In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  The closer he came, the more afraid he was. He wanted to move time ahead and leaned forward in his seat, his right leg moving rhythmically, feeling on his face the warm air that came in the window when they began to drive faster. He searched for signs of what was going to happen to him in a few minutes, prophecies of the immediate future, possible outcomes. He enters the house and Judith has just left. He walks behind the silent maid down the dimly lit corridor, opens the door to the room, and sees Judith sitting on the bed, wearing her high-heeled shoes and street dress, as if she’s just arrived. He gets out of the taxi, pushes the gate, and finds it locked. He rings the bell, whose faint echo reaches him from inside the house, and the sound that had so often announced a meeting with Judith is now a warning. The maid opens the door, and before she has time to say anything, he understands that Judith hasn’t come. Panic seized him. A young woman, alone, whom he saw through the window as the taxi slowed down, was, for a moment, Judith leaving Madame Mathilde’s house after waiting for an hour. Her features dissolved as rapidly as the driver’s chatter or the blurred spectacle of a street disturbance in the center of the city. He paid quickly with a wrinkled bill and got out. At the end of Calle O’Donnell, wide and unobstructed, with an open horizon where the rows of trees and streetcar tracks and electric wires disappeared, Madrid was once again the deserted city of Sunday afternoons in the summer, paralyzed by a dusty heat that the rows of too-young trees didn’t alleviate, submerged in a silence of closed balconies. Without a hat he felt insecure and unprotected on the street. He passed his hand over his hair, adjusted his tie, brushed off his trousers. Madame Mathilde’s maid sees him with his head uncovered and a bruise on his face, shakes her head in disapproval, and opens the door. Each step he took was bringing him closer to the undeniable; whatever it was, it would abolish the torment of uncertainty. The gate opened without resistance. In the garden stood a fountain with a basin but no water, topped by a small statue of a nymph. As soon as he climbed a few steps and pressed the bell that triggered a muffled sound of chimes, he’d know what his ultimate fate would be. He wasn’t asking for a lasting future without distress, only a moment to look at her, hear her voice. He wouldn’t even try to embrace her; it would be enough for him to be at her side and tell her what he needed to say and hadn’t said clearly before. He pressed the bell. No one came to the door. The house wasn’t empty; he could hear echoes of a radio broadcast. He rang again and the maid’s suspicious face appeared in an opening between the frame and the door, narrower than on previous occasions. If she said nothing and led him to the usual room, it meant Judith was waiting for him. The servant wore a black dress and cap, and on Madame Mathilde’s specific instructions had no makeup on her eyes or lips. She closed the door and with the same faint smile and silent docility she’d displayed at other times indicated that he should follow her. He didn’t ask whether Judith had come; saying something would have risked frightening away a fragile hope. At the door the servant lowered her head and moved to one side. When he didn’t dare to look inside, the maid’s voice confirmed his fear. “If the señor wishes, I can serve you a drink while you’re waiting for the señorita to arrive.”

  The ice had dissolved in the glass of whiskey when steps that weren’t Judith’s approached the door and someone knocked. He’d been sitting in the red easy chair by the window, not moving, or moving just enough to take an occasional sip, noting the gradual warming of the drink and the aftertaste of alcohol, watching the progress of nightfall. Like the ice in the glass, his anxiety had gradually dissolved into despair, into the simple inertia not of waiting but of maintaining the immobility of the wait, because of fatalism or reluctance or the inability to make a decision or do anything other than continue to sit, glass in hand, submerging himself in the growing darkness, occasionally seeing himself from the side in the mirror when he turned his head. He could have pressed the bell on the night table to request more ice or ask if there was a call, a message from Judith. But he did nothing. He simply prolonged the wait, putting off the acceptance of what in reality he’d known, surmised not with his intelligence but with the ache in his stomach, the pressure of sorrow in his throat and chest, the warning of the unacceptable. He continued to wait as if the force of his obstinacy would influence Judith’s actions and will. Unmoving and alert, he listened for sounds in the house, the silence of an abandoned place that didn’t resemble the habitual hideout of adulterous plans and sexual appointments of specified duration. He didn’t hear muffled bells, brief rings, footsteps near the door or above him. From the adjoining rooms came no heavy breathing, bursts of laughter, disconnected words, stifled shouts. Only the radio somewhere, broadcasting misled voices and music, announcements. And in the background the remote sounds of Madrid, beyond the sonorous birds in the garden, coming in through the shutters along with a breeze, a hot breath released by the soil and pavement upon the arrival of nightfall. Embers of light remained on the venal red of the bedspread, in the mirror, on the porcelain of the bidet and sink. In memory Judith’s body had the same spectral quality as that dissolving light. How wretched to have brought her so often to a place like this, not to have paid attention to the vileness of almost every object in the room, the vulgarity, the depraved taste of a bourgeois bedroom from the turn of the century replicated in a brothel. Her young skin had touched those shiny, threadbare fabrics impregnated with the smell of tobacco and cheap cologne; her bare feet had stepped on the rug with a worn pastoral scene; when she leaned back, her tousled head had rested on that wall with drawings of flowers and a dark trail of grease. He saw her astride him, her hair over her face and her torso brilliant with sweat in the reddish light of a lamp that transformed the working hours of a Monday morning into night. He saw her kneeling, still dressed, removing his shoes while he sat in that same chair on one of the days when he arrived exhausted from work. Judith untying his shoelaces, taking off his socks, caressing his feet. She raised one of his feet and rested it on her breasts, leaning over to kiss it. He was going to say something and Judith put her index finger to his lips.

  The approaching footsteps made him wake from his self-absorption. How long had he been in the dark? He turned on a light and stood, attempting to straighten his tie and shirt collar. After a few short knocks on the door, the old painted face of Madame Mathilde appeared, an envelope in her hand. His sentence would be on the sheet of paper inside, held by wrinkled hands wearing bracelets and rings. No matter how much I want to, I can’t be your docile lover, the mistress you keep at a distance while you go on living with your family. It’s better if I go and try my best to forget you. Madame Mathilde inspected the room with an expert glance and immediately put on her affable face of discreet complicity, saddened now, the bearer, perhaps, and an unwilling one, of bad news. “Forgive the young lady’s confusion, she’s a beginner.” Madame Mathilde spoke as if she managed a respectable household with servants, and a good deal of protocol, a boarding school or strict social club where few first names and no last names were spoken. “I told the girl to let me know when you arrived so you wouldn’t have to wait for no reason. The señorita came this afternoon and gave me this letter for you, asked me to say she was very sorry she couldn’t come back later, as she wanted to, because it was urgent that she leave Madrid. Which doesn’t surprise me at all, considering how things are going, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Ignacio Abel looked at her in bewilderment, nodding, as Madame Mathilde handed him the letter. He read it sitting on the bed, in the dim light of the lamp on the night table, drinking a whiskey he didn’t remember ordering, facing the mirror where he’d so often seen Judith Biely naked on the red bedspread. If we can’t have each other without hiding and if I have to share you with a woman you don’t love but whom we made suffer and almost die, I’d rather be alone. Shouts and car horns sounded in the distance, military marches and announcements from a radio playing in the house, something he didn’t recall ever occurring before. The night air no longer moved past the shutters. Sweat dampened the ed
ge of his shirt collar, tight against his skin, and instead of relaxing him the whiskey had left a throbbing pain in his temples. What good is it for you to say you were thinking of me if last night you slept with her in the same bed and this afternoon you kissed her goodbye when you left and took the train to come be with me.

  She’d leave Madrid by train that night, he thought with painful clarity. While he waited for her, filled with impatience and desire, in Madame Mathilde’s house, Judith Biely would board a train at the South or North Station, on her way to La Coruña or Cádiz, because those were the two ports where ships for America could sail from, unless she traveled to Irún, on the border, to take a ship from the coast of France. Madame Mathilde had held on to the letter intentionally; she had let him wait to cover Judith’s flight, so he wouldn’t have time to go and search for her. I can’t keep writing in Spanish, so I’ll do it faster and clearer in English. She’d written quickly, knowing she was leaving, coldly resolved to carry out a plan perhaps made some time ago. I’ll miss you but eventually I’ll get over it, provided I don’t see you again. He folded the letter carelessly, put it in a jacket pocket—not ringing the bell that indicated his intention to leave the room, which guaranteed he wouldn’t cross paths with any other of Madame Mathilde’s clients—and went into the hall, where the old woman appeared before him, emerging from a shadowy corner as if she’d been waiting for him. “The drinks are on the house, don’t worry. I always like to keep a real gentleman happy. There are so few left and there’ll be even fewer if this business isn’t straightened out soon—didn’t you hear the radio?” Ignacio Abel almost pushed the obsequious madam out of the way as he handed her a few bills. “No, the señorita didn’t give me any other message, didn’t say anything to me, though come to think of it she was dressed for a trip.” She pressed his hand as she took the bills, understanding, almost maternal, bringing her painted face close to his as she spoke in a low voice. “And permit me to say something in complete confidence. If, as it seems, the señorita will be away for some time, and you want to fill her place, as it were, with discretion and hygiene, you only have to say so, because I can introduce you to a clean, good-looking girl prepared to accept the friendship of a gentleman of your distinction. It goes without saying that in this house the doors are wide open to you.” Ignacio Abel went out to the street, still carrying Judith’s letter in his hand. He saw before him the smile that twisted Madame Mathilde’s mouth slightly and the gleam at the back of her small, astute eyes beneath painted lids. Suddenly he knew. He remembered hearing the doorbell as he waited in the room, allowing himself to sink slowly into the darkness, into memories and lethargy: it was Judith who had rung and entered the house knowing he was in the room. Standing in the vestibule from where she could see at the end of the hall the door behind which he was waiting, Judith had handed Madame Mathilde the letter, speaking to her in a low voice, and then had gone, so close to him and yet resolved to disappear into a distance where he feels he’ll never find her, though he’s come to her country not to flee Spain or build a library close to the great river, but to look for her.

  26

  HE WENT OUT AND suddenly felt it wasn’t the city he’d arrived in a few hours earlier on a Sunday afternoon. If Judith had been so near less than an hour ago, he still had time to find her and keep her from leaving. It was night now, and the streets that went down to Cibeles and the Paseo del Prado were filled with cars and people. Windows were open and houses lit, revealing bedrooms and dining rooms from which came a magnified, discordant cacophony of radios, and silhouettes at the balconies. Suspicion turned into certainty, an accusation; a resentful lover’s rancor gave tangible reality to his suppositions: Judith had gone to Madame Mathilde’s house knowing he was waiting for her, had the self-possession to drop off the letter and leave, and the astuteness to speak in a low voice and perhaps ensure the old woman’s complicity with some money; in the pocket of the widow’s gown the bills he’d just given her were next to Judith’s. On Calle de Alcalá a crowd somewhere between boisterous and surly shoved him and shook raised fists and placards, waved red and red-and-black flags. In the background, toward the domes of the Gran Vía, a shifting light rose that had the drama of a red twilight. It smelled of smoke and burned gasoline, and ashes rained down on bare heads. Perhaps Judith had asked the taxi driver who took her to Madame Mathilde’s to wait for her by the gate, she wouldn’t be more than a moment; now Ignacio Abel thought he remembered hearing the sound of the waiting car’s engine, sure he’d heard the startling noise of a door opening and closing; when he went out to the vestibule, hadn’t he detected a faint trace of Judith’s scent? He examined the immediate past because he was obsessed with confirming he’d had her within reach, as if that might somehow alleviate the reality of her disappearance. Without a hat, briefcase in hand, I see him from the other side of the street as he walks quickly down Calle de Alcalá, paying no attention to the window of the travel agency that displays the scale model of an ocean liner his children always look at, as if he had an urgent appointment, reviewing the possible routes Judith might have taken just a few minutes earlier because by now he’s convinced she’d been very close by, and if he hurries and acts intelligently, he can find her. She had reached and was inside the Atocha or North Station or perhaps had returned to the pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana and was closing her suitcases, the taxi, its motor running, at the entrance, the balconies lit around the plaza, the taverns full. Any possibility he chose would eliminate the others. If he had his car, if a taxi came along, if traffic weren’t so tied up, if so many people weren’t crowding the sidewalks, getting in his way, overflowing into the street. Without taxis or streetcars the distances in Madrid expanded. In twenty or twenty-five minutes he could reach the Atocha Station. In anticipation he saw the iron vault, the glass illuminating the plaza like a great globe of light. Tied to the ground as in dreams by the slowness of his steps, he saw himself running through the waiting room to a Judith dressed for travel and about to get on the train. But most likely he’d make the wrong decision and race between stations, exhausting himself and missing Judith’s departure. On the terrace of the Café Lion they’d brought out loudspeakers, and people gathered around them and climbed up on the iron chairs and tables to listen to proclamations repeated by a metallic-sounding voice, the optimism of official communiqués. The government can count on sufficient resources to crush the criminal attack that enemies of the regime and the working class have undertaken. He looked inside the café, imagining that Negrín would be there, but a sense of urgency he couldn’t control kept pushing him forward. A feverish public drank steins of beer and smoked and ate plates of seafood while sweating waiters plowed their way through, trays raised above their heads. Forces loyal to the Republic are fighting boldly to quash the insurrectionists once and for all. The announcer’s voice vibrated with the emphatic timbre of a sports rebroadcast. A column of heroic Asturian miners is approaching Madrid to offer their assistance to the people of the capital. So it was true they were going to revolt, he thought coldly, almost with relief, with an indifference born of unreality and distance to the voices he was hearing, the mob of bodies he had to pass to continue moving forward. After the official communiqué the “Himno de Riego” was played, followed by a piercing female voice singing “Échale guindas al pavo.” Repeated reports of the defeat of the uprising or of fanciful military exploits were shouted, mixing with the patrons’ hoarse voices ordering more rounds of beer and plates of grilled shrimp or fried squid. The felon Queipo de Llano is fleeing in fear from the enraged people of Sevilla, and soldiers deserting the rebel ranks are cheering the Republic. Again the sinister Spanish farce, he thought, the barracks interjection and bugle call, military parades to the rhythm of a paso doble, the eternal filth of the national fiesta. Trucks filled with armed peasants circled the crowd in a slow eddy around the fountain at Cibeles, then moved like a tide up the other section of Alcalá toward the Puerta del Sol. Through the trees in the garden the large w
indows of the Ministry of War were lit up as on the night of an official dance. At the entrance gates a small tank with a laughable cannon kept guard. The soldiers on duty came to attention every time an official car went in or came out. Rockets or gunfire exploded and the crowd swayed like a wheat field in the wind. Above the buildings on the Gran Vía, Ignacio Abel could see the dome of a church enveloped in flames. Red cinders fell on roofs with the splendor of fireworks. He turned toward the Paseo del Prado at the corner of Correos, where a parked truck was filled with Assault Guards, impassive under their service-cap visors that gleamed like patent leather in the low light. At the edge of the sidewalk a car brushed by him like a strong gust, and from it came warning shouts and the guffaws of young men who pointed rifles and pistols out the windows, a red-and-black flag flapping in the air like a boat’s slack sail. Each car, each truck bristling with flags and upraised fists and rifles. Each human group seemed to advance in one direction, but each group’s direction was different from all the others, and the general effect was of several parades coming together at a traffic barrier, a band competition. From the great whirlpool of Cibeles rose a discord of motors and horns, bursts of anthems, catcalls, rage. There was light in all the balconies of the Bank of Spain. Something was about to happen and nobody knew what, something must have occurred already and was irreparable, something desired and something feared. Judith Biely had disappeared forever or could appear in the crowd around any corner; enthusiasm and panic vibrated like simultaneous waves in the nocturnal heat, a fever rising, a carnival, a catastrophe.