In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “How are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isn’t that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think I’m the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Communist.” Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years he’d developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. “But tell me what you’re working on now, my friend, what projects you have. I’m happy to know you’re completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.” Professor Rossman’s oval head stopped moving, and his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, focused on him with an affectionate attention that made Ignacio Abel feel bewildered as someone much younger, a student not certain he can endure the scrutiny of the professor who knows him well. What had he done in those years that could measure up to what he’d learned in Germany, to the expectations he’d had for himself and his work? The nocturnal lights and strong colors of Berlin, the calm of Weimar, the libraries, the joy of finally penetrating a language he’d handled until then only laboriously and to which his ears suddenly opened up as naturally as if he’d removed plugs of wax, the lecture halls at Weimar, those rainy nightfalls of self-reflection, lamps lit behind curtains, bicycle bells echoing in the silence. The cold, too, and the scarcity of everything, but he didn’t care or notice very much. The hooves of policemen’s horses raising sparks on the paving stones, the solemn, angry demonstrations by unemployed workers in berets and leather jackets and red armbands, the placards and red flags lit by torches, the veterans with amputated limbs begging on the sidewalks, displaying stumps under the rags of their uniforms or faces doubly disfigured by war wounds and surgeries. The young women in short skirts, eyes and lips painted, chin-length hair, sitting on the terraces of Berlin cafés with their legs crossed, smoking cigarettes on which they left red lipstick marks, walking with determination along the sidewalks without male companions, jumping onto streetcars after the offices closed, heels clicking as they hurried down the metro steps.

  He didn’t think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadn’t known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didn’t count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didn’t recognize him and took frightened refuge in her mother’s arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what he’d done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruins—or, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because he’d mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where he’d been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madrid’s University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europe—he’d read something in an international magazine. “Write to me,” he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. “Let me know how everything goes. I wish you could come sometime to teach a course at the School. Let me know how your ideal city of knowledge progresses.”

  But neither wrote to the other. The promises, the good things they wished each other as they were leaving, were as abundant and unreal as the stacks of German bills that filled one’s pockets and weren’t enough to buy a cup of coffee. Suddenly time accelerates, and the children have grown without your being aware of it. On land where nothing existed—where pine groves had been uprooted by steam shovels, the ground leveled, the plain subdivided by imaginary lines—there are now streets with sidewalks, but no houses, young trees, buildings emerging from the mud, some completed but still empty, some inaugurated and put to use, the School of Philosophy and Letters Building is occupied, though masons, carpenters, and painters continue to work there, though students have to cut across open country and walk around ditches and piles of building materials to reach it. Through the windows of his office he could see the red blocks of the Schools of Medicine and of Pharmacy, almost finished on the outside, the structure of the University Hospital, surrounded by swarms of laborers, donkeys, trucks carrying materials, armed guards patrolling the site. Farther on past the somber green of oaks and pines, and above that, on a more distant plane, the outline of the Sierra, its highest peaks still snow-covered. It’s almost six on the large office clock, too late to receive a visitor who doesn’t have an appointment. The calendar shows a date in May 1935, which Ignacio Abel will cross out just before he leaves. He looked up from the board on which a student had spread a plan, and the pale old man from the other world smiled at him awkwardly, his eyes watery, stretching wide a mouth filled with ruined teeth, extending his hand, the other pressing against his chest the black briefcase, as immediately recognizable as his accent and stiff comportment from another century, the briefcase in which he no longer kept dazzling objects with which he’d transmit to his students the mystery of the practical forms that make life better: now he kept documents, certificates in Gothic print and gilt seals no longer worth anything, printed requests for visas in a variety of languages, copies of letters to embassies, official letters that denied him something in neutral language or demanded yet another certificate, some insignificant but inaccessible paper, some consular stamp without which the months of waiting and delays would have been in vain.

  “Professor Rossman, what a pleasant surprise. When did you get here?”

  “My friend, my dear Professor Abel, you wouldn’t believe what has happened. But don’t worry about me, I see you’re busy, I don’t mind waiting.”

  5

  A BLACK SILHOUETTE crossed the illuminated rectangle of the screen where the slides were being projected, next to the podium from which Ignacio Abel gave his lecture. His nerves settled down when he began to speak. He was calmed by the clear sound of his own voice, the sturdy podium on which he rested his hands. Before walking onstage he’d been comforted by the warm sound of the audience filling the hall, after having been afraid that no one would attend the lecture, his fear growing as the day approached; how embarrassed he felt that morning trying to hide his anxiety from Adela and the children during breakfast and then excusing himself from the table, explaining he would rather walk to the Student Residence by himsel
f. He’d been speaking only a few minutes when he’d asked that the lights in the auditorium be turned off, and the murmur of the audience dissolved into silence. On the podium, a lamp with a green shade reflected the white of the written pages onto his face, hardening his features with areas of shadow. He looked older than he was, as seen from the first row where Adela and their daughter were sitting, both nervous, Adela with a shy, protective tenderness, uneasy about his male vanity, the girl proud of the high, solitary appearance of her father onstage, distinguished in his bow tie and reading glasses, which he put on and took off depending on whether he consulted his notes or spoke without looking at them. The girl, Lita, who at the age of fourteen has a precocious love of painting, encouraged by her teachers at the Institute School, appreciates the composition of the scene whose fleeting center is the profile of a female shadow, moving in front of a slide projected on the screen behind her father’s back. She’s flattered that they’ve allowed her to attend the talk; that her father is aware of her and has signaled to her from the podium; that these cultured, amiable ladies whom her mother invites to tea from time to time have come this evening—Doña María de Maeztu, Señora Bonmati de Salinas, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s wife, who has such a pretty name, Zenobia, Zenobia Camprubí—and accepted her without condescension, remarking on how grown-up she looked. (Adela phoned the ladies to make certain they’d attend; she’d been infected by the fear she guessed at in him, the fear there would be no audience; she made the calls without his knowledge in order not to wound his pride.) Lita hoped the interruption hadn’t distracted her father, who complained so often at home about how loudly the maids played the radio, about the arguments between Lita and her brother. He remained silent, his glasses in one hand and in the other the pointer he used to indicate details in the slides, like a teacher in front of a map, wearing an irritated expression that Adela and the girl recognized, though it was subtle, when the door of the hall opened and a woman in high-heeled shoes walked in, her steps resounding on the wooden floor in spite of the caution of her movements. Caution and a certain insolence, or simply the awkwardness of someone who arrives late and has to move about in semidarkness. She passed in front of the beam of light from the projector, the entire length of the first row, toward an empty seat in the corner. I see the silhouette, moving and at the same time frozen, the profile against the screen as in a shadow play, the skirt made of light fabric like an inverted corolla. Ignacio Abel made it a point to stay silent, following the newcomer with his eyes and not hiding his annoyance. That evening in the Residence, in the darkened hall where he could barely make out the familiar faces in the audience—Adela, his daughter, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia, Moreno Villa, Negrín, the engineer Torroja, the architect López Otero, Professor Rossman, far in the back, his bald oval head among women’s hats—he was pleased by the strong, clear sound of his own voice and the attention he was getting, which had a lightly euphoric effect after the first few minutes of settling in, after the noise in the hall and the scraping of chairs, and after the several days of insecurity he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone came to an end. The silhouette of the newcomer was outlined on the slide of a peasant façade, a house built in the middle of the eighteenth century, he explained, looking at his notes, in a southern city, conceived not by an architect but a master builder who knew his trade and, literally, the ground he walked on: the earth that produced the sandy, golden stone of the lintel over the door and windows, the clay for the bricks and tiles, the lime that had whitened the façade, leaving exposed, with admirable esthetic intuition, only the stone of the lintels, delicately carved by a master stonecutter who’d also sculpted, in the center of the lintel, a calyx situated exactly at the axis of the building. He signaled for the next slide, a detail of the angle of the lintel. With the pointer he indicated the diagonal of the joint of two ashlars that formed the corner, where two contrary forces balanced with a mathematical precision that was even more astonishing given that the men who conceived and built the structure probably didn’t know how to read or write. Stone and lime, he said, thick walls that insulated against both heat and cold, small windows avoiding obvious symmetry and distributed according to an irregular order related to the slant of the sun’s rays, and white lime that best reflected the sunlight and eased the interior temperature during the summer months. With mortar and reeds that grew along nearby streams, they created natural insulation for the roofs of the highest rooms—the technique essentially the same one used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Architects of the German school—“myself among them,” he noted with a smile, knowing that isolated laughter would be heard in the hall—always speak of organic construction. What could be more organic than the people’s instinct to use what was closest at hand and flexibly adapt a timeless vocabulary to immediate conditions, the climate and ways of earning a living and the demands of the work, reinventing elemental forms that were always new yet never yielded to whim, that stood out in the landscape and at the same time fused with it, without ostentation or mechanical repetition, transmitted throughout the country and from one generation to the next like old ballads that don’t need to be transcribed because they survive in the current of the people’s memory, in the discipline without vanity of the best artisans. At the rear of the hall, in spite of the darkness, he guessed at or almost discerned the approving smile of Professor Rossman, leaning forward so as not to miss any of the Spanish words: the intuition of forms, the integrity of materials and procedures, courtyards paved with river pebbles tracing a rotating visual rhythm, tiles fitted together with the organic precision of fish scales. (He’d said that word again; from now on he had to avoid it.) As he spoke, he became less self-conscious and his gestures lost their initial rigidity, which perhaps only Adela had noticed, just as she noticed how his voice became more natural. He showed a paved courtyard with columns and a fountain in the center, which could have been in Crete or Rome but belonged to an apartment house in Córdoba, its form so well adapted to its function that it had endured with only minor variations for several millennia. Light and shade shaped just like the material—light, shade, sound, the flow of water in a fountain refreshing a courtyard, the opacity of the outside walls, the daylight that enters from above and spreads through rooms and hallways. Who’d be presumptuous enough to affirm that functional architecture—he almost said “organic”—was a twentieth-century invention? But it was fraudulent to imitate external forms by parodying them; one had to learn from processes, not results, the syntax of a language and not isolated words. Iron, steel, wide sheets of glass, and reinforced concrete would have to be employed with the same awareness of their material qualities that the plebeian architect possessed when he used reeds or clay or stones with sharp edges to erect a dividing wall, instinctively taking advantage of the form of each stone to fit it to the others, not feeling obliged to force it into an external mold. He showed a slide of a shepherd’s hut made of interwoven straw and rushes, another of the interior of a mountain shelter where with stones but no mortar a vault had been built that had the rugged solidity of a Romanesque apse. The chance form of each slab was transformed into necessity when it was fitted as if by magnetic attraction to the form of another. And at the heart of everything was the people’s instinct for making full use of scarcity, their talent in turning limitations into advantages. Until now the slides had shown only buildings. The click of the projector sounded and the screen was filled by a peasant family posing in front of one of the huts with eaves of admirably woven straw and rushes. Dark faces stared into the hall, the large eyes of barefoot, big-bellied children dressed in rags, a gaunt pregnant woman holding a child, a lean, dry man beside her in a white shirt, trousers tied at the waist with rope, and sandals made of esparto grass. In the Residence Hall the picture was something like documentation of a trip to a remote country sunk in primitivism. Just as he used the pointer earlier to indicate architectural details, Ignacio Abel now pointed out the faces he’d photographed only a few months earlier in a village of ph
antasmagorical poverty in the Sierra de Málaga. Architecture, he said, didn’t consist of inventing abstract forms, and the Spanish plebeian tradition wasn’t a catalogue of the picturesque to be shown to foreigners or used decoratively in the pavilion of a fair. The architecture of a new time had to be a tool in the great task of improving people’s lives, alleviating suffering, bringing justice, or better yet, or said more precisely, making accessible what the family in the slide had never seen and didn’t know existed: running water, airy spaces, a school, food that was sufficient and, if possible, tasty; not a gift but restitution, not charity but an act of reparation for unremunerated labor, for the skill of hands and the fineness of minds that had known how to choose the best rushes and braid them to hold up a straw roof or make a basket, the proper clay to whitewash the walls of a hut. From what those people have created over the centuries come almost the only solid, noble things in Spain, he said, original and incomparable, music and ballads and buildings. He was moved, Adela noted from the first row and privately shared his emotion. Ignacio Abel forced himself to contain an effusiveness that took him by surprise. He wasn’t quite sure where it came from, rising from his stomach, as if he were suddenly possessed not by memories of his father and the masons and stonecutters who worked with him, the ones who erected buildings and paved streets and dug foundations and tunnels and then disappeared from the earth without a trace, but by the awareness of those who’d lived before, several generations of peasants from whom he descended, those who’d lived and died in mud huts identical to the one in the slide, as poor, as obstinate, as lacking in a future as those people whose faces were fading, now that the lights in the hall had been turned on but the slide projector had not yet been turned off.