In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “You can’t go around unarmed, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio said when, at the end of the day, he told him about that morning’s gunfire at the Medical School construction site. Eutimio, his senior by only a few years, looked much older, though stronger as well, with his erect posture, large hands, and dark face crossed by horizontal lines like hatchet blows in a block of wood. “You take a big chance coming alone every morning in your car and leaving in the evening when nobody’s around.”

  The pistol Eutimio showed him after closing the office door behind him was much larger than Negrín’s, more primitive than the one Adela’s brother had. It looked like a solid piece of iron hammered into summary form on an anvil. Eutimio remained standing, beret in hand. Ignacio Abel knew that asking him to sit down was useless. So he stood too, leaning against the window, uncomfortable in his own office, his custom-tailored clothes, the softness of his hands, before this man who’d known him when he was a boy and his father took him to work with his crew of masons on holidays and during school vacations. Eutimio, then an apprentice stucco worker, took care of Ignacio: he applied grease to his hands skinned raw by the work, burned by the plaster and lime, and he showed him how to hold his fingers together and blow on the tips to keep them warm in the winter dawns. Ignacio had the admiration for him a small child has for a boy who’s a few years older and yet moves among adults and behaves like them. Eutimio had seen his father’s face before it was covered with the sack.

  “I’m nearsighted, Eutimio. I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

  “But didn’t you do your service in Morocco?”

  “I was so useless they assigned me to an office.”

  “Not useless, Don Ignacio, well connected, if you’ll allow me to speak frankly.” Eutimio, the beret in his hand and his head slightly lowered, had in his lively eyes a gleam both affectionate and sarcastic. “The useless ones who didn’t study and couldn’t pull any strings were sent to the frontlines anyway and died before anybody else.”

  “If I had a pistol, I’d be a danger to everyone except the man who wanted to kill me.”

  “A pistol can save your life.”

  “Captain Faraudo had one in his pocket and they killed him all the same.”

  “The sons of bitches came up behind him. His wife was with him. He was holding her arm.”

  “It has to be the law that defends us, Eutimio.”

  “Don’t tell me that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth doesn’t work. If they are out to kill us, we have to defend ourselves. One of them for each one of us. You know I’m not a violent man, but we have no choice.”

  “That’s what the other side says.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, Don Ignacio, but you don’t understand the class struggle.”

  “You haven’t become a Leninist overnight, Eutimio, have you?”

  “There are things you can’t understand, with all due respect.” Eutimio spoke slowly, distinctly. As a young man he’d listened to the speeches of Pablo Iglesias, and every day he read the lead articles in El Socialista aloud, in a clear voice. “You may have a Socialist Party card and one for the UGT, like your father, may he rest in peace, but what counts in the class struggle isn’t what you’ve read but the shoes you wear or what your hands are like. Your father began as a bricklayer’s helper, and when he had the accident he was a master builder, but we called him Señor Miguel, not Don Miguel. You, Don Ignacio, are a gentleman. Not a parasite and not an exploiter, because you earn your living with your work and your talent. But you wear shoes, not espadrilles, and if you had to use a shovel or a pick, in five minutes your hands would be covered with blisters, like when you were a little boy and your father would take you with us to the work site.”

  “But Eutimio, I thought the class struggle was between owners and workers, not between one group of workers and another. When all of you start shooting, why fire at men who wear espadrilles too?”

  Eutimio stood looking at him with some surprise but also with a good deal of indulgence, as when he was an awkward, chubby little boy who had to be pushed to climb up to the first plank of a scaffold.

  “Just what I said, Don Ignacio—you don’t understand. Probably, when people get desperate, they stop acting rationally. I’m not much good at arguing, but with this in my hand, nobody’s going to silence me.”

  “Not silence, Eutimio, but worse, kill you. Never mind the pistol you carry. The question is, do you have the reflexes to confront those gangsters? And if somebody’s desperate because he doesn’t have work or his children go hungry, I understand his holding up a store or robbing a bank, whatever. I understand those people who wait in the pine groves until nightfall to steal construction materials, or come here in the morning hoping we’ll give them a day’s work. It drives me crazy when the guards take them away in handcuffs, or when other workers chase them with rocks so they won’t compete for the little they have. But you tell me what those gunmen wanted today, or the ones who’ll probably come tomorrow to take revenge.”

  “They want the social revolution, Don Ignacio. Not for workers’ wages to go up but for workers to be in charge. To finally turn the tables, as they say. No more exploiters and no more exploited.”

  Eutimio, who’d always had the sonorous, precise speech of Madrid’s working-class neighborhoods, nourished by the quick wit of the street and by politically charged novels, expressed himself now as if he were reciting a propaganda pamphlet or a newspaper editorial. The secretary came in with a folder of papers to be signed, and the foreman looked down and adopted an instinctive attitude of docility, retreating toward the door, as if to clear away any suspicion of improper proximity to Ignacio Abel. “With your permission,” he said, bowing, both hands holding his beret. Any indication of familiarity had disappeared from his face. In an instant he’d canceled any link he might have had with the director of the office, seemed to have erased from his memory the image of the boy whose hands, stiff with cold, chafed and raw, he rubbed with grease, in the distant time at the turn of the century, on very early mornings illuminated by gaslight.

  From the car after he left work, Ignacio Abel saw him walking alone to the distant streetcar stop, his quick step, the bag with his lunch pail over his shoulder, hands in pockets, among the groups of workers who flowed from the buildings where only custodians and armed watchmen were left, the afternoon sun on the recently installed windowpanes, motionless machines, cranes oscillating in the air crossed by swallows and swifts. Assault Guards stood here and there asking for identification and searching those leaving the construction area.

  “Get in, Eutimio, I’ll take you home.”

  He slowed down to move alongside him, but the foreman resisted, barely turning his head, walking faster. Perhaps he didn’t want other workers to see him getting into the car of the associate director of construction.

  “I’ll get dust all over the upholstery, Don Ignacio.”

  “Don’t be silly. Weren’t you saying I shouldn’t be so overconfident? Well, I don’t like to see you walking alone here either.”

  “Nothing to worry about, Don Ignacio, they won’t interfere with me.” He’d dropped into the passenger seat with the weariness of an old man and had the pistol in his hand, the black barrel pointing toward Ignacio Abel. “And if one of them doesn’t know who I am, I have this to make the introductions.”

  “You’d better move the pistol away, otherwise you won’t just get dust on my upholstery, you’ll fire it by accident when we hit a pothole and blow my head off.”

  “What an idea, Don Ignacio. As you get older you’re more and more like your late father. I always say, if there were more gentlemen like you, the world would be a different place.”

  “Aren’t you getting tired of calling me a gentleman? Aren’t I a worker? Remember what the constitution says: Spain is a republic of workers of every class.”

  “Sounds nice, if only it were true.” Eutimio leaned back in the seat, caressed the leather upholstery appreciatively with his broad finger
tips, brushing the instrument panel with them, the ivory buttons on the car radio, carefully, as if afraid of damaging them. “But you can’t eat the constitution. You know what the landowners say who’d rather lose the harvest than pay decent wages to their workers.”

  “‘Eat the Republic.’”

  “Exactly. They step on people and are shocked when those they’ve stepped on turn around and bite them.”

  “But that wasn’t what we were talking about.”

  “Now you’re angry with me, Don Ignacio, because I called you a gentleman, but you shouldn’t be. I haven’t called you an exploiter, God forbid. You haven’t robbed or deceived anybody, and you’re as much a Socialist as I am, or at least as Don Julián Besteiro and Don Fernando de los Ríos are, and they don’t have calluses on their hands either, as far as I know. The masses you gentlemen like best are the ones in the head, as Prieto says. But things are the way they are, and from what I understand, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us to see them as they are, without cobwebs over our eyes, according to the principles of materialism.”

  “Now you’re the one who resembles Besteiro, with that talk.”

  “It’s clear, if you’ll forgive me, that you drive a car and I walk, or ride a streetcar at best. You wear a hat and I wear a beret, Don Ignacio, and if it rains you don’t get wet, because along with driving in your car you wear new shoes with soles that don’t get soaked with water, and your feet don’t get cold like a man wearing old boots with holes in the bottoms. You work hard, of course you do, but under a roof, and with heat, and when it’s hot you work in the shade, not in the sun. If one of your children gets sick, God forbid, you don’t have to take him to the welfare hospital, where he’ll get worse as soon as he breathes the air that smells of misery and death, and if he gets a little worse a good doctor comes right away and prescribes the medicines he needs and you can pay for, and if he needs it there’ll be a place for him in a sanatorium where they heal lungs with good food and the Sierra air. That’s the truth, Don Ignacio, and you know it. Would you like it if things were different? Of course you would. But it’s a law of nature that you don’t have the same desires or the same urgency as a workman. Sorry, as a worker, to use the correct term. And let’s be clear: I have no quarrel with you and wouldn’t permit anyone to speak ill of you in my presence. I’ve known you since you were a boy. I know how much you had to struggle to go on with your studies, when you and your mother were alone after your father’s accident, may he rest in peace. There’s your merit and talent, but there’s your father’s too. He sacrificed to give you school instead of having you work with him at the sites, which is what another, less enlightened father would’ve done, one less able to move ahead in his trade and earn a little money, and if what happened to him hadn’t happened, I always say Señor Miguel would’ve ended up as one of the great builders in Madrid. Anyway, you’re as good as gold, Don Ignacio, and you remember what it means to work with your hands, but you’re on the side of the gentlemen and I’m on the side of the workers, as clear as the fact that you live in the Salamanca district and I’m in Cuatro Caminos. And let’s be clear: I’m not like some others, you know me, I don’t feel resentful toward anybody, and I don’t think that to bring social justice we have to cut off heads like they do in Russia. I wish I’d had a father like yours and not a poor bricklayer who put me to work as an apprentice at the age of eight. I wish a child of mine had been born with the talent God or natural selection gave you—there’s an opinion about everything. But the way I see Spain, really awful things can happen, and I often wonder which side you’ll be on when the dike breaks.”

  “There’s no reason it has to break, Eutimio.”

  “That’s what you and I think, each from our place in life, because we’re reasonable people, and forgive me for comparing myself to you. Though I have much less education than you do, I’ve learned something reading the papers and all the books I can, and studying people since I began to earn a living in your father’s crew. But everybody isn’t like us, Don Ignacio. Let’s not kid ourselves, you live like what you are, like a bourgeois, and me, for better or worse, have my needs covered for now. We’re both calm, it seems to me, but others who come pushing from behind have much more quarrelsome blood, and there’s not a lot of good sense on your side or mine.”

  “Aren’t we on the same side? Aren’t we in the same party?”

  “You see how they shoot each other inside the party. I open El Socialista or Claridad and I have to put it down right away so I won’t read the terrible things some comrades write about others. If we use up so much anger fighting our own people, how much will be left to face the enemy? There’s a lot of bad blood, Don Ignacio. The crops are rotting in the fields because this year it rained more than usual and the owners would rather lose the harvest than pay a pittance in wages. Some men are born vermin and others become that way because they’re driven to get more or were treated like vermin from the time they were born.”

  As he spoke, Eutimio became more impassioned, breathing more deeply, not looking at Ignacio Abel, his eyes on the road. This man awakened in him a kind of tenderness he no longer felt for anyone, returned him to a time and a part of himself that were accessible only through the presence of Eutimio. His archaic oratory is what he’d listened to when men held meetings on Saturday nights in the small living room of the porter’s lodging, filled with voices and tobacco smoke. Thanks to Eutimio, the thought of his father acquired an intensity and lucidity he rarely experienced anymore, or only in dreams—his father and the overprotected boy, the boy who was now older than his dead father. Eutimio belonged to that time (the very early mornings, the weariness at the end of the day, the rough solemnity of the Socialist meetings where men dressed in dark smocks addressed one another with the formal usted and raised a hand to speak), and when he relived it, somehow his place in the present was turned upside down, the stable, solid life that seemed inevitable and yet might not have happened because there wasn’t any link between it and the life he’d led during that past time, whose only witness now was Eutimio. Nothing back then foretold the present. The boy, studying at the table with the built-in foot warmer in the light of an oil lamp when the wheels of a wagon stopped near the small street-level window, had nothing to do with the gray-haired man with confident gestures who now drove a car along the outer boulevards of Madrid toward Calle de Santa Engracia and the traffic circle of Cuatro Caminos. But Eutimio, sitting beside him, knew; capable of establishing connections with his clear memory and sharp intelligence, he could recognize in Ignacio Abel’s serious profile traits from his childhood, as well as the faces of his parents slowly revealed by age; the only thing that remained of them was a blurred, solemn photograph of pale tinted faces, as primitive as their postures or her embroidered collar and topknot and his slicked-down hair divided by a center part, his mustache with waxed ends. “They’re your paternal grandparents,” he’d once explained to his children, who looked at the photo as surprised as if they had seen people not only from another century and social class but of another species. But memories were not all that Eutimio brought him. There were also physical sensations that invoked his father’s presence: his hard hands, his gestures, the smell of corduroy trousers.

  “You can drop me off here, Don Ignacio. You continue on your way home. I can take a streetcar from here.”

  “Door-to-door service,” he said with a smile and shrugged, confounded by a feeling of shyness he wouldn’t admit to anyone, not even Judith Biely. “Let’s see if I can corrupt you with the comforts of bourgeois life.”

  “The people in the CNT are calling me a strikebreaker as it is.”

  “That can’t be anything to worry about.”

  They went up Calle de Santa Engracia, past the magnificent Water Tower, rising above the city like a Persian funerary monument before the distant blue curtain of the Sierra. Ignacio Abel drove in silence, listening to Eutimio, observing out of the corner of his eye the change in the other man’s posture
as they approached his neighborhood: uncomfortably erect, knees together, unwilling to abandon himself to an intimacy as easily withdrawn as granted. Before it reached its limits, Madrid expanded into rural spaciousness, rows of low houses in front of which women embroidered in the sun, sitting on rush chairs in large lots surrounded by plank fences covered with faded election posters. A dusty, village light floated above the Cuatro Caminos traffic circle: ragpickers’ wagons, herds of goats, cowbells and the bells of streetcars, circling a waterless fountain that looked like a stage set, a fountain dislodged from the bourgeois promenade for which it was built. The strongest notes of color were the green and red of geraniums on the balconies. A group of children kicking a ball made of rags in the middle of the street interrupted their game to run alongside the car. They winked and made mocking faces, almost pressing their noses to the windows. One ran with a crippled leg, leaning on a crutch; on the head of another a rash of ringworm was turning white.