In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He took Judith Biely for a walk in the Royal Botanical Garden the second time they met. She recognized American trees, the identical fall colors, though it surprised her that the forest ended abruptly and they immediately came upon the straight paths, fences, and pergolas of a French garden. She walked by his side and both were silent, listening to the rustle of dry leaves under their feet. They’d done no more than caress and kiss with apprehensive awkwardness in the greenish half-light of the bar at the Hotel Florida, and then in the car when Ignacio Abel drove her for the first time to her boarding house, the two of them surprised and silent following their boldness. They hadn’t seen each other naked. Conversation had distracted them from the fact of being together and permitted them to suspend the connection affecting them behind their words. They’d agreed to meet at the entrance to the Botanical Garden, and the impulse for one to go to the other had been halted in the prelude to physical intimacy. Indecisive or diffident, they didn’t kiss or take each other by the hand. A renewed timidity wiped away the closeness of their first meeting; it seemed impossible that they’d embraced and kissed at length. They had to begin again, probe the reestablished limits one more time, the invisible restraints of good manners. How strange that all of it had occurred, that only a year had gone by since then, that the October afternoon light was almost identical, like the smell and colors of the leaves. “And the strangest thing of all is that I feel so at home in Madrid,” Judith had said just before she fell silent, her hands in the pockets of her light coat, her head bare, looking around as calmly as on the first day they were together on the street, on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía when they’d left Van Doren’s apartment, in front of the movie posters covering the façade of the Palacio de la Prensa. In the Garden, on a cool, damp October morning with the subtle scent of smoke and fallen leaves in the air, they read the labels with the names of the trees in Latin and Spanish. Judith pronounced them aloud, uncertain, allowing herself to be corrected, taking pleasure in names that alluded to distant origins: the elm of the Caucasus, the weeping pine of the Himalayas, the giant sequoia of California. She told him she felt more at home in Madrid than in any European city she’d visited in the past year and a half, and it had been true from the moment she got off the train in the North Station and went out to a sunny, damp street in the first light of a September morning and took a taxi to the Plaza de Santa Ana, filled with produce and flower stands covered by awnings, the shouts of vendors and the warbling of birds for sale in their wire cages, the cries and flutes of knife grinders and the sound of conversations coming through the wide-open doors of the cafés. Her New York neighborhood had been like that when she was a girl, she said, but perhaps with a more anguished vitality, a more visible fury in the daily search for sustenance or profit, in the harshness of social relationships, men and women from remote places in the world having to earn a living from the first day and without anyone’s help in a city that for them was strange and overwhelming beyond the familiar streets where immigrants crowded together, dressed as they had dressed in the villages and ghettos of the far eastern reaches of Europe, surrounded by signs, shouts, and cooking odors that reproduced those of the old country. In Madrid the street peddler standing on a corner or the patron leaning on the bar in a tavern gave Judith the impression of always having been there, inhabiting an uneventful indolence, like that of the men in dark suits who looked out at the street through the large windows of cafés or the drowsing guards in the rooms of the Prado. He asked her whether, in the matter of Oriental indolence, she’d tried the clerks in public offices yet, gone at nine to take care of some transaction and waited until after ten, and found herself looking, beyond the arc of a small window, at a face both embittered and impassive, a nicotine-stained index finger moving back and forth, negating something, or pointing accusingly at a missing stamp on a document, a seal, the signature of someone you’d have to look for in another, more obscure office where the window for serving the public wasn’t open yet.

  “Don’t mistake backwardness for exoticism,” Ignacio Abel said, uncertain at having used the familiar form of address, as if it were an inappropriate move, not daring merely to touch her but to desire her fully. “We Spaniards have the misfortune of being picturesque.”

  “You seem and don’t seem Spanish,” said Judith, and she stopped, looking at him with a smile of recognition, more adventurous than he, impatient, wanting to let him know she did remember that what happened the last time wasn’t forgotten.

  “Do I seem American to you?”

  “More American than anybody.”

  “Phil Van Doren would have his doubts. His family came to America three centuries ago, and mine thirty years ago.”

  He didn’t like her saying that name, Van Doren, and even less the casual name Phil. He thought of the fixed, sarcastic eyes under depilated brows, the blunt, hairy hands with rings pressing Judith’s waist, the moment when, just having walked out of his study and leaving them alone, he looked in again, pushing the door abruptly as though he’d forgotten something.

  “For him we Spaniards must be something like Abyssinians. He talks about his trips through the interior of the country as if he had to take along native carriers.”

  He realized his hostility was a deep personal ill will caused by his jealousy of a link between Van Doren and Judith from which he was excluded and about which he didn’t dare question her—what right did he have? If Van Doren didn’t like women, why did he touch her so much? How could Ignacio Abel feel confident next to her when they were alone, if he didn’t dare touch her or look her in the eyes? He heard train whistles in the nearby station, and car engines and horns on the Paseo del Prado, muffled by the dense trees, like the rustle of the dry leaves beneath their feet that sank slightly into the damp earth, only a year ago, a year and a few days, in another city, another continent, another time. And if she had regrets or simply considered it unimportant, or thought there was something embarrassing or ridiculous in the eagerness of a well-known married man with children, a man in his late forties who couldn’t risk being seen in public with a woman who wasn’t his wife, a foreign younger woman observed by the vigilant faces of Madrid in taverns and cafés. What was he doing, he must have asked himself when they both fell silent and conversation no longer stretched the ruse of a pretext beneath them like a net, leaving the office much earlier than he should have, making a date with Judith with an excuse of almost pathetic puerility, showing her the Botanical Garden, his favorite place in Madrid, he told her, the best of Spain, better than the Prado, better than University City, his motherland full of statues of naturalists and botanists, not bloody generals or cretinous kings, his island of civilization dedicated to the knowledge and patience to classify nature according to the scale of human intelligence. Then Judith stopped, facing him on the other side of one of those basin fountains where red fish swam and a weak jet of water rose, and before she said anything, he knew she’d refer to what hadn’t been mentioned so far, the other night in the bar at the Florida.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d call me.”

  “How could I not call you?” Ignacio Abel felt himself blushing slightly. He spoke so softly it was difficult for her to understand what he was saying. “What made you think that? I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

  “You were so serious while you were driving, not saying anything, not looking at me. I thought you must have regretted it.”

  “I couldn’t believe I dared kiss you.”

  “Will you dare now?”

  “How do you say me muero de ganas in English?”

  “‘I’m dying to.’”

  But in the boldness he’d felt on the afternoon of their first meeting, there was not only desire but also alcohol, the clear liquid in the cone-shaped glasses served in Van Doren’s apartment by the waiter following his employer’s instructions, his subtle, imperious gestures. The intoxication of drink, the novelty of words, the same song playing again on the phonograph, his own voice slightly changed,
the October sky over the roofs of Madrid, the faces of the guests, most of them American, the works by Klee and Juan Gris, the blank, diaphanous space that took him back to his time in Germany, just as his desire for Judith wakened the part of him that had been sleeping since his affair with his Hungarian lover. He said, looking at his watch when Van Doren had left them alone in his office, “Now I really do have to go,” and was grateful as if for a disproportionate gift when Judith replied that she did, too, and would leave with him, and in the elevator she sighed with relief, arranging her hair in the mirror. Out on the street they’d walked together for the first time, in the light of day and among people, with no need for caution, even when it was time to say goodbye and nothing happened, time for each of them to walk away into the crowd on the Gran Vía at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, store windows and large, hand-painted canvas banners on the façades of movie theaters, honking, the sun shining on the silvery metal of automobiles, a present without a future, the inevitable future unleashed by a word that might not be said. He could say what was true, that it was urgent for him to go back to the office, to documents and blueprints and urgent calls he had to answer. He felt lightheaded: if he drove with the window down, the air would clear his mind. At each moment possible futures unfolded that burn like flares in the darkness and a second later are extinguished. He wanted to go on listening to her voice, the peculiar way her Spanish vowels and consonants sounded, to prolong the state of gentle physical intoxication, her proximity the powerful imminence of something, the exciting, mysterious ambit of the feminine. Judith stood looking with a smile of recognition at the sunlight on the terraces of the tallest buildings, the limpid blue of the sky against which the tower of the Capitol Theater was outlined.

  “I look up and it’s as if I were in New York.”

  “But the buildings must be much taller there.”

  “It’s not the buildings, it’s the light. This is the same light as in New York right now. I mean, that will be there in six hours.”

  He could suggest they have a drink and Judith would smile and thank him and say she was late for an appointment with her students or a talk at the Residence or at the Center for Historical Studies. He thought about his dark, empty apartment when he’d go home that night, when he’d open the door and not hear the voices of his children; perhaps they were exploring the garden of the house in the Sierra, or planning an expedition, like the ones in Jules Verne’s novels, for his arrival the following day. In a lighthearted tone that surprised him and hid his fear, he told Judith he was inviting her to have a drink at the Hotel Florida across the street. After a moment of hesitation she agreed, shrugging with a smile, and took his arm to cross the Gran Vía in the middle of traffic.

  Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell. He’s dreamed of Judith Biely’s voice (which he hardly remembers after only three months), but its sound was less true than the sensation of being brushed, touched by her hand, pressed against her smooth skin, kissed by her lips, caressed by her curly hair almost as immaterially as by her breath, like a faint breeze that has silently come through an open window. He was walking beside her along an avenue in the Botanical Garden and suddenly they were silent and all that could be heard were the leaves beneath their feet: the leaves of trees brought as seeds or frail shoots from America in the eighteenth century, housed in the dark holds of ships, waiting to germinate in this distant land where Judith Biely, after almost two years of traveling, feels at home, in a homeland she never knew she had until now, recognizing the trunks and the shapes and colors of the leaves, learning their names in Spanish, saying them in English so he could pronounce after her. He seemed awkward now and much younger than the first few times she saw him, younger and softer at each meeting, as if his life were being projected backward: the tall, professorial figure behind a podium at the Residence, with his dark suit and gray hair and judgmental appearance. The man who afterward looked at her across the crowd from the other end of the room, who left without saying goodbye, beside his wife, who was visibly older than he; who appeared in the doorway of Van Doren’s apartment; who leaned stiffly toward her in a private booth in the bar of the Hotel Florida and almost didn’t dare kiss her; who now, only a few days later, disconcerted, erudite, pronounces the names of trees in Latin, not realizing the mud on the ground was dirtying his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers, stopping because she’d stopped and not daring to meet her eyes, perhaps regretful, overwhelmed by the responsibility of having gone so far, of having called her again, unable to continue talking, to go on pretending he was some kind of teacher or mentor of botany or Spanish customs and she a foreign pupil, paralyzed by the recognition of a desire that couldn’t be contained and that he couldn’t manage, a desire he barely remembered existed.

  “I’m dying to.”

  9

  NOT USED TO LYING, the ease of concealing something for the first time in a long while surprised him. The novelty of pretense was as stimulating as his resurgent desire and the signs of falling in love. There was a kind of innocence in such perfect impunity. What no one could know had occurred only a few hours earlier, and was clear and fresh in his memory, and still had left no trace in his external appearance. The mind’s secrecy was a prodigious gift. Lying on the grass in the mild sun of a Saturday afternoon, he talked distractedly with Adela about the children’s new school term, and though she was looking into his eyes she couldn’t know what he was thinking, what he was reliving, delighting in the precision of each detail, each minute. His memory was a camera obscura where only he could see Judith Biely, a gallery of murmurs where only he heard her voice, as close as if she were talking into his ear. Adela was probably grateful for his talkative, friendly mood when he arrived that morning at the house in the Sierra, his rested, almost smiling air, his amiable disposition toward her and her relatives, which came as a surprise since he often seemed uncomfortable around them. She was in the kitchen helping the maids peel quinces—she liked the brown and gold down that remained on her fingertips and had so delicate a scent when she brought her fingers to her nose—when she was startled by the sound of a car’s engine. Pleasantly surprised that her husband had arrived earlier than expected, fearful he would be unsociable, in a bad mood, sleep-deprived. She would have liked not to have so acute a perception of the variations in his state of mind, not to respond so immediately to any indication of a change of mood, of anger or dejection, as if over the years she’d sharpened an instrument of detection so sensitive it approached prophecy, because it warned of certain symptoms before they occurred. Her children’s footsteps resounded as they galloped down the stairs. “Ah, my faithful vassals at the battlements, a knight-errant approaches the castle, if not an inn or station snack bar,” Don Francisco de Asís declaimed with theatrical exaggeration under the squat granite columns of the porch when his grandchildren crossed the garden on their way to the gate. Ignacio Abel stopped the car in front of it, looking at himself for a moment in the rearview mirror, prepared without remorse for the novelty of lying. In the seat next to him was no trace of the woman who only the night before had sat there, half closing her eyes to feel the cool air coming through the lowered window and blowing her hair away from her face while he drove up the Castellana. She’d looked into the same mirror to fix her lipstick and comb her hair with her fingers before getting out. The eyes that a few hours earlier had looked at her with so much attention and desire now revealed nothing, the same eyes that had seen her come near, opening her lips and tilting back her head. How strange that this memory wasn’t visible to others, that it was so easy to keep the secret, like a thief who shakes your hand and steals something valuable with no effort and in view of everyone
and then walks away in the full light of day. He got out of the car and his daughter ran toward him and hung around his neck to kiss him. The boy remained standing by the gate, expectant and serious, more timid than his sister, weaker, perhaps suspecting something, alert to any sign that his father’s presence was not completely certain, for he tended to arrive later than he’d announced, and probably this time, too, his stay would be shorter than he’d promised. Embracing his father, he then clung to him as if to make sure he really had arrived, as if deep down he’d feared he wouldn’t appear. In the clear space of the garden in front of the house, Don Francisco de Asís received Ignacio Abel with open arms in a melodramatic gesture of welcome, like a parody of the classic Spanish theater he liked so much. “What a surprise, my illustrious son-in-law! Your presence honors this humble rustic dwelling, ancestral home of my elders!” He gave his son-in-law two loud, wet kisses, too absorbed in himself or too innocent or childish to notice Abel’s physical displeasure, his attitude of rejection. But Adela noticed it, waiting in the doorway, drying her hands, which smelled of quince, on her apron. She heard her father’s hackneyed declamation through her husband’s ears, and what otherwise would have been no more than one of an old man’s tiresome habits that awaken only patience and some tenderness sounded to her like embarrassing nonsense. She noticed her husband’s expression as he pulled back slightly; she knew what he must be thinking and was ashamed of her father’s eccentricities, guilty about the embarrassment and disloyalty to him that muddied the otherwise loving resignation with which she would have accepted those eccentricities if not for Ignacio Abel. Too sensitive to the states of mind of someone who paid little attention to hers, as inclined as her son to depend too much on an undependable affection. The girl didn’t suffer from these kinds of insecurities: she walked with her father along the gravel path, carrying his briefcase like a page in his service, certain of the preference bestowed on her. She became pleasingly childish in his presence, to the same degree that with her mother she defended somewhat defiantly her right not to be treated like a little girl.