword” — establishes the novel’s preoccupation with how the dead continue to haunt the living: not through supernatural visitation but through the ineradicable weight of knowledge.
Collecting Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
First Spanish edition (Anagrama, Barcelona, 1994): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $15–$40
- First English edition (Harvill, 1996): $15–$40
- First US edition (New Directions, 2001): $10–$20