In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  In a drawer in his study locked with a small key, useless now, which Ignacio Abel continues to carry in his pocket, is the folded sheet announcing the lecture. The smallest things can last a long time, immune to abandonment and even the physical disappearance of the person who held them in his hands. A yellow sheet, somewhat faded, the line of the fold so worn that after a few years it will fall apart if someone attempts to open it, if it hasn’t been burned or tossed in the trash, if it doesn’t disappear beneath the rubble of the house after one of the enemy bombing raids the following winter. He found the handbill in a pocket of the jacket he hadn’t worn since then, but by now it was a secret clue, the material proof of the start of another life that began that evening, without anything announcing it, not even the silhouette crossing in front of the slide projector. The day and the year, the place and the hour, like an unearthed inscription that permits the dating of an archeological find: Tuesday, October 7, 1935, 7:00 in the evening, the Auditorium of the Student Residence, Pinar 21, Madrid. Ignacio Abel folded the sheet carefully, with a certain clandestine feeling, and locked it in the same drawer that held his first letters from Judith Biely.

  If not for that paper printed in the Residence’s noble, austere typography, perhaps he wouldn’t have proof of the date he heard her name for the first time. But a few minutes before someone introduced them, he’d already recognized her in a kind of flash when, as he concluded his talk, the lights in the auditorium went on and he bowed with some discomfort when he heard well-mannered applause and woke from a fervor he now privately regretted or was embarrassed by, looking sideways toward the end of the first row where Adela and the girl, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia Camprubí, and María de Maeztu in her twisted hat were all sitting, and next to them, incongruous and young, exotic with her fair hair, pale skin, and energetic applause, the stranger who’d irritated him when she came in late. He remembered the woman at the piano, her back to him, who’d turned around, just as he recalled the ripe autumnal quality of the sunlight shining on her hair.

  He embraced his daughter, who ran toward him as soon as he came down from the stage. “Why isn’t your brother here with all of you?” “He had a German lesson with Señorita Rossman. Have you seen her father? Mamá couldn’t get away from him.” Professor Rossman made his way through the crowd, enveloped him in his oppressive Germanic cordiality, his sour smell of unwashed clothing, a squalid pensión, and prostate disease. (“Professor Rossman smells like old cat piss,” his son once protested with the savage sincerity of a child.) “An excellent speech, my dear friend, excellent. You don’t know how grateful I am for your invitation, yet another courtesy I can’t reciprocate.” Behind the thick lenses of his round glasses, Professor Rossman’s colorless eyes were wet with emotion, an excessive gratitude Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive. He did, in fact, smell of uric acid and had on a suit he had worn too much, and his bald oval head shone with sweat. He now scraped a living by selling fountain pens in cafés and with the small amount of money Ignacio Abel paid his daughter to give German lessons to Miguel and Lita. “But I don’t want to keep you, my friend—you have many people to greet.” Ignacio Abel moved away, and Dr. Rossman remained alone, isolated by his obvious state of impoverished foreignness and misfortune.

  While he looked after the ladies and accepted congratulations, agreed with comments, thought before responding to questions, Ignacio Abel looked through the crowd for the blond woman, fearing she’d left. It comforted his vanity that so many people had attended. The booming voice and corpulence of Don Juan Negrín stood out from the civilized murmur of the others. “I was the one who proposed to López Otero that he hire our friend Abel when we began construction of University City, and as you see, I wasn’t wrong,” he heard Negrín say, in the center of a vaguely official group, with his mouth full. Waiters in short jackets held trays of small sandwiches and served glasses of wine, grenadine, and lemon soft drinks. Professor Rossman bowed stiffly to people who didn’t know him or didn’t remember that they’d been introduced, and took canapés as the trays passed, eating some and putting others in his jacket pocket. When he returned to the pensión that night, he’d share them with his daughter. Ignacio Abel looked at him out of the corner of his eye, conscious of too many things at the same time, constantly torn by feelings that were too disparate.

  “Juan Ramón would have liked so much to hear the lovely things you said this evening,” Zenobia Camprubí commented. “‘The cubist rigor of white Andalusian villages’—how beautiful. And how grateful I am that you quoted him. But you know how delicate his health is, how difficult it is for him to set foot outside.”

  “Ignacio always says your husband has an instinctive sense of architecture,” Adela said. “He never tires of admiring the composition of his books, the covers, the typography.”

  “Not only that.” Ignacio Abel smiled, looked furtively beyond the circle of ladies who surrounded him, and didn’t notice his wife’s annoyance. “The poems, above all. The precision of each word.”

  Moreno Villa spoke with the blond foreigner, gesticulating a great deal, leaning against the piano, and she, taller than he, nodded and occasionally let her glance wander over the crowd.

  “I thought it went without saying that we don’t admire Juan Ramón because of the external beauty of his books,” said Adela, suddenly very shy, deeply humiliated, like a much younger woman. Zenobia pressed her gloved hand.

  “Of course, Adela darling. We all understood what you meant.”

  A photographer circulating through the crowd asked Ignacio Abel to allow him to take a picture. “It’s for Ahora.” Abel moved away from the ladies and observed that his daughter looked at him with pride, and the blond woman turned when she noticed the flash. The following day he was irritated to see himself in the newspaper photo with an overly complacent smile he hadn’t been aware of and perhaps gave other people an idea of him that he disliked. The esteemed architect Señor Abel, associate director of construction at University City, spoke brilliantly last night on the rich history of traditional Spanish popular architecture to a select audience who gathered to hear him in the auditorium of the Student Residence. Cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, the gloved, mobile hands of the women, the delicate veils of their hats, the civilized sound of conversations. Judith Biely’s laugh burst like a glass breaking on the polished wood floor. He would have liked to detach himself heedlessly from the admiring circle of ladies and walk straight across the hall to her.

  “I liked the comparison of architecture and music,” said Señora de Salinas in an almost inaudible voice; she always had an air somewhere between fatigue and absence. “Do you really believe there’s no middle ground between the popular tradition and the modern objects of the twentieth century?”

  “The nineteenth century is all bourgeois adornment and bad copies,” the engineer Torroja interrupted. “Pastry decorations made of stucco instead of cream.”

  “I agree,” said Moreno Villa. “The trouble is, the fine arts in Spain haven’t come into the twentieth century yet. The public is bullheaded and patrons are backward.”

  “You only have to look at the villa with fake Mudéjar tiles where his excellency the president of the Republic has his private residence.”

  “Architecture for the bandstand.”

  “Worse, the bullring.”

  Moreno Villa and the blond woman had gradually approached. She wasn’t as young as she’d seemed at a distance because of her haircut and self-assurance. Her features looked as if they’d been drawn with a precise, fine pencil. An old acquaintance of the ladies and their eminent husbands, Moreno Villa carried out with old-fashioned ease the protocol of introductions. I looked at you up close for the first time and it seemed I’d always known you and that no one but you was in that hall. With secret male disloyalty, Ignacio Abel saw his wife comparing herself to the young foreigner whose strange name he heard for the first time without catching the surname. A Spanish woman, mature, widened by motherhood
and the neglect of age, her hair waved in a style that had become out-of-date, so similar to the other women, her friends and acquaintances, fond of midafternoon teas, artistic and literary talks for ladies at the Lyceum Club, the wives of professors, midlevel government dignitaries, inhabitants of an enlightened and rather fictitious Madrid that took on something of reality only in places like the Residence, or in the shop of popular Spanish crafts run by Zenobia Camprubí.

  “Will you forgive me for coming late to your lecture? I’m always in a rush and I lost my way in the halls,” Judith said.

  “If you’ll forgive me for interrupting your rehearsal the other day.”

  But she hadn’t noticed, or didn’t remember.

  “My dear Abel, give me a hug. You’ve won two ears and a tail in a very demanding bullring—excuse the metaphor, since I know you hate the national pastime.” Negrín broke in with his excessive presence, the physical pride of a large man in a country of short men. Moreno Villa made the introductions, and this time Ignacio Abel listened closely to the foreigner’s name.

  “Biely,” said Negrín. “Isn’t that Russian?”

  “My parents were Russian. They immigrated to America at the beginning of the century.” Judith spoke a clear, careful Spanish. “Don’t you like bullfights?”

  When she asked the question she looked at Ignacio Abel in a way that canceled out the presence of Negrín and Moreno Villa. His daughter came toward him, took his hand, told him in a quiet voice that her mother was a little tired. The time he spent with Judith would always be measured, threatened, always subject to someone’s questioning, to an anguished usury of hours and minutes, of wristwatches you don’t want to look at yet glance at sideways, public clocks that slowly approach the hour of an appointment or mark with indifference the inexorable moment of saying goodbye that can’t be put off any longer.

  “Our friend Abel feels the same as the eminent husband of Señora Camprubí, who’s here now,” said Negrín. Adela and Zenobia had approached the group. Adela looked at the foreigner to whom she hadn’t been introduced with the distrustful curiosity she frequently displayed with strangers, men or women. “His secular, anti-military, and anti-bullfight principles are so solid that his worst nightmare would be a battlefield Mass in a bullring.”

  Negrín celebrated his own joke with a laugh. He could no more control the volume of his voice than the pressure of his hand, and didn’t realize that Judith Biely hadn’t completely understood what he said, spoken rapidly and enveloped in the noise of nearby conversations.

  “Great Spanish intellectuals have written beautiful things about bullfighting.” Judith had thought out the entire sentence in Spanish before daring to say it.

  “It would be better for everyone if they wrote about things that were more serious and less barbaric,” said Ignacio Abel, regretting it immediately because he noticed that she blushed, the foreign pink of her skin more intense on her cheeks and neck, like a rash.

  Adela reproached him afterward in the taxi, as they were crossing the deserted edges of Madrid at night, with stretches of unlit building lots and streetcar tracks that would be lost in rural darkness beyond the last illuminated corners. “How cold you are sometimes, my dear. You don’t moderate your words or realize the overly serious face you put on. First you make me look ridiculous in front of Zenobia and then you say something rude about the bullfights to that poor foreign girl who was only trying to make polite conversation. She must have felt awful. You never gauge your strength. You don’t seem to realize how much you can wound. Or maybe you do, and that’s why you do it.” But what she was rebuking him for, not with her words but with the tone in which she pronounced them, was that he’d looked to her to alleviate his insecurity but afterward hadn’t shared his relief and satisfaction at his success, hadn’t bothered to thank her or even to notice the deep conjugal emotion that she, docile and at the same time protective, felt, the too-comforting admiration he no longer seemed to need. Leaning back in the cab, exhausted, lightheaded, Ignacio Abel looked with some private hostility at Adela’s profile, so close, so overly familiar, the face of a woman he suddenly realized he didn’t love, with whom he hadn’t associated the idea of love for many years, if he ever had. He couldn’t recall. He could perhaps recover a trace of old tenderness by identifying in the faces of his children the features of a much younger Adela. But he was reluctant to think about the past, the years of their engagement, and perhaps he was ashamed of having loved her more than he was now willing to remember, with an antiquated, verbose love, almost the kind found on a hand-colored romantic postcard, the love of the young, ignorant man it had been difficult for him to stop being, the man Adela recalled with a memory that was both compassionate and ironic. What she saw in him couldn’t be detected now by anyone who knew only the accomplished, solid man of today, none of the ladies who’d watched and listened to him this evening at the Residence, tall on the platform, well dressed in his pinstriped suit and handmade shoes, his flexible high-quality collar and English bow tie. She’d tied the bow before he left the apartment. They saw the finished man, not the precarious rough drafts that had preceded him, the architect who projected images of old Andalusian houses and German buildings with right angles, broad windows, and nautical railings on the terraces, who knew how to pronounce names in German and English and appropriately interrupt a serious exposition with an ironic aside that flattered the audience by presupposing their ability to catch it. But she, Adela, sitting next to their daughter and her friends in the first row, pleased by her husband’s brilliance, knew things about him the others did not, and could measure the distance between the man of this evening and the unpolished, half-grown boy he was when they first met, calibrate the degree of artifice in his manner and worldliness, for at those moments everything in him was too irreproachable to be completely true. Although it may not matter to you, there’s no one in this world who can love you more than I because there’s no one who has known you so intimately your whole life and not just a few months or a few years. The scorned lover is a legitimist who vainly defends ancestral rights no one believes in. She doesn’t see the signs, doesn’t suspect what’s incubating inside him, in the still unmodified presence of the other, doesn’t perceive the slightly greater degree of ill will in his silence, the secret, not fully conscious disloyalty of the man who rides beside her in the taxi, tired and content, relieved to be returning home, mentally listing the people he knew who attended his lecture, the ones Heraldo, Ahora, and El Sol will mention tomorrow in articles he’ll look for with disguised impatience, for his vanity lies in not showing his vanity, and it disconcerts him not to be immune to the weakness that he finds so unpleasant in others. Now the taxi was driving down Calle Príncipe de Vergara, advancing more slowly along the row of young trees on the central promenade, some displaying the dimmed bulbs and paper pennants of a recent festival. “We’re close to home now,” said the girl, who sat next to the driver, erect and attentive, as if responsibility for their ride home had been entrusted to her. Coming toward them on the sidewalk were an older man and a tall, thin woman holding his arm, walking close to the wall on their way to the metro station. “Look, Papá, we’re lucky, Professor Rossman got here ahead of us and has already picked up his daughter.”

  6

  THE SAME MUSIC had brought him to Judith for a second time. In the echoing corridor of an office building in Madrid, a distant song had invoked a feeling of familiarity at first, clarinet and piano becoming more distinct, then fading as if the wind had changed. He looked at the numbered doors of offices where he heard the ringing of telephones and the clatter of typewriters, and it took him a while to identify where the sudden vibration of recognition came from; he’d heard the same song just before he opened the door to the auditorium in the Residence, expecting to find Moreno Villa, on that afternoon whose date he was certain of because it was the day of San Miguel. But he didn’t know the song had stayed with him. He knew it now, as the isolated thread of the melody joined the
two images he had of Judith and wakened a vague expectation of seeing her again. Even after seeing her again at the Residence and desiring her, he could have forgotten her in the end. During that period of obsessive immersion in his work, his states of mind were as transient as the shapes of clouds. Beyond his drawing board and the large model of University City, the external world was a confused hum, like a landscape in the window that becomes more blurred as the speed of the train increases. Political passion, which had never put down deep roots in him, had been dampened over the years, tempered by skepticism and a distrust of exaggerated emotions, guttural manifestoes, and Spanish torrents of words. As distractedly as he looked over newspaper headlines or listened to the eight o’clock news on the radio, he withstood erratic squalls of dejection or impatience, familial annoyance, remorse with no visible motive, longing with no object. Urgency carried him from one place to another, as isolated in his tasks as he was inside the small Fiat he drove fast across Madrid. With no effort the attraction he’d felt for the foreign woman he saw in profile, crossing the projector’s beam of light, had weakened—the attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by Judith’s proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimensions of a great area of darkness. In the promise was a portion of nostalgia for what had never happened, and regret for what probably wouldn’t happen now. Life could not be only what he already knew; something or someone had to be waiting for him down the road, just around the corner, in the narrow swaying streetcar he watched coming up an avenue, tracks shining in the sun on the paving stones, or behind the revolving door of a café, something or someone in the mists of the future, as soon as tomorrow or the next minute. No longer believing, he continued to wait; the loss or decline of faith didn’t eliminate expectation of the miracle. Something would come leaping over everything: the project for a building that would resemble no other; the richer, denser life of excitements and textures he’d glimpsed, almost touched, in Germany for barely a year, the time that had seemed the start of his true existence and turned out to be simply a parenthesis that disappeared with the passage of the years, the delayed conclusion to his youth. Slim, independent, foreign, talking to a group of men with a naturalness that would have been unusual in a Spanish woman, Judith Biely had attracted him perhaps because she reminded him of the young women in Berlin and Weimar, coming out in groups in the late afternoon from department stores and office buildings, typists, secretaries, salesclerks, leaving behind them a scent of lipstick and the sweet smoke of American cigarettes, the brims of their hats tilted down to their eyes, their light clothing and athletic strides, dashing fearlessly across streets and past automobiles and streetcars. What excited him most was that easy confidence he’d never seen in Spain, which stimulated and intimidated him at the same time. When he was in his thirties, an architect and a family man, with a grant from the government to study abroad, dressed somberly in the Spanish manner, the women who walked along the streets or chatted in cafés with their cigarettes and drinks, their short skirts, crossed legs, and red lips, tossing their straight hair as they gestured, awakened in him an excitement and fear very similar to those of adolescence. Sexual desire was indistinguishable from enthusiasm for what he was learning and the tremors of discovery: night lights, the sound of the trains, the joy of truly submerging himself in a language and beginning to master it, his ears opening as well as his eyes, his mind overflowing with so many stimuli he didn’t know how to avoid, and when he spoke German with a little fluency, without realizing it he acquired an identity that was not completely the one so tediously his, but lighter, like his body when he went out each morning, ready to take in everything, giving himself over to the clamor of Berlin or the tranquility of the heavily tree-lined streets of Weimar where he would pedal his bicycle on the way to the School, delighting in the sound of tires on the paving stones and the soft wind on his face. In the unheated lecture halls of the Bauhaus almost half the students were women, all of them much younger than he. At a party, a woman named Mitzi had kissed him, putting her tongue in his mouth and leaving in his saliva an aftertaste of alcohol and tobacco. Later she sneaked back with him to his room at the pensión, and when he turned around after looking for the book he’d promised to lend her, she was naked on the bed, slim, white, shivering with cold. Never before had a woman undressed in front of him like that. He’d never been with so young a woman, who took the initiative with a spontaneity at once delicate and obscene. Under the blankets she seemed about to come apart in his arms, as open and succulent as her mouth had been a few hours earlier at the party. She said she came from a large family in Hungary that had been ruined. She communicated by moving at will from German to French, and he heard her murmuring incomprehensible words in Hungarian, like phonetic splatters in his ear. She’d begun studying architecture, but at the School discovered that photography mattered more to her. She searched in nature and in ordinary places for the abstract visual forms her compatriot Moholy-Nagy, who also was or had been her lover, taught her to see. She gave herself in love with her eyes open and as if offering herself for a human sacrifice in which she was both priest and victim. When she took the initiative, she’d come with a shudder as if in a methodical trance that was somewhat distracted, even indifferent. Afterward she’d light a cigarette and smoke stretched out on the bed, her legs open, a knee raised, and just by looking at her he’d be consumed again with desire. The presumed Hungarian ex-countess or ex-marquise lived in a basement that had only a straw mattress and an open suitcase with her clothing, and above that a sink and mirror. In a corner, on an imposing porcelain stove that rarely gave off adequate heat, a pot of potatoes simmered. No salt, no butter, nothing, only boiled potatoes that she ate in an anarchic way throughout the day or night, piercing them with a fork and blowing to cool them before she began chewing. He remembered her sitting on the mattress with his overcoat around her thin shoulders, hair disheveled, leaning over the pot and stabbing a potato with the fork, a lit cigarette in her other hand, chewing with a purr of contentment. What most disconcerted Ignacio Abel was her lack of any trace of modesty. She burst into laughter the first night when he tried to turn off the light. For years he became inconsolably excited on sleepless nights as he lay next to Adela’s wide, sleeping body, remembering the intoxicated smile that sometimes was in her eyes when she raised her head between his thighs to catch her breath or see in his face the effect of what she was doing to him with her tongue and thin lips, where the line of color had been erased; what no woman had done to him before and, he imagined, what wouldn’t happen to him again; what she did with the same surrender and indifference, he soon discovered with an attack of rustic Spanish jealousy, to other students at the School in addition to her professor of photography. At some point Mitzi disappeared, and he, humiliated and ridiculous, went looking for her. He was wounded in particular by the astonishment and slight mockery with which she listened to his old-fashioned, offended lover’s complaints expressed in awkward German. No one had an exclusive right to her. Had she put any conditions on him, ever asked him to turn the photo of his wife and two children on the night table to the wall? How was he so sure he was enough to satisfy her? When he tried to hold her she got away, slipping her sweaty, agile body out of his coarse male embrace like a swimmer kicking free of an undulating underwater plant that was entangling her feet. Perhaps Mitzi went to bed with other men to sleep occasionally in less inhospitable rooms than his, or eat something other than potatoes, or smoke cigarettes less toxic than the ones she bought on the street from war veterans missing an arm or leg or half a face who rolled them with tobacco from the butts they picked up from the ground. Perhaps that was why she’d gone to bed with him, who found his hands full of eno
rmous bills worth millions of marks each time he changed a few francs of his paltry Spanish scholarship. Hunger exaggerated the collective hallucination and heightened the brilliance of bright nocturnal lights and the cascades of pearl necklaces on women who descended from black cars as long as gondolas at the doors of luxury restaurants. There was a sexual palpitation in the air that corresponded to a kind of perpetual rutting that drove him, when he was alone, to wander the streets where there were cabarets and brothels from which came bursts of syncopated music and splashes of light in strong colors, reds, greens, blues sometimes blurred by fog. Women with platinum hair and long legs, bare in spite of the cold, turned out to be men with shadowy chins and deep voices when he passed close to them, looking away and ignoring their invitations. At two or three in the morning he’d rap his knuckles on the little window of the basement where she lived, caress and open her in the darkness, and never know whether she was completely awake or moaned and murmured and laughed in her dreams as she held his waist with thin, supple thighs. Then he’d lie next to her, oppressed by stupefaction at himself and his own fury, now placated, with its share of Catholic remorse. But other times he looked for her and couldn’t find her, or, even worse, saw light in the dirty window and knocked but obtained no reply, and what became physically intolerable was the certainty that she was in bed at that moment with another man, the two of them lying there in silence, looking at the shadow on the glass, she placing her index finger on her painted lips, mockery on her face. In ten years Ignacio Abel hadn’t felt anything resembling that physical upheaval and hadn’t forgotten any of its details. He told no one of his adventure; he always stayed silent in men’s conversations about sex. But several years after his return from Germany, he saw his own derangement in a film of Buñuel’s shown privately in a small room at the Lyceum Club, not without great embarrassment on the part of the ladies. In the film a young woman, whom he found easy to confuse with his transient Hungarian lover, voluptuously sucked the foot of a marble statue; the two Buñuel lovers looked for each other, and when they found each other were separated again and harassed again and desired each other so much they dropped to the ground, embracing, not noticing the scandal they caused around them. He returned to Madrid early in the summer of 1924, and things and people seemed at a standstill, exactly where he had left them a year earlier. Even his former spirit was waiting for him, like a suit from several seasons ago hanging in a closet. He realized, like someone coming out of a drunken binge, that in Germany he’d sunk feverishly into a collective state of delusion and vigilance. As soon as he crossed the Spanish border, presenting his passport to Civil Guards with the surly faces of the poor under their three-cornered hats, and climbed into a train, excessive stimulation turned into dejection. He found strength only in the suitcase filled with books and magazines he’d dragged like a stone through the stations of Europe; they’d be nourishment for his mind in the years of intellectual penury that were approaching. In Madrid it was as hot as a desert and the streets in the city’s center were filled with the slow, baroque Corpus Christi procession: canons in heavy capes raising crosses and swinging ornate silver censers; women in black mantillas, with African down on their fleshy lips (among them his own mother-in-law, Doña Cecilia, and the unmarried sisters of his father-in-law, Don Francisco de Asís); soldiers in full-dress uniforms presenting arms to the Holy Sacrament. He went into his house and the air had the dense smell of the muscle ointment Adela’s father used and the garlic soup he enjoyed when he came over during her husband’s absence. Miguel, his face red, cried constantly, and Adela listed the symptoms of a possible intestinal infection, as if Ignacio Abel or his absence were responsible for it. The girl, four years old now, was frightened and threw herself into her mother’s arms when she saw the tall stranger who left two enormous suitcases in the entrance and came down the hall reaching for her, his big arms spread wide.