In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He woke thinking it was late, but it was not yet eight o’clock. He took a shower, brushed his teeth, shaved the gray and white stubble of his beard, avoiding his eyes in the mirror. At least there was still running water and he still had clean and pressed clothes in the closet. He’d go back to see Bergamín. He’d ask again at the offices and requisitioned palaces and militia barracks he’d visited the previous day. He’d go to the State Security Office, the Workers’ Cooperative, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Europa movie house, the Beatriz movie house—he’d been told that since the basements were full, they held some prisoners, their hands tied, in theaters. He was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror in the entrance hall when the telephone rang. It was Señorita Rossman, begging his pardon for calling so early, silent for a moment when he told her he still had no information, but she shouldn’t worry, he was about to leave the house to continue the search. He called the number for Bergamín’s secretary, but no one answered. The urgency of war didn’t change office hours. He remembered a poster in the metro: EVERYONE TO THE FRONT! DEATH BEFORE RETREAT! THE RED BULLETS REGIMENT CALLS ON YOU! (Registration from 9 to 1 and from 4 to 7.) Not even for Death Before Retreat were administrative hours expanded. He went for breakfast to a nearby dairy store on Calle Don Ramón de la Cruz. It looked closed. He knocked on the metal blinds and the owner, who knew him, let him in, looking up and down the street, then closing the blinds again. In his old life, the owner would come up the service stairs early each morning carrying the milk and butter his children liked best, and in the summer he sold delicious meringue ice cream. The counter and walls preserved their usual white brilliance, but a calendar with the Virgin of Almudena, and a framed print of the Christ of Medinaceli, had disappeared from the walls. “I open up for you because I know and trust you, Don Ignacio, but tell me what I should do if one of those patrols with muskets shows up and requisitions several days’ worth of stock. They take a hundred-liter can of milk they say is for militiamen at the front or for orphaned children and pay me with a voucher on a scrap of paper, and you tell me what good that is to me, or they raise their fists and boom: UHP! Unite, brothers of the proletariat! They say they’re all proletarian brothers, and what am I, a bourgeois? Haven’t I been getting up at four in the morning every day since before my head reached the counter? He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat, they always say. And if they take what’s mine away from me, what am I to eat while I work myself to death? And what work are they doing if they are not at the front? What committee or what International Red Aid will feed my children if I have to close the store because they steal everything from me, or if it occurs to them one morning to collectivize my business, or pronounce me an insurgent, and I end up filled with bullets at a cemetery wall in Almudena or on the San Isidro meadow or wherever it is they kill people? Excuse me for letting off steam, Don Ignacio, but you’re a decent man, and if I stay here all day without talking to anybody, I think my head will explode. How much longer do you think all this can go on? Because if things don’t get better soon, in a few days I won’t have any milk or coffee left, and the reserves of sugar are running out. Wouldn’t you like another coffee, on the house?” The shop owner was a fat, gentle man with a soft double chin, as if nourished by the same excellent butter and thick cream he was proud to sell to his distinguished clientele, almost all gone now, fled or in hiding, and some turned out of their houses after midnight and executed not far away, on some empty lot. He spoke to Ignacio Abel and at the same time was attentive to the cup of coffee and the expression with which this rare patron, who hadn’t left Madrid and didn’t seem frightened, sipped it, and every few seconds his restless eyes went to the partly open door when he heard footsteps or the sound of a car engine on the street. The jolly merchant who ceremoniously greeted the señoras of the neighborhood and knew the names of all the maids now crouched in the store he had refused to abandon or close, the redoubt with the white counter and tiles into which he’d put the effort of a lifetime, the inhuman small hours of the morning, the céntimo-by-céntimo saving, the servility toward ladies and gentlemen who insisted on being called Don or Doña or Señora de and Señora Marquesa and yet sometimes didn’t pay their dairy bills; and now, without understanding why, he who’d never been political had to live in fear, he said, lowering his voice, in fear that somebody would come and take away his life’s work or shoot him. Then his eyes filled with fear as it dawned on him that his trust in Ignacio Abel was without foundation. Well-known, respectable-looking neighbors were not above accusing others if it meant saving themselves or staying in the good graces of a gang of killers. Besides, how could a man of his rank still live so comfortably in this neighborhood without being in cahoots with those killers? The same affable expression was on his face but now doubt had passed like a shadow across his eyes, and they became evasive as he charged Ignacio Abel for the coffee and thanked him for the tip. One had to look closely to read fear, because everyone knew that showing it openly could be interpreted as a sign as clear as buying batteries of a certain size to tune in enemy stations, or slipping, early on a Sunday morning, into the side door of a church, not yet converted into a garage or warehouse, where Masses were still being said.

  But fear also had a subtle hue on the faces of those who felt relatively safe: the doorman, for instance, proud in his blue coverall and leather straps and raising his fist when parades passed by, remembered defending, among a group of deliverymen and maids from the neighborhood, what he called the forces of order and celebrating the Foreign Legion’s victory against the rebellious Asturian miners in 1934. Somebody else might also remember. Ignacio Abel saw a familiar face approaching (perhaps a neighbor, making a clumsy attempt to hide his bourgeois status, unshaven, without a tie, wearing a beret instead of a hat), saw the fear in those eyes as they evaded him. He couldn’t see it in his own face but felt its effect and imagined that same look, unfamiliar and frightened, persisting in an impossible pretense when an armed patrol came toward him, or a car stopped abruptly beside him, or at night when footsteps raced up the marble stairs of his overly opulent building. But who would acknowledge the terror, even in secret, deep down inside, each with his share of the great universal, unnamed fear one learned to hide in the light of day but unraveled when night fell and the streets emptied.

  He walked along the street on the second day of his search for Professor Rossman, and in every face he recognized a different gradation of fear, more obvious the more it was hidden, the more it was wrapped in euphoria, lightheartedness, or feigned indifference. He saw fear in the families of fleeing campesinos who walked along Calle Toledo; he saw it in people coming out of the metro, getting off a streetcar at the last stop, at the empty lots where he began to look that morning for Professor Rossman among the corpses; on the faces of the dead fear had dissolved or hardened into a grotesque grimace. But fear was also in those who went there for the pleasure of walking among the bodies and pointing at postures they found comic or ridiculous, and with a foot turning up a face that had fallen into the dirt. There was fear in their laughter as well as in their silence, in the fatigued indifference of municipal workers who loaded corpses into trucks, and in the meticulousness of the court officials who prepared death certificates and consulted their watches to make a note of the time the bodies were found. Unidentified male, bullet wounds in the head and chest, perpetrator or perpetrators unknown. He went to see Bergamín again, but he was not in his office yet, and the secretary, not the one he had met before, knew nothing about measures taken to resolve the disappearance of Professor Rossman, but she made a note just in case, along with Ignacio Abel’s address and telephone number. He climbed on a moving streetcar going up the Castellana and got off at the Museum of Natural Sciences and the road to the Student Residence. Was it Negrín who’d told him that the bodies of the executed appeared there too, every morning? “On our playing fields, my dear Abel, against the museum walls, steps from my laboratory, which has been closed for who knows how long.”

  �
��I hear them every night from here, close by,” said Moreno Villa, aged, thinner, unshaven, looking like a beggar or a martyr in a painting by Ribera.

  The Residence was now a barracks for militiamen and Assault Guards. Next to the reception desk was the guardroom, a mass of armed men who came and went with rifles on their shoulders, straw mattresses spread on the floor, smelling like a pigsty, tobacco smoke everywhere, the walls full of posters covered with handwritten slogans, the floor littered with cigarette butts. In the corridor leading to Moreno Villa’s room were hospital beds occupied by wounded militiamen; the air reeked of disinfectant and blood. Yellowish, badly shaven faces turned incuriously as he passed, eyes possessed by a kind of fear unlike any other, the somber, hermetic fear of those who have seen death.

  “I hear a car driving up the hill, the doors opening and closing, orders, sometimes laughter, as if it were a party. Then bursts of gunfire. By counting them I know how many they’ve killed. Sometimes they’re sloppy or drunk, then it takes longer.”

  Moreno Villa in his large, ascetic room, the cell of the anchorite he’d become after not seeing anyone for so long or not venturing out for days, not even to the garden at the Residence’s entrance, now occupied by Assault Guard trucks and motorcycles. He went out only to go to work at the archives of the National Palace, with the punctuality of a dutiful official who didn’t have to be asked. The president of the Republic, who had his office near Moreno Villa’s, had suggested that he sleep at the palace. But he preferred to return every evening to the Residence, as incongruous among militiamen and the wounded as he would have been anywhere else in Madrid, in his old-fashioned suit, high shoes, and the bow tie he’d been in the habit of wearing since he came back from the United States, the trip he’d written about in a short, heartfelt book, as all of his were, a book by an author who enjoys some prestige but whom no one reads. He was just as Ignacio Abel had seen him a year earlier, surrounded by books, sitting near the window in front of a small, unfinished still life, perhaps the same one he’d started in late September, in the remote past of less than a year ago.

  “By this time they’ve already taken away the bodies. A municipal crew comes in a slow garbage truck. I recognize it by the sound of the engine. They arrive a little after dawn. If your friend was here last night, he must be in the morgue by now. Rossman was his name, wasn’t it? Or still is, poor man, who knows. I remember chatting with him once.”

  “Last year, in October, he came to my lecture.”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it? Remembering anything that happened before all this began. Things happen and they seem inevitable, as if anyone could have predicted them. But who could have told us our Residence would be turned into a barracks? A barracks and also a hospital, a few days ago. Now, aside from the shots at night we have to listen to the moans of those poor boys. You have no idea how they scream, Abel. No medicine, no sedatives, no anesthesia, no nothing. Not even good gauze to control hemorrhages. I leave my room and find puddles of blood on the floor. We didn’t know how sticky blood is, how shocking it is, the quantity of blood a human body holds. We thought we were men with experience and judgment, but we were nothing and knew nothing. And the little we knew is ridiculous and serves no purpose. Don José Ortega stayed for a few weeks before he left Spain, like so many others. He was ill. It was painful to see him sitting in a hammock in the sun, an old man, his mouth hanging open, yellow, with that lock of hair he always carefully combed to hide his bald spot. Our great philosopher, the man who had an opinion on everything, silent, looking into the void, dying of fear, just like all of us, or more so, because he was afraid his fame would work against him and he would not be allowed to leave Spain. I don’t know if you know that some people came to ask him to sign the manifesto of intellectuals in favor of the Republic. Bergamín, Alberti, someone else, all of them with boots and leather straps, with pistols. But Don José didn’t sign. As sick as he was, feverish, scared. They left and he was much worse. I approached him to ask after his health, and he didn’t answer.”

  “And they didn’t ask you to sign the manifesto?”

  “I’m not famous enough. It’s the advantage of being invisible.”

  “Poor Lorca didn’t have it.”

  “He left Madrid because he was frightened. He took the express after they killed Lieutenant Castillo and Calvo Sotelo, July 13. I spoke with him a few days earlier. He was very frightened.”

  “I saw him from a taxi. He was sitting on the terrace of a café on Recoletos, in a light suit, smoking a cigarette, as if waiting for someone. I waved to him but I don’t think he saw me.”

  “Now we spend our lives trying to remember the last time we did something or saw a friend. It frightens us to think it was the last time. Before, we would say goodbye as if we were going to live forever. How many times have you and I said goodbye, Abel my friend, or passed each other if we were in a hurry with no more than a tip of the hat. When we say goodbye this time, it’s not unlikely we won’t ever see each other again.”

  “It’s dangerous for you to be living here alone, so removed from everything. Come to my apartment. I’m there alone. One of the maids stayed with my family in the Sierra and the other disappeared. You’ll be safer and we can keep each other company.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Abel my friend. Who’ll want to do anything to an old man?”

  “You’re not that old and you aren’t safe. No one is. I saved myself at the last moment almost by accident.”

  What would happen to Moreno Villa, sedentary and stubborn, determined to live as if the world hadn’t collapsed around him, alone in the Residence, wandering the hallways and classrooms where the foreign students who’d left toward the end of July wouldn’t return, where the beautiful exotic voices he loved no longer sounded? He spent sleepless nights in the dark, listening to the gunfire, the car engines, the shouting, the laughter.

  “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about a good deal lately, Moreno? An article you published last year about the desire everyone seemed to have to kill his adversary. I thought you were exaggerating.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it too. ‘I Was Killing Them All’ was the title. Then I saw it in El Sol and was almost ashamed to have used those words, though it was meant to be ironic. Some words shouldn’t be written or pronounced. You say something without conviction or thinking, and once you’ve said it, it begins to be true.”

  They said nothing else, uncomfortable in a silence they couldn’t break. A bugle sounded from the garden in front of the Residence. On the athletic fields groups of militiamen were training to the beat of a drum.

  “And you, Abel, do you plan to leave?”

  He took a while to answer. How could Moreno Villa believe that if he was leaving, or trying to, it was because he’d planned the trip long before the war started, because in that earlier time, already as distant as a dream, he’d been invited to spend an academic year at an American university, to give classes and perhaps design a library? Others had already left, taking advantage of privileges, inventing international missions, diseases that required treatment abroad. There were rumors that Ortega himself hadn’t really been gravely ill when he left, that at heart he sympathized with the Fascists or was in some way involved with them and feared reprisals. Ignacio Abel’s words told the truth but sounded false, even to his own ears; they sounded like the lie of someone who’s going to desert and repeats an explanation, an honorable alibi, especially when he heard himself saying that worst of all was not hearing anything from his wife and children on the other side of the front, so close and yet in another country, another world, the antithesis of this one but just as delirious. “I expected to take them with me,” he said, knowing it wasn’t quite true, knowing the lie contaminated his sorrow over the absence of his children, imagining that perhaps Moreno Villa suspected other reasons, not just his possible cowardice and intention to flee Spain, but also what he’d probably learned or been told in a Madrid so rarefied and filled with gossip, especia
lly because he lived in the Residence and had met Judith, witnessed with the astute eyes of an easily infatuated bachelor the first meetings between her and Ignacio Abel. Out of vanity or lack of imagination, you convince yourself that others pay attention to every little thing you do. Moreno Villa’s sad, questioning eyes troubled Ignacio Abel, they probed his conscience, but as he spoke he noticed in his own voice a tone of imposture or guilt. Moreno Villa was thinking about something else, as much a prisoner of his ruminations and uncertainties as Abel was, just as perturbed by the eruption of all this madness, this bloody world he didn’t understand and couldn’t escape and couldn’t ignore.