In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  The days go by and the possibility of something that was about to occur dissolves like a drawing traced in one’s breath on glass. Ignacio Abel might never have seen Judith Biely a second time and neither would have thought of the other again as they moved into the labyrinths of their own lives. Now he was walking along a corridor on the tenth floor of a new building on the Gran Vía—dark suit, double-breasted jacket, hat in hand, gray hair flat against his temples, the distracted, energetic appearance of someone who at heart doesn’t fear very much or expect too much, except for what’s appropriate. Surrounded by the predictable sounds of footsteps, secretaries’ clicking heels, bursts of announcements on radios, ringing telephones, the clatter of typewriters behind frosted-glass doors, he could distinguish more clearly the music he’d begun to hear when he left the elevator. The song reminded him of Judith Biely even before he knew it was guiding him to her. He remembered her first name but not her second—the sunlight coming in through the large window facing west as she turned her head without interrupting the melody she was playing on the piano, Negrín saying that her last name was or sounded Russian. The silent elevator had opened on a wide expanse of polished floor and a wall of glass bricks that diffused the light from a large interior courtyard. The elevator operator touched his cap and stepped aside to let him pass. It smelled promisingly new, just completed, with odors of recent varnish, fresh paint, and wood. Even footsteps had the resonance of a space not yet completely occupied, its bare walls returning echoes and accentuating sharp sounds.

  The music came from the other side of one of the numbered doors along the corridor where Ignacio Abel was looking for the nameplate of the person who’d made an appointment with him, the effusive voice with a strong Mexican accent that called him on the phone two or three days after his lecture. “You don’t know who I am, but I know a great deal about you,” the voice said. “I know and admire your work. We have mutual friends. Dr. Negrín was kind enough to give me your number.” Ignacio Abel accepted out of curiosity, yielding to flattery, and because that Friday afternoon he was going to be alone in Madrid. Adela and the children had left for the house in the Sierra in preparation for one of the great yearly family celebrations, the saint’s day of her father, Don Francisco de Asís. He imagined the appointment would be in an office. There were many in the building, the headquarters of foreign businesses, film producers and distributors, travel agencies, and steamship companies. The typewriters and telephones sounded in gusts, as when a door is opened and closed and the sound of the rain comes in. Young secretaries passed him, wearing makeup and moving fast like the ones he’d seen ten years earlier in Germany: uniformed pages, telegram deliverymen, clerks with briefcases under their arms, workers putting the finishing touches on installations. The activity pleased him, the suggestion of urgent tasks, so different from the lethargic calm of the ministerial offices where he sometimes had to go to take care of matters related to the construction at University City: records of payments that were never resolved, transactions that ground to a halt because a signature was missing, or a certificate, or the purple oval of a stamp, or medieval red sealing wax at the bottom of a document. On the outside this building, like so many recent ones in Madrid, had a noble mass but was complicated and affected, with columns and cornices that held up nothing and stone balconies where no one would ever stand, plaster filigrees whose only purpose would be to immediately collect pigeon droppings and soot from chimneys and cars. The interiors, however, were diaphanous, right angles and clean curves, arithmetical sequences that unfolded before him as he walked along the corridor and approached the door from which the music came; it wasn’t frosted glass and didn’t have a commercial sign but a discreet plaque with a name written in cursive script: P. W. Van Doren.

  He recognized the song at the same time he recalled her musical and forgotten last name: Biely. And a moment later, when the door opened, he saw her, with no prior warning, as if her presence had been an emanation of the music and her suddenly remembered name. Instead of an office he found himself in the middle of what seemed to be a party, somewhat incongruous at that early hour, still part of the working day. He had the feeling that when he crossed the threshold he was entering a space not continuous with the corridor that brought him there; it didn’t seem Spanish, didn’t seem completely real: a large living room with white walls and abstract masses, like an interior in a modern film. The people, the guests, looked like extras, arranged in small groups and conversing in several languages and on different planes, as if to occupy the set in a convincing way. Unexpected, recognized, carnal among those figures who didn’t notice the presence of the new arrival—not because they intended to act as if they didn’t see him, but because they moved on another plane of reality—Judith saw him as soon as he came in and from a distance made a gesture of welcome. She held a gleaming record in her hands and stood next to the gramophone, lost as well among strangers though he didn’t realize it at the time, in front of a large window overlooking a provincial Madrid of tile roofs and bell towers and church domes, keeping the rhythm of the song with nods of her head. The clarinet, the piano, Benny Goodman accompanying Teddy Wilson on a disk recorded in New York only a few months earlier, discovered by her with a rush of nostalgia in the listening booth of a music store in Paris at the beginning of the summer, when she didn’t yet know she would travel to Madrid in September, when Spain for her was still the place dreamed about in books, a country as illusory and anchored in her youthful imagination as Treasure Island or Sancho Panza’s Ínsula Barataria. The maid in the black uniform and white cap who opened the door moved away discreetly, carrying Ignacio Abel’s hat and umbrella. His quick, expert glance simultaneously assessed the dimensions of the space and the quality and disposition of the objects, identifying the creators of the paintings and furniture, almost all German or French of the past ten years except for a distinguished Viennese or two from the beginning of the century. Everything had the attractiveness of excessive premeditation, of calculated disorder, with a shine like that of photographic paper or an international design magazine. A young waiter, his hair lacquered with pomade, offered him a glass of transparent liquid that smelled of iced gin, a small tray with canapés of fresh butter and caviar. Judith seemed to take a long time to reach him through groups of people who separated without seeing her to let her pass or whom she skirted, guided only by the melody she’d played tentatively on the piano in the Residence. The closer she came, the more real and exciting she was, dressed in a plain white blouse and wide trousers. Then she shook his hand with masculine assurance. Her warm hand, with slim fingers and fragile bones when he pressed it slightly, caught in his for a moment that was prolonged without either one doing anything about it, not knowing anything about the other and alone again in the sound made by invisible people, just as they’d been a few nights earlier at the Residence. When she looked at him, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his own appearance, too severe and too Spanish in that environment, among people younger than he and, like Judith, dressed in sports clothes—close-fitting sweaters, bright ties, checked trousers, two-toned shoes. Occasionally a laugh or an American exclamation rose above the conversations and the clink of glasses.

  “The man who doesn’t like bullfights,” said Judith. “I’m so happy to see you again, among so many strangers.”

  “I thought they were all compatriots of yours.”

  “But in my country I wouldn’t have known any of them.”

  “One isn’t the same away from one’s country.”

  “What are you like when you’re away from Spain?” Judith looked at him over the glass she held to her lips.

  “I almost don’t remember. I haven’t traveled for a long time.”

  “You say that sadly. Your face lit up when you showed photographs of modern German buildings in your talk.”

  “I hope you weren’t too bored.” Alcohol, which he wasn’t accustomed to drinking, caused a warm surge in his chest each time he took a sip. The smell
of gin mixed with the scent of Judith’s cologne or soap. The physical desire her closeness provoked was as new and as immediate for him as the alcohol in his blood, and it produced a comparable bewilderment. He was waking after more than ten years, astonished at having been asleep for so long.

  “Now you’re fishing for compliments.” Judith had moved instinctively to English and began to laugh at her own linguistic confusion: she wiped her lips with a small napkin, sorry now for her laughter and perhaps her remark. “You know very well no one was bored.”

  He liked her even more than he remembered. He hadn’t known how to keep in his memory the exact color of her eyes, the brightness of her ironic and alert intelligence, the way her thick, curly hair was cut at a right angle at her cheeks, the luminous timbre of her voice in Spanish. Enthusiasm made her beautiful. She’d been in Madrid for a month and felt all the ardor of an unexpected love affair with the city. She was one of those people able to take pleasure in everything, to be grateful for the new with no shadow of mistrust toward the unknown. Talking to her that afternoon, Ignacio Abel thought she resembled Lita in her balance between a rigorous vocation for learning and a good-natured aptitude for receiving the gifts of the unforeseen, for serenely enjoying life. She’d spent two years traveling in Europe and planned to leave a six-month stay in Spain for the end. But a former classmate from Columbia University, where Judith had abandoned her doctoral studies a few years earlier, called at the beginning of the summer: she was ill and couldn’t take charge of the group of students whom she had to accompany during a semester of exchange studies in Madrid. So many pieces of chance required to weave a decisive moment in life. Since the beginning of September, and contrary to all her recent expectations, Judith Biely was a teacher living in a pensión in Madrid, in an austere, bright room overlooking the Plaza de Santa Ana, while she waited for a room to become available at the Residence for Young Ladies. She was perfecting her Spanish, which she had begun to study on her own as a child after reading a student edition of Tales of the Alhambra; she attended classes in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and in Spanish history at the Center for Historical Studies on Calle Almagro, and went to lectures and concerts and film screenings at the Student Residence; she ate delicious, indigestible stews in the taverns along Cava Baja; she strolled at dusk along Vistillas and the Viaducto and the Plaza de Oriente to watch the sunsets that in this inland city took on the delicate breadth of ocean horizons sieved with mist. The purples and grays of the Sierra seen through her window on the first rainy days of October she recognized a short time later in the backgrounds of Velázquez’s hunting scenes. The joy of leaving her pensión and spending a morning in the museum was not very different from the pleasure afterward of having a sandwich of fried squid and a glass of beer at a stand on the Paseo del Prado, watching the talkative, active people of Madrid walk by, attempting to decipher their turns of phrase, reviewing in a small notebook the new words and expressions she was learning. When she was ten or twelve years old and her family lived in Brooklyn she read Washington Irving, bent for hours over a table in a public library, looking at illustrations in which the Alhambra was an Oriental palace, sitting by a window through which she could see courtyards covered with clotheslines of sheets in a neighborhood of Italian and Jewish immigrants; now she was impatient to take an express train one night and wake up in Granada. A little before enrolling at City College she discovered a book of travels through Spain by John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again, and now she carried it with her and at times reread it in the very places described in its pages. Thanks to Dos Passos she’d learned about Cervantes and El Greco, but in the Prado was moved much more by Velázquez and Goya. Had she seen Goya’s frescoes in the dome of San Antonio de la Florida, his less famous but equally powerful canvases in the Academia de San Fernando, his several series of etchings? Ignacio Abel surprised himself by offering to act as guide. They were very near San Fernando, and they could reach the hermitage of San Antonio in just a few minutes by car: you crossed the river, and the landscape of the Pradera, with the city in the background and the great white smudge of the Palacio de Oriente, was the same one Goya painted. His own boldness disconcerted him: it would in no way be difficult to put out his hand and touch her face, so close, to move away the lock of hair that brushed the corner of her smiling mouth. Judith nodded, very attentive in order to understand each word, her thin lips moistened by her drink, her eyes shining, or was it simply the euphoric effect of alcohol and conversation in a foreign language, the same boldness that was urging him on, irresponsible, a little dizzy, insisting that his car was nearby, and besides, because of his work, he knew the chaplain at the hermitage, who would allow them to climb up to the dome to see the frescoes more closely. He was not in love yet and already he was jealous of others who might touch her, other men joined to her by the complicity of language. A husky man with a shaved head embraced her from behind.

  “Judith, my dear, would you please introduce me to my own guest?”

  How did he know her, for how long? Why did he rest his square chin on her shoulder and brush her hair with his lips with no awkwardness and put his arms around her waist, his two large, thick hands with black hairs (but pink, glossy manicured nails) closing just above her trousers? She made a gesture of detaching herself but without much conviction, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable though not enough to move her face away, to separate the hands that pressed her against the male body adhering to her back. How would it feel to be in his place, pressing that slim body, feeling the rhythm of her breathing beneath the fabric of her blouse? He was surprised by this confusion of sudden emotions, as impervious to the control of his will as the beating of his heart or the rapid surges of pressure at his temples.

  “Phil Van Doren,” said Judith, looking at Ignacio Abel as if begging his pardon. “Philip Van Doren the Third, to give his complete name.”

  “I couldn’t attend your lecture the other day, but I read about it in several newspapers, and Judith gave me all the details.”

  I would have liked to separate those two hands that touched you so confidently, with their black hairs and rings and polished nails, make him move away from you and not put his mouth so close to yours, and not keep brushing against you with that proprietary air he had toward everything, his house, his guests, even me, who didn’t even know why he’d called me and didn’t care, it was enough to have found you again.

  “As I told you on the phone, I’ve made some inquiries about you. I’ve seen some of your work in Madrid.” Van Doren spoke excellent Spanish, with a Mexican accent. “The public school in that southern neighborhood, the Marketplace. Magnificent works, if you’ll permit the opinion of an amateur.”

  He pronounced amateur in perfect French. He had light eyes and a penetrating gaze that could easily turn suspicious or sarcastic, and he depilated his eyebrows as carefully as he shaved his skull. No matter how sharp his razor, it would never mitigate the black shadow of his beard. From a turtleneck sweater that emphasized his pectoral muscles emerged the tanned, powerful head of an athlete. Ignacio Abel immediately felt relief tinged with discomfort: in those solidly masculine hands embracing Judith there was probably no desire, but his gaze had the excessive fixity of someone prepared to make quick, irrevocable judgments regarding whoever was in front of him, subjecting that person to tests for which he was the only judge; a brazen, covetous, indiscriminate, incautious curiosity, an instinct for discovering what was most hidden and learning what no one else knew.

  “Things never turn out as one would like,” said Abel, flattered, especially because Judith was there, and unaccustomed to praise. “There’s always a lack of money, and delays, and you have to fight with everybody. Not to mention the strikes, the ones that are justified and the ones that are not . . .”

  But once he was no longer the person speaking, Van Doren became instantly distracted. He looked at the guests, the waiters, attentive to every detail, making abrupt movements with his head as if const
antly adjusting the angle and distance of vision. He nodded a great deal, he greeted someone briefly, he looked toward the large windows as if the brightness of the day or the condition of the atmosphere also depended on him. He asked Ignacio Abel to accompany him to his study. When he’d taken him by the arm to lead him there, he seemed to remember Judith, signaled her to join them, and put his arm around her waist, affectionate again, noticing her glass was almost empty, ordering a waiter with an authoritative gesture to give her another, his face animated by a wide smile one moment and very serious the next, frowning in anger. Ignacio Abel allowed himself to be carried along. The hand leading him was as strong as his sexual desire, and the gin he drank unexpectedly weakened his self-control. He was confused by the strangeness of the place, the bubble of space he’d entered when the maid opened the door and he saw Judith in the back of the room, gesturing as if she had been expecting him all along; she knew he’d come; somehow it was part of a purpose that involved him without his knowledge; she was going to change the record on the gramophone and turned when she heard the doorbell over the music and the guests’ voices.