In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Night had fallen. The last doors of the market closed with a clang of metal shutters. On the ground slippery with rotten fruit and fish scraps, the typography of political leaflets stood out, spiked with symbols and exclamation points. She’d become disoriented and was walking down a narrow street where the only light was a dim bulb at the far corner. With her head erect and eyes looking straight ahead she crossed the stain of dirty electric light from a tavern that exuded an odor of acidic wine and the sounds of drunkards’ conversations. A shadow brushed against her at the same time as a fetid breath. A rough, roguish male voice said something she didn’t understand but that instinctively made her walk faster. At her back, very close, someone called to her, footsteps echoed hers. A woman alone and young, in high heels, her head uncovered, a foreigner: she quickened her pace and the shadow following her lagged behind and the voice fired an insulting interjection, but a moment later the footsteps approached and with them the breath and the filthy muttered words that frightened and offended her, alone in a strange city that had suddenly become hostile, doors closed the length of the street, and behind the windows covered with shutters and curtains, sounds of conversations, dishes and glasses at suppertime. She wanted to run but her legs felt heavy as in a dream. If she attempted to escape, she’d be acknowledging the proximity of danger, she’d provoke her pursuer and achieve nothing but trouble, the terror of physical harm. A shadow, or perhaps two shadows, now she wasn’t sure, footsteps to her right and to her left, as if to keep her from running, a touch that provoked revulsion, of rage at the insolence, the sexual pursuit. She could confront them, shout insults, call for help at the closed doors and the windows screened by curtains. If only he’d come, if only he’d appear at the end of the street, his silhouette tall and strong against the light at the corner, his open arms offering her refuge and enclosing her in caresses, at first so timid, so incredulous, the caresses of a man grateful for love who can’t fully understand that it has been granted him. They were drunk, alcohol made them bold and weakened them too. Beyond the corner, the street widened into a little square, and on the other side she saw the large windows of a café frosted with steam. A rough hand squeezed her arm, the drunken voice came so close to her ear she felt on her neck the damp touch of breath or saliva. She shook off the hand without looking back and ran across the street, dodging a cold blast of wind and the horn of a car she hadn’t seen coming. Inside the café she was enveloped in air thick with voices and smoke. Male eyes lingered on her, she felt them on her back and the nape of her neck as she walked to the rear, to the arch covered with a curtain behind which must be the lavatory and a telephone booth. She knew his home number by heart but had never used it. She asked for a token, not hiding her urgency, the intensity of her fear. She imagined him in the interior of his other life, as if she’d walked down a dark street and looked through a wide, tall window where a domestic scene took place in silence. She wasn’t going to leave the café until he came for her, wouldn’t abandon the protection of the telephone booth. Impatient, drumming her nails on the glass, trying to catch her breath, she listened to the rings. Someone picked up and Judith paused as she was about to say his name. In silence, the earpiece in her hand, holding her breath, she heard a curious voice asking who it was, Adela’s voice, which she’d heard only once, long before, at the start of everything, the voice of the woman she’d met briefly at the Student Residence.

  13

  LULLED TO SLEEP by the rhythm of the train, he saw his children vividly in the lightning flash of a dream. Perhaps he heard their voices too, because now he remembers that they were close, somewhat weakened, like voices in an open space, perhaps the garden of the house in the Sierra or the edge of the irrigation pond; voices heard in the late afternoon, with an echo of withdrawal and anticipated distance; the past and present collapsed, the recovered voices and the sound of the train filtering into his half-sleep, lit by an alloy of light from the Hudson and the Sierra de Madrid. A voice no longer heard fades away in memory, after a few years it’s forgotten, as, they say, people who lose their sight gradually forget colors. Ignacio Abel can no longer remember his father’s voice and doesn’t even know when he forgot it. His mother’s he can invoke in association with words or phrases peculiar to her: the way she shouted I’m coming when an impatient tenant called for her from the doorway, when someone knocked on the glass of the porter’s lodging. He does remember that: the vibration of the frosted glass, the ringing of the bell, and his mother’s footsteps, slower and slower as she aged and grew heavier and clumsier because of arthritis, yet she preserved a sharp, young tone and streetwise inflection in her voice. I’m coming, she shouted, adding, under her breath, We’re not airplanes.

  He wonders whether his children will begin to forget his voice as well, his face gradually replaced by the frozen image in a photograph. Distance makes his return that much more difficult. Minutes, hours, days, kilometers, distance multiplied by time. Right now, immobile, leaning back in the train, his face next to the window, he continues to leave, to go away. Distance is not a fixed, stable measurement but an expansive wave that pulls him in its centrifugal current, its icy vacuum of unlimited space. Trains, ocean liners, cabs, subway cars, rambling steps to the end of unknown streets. Hotel room after hotel room always at the end of similar flights of steep stairs and narrow halls with identical smells, a universal geography of desolation. But his children, like Judith Biely, are also moving away at the same velocity in different directions, and each instant and each step added to the distance makes his return more improbable. There’s no way to undo the kind of destruction that can sweep away and overturn everything, no way to overcome the accelerated course of time. Doors closing behind him, rooms where he’ll never sleep again, corridors, customs barriers, nautical miles, kilometers traveled north by the train carrying him to another unknown place, just a name now, Rhineberg, a hill in a forest beside steep banks and a white building that doesn’t yet exist, whose initial sketches are in his briefcase: rough, essentially reluctant drafts of a project that might never be built. Constantly going forward, never going back, adding distances, geographical accidents, plains, mountain ranges, cities, battlefronts, countries, entire continents, oceans, modest hotel rooms.

  Memory, like any construction material, has degrees or indices of resistance that in theory one should be able to calculate. How long does it take to forget a voice and not be able to invoke it at will, its unique, mysterious timbre, its tone when it says certain words, whispers in one’s ear or calls from a distance, at once intimate and remote in a telephone receiver, saying everything when it pronounces a name, sweet words it had not spoken to anyone until then. Or perhaps it has: perhaps others remember that same voice, unknown men who haunt like shadows the unexplored country of the past, the earlier lives of Judith Biely, the one she must be living now; eyes that also rested on her naked body, hands and lips that caressed her and to which she surrendered with abandon. To whom else had she said those words, even more singular and exciting because they belonged to another language, honey, my dear, my love. To whom was she saying them now, to whom had she said them in the three months she’d been away from Spain, back in America or perhaps wandering again through European cities, gradually forgetting him, not contaminated by the Spanish misfortune, free of it just by crossing the border, equally immune to the suffering of love and the mourning of a country that, after all, isn’t hers. As spontaneously as she’d decided to become his lover one early October afternoon in Madrid, she decided to break things off a little more than eight months later, toward the middle of July, with a determination that left no room for ambiguity or remorse, and perhaps has also made her immune to pain. So little time, if you stop to think about it. Ignacio Abel continues to see her in his dreams but doesn’t hear her voice. Perhaps it was Judith Biely’s voice he heard saying his name so clearly in Pennsylvania Station, and yet a moment later he couldn’t identify or remember it. Without the photographs, the voice fades before the face. The
photo is absence, the voice is presence. The photo is the pain of the past, the fixed point left behind in time: the frozen image, invariable in appearance, yet more and more distant, more unfaithful, the semblance of a shadow vanishing almost as rapidly on photographic paper as in memory. Feeling his pockets, tormented by the thought of losing any of the few things he now possesses, Ignacio Abel finds his wallet and with his fingertips seeks the photo Judith Biely gave him shortly after they met. In it she smiles just as she’ll smile at him only a few weeks later, with confidence, not holding anything back, openly showing the plenitude of her expectations. The photo awakened Ignacio Abel’s jealousy of Judith’s earlier life in which he didn’t exist and about which he preferred not knowing, not asking, fearing the inevitable male shadows that were there. Perhaps what made her smile and turn, forgetting about the automatic click of the camera, was a man’s presence. What had excited him most about her from the start was what made him most afraid and what had eventually taken her away from him: the strength of her will, which he’d not seen in any other woman, manifested in each of her gestures as clearly as her physical beauty. The flash in the automatic photo booth gleamed on her curly hair, teeth, shining eyes; it rebounded off the line of her cheekbones. That photo was the same one Adela had held in her hands, bewildered, in a kind of fog that threw her features out of focus, and was about to tear up but merely dropped to the floor, along with two or three letters, leaning against the desk in his study whose drawers Ignacio Abel had forgotten to lock.

  Unlike Judith’s voice, Adela’s remains intact in his memory. He’s often heard it calling to him, as she sometimes called to him when she had a bad dream and clung to him in bed, her eyes closed, to be certain he was near. He’s heard it coming from the end of the hall in the apartment in Madrid, as clear in wakefulness as in dreams, on summer nights when the noises of war were gradually becoming routine, waking him at times with the feeling that Adela had come back, crossed the front line, returned to claim him and demand an explanation. How dirty the house was, how disordered the rooms. (There were no longer maids who came in to clean, no cook to prepare food for the señor, soon there wouldn’t even be food.) Too bad he’d let the plants on the balcony die. What a shame he hadn’t made more of an effort to get in touch with his wife and children. The complaints written in the letter he should have torn up or at least left behind in the hotel room in New York, those remembered and the ones imagined, intertwine in the monotonous sound of a voice that belongs to Adela and to his own guilty conscience. How strange not to have felt in her voice that she suspected, that she knew. How could she not have known? How strange not to be able to see oneself from the outside, in the looks of others, those who are closest and suspect though they would have preferred not to find out, who discover without understanding. The boy so serious in the last few months, so withdrawn, observing, standing at the door of his room when his father lowered his voice to speak on the phone in the hall. Ignacio Abel turned to wave a last goodbye after the gate closed at the house in the Sierra, and Miguel, standing next to his mother and sister at the top of the steps, looked and didn’t look at him, as if not wanting to believe that gesture of farewell, as if wanting to let him know he wasn’t deceived, that he, his scorned twelve-year-old son, knew with incongruous lucidity about his father’s impatience, his desire to leave, the relief he felt getting into the car or quickening his pace on the way to the station so as not to miss the train that would take him back to Madrid. His mother, next to him, remained enveloped in a fog of sorrow that rarely lifted, and Miguel could not grasp her motives no matter how much he scrutinized her; Lita became quite emotional, uncharacteristically so, and perhaps somewhat superficially, just as she did when she saw her father arrive and ran out to embrace him and tell him right away the grades she’d received, the books she’d read.

  With clarity Ignacio Abel now relives a scene, the paused image in a documentary film: night in the apartment, the white cloth on the dining room table illuminated by the chandelier, the gold-green light reflecting on place settings and white china plates, the crystal of glasses. The time is February, a few days before the elections. He sees it from the outside, from a distance, a domestic scene glimpsed by the solitary stranger on a street in a city where he doesn’t know anyone, where nothing awaits him but a hotel room. He’s at the head of the table and Adela faces him, the children at the sides in their assigned seats, holding a quiet, trivial conversation while the maid walks down the hall after serving the soup, the maid who was now putting on a white cap and apron, ordered to do so by the señora, who was becoming more and more strict about such details, who a short while before had reprimanded the cook for going out in a hat instead of the kerchief or beret appropriate to her position. Miguel moved his left leg nervously under the table and attempted with little success not to make noise eating his soup. He observed out of the corner of his eye, in a permanent state of alert, attentive to the smallest detail or hint of danger with a sensibility much more acute than his capacity to reason, and therefore more restless. He imagined himself transformed into an invisible man like the one in the movie he’d seen a few Saturdays before with Lita and the maids, behind the back of his father, who, like a distracted, arbitrary monarch, forbade excursions to the movies whenever he heard about an epidemic of something or other in Madrid. The Invisible Man! Miguel was easily overwhelmed when he liked a film a great deal. He couldn’t sit still; he leaned forward in his seat as if trying to be closer to the screen, to sink into it, convulsed with laughter or trembling with fear, pinching Lita, punching her, so enthralled by the film that when they left the theater he was lightheaded, agitated, and that night there was no way to keep him quiet when the lights were turned off; he wanted to keep talking to Lita about the scenes and characters, and when she fell asleep he was still too excited to close his eyes, and he relived the film, imagining variations in which he himself played a part. The chilling enigma of a scientific discovery that offers superhuman powers to the person who controls it! How marvelous to spy without anyone seeing you, to watch everything with no danger of being caught. On his way home from school he’d seen on the door of the shabby theater he was allowed to go to with Lita and the maids the ferocious poster for a film with a black silhouette holding a letter and a large magnifying glass. THE SEALED ENVELOPE (The Secret of the Dardanelles). COMING SOON. How fantastic that phrase was—coming soon—what excitement it unleashed in him when he simply thought about it, about the days left until the film opened, about the possibility of being sick or coming home from school with a failing grade and as punishment not being allowed to go to the movies. If his father became aware of his jiggling leg, he’d scold him, but Miguel hoped the tablecloth would hide it, and in any case he was incapable of sitting still or ordering his leg to stop. “You’re sewing on the Singer,” his father would say. “It seems the boy will have a tailor’s vocation after all.” They all acted in their predictable ways, repeated themselves, the same gestures, but Miguel was the one they all noticed—the scapegoat, he thought, feeling sorry for himself, the black sheep. He thought the Dardanelles in the title of the movie must be members of some secret society of spies or international traffickers, and Lita had laughed at him, calling him ignorant, and told him the Dardanelles was the name of a strait. “And why do you care if your son moves his leg, it’s not serious,” his mother would say, giving his father a look at once concerned and resigned, different from the one she gave the boy, with whom she had to be both indulgent and severe. Dinner became a series of increasingly difficult tests, a race of exasperating slowness, and as he weakened, tripping over obstacles, jiggling his leg without a moment’s rest under the table, unable to sit still in his chair, Lita sat across from him, gliding as if on a magic carpet, smiling and self-confident, eating her soup in silence, handling her knife and fork without leaning her elbows on the table, politely attentive to the adults’ conversation and at times asking a question or making an observation that didn’t provoke an ironic or c
ondescending reply, the kind he’d become used to hearing from his father. He would have liked to run out, not leaving his napkin folded beside the plate, not asking permission to leave the table, just becoming invisible, floating along the hall toward the partially prohibited territory filled with promise at the back of the house, the kitchen and laundry room and tiny room the cook and the maid shared, where he could hear the sound of the radio, with Angelillo singing a song that brought tears to his eyes, the story of the gravedigger Juan Simón, who one day finds himself obliged to bury his own daughter, dead in the bloom of life: