In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Lying down in the dark bedroom, in the oppressive heat of a June morning, she listened to the maids coming and going in the house. They must be chattering about her, how lucky the señora is, she can go to bed in the middle of the day with a migraine, after a bad night. Wasn’t it because her husband was giving her a lot of grief, and what else would he give her when she looked like his mother? Where would he look for what he clearly wasn’t getting at home? Adela was afraid of them. She saw with closed eyes the little key in the lock and saw herself opening the drawer, and suddenly she saw something or imagined something even more painful than the possibility of having been deceived. Perhaps it was not that he no longer loved her but that he had never loved her, had approached her because no other woman of the type and class he found attractive would have accepted him, had courted her with the same calculation and the same appearance of sincerity with which, years later, he flattered those who could influence his appointment. Perhaps the aunts and cousins, disappointed by the failure of their predictions of her spinsterhood and astonished that a well-educated young man, though poor, wanted to marry her, had been correct in their initial suspicions, diluted as the years passed but never completely discarded. There was no middle ground in his ambition for respectability. He’d calculated everything since the time he was very young, when he discovered that his father’s death wouldn’t mean the end of his education, but also that nothing would be given to him but the small sum his father had saved, which would allow him to survive until the end of his course of study only if he lived with an austerity close to indigence. He hadn’t allowed himself any weakness, any vice. His intelligence and tenacity brought him to a point where he had all the necessary qualifications but not the right to take another step toward the social position that mattered so much to him, even though he saw himself as a radical contemptuous of bourgeois formalities and had a wholesome resentment of a caste system he’d experienced firsthand, literally born and brought up on one of its lowest rungs, in a porter’s basement lodging. How could she accept that their entire life had been a deception? Adela got out of bed and ate something light. The telephone rang and her heart seemed to stop. Something had happened to him, gunfire or a bomb at the construction site; someone had shot her brother. The maid answered the phone and left the receiver off the hook. She’d said she didn’t know and would ask the señora. It couldn’t be anything serious. “Doña Zenobia Camprubí wants to know if you can come to the phone.” “Tell her I’m not in. Say I’ll be back this afternoon and you’ll give me the message.” Her friends were puzzled that she no longer attended the lectures at the Lyceum Club, that she never had time to go with them to the theater or concerts or simply to have tea in the house of Señora Margarita Bonmatí, who lived only a few doors down, or at Zenobia’s, which was closer, a step away almost, at the corner of Príncipe de Vergara and Padilla. But she went out less and less, and realized she was frightened of people, hostile people who shouted but also people she knew who were affectionate with her; she suddenly felt paralyzed, had a need not to be seen, not to look at herself in the mirror. All she wanted was to stay still, not see anyone, lie on her bed in the dark, but fear pursued her even in that refuge, her alarm at footsteps approaching or the telephone ringing, or her uneasiness that the children would be late coming home from school, or that night would fall and her husband wouldn’t have returned yet, better to close her eyes and not listen to anything or feel anything, not die but be safe from any shock. Afterward the maids would say that in the morning they’d noticed the señora acting strange, seen that something was wrong. She got up from the table, unaware that her napkin had fallen to the floor, and the cook saw that instead of withdrawing to the room where she embroidered and read, she went into the señor’s study, being careful to close the door behind her.

  She left the house without saying she was leaving, without putting back the drawer that fell from her hands when she found the letters and photographs. Only a few letters were out of their envelopes, as if Adela hadn’t been curious to read all of them, or had the sang-froid to refold them after she read them and put each one where it belonged. The drawer remained overturned on the floor, the tiny key still in the lock. What wounded her most deeply wasn’t the young face and slender body of his foreign lover but his face in some of the photos, the open, cheerful smile she’d never received. Adela must have crossed the hall to her bedroom, where she dressed for the street, and left the house without being seen by the maids, who missed her only when the two children came home from school and didn’t find her in the sewing room, where she sat each afternoon, looking out at the street because she liked to see them arrive and make certain they crossed properly. This is how she’d once waited for her husband to come home, when they were both younger and he worked in a municipal office and kept more regular hours (she’d watch him arrive from the balcony, and he’d jump off the streetcar on the corner and look up at her). She probably wanted to avoid the risk of running into her children and frustrating her plan, if she’d already formulated it when she left the house and knew where she was going. The doorman was the only one who saw her go out, and he said afterward that he thought Señora de Abel was more distracted than usual and didn’t stop to exchange a few words with him, only nodding her head as if she were in a hurry to get somewhere, like when she’d rush out on Sundays for twelve o’clock Mass. The owner of the grocery on the corner saw her cross the street and wait for a taxi, raising her gloved hand slightly each time one came near, with the kind of distinguished timidity typical of her gestures, as if she were uncertain whether it was correct for a lady to be alone on the street and hold out her hand for a cab. She carried a handbag and wore a small hat with a short veil, a light dress, white shoes, short lace gloves. The heavy fog dimmed the shadows of things without blurring them completely: the shadows of trees on the sidewalk, her own preceding her. The store owner saw her get into the taxi, and after a while he saw her children coming home from school, pushing each other and arguing as they did so often. On a corner of Calle de Alcalá, at the gates of the Retiro, Adela asked the driver to stop. She gave him a bill and told him to keep the meter running, she’d be back in a few minutes. At the door of the small church where she often went, not to pray but to sit in silence, in the cool shade tinted by light coming through the stained-glass windows, there was always a blind violinist with a dog. When young girls passed, their high heels clicking rapidly, the blind man played tunes from operettas or the music hall; when he heard the slower steps of a mature woman and smelled her perfume, he put on an expression of religious ecstasy and lengthened the notes of Schubert’s or Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” leaning forward, the dog between his legs as if guarding the cardboard box where he collected alms. Here he stood in spite of the hour, at the door of the church no one else would enter until much later. “Ave María purísima,” he said to Adela, perhaps recognizing her footsteps or her perfume, and she replied, “Sin pecado concebido,” frightened by the gesture with which he stretched out to her the arms that held his violin and bow, and made a parodic bow, but it didn’t occur to her to give him a coin, she was so dazed, so impatient to enter the church and enjoy the benign sensation of coolness and shadow, of refuge, of quiet that for a few minutes wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d become fond of visiting the church because she rarely saw anyone there and the priest didn’t know her. The one in her parish called her Doña Adela or Señora de Abel and from time to time suggested she join groups of pious ladies in the distribution of clothes to the poor, or in novenas. In his homilies he thundered against the impiety of the times and demanded prayers for the salvation of an afflicted Spain. In February, on the Sunday before the elections, as Adela was leaving the church, the priest approached, holding envelopes in his hand. He knew she was an exemplary Catholic lady, he said, and that he could speak to her in confidence. It was necessary to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and to God what was God’s, that was the evangelical commandment, and the sole concern of the Church—the
daughter of Christ—was to follow the doctrine without becoming involved in the business of this world. As he spoke, the hand holding the envelopes extended toward her, though not so much that Adela felt obliged to take them. But when the Church suffered persecution, wasn’t it the task of good Catholics to do everything possible to come to her defense? Now Adela understood and kept smiling, nodding, still comforted by the Mass and Communion, the black embroidered veil on her head. She, like a good Catholic, surely would be able to follow her conscience when it was time to vote in the upcoming elections, but who could be sure her maids, young and uneducated, wouldn’t succumb to demagogic propaganda, the charm of impious forces? Or simply, in their ignorance, in their innocence, they might not vote at all, depriving the defenders of the Church and her Social Doctrine of their humble but invaluable support. Adela extended her right hand, and the priest extended his, thinking she was going to take the envelopes with electoral ballots, but what Adela did was to gently push the hand offering them to her, barely touching it, leaning forward slightly, smiling before turning away, saying with all the good breeding her voice could hold, “Don’t worry, Father. We’ll all know how to vote the dictates of our conscience, with the help of God.” What would her priest think if he knew she’d voted for a candidate of the Popular Front, and a Socialist besides, Julián Besteiro, not telling anyone, not her parents or her brother or Ignacio, who hadn’t asked her; he probably considered it a foregone conclusion that she’d vote for the right. You believe you’re not as intransigent as others but you also think if a person has faith she has to be reactionary and even a little bit retarded. Now she sat in a corner of the empty church, in the last row of pews, after dipping her fingers in the font of holy water—the stone so cold, oozing dampness—and kneeling briefly before the Blessed Sacrament as she made the sign of the cross. Her body felt heavy, weak from the heat, her swollen knees painful. The church was small, without much merit, vaguely Gothic, built at the end of the last century. The walls, painted pale blue, had sentimental images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph with his staff of spikenard, his expression of kindhearted nullity, his curly beard, along with a saint dressed as a nun, her eyes turned toward heaven. The largest image was of Christ crucified, before which candles always burned. She liked his expression of noble human suffering, of acceptance of the pain and injustice driven into his mortal body. She liked the name written beneath the crucifix: Most Holy Christ of Forgetting. She could imagine her husband’s sarcastic comments if he were to see the ogival chapels with their gold-tinted ceilings, the images. But she liked the floor tiles, like those in a middle-class living room, the combined smells of wax and incense in the air, the delicate shade that made the faces of the images paler and their ecstatic glass eyes more brilliant, the trembling of the lighted lamp in the main altar, above the probably false gold of the Eucharist. Hail Mary, full of grace. She prayed in a quiet voice, not asking for forgiveness but with the feeling she was wrapped in a melancholy mercy as soothing as the cool darkness. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. The evidence of her unbearable sorrow would be enough for forgiveness to be granted her. The only thing she wanted was for the calm and silence never to end, for the unrelenting sun not to wound her eyes, for the gleam of the tiny key to be erased from her mind, and for the radiance of that young foreign smile in the photos to disappear, along with the cheerful assurance of that handwriting, so different from hers, taught in the nuns’ academy, in which she too had written love letters many years ago. Rest was all she asked for, to free herself of an exhaustion so profound she’d need years to notice some relief, to sink into the forgetting that the crucified Christ seemed to want for himself, the forgetting that was the only absolution for pain. The words of the prayers came effortlessly to her lips, just as her fingers had gone to the holy water and then to her forehead, chin, breast. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. But for now there was no rest. The taxi driver was growing impatient and blowing the horn. Each blast of the horn shook her like a scream. If he left, it wouldn’t be easy for her to find another taxi at this hour of the afternoon. With infinite reluctance she stood and crossed herself again as she passed in front of the Blessed Sacrament. She lit a little oil lamp before the high plaster Virgin—it had a faint dab of color on cheeks as yellow as wax—and dropped a coin into the slot of the poor box. The metallic clink inside the tin box resounded in the silence. Turn thine eyes of mercy toward us. She had to ask forgiveness for something, but not the desire to dissolve into a sweet darkness without memory: she had to ask forgiveness for the rancor she’d nurtured toward her daughter because of the girl’s unconditional devotion to her father, which had unjustly seemed an affront to Adela. To what extent had pain caused her to lose her dignity (it was a lie that pain ennobled)? To the extent of being jealous of her daughter, of feeling resentful when she saw her go out to meet her father every time his key sounded in the lock at the apartment in Madrid, or the rusted hinges of the gate creaked at the house in the Sierra. In her high-heeled shoes her swollen feet hurt. When he heard her leave the church, the blind man put out the cigarette he was smoking and stuck it behind his ear before beginning, somewhat tortuously, the “Ave Maria.” The driver, his elbow leaning out the window, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, saw her approach with a look more of indulgent mockery than impatience. Let him not talk to her in such a loud voice when she gets back into the cab, let him not say anything at all on the way to the North Station. She was opening the back door when she realized she hadn’t given anything to the blind violinist this time, either. She retraced her steps, opened her handbag, then her change purse, and chose a coin more generous than usual. The blind man doffed his cap when he distinguished the coin by its sound and made an exaggerated bow.

  Two hours later, at about six, they saw her get off the train at the village station on the other side of the Sierra. The sky was as overcast as in Madrid, but the heat was not as overwhelming. The stationmaster, who’d known her since he was a little boy, was surprised to see her dressed in city clothes, and even more surprised to see her alone, without a suitcase, in high-heeled shoes that would make it difficult for her to take the shortcut from the station to the road to her house and then into pine groves after leaving the village. Some of the men playing cards and drinking wine in the tavern must have seen her too, the ones who fell silent and looked out the window each time a train pulled in. Though it was hot, the summer families hadn’t begun to arrive. The men saw her walk away on the narrow path past rockrose bushes—they’d just bloomed, with yellow pistils among white petals and sticky, glistening leaves—maintaining with difficulty the regularity of her steps on the pebbled path. They must have assumed she’d come to inspect the house before the family moved in, but it was strange for her to come alone, without the maids, and dressed in that formal manner. She stopped for a moment at the fence and didn’t go in. Or if she did go in, she came out again quickly, leaving everything the way it was, not even opening the shutters, as if she’d decided not to touch anything, not to disturb the tranquility of things kept in darkness all winter.

  She continued along the dirt path, looking dignified in her city hat and the handbag held tightly in her hand, though it turned out that there was virtually nothing in it aside from the change purse, empty after she had given money to the blind man with the violin and paid the cab fare, and a one-way train ticket. The path climbed gently west, toward the slopes of pines and oaks and the pastures, separated from one another by low stone walls. It was the same path that led to the irrigation pond they’d walked to since her children were small. In the mornings, after breakfast, or after their siesta as the heat began to ease, though at that height it was unusual for at least a little breeze not to blow. The children at first held by the hand, then, year after year, running ahead of them, impatient to reach the pond and jump into the clear icy water. How could she not have noticed how fast they were leaving childhood? And they, Ignacio Abel and Adela, w
atching them from a distance, sitting in the folding chairs on the shore, in the shade of the pines, conversing more impersonally as the years passed. Persevering in spite of the heat, as if she’d shaken off some of the weight that made her walk more slowly in recent years, Adela followed the path—which became less defined in the pines, the serene endurance of things indifferent to human presence—distracted and at the same time self-possessed, finally armed with a purpose, clutching the bag in which there was only a ticket stub and an empty change purse. The Sierra air plunged her into her most treasured memories, into the warm waves of summers that retreated past the childhood of her children into the distance of her own early years. She reached the pond, and its motionless depth made the silence more dense. The light gray sky beyond the somber arch of the tops of the pine trees was reflected in the pond’s smooth surface. For a moment she thought she wasn’t alone, but there was no one at the shutterless windows of the abandoned power station. To the south, beyond the foggy horizon, was Madrid. To the west, between rocks and oak groves, she could see the blurred silhouettes of the domes of El Escorial. Not a single detail had changed in the landscape of tenuous lines and faint smudges of color she’d been looking at since she was a girl. She took a few steps along the retaining wall and stood still at the edge of the water, looking at her own image, her thick knees and wide hips, the light dress she’d never known how to wear with elegance, her hat. She closed her eyes and stepped into the emptiness, clutching her bag in both hands, as if afraid she might lose it.