In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  I can easily imagine the two men talking, and listen to their calm voices as the afternoon sun slowly leaves the room and disappears behind the roofs of the city. They are not exactly friends, because neither one is particularly sociable, yet they are united by a vague familiarity, by a common air of decorum, though Ignacio Abel is younger, of course. They use the formal usted with each other, which is a relief to Moreno Villa now that almost everyone calls him Pepe or even Pepito, reinforcing the suspicion that he’s lost his youth without gaining respect. He keeps comparing—he can’t help it—his rumpled, stained clothing to Abel’s suit; the tense, erect posture the other maintains in the upright chair as he spreads drawings and photos on the table to his own, old man’s carelessness in the easy chair that belonged to his father; his two more or less borrowed rooms to Ignacio Abel’s apartment in a new building in the Salamanca district, this father of two children whose work gives him a solid, undeniable place in the world.

  “And what will you do when University City is finished?”

  Ignacio Abel, disconcerted by the question, took a moment to answer.

  “The truth is, I don’t think about it. I know there’s a deadline, and I want that date to come, but at the same time I don’t really believe it.”

  “The political situation doesn’t seem very reassuring.”

  “I prefer not to think about that either. Of course there’ll be delays, I have no illusions about it, no matter how many guarantees Dr. Negrín gives me. All construction sites have delays. Nothing turns out the way it was planned. You know what you’re going to paint in that picture, but uncertainty is much greater in my work. Each time there’s a change of minister or a construction strike, everything stops, and then it’s even more difficult to get started again.”

  “You have plans and models of your buildings. I don’t know how this picture will turn out, or whether I’ll paint it at all.”

  “The model doesn’t serve as your guide? It’s calming to look at the fruit you have before you, the glass bowl.”

  “But if you pay attention, they’re always changing. It doesn’t look the same as it did when you came in a little while ago. The old still-life painters liked to put some blemish on the fruit, or a hole with a worm looking out. They wanted people to see that youth and beauty were false or transitory and that putrefaction was at work.”

  “Don’t tell me that, Moreno.” Ignacio Abel smiled in his quick, formal way. “I don’t want to go to the construction site tomorrow and think I’ve spent six years building future ruins.”

  “You’re lucky, Abel my friend. I like your things very much, the ones I’ve seen in architecture magazines, and the new market on Calle Toledo. Once I was passing by and decided to go in just to appreciate the interior. So new, and already so full of people, with the aromas of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, spices. The things you make are as beautiful as a sculpture and yet also practical and of use to people in their lives. Those vendors endlessly shouting and the women buying enjoy your work without thinking about it. I thought about writing to you that day, but you know sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In my case, you must be thinking, it certainly wasn’t for lack of time.”

  “I think you judge yourself too harshly, Moreno.”

  “I see things as they are. My eyes are well trained.”

  “Physicists say that the things we think we see don’t resemble in any way the structure of matter. According to Dr. Negrín, Max Planck’s conclusions aren’t far from Plato’s or those of the mystics of our Golden Age. The reality you and I see is a deception of the senses.”

  “Do you see Negrín often? He never goes to his old laboratory anymore.”

  “Do I see him? Even in my dreams. In fact, my nightmares—the only Spaniard who performs his job to the letter. He’s informed about everything—the last brick we laid, the last tree planted. He calls me at any hour of the day or night, at the office or at home. My children make fun of me. They’ve made up a song about him: Ring, ring, / Is he in? / Tell him it’s Dr. Negrín. If he’s traveling and isn’t near a phone, he sends a telegram. Now that he’s discovered the airplane, he has no limits. He lectures me by underwater cable from the Canary Islands at eight in the morning, and at five he comes to my office straight from the airport. He’s always in motion, like one of those particles he talks about so much, because aside from everything else, he’s always reading German scientific journals, just as he did when he was dedicated only to the laboratory. You can know at any given moment where Dr. Negrín is, or his trajectory, but not both things at the same time.”

  It was growing late. In the deepening shadow the two voices became increasingly inaudible and at the same time closer, now two silhouettes leaning each toward the other, separated by the table and the fruit bowl. The residual brightness, still beyond the reach of the dim light coming through the window, reflected off the white canvas on the easel, highlighting the few lines sketched in charcoal. Moreno Villa turns on the lamp next to his easy chair—the lamp and end table are relics of his parents’ old house in Málaga—and when the electric light illuminates their faces, it cancels the confidential, slightly ironic tone the voices had been slipping into. Now Ignacio Abel looks at his watch, which he had already furtively consulted once or twice. He has to go; he remembered again that today is San Miguel, and if he hurries he’ll have time to buy something for his son, one of those painted tin airplanes or ocean liners he still likes though he’s not a little boy anymore, perhaps a new electric train, not the kind that imitates the old coal trains but express trains with locomotives as stylized as the prow of a ship or the nose of a plane, or a complete American cowboy outfit, which would require him to buy his daughter an Indian girl’s dress, just to please the boy. She, unlike her brother, is in a hurry not to look like a little girl, but Miguel would like to hold her down hard and keep her from growing, keep her as long as possible in the space of their shared childhood. Ignacio Abel puts his papers and the photographs of traditional Spanish architecture back in his briefcase and shakes Moreno Villa’s hand, moving his head away slightly, as if before leaving he’d already stopped being there. An indolent Moreno Villa doesn’t walk him to the door but sinks deeper into the easy chair, as if trying to hide his loose, stained painting trousers and flannel slippers.

  “You still haven’t told me what you’ll do when University City is finished,” he says.

  “I’ll let you know when I have time to think about it,” says Ignacio Abel, compensating with a smile for the recovered stiffness of a very busy man.

  The door closes, and the footsteps storm down the hall, and in the silence of the room the distant noises of the city filter in, along with the sounds of the Residence and the athletic fields where isolated exclamations from players and the whistles of referees can be heard. Closer, though he can’t identify where it’s coming from, Moreno Villa listens to a burst of piano music that becomes lost in the other sounds and returns again, a song that brings to his mind, stripped now of grief but not of melancholy, a red-haired girl he said goodbye to in New York more than six years earlier.

  4

  AS SOON AS HE leans back in the seat, Ignacio Abel is overcome by uncertainty. Suppose he’s on the wrong train? The train begins to move and that brief moment of calm turns to alarm. I observe the automatic gesture of his right hand, which had rested, open, on his thigh and now contracts to search for his ticket; the hand that so often rummages, investigates, recognizes, driven by fear of losing something, the one that rubs his face, rough with the unwanted beginning of his beard, touches the worn collar of his shirt, finally closes with a slight tremor, holding the discovered document; the hand that has not touched anyone for so long. On the other side of the tracks sits an identical train that remains motionless, and perhaps that is the one he should have taken. In less than a second he is a bundle of nerves again. At the slightest suspicion of a threat, every fiber in his body tightens to the limit of its resistance. Now he can’t find
the ticket. He pats his pockets and doesn’t remember that a while ago he put it in his briefcase to be sure it wouldn’t become entangled in his fingers and fall out accidentally when he looked for something else in his trouser pockets, jacket pockets, raincoat pockets—the haunts of tiny, useless objects, breadcrumbs, coins of little value from several countries. He touches the edge of the postcard he didn’t mail. At the bottom of some pocket, the keys to his apartment in Madrid jingle. He feels the telegram, a corner of the envelope that contains the letter from his wife. I know you’d rather not hear what I have to say to you. He finally opens the briefcase and sees the edge of the ticket, his deep sigh of relief coinciding with the discovery that he’s again been the victim of an optical illusion: the train that’s started to move is the one at the next platform, an identical train from which, for a few seconds, a stranger has been looking at him. So he still has time to double-check. A porter has come into the car, dragging a trunk. Ignacio Abel goes up to him and shows him his ticket, attempting to pronounce a sentence that’s been clear in his mind but breaks down into nonsense as he struggles to articulate it. The porter wipes his forehead with a handkerchief as red as his cap and says something that must be simple but Ignacio doesn’t understand it at first. The man’s gesture is as unmistakable as his weary, friendly smile, and after a few seconds, like a clap of thunder after lightning, every word acquires delayed meaning in Ignacio’s mind: You can be damn sure you’re on your way up to old Rhineberg, sir.

  The ticket is for this train and no other. He knew it, but anxiety got the best of him: like an intruder, it usurped the movement of his hands, accelerated the beating of his heart, and pressed against his chest, lodging like a parasite inside the empty shell of his previous existence. In his heart, he no longer believes he can ever go back. Who’ll undo what has been done, raise what’s fallen, restore what’s turned to ashes and smoke? Would the human flesh rotting beneath the ground rise up if the trumpets of the resurrection were to sound? Who’ll erase the words, spoken and written, that sought to legitimize the crime and make it seem not only respectable and heroic but necessary? Who’ll open the door no one is knocking on now, pleading for refuge? Sounds travel at a perceptible though infinitesimally slow rate between his ear and the circuits in his brain where words are deciphered. He sits down again, breathing deeply, his face against the window, looking at the subterranean platform, a stab of pain near his heart, trying to calm down, waiting. In his mind two clocks show two different times, like two discordant pulsations he might detect by pressing two different points on his body. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s ten at night. In Madrid it’s been dark for several hours, and only the dim light of a few street lamps, the globes painted blue, can be seen in the deserted streets. Sometimes the headlights of a car driving at top speed emerge from around a corner, the tires screeching against the paving stones, mattresses tied haphazardly to the roof as an absurd protection, acronyms scrawled with a paintbrush on the side panels, a rifle protruding from the window, perhaps the ghostly face of someone whose hands are tied, who knows he is on the way to his death. (They didn’t bother to tie his legs; he was so docile they probably didn’t think it was necessary.) In the house in the Sierra where his children may still be living, they can hear in the darkness the dry thump of the pendulum and the mechanism of a clock that always runs slow. In the Sierra de Guadarrama the nights are cold now and the smell of damp rotting leaves and pine needles rises from the earth. Over the dark city, on the first clear nights of autumn just a few weeks earlier, the sky recovered its forgotten splendor, the powerful radiance of the Milky Way, which revived old fears from his childhood nested in the memories of a Madrid that predated electricity and the endless streams of headlights running down the streets. With the war, darkness returned to the city along with the night terrors of children’s folktales. As a boy, he’d wake up in his tiny room in the porter’s lodging and stare at faint yellow gaslights from the small barred window at the height of the sidewalk. He would listen to the footsteps and the pounding of the metal tip of the night watchman’s pike on the paving stones, his slow, frightening steps like the steps of the bogeyman himself. Many years later, in a darkened Madrid, footsteps and pounding were once again emissaries of panic: the elevator noises in the middle of the night, the heels of boots in the hallway, rifle butts banging on the door, resounding inside one’s chest to the accelerated rhythm of one’s heart, as if two hearts were beating simultaneously. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, they’re going to kill me. Now the train is really moving, but slowly, with powerful majesty and the vigor of its electric locomotive, granting intact the happiness of every journey’s start: perfect absolution for the next two hours when nothing unforeseen can happen. A brief future with no potential surprises on the horizon is a gift he’s learned to appreciate in recent months. He felt the same way, only more so, in the port of Saint-Nazaire when the SS Manhattan pulled away from the pier, the deep howling of the siren in the air, the engine’s vibration rattling the metal beneath his feet and the railing where he rested his hands as if on the metal of a balcony on a high floor. When he looked down at the shrinking figures waving handkerchiefs on the dock, he felt not the simple joy of having escaped, of actually leaving for America after so many delays, so many days in that state of fear and anxiety, but the suspension of the immediate past and the near future because he had before him six or seven days to live in the present without having to confront anything, fear anything, decide anything. That was all he wanted, to stretch out on a hammock on deck, his eyes closed and his mind clear of all thought, as smooth and empty as the ocean’s horizon.

  He was a passenger like any other in second class, still relatively well dressed, though carrying only one small suitcase made him somewhat unusual. Was a person traveling so far with so little luggage completely respectable? You may encounter problems at the border no matter how many documents you show, Negrín had warned him on the eve of his departure, with sad sarcasm, his face swollen from exhaustion and lack of sleep, so you’re better off not carrying much luggage in case you have to cross to France over the mountains. You know very well that in our country nothing’s certain anymore. As the ship left the pier, the war’s stigmas were left behind, the pestilence of Europe, at least for the time being, faded from his memory as water dissolves writing and leaves only blurred stains on blank paper. In a way, the war had reached the French border, the cafés and cheap hotels where Spaniards met, like sick people brought together by the shame of a vile infection that when shared perhaps seemed less monstrous. Spaniards fleeing from one side or the other, in transit to who knows where, or appointed more or less officially to dubious missions in Paris, which in some cases allowed them to handle unusual sums of money—to buy weapons, to arrange for newspapers to publish reports favorable to the Republican cause—grouped around a radio trying to decipher news bulletins that mentioned the names of public figures or places in Spain, waiting for the afternoon papers in which the word “Madrid” would appear in a headline, but almost never on the front page. They had stormy arguments, slamming their fists on marble-topped tables and waving their hands through the clouds of cigarette smoke, rejecting the city where they found themselves, as if they were in a café on Calle de Alcalá or the Puerta del Sol and what lay before their eyes didn’t interest them in the least, the prosperous, radiant city without fear where their obsessive war didn’t exist, where they themselves were nothing, foreigners similar to others who talked louder and had darker hair, darker faces, gruffer voices, and the harsh gutturals of a Balkan dialect. On the two nights he had to spend in a Paris hotel, waiting to have his transit visa and ticket to America confirmed, Ignacio Abel did his best not to run into anyone he knew. It was rumored that Bergamín was in Paris on an obscure cultural venture that perhaps disguised a mission to buy weapons or recruit foreign volunteers. But Bergamín was probably in a better hotel. The one where Ignacio Abel stayed, with a profound feeling of distaste, was la
rgely populated by prostitutes and foreigners, the various castoffs of Europe, among whom the Spaniards preserved their noisy national distinction, intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others, those who’d left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless, carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-Fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exile or furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by the identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn’t guarantee much and bureaucratic decisions always delayed, the hostility of hotel employees and the violent searches by the police. With his passport in order and his American visa, with his ticket for the SS Manhattan, Ignacio Abel had eluded the fate of those wandering souls, whom he would pass in the narrow hallway to the toilet or hear groaning or murmuring in their equally foreign languages on the other side of his room’s thin wall. Professor Rossman could have been one of them if, on his return from Moscow in the spring of 1935, he’d remained with his daughter in Paris instead of trying his luck at the Spanish embassy, where the clerks in charge of residency permits had seemed more benevolent or indifferent or venal than the French. At times during those days in Paris, Ignacio Abel thought he saw Professor Rossman in the distance, his arms around a large black briefcase, or holding the arm of his daughter, who was taller than he, as if he’d continued to have a parallel existence not canceled by the other, the one that took him to Madrid and nomadic penury, gradual loss of dignity, then the morgue. If Professor Rossman had remained in Paris, he’d be living now in one of these hotels, visiting embassies and consular offices, persistent and meek, always smiling and removing his hat when he approached a clerk’s window, waiting for a visa to the United States or Cuba or any country in South America, pretending not to understand when a bureaucrat or shopkeeper called him sale boche, sale métèque behind his back.