In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “Brother-in-law, good to see you.”

  Adela’s brother took him by the arm and led him, almost by touch, up a dimly lit narrow staircase. At the top, off a corridor, was a room from which came a greenish light and the dry click of billiard balls. Someone appeared in the doorway when he heard approaching footsteps, a man much younger than Víctor who held a pistol, shiny with oil, in one hand and in the other a rag he’d been cleaning it with.

  “Ignacio, what are you doing out on the street, and on this night?”

  “Your parents and sister expected you today for lunch.”

  “What a way to talk to me. As if I were a kid.”

  “Who’s this, comrade?”

  “My brother-in-law. No danger. Come in and have a drink with us, Ignacio. This isn’t a night to be wandering around.”

  “I’m in a hurry. You ought to go to the Sierra, be with the family. Enough now of fantasies and pistols. This afternoon your father asked me to look out for you.”

  They spoke quietly, close together in the corridor, near the half-open door through which came, along with the clicks of billiard balls, the sound of a radio program. The station wasn’t in Madrid but Sevilla. In the crackle of static a bugle sounded and then a barracks voice. Ignacio Abel was going to say something but Víctor indicated silence with his index finger. Ignacio couldn’t make out the words.

  “That’s a soldier with both balls, brother-in-law. This’ll be over in two days. The best are with us. Look at the rabble that came out to defend your republic. To defend your republic by burning churches and breaking into stores.”

  “If they catch you listening to that station, you’ll be in big trouble. You and your friends.”

  “How you talk to me, brother-in-law, I can’t believe it, as if I were a kid.”

  “They’ll kill you if they find that pistol on you.”

  “What pistol?”

  “The one you’re carrying in your jacket pocket. Are you carrying your Falange card too?”

  “So many questions and you don’t say anything.”

  “Go back to the Sierra tonight. Stay there with the family until this business calms down.”

  “This isn’t going to calm down, brother-in-law. No going back now. Haven’t you heard Queipo on the radio? In two days there’ll be two columns of legionnaires cleaning up Madrid, the way they cleaned up Asturias in ’34. There won’t be enough street lamps to string up all the bastards. Blood will flow like water in the Manzanares. Remember what I’m telling you. Spain can be cleansed only with a torrent of blood.”

  “Is that phrase yours?”

  “If it weren’t for the situation, I’d shoot you right now.”

  “Don’t deny yourself.”

  The same young man appeared in the corridor, still holding the pistol and rag. He wore military boots under his civilian trousers.

  “Anything going on, comrade?”

  “Nothing, comrade. We’re just talking.”

  “Well, make it quick, there’s a lot to do.”

  “Do you think because you’re my sister’s husband and the father of my niece and nephew that I’ll always put up with your ridiculing me?”

  “Get out of my way. I have to go.”

  “Go where? To cheat on my sister?”

  “If you need anything, come to the apartment. You’ll be safe there.”

  “You mean if I’m afraid, I can hide at your place?”

  “If it were only mine, but no, it’s also Adela’s.”

  “Look, you’re the one who ought to ask me for a place to hide.”

  “Not very likely. Your side surrendered in Barcelona.”

  “Do you still believe what the government says?”

  “It’s the legitimate government. It’ll always be more trustworthy than a lying military gang.”

  “A legitimate government doesn’t distribute weapons to criminals or open the jails to let out all the murderers. Look what your friends from the Popular Front are doing. Killing people like dogs in the street. Burning churches. Taking advantage of the confusion to commit armed robbery.”

  “I have to go, Víctor.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t be out on the street tonight. Don’t think you’re safe because you’re a Socialist. They’re destroying Socialists like you. Even your own people are calling you traitors.”

  “Traitors are the ones who swear loyalty to the Republic and then rise up against it.”

  “Go home and stay there. This little party by your revolutionary friends will end right now. The Civil Guard is with us. The best of the army. Before midnight every garrison in Madrid will be on the streets.”

  “Aren’t you running off at the mouth?”

  Víctor, his thin hair flat against his skull, blocked his way in the corridor. He was breathing with a disturbing sound in his weak lungs. The pistol bulged on one side of his chest, under his summer jacket. He made a gesture of moving his hand toward it, perhaps to refute the sarcasm of his sister’s husband with visible proof of his manhood. Ignacio Abel brushed him aside and looked for an exit in the dark. At his back he heard the snap of a pistol’s hammer and resisted the temptation to turn around. He felt his way down the stairs, and when he reached the doorway he stepped on spilled garbanzos or lentils or grains of rice, the glass of broken bottles, of jars that gave off a strong smell of vinegar. The metal shutters of the grocery store were down and the looters had disappeared. He went to the street and walked to the Puerta del Sol. He should have retraced his steps or taken a side street, but by now it was impossible. He wasn’t walking, he was pushed, dragged in the direction of the great uproar that rose from the square, not of human voices but the prolonged boom of a storm, an avalanche plunging down a slope, leveling everything, joined by car horns, the sirens of ambulances or fire trucks or Assault Guard vans. His sense of time was completely off. Running into Adela’s brother, their absurd conversation in the dark. He counted the strokes of the clock at the nearby Ministry of the Interior: it was only eleven. In ten minutes at most he could cross the Puerta del Sol, go up Calle del Carmen or Calle de Preciados to Callao, reach Van Doren’s house—he wouldn’t wait for the elevator, he’d run up the stairs and go straight across the hall, where he’d heard the music that once led him to Judith. With the determination of a sleepwalker he gave himself until midnight to find her. If he persisted, he might still get her back. If he could manage to make his way through the multitude of bodies, heads, faces contorted by screaming mouths, fists shaking in the air, keeping time with syllables repeated like percussive blows against the concave line of buildings in the square, violent sound waves breaking against the cubic mass of the Ministry of the Interior, where the balconies were wide open, revealing interiors with large crystal chandeliers and salons upholstered in red. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons. The headlights of cars and trucks surrounded by the crowd illuminated their faces dramatically; drivers blew their horns, unable to get through the mob. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons. People were climbing up on the roofs of halted streetcars and the plinths of street lamps, to the barred windows of the ground floor of the ministry, as if trying to escape a rising flood. Above the roofs neon signs blinked for Anís del Mono and Tío Pepe—The Sun of Andalucía in a Bottle—the bottle of fino sherry topped by a broad-brimmed hat and dressed in the short jacket of a picador or a flamenco dancer. A single shout rose as one, the rhythm marked by feet stamping on the ground and fists shaken in unison, some holding pistols, rifles, sticks, shotguns, swords. Wea-pons, they shouted, separating the syllables, exaggerating them in a hoarse pulsation that made the air vibrate like the passage of trains beneath the pavement. The word sounded like a demand and also an invocation. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, like a furious stampede, one syllable after the other, drowning out with their volume speeches that indistinct figures shouted into microphones from the balconies of the ministry. In his light suit and with his briefcase firmly held to his chest, I lose
sight of Ignacio Abel in the sea of heads and raised fists that fills the Puerta del Sol, submerged at times in shadow, then illuminated by the blue light of street lamps or the headlights of cars trying to move forward. Like the voices, faces become confused. He pushes from the side, manages to move forward a few steps, and the flow of a human current makes him retreat again, as if losing strength as he swims toward a shore that seems constantly to recede, the corner of Calle del Carmen, though now there’s a whirlpool that drags him toward it, while a storm of applause shakes the entire plaza, perhaps because on the balcony of the ministry another figure has appeared and cries out and gesticulates just like the previous one. The applause is transformed into a vibration of clapping, and above that another shout ascends, not two syllables but three, UHP, rumbling in the concavity of one’s stomach like the bumping of a train’s wheels beneath a great iron vault: Yew, Aitch, Pee. But perhaps what they are cheering isn’t the figure gesturing wildly on the balcony but some Assault Guards who’ve been raised onto shoulders and sit erect above the heads with unstable gestures of triumph, like bullfighters who a little while earlier had been knocked down in the ring, caps to one side, tunics open over sweat-stained undershirts, shouting things no one can hear, and a moment later they’ve been taken down or have fallen in a sudden undulation of the shoulders that supported them. Just then the whirlpool carrying Ignacio Abel opens an empty space in its center, where a wardrobe or dresser thrown down from a balcony has broken into fragments, so close to the corner that if he boldly pushes a little more he’ll be able to touch it. The crash of the furniture against the paving stones widens the circular space, where things continue falling, each collision received with shouts of rejoicing and a round of applause. From a balcony on the second floor, men wearing blue coveralls and peaked military caps, cartridge belts and rifles strapped diagonally across their backs, throw into the square a large desk that several of them have lifted over the railing, and from it comes a gale of papers that for a time fly over the heads of the crowd; they toss down chairs, coat racks, an overly large sofa that at first is stuck on the balcony and finally is pushed over, to shouts of encouragement; a militiaman appears holding a huge portrait of Alejandro Lerroux, and the people in the square receive it with shouts of Fascist! and Traitor! and when it falls to the ground they fight to trample on it. Ignacio Abel has reached the corner by now and breathes a sigh of relief when he’s blinded by the headlights of a truck that has braked in front of him. With a roar the truck goes into reverse and turns, and people surround it, blocking Ignacio Abel’s way again. In the truck bed a canvas tarp is raised and a group of men in civilian clothes, wearing military caps and helmets, begin to pry open long boxes. Now Ignacio Abel is pushed against the truck, and when he tries to move away, eager faces and extended hands prevent him. Weapons, they say, not shouting now. The word multiplies, extends, and each time someone says it, the group becomes denser and the shoving stronger. He’ll have to move away if he doesn’t want to be flattened against the back of the truck. He hears the creak of the boards as nails are pulled out, someone’s voice shouting with an accent of command, We don’t give anything to anybody without a union card. The man who seemed to be speaking with the certainty of being obeyed now stumbles and almost falls, holding a helmet too big for him down on his head. The people climb onto the truck, pull the lids off the boxes, take out rifles, pistols, and grenades, and the truck seems to move, to shift a little under the pressure of the bodies leaning against it, the hands and shoulders pushing, trying to get through, trying to reach the boxes, which are overturned now, spilling weapons with a crash of metal, pistols and rifle bolts and trampled boards, small boxes of bullets that roll to the ground and are grabbed by the handful. Ignacio Abel has stepped on something that crunches under his shoe but doesn’t turn to see what it is, perhaps someone’s hand, but he’s managed to get free. He leaves the truck behind and finds himself looking at a suddenly empty Calle del Carmen.

  He’ll never get there. At the Carmen Church, beside its open doors, armed militiamen are putting up a barricade or roadblock of long benches and kneeling stools. Several are attempting to pull a confessional down the steps, shouting encouragement to one another. It may not be a barricade; they may simply be piling up benches and the gilded panels of altarpieces to light a bonfire. “Where are you going so fast? Papers, comrade.” It seems that rigorous rules have been established overnight, which didn’t exist yesterday and today are obeyed by everyone without question. Again the card hurriedly looked for in his pockets, his controlled impatience, his fear of rifle barrels held by inexpert hands, of sideways glances. If they let him go, in less than five minutes he could be ringing the bell at Van Doren’s house. The one who’s looking at the union card in the light of a street lamp doesn’t know how to read and isn’t used to handling papers. Perhaps he recognizes the seal, the initials in red ink, UGT. A small woman dressed in a blue coverall, from which a cartridge belt is hanging, asks him to open his briefcase: documents, plans. “I’m an architect,” says Ignacio Abel, looking into her eyes, not too long, afraid of provoking her. “I work at University City.” How little is needed for dignity to be wiped out, for you to move your head and smile and melt inside with gratitude toward someone who could arrest or execute you but instead returns your identification, gestures with a hand, and lets you pass. In the Plaza de Callao there are trucks with their motors running, their sides armored with metal sheets held on somehow, and mattresses tied to the roofs with rope. At the Cine Callao the blinking sign announces the premiere of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 6:45 and 10:45, numbered seats. A triumph! At the door of the Hotel Florida a couple, foreign tourists, watch with placid curiosity the goings and comings of the militiamen, the parade of automobiles driving at top speed toward the Plaza de España, sinking into the darkness of the last stretch of the Gran Vía, where spectral buildings are under construction and wide empty lots are enclosed by board fences covered by political posters. Waves of people holding flags and walking toward the Puerta del Sol singing anthems in fatigued voices meet, but don’t mix, with the slightly dazed people who are leaving the last show at the Cine de la Prensa. Air-cooled, 14 weeks!! Morena Clara, with Imperio Argentina and Miguel Ligero. On the sidewalk in front of Van Doren’s building, two cars form a corridor to the curb where a truck is waiting, its back doors open. On the hood of each of the cars is an American flag. The automobiles and small flags delimit a parenthesis of stillness no one interrupts. Between the truck and the building entrance, Philip Van Doren’s maids in caps and butlers in uniform come and go, carrying bundles, boxes, and trunks, holding crates of paintings in gloved hands, not hurrying, as if they were preparing their employer for a journey to the door of a country house. Inside the entrance, on each side of the elevator, stand two martial-looking young American men dressed in civilian clothes, their arms crossed, legs slightly apart. They inspect Ignacio Abel from head to toe and indicate with a gesture that he may take the elevator; another young American, his hair short, operates it. The elevator operators’ strike has no effect here either. He once rode up in this same elevator not knowing he was going to meet her, walked along this hall listening to the clarinet and piano music from a distance. Butlers and maids come and go in methodical silence, carrying carefully packed objects, paintings, sculptures, lamps, all of the servants so sure of their assignments you barely hear anyone giving orders. An American flag is fastened above the door of the apartment. Ignacio Abel goes in without anyone stopping him or seeming to notice him. The almost empty space is larger and whiter than he remembered. Before that window Judith had stood, a shiny record in her hands. The gramophone has been packed, and a maid, kneeling on the rug, has just placed a pile of records into a made-to-measure box. A man in a mechanic’s coverall is taking apart a complicated floor lamp with chrome tubing and a spherical globe of white glass. The windows are open but the street noises filter in like distant waves. Judith can appear right now in any doorway. Ignacio Abel sees himself in o
ne of the tall mirrors and doesn’t recognize himself: the sweaty face, the loosened tie, the briefcase pressed against his chest. At the end of the room, next to a window through which the Capitol Building’s tower—as slender as a prow, crossed by the bright Paramount Pictures sign—seems close, Philip Van Doren is looking through binoculars and speaking on the phone in English, dressed in a short-sleeve shirt, light trousers, and white sport shoes, his shaved head gleaming under the ceiling lights. He’s seen Ignacio Abel reflected in the glass and turns toward him, smiling, when he hangs up the phone. He smells of soap and fresh cologne, a recent shower. He doesn’t know where Judith is, or if he does know, he won’t say, because he’s promised her not to tell him. On Ignacio Abel’s face—the unfamiliar face Abel saw a moment ago in the mirror—Van Doren sees signs of a disappointment that suddenly makes Abel’s fatigue worse. Van Doren’s Spanish has become even more precise and flexible in recent months.