In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Professor Rossman no longer had to wait for anything. He’d been buried with several dozen other corpses and hurriedly covered by lime in a common grave in Madrid, infected without reason or fault by the great medieval plague of Spanish death, spread indiscriminately by the most modern and most primitive means alike, everything from Mauser rifles, machine guns, and incendiary bombs to crude ancestral weapons: pocketknives, harquebuses, hunting shotguns, cattle prods, even animal jawbones if necessary, death that descended with the roar of airplane engines and the neighing of mules, with scapulars and crosses and red flags, with rosary prayers and the shouting of anthems on the radio. In the tucked-away cafés and rundown hotels of Paris, Spanish emissaries from both sides closed deals on weapon purchases that would allow them to finish off their compatriots with greater speed and efficiency. In the midst of this carnival of Spanish death, the pale face of Professor Rossman appeared to Ignacio Abel in dreams and in the light of day, producing in him a shudder of shame, a wave of nausea, like the one he felt the first time he saw a dead body in the middle of the street under the relentless sun of a summer morning. If he overheard a conversation in Spanish at the cheap restaurant where he ate in Paris, he maintained a neutral expression and tried not to look, as if that would save him from contagion. In the Spanish newspapers, the war had been a daily typographic battle: enormous, triumphant, and colossally untrue headlines printed haphazardly on bad paper, on scant sheets, spreading false reports about victorious battles while the enemy continued to approach Madrid. In the Parisian papers, solemn and monotonous as bourgeois buildings, and secured in their burnished wooden holders under the soothing half-light of cafés, the war in Spain was an exotic, frequently minor matter, news of sheer savagery in a distant, primitive region of the world. He recalled the melancholy of his first trips out of the country, the feeling of leaping in time as soon as he crossed the Spanish border. He relived the shame he’d felt as a young man when he saw pictures of bullfights in a French or German newspaper: miserable horses, their bellies gored open, kicking in agony in a quagmire of guts, sand, and blood; bulls vomiting blood, their tongues hanging out and a sword running through the nape of their necks, turned into red pulp by the failed efforts to kill them with a single thrust. Now it was not dead bulls or horses he saw in Parisian newspapers or in newsreels at a movie theater where he longed for Judith Biely; this time it was men, men killing one another, corpses tossed like bundles of rags into ditches, laborers wearing berets and white shirts, their hands raised, herded like cattle by soldiers on horseback, filthy soldiers wearing grotesque uniforms, cruel, arrogant, driven by a senseless enthusiasm, as exotically sinister as bandits in daguerreotypes and lithographs from the last century, so alien to the worthy European public who had witnessed from a distance the massacre of Abyssinians holding shields and spears and who for months and with perfect impunity had been gunned down and bombed from the air by Mussolini’s Italian expeditionary forces. For a time the Abyssinians appeared in newspapers, in illustrated magazines, in newsreels, but once they’d played their transitory part as cannon fodder, as extras in the great masquerade of international scandal, they became invisible again. Now it’s our turn, he thought as he leafed through the newspaper in the restaurant, lowering his head behind the large sheets for fear a Spaniard at one of the nearby tables might recognize him. ESPAGNE ENSANGLANTÉE—ON FUSILLE ICI COMME ON DÉBOISE. Among the French words, rebounding like pebbles in the dense typography of the paper, were the names of Spanish towns, the geography of the enemy’s inexorable advance toward Madrid, where the flamenco music that played on the radio, broadcast by loudspeakers in the cafés, would be interrupted from time to time by a cornet fanfare and a resonant voice that announced increasingly glorious and unlikely new victories that were received by the public with applause and bullfight olés. DES FEMMES, DES ENFANTS, FUIENT SOUS LE FEU DES INSURGÉS. In a blurred, dark photograph he recognized a straight, white highway, figures advancing, laden animals, a peasant woman holding a nursing child whom she tried to protect from something that came down from the sky. He calculated the enemy’s distance from Madrid, probably reduced now by the rapid advance of recent days. He imagined the repetition of what he’d seen with his own eyes: wagons, donkeys, cars overturned in ditches, militiamen tossing aside rifles and cartridge belts to run faster through the countryside, officers shouting orders no one understood or obeyed. The highway was an overflowing river of human beings, animals, and machines pushed forward by the seismic upheaval of an enemy that was close but still invisible. Beside him, in the back seat of the official automobile caught in a traffic jam of trucks and peasant wagons, among which, absurdly, a flock of goats wandered, Negrín contemplated the disaster with an expression of dejected fatalism, his profile morose against the window, his chin thrust into his fist, while the uniformed driver uselessly blew the horn in an attempt to inch forward. A little beyond the highway stood a white house with a grape arbor, a gentle slope of dark earth recently tilled for autumn planting. In the background, against the clear afternoon sky, rose a great column of thick, black smoke that gave off a smell of gasoline and burned tires. “They’re much closer than we thought,” said Negrín. Hostile or terrified faces pressed against the car windows trying to peer inside. Furious fists and rifle butts struck the roof and sides. “I don’t think they’ll let us get through, Don Juan,” said the militiaman who was their bodyguard and sat beside the driver.

  Perhaps Professor Rossman decided to try his luck in Spain because he trusted in the help of his former student Ignacio Abel, who could have saved his life yet did nothing, or almost nothing, for him. Who could have warned him at least, advised him not to talk so loud, or make himself so visible, or tell anyone what had happened in Germany, what he’d seen in Moscow. Abel could have supported him with more conviction and not merely arrange job interviews that led nowhere or hire his daughter to give Lita and Miguel German lessons. But the favors granted least frequently are those that would cost almost nothing: need that is too apparent provokes rejection; the vehemence of a request guarantees it will receive no response. Professor Rossman’s eyes were more faded than he remembered, and his skin was whiter, a little viscous, the skin of someone who’s grown accustomed to living in damp shadows, without the military luster his bald head once displayed, shining under the electric light of a lecture hall on the early nights of winter. Ignacio Abel raised tired eyes from the worktable covered by blueprints and documents in his University City office, and the pale man dressed with funereal severity who called him by name and held out his hand wore the uncertain smile of someone hoping to be recognized. But Dr. Rossman was not an older version of the man Ignacio Abel had met in Weimar in 1923 or to whom he’d said goodbye one day in September 1929 in Barcelona, at the France Station, after visiting the German pavilion at the International Exposition with him and spending hours talking passionately in a café; less than six years later, in April or May of 1935, he was another man, not changed or aged but transfigured, his skin pale as if his blood had been diluted or extracted, his eyes like slightly cloudy water, his gestures as frail and his voice as faint as a convalescent’s, his suit as worn as if he hadn’t taken it off, even to go to sleep, since leaving Barcelona in 1929. When one no longer has a bathroom, a clean bed, and running water, deterioration comes quickly. Very quickly, and at the same time very gradually. Your shirt collar turns darker even though you scrub it in a sink; your shoes stretch, crossed by cracks resembling the wrinkles in a face; the elbows of your jacket, the knees of your trousers, take on the shine of an old cassock or a fly’s wing. Ever since he was a child, Ignacio Abel had instinctively spotted misfortune that afflicted impoverished decent people, respectable tenants late in paying rent in the building where his mother worked as porter: gentlemen with slicked-back hair and misshapen boots who would bend down rapidly to retrieve a cigarette butt from the ground or look furtively inside a garbage can; aging widows who went to Mass, leaving on the staircase a trail of unfathomable stenc
h, their greasy chignons held by combs under mended veils; clerks wearing ties and celluloid collars, their nails dirty, their breath smelling of sour café con leche and ulcers. Seeing Professor Rossman appear without warning in his University City office as if he’d just returned from the land of the dead, Ignacio Abel felt the same mixture of pity and revulsion those people had inspired in him when he was a boy. Professor Rossman’s smile seemed strange now that almost all his teeth were missing. The only thing that remained of his former presence, aside from his formality—the bow tie, hard collar, high shoes, the suit tailored before 1914—was the large briefcase he held with both hands against his chest, the same one he’d drop on his desk in a lecture hall at the Bauhaus, producing a metallic noise of random objects and junk, but more worn now, with the consistency of cracked parchment, as soft as his toothless mouth but still maintaining all the Germanic severity of a professor’s briefcase with its metal buckles and clasps and reinforced corners, the briefcase from which the most unexpected objects would emerge during his classes, like the doves or rabbits or scarves that come out of a magician’s top hat.

  One by one, with the comic astonishment of a silent film, Professor Rossman would remove from his apparently bottomless briefcase perfectly ordinary objects that in his hands took on the miraculous quality of the newly invented. In his Weimar class in an unheated lecture hall, where the cold wind blew through broken windowpanes, Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, without removing his overcoat or scarf, examined as if they were pristine inventions or recently discovered treasures the most mundane tools, the kind that everyone uses every day and no one notices because their invisibility, he’d say, was the measure of their efficiency, the test of a form corresponding to a task—a form often shaped over centuries, even millennia, like the spiral of a shell or the almost flat curvature of a pebble polished by the friction of sand and water at the ocean’s edge. No books, sketches, or architectural magazines came out of Professor Rossman’s briefcase but the tools of carpenters, stonecutters, and masons, plumb lines, spinning tops, clay bowls, a spoon, a pencil, the handle of a coffee grinder, a black rubber ball that rebounded off the ceiling after popping up like a spring before the infantilized eyes of the students, an artist’s brush, a paintbrush, an Italian vase of heavy green glass, a crank of corrugated brass, a packet of cigarette papers, a lightbulb, a baby’s bottle, a pair of scissors. Reality was a labyrinth and a laboratory of objects that were prodigious but so common you easily forgot they didn’t exist in nature but were products of the human imagination. A horizontal plane, he’d say, a staircase. In nature the only horizontal plane was motionless water, the distant horizon at sea. A natural cave or a treetop can suggest the idea of a roof, a column. But what mental process first produced the concept of a staircase? In the icy lecture hall, his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, not removing his overcoat or wool gloves, Professor Rossman, who was susceptible to the cold, could spend an entire class voluptuously concentrating on the form and function of a pair of scissors, the manner in which the two sharpened arms opened like a bird’s beak or an alligator’s jaws and cut a sheet of paper perfectly, cleanly, following a straight or curved line, the sinuous profiled lines of a caricature. His coat pockets were always stuffed with everyday objects, things he would pick up from the ground, and when he probed them with his glove-covered fingers, looking for something specific, he’d usually come across another unexpected object that demanded his attention and fired his enthusiasm. The six sides of a die, dots bored into each one of them, contained the infinite possibilities of chance. Nothing was more beautiful than a well-polished ball rolling on a smooth surface. A tiny match contained the marvelous solution to the millenarian problem of producing and transporting fire. He extracted the match from its box with care, as if he were removing a dried butterfly whose wings could be destroyed if handled too casually, held it between his thumb and index finger, showed it to the students, raising it in a somehow liturgical gesture. He pondered its qualities, the delicate, diminutive pear shape of the head, the body of wood or waxed paper. The box itself, with its complication of angles and the master stroke of intuition it had been to invent two parts that adjusted to each other so effortlessly and at the same time were easy to open. When he struck the match, the tiny sound of the match head running along the thin strip of sandpaper was heard with perfect clarity in the silence of the lecture hall, and the small burst of flame seemed like a miracle. Radiant, like someone who’s successfully completed an experiment, Professor Rossman displayed the burning match. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it as naturally as if he were in a café, and only then, once he had put out the match, did those listening to his exposition emerge from the hypnotic trance they’d been led into without realizing it.

  Professor Rossman was like a peddler of the most vulgar, most improbable things. He lectured as easily on the practical virtues of a spoon’s curvature as on the exquisite visual rhythms of the radii of a bicycle wheel in motion. Other professors at the School proselytized for the new, while Professor Rossman revealed the innovation and sophistication that remain hidden and yet produce results in what has always existed. He would clear the middle of the table, place on it a top he’d bought on his way to the School from some children playing in the street, start it twirling with an abrupt, skilled gesture, and watch it spin, as dazzled as if he were witnessing the rotation of a heavenly body. “Invent something like this,” he challenged the students with a smile. “Invent the top, or the spoon, or the pencil. Invent the book that can be carried in a pocket and contains the Iliad or Goethe’s Faust. Invent the match, the jug handle, the scale, the carpenter’s folding ruler, the sewing needle, the scissors. Perfect the wheel or the fountain pen. Think of the time when some of these things didn’t exist.” Then he looked at his wristwatch—he was enthusiastic about this new gadget, which had appeared, according to him, among British officers during the war—picked up his things, placed his lunatic inventor’s or junkman’s objects back in his briefcase, filled his pockets with them, and dismissed the class with a nod and a mock-military click of his heels.

  “My dear friend, don’t you remember me?”

  But it hadn’t been that long. In Barcelona, less than six years earlier, Professor Rossman, stouter and balder than in Weimar, in one of the suits probably cut by the same tailor who had made them for him before 1914, inspected the final details of the German pavilion at the International Exposition with bird-like gestures and an owl’s pale eyes behind his glasses. He had to be sure everything would be just right when Mies van der Rohe made his grand appearance there, wearing the monocle of a Prussian officer, chewing the long ebony holder into which he inserted cigarettes with a surgical flourish. Professor Rossman took Ignacio Abel’s arm, asked about his work in Spain, lamented that he hadn’t returned to the School now that things had improved so much and there was a new, magnificent campus in Dessau. He passed his hand over a polished surface of dark green marble to check its cleanliness, studied the alignment of a piece of furniture or a sculpture, brought his eyes close to a sign as if to make certain the typography was exact. In the austere, limpid space no one had visited yet, Dr. Rossman seemed even more anachronistic with his stiff collar, high shoes in that 1900 style, and the aloof courtesy of an imperial functionary. But his hands touched objects with the same old avidity, confirming textures, angles, curvatures, and in his eyes was the same permanent mixture of interrogation and amazement, a brazen urgency to see everything, a childish joy at incessant discoveries. Now his jovial disposition had been strengthened along with his physical presence, and he recalled with relief the not so distant past of uncertainty, inflation, hunger, days when he carried a boiled potato, his only food for the day, in his bottomless briefcase or in a coat pocket, when in the unheated lecture halls of the School it was so cold he couldn’t hold the chalk between his frostbitten fingers. “But you remember as well, my friend, you spent the winter of 1923 with us.” Now Professor Rossman looked at the future with a serenity
tempered by the basic mistrust of someone who’s already seen the world drown once. “You have to come back to Germany. You won’t recognize Berlin. You can’t imagine the number of new, beautiful buildings being built. You can see them in the magazines, of course, but you know it’s not the same thing. Berlin resembles New York. You have to see the new neighborhoods with workers’ housing, the big department stores, the lights at night. Things we dreamed about at the School in the middle of the disaster seem to have become reality. A few, not many. But you know how something well made, even if small, can make a difference.”

  The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took one’s breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that won’t be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of Gaudí’s buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.