In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  How strange that in this part of his life nothing had been altered by what only he and Judith Biely knew, that he didn’t have to pretend in order to conceal—as if he’d crossed the invisible border between two contiguous worlds, the inhabitants of one not suspecting the existence of the other. And though he missed Judith and would have liked to wake beside her, he delighted in the presence of his children and the scent of rockrose and resinous wood smoke in the Sierra air, the first autumn colors in the garden. The Japanese creeper climbed like a flame curling around a column at the entrance and along the balcony railing, the vibrant red of its leaves standing out against the granite and whitewash on the façade of the house that had a certain rustic nobility in its proportions. On Saturday morning, time in this other world seemed suspended. A cowbell’s slow clang, the lowing of cattle from nearby pastures, and occasional shooting by hunters didn’t disturb the autumnal stillness. Ignacio Abel was self-absorbed, doing nothing, the newspaper on his lap, sitting on the porch that faced south, and the sun had a slow density of honey that warmed the air, turned things golden, revived dozing insects. The last figs were opening on the fig tree, revealing the red pulp that sparrows and blackbirds pecked at and wasps sucked. Inside the house the family chattered noisily, Doña Cecilia’s shrill tones rising above the others, supported by Don Francisco de Asís’s booming organ voice, like a basso continuo. There would be elections, he declaimed, in a long-sleeved undershirt and slippers, his suspenders hanging down on each side, the paper in his hands like a banner ruined by the misfortunes of Spanish politics. There would be elections, and if the right won again, the left would rise up in another attempt at a Bolshevik revolution, and if the left won, the Bolshevik revolution would also be inevitable, a collapse of civilization as terrifying as in Russia. Don Francisco de Asís liked the word “terrifying,” the word “civilization.” Doña Cecilia asked him please not to talk about those things: in her husband’s booming voice, apocalyptic prophecies gave her, she said, an upset stomach. Don Francisco de Asís voted sensibly for the Catholic and somewhat cajoling right of Gil Robles, but what truly moved him was the oratory of Don José Calvo Sotelo: what emotion when that man said “ship of state” or “the backbone of the nation,” with what good judgment had he reformed and strengthened public administration throughout his mandate as minister during the dictatorship of Don Miguel Primo de Rivera. The boy played ball in the garden, imagining he was eluding famous soccer players, happy to be at the house in the Sierra, happy his father had come. The girl sat on the swing, balancing slowly as she read a book, the tips of her sandals brushing against the ground. Bluish oak groves in the distance; from the pastures the echoes of isolated shooting; on the ground quinces and burst pomegranates, their skins red and dry; on the grapevine that shaded the entrance to the house the last grapes had the same rich honey color as the October sun (he recalled the fruit bowl of grapes and quinces in Moreno Villa’s room). His briefcase filled with documents and drawings lay on the table outdoors where the family had supper on summer nights, but Ignacio Abel felt too lazy to open it. Time had paused in a sweet somnolence that weighed on his eyelids. In Madrid Judith Biely would be thinking about the same things, wondering where he’d gone. They hadn’t spoken about seeing each other again when they said goodbye. As if satisfied with what had already happened, first in the half-light of the private booth, when they suddenly faced each other in silence after a lively conversation, then in the uncomfortable interior of the car. Looking for a continuation, making plans, would have profaned the unexpected paradise where they suddenly found themselves, not as if they’d traveled there but had awakened and were not completely certain where they were. Concealment was so easy: to think about Judith Biely’s bare thighs above her stockings and at the same time to smile at Adela, who came out of the house bringing him a glass of wine and an appetizer, a foretaste of the meal being prepared, Doña Cecilia’s renowned arroz con pollo. And it hadn’t been difficult, when he arrived, to kiss Adela on the lips while he passed his hand along her waist in an unusual gesture that the boy’s vigilant eyes noted with approval. He was so unaccustomed to lying, he hadn’t even devised a response for when Adela or his father-in-law or the children asked him what he’d done yesterday afternoon. But it wasn’t at all difficult to invent something on the spot, and he was astonished it was all so easy, that something unforgettable could have occurred with no consequences and flowed with as little premeditation as the words they’d said in a dim corner of the bar at the Hotel Florida, which they chose with tacit complicity. That was how they’d talked as they rode down in the elevator of the Palacio de la Prensa, how Judith Biely had held his arm when they crossed the Gran Vía, dodging traffic.

  He’d forgotten the sensation of novelty, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was the pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding car passed close to them. It was her singularity as a woman, possessed of a life that seemed richer and more mysterious because he knew nothing about it, with a language and accent in Spanish that didn’t belong to anyone with her same background but only to her, as intrinsic to the attraction she exercised as the shape of her eyelids or her large mouth. With impunity he felt he inhabited two worlds. The emotional intoxication of yesterday afternoon in Madrid was transmitted without guilt to his perceptions this morning in the house in the Sierra, just as it had accompanied him on his drive along the highway to La Coruña, the car’s speed as assuring and joyful as his self-awareness. The freshness of the air on that October morning, the oak groves and houses as clear in the distance as if etched in diamond, a motionless swelling of clouds overflowing the mountains of El Escorial with the magnificence of an ice cliff.

  Judith had liked listening to music on the radio as they drove across Madrid. With concealed vanity Ignacio Abel pressed the accelerator and handled the controls of the recently installed radio. The speed and the music seemed to feed on each other. In the headlights the straight rows of trees along the Castellana and the palaces behind the gates and gardens became visible; streetcar tracks gleamed on paving stones. He was lucky to have become an adult in an age of extraordinary machines, more beautiful than the statues of antiquity, more incredible than the marvels in stories. Very soon they’d all conspire to facilitate his love for Judith Biely. Streetcars and automobiles would rapidly carry him to her, prolonging the meager time of their meetings; telephones would secretly bring him her voice when he couldn’t have her with him and he’d call her from his house, covering his mouth with his hand, feigning a conversation about work if anyone came near; movie theaters would welcome them in their simulacrum of hospitable darkness when they wanted to hide from the light of day; telegraph offices would remain open late so he could send her a telegram on the spur of the moment. Mechanized belts transported the letters they soon began to write to each other and canceled the stamps automatically, allowing their messages to traverse distances with more accurate speed. Thanks to a splendid Fiat motor, he’d driven from one world to another in less than two hours. Adela noticed he was talking more than usual that morning. He greeted his mother-in-law, the maiden aunts, distant relatives whose names he never remembered. The family began to prepare early for the celebration—moved back to Saturday to make it more resplendent—of Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. From the kitchen came the bubbling aroma of the stew, along with Doña Cecilia’s melodramatic voice deliberating with Adela, the maids, and Don Francisco de Asís regarding the advantages and disadvantages of starting the rice, for fear that if her son Víctor arrived late, as he so often did, he’d find it overcooked when after all he liked it so much and it was so easy for rice to be overdone and then it lost all its savor. In this family there was nothing that wasn’t a tradition, a commemoration. Every time Doña Cecilia prepared her stew—“legendary” in the opinion of Don Francisco de Así
s—the conflict regarding the proper moment to put in the rice was repeated almost word for word, what Don Francisco de Asís called “the burning question”: whether to add the rice to the bubbling liquid now or wait a little longer; whether to send the maid to the gate to see if Señorito Víctor was arriving from Madrid; whether to hold off at least until they heard the next train at the station. Ignacio Abel thought about Judith Biely—but he didn’t have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory—and he greeted and chatted like an actor who doesn’t need to make much of an effort to perform his assigned role. He listened, agreed without understanding anything, refined his capacity for resignation and self-absorption. When Víctor finally arrived—on an almost telepathic hunch Doña Cecilia had put in the rice only a few minutes earlier—it was in no way difficult for him to accept the excessive grip of his handshake and not show displeasure. He didn’t even lie; he told the partial truth, explaining to Adela and the children that he’d spent all of Friday afternoon at the home of an American millionaire who lived in Madrid and had invited him to travel to America to teach some classes and design a building.

  “A skyscraper?” said the boy. “Like the Telephone Company?”

  “Bigger, dummy. In America skyscrapers are much taller.”

  “Don’t talk like that to your brother.”

  “A library. In the middle of a forest. On the banks of a very wide river.”

  “The Mississippi?”

  “You think that’s the only river in America?”

  “It’s the one in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

  “The Hudson River.”

  “That has its mouth right at New York.”

  “She thinks she knows all about geography.”

  “Will you take us with you?”

  “If your mother agrees, this afternoon I’ll take you to the irrigation pond—that’s much closer than America.”

  He didn’t pretend. It was easy for him to talk to Adela and his children and not feel the sting of imposture or betrayal. What happened in his secret life didn’t interfere with this one but transferred to it some of its sunlit plenitude. And he didn’t care too much about the ominous prospect of immersion in the celebrations of his in-laws, usually as suffocating for him as the air in the places where they lived, heavy with dust from draperies, rugs, faux heraldic tapestries, smells of fried food and garlic, ecclesiastical colognes, liniments for the pains of rheumatism, sweaty scapulars. A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he’d never stopped being a stranger, an intruder. The maiden aunts swarmed in the sewing room, which had an oriel window facing south. They covered their mouths when they laughed, leaned toward one another to say things in a subdued voice, embroidered sheets and pillowcases with romantic motifs of a century ago, marked patterns with slivers of soap polished to the same shine as their faces of girls grown old. Ignacio Abel kissed them one by one and still wasn’t sure of their number. The uncle who was a priest would arrive when it was time to eat, with a good appetite but a somber face, recounting tales of ungodliness or assaults against the Church, predicting the return to government—if it was true that elections would be called—of the same men who in 1931 secretly encouraged the burning of convents. Abel’s recently arrived brother-in-law, Víctor, dressed for a Sierra weekend in a kind of hunting or riding outfit, extended his hand with the palm on the diagonal, turned partially downward, in a gesture he must have thought athletic or energetic. “Ignacio, how good to see you.” His thin hair, lying close to his scalp, formed a widow’s peak. He was younger than he looked; what aged him was a rather perpetual scowl and the shadow of a beard on his bony, prominent chin, the hardness of his features, a product of his determination to display manliness without weaknesses or cracks. His Hispanic, virile brother-in-law’s cordiality contrasted with a deep distrust of Ignacio Abel that was only in part ideological: Víctor gave the impression of lying in wait, looking for some threat to the honor or well-being of his sister, toward whom he felt protective although ten years her junior. Adela treated him with the limitless indulgence and docility of a pliant mother, which irritated Ignacio Abel. Víctor carried a pistol and a blackjack. Sometimes he came to eat at his parents’ house in the shirt and leather straps of a Falangist centurion. Adela was both submissive and protective: “He always liked uniforms, and the pistol doesn’t even have bullets.” He raised his chin as he shook Ignacio Abel’s hand and looked into his eyes, searching for signs of danger, not suspecting anything. He showed them the gift he’d brought for his father: a pseudo-antique Quijote bound in leather, with gilt letters and edges and reproductions of Doré. The family possessed an insatiable appetite for atrocious objects, fake antiquities, Gothic calligraphy on parchment, luxury bindings, and illusory genealogies. On the façade of the house, behind the two granite columns that held up the terrace, were embedded the heraldic coats of arms of the two family names, those of Don Francisco de Asís and of Doña Cecilia: Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo. In the family the distinctive traits of each of the two branches were passionately debated: My son Víctor has the unmistakable Ponce-Cañizares nose; you can tell the girl came into this world with a pure Salcedo character. From the time they were born, the children of Ignacio Abel and Adela were picked up by their grandfather, the maiden aunts, Abel’s brother-in-law Víctor, and the uncle who was a priest, and scrutinized as they discussed to which of the two lines a nose or a type of hair or dimples belonged, from which Ponce or Cañizares or Salcedo the baby had inherited the tendency to cry so loudly—those strong Cañizares lungs! No sooner had the child taken a few hesitant steps than the exact resemblance to some especially graceful ancestor was recognized, or its Ponce or Ponce-Cañizares or Salcedo origin vehemently argued over with the attention to detail of philologists debating an obscure etymology. In the heat of these gratifying diatribes they tended to forget the inevitable genetic contribution of the children’s father, unless they could relate it to the hint of a defect: The boy seems to have inherited his father’s eccentricity, one of them would say. At family meals Adela would look at her husband out of the corner of her eye and become irritated with herself for not knowing how to overcome the stress of imagining what he must be thinking, what he must be seeing. You despise my parents, who love you like a son, who love you even more because your parents aren’t alive. You see them as foolish and ridiculous and don’t realize they’re not young anymore and are developing the manias of old people like the ones you or I will have when we’re their age. You think my brother is a Fascist and a parasite, and when he says something to you your answer is so dismissive even I feel embarrassed. You can’t see any goodness or generosity in them, or how much they love your children and how much your children love them. You can’t imagine how they suffer when they hear about the horrible things your people or the people you think are your people are doing in Madrid, and they’re in distress just like me and your children at not knowing where you are or if those savages have done something to you. I think they make you angry and jealous. You don’t know how happy each of your professional accomplishments makes them. They respect you and don’t care if you’re a Republican and a Socialist and don’t go to Mass on Sunday or want our children to have a religious upbringing, as if my opinion didn’t matter. You despise them just because they’re Catholic and vote for the right and go to Mass and recite the rosary every day, even though they don’t hurt anybody. But you didn’t turn down the money my father gave us when we didn’t have anything, or the commissions you received thanks to him, and when you got it into your head to go to Germany even though the children were so young, you didn’t think twice about asking my father to let us live in his house while you were away because that would allow you to leave with no sense of guilt, besides saving you money as you wouldn’t have been able to live for a whole year in Germany on the grant the Council for Ad
vanced Studies gave you. You aren’t grateful to them for accepting you with open arms even though other people in my family and from our class told them you didn’t have a cent when you courted me and were the son of a Socialist construction foreman and a caretaker on Calle Toledo. They’re reactionaries as all of you call them but they’ve always been much more generous with you than you’ve been with them. Had it not been for them and our children I would have rotted with loneliness all these years. What would I do without them now that you have gone back to Madrid even though you knew as well as we did that something very bad was going on there, you cared more about seeing your mistress than staying with your own children.