In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “Weren’t you really proud of your job? Weren’t you in a hurry to finish the construction? Where better than your University City?”

  He was crowded in the back seat between the two militiamen, the clerk to his left, smiling with his fleshy mouth, and the tassel on the cap of the one to his right swinging back and forth. After a ride through darkened streets and lots whose duration he couldn’t measure, he recognized beyond the illumination of the headlights the shapes of the first buildings in University City. There was a checkpoint before they reached it. Militiamen with flashlights and rifles signaled for them to stop.

  “Who are these guys?” said the clerk.

  “The UGT, judging by their look, the brand-new rifles,” Ignacio Abel said.

  “Shut your mouth.”

  Long classroom benches blocked the dirt road. He recognized the benches from the Philosophy Building. The patrol leader took out identification, and a guard used his flashlight to study it. Ignacio Abel wanted to ask for help but his jaws were locked, his legs paralyzed, his hands cold on his thighs. The beam from a flashlight shone full in his face, forcing him to close his eyes. That he was about to die was inconceivable. Much more humiliating was the possibility of pissing in front of those who’d arrested him, or worse, shitting and having them smell it, bursting into laughter, making gestures of disgust.

  “And who’s that with you?”

  “A Fascist,” said the driver. “It’s our business.”

  The guards hesitated. Finally the one with the flashlight signaled and other militiamen pulled away the benches to let the vehicle through, raising a cloud of dust that shimmered in the beam of the headlights. The van came to an abrupt stop and Ignacio Abel felt a sharp pain in his right knee as it banged into a metal edge. He was limping when they took him out. He wanted to walk but his legs gave way. They pushed him against a wall, and he recognized it as a wall of the Philosophy Building, the rows of brick peppered with bullet holes and spatters of blood. They hadn’t handcuffed him. He thought that the next morning, when he was found by the magistrate and the officer responsible for collecting the corpses before the municipal garbage trucks passed, they’d have no difficulty identifying him, because as a precaution he carried in his pocket his UGT and Socialist Party cards. Then another car arrived with even brighter headlights, forcing him to cover his eyes. He heard heated arguments around him but didn’t understand a word. He slid to the ground when a rough hand pried his hands away from his face, and in the confusion of the moving shadows and headlights he recognized the voice of Eutimio Gómez, the lean figure bending over him.

  “It’s okay, Don Ignacio, it’s okay now.”

  28

  BEFORE THE TRAIN emerges from a meander in the river, the signal is heard, solemn as a ship’s foghorn, and the electric cables and iron columns of the elevated platform vibrate. The nervous traveler will see the station in the distance like an Alpine castle crowning a wall of bare rock. Rhineberg: someone must have thought of the wooded cliffs above the Rhine when the name was chosen, and the nostalgia endured in the peaked towers of the station. A long metal staircase and the elevated passage that crosses the tracks like a covered bridge join the main building and the platforms. A man looks at his watch when he hears the train approaching and raises his eyes to a glass door. In the setting sun, the yellows and reds of the trees radiate embers of light; a wind from the river brings a wintry cold to an afternoon that had been mild, and moves waves of dry leaves across the platforms and tracks. The ground trembles beneath his feet when the train appears, its headlight shining, and stops with a screech of brakes. For a few long seconds it is quiet, hermetic, filling the entire platform with a suggestion of suspended energy. The only passenger to get off wears a raincoat of European cut and carries a suitcase too small for someone who’s come a long way. He stands in some bewilderment as the train begins to move, his suitcase in one hand, his hat in the other, disconcerted at not seeing anyone, afraid he got off at the wrong station, enveloped by the solitude of the riverbank, the silence of the woods. At his back he hears a voice saying his name and is afraid he’s imagining it. Behind the glass of the elevated passage, Philip Van Doren smiles when he recognizes him, watches him turn to the other man, Professor Stevens, chair of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts (they met briefly in Madrid the previous year), and welcomes him, shaking his hand vigorously, the first person with whom he’s spoken in many days, the first time anyone’s welcomed him, granting him full existence, in any of the places he’s passed through in recent weeks. Two figures seen from a distance, from above, in a secondary station on the bank of the Hudson River, one October afternoon seventy-three years ago.

  He gets ready as soon as the train leaves the previous station. One by one he goes through all his pockets, neurotically checking their contents, his passport and wallet with documents and photographs, Judith Biely’s last letter, Adela’s letter, I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing right now though I can imagine. Just know that if you want to come back to me and your children when this is all over, because someday it will be, the door is open. He went to the toilet and managed to wash his face, comb his hair, straighten his tie, brush fallen hairs and dandruff flakes from his lapels, rinse his mouth for fear that whoever came to meet him might smell his breath, and examine his nails, which should have been trimmed. He’s seen the bags under his eyes, the loose flesh under his chin and jaw. He remembered shaving in front of a mirror and seeing beside his reflection Judith’s much younger face, her hair brushing his cheeks while her naked body pressed delicately against his back. They were in the house facing the sea, the house where they woke up next to each other for the first time, the smell of the Atlantic coming in the window. A flash of memory so fleeting it’s extinguished without bitterness, without wakening a real connection between past and present. The conductor has passed, calling out the name of the station and gesturing to confirm that this time he does have to get off. Through the window, as the train begins to lose speed, Ignacio Abel sees the name in large black letters: RHINEBERG.

  He doesn’t see anyone at first. He gets off and finds himself at the end of a long platform facing the great river, a row of tall iron columns and arches supporting what seems to be a covered passage where someone’s looking down and perhaps signaling to him. The smells of the river and the leaves and damp earth from the woods fill his lungs as he feels a silence descend in which the distant clatter of the train and the echo of the locomotive’s whistle fade away. Then someone says his name but he almost doesn’t acknowledge it, almost fears a trick of the imagination, his first and last name pronounced with improbable fluency and a certain reverence. Professor Ignacio Abel, it’s great to have you here with us at long last. He nods awkwardly, instinctively reticent, adapting himself with difficulty to being near another human and trying to catch words in English that are spoken too fast, his hand caught in the warm handshake of Professor Stevens, who, with the same determination, has taken hold of his suitcase: tall, a bit awkward, his arms and legs long, a lock of hair over his forehead, his face no longer young, his skin, a reddish brick color, covered with fine wrinkles, his eyes light blue behind his glasses. Stevens confuses him with his excessive energy, the speed of his praise, his questions, his request to be forgiven for delays and misunderstandings whose explanations Ignacio Abel can’t understand (secretaries, offices, telegrams, inexcusable slip-ups); what an incredible honor finally to have you with us after so many difficulties, how was the train trip, you must be very tired after crossing from Europe. He can’t see in himself the person to whom Stevens’s signs of esteem and excuses are directed, as if they had mistaken him for someone else, and he lacked the necessary command of the language to correct the mistake or the strength to rise above the display of fresh enthusiasm by the head of the department, with his checkered sweater under his jacket and his green polka-dot bow tie, his long-fingered hand that refuses to return the suitcase, don’t mention it, pulling at it vigorously as he
leads the way to the elevated passage, the iron steps vibrating under the tread of his large shoes. Following him up the stairs, facing the broad Hudson stained with reddish glints of the setting sun, Ignacio Abel feels a weariness he doesn’t remember having experienced before, all the more evident in the presence of someone younger (but he didn’t feel the age difference when he was with Judith; how strange to have lived so long in a state of total unawareness, to have thought himself immune to the years, to weakness, to death). Leaning against the glass door that leads to the tracks, his arms crossed, the same expression on his face as on the night three months earlier when he stood by the window on a top floor in Madrid, Philip Van Doren looks him up and down with a serene smile before approaching him, as if observing signs of the accelerated passage of time, the result of an experiment. But then he changes in an instant, moves away from the glass door, and for an uncomfortable moment Ignacio Abel thinks Van Doren will embrace him, but he is observing everything, perhaps controlling his surprise, not wanting to reveal that he’s noticed the state of Ignacio Abel’s shoes or shirt or tie, the difference between the face he sees now and the face of the man he met in Madrid a little more than a year ago, the man he saw walk away along the Gran Vía one midnight three months ago. He doesn’t embrace Ignacio Abel but extends his hands, clasps both of his, he, too, subtly changed in this place where he’s not a foreigner, where his figure doesn’t stand out against an alien background, perhaps stockier, fleshier, the same gleam on his shaved head and his chin lifted above a high collar. “Dear Ignacio, what a pleasure to see you,” he says in Spanish, stressing with a smile the complete correctness of the expression dichosos los ojos, his vanity at knowing how to use it, he who was always asking for Judith’s help in finding equivalents of English phrases. “You have so much to tell me. I telegraphed the embassy in Madrid every day. I called. I tried to call your apartment, but it was impossible to get through. Dear Ignacio. Dear Professor. Welcome, at last. Stevens will take care of everything. He’s impressed at having you here. He can’t believe it. He knows your work, your writings. He was the first person who talked to me about you.” He gives orders, just as he did in Madrid. Brief signs, glances. Stevens walks ahead carrying Ignacio Abel’s suitcase, opening doors for them, standing to one side, remaining behind, obedient, conscious of his position. Van Doren gives him instructions, and Stevens listens and nods, taking care of everything. The back seat is spacious and has a subtle smell of leather. Abel sits uncomfortably, rigidly, not leaning back, his knees together, hat in his lap. He has lost the habit of comfort as well as the habit of flattery. Van Doren takes out a cigarette, and Stevens, who’d started the engine, turns it off to look for a lighter and give him a light. Van Doren leans back, barely moving his right hand to wave away the smoke or to indicate to Stevens with some impatience that he should get started at long last. “You’ll spend the first few days in the university guesthouse, if you don’t mind. In a week at most you’ll have your own place, in a convenient location near campus and the library site. Within walking distance. How do you say that in Spanish? Wait, don’t tell me. A stone’s throw? Our dear Judith wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. Though perhaps sitio isn’t the correct translation for site . . .” How little time it took him to say her name, invoke her presence; observing Ignacio Abel’s face, looking for signs of surprise, the name spoken aloud to him for the first time in so long. He must be waiting for Abel to summon the courage to ask whether he knows anything of her, as he did that night in Madrid at the window where the light of the fires was reflected; planning his little experiment, saying a name as if pouring a drop of some substance into a beaker. But now he looks out the car window, leaning back in the leather seat. He takes a breath, perhaps he’s going to say something, that he knows where Judith is. “I imagine you haven’t had time to hear the latest news from Spain. Their army took Navalcarnero yesterday. I don’t think it’ll be in tomorrow’s papers. How beautiful the names of Spanish towns are, and how difficult to pronounce. I look at the map and read them aloud. The most difficult thing is knowing where the accent goes in such long words. I see the names and miss the car trips along those highways. They took Illescas only three days ago. How far is Navalcarnero from Madrid? Fifteen miles, twenty? How long do you think it’ll take them to reach Madrid?”

  The car advances along a narrow road flanked by enormous trees, and beyond them he watches autumnal woods glide past, meadows where horses graze, isolated farms, fences painted white that gleam in the declining afternoon light. On the rolling fields the oblique light reveals a faint mist rising from soil dampened and enriched by the rain and covered by the mantle of autumn leaves that will slowly rot until they turn into fertilizer. He recalls his first trips through the fertile, rain-soaked plains of Europe, misty dawns beyond a train window, daylight revealing straight lines of trees along sumptuous riverbanks, cultivated fields. What an injustice to come from the Spanish barrens, the bone-dry plains and mountains of bare rock inhabited by goats and human beings who lived in caves, who had, men and women both, skin as dark and harsh as the landscape where they barely survived by scratching at the earth, their faces deformed by goiters, injustice bending them like a curse without remedy. “No reason to despair, Abel my friend, like those ashen gentlemen of the Generation of ’98—Unamuno, Baroja, all the rest,” Negrín would say, laughing. “Two generations will be enough to improve the race without eugenics or five-year plans. Agrarian reform and healthy food. Fresh milk, white bread, oranges, running water, clean underwear. If they only give us the time, the other side and our own people . . .”

  But they didn’t. Perhaps there never was any time to give, the real possibility of avoiding disaster never existed, and the future that the year 1931 seemed to open before us was a fantasy as foolish as our illusion of rationality. In the ditches along the recently paved avenues of University City, there are now piles of corpses; in the classrooms we hurried to have ready for the beginning of the school year, no one’s come to study; everything prepared, new benches and blackboards, echoing corridors where some of the windows have probably shattered, where cannon fire will roar very soon, and as happens now, between midnight and dawn, rifles firing at bodies against the walls. Tomorrow, within a few hours, as soon as it dawns over the plain, they’ll continue to approach, heading for Madrid as they have throughout the summer, coming up from the south along desolate straight highways like a pernicious epidemic against which there’s no antidote, no possible resistance, only immolation or flight, bewildered, poorly armed militiamen throwing themselves unprotected against canister shot or fleeing cross-country and tossing aside their rifles to run faster without even seeing the enemy, terrified by the shadows of riders on horseback or by the shouts of others as lost as they. With the pink manicured nail of an index finger—the finger that now distractedly taps the cigarette to shake off the ash while through the car window a landscape of meadows, white houses and fences, red, ocher, and yellow splashes of woods that follow one another in orderly succession—Philip Van Doren has followed on a map the line drawn by the names he read in the papers, or in who knows what reports, which reach him even before they’re published: sonorous, abstract names, Badajoz, Talavera de la Reina, Torrijos, Illescas, as conspicuous with their hard consonants and bright vowels in the music of the English language as their exotic spellings in news columns and headlines. But what does Van Doren know of what lies behind those names? And what can Professor Stevens imagine when he reads the paper or listens to the radio while he eats breakfast next to one of those large windows without shutters or curtains, before these landscapes free of sharp edges, the signs of poverty, drought, or scars of dry streams, bathed in a soft light that seems to touch things ever so delicately while the afternoon fades slowly, enduring in the clear blue of the sky and distant mountains, the dusty gold of hills covered with maples and oaks, the west sides of houses painted white? Names he remembers, places he passed on a trip, villages where he stopped to study a church tower or
take photographs of a mill, a washing site, a structure devoted to labor—not even that, a stone wall crowned with tiles, the arch of a bridge over a stream. Day after day, beginning at dawn, in the terrible heat of summer afternoons, in the more temperate twilights, the armed invaders have continued to advance through those landscapes stripped of trees where no one can hide, attacking villages, each a name quickly eliminated from maps, leaving behind a harvest of corpses, a horizon of burned houses along the white strip of highway, the lines of telegraph poles and wires. They advance in military trucks, in requisitioned cars, in cavalry squads that terrorize unarmed fugitives with raised swords and shouts of primitive fury. Turbans and scimitars mixed with machine guns; trophies of cut-off hands and ears, and range finders for the artillery that demolishes with cannon fire a church tower where peasants armed with old shotguns have taken refuge, resolved to die; barbaric acts executed with the kind of precision all of you wanted to realize in the University City project, says Philip Van Doren, uncertain about the verb he’s used—it’s either too inaccurate or too vague. “How do you say to carry out in Spanish?” he asks, not looking at Ignacio Abel, or looking at him obliquely to let him know that the person who could give him the answer is not there. Both of them are thinking about her. “Llevar a cabo,” he says, satisfied now, relieved, Judith’s shadow invoked between them, as present as the war that’s invoked in the names of the towns the enemy continues to take, the ones that will fall tomorrow, within a few hours, when it’s still dark here but dawn in Spain: motors starting up; horses neighing; the deafening noise of weapons, of military boots on gravel (but they don’t wear boots either, or only the officers do; they wear espadrilles, just like our men, united in penury, in their destiny as cannon fodder); slaughter as an exhausting but intoxicating task, like a human hunt where without effort the astonishing number of retrieved prey multiplies, all uniform in the terror of their flight and their helplessness. The beautiful names on maps now designate cemeteries. The other country, occupied now and an enemy, spreads like a stain as the troops advance, reinforced by a retinue of blue-shirted butchers who go through villages with typed lists of those condemned, leaving behind a trail of corpses. While he waited and did nothing in Madrid, they continued to approach, while he traveled by train to Paris, dissembling in his flight, and boarded the ship and was hypnotized looking at the ocean as gray as a steel plate, writing postcards that wouldn’t reach their destinations, imagining letters he’d never write. From Navalcarnero the highway runs almost in a straight line to the outskirts of Madrid. Long before they arrive, the invaders will see in the distance the white patch of the National Palace on the cliffs of the Manzanares; they’ll see the red outline of its roofs, interrupted by the Telephone Company tower beneath the immense sky of Castilla.