In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Give me time. If I had time. It’s a question of time. We’re still in time. We’re out of time. In the reserved booth at the Ritz, Philip Van Doren looked at them with the magnanimity of a potentate, an oligarch of time, offering them the tempting and perhaps humiliating alms of what they most desired, so powerful he didn’t ask anything in return, not even gratitude, perhaps only the spectacle of the penury he detected in them, the subtle way in which hidden sexual passion debased them, consumed them, like respectable people subject to a secret addiction, morphine or alcohol, reaching the point where their deterioration becomes visible. I need time. How much more time do you want me to give you? Time like a solid block of calendar pages, each day an imperceptible sheet of paper, a number in red or black, the name of a weekday. Judith Biely, foreign and distinctive, inexplicably his, searching for his foot under the table as she smiled, raising the glass of wine to her lips, playing footsie, she had taught him to say. Time slow, fossilized, bogged down, solemn in the pendulum clock at the end of the hall, the one Ignacio Abel sees as he stands waiting, clutching the telephone receiver, impatient, the clock that strikes the hours with bronze resonances in the midst of his insomnia, in the dark expanse of the apartment, when he thought an eternity had gone by and he counts the strokes and it’s only two in the morning, his face against the pillow and the racing heartbeat, the rhythmic surges of blood in his temples, while Adela sleeps beside him, or is awake and pretends to be asleep just as he does, and also knows he’s not sleeping, the two of them motionless, not touching, not saying anything, their two minds physically as close as their bodies yet remote from each other, hermetic, submerged in the same disquiet, the identical agony of time. Time that doesn’t pass, as crushing as a burden, a trunk or a slab of stone. Time at dinner, when the four of them fall silent and hear only the sound of the spoon scraping against the china soup bowl and the noise Miguel makes eating it and the small thump of the heel of his shoe against the floor. The time I have left before the deadline for requesting a leave at University City or applying for a visa at the American embassy. The exquisite time Judith takes to come when he’s known how to caress her, attentive to her with his five senses, Judith’s half-open mouth, her eyes closed, breathing through her nose, her long naked body tensing, the palms of her hands on his thighs, her jaw tensing as she is about to climax. The time that always comes to an end, although the fervor of their meeting made it seem unlimited at first. Knotting his tie in front of the mirror, a quick comb through his hair, Judith sitting on the bed and pulling on her stockings, observing his hurry, his subtle gesture when he consults his watch. The time of returning in a taxi or Ignacio Abel’s car, both of them suddenly silent, far apart in the silence, already fallen back into the distance that does not separate them yet, looking through the window at illuminated clocks against the night sky of Madrid that indicate an hour always too late for him (but he doesn’t think about the other time waiting for her when she goes into her room at the pensión and looks at the typewriter where she hasn’t written anything for so long, the letters from her mother that she answers only now and then, suppressing a part of her life in Madrid, inventing in order not to tell her she’s become a married man’s lover). The time it takes for the sereno to appear after the echoing claps that call him in the nocturnal silence of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, more and more distressing, like guilt nipping at his heels; the time that goes by until the elevator arrives and then ascends very slowly and he looks at his watch again and thinks with disbelief that by now Adela must be asleep and won’t notice the smell of tobacco and another woman’s perfume, the crude odor of sex; the time for getting out on the landing, trying to prevent his footsteps from sounding too loud on the marble in the corridor, looking for the key in his pocket and making it turn in the lock, hoping no light is on in the apartment except for the altar of Our Father Jesus of Medinaceli with its small eave and two tiny electric lamps. Time will tell. Time heals. The time has come to save Spain from her ancestral enemies. The time of glory will return. If the government really intended to do it, it would still have time to head off the military conspiracy. Victorious Banners will return. I truly hope time does not pass. The Time of Our Patience Has Run Out. It is no longer the Time for Compromises or Vagueness with the Enemies of Spain. The time I have lost doing nothing, leaving urgent decisions for another day or the next few hours, imagining that passivity will make time resolve matters on its own. The time left before Judith decides to return to America or receives a job offer or simply goes to another European city less provincial and more stable, where there’s no shooting in the streets and the papers don’t publish front-page articles on political crimes. The weeks, the days, perhaps, to wait before the explosion of the military uprising everyone talks about, with suicidal fatalism, with impatience for the disaster, the social revolution, the apocalypse, whatever it may be, to finally happen, anything but this time of waiting, seeing funerals go by with coffins draped in flags, carried on the shoulders of comrades with a praetorian air, in red shirts or navy-blue shirts and military leather straps, raising open hands or clenched fists, shouting slogans, “Long live”s and “Death to”s, taking hours to reach the cemetery. The time it takes a letter recently dropped in a box to be picked up and sorted, canceled, delivered to the address indicated on the envelope; the time it takes each morning for the slow, servile clerk to distribute the mail, moving among the typists’ and draftsmen’s tables with the tray in his hands, stopping with unacceptable indolence to chat with someone, accept a cigarette; the time it takes for his greedy fingers to tear the edge and extract the sheets, for his eyes to move quickly over each line, from left to right, then return to the beginning, like the carriage of a typewriter, like the shuttle of a loom, drinking in each word as quickly as the time it took to write it, soaking up in the trickles of ink the traits of a handwriting as desired and familiar as the lines on a face, as the hand that slid across the paper writing it. You can’t say no to me. Imagine the house and us in it, we can’t turn down what Phil’s offering us, I have a right to ask this of you, only a few days.

  He looks at his watch and realizes it’s been a while since the last time he looked, like the smoker who begins to free himself of his addiction and discovers that more time than ever has gone by without the temptation to light a cigarette: a few minutes after their departure, when the train had just passed the George Washington Bridge. Time on our hands. He’s heard Judith Biely’s voice on the phone, clearly recognized those words, their temptation and promise, their warning, We’re running out of time. How little time they had left, much less than he’d imagined, than fear had led him to predict: his hands suddenly empty of time, barren fingers curving to grasp air, intuiting at times, like a tactile memory of the body they haven’t caressed for three long months, the empty duration of his time without her. Running without a pause, running out of time, she said too, and he didn’t know how to understand the warning, didn’t perceive the speed of the time already sweeping them away. How much time has it been that these hands haven’t touched anyone, haven’t curved adjusting to the delicate shape of Judith Biely’s breast, haven’t pressed to him his children, who run to embrace him down the hall of the apartment in Madrid or along the gravel path in the garden in the Sierra; this right hand that rose in a fit of anger and descended like a bolt of lightning on Miguel’s face (if only it had been paralyzed in midair, pierced by pain; if only it had withered before hurting and shaming his son, who perhaps doesn’t know now whether his father is alive or dead, who’s probably already begun to forget him). His child’s hands so easily hurt by the harsh scrape of materials, paralyzed by cold on early winter mornings and warmed by Eutimio, who pressed them between his, which were so rough, scorched by plaster. “It was sad to look at your hands, Don Ignacio. I rubbed them in mine to warm them and they were like two dead sparrows.” With these hands he wouldn’t have been able to hold the pistol Eutimio showed him that morning in his office, the same one Eutimio raised and pressed
to the middle of the chest of one of the men who pushed Ignacio Abel against a brick wall behind the School of Philosophy. He remembers with displeasure the sweat on his palms, as debasing as wetness in the groin. Time on our hands: time’s not used up slowly, like a great flow of water that turns into a trickle and then driblets before it’s extinguished. Time that ends suddenly, from one moment to the next you may be dead, your face in the dirt, or after a meeting someone says goodbye, someone you will never see again. The time of an encounter that seemed like any other concludes and neither of the lovers knows or suspects it will be the last. Or one of them does know and says nothing, has come to a conclusion but keeps the decision a secret and is already calculating the words that will be written in a letter, words one doesn’t dare say aloud.

  He hung up the phone and the expression Judith Biely had used remained floating in his mind like the timbre of the voice that after a few hours he’ll hear again, close to him now, brushing him with the breath that gave shape to her words, Time on our hands, for once not numbered hours, minutes dissolving like water or spilling like sand between his fingers, but days, four whole days with no goodbyes or postponed longings, secret or stolen time, unlimited, overflowing, receiving them with the clemency of a country of asylum whose border will open with just a single lie, a false passport of limited but instantaneous validity, a lie that’s not even completely false: Thursday I’m going to the province of Cádiz and I’ll be back Monday morning. The truth and the lie said with exactly the same words, as difficult to separate from one another as the chemical components of a liquid. An American client is thinking about buying a house on the coast and asked me to go and see it before he makes his decision. It was so easy and the reward so limitless that it produced an anticipatory feeling of intoxication, almost of vertigo during dinner in the lethargy of the family dining room, where time went by so slowly, time like lead on his shoulders, the funerary rhythm of the large standing clock, an ostentatious gift from Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, with its bronze pendulum in the body as deep as a coffin and its legend in Gothic letters around the gilded face, Tempus fugit. “You’re always complaining you don’t have time,” said Adela, barely looking at him, attentive instead to the plate in front of her, conscious of Miguel’s anxious vigilance, of the knee moving nervously under the table, “and now you accept another commitment. You could have taken advantage of the strike to relax with us in the Sierra.” “I can’t say no,” he improvised, encouraged by how easy it was, not lying completely, using provable facts like the malleable material used to mold the lie. “It’s the entrepreneur who offered me the assignment in the United States.” But somehow the dissimulation trapped him: when they heard him mention the United States, Miguel and Lita broke into the conversation, interrupting him to ask if all of them were going to America, when, in which of the ocean liners displayed in the windows of travel agencies on Calle de Alcalá and Calle Lista, detailed models where you could see the portholes and the lifeboats and the tennis courts drawn on deck, posters of ships with high, sharp prows cutting through the waves, columns of smoke rising from smokestacks painted red and white, beautiful international names inscribed on the black curve of the hull. Like his mother, Miguel noticed his vexed, almost agonized expression, the contretemps of not having an answer prepared when the lie had flowed so comfortably until then. But Miguel didn’t know how to interpret the incessant data his attentiveness provided, transformed for him into a confused state of alarm, the intuition of a danger that was near though he couldn’t identify it: like those adventure movies in Africa he liked so much, when an explorer wakes at night and leaves the tent and knows a wild animal or an enemy is circling the camp but can’t detect anything except the usual jungle sounds, and the leopard treads silently and is near, brushing the tall grasses with his long, muscular body, or the treacherous painted warrior approaches, raising a spear, while Miguel trembles in his seat, pulls in his legs, almost shudders, bites his nails, squeezes Lita’s arm until he hurts her. He observes the muscle that moves in his father’s closely shaved jaw, a throbbing that reveals he’s irritated. “Now isn’t the time to bother Papá with those questions. He has enough trouble at work. Will you go by car? All I ask is that you call us when you arrive. You know by now that if you’re on the road and don’t call, I can’t sleep.”

  Everything so easy again, after the minor setback, he felt almost grateful to Adela, and the anger toward his son dissolved, anger provoked by that anxious question, that excessive expectation he’d planted himself and didn’t know how to encourage or impede. But if Miguel’s expectation irritated him so much, now, after three months of distance and remorse, on the train that carries him farther away from his children, he understands the senseless hope condemned by its excess to disillusion, because it resembled his own too much, because the boy’s weakness, his nervousness, presented him with a mirror he perhaps would have preferred not to look into. He too was tortured by impatience to conclude as soon as possible the impersonation of family life at dinner; he too lived perturbed by desires he didn’t know how and didn’t want to control, dazzled by expectations that were never satiated and never fulfilled, incapable of appreciating or even seeing what he had before him, restless to have the present end as soon as possible and the future arrive, whatever it might be, any of the futures he’d been pursuing like successive mirages throughout his life, without age or experience or the habit of disappointment dulling his longing or chipping its cutting edge. Let the formalities of dinner conclude immediately, the routine annoyance of sitting down to read the paper, barely glancing at the headlines, while Adela in the easy chair next to his put on the glasses that made her look older and read a magazine or a book while she listened to the nightly concert of classical music on Unión Radio, near the partially open balcony door through which a light breeze entered along with attenuated street noises. From that balcony, if they’d been listening, they could have heard the shots that ended the life of Captain Faraudo on May 7. Let the children come in to give each a goodnight kiss, Lita in her pajamas and slippers, her hair brushed smooth; Miguel secretly indignant at the unavoidable obligation of going to bed, observing with his useless sixth sense that his parents rarely looked each other in the eye when they spoke, knowing that in a while his mother would walk to the bedroom and his father to his study, with the plans and models that absorbed his life, with the letters he sometimes wrote or read and immediately put away in a drawer when interrupted, the drawer he never forgot to lock with a key, a tiny key he kept in a vest pocket. Because he liked movies about Arsène Lupin and Fantômas (in fact there wasn’t any kind of movie he didn’t like), Miguel fantasized about dedicating himself as an adult to a distinguished criminal career as a white-gloved thief, an expert in opening safes, bank vaults, drawers in desks identical to his father’s that hid under lock and key what in movies and novels were called compromising documents, perhaps the stolen letters used by an unscrupulous blackmailer to extort money from a beautiful woman of high society. Instead of the books given to him at school, the Clásicos Castellanos whose dry backs stood in a row on Lita’s shelf, Miguel read the illustrated stories in Mundo Gráfico. The heading of one story made him lose sleep now: Behind a Façade of Apparent Normality, Family Hid Shameful Secret. He reflected on this with the light off, tossing in bed, bothered by the heat, upset at not having done his homework or begun to study for the final examinations that were approaching at a terrifying speed. At least his father was leaving the next day on that trip to the province of Cádiz and wouldn’t be back until Monday: the prospect of his absence filled Miguel with an unmanageable mixture of relief and uncertainty. His father wouldn’t be at the table to draw attention to him when he made noise eating soup or jiggled his leg, wouldn’t make his half-interested, half-sarcastic inquiries about homework or tests. What if he was killed in a car accident? What if behind his apparent façade of normality he was hiding a secret as shameful as the protagonist’s in Mundo Gráfico? “Lita,” he s
aid, “Lita,” hoping his sister was still awake, “do you think our family is hiding some shameful secret?” But Lita was asleep, so all he could do was resign himself to the immense tedium of darkness and heat on a June night, the slowness of time, the striking of the hours on the hall clock that his father would hear just as he did, with an impatience that lengthened the waiting time even more and mixed with the fear of falling asleep and not hearing the alarm clock. It would ring at five, and at six, a little before dawn, Judith Biely would be waiting for him in the Plaza de Santa Ana, by the entrance to her pensión, a small suitcase in one hand and in the other her portable typewriter, shivering, her jacket collar pulled up against the damp cold of night’s end.