In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  In the distance he hears the noise of a train that takes a long time to pass, coming up the bank of the Hudson emitting the sound of a ship’s siren. He can’t believe he’s not riding in that train, that he doesn’t have before him the urgency and uncertainty of another trip, doesn’t have to anticipate any sudden fright, or find he’s lost, or know he’s anonymous. In the car, to flatter him, Stevens cited his articles in international architectural magazines, and Ignacio Abel had the feeling he was hearing about someone else. So many years of study, work, ambition, and vanity dissolve into empty hands, hands with dirty nails protruding from the worn cuffs of a shirt he hasn’t changed in several days. One morning, his feet aching from walking around New York, he sat down on a sunny bench in Union Square and thought no one could distinguish him from the other solitary, honorably poor men who read the help-wanted pages in the newspapers or pawed through trash baskets. He looked up and a banner hanging between two lampposts trembled in the gentle October breeze: SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE AGAINST FASCIST AGGRESSION.

  It’s a relief to be left alone in the house and not have any engagements scheduled for tonight. The banner in Union Square announced a meeting that evening in support of the Spanish Republic. If Judith was in New York, she’d probably attend. Tomorrow morning Stevens will take him around the campus and show him, if he’s not too tired, the hill and the clearing in the woods where, in not too long a time, everyone in the college hopes, the new Van Doren Library will be built (perhaps not white after all, too visible; perhaps the color of the rocks that peek out of cultivated land, or of the stone walls in the woods that marked old farm boundaries). In the evening the college president will give a dinner in his honor for a select group of guests (Stevens smiles, as if uncertain whether he’s among them). In a few days he’ll be assigned convenient housing for the entire year, closer to campus. But today he doesn’t have to worry about anything, Stevens said, turning to him as he drove with one hand along those country roads he knows by heart; just rest up after the long journey. (Stevens looks at him and speaks to him as if he were ill, he thinks, uncertain of the tone he should use with a man who’s just left a country at war, a distant European suffering that for him must have something exotic about it.) And he shouldn’t be frightened if he hears strange noises at night, his host says afterward, as they’re saying goodbye, and Ignacio Abel understands that Stevens has repeated the identical joke to other guests: the house is old, and at night the wooden structure tends to creak, but he can be sure it isn’t bewitched, It’s not a haunted house as far as we know, though it’s possible some forest animal may approach, a ferret, a deer. On winter nights, bears and wolves are on the prowl. What a relief to hear the outside door close and the car drive away as the taillights begin to fade. He remains still, the weariness of the past few hours and so many days dissolving into a muscular weakness, his eyes charmed by the landscape at the window, the forest of tall conifers where night has fallen beyond the clearing in which the house stands, the sky of gradually darkening blue, and against it the treetops outlined with precision, the branches curved upward like the roofs of pagodas. Ignacio Abel has never experienced a silence like this. The silence is a crystal bell, a vault under which the most cautious footstep, the lightest touch, would have resonated. His hotel room in New York faced a gloomy courtyard where machinery rumbled night and day, and at regular intervals the walls and floor shook because an elevated train passed nearby. (In his sleeplessness he’d count the days he had to wait, the amount of money he’d spent since leaving Madrid, how much he had left.) The silence has a depth, an oceanic extension as limitless as these woods, which must extend, he imagines, to the cold of the Arctic Circle, to the Great Lakes and Niagara Falls, to the shores where at this moment the Atlantic is pounding. The silence weighs so powerfully it muffles the voices that haven’t stopped sounding in his memory in recent days. Before leaving, Stevens turns on the lamp on the night table like a bellboy presenting the room to a recently arrived guest: he shows him the bathroom, how the hot and cold water faucets work. When the stream of water hits the bathtub it gives off steam. He opens a closet that emits a scent of varnish and pine. Stevens moves with agility, a hysterical touch of speed, like a dancer dressed in street clothes in a movie musical. His red face, his blue eyes behind gold wire-frame glasses, he is always conscious of the ironic or censorious or simply disdainful presence of Philip Van Doren, before whom he acts as if he were constantly being subjected to an aptitude test for which he’s not prepared; more anxious when Van Doren is silent, when without saying a word he makes his displeasure or approval known with a fleeting expression the inexpert observer may not perceive. In the kitchen Professor Stevens explains how the coffeepot and toaster work while Ignacio Abel absent-mindedly nods without understanding very much, impatient to be alone, his feet hurting under the weight of his body. After so many days without a real conversation, it’s difficult for him to pay attention to Stevens’s chatter or Van Doren’s comments and to respond coherently in English.

  He inspects the bedroom, slowly becomes conscious of every detail, the high bed with its plain wooden headboard, plump white pillows, a white quilt on which he left his unopened suitcase. Pressing on the soft quilt is like submerging his hand in deep, warm, still water. He regains the pleasure of starched bed linen, fragrant sheets, the warm shelter of domestic comfort. How would it be to have Judith Biely with him in this room—Judith who perhaps right now is somewhere on this continent of dark forests undulating beyond the window. How would his children have explored the house, Miguel and Lita chasing each other on the stairs, going out into the woods to imagine they were living in a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a film about soldiers in long jackets and three-cornered hats and Indians with tomahawks and stiff crests of hair and painted faces. There’s a wide, solid desk of varnished wood in front of the window. When he turns on the brass lamp with a green shade that stands on it, the darkness of the landscape becomes a mirror in which he sees his face, partially in shadow, against the background of the room. Who has seen you and who sees you? Who would recognize you now? His face with the rough shadow of a beard, an edge of grime on his shirt collar, his tie carelessly knotted. The face Van Doren and Stevens have seen, which he has detected behind their courtesy. From a distance comes the sound of a train that takes a long time to pass: lit windows through the trees, reflected in the ocean-like current of the river. In Madrid night fell hours ago and it’s still a long time until daybreak. The tremor of battle goes on in the distance and darkness, just like the sound of the train. REBEL FORCES EXPECTED TO FURTHER TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP ON LOYALIST CAPITAL, a newspaper headline said yesterday or the day before. Standing in front of the window, Ignacio Abel empties his pockets onto the desk: train tickets, hotel bills, French and Spanish coins, American pennies, receipts from Automats in New York, pencil stubs, the telegram from Stevens that reached the hotel after three days, when he thought he’d be thrown out for lack of payment, loose one-franc bills, a wrinkled five-peseta note, the few dollars to which his entire capital has been reduced. Forgotten things, like archeological remains of a lost time: the keys to his apartment in Madrid, two movie tickets from an afternoon in early June, the letter he decided several times to tear up and yet has kept, Dear Ignacio, allow me to call you that, despite everything. I’m your wife and have the right and still love you. Adela’s letter and Judith’s, his wallet swollen and misshapen by use, Judith’s photo next to one of his children, his Socialist Party card, the General Union of Workers card, his identity document, his notebook with the first sketches for the library, lines and pencil smudges, uncertain attempts at forms that have become irrelevant in the context of the power and scale of this landscape: what can he design that won’t be trivial and ridiculous, his Spanish imagination nullified here, just as it is in New York City, by the excessive size conspicuous both in human works and in nature, requiring an energy, a spirit, a lack of restraint for which he isn’t prepared. He’s been alone in the
room for a while and still isn’t calmed by its spaciousness or its silence. He sees himself as a foreign body, potentially infectious, propagating disorder, smells that have clung to his clothing during his journey, dirty clothes now turned out of the open suitcase on the bed and things spilling out of his pockets onto the desk, the silence oppressing him, the external darkness increasing the dimensions of distance.

  A metallic noise wakes him, blows from a hammer or monkey wrench, steam whistles. In fractions of a second his mind, alert but still disoriented, eliminates a succession of places: his bedroom in Madrid, the tiny cabin on the ship, the hotel room in New York, the one in Paris. With the sudden shock of antiquated pipes, the heat has come on. He remembers dreaming about voices that dissolve before he can identify them. One said his name amid the noise of a crowd, murmured it in his ear; another begged for his help on the other side of a closed door. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door. What he has no memory of is lying down on top of the quilt, not taking off his shoes, covering himself with his raincoat, as if he’d gone to sleep on a bench in a waiting room. He is aware of his body but sees it from the outside. He knows that if he so decides, he can lift the hand resting on his chest or open his eyelids a little more or close them again or bend a leg, but he does nothing, and in this inaction is a kind of indifference or physical distance, as if the neural connections between brain and muscles had temporarily been suspended. It isn’t that he’s lost feeling, as when a limb goes numb in a cramped position. He notes the pressure of his body on the quilt and the heat of his hands, one on the other, notes the thin weight of his lids on his eyeballs. His body is heavy and at the same time it floats on the quilt that’s both dense and light. His body is heavy but not his thoughts, not the flow of consciousness or his perception of things. At some point as he slept and the night thickened, the woodpecker’s beak stopped striking the tree trunk, but the owl’s call or hoot did not; it returned, identical, after longer intervals of silence. Is this how it is to be dead, when the heart has stopped but there remains, so they say, a final glimmer of lucidity in the brain, when the bullet’s just torn open the chest or the severed head’s fallen into the guillotine basket? If only Professor Rossman had known a last moment of pity like this one, lying face-up on the ground, his lifeless body resting on the great breadth of the earth, beyond fear and pain, beneath a summer sky at dawn. Inside his shoes, Ignacio Abel’s feet are swollen now and more painful, as if each foot weighs the millions of steps taken on his journey. The air enters his nostrils and leaves an instant later, warmer, the temperature of breath. In a rhythm just as involuntary, his heart contracts and expands in his chest, the waves of blood in his ears, the pulsation in his temples, a pressure in his skull that isn’t quite a headache.

  Who has seen you and who sees you? Who are you tonight, suspended in a place too strange and distant to be grasped in this large empty house, in this ocean of silence, this dark forest where the light from your windows travels to the highway? In his sleep he heard trains passing, as they’d passed during siestas and on summer nights in the Sierra, going to and coming from Madrid, the express trains heading north at midnight and those approaching the capital close to dawn after a night in transit. And the slow, short-distance trains too, that didn’t go beyond Segovia and Ávila, the ones the fathers took during the summer to go to work in Madrid and return to the Sierra on Saturday afternoon, so recognizable, in their light suits and straw hats and briefcases under their arm, among travelers from the villages, dark unshaven faces, women with black scarves and kerchiefs on their heads, rustic wares of traveling vendors, containers of honey they’d peddle on the streets of Madrid, canvas sacks filled with cheeses, cages of hens, recently weaned piglets. It seemed that everything had lasted forever and would always be that way, the passage and whistle of trains as regular as the course of the sun or the bells in the village church. Now trains don’t pass close to the house, shaking the pavement and the windows every hour. Now the old, slow trains that summer people and campesinos rode leave Madrid crowded with noisy militiamen, slogans painted on the cars and banners hanging from the locomotives, and they travel only half their route, to the last stations on this side of the Sierra, almost at the front. It’s only October and the militiamen are already shivering with cold when night falls. Not enough blankets, said Negrín, no wool clothing, or hats, or boots, not enough trucks to keep the front supplied with food and ammunition, and no guaranteed relief forces. The heavy pain of Spanish poverty: in the photos of staged heroism published in the newspapers, the men advance or drop to the ground, dressed in old jackets or helmets that seem the castoffs of different armies. They shiver at night in the shelter of shepherds’ huts, in the hollows between large granite crags. How will it be if the war hasn’t ended when winter comes? They don’t light fires so as not to give their positions away to the enemy. They hear noise, and fire into the darkness, wasting scant ammunition; for no reason, the shooting spreads up and down the frontline. On the other side his children must hear it, the house is close to the lines, to the names of towns now the lexicon of war. No doubt the family has gone to Segovia: suddenly almost another country, an inverted image of the Bolshevik and Anarchist Madrid that sprang up overnight late in July; military men and priests on the streets, processions of saints, not parades with red flags, the open hands of the Fascist salute instead of clenched fists, the ecclesiastical severity of the Spanish provinces in the previous century. My children in that world, unavoidably swallowed up by a clerical darkness from which I won’t be able to rescue them, by candles, novenas, scapulars, and cassocks into which their mother’s family submerged them as soon as I became careless, or as soon as I desisted, too weak, lacking the necessary intransigence, compelled by Adela, by her obedience to her people, unless in her heart she shares it too and hasn’t shown it openly in order not to oppose me, not to emphasize the abyss that separated us from the start, the misunderstanding that neither of us wanted to look at, two strangers who have children in common and share nothing but a bed, a resignation indistinguishable from boredom. It’s never mattered to you that I love you, and you’ve never shown gratitude for the affection my parents gave you and have felt only contempt for them—the letter also on the desk now, within reach, almost memorized, hidden inside the envelope and distilling from so great a distance its constant complaint. In Segovia Don Francisco de Asís owns a house with a coat of arms carved in stone above the lintel of the street door; he calls it “my ancestral home,” though in reality it isn’t very old and came into his possession many years ago at an auction, and the stone coat of arms with a shield crowned by a helmet and a cross of Santiago he bought at a demolition site. You leave and it’s useless, you wear out the soles of your shoes walking through city after city, you spend a week nauseated in a cramped cabin on a ship that crosses the Atlantic, and it’s as if you had lost your strength in one of those revolving tunnels at a carnival, the tube of laughter, you never manage to move from the same spot. You go away and one part of you remains torn by separation and guilt, and the other part suffers the oppression of not being able to leave, to create distance. Continents and oceans can’t loosen the knots of captivity. Because you must know that whatever you do you’re still my husband and the father of your children. Those ties can never be broken. Not even animals abandon their young. From so far away he sees them, like the photographs in which he never appears though he’s hovering nearby, conferring in the familial circle around a table with built-in foot warmers in the house in Segovia, with gloomy paintings of saints on the walls, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela and his two children and perhaps the uncle who is a priest, and who gives religious pictures to the children and suggests they pray at night and go to Confession and take Communion, if only to make their dear grandparents happy. He sees them like a ghost, a soul in purgatory in whom Doña Cecilia says she believes and to whom she lights little oil lamps that according to her go out when touched by the passage of a soul, the w
ing of an angel. The most sacred thing of all isn’t the sacraments, but the love you and I have had, our children are the proof. They all pray the rosary, murmuring, their heads lowered, Miguel and Lita kicking each other, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela offering fervent prayers for their son and brother, not knowing whether he’s alive or dead, and perhaps also for him, the son-in-law, who disappeared on July 19, though with some misgivings, because it disconcerts them or they think it’s unsuitable to pray for someone who has no faith, but they must set an example for the children, they who are severe in their mourning for the two who are absent and about whom they’ve heard nothing for months, the son and brother, the husband and son-in-law to whom Adela wrote the letter, run through with rancor, that’s taken so long to reach its destination and yet hits its target with the accuracy of a poisoned arrow. Why is it bad for your children, who are just as much mine as yours, or even more mine because I gave birth to them, I brought them up and have been there for them every day, every night when they were burning up with fever, what harm can it do them to be brought up in the Catholic faith? Her family will indoctrinate the children, they’ll fall again into the hands of priests and nuns, they’ll be forced to confess and take Communion on Sundays and perhaps they’ll be pointed at in the school where they’ve begun the new year as secular children, offspring of an enemy, who don’t know how to chant prayers or sing church hymns, not to mention the Fascist anthems.