In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Though he hadn’t heard the typewriter for some time, he realized it only now. He called to her, her beautiful name echoing in the empty house. In the typewriter a blank sheet of paper moved almost imperceptibly in the air, fragrant with algae, that entered through the open balcony. The written pages on one side of the machine, the blank sheets on the other. He called her again and his voice sounded strange. The electricity had gone off. He looked for her in the house, holding the oil lamp, calling her again, noticing the seamless transition from surprise to anguish. She couldn’t be far, nothing could have happened to her, but her absence suddenly turned everything unreal, the white walls and the staircase lit by the oil lamp, the loneliness of the house on the escarpment, the presence of the two of them in it, the noise of the ocean. He couldn’t calculate how much time had passed since he last saw her, when he stopped hearing the typewriter as he leaned on his elbows at the window, looking at the white, sinuous line of the waves, the beam of the lighthouse in the western sky where red streaks were fading behind violet fog like embers under ash. He went through the rooms one by one and Judith wasn’t in any of them. He walked silently, barefoot on the clay tiles. In the kitchen, on the wooden table, was a glass half full of water, a plate with a knife and the skin of a peach. Through the window he could see the beach and ocean lit by the full moon, beyond the tall dry grass along the edge of the escarpment. Below, where the wooden stairs ended, he could make out, with great relief, the silhouette of Judith Biely’s back, her clear shadow projected by the moon on the sand, smooth and shining as the tide withdrew. He called to her, leaving the house, the wooden stairs trembling and creaking under his weight. He wanted to reach her and, as if in dreams, had a sensation of impossible slowness that worsened when he touched the dry, sifting sand at the bottom. He barely moved forward. He called but could not hear his own voice, weakened by the heightened crashing of the sea. Judith turned slowly toward him, as if she’d known he was approaching. The wind blew the hair from her face, widening her forehead, fastening to her slim body the silk of her robe. In her welcoming smile was something both fragile and remote that hadn’t been there an hour or two earlier, when she’d offered herself to him and claimed him with fierce determination: an air of resignation, as if that very moment already belonged to a distant past. Confused in his male way, Ignacio Abel stood in front of her, still breathing in relief at having found her. He dared to embrace her only when he saw she was shivering, the skin on her arms bristling in the damp chill of the wind. “Where will we be tomorrow night at this time?” Judith said, trembling even more when he hugged her, her face cold against his, her hips pressing against him. “Where will we be tomorrow and the next day and the day after that?” But if she’d said it in Spanish, the words wouldn’t have had the same prison-sentence monotony: tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow.

  18

  WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? You look rested,” said Negrín, laughing. “In the Madrid of consumptives, you look healthier than a mountain climber.”

  But it wasn’t possible to look at someone in the same way when you knew he was carrying a pistol in a holster tight against his left side, glimpsed when his jacket opened after an abrupt gesture, or showing a bulge you might not have noticed if you weren’t certain this well-dressed, ordinary man had a firearm, or held by his belt, crudely thrust between trousers and shirt, or as bulky as a stone in the right pocket of the foreman Eutimio Gómez, next to his tobacco pouch and tinder lighter, or recklessly kept anywhere, the way Dr. Juan Negrín patted his pockets and vest to show Ignacio Abel the small pistol after using a napkin to wipe his broad fingers stained with the juice of langostinos and prawns.

  “It’s Czech,” Negrín said, producing a metallic crack as he adjusted something on it with an expert gesture, “the latest model.”

  Then he forgot about it, as if it were a cigarette lighter, leaving it on the wet marble table with the tray of shells, the steins of beer, the ashtray, the crumpled napkins; his bulk had quickly occupied all the space, as it did anywhere he happened to be, whether at an office desk or a laboratory counter. Dr. Juan Negrín lived in perpetual physical discord with a world whose meager dimensions didn’t correspond to his formidable breadth, whose rhythms were always unacceptably slow in contrast to his tireless energy. In Negrín’s presence Ignacio Abel always noticed errors of scale, as on a plan or drawing where the proportions of some element have been badly calculated. Enormous overcoats became skimpy if he put them on, well-cut suits were too tight for him, hats that seemed large enough in his hand or hanging on a rack became too small on his head. He stood to receive Ignacio Abel in a private dining room at the Café Lion, and the vaulted ceiling of the cellar became so low he had to stoop; beneath the marble table he had to keep his knees pressed together so his legs would fit. His voice thundered with rich acoustics that demanded more ample spaces. His fingers cracked the shells of prawns with ease. He crisscrossed Madrid—his old laboratory, the Café Lion, the Congress of Deputies, University City—turning vigorously against the reduced dimensions of things, against successive carapaces that limited his movement. He should have lived in a larger country with taller people, wider highways, faster trains, much shorter official ceremonies, more expeditious functionaries, fewer sluggish waiters. He traveled by air whenever he could, more often than not in the diminutive planes of the Spanish Postal Transport Airlines, which presented another challenge to his corpulence. He accumulated job titles and political responsibilities with the same Pantagruelian spirit he brought to ordering trays piled high with shellfish, plates of ham, bottles of wine, steins of beer running over with foam. He called the waiter with two resounding claps and ordered more beer for Ignacio Abel and himself and a platter of fried fish. When the waiter took away the tray of discarded shells and the empty steins, the pistol stood out more clearly on the table, as incongruous and toxic as a scorpion.

  “So you want to go away to one of those opulent American universities,” he said, avoiding preambles, the languid waste of time of Spanish circumlocution. “I won’t be the one to stop you.”

  “It’s only for a semester. And only with your authorization.”

  “You don’t have to pretend with me, Abel. Don’t talk as if you didn’t think much of it. You want out, like anyone with a little common sense. Leave this place for a while, see things from a distance, have your family safe. If only I could. Doing your work well, with the current in your favor instead of having to fight against it. All that, not to mention the small advantage of going outside and not being afraid some visionary will shoot you in the name of the social revolution or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or that you’ll get in the way of a bullet aimed at somebody else.”

  “Things will calm down, I imagine.”

  “Or not. Or they’ll get worse. Did you hear Prieto’s speech in Cuenca on May 1 on the radio?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Didn’t you read it in the paper?” Negrín laughed out loud. “Abel, I’m afraid that even for an architect your stay in the ivory tower, or on the beach where you got that tan, has lasted too long. Are you sure you didn’t go to Biarritz for a few days with some girlfriend? What Don Indalecio said, aside from many sensible and fairly sad things, is that a country can tolerate everything, including revolution, but not permanent, senseless disorder. Of course, to say this he had to go to Cuenca, and me with him, as if I were his squire, because here in Madrid, as you know, our beloved comrades in the Bolshevik wing of the party would have lynched him. Do you still have your Socialist Party card, Abel?”

  “And my dues are paid.”

  “Aren’t you tempted to tear it up?”

  “And replace it with what?”

  “At heart you’re sentimental, just like me. Except you’re much more intelligent and haven’t allowed yourself to be dragged into the vortex where I find myself now and, frankly, don’t know how to get out of. In fact, I don’t know how I got into it. I’m even catching the orat
orical fever, come to think of it. I’ve never said the word ‘vortex’ before.”

  “You have a political vocation, Don Juan.”

  “A political vocation? The only vocation I have is being a scientist, my dear friend. Politics, what they call politics, either exasperates me or bores me to death, no middle ground. Azaña has a political vocation, or Indalecio Prieto, or poor Don Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, whom we threw out of the presidency of the Republic with a kick that most certainly was indecorous. What I like is to see things accomplished—to get things done, as the Americans say, with that pragmatism they have. But here politics is nothing but words, forests of words, hectares of speeches with subordinate clauses. Have you seen how Azaña listens to himself, how he rounds off a paragraph as if he were making a long flourish of the cape in front of a bull? The only thing missing is that from the bleachers in Congress instead of ‘Bravo’ they shout ‘Olé,’ lengthening the vowels a good deal: Oooooleeeeeé. And even so, from time to time Azaña says things of some substance. But what did Don Niceto say in all his kilometric speeches, aside from quoting the classics with an Andalusian ‘s’ instead of a Castilian lisp? And the illustrious Don José Ortega y Gasset, how many afternoons did he put us to sleep in Congress with his flowery prose? Ultimately he became disenchanted with the Republic as well and didn’t offer his services as a deputy again, otherwise I’d have been tempted to go much farther away than you to avoid hearing him. Like Don Miguel de Unamuno, the worst defect Don José Ortega sees in the Republic is his not being named president for life. I watched him speaking in his seat as if he were explaining introductory philosophy to his students. Do you believe one should trust a philosopher who colors his gray hair with cheap dye and makes so great an effort to hide his baldness when he has no chance of success?”

  “He also seems to wear lifts in his shoes.”

  “As an architect, you notice the structural details! I’ll stay with the ornamentation.”

  Negrín could eat and speak at top speed and at the same time guffaw, or acquire a serious frown when he imagined a gloomy future. But that apprehension never discouraged his activism or diminished his energy; instead it excited them. Beside him, Ignacio Abel easily felt guilty of passivity, languor. This man who was an internationally eminent scientist, and at some point would inherit a fortune, had chosen to dedicate his life and talent and his astonishing reserves of energy to improving a harsh, impoverished country where he may never receive any recompense, any show of gratitude. His generosity was undoubtedly mixed with a potent dose of pride, a kind of reagent without which he wouldn’t have acted. As for the vigor of his character, perhaps it was as hereditary and removed from his will as his colossal physical size or the unlimited sexual appetite about which rumors circulated throughout Madrid. Nevertheless, Ignacio Abel found in Negrín a moral conviction that he didn’t possess, a capacity that occasionally struck him as histrionic but essentially seemed much healthier than his own tendency to dissimulate and be reserved, to observe in silence and nourish rancorous irony, with no risk of being refuted and no effect on the reality of things.

  “Believe me, what I want is to lock myself away and do research fourteen hours a day in a good laboratory. At the Residence I can’t get myself to go into my own lab for fear I’ll just break down. Or when I go to University City and see you behind the glass door of your office, bending over the drawing board, so absorbed that when I knock on the glass to attract your attention you don’t raise your head . . . How I envy you, my friend—what a privilege. To do one thing and do it well, with your five senses. Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal used to tell me, with that lugubrious face he had toward the end, shaking his skinny, dead man’s finger as yellow as a wax candle: ‘Negrín, you’re involved in too many things. The man who embraces too much holds very little close.’ He made me angry, of course, but he was absolutely right. Though I was involved in some of those things because of him!”

  “But you’ll return to research sooner or later. I don’t think you’ll stay in politics forever.”

  “A scientific researcher is like an athlete, Abel my friend. What’s the point of kidding ourselves? He has a few truly splendid years and then nothing, routine. He stops keeping up with the latest publications for a time and he’s out of the competition. Like the boxer who stops training, the athlete who doesn’t run. He gets a potbelly, just like the one I’m getting! Why don’t you finish your beer and we’ll order another round. Don’t you have any vices? It seems Hitler has absolutely none. Did you know he’s a vegetarian and it’s forbidden to smoke in his presence? Here, a politician who doesn’t smoke and have a rich deep cough is considered a fag. Speaking of Hitler, would you like to know the secret of his success, according to Madariaga, our only international expert? His secret is the airplane. Other candidates traveled by train, at most by car. The result was that in the election campaign they are nowhere to be seen. Hitler always traveled by plane, so he had time to be everywhere. The airplane, the radio, and the movie projector have achieved the miracle of omnipresence. Meanwhile our poor President Azaña turns pale and holds on to his seat if his official car goes faster than thirty kilometers an hour, and when he climbs the steps to an airplane, he begins to tremble so much his aide has to push him up. The speed of Spanish politics is that of a mule cart. So you tell me what’s to be done. Extend electrification, as suggested by Comrade Lenin, so admired now in broad sectors of our party!”

  “Do you think the Leninism of Largo Caballero and his people is serious?”

  “Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. The most frivolous, most absurd idea becomes real if a few fools believe it and are prepared to take action. Can anyone take seriously calling Largo Caballero the Spanish Lenin? He does. And the fifth-rate literati with sour café-con-leche breath who fill their heads with Marxist fantasies. And, of course, fearful Catholics who listen to the awful speeches he gives in bullrings about the impending proletarian revolution—”

  “Written by individuals who are much more astute than he is.”

  “And more sinister too, don’t forget. Think of the nonsense he said, or they had him say, during the campaign: if the right won, civil war would be inevitable . . . Largo has become a supporter of the dictatorship of the proletariat because they’ve made him believe that when it comes, he’ll be the dictator. All empty talk, of course. But empty talk that in no way favors our cause and serves only to further inflame our enemies. Believe me, they live in a delusion, a world of fantasy. They go to the Sierra on Sundays to shoot a few bullets with old pistols and sing ‘The Internationale,’ and they imagine they’ve formed the Red Army, and whenever they feel like it they’ll seize power by storm. The Winter Palace. Or El Pardo Palace, where the president of the Republic hasn’t had time to go for summer vacation, given how calm things are around here . . . They don’t learn anything. They didn’t learn anything from the disaster of the 1934 uprising. Their heads are filled with propaganda posters and Soviet films. And the few of us who dare contradict them and ask for a little good sense are viewed as worse than Fascists. Do you see this small pistol that inspires so little confidence? Last week I drove Prieto in my car to a meeting in Ecija. A horrible road, as you can imagine, African heat, lots of flies, Prieto and I so fat we barely fit in the car, and behind us an old bus with a gang of armed boys, just in case. The meeting began all right, but after a few minutes they were booing us.”