In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Extreme precision matters. Nothing real is vague. In his suitcase Ignacio Abel carries his architect’s diploma, signed by Professors Walter Gropius and Karl Ludwig Rossman in Weimar in May 1924. He knows the value of exact measurements, the calculations of the resistance of materials, the balance between contrary forces that keeps a building standing. What could have happened to the engineer Torroja, with whom he liked to talk about the physical foundations of construction, learning disturbing facts about the ultimate insubstantiality of matter, the demented agitation of particles in the void. The sketches in the notebook he carries in one of his pockets will be worthless if they’re not subjected to the illuminating disciplines of physics and geometry. What were the words of Juan Ramón Jiménez that seemed like the summary of a treatise on architecture? The pure, the precise, the synthesizing, the unambiguous. Ignacio Abel made note of them on a slip of paper and read them aloud at the Student Residence during the lecture he gave the previous year, October 7, 1935. Nothing occurs in an abstract time or a blank space. An arch is a line drawn on a sheet of paper and the solution to a mathematical problem, weight transformed into lightness through the interplay of contrary forces, visual thought converted into habitable space. A stairway is an abstract form as necessary and pure as the spiral of a shell, as organic as the arborescent veins of a leaf. At the top of a wooded hill, in a place Ignacio Abel has yet to visit, the white structure of a library already exists in his imagination and in the sketches in his notebooks. Beneath the iron arches and glass vaults of Pennsylvania Station, in the air flecked with dust and smoke, shaken by the din of concave spaces, the clocks mark a precise time: in a rapid spasm the eye barely perceives, the minute hand has just advanced to five minutes to four. The ticket Ignacio Abel holds in his lightly sweating left hand is for a train that leaves at four from a platform whose location he still doesn’t know. In the inside pocket of his raincoat he has the passport that was on the night table next to his wallet this morning, and a written, stamped postcard he forgot to mail in the hotel lobby is now in a jacket pocket next to the letter he didn’t tear into pieces. Two children growing up without a father at their most difficult age and in these times and my having to rear them all alone. The postcard is a color photograph of the Empire State Building seen at night, with rows of lit windows and a zeppelin moored to its splendid steel spike. Every time he traveled he sent daily postcards to his children. He’s continued to do so this time but doesn’t know whether they’ll reach their destination; he writes the names and address as if repeating an incantation, as if his obstinacy in sending the cards would be enough to prevent their being lost, like the impetus and aim with which one fires an arrow, or the meticulous resentment with which his wife enumerated each of her complaints in writing. Dear Lita, Dear Miguel, this is the tallest building in the world. I’d have liked to see New York from the sky, up in a zeppelin with you. In the ink-blue sky of the postcard a full yellow moon and conical reflectors illuminate the futuristic silhouette of the dirigible. Postcards and letters go astray now in the convulsive geography of the war. Adela’s letter and the telegram temporarily rescued Ignacio Abel from his gradual nonexistence in the hotel room, where for four days the telephone didn’t ring and no one said his name or even had the most incidental conversation with him. He also carries in a pocket the belated welcoming telegram from Professor Stevens, chairman of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at Burton College, the letter in which, through a hallucination of desire, he recognized Judith Biely’s hand, if only for a few seconds, as clearly as he heard her voice in Pennsylvania Station. Except he didn’t, and the writing doesn’t resemble hers at all. Last night, before turning off the light, Ignacio Abel read all of Adela’s letter and put it back in its envelope, leaving it on the night table next to his passport and wallet and reading glasses, resisting without difficulty the temptation to tear it up. In the room’s imperfect darkness, submerged in the hoarse vibration of the city that enveloped him like the incessant tremor of the ship’s machinery during his six-day voyage across the Atlantic, Ignacio Abel watched his wife’s old-fashioned delicate writing glide before his eyes, and in his wakefulness the words in the letter took on her monotonous voice with its simultaneous catalogue of reproaches and a sort of indestructible tenderness against which he had no defenses.

  After several days of waiting, time again accelerated in a disquieting way. It was almost three-thirty when he looked at his watch, and the train for Rhineberg left at four. It had become so late that he slammed shut the suitcase on the bed and realized only as he was opening the door that he had left his passport on the night table. He shuddered at the thought of leaving without it. An entire catastrophe can be contained in a moment’s carelessness. They were less than a minute away from killing him on that night in late July he often dreams about, when a voice saying his name in the darkness saved him: Don Ignacio, calm down, nothing’s going to happen. The blue passport with the seal of the Spanish Republic was issued in the middle of June; the year’s visa for the United States is dated early October (but everything takes so long, it doesn’t seem it’ll ever arrive). The photograph is of a huskier man, not exactly younger but less mistrustful, with a less insecure expression and eyes that will always have something furtive about them but rest on the camera lens with serenity, even with a touch of arrogance, accentuated by the excellent cut of his jacket, a crisply folded handkerchief and fountain pen in the breast pocket, the silky gleam of his tie, the obvious quality of his shirt. At each sentry post along the borders Ignacio Abel has crossed in recent weeks, the guards compared more and more slowly the face in the passport to that of the man who presented it to them with a docile expression that gradually grew more nervous. In this accelerated time, photographs don’t take long to become unfaithful. Ignacio Abel looks at his passport photograph and sees the face of someone who has become a stranger and ultimately generates no sympathy in him, not even nostalgia. Nostalgia, or rather a longing as physical as a disease, is what he feels for Judith Biely and his children, not for the man he was a few months earlier, and even less so before the war. Ignacio Abel’s eyes have seen things the man in the photograph, whose assurance is petulance, or worse, blindness, doesn’t suspect. A step away from the future explosion that will turn everything upside down, he doesn’t sense its proximity and can’t imagine its horror.

  Exact details: his passport has suffered the same deterioration as his clothes and suitcase; it has passed through too many hands, received the forceful impact of a good number of rubber stamps. The exit stamp from Spain has the badly printed red-and-black initials of the FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation, and the trace of dirty fingerprints. The hands of the French gendarme who inspected it only a few meters away were pale and bony and had shiny nails. His fingers handled the passport with the misgivings of someone who fears an infection. On the Spanish side, the Anarchist militiaman had stared at Ignacio Abel with a glint of threat and sarcasm, with contempt, letting him know he considered him a malingerer and a deserter, and though the militiaman let him pass, he didn’t renounce until the last moment the authority to seize the passport that meant nothing to him; the French gendarme, his head rigid above the hard collar of his uniform, had studied Ignacio Abel at length without ever looking him in the eye, without granting him that privilege (it requires training to examine someone’s face without meeting his eye). The French stamp, with a polished wooden handle, came down on the open passport with the crack of a metal spring. At every border someone will take his time studying the passport and any other document he feels like demanding, peer over his glasses with distrust, turn to a colleague or disappear behind a closed door, taking the suddenly suspicious document with him—someone who thinks of himself as a guardian, a master of the future of those who wait, admitting some, inscrutably rejecting others, taking his time to light a cigarette or exchange gossip with the clerk at the next table before turning back to the window and examining once again the person waiting, the one who knows he’s
on the verge of salvation or damnation, of yes or no.

  Perhaps today the enemy is in Madrid and the passport is no longer valid. On the floor of the hotel room, beside the bed, Ignacio Abel left a rumpled newspaper that the cleaning woman will throw into the trash without looking at it. INSURGENTS ADVANCE ON MADRID. The news item is three days old. INCENDIARY BOMBS FALL ON BATTERED CITY. In the middle of a sleepless night he listened to a news bulletin on the radio, read without pause in a nasal, high-pitched voice; the only word he could catch was “Madrid.” Between the advertising jingles and the whistles of static, the name sounded like a remote, exotic city lit by the brilliance of bombs. Perhaps by now his house is a pile of rubble and the country to which his passport belongs and on which his legal identity depends has ceased to exist. But at least the words “Spain” and “war” and “Madrid” were not on the front pages of newspapers at one of the station newsstands he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He looks at arrows, displays; he listens in passing to bursts of trivial conversations that become transparent and seem to refer to him or contain prophecies; one by one he examines the faces of all the women, not because he expects suddenly to see Judith Biely but because he doesn’t know how not to look for her. The mellow afternoon twilight descends diagonally through the glass of the vaulted ceiling and traces its broad parallel streaks stippled with dust on people’s heads. He tries to ask a porter in a dark blue uniform and red cap a question, but in the confusion his effort isn’t noticed. A column of people hurries toward a corridor under a large sign and an arrow: DEPARTING TRAINS.

  How long had it been since he’d heard someone say his name out loud? If no one recognizes you and no one names you, little by little you cease to exist. He turned, knowing it couldn’t be true that someone was calling to him, but for a few seconds a reflexive impulse continued to affirm what his rational mind denied. The voices of the past, the ones that still reach him in his flight, join in a sound as powerful as the one that echoes beneath the iron-and-glass vaults of Pennsylvania Station. Distance in time and space is their acoustic chamber. He’s fallen asleep after lunch one Sunday in July in the house in the Sierra, and his children’s voices call to him from the garden where the sound of the rusted swing filtered into his sleep. They tell him it’s getting late, that the train to Madrid will come by very soon. He answers the telephone in the middle of the long hall in his apartment and the foreign voice saying his name is Judith Biely’s. He walks into the shade of the awning over the café next to the Europa movie house on Calle Bravo Murillo and pretends not to hear the voice behind him calling his name, the voice of his old teacher at the Weimar Bauhaus, Professor Rossman. He has no reason to avoid him but prefers not to see him; he doesn’t know that this September morning is the last time Professor Rossman will call him by name on a street in Madrid. His voice is lost in a choral explosion of martial anthems, accompanied by drums and cornets, which emerges from the open doors of the movie theater along with a breath of shade and the smell of disinfectant. But the voice repeats his name, as Professor Rossman pats him on the shoulder, my dear Professor Abel, what a surprise, I thought you’d be in America by now.

  Auditory hallucinations (but the voice that spoke his name outside the locked door was not a dream: Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, don’t let them kill me). Ignacio Abel tells himself that perhaps the human brain instinctively hears familiar voices in such situations so that the mind doesn’t lose its grip on reality. He heard them this summer in Madrid, at night in his darkened apartment, larger for not being inhabited since the beginning of July, most of the furniture and lamps draped in white cloths to protect them from dust; he didn’t bother to remove them. He thought he heard the radio at the back of the house, in the ironing room, and it took him several seconds to realize it wasn’t possible, or that his memory had manipulated the sound of another radio in the vicinity and transformed the echo of a recollection into a present sensation. He imagined he heard Miguel and Lita having an argument in their room, or that Adela had just come in and the door slammed behind her. The brevity of the deception made it more intense, as did its unexpected occurrence. At any time, particularly when he abandons himself to restless sleep, the voice of Judith Biely would whisper his name so close to his ear he could feel the brush of her breath. In Paris, on his first morning away from Spain, the unexpected voices combined with the fleeting hallucinations. He would see a figure in the distance, the silhouette of someone on the other side of a café window, and for a second he was sure it was someone he knew in Madrid. His children, about whom he’d heard nothing, played soccer on a sandy path in the Luxembourg Gardens; the day before starting out on his journey, he went to say goodbye to José Moreno Villa, alone and looking older in a tiny office in the National Palace, bending over an old file—and yet now he saw him walking a few paces ahead on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, erect, younger, wearing one of his favorite English wool suits and a felt hat tilted slightly to the side. A second later the illusion disappeared as he came closer to the person who’d inspired it, and Ignacio Abel found it difficult to understand how the deception had been possible: the children playing in the Luxembourg were older than his and in no way resembled them; the man identical to Moreno Villa had a dull face, eyes lacking intelligence, and a suit of mediocre cut. Through the small round window of a restaurant kitchen he saw, and for an instant was paralyzed by, the face of one of the three men who’d come to search his house on one of the last nights in July.

  But the experience of the deception didn’t make him more cautious. Not long afterward, he again saw in the distance, at a café table or on a station platform, an acquaintance from Madrid, someone he knew was dead. At first the faces of the dead are imprinted deep in one’s memory and return in dreams and daytime hallucinations shortly before they fade into nothingness. The bald oval head of Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, whom he had seen and recognized with difficulty one night early in September at the morgue in Madrid under the funereal light of a bulb hanging from a cord where flies clustered, fleetingly appeared to him one day among the passengers sitting in the weak October sun on the deck of the ship he’d taken to New York: an older bald man, probably a Jew, lying on a canvas hammock, his mouth open, his head twisted to one side, sleeping. The dead look as if they’ve fallen asleep in a strange position, or were laughing in their dreams, or death came without waking them, or they opened their eyes and were already dead, one eye wide, the other half closed, one eye blackened or turned to pulp by a bullet. Sudden memories are projected in the present before him like photograms inserted by mistake in the montage of a film, and though he knows they’re false, he has no way to dispel them and avoid their promise and their poison. Walking along the boulevard that led to the port of Saint-Nazaire—at the end of a perspective of horse chestnut trees rose the curved steel wall of an ocean liner, where a name recently painted in white letters, SS MANHATTAN, gleamed in the sun—he saw a man with a broad face and black hair, dressed in a light-colored suit, sitting in the sun at a café table: through a trick of memory, he saw García Lorca again on a June morning on the Paseo de Recoletos in Madrid, from the taxi in which he was rushing to one of his secret meetings with Judith Biely. One of the last. Distance enlivened the details of memory with the immediacy of physical sensations—the June heat inside the taxi, the worn-leather smell of the seat. Lorca, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette at a marble-topped table, and for a moment Ignacio Abel thought he’d seen and recognized him. Then the taxi circled Cibeles and drove very slowly up Calle de Alcalá, where traffic had stopped, perhaps for a funeral procession, as there were armed guards at the corners. He looked at his wristwatch and the clock on the Post Office Building; he calculated each minute of his time with Judith that was stolen from him by the slow-moving taxi, the crowd gathered for the funeral with flags, placards, and the convulsive gestures of political mourning. Now he thinks of García Lorca dead and imagines him in the same light-colored summer suit he wore that morning, t
he same tie and two-toned shoes, dead and curled up like a street urchin in that posture of preparing for sleep displayed by the bodies of some who have been shot, lying on their side with their legs pulled up, face resting on a partially extended arm, sleepers tossed into a ditch or near an adobe wall riddled with bullet holes, spattered with blood.