In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn’t name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction of everything he’d achieved. In some German or French magazines he’d sometimes see photographs by his lover of so many years ago, signed with a short, clear pseudonym. Very calmly he pondered the asymmetry of memory: what had mattered so much to him was probably nothing to her. Time had erased his resentment and male suspicion of ridicule, leaving him with secret gratitude. He continued searching because of a youthful habit of his spirit transformed now into a character trait, separate from the expectations of his real life, which had flattened as it became more solid, stripped of risk and also of surprise, like a project that acquires a firm, useful presence when it materializes and at the same time loses the originality and beauty that were such powerful possibilities at the start, when it was no more than a sketch, a play of lines in a notebook, or not even that: the lightning flash of an intuition, the vacant space where foundations will not be dug for a long time to come. Somehow what was accomplished was frustrated, the work finished but omitting the best of what might have been. Perhaps the cutting edge of his intelligence had dulled, just as his sight was weaker and his movements clumsier, his body heavier and blunter, not pierced for so long by the stab of true desire. The tension of expectation remained unchanged, but it was likely that what awaited him in the future would not be much more than what had happened to him in the past. He wouldn’t feel again the suspense of the unknown, the feeling of unlimited possibility he’d had during the time he spent in Germany, so luminous and brief in memory. He had put his talent and ambition into his work and tended to his personal life distractedly, like someone who delegates to others the subordinate details of a complex assignment. Moving up with almost no one’s help—with only his enterprising illiterate mother, his prematurely dead father, and the decision his father never expressed but arranged for efficiently and in secret: his son would have a future less harsh than his—studying first for the bachelor’s degree and then the diploma in architecture, living with a kind of fanatical asceticism, had required so great a degree of concentration and energy that by comparison the rest of his life seemed a long period of idleness. Once he’d achieved the diploma and obtained his first position, constantly doing what was required or expected of him had demanded no more effort than allowing himself to be carried along with a certain strategic cleverness in the general direction of respectability. Perhaps, when the two of them were young, he’d been fonder of Adela than he remembered now. Their engagement, marriage, children, a girl and then a boy, had followed one another at decent intervals. With a combination of calculation and private irritation he’d complied with the norms of Adela’s family—attended his children’s baptisms, confirmations, and laying on of scapulars, languished through countless family celebrations, weddings and saints’ days and Christmas and New Year’s dinners, adopting a well-bred and increasingly absent air that everyone accepted as proof of his oddity, perhaps his talent, and maybe as a remnant of the indelicacy typical of his plebeian origins, to which no one alluded but no one forgot. In spite of his being the son of a woman who worked as a porter on Calle Toledo and a mason who’d done well, they were magnanimous enough to accept him as one of their own; they’d presented him with the most distinguished (though somewhat frayed) daughter of their irreproachable family and facilitated his access to the first rungs of a profession to which he otherwise could not have aspired no matter how many academic honors and diplomas in architecture he might have. They expected him to fulfill his responsibilities, to pay in regular installments and for the rest of his life the formidable interest on his debt: dignified behavior, observable conjugal ardor, rapid fatherhood, a profitable and brilliant display of his abilities, in principle only theoretical, by virtue of which he’d been accepted without too many reservations into a class that wasn’t his.

  For years he performed the role so literally and with no detectable effort that he almost forgot another life might have been possible. Deception and conformity quickly became stable traits of his spirit, along with a profound indifference toward everything that wasn’t the solitary intellectual exaltation his work afforded him. Tedium without histrionics, sex without desire, and a shared and excessive concern for the children sustained his conjugal life. Unthinkingly, he imagined that his self-involvement and impassivity, gradually transformed into indifference, didn’t trouble Adela, that she even accepted them with relief, for she was a woman who always seemed insecure about and rather ashamed of her body, convinced it was typical of men to leave home early and return late and occupy the intervening time with incomprehensible tasks whose only result worthy of interest was the family’s welfare. The idea of patronizing prostitutes would have offended him even if he’d been able to ignore the undeniable hygienic arguments against it, which to his surprise didn’t faze other men. What he’d experienced in a room in Weimar with a young, determined, naked woman who shivered and embraced him and looked smilingly into his eyes as he moved rhythmically on top of her, adapting his thrusts to the knowing undulation of her hips—that wasn’t going to happen to him again, in the same irrevocable way he wouldn’t relive his youth. He looked attentively at all women but rarely felt deeply attracted by one or turned to continue looking at her after she passed. He supposed age was dampening his physical desire as much as his ambitions and the wildness of his imagination. He’d liked an American stranger a great deal for a few minutes and they exchanged a few words, and he’d been satisfied to think about her in the darkness of a taxi while Adela sat beside him and spoke with a hostile tone in her voice, as if she’d guessed, as if she’d been capable of catching in her husband’s eyes an instantaneous flash that hadn’t animated them in many years, just as Lita had noticed the foreigner’s narrow skirt and haircut and accent when she spoke Spanish, so different from Señorita Rossman’s severe Germanic consonants. He thought about her again as he lay in silence next to his wife that night, forcing himself to fix in his memory the details of her face—the freckles around her nose, the gleam of her eyes behind a lock of curly hair, which he’d been madly tempted to brush aside with his fingers—at the same time noting an indubitable beginning of physical excitement that soon languished, a flame fed by the very weak materials of his adult imagination. The following day, in his office at University City—on his desk was a newspaper with a review of his talk and a dark photo in which his face could hardly be seen—he asked to be connected to Moreno Villa’s telephone while he thought of the pretext for a conversation that would veer easily toward Judith Biely. But he hung up immediately, indecisive, cutting off the operator, unaccustomed to those kinds of tricks, and he didn’t have the opportunity to repeat the call or carry out a vague intention to invent an excuse for returning to the Residence in the childish hope he’d run into her.