In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  On that morning she came toward him in the same straight line she’d taken across Fifth Avenue from the stairway of the library: her back erect, her pace the bold, determined walk of people in her city, her mouth partially open, wearing the same expectant expression Ignacio Abel saw from the table at the back of the café where he was waiting for her, or when he remained standing, not taking off his jacket and often not even his overcoat, in the room rented for the secret meetings where he saw her naked for the first time, in the semidarkness of heavy curtains and half-closed shutters through which the afternoon light filtered as faintly as the noises of the city and the sounds in the house. Each of the steps she’d taken preceded her silent walk on bare feet across the worn rug toward the man who hadn’t moved or begun to undress. Only weeks earlier, a little more than a month, she’d arrived at a pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana, not knowing anyone in Madrid and exhausted after an entire night on the train that brought her from Hendaye. How different from Paris this city smelled, how different the odor in the air since she’d crossed the border. Early on that September morning, Madrid had the damp smell of an earthenware jug set to cool in a kitchen window. It smelled of paving tiles recently watered by a municipal tank pulled by two old horses; it smelled of horse manure, oil, dry dust, of the stubble on which there was still dew as the train pulled into Madrid; of rockrose and pines in the Sierra; of the damp half-light and wooden steps of the building where the pensión was located, steps scrubbed and scoured with bleach, half-light invaded by the smell of sausage and spices from a grocery store downstairs whose shutters were just being raised when she arrived, suitcase in hand, receiving as a welcome, almost an embrace, the dense aroma of the coffee the shopkeeper was grinding in the doorway. The room she was given faced a narrow street that led to the plaza. A noise rose from it that at first she couldn’t identify, still disoriented by strangeness and fatigue: people chatting in groups looking for shade, peddlers, street vendors announcing repairs of umbrellas and tin pots, radio speakers in stalls selling drinks, the songs of maids cleaning, hanging clothes on the flat roofs, beating carpets or shaking out sheets on nearby balconies. Happiness settled in her: it was the sense of ample, austere space in the room, more welcoming than the increasingly smaller ones she’d been able to afford in Paris. As in the landscapes she saw at daybreak from the train window, in the room things seemed arranged in an order that defined space. In other countries in Europe, the countryside, like the cities, appeared too complete, too full, too cultivated and inhabited. In Spain empty spaces had the amplitude of America. Above the iron bed in the room was a crucifix, and a painted plaster Virgin Mary stood on a bureau in which she put her clothes, its deep drawers lined with sheets of newspaper. The walls were white, painted with lime, and had black paneling that reached as high as the window; the floor was of red clay tiles interspersed with smaller ones of polychrome ceramic. The straight bars of the bed ended in gilded tin balls that jingled when footsteps made the floor vibrate. On the bureau, next to the Virgin with a smooth bosom and blue mantle who crushed the head of a serpent with her small, unshod foot, was a kind of bronze or tin candelabrum holding candles. The electric cable crossed the wall in a straight line to a black bakelite switch above the bed and the bulb with a blue glass shade hanging from the ceiling. The top of the bed sheet was folded over a light quilt, under the pillow, with a solemn suggestion of whiteness and volume that Judith would recognize that same morning, on her first visit to the Prado, in the habits of Carthusian friars painted by Zurbarán. Opposite the bed was a bare pine table, solid, its legs resting on the tiles, with a drawer that emitted a smell of resin when it was opened. In front of the table was a chair with a straight back and a rush seat that invited you to sit down. Before she finished unpacking the suitcase, she placed her typewriter on the table, along with a folder of blank sheets, an ink bottle, her fountain pen, a blotter, a pencil case, her notebook, the small round mirror she always had at hand when she sat down to work. Each object seemed to fit with an effortless precision that anticipated writing and made it inevitable: all the things on the wooden table in the golden, slightly damp light of a Madrid morning related to one another like the random objects in the flat space of a cubist painting. The armoire, tall and gloomy, had a full-length mirror, and Judith looked at herself, benevolently studying the signs of weariness, the contrast between her foreign presence and the background of the room. The washbasin and pitcher of water on the washstand were of white porcelain with a delicate blue edge. She felt a sensation she hadn’t yet experienced on her journey: an immediate affinity with the place where she found herself, a harmony that alleviated the solitude and at the same time confirmed for her the privilege of not needing anyone. On the roof opposite the window a cat lay dozing in the sun. Farther away, at a dormer window, a woman was wrapping her black hair in a towel, her eyes and face turned to the sun. A few days later, Judith had learned to identify the buildings outlined against the roofed horizon: the large tower with columns and the bronze Athena of the Fine Arts Circle, the battlements on the Palace of Communications, and above them a flag waving that had awakened in her an unwarranted affection from the moment she first saw it when she crossed the border at Hendaye—red, yellow, purple, shining in the sun with something of the proletarian boldness of the geraniums on the balconies.

  She wanted to do everything at once, that very morning, she later told Ignacio Abel. Go out to the street, lie down on the white, fragrant sheet, write a letter to her mother, write an article about her trip: the sensation of having come to another world simply by crossing a border; of finding people with darker faces and eyes with an intensity that at first disconcerted her; of glimpsing through the train window, in the darkness, the shadows of bare rocks and precipices; of being awakened by the violent shaking of a train much slower and less comfortable than French trains and seeing at first light a level, abstract landscape in earth tones, flat and dry like a juxtaposition of autumn leaves. She wanted to read the book by Dos Passos she’d brought with her but also wanted to sit at the table with a dictionary at hand to read a novel by Pérez Galdós that her professor at Columbia had introduced her to, or go outside holding the novel and find the streets his characters had walked along. Sitting in front of the typewriter and the open window, she felt for the first time, in her consciousness and at the tips of her fingers, barely brushing the keys, the imminence of a book that would include each of the things she was feeling at that moment. It wasn’t a chronicle or a travel story or a confession or a novel; the uncertainty both wounded and stimulated her; she sensed that if she stayed alert but also allowed herself to drift, she’d find a beginning as tenuous as the tip of a thread; she’d have to squeeze it between her fingers not to lose it, but if she squeezed it with a little more strength than necessary, the thread would break and she wouldn’t be able to find it again. Through the window came the voices of street vendors, the cooing of pigeons, the noises of traffic, the ringing of bells. The sounds of the bells changed every few minutes or became confused with one another: the horizon over the roofs was filled with bell towers. Someone knocked at the door, startling her. A maid came in with a tray and Judith tried to explain in her awkward Spanish that there must be some mistake, she hadn’t ordered anything. “It’s from the landlady,” the maid said, “in case the señorita arrived with an empty stomach after traveling so much in foreign countries.” She put the tray on the table, using her elbow to move the typewriter, which didn’t fail to attract her attention because she didn’t associate it with a woman. “I hope you enjoy it”: a large cup of coffee, a small pitcher of milk, a toasted white-flour roll, cut in half, dripping a gold-green oil, the grains of salt on top gleaming in the light. Suddenly she discovered how hungry she was. The bread covered in oil crackled as it dissolved in her mouth, the grains of salt bursting on her palate like seeds of delight. With a checked napkin she wiped the oil from the corners of her mouth, the muzzle of cream the milk left on her lips. Everything conspired for her h
appiness, including her exhaustion, the sweet somnolence, the din of the church bells that provoked flights of pigeons over the roofs. She took off her shoes and sat on the bed, to massage her feet, swollen and painful after so many hours of traveling. She lay down, holding the novel by Pérez Galdós, searching its pages for place names in Madrid that wouldn’t be too far away, and in less than a minute she was sleeping as soundly as she had when she was a little girl on those winter mornings when she didn’t feel well and her mother brought her breakfast in bed, after the men had gone and a peaceful silence had descended on the apartment.

  11

  WHEN HIS CHILDREN were small, Ignacio Abel liked to make for them drawings and models, cutouts of houses, automobiles, animals, trees, ships. He’d begin by drawing a tiny dog in his sketchbook, and next to the dog a street lamp would emerge like a tall flower, and near it a window, and from there the entire house would take shape, and above the roof and chimney, beside which a cat was outlined, the moon appeared like a slice of melon. Lita and Miguel would look at those prodigious creations, their elbows on the table, leaning so close to the sketchbook they barely left him room to continue drawing, competing for a proximity they rarely enjoyed. They lived in their shared bedroom that was also their homework room and playroom, and in the back rooms where the maids reigned, not observing the severe norms of silence or things said in quiet voices that the children had to submit to when entering adult territory: in the kitchen, in the laundry room, where Miguel spent all his spare time, the maids talked loudly and the radio played all day long, and through the window overlooking an interior courtyard came the voices of the servants in other residences as they called to one another, slurring their speech in an accent Miguel imitated perfectly. In the rest of the house the children had to close and open doors gently, walk without making noise, especially near their father’s study or the bedroom with closed curtains where their mother often had to withdraw because of endless headaches or ailments that rarely had a precise name or were serious enough to require the doctor’s presence. In the kitchen the maids’ voices and those on the radio fused with the splatters and smoke emanating from the stoves, and colorful characters would appear at the service door, delivery men from the stores, peddlers loaded down with cheeses, pots of honey, sometimes chickens or rabbits, heads down and feet tied. But the door separating the service area from the rest of the apartment had to be kept closed, and the children, above all Miguel, who had a more confused idea of his place in the world, were fascinated by this rigorous frontier that only they moved across freely. Not only faces and sounds changed but accents and odors, the odors of things and of people: on one side it smelled of oil, food, fish, the blood of a recently slaughtered chicken or rabbit, the maids’ sweat; on the other side it smelled of the lavender soap their mother used to wash her hands, their father’s cologne, furniture polish, the cigarettes visitors sometimes smoked.

  As she grew older, the girl ventured across the frontier less and less frequently, for the most part in order to remain true to the character of a distinguished intellectual señorita she’d invented for herself, and instead of flamenco verses about jealousy and crimes and great black eyes playing on the kitchen radio, Lita listened with her mother to symphonic broadcasts on Unión Radio. While Miguel, enthralled, read about film stars and advertisements for exorcisms and astrological remedies in the cheap magazines the maids bought (LOVE and LUCK are yours FREE OF CHARGE if you possess the mysterious RADIATING FLOWER prepared in accordance with the millenarian rites of PAMIR and the immutable astrological principles of the MAGI OF THE ORIENT), Lita read novels by Jules Verne, knowing she’d earn her father’s approval, and interpreted for the family the popular ballads she learned to sing at school. But both had felt attracted to their father’s study, whose mysterious spaces their childish imaginations had enlarged. He was fast and sure with the pencil, as absorbed as his children in what he was doing. He would shade the outlines of the drawing and add the form of a foldable base, then cut everything out, house, tree, balloon, animal, automobile with its convertible top and headlights, the radii of the wheels perfectly detailed, even the profile of a chauffeur in a visored cap at the wheel, a Western outlaw on horseback, a motorcycle with the driver leaning forward, wearing a leather jacket and aviator goggles. Once he drew an airplane, and when he finished cutting it from the sketchbook, flew it between his fingers above the heads of the children, each desperate to hold it first. In stationery stores he looked for cutouts of famous buildings, bridges, trains, ocean liners; he taught them to handle scissors, in which their pudgy child’s fingers became entangled, to follow with cautious precision the edges of a drawing, to distinguish between cutting and folding lines, to gently squeeze the bottle of glue so that only the small drop that was needed came out. And when they became impatient or gave up, he’d take the scissors and show them again how to cut out a drawing, recalling Professor Rossman, his teacher in Weimar, who would go into a comic ecstasy when he heard the sound and observed the resistance of the sheet of paper he was cutting.

  He brought them old models from the office, drew cutouts of buildings he’d studied in international magazines. When they were older, perhaps they’d remember that as children they played with models of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, which they liked more because it resembled a lighthouse and a castle tower. But it wasn’t that Ignacio Abel condescended to entertain his children or showed them praiseworthy patience. His own love of architecture had a portion of self-absorbed childish play. He liked to cut and fold. The flexible angles of an empty pillbox gave him immediate tactile pleasure, pure forms as perceptible with one’s fingertips as with one’s eyes: angles, stairways, corners. How strange the invention of the staircase, a concept of something so remote from any inspiration in nature, space folding over itself at right angles, a single broken line on blank paper, as limitless in principle as a spiral, or those parallel lines whose definition had overwhelmed him at school: “No matter how far they extend, they will never meet.” So close one to the other, yet condemned never to meet by an unexplained curse. From his able hands, from the shadows of words and childish fears, an emotion receded to the bottom of time: as if advancing along a very long passage toward a faint light, he saw the boy he had been, sitting in a room with a low ceiling, bent over a notebook, wielding a cheap pen, dipping it into an inkwell, objects near him erased beyond the small circle of the oil lamp. The sun didn’t come in the basement window, but the sound of people’s footsteps did, and animals’ hooves, and wagon wheels, the permanent yelling of street vendors, the monotonous chant of blind men singing. One night hooves and wheels stopped at the window. Someone knocked at the door and he remembered that his mother had gone out and he had to go up and open the street door. In the wagon was a shape covered with sacks.

  He made a small building and told his children it was a house for fleas; next to it a tree, an automobile, a bridge a little farther away, its raised arch identical to the one in the Viaducto, or the one the engineer Torroja had designed to save the gully of a stream in University City; the marquee of a train station, its clock hanging from the beams, the tiny Roman numerals drawn inside the sphere with a pencil he’d sharpened to an extremely fine point. With the same joy he studied the scale model of University City that had been growing in one of the drafting rooms at his office, a replica of the space visible through the windows, at first not a blank page but a wasteland of bare earth covered with the stumps of thousands of pines. Like Gulliver in Lilliput he supervised a diminutive city where his footsteps would have reverberated like seismic shocks, the city that had begun as cardboard and ink, glue, blocks of wood, the faithful model of a fragment of the world that was three-dimensional but didn’t exist yet or was being created slowly, too slowly. On the other side of the windows, steam shovels opened great trenches in the barren earth, lifting roots like manes of hair, like naked branches of trees that would have grown in the subsoil (to build, one first had to clear away and
cut down, clean out and flatten, make the earth as smooth and abstract as a sheet of paper spread on a drawing table). Laborers swarmed along the esplanades, on the embankments; with agility they climbed the scaffolding of buildings under construction, thronged in corridors and future lecture halls, applying cement, installing tiles, completing a row of bricks, beginning another; monarchs of their trades, experts in giving real form to what began as capricious fantasy in a sketchbook, copper-colored men in berets with cigarettes glued to their lips; powerful dump trucks and droves of donkeys that transported loads of plaster or jugs of water in their panniers; armed guards who patrolled the construction sites to chase away the crowds of laid-off workers who demanded jobs or tried to overturn or burn the machines that had replaced them and condemned them to starvation. Primitives and millenarians, like them, deluded now not by the expectation of the End of Days but by Libertarian Communism. With a slight effort of his rational imagination, Ignacio Abel could see the completed buildings when bricklayers were still hard at work on their scaffolding and cranes with electric motors swayed over them: beautiful blocks of red brick shining in the sun, along with the exact visual rhythm of the windows, against the dark green background of the Sierra’s spurs. He saw avenues with large trees that now were little more than weak shoots or not even that, cardboard trees he’d cut out himself and glued to the sidewalk of a model. The School of Philosophy students crossed felled trees to reach their building, inaugurated in a rush (in the lecture halls one could still hear the workers’ shouts and pounding hammers). He imagined the students arriving in high-speed streetcars along the straight, wide avenues, strolling in the shade of the trees, lindens or oaks, dispersed on the grass that would grow someday on that bare ground: young, well-fed men and women with strong bones, children of privilege but also workers’ children, educated in solid public schools where knowledge wouldn’t be corrupted by religion and merit would prevail over family background and money. He preferred the vigor of sap to boiling Spanish blood, botany to politics, irrigation projects to five-year plans. Running water, electric streetcars, trees with broad, dense foliage, ventilated spaces. “Abel, for you the social revolution is a question of public works and gardening,” Negrín once said to him, and he replied, “And it’s not for you, Don Juan?” He could almost see his daughter, in a few years’ time, destined for the School of Philosophy and Letters, good-natured and mature, jumping off the streetcar, books under her arm, her hair under a beret slanted to one side, her raincoat open, still an uncommon sight among groups of male students. The future wasn’t a fog of the unknown or a projection of senseless desires, not the predictions of cards or lines on one’s hand, not preachers’ sinister prophecies of the end of the world or paradise on earth. The future was foreseen in the blue lines on plans and in the models he’d helped to build, seeing something in a single glance, understanding with one’s eyes, guessing at a form with the touch of one’s fingers. Ignacio Abel loved the blocks of wood in his children’s building sets, the typography in the books of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poetry of right angles in Le Corbusier. The flat outskirts of Madrid were a clear drawing table on which the future city could be laid out beyond the plans for the university. Straight perspectives that would dissolve in the horizon of the Sierra, vanishing lines of streetcar tracks and electric cables, the workers’ district and its white houses with large windows surrounded by plazas and gardens. To the same extent that he distrusted the vagueness of words, he loved concrete acts and tangible, well-made constructions. A school with bright, comfortable classrooms, a spacious playground, a well-equipped gymnasium; a bridge built with solidity and beauty; a rationally conceived house with running water and a bathroom—he could not imagine more practical ways of improving the world.