In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “Be careful, Don Ignacio, these kids could throw themselves under the wheels.”

  Behind grilles, from balconies and the doorways of small workshops, taverns, and grocery stores, suspicious, attentive eyes observed the car’s passing. Three men approached, dressed in white shirts and old jackets, caps above their faces, legs far apart. In the waistband of one of them was the black butt of a pistol. They stood motionless in front of the car in the middle of the street, looking at Ignacio Abel, who kept the engine running and, with instinctive caution, had both hands still and visible on the steering wheel, his eyes alert and at the same time avoiding their questioning, defiant stares.

  “Don’t worry, Don Ignacio, these are good boys.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They’re on watch.”

  Eutimio lowered his window and signaled to the one wearing a pistol, who examined the interior of the car, a contemptuous expression at the corner of his mouth where a cigarette burned. A boy’s nose was flattened against each window, open mouths fogging the glass with their breath, their eyes looking inside as if into an aquarium.

  “You can trust this gentleman, comrade,” said Eutimio, avoiding the other man’s eyes, which were close, the smoke of his cigarette in his face. “He’s my boss at work and I’ll answer for him.”

  The men spoke briefly among themselves, then moved aside to allow them to pass, coming together again to watch the car, like watching a train or ship move away. In his rearview mirror, Ignacio Abel saw the men recede and let out a sigh of relief not as inaudible as he imagined.

  “They frightened you a little, Don Ignacio. Nothing to worry about. You have to understand that in this neighborhood, when you see a car like yours, it means something bad’s going to happen.”

  “The Falangists?”

  “Or the monarchists. Or the boys from Young Popular Action. They speed up Santa Engracia and run over whatever’s in front of them. They shoot and don’t care who they hit. Last week they killed a poor woman sweeping at her front door. The class struggle, Don Ignacio. They lean their heads out of car windows, stretch out their arms, and shout ‘Arriba España!’ Then they turn into Cuatro Caminos and nobody can find them.”

  Now Ignacio Abel observed more attentively his expressions and glances, as well as the mixture of discomfort and confidence Eutimio felt when he was recognized close to home. The confined space of the car and their physical proximity had favored an ease of manner that would vanish as soon as Eutimio got out, with a gesture of farewell that would conceal the intention to shake hands instead of thanking him by bending his head slightly as he stood on the sidewalk, having removed his beret. A blind at a balcony moved to one side; a woman’s hand shook a curtain of cheap cloth; some boys playing leapfrog interrupted their game, and one turned his head to look at the car with an expression at once serious and adult; the rope some girls were jumping, colored ribbons in their hair, remained motionless on the pounded earth; young men in shirtsleeves approached the door of a tavern.

  “I’m inviting you to have a glass of wine and get the fear out of your body, Don Ignacio.”

  “Eutimio, come on, this wasn’t anything to worry about.” Having shown his alarm so obviously embarrassed Ignacio Abel. Affectionate, almost paternal, Eutimio still took some pleasure in the weakness of a superior, more evident because when he got out of the car, Ignacio Abel found himself without defenses in unfamiliar territory. “I’ll have a glass if you let me invite you.”

  He had plenty of time: he didn’t have an appointment with Judith Biely and had no desire to return home on a May evening that seemed to have halted in a luminosity not yet dimmed by twilight. When he returned home he’d permit himself the consolation of telling Adela the truth—this would soothe the conscience of a recent, still inexpert liar—but she’d probably think his conversation with a foreman in a tavern in Cuatro Caminos was a lie, one of many she didn’t bother to pretend she believed. Distracted, happy, almost virtuous, as if today’s truth somehow would compensate for deceit on so many other occasions, he wouldn’t even notice Adela’s incredulity.

  “Don’t worry about the car, Don Ignacio, you can trust us here. You don’t have to lock it. We’re poor but honest, like in the operettas.”

  The children not only looked at the car—the soft green paint, the butter-colored leather top, the crank handle, nickel-plated like the wheel spokes—they looked at him in particular, as if he were from another universe: white hands, made-to-measure suit, the peak of a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, the gleam of his silk tie, his two-toned shoes. The children’s black eyes were a mirror that reflected a distorted version of himself, the tall, strange man they were seeing, the one who got out of the car, slamming the door and looking around with an expression of instinctive guardedness, like a colonial dignitary on an inspection tour, benevolent, perhaps, but always distant, possessing an arrogance that didn’t need to be a personal attitude because it was engraved on the character of his caste. He thought of his own children as he looked at these faces, which had a radiant dignity in spite of the poverty. He saw not the man he was now but the boy who so many years ago, late in the afternoon, went out fearfully to play on another street much like this one, in his neighborhood at the other end of Madrid. For a few seconds the children’s voices had echoed in a kind of concave eternity, in the realm outside time of games and street songs, the ones he’d listened to so often in the porter’s lodging, coming through the window high above his head, at the level of the sidewalk. He hadn’t been one of them, not even then. A pure moment recovered from that distant time made him stop in the doorway of the tavern, happy and lost, blinking as if the afternoon light had blinded him.

  “The same thing happened when you were a boy,” Eutimio was saying, his face close and slightly out of focus. “You’d stand there, thinking your thoughts, and your father, may he rest in peace, would say, ‘This boy of mine looks like he’s turning into a sleepwalker.’”

  The tavern, more like a wine cellar, was dark and deep and smelled of sawdust and sour wine, casks and herring in brine. Entering felt like advancing through the half-light of the past: as a boy his father would send him to taverns like this one to buy a pint of wine or to take a message to one of the masons or artisans who worked for him. But here, soccer, bullfight, and boxing posters lined the whitewashed walls, and a large radio played behind the counter. On the gaudy print from an almanac, under a legend that proclaimed Happy 1936!, the Republic was a young woman with a Phrygian cap pulled to one side of her head, her body barely covered by the folds of a tricolor flag that molded her breasts and revealed the fleshy thigh of a chorus girl or dancer.

  The men drinking at the zinc bar and at the tables greeted Eutimio and examined Ignacio Abel from head to toe. Their presence and voices filled the space, and they gave off a strong sensation of vigor and weariness after work. The new arrivals sat at an isolated table, and the tavernkeeper brought them a squared flask of red wine and two low, thick glasses, still wet from the rinse water. When Eutimio sat down, the pistol in the inside pocket of his jacket bulged visibly.

  “It seems unbelievable, Don Ignacio, that you and I are sitting here at the same table, when at work I have to take off my cap to speak to you and it’s not a good idea to look you in the eye.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Eutimio. Hasn’t life changed at all since my father’s time? And it’ll change even more now with the Popular Front government.”

  “A government of fine bourgeois gentlemen, Don Ignacio, who ignore the workers’ vote.”

  “Our party’s to blame, yours and mine. The one that hasn’t allowed a Socialist to be president. It was so difficult to bring in the Republic and now they don’t want it anymore, they don’t think it’s enough. Now they want a Soviet revolution. You were at the May Day demonstration where the Socialists paraded, and it looked as if they were on Red Square in Moscow. Red flags with the hammer and sickle, portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Our people were different from the
Communists only because they wore red shirts, not sky-blue ones. Not a single flag of the Republic, Eutimio, the Republic that came in because we Socialists wanted it, because the Republicans were nothing. But these May Day Socialists didn’t cheer for the Republic, they cheered for the Red Army. To the great joy of the right, as you can imagine.”

  “I already told you, Don Ignacio, the Republic’s pretty but it doesn’t feed you.”

  “And do strikes with gun battles and burned churches feed you?”

  “You don’t have to say that to me, Don Ignacio. I’m an old man, you know, and I’ve seen all kinds of things, but until now life hasn’t gone badly for me. I have a decent little house right near here and a small orchard in the village, and my wife and daughters sew on Singers and earn a wage that’s no worse than mine. Since I know how to read and write and have a good head for numbers, I could be a foreman, and in my house we might have hard times but not poverty. My younger boy, thanks to you, has a job as a clerk in the waterworks office, and though he doesn’t earn much, he’s hard-working. At night he’s studying to be a draftsman, and I hope he can find a job in the University City office someday soon, if you give him a hand. But other men are much worse off, Don Ignacio, and they don’t have patience and good judgment, and if they do, they can lose them when there’s no work and not much justice and they see their children die of hunger, or they lose their house because they can’t pay for it and find themselves sleeping under bridges or spending the nights in doorways.”

  “It can’t all be done at once, Eutimio.” Now it was his voice that sounded false, even though he was saying something reasonable, perhaps as reasonable as it was sterile. “The Republic’s only five years old. The Popular Front won only three months ago.”

  “And who are we to tell anybody to be patient? Or to wait a few months to give food to his children or take them to a doctor? Neither of us is going to bed without supper tonight, and excuse me for comparing myself to you.”

  “And is setting off bombs and killing people going to solve anything? Having an armed rebellion against the Republic as they did in Asturias? Threatening every day to break the truce and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

  “The working class has to defend itself, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio gestured for him to lower his voice. “If it weren’t for those boys on watch outside, you and I probably couldn’t have our quiet glass of wine.”

  “You people don’t understand, Eutimio.” As soon as he said it, he realized the plural was offensive, but he was becoming inflamed, and an unpleasant but strong feeling of superiority erupted in him. “There are laws that are above everybody. There are police, there are judges. We’re not in the Wild West or Chicago, the way everybody seems to think. You don’t take up arms against the legitimate government just because you don’t like the election results. You don’t go around with a pistol taking the law into your own hands.”

  “I’m not a fool, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio had left his empty glass on the table and was looking at him seriously, offended, at the same time leaning his head forward to make sure no one heard him. “What you say about the law is fine, but at this point nobody believes it anymore. Tell it to the rebellious military who never stop conspiring and the judges who let the Falangist gunmen who kill workers go free.”

  “Then what should we do? Should we all arm ourselves? ‘One man, one pistol’ instead of ‘One man, one vote’?”

  “I don’t know what we should do, Don Ignacio. Probably younger people whose ideals are stronger than ours will give us the solution. When I was a boy and heard Pablo Iglesias and the speakers back then talking about the classless society, tears came to my eyes. And now, instead of the classless society, what I dream about is my little orchard and not losing my wages. Maybe you didn’t imagine either when you were a boy that you’d enjoy driving a car and living in a building with an elevator in the Salamanca district—”

  “We’re back to that again.”

  “Don’t make me lose my patience, Don Ignacio. Or my respect either, if you’ll permit me. And don’t raise your voice—you’ll probably say something other people won’t like to hear. Young people have a spirit we don’t understand anymore. Even my boy, who never broke a dish, who always went from home to work and work to home, joined the Communist Youth last year. Upsetting for a father, but now they’ve joined with our youth groups, which makes me feel calmer. You and I will be happy if this world we know gets a little better—after all, it’s our world. But what they want is a different world. Haven’t you seen the posters? ‘We carry a new world in our hearts.’”

  Literature again, he thought, but he didn’t say it for fear of offending Eutimio. Cheap literature, newspaper trash, third-rate verses, sometimes sung in anthems for greater effect. An entire country, an entire continent infected by mediocre literature, drunk on shoddy music, operetta marches, and bullfight paso dobles. In this tavern, with its poor electric light and stink of bad wine, the floor littered with wet sawdust and cigarette butts, he realized that deep in his soul he didn’t feel much sympathy for his fellow men, that he needed the vagueness and protection of a certain distance to get along with them, to become emotional over principles and words of liberation like the ones he’d heard as a boy at his father’s meetings. He thought that what he really wanted was to leave Spain: with no preparation, notification, or remorse, to put distance between himself and his country, get on a night express next to Judith Biely and wake in a port city where he’d sail that same day on a ship for America, disappear without a trace, free of any connection, as separated from the outside world and all the anguished obligations in his life as when he embraced her after undressing her and buried his face in her neck, inhaling her smell, as if he were breathing in advance the air of another country and another life, his eyes closed while the curtains filtered the workday-morning light, and muffled sounds of the city reached the brief, hired intimacy that welcomed them in the house of Madame Mathilde.

  The next morning, when he arrived at the office, Eutimio bowed his head slightly and made a gesture of greeting without looking him in the eye.

  17

  TIME ON OUR HANDS, said Judith before hanging up the phone, confirming the time they would meet, the start of the trip, an almost dreamed-of flight, so there would be no possible doubt or confusion, and he liked the poetry implicit in the common expression, as he did so often when he learned a new turn of phrase in English from Judith or explained a Spanish one to her. Time on our hands, for once overflowing cupped hands like cool water from a powerful tap where someone who can finally satisfy his thirst will joyfully plunge his face or wet his lips; whole days and nights exclusively theirs, not shared with anyone, not contaminated by the indignity of hiding, not measured out in minutes or hours, a treasure of time whose magnitude was difficult for them to imagine. But what they couldn’t imagine at all was the two of them away from Madrid, in a setting other than the city that had brought them together and imprisoned them, subjecting them to the curse of secrecy, lies, and never enough time. Time on our hands, he recalls now, repeating it in a soft voice, looking at his hands inert on his thighs, on the raincoat he didn’t take off when he boarded the train, hands good for nothing except patting his pockets in search of some document or rubbing his face each morning after shaving, clutching the sweat-darkened handle of his suitcase, fastening buttons or discovering that a button has fallen off and left only vestiges of thread, or his shoelaces are fraying, or the right pocket of his jacket is coming loose. At least we had that, he thinks, that gift, not the anticipation of something that would come later but almost a final favor before the inevitable occurred, four whole days, from Thursday to Sunday, the straight white highway unfurling before the car when they left Madrid for the south while dawn was breaking, and at the end of their journey the house on the sand escarpment, the smell of the Atlantic coming in as forcefully as the smell of the Hudson comes in now through the train window: hands filled with time, with the craving proximity
of the other, undressing each other as soon as they took a few steps inside the dark of the house, not opening a window, not taking the bags out of the car, exhausted after so many hours on the road and still aching with desire, incapable of putting it off any longer. It wasn’t the same as saying tiempo de sobra: no matter how much time they had, it would never be more than enough, not even by a minute, and in any case those words didn’t express the physical sensation of an undeserved abundance that fills your hands, like the coins or diamonds of a fairy-tale treasure, tiempo a manos llenas. Hands full of time, but no matter how tightly you squeeze your fingers and press together your hands curved like a bowl, water will always escape, time trickling away second by second like tiny grains of sand, gleaming like crystals in the morning light on the beach they walked together, not seeing anyone for its entire length, sole survivors of a cataclysm that had left them alone in the world, fugitives from everything, from their lives and the names that identified them with those lives, renegades from any tie or loyalty—parents, children, spouses, friends, obligations, principles—other than the ones that joined the two of them, apostates from any belief.

  If at least you’d had real courage, he thinks now, looking at his two empty hands, hands with sinuous veins and badly trimmed, slightly dirty nails, if you’d dared a real apostasy and not a semblance, a real flight and not a fiction. Even the four days now fading away into nothingness for the lovers who until then hadn’t been able to spend more than a few hours together, hadn’t known what it meant to open one’s eyes at the first light of day and find each other, to be present at the other’s contented sleep and waking. Always so little time, the hours numbered, falling away into the sand of fleeting minutes and seconds, the timepiece ticking, the noisy mechanism in the alarm clock on the night table or the subtler one on his wrist, attached to it as if it were a pillory, second by second, the tiny jaws undermining the houses of time where they hid to be together, their secret refuges almost always precarious, always in danger of being invaded, no matter how deep they wanted to hide, one beside the other and one in the other, canceling the outside world in the single-mindedness of an embrace with eyes closed. Footsteps in the hall of the house of assignation, doors that at any moment might open, voices on the other side of thin walls, the moans of other lovers, inhabitants like them of the secret city, the submerged, venal Madrid of reserved booths, rooms rented by the hour, parks at night, the sordid border territory where adultery and prostitution came together. They lived besieged by creditors, by thieves and beggars of time, by greedy moneylenders and shady traffickers in hours. Time phosphoresced on the hands of the alarm clock on the night table in the room at Madame Mathilde’s, in the low light of curtains drawn in the middle of the morning. The ticktock sounded like a taxi meter: if they were late by only a few minutes in leaving the rented room, they’d hear footsteps in the hall and knocks on the door; if they wanted more time they’d have to buy it at a higher rate. Time fled in numerical spasms like distance on the car’s odometer while they traveled south as if they never had to return. The time of each wait dilated and even halted because of uncertainty, anguish that the other wouldn’t appear. The lightning flash of arrival abolished for a few minutes the passage of time, leaving it suspended in an illusion of abundance. Illicit time had to be purchased minute by minute, obtained like a dose of opium or morphine. The scant wealth of time was lost waiting for a taxi, traveling endlessly in a very slow streetcar, driving in traffic, dialing a number on the phone and waiting for the wheel to return to its point of departure in order to dial the next one: how much time wasted waiting for an answer, listening to a bell that rings on the other end in an empty room, growing impatient because an operator takes a long time to answer or transfer a call, fingers restless as they drum on a table, his eyes vigilant in case someone approaches from the end of the hall, a hemorrhaging of time, drop by drop or in a gush. It was Philip Van Doren who gave them the four days when he offered them the house he’d bought or was about to buy on the Cádiz coast without even seeing it, knowing it only from plans and photographs. He seemed to take pleasure in sheltering them, urging them toward each other from a benevolent distance, intervening in the name of chance, as he’d done when he left them alone in his study that October afternoon. The house of time Ignacio Abel wanted to build so that only Judith and he would live in it really existed for only four days, between Thursday afternoon and the small hours of Monday: white, with cubic volumes, outlined in a horizontal on an escarpment, its forms variable in the photos Van Doren spread before him on the tablecloth at the Ritz where he’d invited them to dinner, in a reserved booth, implicitly acknowledging the advantage to Ignacio Abel of not being seen in public with his lover, while from the street, from the Plaza de Neptuno, came the muffled sounds of a battle with stones and bullets between Assault Guards and striking construction workers—whistles, breaking glass, sirens. He’d pushed the cuffs of his sweater away from his wrists with impatient gestures and placed the photos on the table as in a card game, raising his depilated eyebrows, puffing with delight on a Havana cigar, a smile on his fleshy lips, his too-small mouth, incongruous with his heavy square jaw and hairy fingers. “My dear Professor Abel, don’t feel obliged to say no. I’m not doing you a favor, I’m requesting your professional opinion, asking you for a report on a painting before I buy it. Look at the house and tell me its condition. Live in it for a few days. They assure me it’s fully stocked, but I don’t believe anyone’s lived in it yet. A German acquaintance of mine, loaded with money, had it built, and now he’s not sure it’s a good idea for him to go on living and doing business in Spain. I presume to imagine that Judith wouldn’t mind accompanying you. It’ll be good for you to escape the heat in Madrid and the more suffocating political climate. Now that there’s another strike, it won’t be prudent for you to be seen arriving every morning at University City. Do you believe the military will finally rebel, Professor Abel? Or that the left will move forward with a new dress rehearsal for a Bolshevik revolution? Or will everybody take a summer vacation and then nothing will happen, as the minister of communications told me just a few days ago?”