In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He had accomplished things that could be measured and judged, that had an undeniable lasting presence in reality. How unsettling the thought that time would run out, that he wouldn’t have the intellectual clarity or presence of mind or courage to carry out what he dreamed of: a house where he and Judith Biely would live both in the world and separate and safe from it, a library in a clearing in the woods beside a great river. The tiny human figures he’d placed on the model to give an idea of scale—he saw them as animated and enlarged to the size of adults, young men and women carrying books, his own children. He was impatient for that future to arrive sooner. He’d heard Juan Ramón Jiménez speak of an unhurried hurry, of joyful work. He wanted to see them concluded: the University Hospital, the School of Medicine, the School of Sciences, the School of Architecture (so close to completion); he wanted that open ground with trenches like scars and harsh brambles to be an athletic field; he wanted the sticks of trees to grow and give more shade to the barren land of Madrid (other trees had been cut down earlier, other walls demolished by pickaxes and steam shovels, but in a short time the wounds in the landscape would heal, and what existed before would be forgotten). How painful the slowness of the work, what impatience with administrative procedures, with the dilatoriness of the human effort required for any task, even more so with such primitive methods of construction. Picks, hoes, shovels scratching at the hard earth of Castilla, malnourished laborers in filthy berets, with ruined mouths from which hand-rolled cigarettes hung. Early on Monday the work would start up with a show of energy, and a week later all was left hanging because of a government crisis or because another construction strike had been called.

  Sometimes he thought: you could have been one of them, your son could have been born to earn a scant wage as a bricklayer in University City or to throw rocks at the mounted guards and not study for a career. (What would Miguel study? What would he be suited for?) As a boy he’d worked with his hands during school vacations with the crews under his father, the foreman respected by his bricklayers because even if he’d prospered enough to wear a vest and jacket, he still had a face burned by weather and blunt, hard hands, and was more skilled than anyone in tracing the line of a wall with squinting eyes and no more help than a cord and a lead weight. Accompanying his father as a boy, he’d learned the physical effort demanded by each shovelful of cement and moved earth, each paving stone in its precise place, each brick in its identical row. Everything was easy, dazzling on the plan: the lines of ink and patches of watercolor culminated in a building in a couple of afternoons of joyful work, an entire city invented in a few days. Avenues crossing at right angles, receding to the vanishing point; trees in the tender greens of watercolor; small human figures to indicate scale. But in reality the figure seen through the windows of the drafting room is a man who tires easily and isn’t well fed; who left his wretched living quarters in an outlying suburb before dawn to walk to work and save the few céntimos a streetcar or the metro would have cost; who at midday eats a poor stew of garbanzos boiled in a broth made from an old bone; who could fall from a scaffolding or be crushed by an avalanche of bricks or stones and become an invalid and spend the rest of his life lying on a straw mattress in a room at the end of a foul-smelling hall while his wife and children go hungry and find themselves condemned to the humiliation of public charity. When he inspected a construction site, passively observing the physical effort of other men, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his well-cut suit, his body fresh from his morning shower and absolved from the brutality of labor, his shoes dirtied by dust, the shoes the bricklayer bent over in a trench would see at eye level when he passed: gentlemen’s shoes, so insulting to the man who wears espadrilles. “You don’t understand the class struggle, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio had told him, the foreman who forty years earlier had been an apprentice on his father’s crew. “Class struggle is when a few drops of rain fall and your feet get wet.” He felt shame and relief, wished for social justice, and feared the rage of those hoping to make it happen through the violence of a bloody revolution. How many men had died in the Asturias uprising, how many suffered torture and prison? For what? In the name of what apocalyptic prophecies translated into the language of tabloids, at the hands of such brutal uniformed avengers, drunk on other degraded words, or not even that, mercenaries paid as miserably as the rebels they hunted down. He feared that cruelty or misfortune would crush his children, dragging them into the penury from which he’d escaped but that was still so close, like a certain, visible threat: in the scabby, barefoot children who circled the site looking for something to steal or approached the workers to beg for something to eat, who walked with their heads down, holding the hand of a father who’d been laid off. He wanted his children to become strong, to learn something about the harshness of real life, particularly the boy, so weak and vulnerable, but he also wanted to protect them beyond any uncertainty, save them forever from evil and sorrow. Sometimes he took the children to the office, especially after he’d bought the car. He took them for rides along the future avenues, pointed out the places where perhaps they would study. He’d accelerate so the wind would hit them in the face, drive to the dusty green of the Monte del Pardo, then return to University City. Their mother had dressed them as if they were going to a baptism: the boy with straight bangs across his forehead, his small man’s jacket, his loose-fitting trousers; the girl’s hair arranged with a part and a ribbon, wearing patent leather shoes and socks. He’d continue working after the other employees had left and the children played like giants in the model of the city. At home, the maids were surprised to see the señor take care of the children while the señora attended her social gatherings, the lectures and expositions at the Lyceum Club, or spent the entire day in the darkened bedroom; surprised that he would go down on all fours with the children in the hallway, or move aside the papers on his worktable to make room for their constructions of paper and cardboard and their toy car races.

  It hadn’t always been this way. For a long time he wished they hadn’t been born, during anguished nights of crying and fever when he felt suffocated under the weight of his responsibility. He went far away, but with distance guilt became sharper. In Weimar, each time he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter he was afraid he would find out that one of them was sick (surely the boy, not only younger but more fragile). At times he’d walk along the street enjoying the silence after a day of hard work and study and suddenly have the presentiment that when he reached the pensión the landlady would hand him an urgent telegram. He feared misfortune, and punishment even more. For having gone away, for not feeling homesick. For surrendering to the embrace of his Hungarian lover, who, when they had finished, pushed him away, lit a cigarette, and seemed to forget his existence. For having applied for the study grant without consulting Adela and putting off the moment of telling her in the cowardly hope he’d be turned down, avoiding both the need for courage and the certain melodrama. He was afraid of telegrams, unexpected phone calls, knocks on the door, the signs that he’d soon learn something that would ruin everything.

  The wagon with wooden wheels and iron reinforcements had stopped at the low window of the porter’s lodging, and the hooves of a horse had struck the paving stones, but he didn’t look up from the notebook where he was copying an exercise in geometrical drawing, going over in ink the lines he’d previously drawn in pencil (two parallel lines, regardless of how far they extend, never meet), wetting just the tip of the nib in the inkwell to avoid the error of a blot on the white paper. It was another time, almost another century, and he was thirteen years old in the winter of 1903. (The king had been crowned a few months earlier. Ignacio Abel had seen him go by in a carriage surrounded by golden shakos with crests of feathers and noticed that he wasn’t much older than himself: the king had the long, pale face of a boy beneath the visor of his high military shako.) There was knocking at the entrance door and he didn’t look up because his mother was the one who took care of the porter’s lodgi
ng. There was more knocking, louder this time, and then he remembered that his mother had gone out, telling him to look after things. A stranger wearing a beret and a bricklayer’s smock asked for her and looked at him when he said she wasn’t in, and he was her son. He was still holding the pen with the wooden shaft when he approached the wagon where the shape covered in empty plaster sacks lay. Wagon wheels will leave two parallel lines that will never meet as they carry on bare boards that bounce over potholes a dead body covered with a sack. His father, always so agile, so impatient with his son who had vertigo when he climbed a foot or two, had broken his neck falling from a scaffold. After many years Ignacio Abel still sometimes dreamed he had to move aside the cloth of the dusty sack with the large, dark stain to see the face underneath. In the soft palm of his child’s hand the shaft of the pen broke in two, a sharp splinter piercing his sweaty skin. His guilt as a father mixed with his fear of misfortune. Vertigo in the face of those fragile lives to whom he was tied by an overwhelming responsibility was revived by his retrospective compassion for the boy who had bent his head over a notebook in that poorly lit room moments before the knocking at the door, ignorant of the fact that he was now the only child of a widowed mother, an exemplary student at the neighborhood Piarist school, rescued from a sentence to manual labor thanks not only to his intelligence but to the money his father had saved for so many years, knowing he wasn’t well, knowing he’d leave a defenseless child too delicate to earn his living as he’d done. He had been ill. When he fell from the top of the scaffolding, it wasn’t because he tripped or because of a loose board but because his heart burst.

  Slowly, Ignacio Abel had been coming to terms with the presence of his two children and discovered, as time went on, that they were the most luminous part of his life. Watching them grow taught him to mistrust disappointment and be thankful for the unexpected. What real life imposed on his desire and the project were not only limitations but also possibilities, the gifts of risk and the unforeseen. The anonymous masters of architecture had worked with what they had closest to hand, not with materials they’d selected but with those provided by chance, stone or wood or clay for adobe bricks. His father would touch a dressed stone of granite with his large open palm as if he were stroking an animal’s back. There was discipline, a pride in the struggle to execute a project exactly according to plan. In 1929 he’d traveled to Barcelona expressly to see the German pavilion at the International Exposition, and as he studied with Professor Rossman the rooms of marble and steel and glass walls, he’d discovered in himself, beneath the admiration, an element of rejection. The perfection that only a few years earlier would have seemed indisputable disturbed him now for its coldness, over which it seemed the human presence would slide without leaving a trace. He loved the reinforced concrete, the extensive sheets of glass, the firm, flexible steel, but he envied the talent and skill when he saw at the side of a road a melon patch with a watchman’s shack made of straw and reeds, woven with an art that had existed four thousand years ago in the salt marshes of Mesopotamia, or a simple wall built with stones of different sizes and shapes that fit solidly together with no need for mortar. There was no plan so perfect that uncertainty could be discarded. Only the test of time and the elements revealed the beauty of a construction, ennobled by weather and worn by the movement of human lives, just as a tool handle was worn by use, or the treads of a staircase. And if the fulfillment of what he’d desired when he was very young resulted in disappointment and wariness over the years, the best he had was the consequence of the unexpected: the Hungarian woman who pressed her flat belly and meager hips against him in an unheated room in Weimar; Judith Biely; Lita and Miguel, who perhaps are forgetting his face and the sound of his voice or think he’s dead and are beginning to erase him from their lives, strengthened by a will to survive despite his absence.

  No sign warned him of the appearance of Judith Biely. He’d never dreamed of or wished for children, who arrived by chance in the inertia of his marriage. No project, no fulfilled desire, not even those that without much hope inspired him at the age of thirteen or fourteen in the porter’s lodging (his schoolbooks and notebooks on the oilcloth-covered table with the built-in foot warmer, the inkwell and pencils, the oil lamp always lit in the damp basement apartment, the photograph of his dead father on the fireplace mantel, a black ribbon at a corner of the frame), had offered him as much happiness as watching his daughter grow, an unexpected masterpiece in which he could take pleasure with no hint of vanity or fear of disappointment. She lived in a self-determined, autonomous way, born of parents but independent of them, with a vague family resemblance—her hair identical to that of the Ponce-Cañizares clan, her rounded nose as unquestionably Salcedo as the hazel color of her eyes. From whom had she inherited her serenity, her consideration of people over and above the familial or the social, her equable instinct, her balance between a sense of duty and a disposition for joy? She’d inherited none of that from him, of course, or from Adela or her family, whom she nonetheless adored, especially her grandfather Don Francisco de Asís. As a little girl she’d been protective of her brother, tender with him, perhaps because the boy was younger and rather frail. Adela was frequently ill after Miguel’s birth. The wet nurse fed him and kept him clean, the maids hovered over him, but it was his sister who from the start concerned herself with caring for him, teaching him to play, urging him to walk, guessing his desires, understanding his language. She cared for her brother with the same satisfaction she took in jumping rope or cutting out a childish figure or arranging the furniture in her dollhouse. When he was a baby she’d take him in her arms, pressing him firmly against her and placing her hand at the back of his neck to protect his tender head. She cradled him, pressing her chubby cheeks against the boy’s pale little face, kissing him with a spontaneity her parents lacked. From early on, the boy admired her, and was as unconditional in his love as a dog to his owner, from whom he expects all good things and to whom he attributes all powers. It was she who helped him take his first steps and wiped away his tears and snot every time he fell. She played school and sat her brother in a low chair, in the same row as the dolls to whom she gave sums to do, or dictations, writing with chalk in her neat round hand on a blackboard the Three Kings had brought for her. The boy grew up adoring her, imitating her, so close to her in age and at the same time small and docile enough to obey her and learn from her. But he didn’t learn her social skills, her capacity for making friends and establishing intense relationships, as rich in embraces and promises of eternal friendship as in dramatic fights and reconciliations.