In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  22

  AS SOON AS HE SAW her sitting at the usual table in the back of the café, he realized her face was not the same face and her eyes would not look at him in the same way. It was she who suggested they meet in the café—that morning, the idea of going to Madame Mathilde’s house produced a physical revulsion in her. She didn’t look up, though she must have heard the glass door opening in the almost empty café. She wasn’t reading the open book in her hand. She was smoking, unusual for her at that time of day. She hadn’t touched the coffee in front of her. For one painful instant she was a stranger, a woman he wouldn’t recognize when she raised her head and to whom he’d apologize for mistaking her for someone else. Ignacio Abel saw himself in the mirror behind the red divan where she was sitting. His face wasn’t the same either, and not only because he hadn’t slept the previous night, most of it spent in the sanatorium, sitting by a closed door behind which he couldn’t make out a sound no matter how closely he listened. Sometimes the door to her room opened to let in a nurse, who closed it immediately, or the doctor with the somber expression, who at first gave him no hope and only later, at daybreak, told him the patient had responded to the treatment to revive her. Probably, though it was too soon to say so with any certainty, she’d recover with no aftereffects. The doctor never asked what had happened; he looked at Ignacio Abel with an air of reserve that perhaps hid an accusation, the same look as in the fatigued eyes of the nurse as she closed the door without letting him look in on Adela. In the silence Ignacio Abel thought he heard violent retching, guttural sounds that in the strangeness of the sleepless night seemed the product of his imagination. But after a few minutes the nurse came out carrying a pail, half filled with something that resembled dirty water and smelled of plumbing mains and vomit, and a clinical device ending in a black rubber tube.

  “The doctor’s given her a shot of a sedative. What she needs now is rest.”

  “When can I see her?”

  “You’ll have to ask the doctor.”

  Daylight was flooding the windows when they let him enter the room. Adela’s brother was guarding the head of the bed, pale, eyes glassy, lids swollen, unshaven, staring straight into his eyes.

  “You’ll have to explain how you arranged for them to keep me out,” Ignacio Abel said.

  “You’re the one who has some explaining to do.”

  Víctor pointed to his sister, who was sleeping, her broad face ashen against the white sheet. Her mouth was open and her lips had traces of lipstick. Her damp hair spread in a graying tangle on the pillow. Ignacio Abel remained silent, just as he had the night before on the phone when Víctor accused him of something unintelligible, not bothering to tell him what had happened to Adela or where she was.

  “You’re to blame for this. You don’t fool me.”

  “Blame for what?”

  “My sister almost drowned.”

  A chill ran through his body, a wave of nausea. He thought: he knows what happened, knows Adela found the letters and photos. But that was impossible, he quickly realized, when he learned she was unconscious in a room at the tuberculosis sanatorium. The caretaker at the abandoned power station, who made his rounds at about that time of day, heard what he thought was the sound of a body dropping into the water. He didn’t see anyone at first, only the rings expanding on the surface that always was motionless. Someone or something, perhaps an animal leaning over to drink, had fallen into the deep water, but it was strange that it wasn’t struggling to reach the surface. He ran down to the edge, to where a vertical string of bubbles had appeared. The late afternoon sun pierced the layers of water: he saw a woman sinking or, already having reached the bottom, beginning to rise, then suspended as if trapped in the underwater vegetation, her hair floating like a tangle of algae, her arms motionless at her sides. He leaped into the water, attempted to bring her to the surface, but she was heavy and seemed to be pulling him down and struggling not to lean against him. “We both could’ve drowned,” he said afterward, in the tavern at the station, to the men who’d seen Adela walking along the platform at the hottest, emptiest hour of the afternoon, with her handbag and gloves, her small hat, her city clothes, advancing awkwardly on high heels. At first the caretaker didn’t know who she was, didn’t recognize the woman he’d known for many summers: the bluish face, the closed eyes, the flattened, streaming hair. He ran to the road and miraculously saw the forest warden’s truck approaching. The only place nearby where she could be cared for was the sanatorium. A doctor recognized her when he saw the stretcher come in, the doctor who’d treated Víctor during one of his rest cures and was an acquaintance, perhaps a Falangist connection, Ignacio Abel thought, observing his rather flashy, defiant air, imagining a blue shirt beneath his white coat.

  The night before, the telephone had rung on the desk in his study, where he stood looking at the open drawer and the papers and photos on the floor, not bending down to pick up anything. He let it ring, imagining in a cowardly way that Adela must be calling, perhaps from her parents’ house, dignified, vengeful, her voice trembling, choking on her tears. It was Lita who picked up the phone in the hall, who opened the door (Miguel was there, holding his notebook) and saw her father standing, on his face a disconcerted expression, as if he’d discovered a robbery or a natural disaster. Wherever the guardian brother had called from that night, he reserved the right not to answer certain questions: where they’d found Adela, who’d found her, and why she was in the sanatorium. “She’s between life and death. If anything happens to my sister, I hold you responsible. You’ll have to answer to me.” The letters and photos remained scattered on the floor, the drawer overturned, pouring out its content of sweet words suddenly transmuted into poison. The reality of a few minutes earlier now belonged to a remote time. Ignacio Abel clenched the receiver, repeating questions his brother-in-law didn’t answer, and the sweat on his hand made it slip. From the street came a tune from a saint’s day fair, one of many verbenas held at the beginning of summer in Madrid; Judith had become very fond of them. (Only a few days earlier he’d taken her to the verbena of San Antonio; he’d finally kept his promise to show her at close quarters the Goya frescoes inside the dome of the hermitage; he’d pressed her to him and kissed her, taking advantage of a stretch of shadow.) He looked up and Miguel and Lita were in the doorway of the study, watching their father with alarm and suspicion, as if they, too, accomplices in their uncle’s vigilance, knew and accused, witnessing the disorder of papers and photos on the floor, each of those gifts transformed into part of a contagion that had already brought Adela down, he didn’t know how or where, and perhaps would irreparably damage his life, bringing him face to face with the lethal consequences of his actions. “Where is she?” he repeated, afraid the children might find out something. “Where are you calling from?” The line seemed to have been cut, but Víctor was still there, silent, subjecting him to the uncertainty, a punishment that would undoubtedly fall on him more harshly because he hadn’t anticipated it. He’d preferred to believe his impunity would be unlimited, that between the world in which he lived with Adela and his children and the one he shared with Judith there would always be a separation as radical as the one dividing parallel and simultaneous universes. Now, in astonishment, he was witnessing the magnitude of the disaster without wholly accepting it, like a flood or cave-in caused by an earthquake, a calamity no one can foresee.

  “I told you so many times,” said Judith, looking away after her eyes had met his for an instant. She no longer seemed the same behind the smoke of the cigarette she didn’t bring to her lips, the cup of café con leche she hadn’t touched. She seemed separated from him by an invisible wall she herself had raised. “I told you to tear up the letters or let me keep them. Not to keep them in your house. There was no need. It wasn’t decent.”

  She too was accusing him. Cold, so close and yet beyond his reach, the house of time he’d built in his imagination for her, sitting in the same corner of the café where they’d met so of
ten. Under the table they’d often searched for each other’s hands, touched knees. They’d left substantial tips so the usual waiter would save that divan for them, the waiter who brought their coffees and didn’t come back unless they called him, who was accustomed to dealing with other secret couples or at least very dubious ones, mature gentlemen with young girls they’d found through classified ads, aging engaged couples, lovers trapped in a routine as curdled as marriage who didn’t have the money to rent a room for their assignations. One morning the same place changes abruptly; the lover’s familiar face is the same but also a stranger’s. Ignacio Abel had seen his in the mirror in the café, and it was the face of a bad night spent at the sanatorium and of shame and remorse; the face his children had seen the previous night, before focusing on the letters and photographs of someone they couldn’t identify; the one his brother-in-law looked at in the sanatorium, identifying the stigma of disloyalty that finally had been exposed after so many years when he’d yielded in his vigilance or allowed himself to be deceived by an air of rectitude everyone else accepted and his own sister revered without question. Ignacio placed his hand on the marble tabletop, and Judith withdrew hers. She’d preferred not to look at him as he approached, or perhaps, absorbed in her own remorse, she hadn’t seen him approaching, hadn’t stood to press against him as if they hadn’t seen each other for a long time. A kind of innocence had ended, and now they were beginning to wonder how it had lasted so long, and at what price: the face he’d seen for several months, as free of guilt as it was of any shadow from the world beyond the two of them; perhaps she wouldn’t look at him again and her eyes would always have this new expression. In the same place where on other occasions they’d taken refuge as lovers, they now seemed to have the suspicious air of accomplices in a sordid crime, in that café far removed from the center of the city, in that shadowy corner badly lit by an electric lamp as weak and yellow as a gas flame. For Judith the shame was no less intense: her upbringing made the strictest moral demands. Now she was struck by her own inconsistency, her blindness sustained for so long without seeming to do her harm, without calling into question her own integrity, dispelling the mist and intoxication of words and desires that had enveloped her in recent months. In another country and another language, reality might have seemed subject to more benevolent rules; what she desired, what she dared to do, must have had a partly dreamy, partly conjectural element of fiction, as if she were just living the book she hadn’t begun to write. She detected signs, warnings, but preferred not to see them. She’d accepted humiliating norms—secrecy, lies—and wrapped them in literature to make her capitulation acceptable. She’d effortlessly suspended her own principles, childishly imagining she was experiencing a novel-worthy love, sinking into a darkness as full of phantoms and echoes as a movie theater, and as removed from reality. The ceiling lights suddenly came on, making her blink in disbelief when she went out into the harsh light of the street; on this June morning, after hearing the news on the phone—from the time she’d lifted the receiver and heard his voice, she’d understood he was going to tell her something irreparable—she’d crossed Madrid in a taxi to reach this empty, gloomy café where confirmation of the anticipated awaited her, and with it the invalidation of the very things that had attracted her earlier, a stage set onto which the light of day was mistakenly projected, revealing false, carelessly painted arches, dusty wooden platforms, artificial plants, rumpled curtains. A woman lay in a coma in a sanatorium, and she, Judith, had gently pushed her to the edge of the pond where she sank after offering no resistance. Judith remembered clearly the only time she’d seen her, focusing on her, observing that she looked older than her husband, that her figure and age didn’t correspond to the lively daughter who ran to throw her arms around her father’s waist when he came down from the platform where he’d given his lecture. Days so distant, the beginning of October, now enveloped in imprecision with which boundaries of time are remembered, when you’re at the edge of something and don’t know it yet, the first step past a threshold you didn’t notice as you crossed it. There was something incongruent between that woman and man: his avid look made him seem younger, his look and the obvious care he took in his physical appearance, the alert, restless tension of someone not resigned to what he’s achieved, who resists considering the shape of his life as final. That’s where they did not fit: her fatalism, sweetened by placidity, nourished by melancholy; his not completely conscious vanity, his unstable blend of insecurity and arrogance, a man who still expected something or expected everything, who perched uncomfortably on what he’d already achieved and stood quickly like an uneasy guest waiting for something or someone, though he doesn’t know what or who. And the daughter, almost a young woman, halfway between one life and another, embracing her father with the ease of a little girl, with a spontaneity and sensuality her mother would never have. Caressing his daughter’s head, he searched for Judith with the caution of a man who prefers not to have the direction of his eyes followed: there was something brazen and furtive in them, a subtle yet complete examination she perceived as physically as if a hand or a breath had brushed her skin. Everything seemed inevitable even before it occurred, everything somehow unreal, part of the suspended life granted her by her status as a foreigner, absolved from the gravity of her own country, exalted by being submerged in a different language, so clear of memory that everything in it shone with excessive colors. Before writing a single word on the portable Smith-Corona, always on the table in her room at the pensión, she’d lived as if dreaming a novel in complete detail, a novel about the European journey of a Henry James heroine, the heroine she’d imagined she would be as she read novels in the public library. But unlike James’s intelligent, generous women, she would travel alone without answering to anyone, earn her living, sit by herself in a café with no one to set limits for her. But what had she done with her hard-won freedom, with the fantasy delegated to her by her mother, with her European novel? That morning she saw them dissolve in a café on the outskirts of Madrid, its floor littered with sawdust and cigarette butts and a vague smell of urinals and sour milk, with worn plush divans and clouded mirrors, sitting across from a married man older than she was, with whom she’d sustained not the love of an intrepid Henry James heroine but a wretched adulterous affair. From the time she was a child she’d forged an idea of freedom that was the antithesis of her mother’s bitterness: in recent months she’d taken part with no remorse in the deception of a woman in whom her mother would have recognized herself. Perhaps she had unconsciously noticed that similarity the one time she saw Adela behind her manners of an educated, bourgeois woman in Madrid, well along in years, older than she should have been according to her daughter’s age and the worldly disposition of a husband to whom time was being kinder than to her.

  She’d heard the trembling of the badly fitted glass in the café door and knew he was coming in but preferred not to raise her head, expecting she’d find in his eyes the remorse and fatigue of the previous night, and above all the refutation of a feeling that had begun to desert them in recent days, though neither had acknowledged it. Time had ended; it had collapsed for them like a tower or sandcastle since the last night they’d spent in the house by the sea. Fleeing from anguish to revived desire, from desire to insomnia, to waiting for dawn on a Monday when their parting would be crueler than on other occasions precisely because they’d been together a longer time. It was necessary to pay, but they didn’t know the price; love was built on someone else’s destruction. Sitting in the café, her eyes fixed on the round marble tabletop, smoke from her cigarette rising to one side of her face, Judith imagined the other woman’s pain like a knife thrust with crude obstinacy into her abdomen. Ignacio Abel stood across from her, his tie crooked, hat in hand, as if he didn’t dare sit down. What was gained in one dazzling minute is just as easily lost. The glitter of desire in a pair of eyes can be extinguished just as it illuminated them. After spending a sleepless night at the sanatorium in the Sie
rra, Ignacio Abel had driven back to Madrid and hadn’t had time to shower or change. His hair was dirty, flat against his skull, his unshaven cheeks dark, the skin under his chin flabby, and his hat left a mark across the middle of his forehead, made tender by the heat.

  “Have you been waiting a long time?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “I couldn’t come any earlier.”

  “Shouldn’t you have stayed with her?”

  “She’s out of danger. I’ll go back this afternoon. She was still unconscious.”

  “We almost killed her, you and I. We pushed her over the edge.”

  “It’s still not certain it wasn’t an accident. No one saw her jump in the water. She was wearing high heels, and the stone at the edge was wet. She might have slipped.”