In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Ignacio Abel lies in bed, exhausted, silent, as memory acquires clarity in the midst of his loneliness and guilt. He travels with the lightness of dreams to the house in the Sierra, past which the trains no longer run and from which perhaps the gunfire on the front can be heard. Perhaps it’s been abandoned or converted into a barracks, like the Student Residence, a barracks for the others, for that abstract and not completely human species the newspapers call the Enemy, a word, he realizes now, of theological inspiration. In his old school, transformed into a lot with burned ruins, the priests called the devil the Enemy and warned that the word must always be written with a capital letter. Now the Enemy must occupy the neglected garden that for his children was a forest where they staged adventures copied from novels and collected insects and plants for their biology classes; the garden with the rusted swing on which they were swinging on that Sunday three months ago when he saw them for the last time, though they were both too old for it. Lita with her well-formed chest, Miguel in short pants he won’t wear again after this summer. He’s changing so quickly that when I see him again I won’t recognize him. He’ll have the shadow of a mustache, he’ll part his hair and brush back the bangs that would fall over his eyes, an adolescent who’ll look more like his uncle Víctor, his features usurped along with his soul, distancing him from me into an adulthood in which perhaps I, his father, won’t exist. If I haven’t already ceased to exist, erased by distance, lack of news, the likely absence of the postcards I’ve been sending them since I left Madrid, just as when they were younger and I took trips: the Plaza de la República in Valencia, the beach at Malvarrosa, the Eiffel Tower, the recently inaugurated Trocadero, Notre-Dame from a bridge over the Seine, the Boulevard de Saint-Nazaire that ends at the port, the SS Manhattan sailing at night on the high seas with the portholes illuminated and garlands of bulbs over the deck, the Statue of Liberty, the arcades at Pennsylvania Station, the hotel in New York where I stayed, its vertical sign running along the side of the building and a small pencil mark over a window on the fourteenth floor, this is my room, the Empire State Building crowned by a dirigible (but he never managed to mail that postcard: he stamped it and forgot about it in his concern not to miss the train). Lita has a tin box filled with postcards and letters arranged by date. At the beginning of her vacation she took it to the Sierra along with her books and journals. Miguel brought with him the textbooks for the classes he’d failed in June and the notebooks with assignments he’d done at the last minute, covered with the teacher’s red-pencil markings, his spelling mistakes underlined, his inkblots. But he couldn’t have taken his examinations in September. In that regard the war has been a respite for him. He’ll have to repeat the year, and Lita will too if the war doesn’t end soon.

  It’s no longer possible to avoid the word: he saw it in the French papers, obscene in the red and black ink of the headlines: GUERRE EN ESPAGNE. He’s seen it in the New York papers he sometimes worriedly looked for—and other times tried to avoid—at the stand outside his hotel: LATEST NEWS ON THE WAR IN SPAIN. Like a congenital illness he can’t be cured of, and those who printed and delivered the papers were immune to, like our poverty and picturesque backwardness, our baroque Virgins with glass tears and silver hearts pierced by daggers, and that colorful, savage slaughterhouse that is our national pastime. KILLINGS AT THE BULLFIGHT RING IN BADAJOZ. Our names, so sonorous and exotic, standing out among the words of another language, thatched walls in ruins, barren lands, photographs of our poor people’s war, our women with black shawls and bundles on their heads fleeing along roads, crossing the plains, shoved with rifle butts at the frontier by French gendarmes while I looked away and did nothing and felt the cruel privilege of my formal dress and my papers in order. That still didn’t exempt me from the Spanish disease: the customs officials searched my suitcase with calculated rudeness, took their time examining my drawings and sketches, the passport they’d already gone over once, the photograph I was beginning not to resemble, the page with the U.S. visa. Who’d accept without suspicion that title, Spanish Republic, inscribed in gold letters on the cover above the shield with its mural crown, if at any moment that republic might cease to exist, and if a few steps away, on the Spanish side of the border, there were no uniformed guards and clerks but militiamen who’d hauled down the tricolor and hoisted a red-and-black banner on the flagpole. In spite of everything, while he waited, dignified and upright, for the gendarmes to return his passport and permit him to close his suitcase, there was his pride at being a citizen of the Spanish Republic and rage at the indifference of the French and British who watched it turn, awkward and defenseless, to face its attackers, but also the feeling of inferiority for belonging to such a country, and the desire to escape it, and guilt for having run away, for not having known how to be useful, for not having remedied anything.

  He remembers being on the Plaza de Oriente one morning, the last one, when his escape was assured and he went to say goodbye to Moreno Villa. Lashed by wind and rain, the plaza looked larger, the National Palace more gray than white against the background of dark storm clouds coming out of the west over the sharp greens of the Campo del Moro, with the Casa de Campo dissolving in the fog. In the French gardens an encampment of refugees protected themselves from the rain under their carts or canvas cloths stretched between the hedges and trees. In the middle of October, winter announced its arrival in Madrid, as if brought there by the gradually approaching war along the southwest highway, the one to Extremadura. How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago, the plaza with the encampment of tarpaulins and shanties among the hedges, around the equestrian statue of Felipe IV supported only by the hind legs, delicate against the gray sky and the rain, wielding a sodden red flag; Ignacio Abel walking by it, a solitary bourgeois silhouette under an umbrella, approaching the guardpost where soldiers in the impeccable uniforms of the presidential battalion—steel helmets, leather straps, shining boots, well-shaven faces—will let him pass with no more formality than checking his name on a typed list. Footsteps and orders echoed in the granite cavities of the foyer. In a porter’s lodge behind a small glass door, one could hear a radio and a typewriter and smell the aroma of food. He climbed broad staircases of granite and then of marble that had no carpeting to muffle his steps. He crossed halls with tapestries and clocks and swirling mythological scenes painted on the ceilings, and bare corridors that led to courtyards with stone arches covered by glass domes on which the rain drummed. Moreno Villa was in an office behind a paneled door with a low lintel, a tiny office overrun by books and file folders in the middle of a magnificence of empty spaces. Ignacio Abel thought that throughout his life Moreno Villa had maintained an invariable model of a workroom, identical in the National Palace and the Student Residence, in any place where chance might lead him in a future that had suddenly become uncertain. The cold was insidious, slowly overpowering you, first your fingertips and the end of your nose, then the soles of your feet. In a corner of the office was a small electric heater. But the current was weak and the glow of the element as sickly as in the lamp on the desk where Moreno worked, absorbed in his files, his investigations into the buffoons and madmen who served the kings in the time of Velázquez. His white beard had grown pointed, like a figure by El Greco. He was thinner than in the summer, and wore reading glasses that made him look older.

  “You’re finally leaving, Abel. You must find it hard to believe you have all your papers in order. It’s obvious you’re a man who wants to leave, who knows how to leave, if you’ll allow me to say so.”

  “Are you still sleeping in the Residence?”

  “And where would I sleep if I didn’t sleep there, Abel? It’s my home. My provisional home, but I’ve lived there so many years I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. The garrison is gone and now they’ve set up a field hospital. How those poor boys scream. The horrible wounds. You think you know war’s dreadful but have no idea of anything until you see i
t. Imagination is useless, impotent, cowardly. We see soldiers fall in films and believe that’s how it is, that everything’s over quickly, a bloodstain on the chest. But there are things worse than dying. Tell me what kind of insanity that is—what’s the good of such suffering? You look away, because when you look, you’ll retch. And the smell, my God! The smell of gangrene and excrement from burst intestines. The smell of blood when the nurses cover them with newspapers or sawdust. Sometimes I tell myself I’ll have to draw these things, but I don’t know how, it makes me ashamed to attempt it. I think no one has done it, no one has dared, not the Germans in the Great War, and not Goya. Goya got closer, but even he lacked the courage. I think of the caption he put on one of the prints in Disasters of War: ‘One cannot look.’ You won’t have to any longer.”

  He didn’t need to go on waiting. He was there saying goodbye to Moreno Villa and it was as if he’d already begun the journey, postponed so many times because of tortuous procedures, papers or stamps or signatures, promised letters, delayed or lost in the mail. Before going to see Moreno Villa he’d picked up the final document and carried it like a fragile treasure in the inside pocket of his jacket, a safe-conduct on the letterhead of the Ministry of Finance, signed by Negrín in his new position as minister, authorizing the trip to Valencia and from there to France and suggesting a vague official mission—in case new difficulties arose and his passport with the American visa and the French transit visa wasn’t enough when he reached the border. “We’re a government that almost doesn’t exist,” Negrín told him in his large office in the Ministry of Finance. He finally had a space that corresponded to his physical size, with an enormous desk, a large window facing Calle de Alcalá, a thick rug into which footsteps sank silently. “We give orders to an army of phantom divisions in which a handful of officers still loyal to the Republic have no troops to command. They’ve made poor Prieto minister of the navy, but the few old warships the Republic has are lost, and we don’t know where they are because the sailors killed the officers and threw them in the ocean and didn’t leave anyone who knows how to read a nautical chart or set a course. We write decrees that no one obeys. We’re unable to control the borders of our own country. Governments that should be our allies want nothing to do with us. We send telegrams to our embassies or set up conference calls, and the ambassadors and secretaries have gone over to the enemy. We’re the legitimate government of a member of the League of Nations, and even our French comrades from the Popular Front treat us as if we had the plague. They don’t want their excellent relations with Mussolini and Hitler ruined on our account, not to mention the British, who for some reason despise us more than they do the insurgents. They don’t want to sell us weapons. We have no planes, no tanks, no artillery, and barely a fraction of the materiel left over from the Great War that those thieving French didn’t want and were selling to us until a few months ago. And now not even that, no helmets from 1914 or muskets from the Franco-Prussian War . . .”

  But strangely, Negrín’s lucidity before the magnitude of the catastrophe didn’t dishearten him. When Abel entered his office, he found him dictating a letter in French at top speed to a secretary, walking back and forth, his hands behind his back. He paused to make a call, grew impatient that it took so long to be connected, slammed down the receiver. “Even so, we won’t surrender,” he said, stopping in front of Abel. “We’ll rebuild the army from the bottom up, an effective and well-equipped army, with discipline and muscle, an army of the people and the Republic. We’ll end this madness—reality is the best antidote to mental derangement. We know why the enemy’s fighting and why the military rebelled, but what we don’t know is why we’re fighting. Or if there is a we that we fit into, all of us who’ll end up shot or exiled if the other side wins. Each madman has his mania. Don Manuel Azaña wants the French Third Republic. You and I and a few others like us would settle for a Social Democratic republic like Weimar. But our coreligionist and now president of the government says he wants a Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, and Don Lluís Companys a Catalán republic, and the Anarchists forget we’re at war and facing a bloodthirsty enemy and in this chaos experiment with the abolition of the state. And to put into practice its own particular delirium, the first thing each party and union does is invent its own police, its own prisons, and its own executioners. But I refuse to believe all is lost. Our currency has fallen internationally, but we have more than enough gold and can pay cash for the best weapons. Our sister democracies, as they say in speeches, don’t want to sell them to us? We’ll buy them from the Soviets, or international traffickers, whoever.” The telephone rang: the connection he’d asked for was possible now. He requested something in a categorical way but with the greatest courtesy, and since the secretary who’d been typing the letter took her time removing the paper from the typewriter, Negrín pulled it out himself with a precise gesture and checked the spelling by pushing up his glasses and bringing the letter close to his eyes. “And that’s not all, Abel my friend. Those photographs our militiamen take of themselves dressed like priests in the ruins of burned churches and that do us so much good in the eyes of the world when the newspapers publish them? Those same papers refuse to publish the photographs we send them of children blown to pieces by German planes because they say they’re propaganda. We have no people who speak foreign languages. We send loyal Republicans and Socialists abroad to fill diplomatic posts and explain our cause, but how are they going to explain it if in the best case they never went beyond first-year French in a priests’ academy. This good-looking girl who works with me here is a treasure, she speaks French. But letters in English or German I have to write myself, and if foreign emissaries or journalists come to interview someone in the government, I act as interpreter.” A functionary came in with a document in a folder, which he presented ceremoniously to Negrín, calling him “Señor Minister.” Negrín looked it over quickly before signing it with a flourish and passed it to Ignacio Abel. “If they don’t let you cross with this, I can think of only one measure,” he said, laughing. “You carry a pistol too, just in case, and shoot your way out.” Ignacio Abel carefully folded the safe-conduct and put it in an inside pocket. He remembers now that when he left Negrín’s office, his relief was stronger than his remorse or his gratitude. In the waiting room stood officials, militiamen, and uniformed carabineers. The carabineers came to attention when they saw the minister, who took Ignacio Abel’s arm and accompanied him to the exit. He’s going to ask me not to leave, Abel thought, suddenly frightened, feeling on his arm the pressure of Negrín’s enormous hand; he’s going to remind me that I can speak foreign languages and should offer my services to the Republic just as he’s doing, sacrificing a career far more brilliant than mine, that if he wanted to, he could obtain an appointment at any university outside Spain. But Negrín didn’t ask anything. He ignored Abel’s extended hand, gave him a hug, and told him, laughing, not to take too long with that building in America, come back soon and finish University City once and for all. So many ruins will have to be razed, he said, you architects will turn into gold. He stood for a moment on the threshold of a door with elaborate gilding, then turned and disappeared.

  Lying in bed, he relives the sensation of cold drops on his cheeks, on a morning in October that felt like December. He thought of Negrín turning to go back to his office, thought that perhaps he too had been infected by a form of madness. The rain streamed down the tall gray façades on Calle de Alcalá, soaking the torn posters, shreds of wet paper breaking up the slogans in red letters and the figures of heroic militiamen in boots trampling swastikas, bishops’ miters, bourgeois top hats, shirt fronts with medals, workers breaking chains and advancing toward brilliant horizons of factory smokestacks. The peddlers, shoeshine boys, and habitual idlers in the Puerta del Sol took shelter from the rain under the awnings of shops and in the doorways of buildings. The city had become sullen and wintry, and smelled of wet soot, garbanzo and cabbage stew, and overheated air from the metro tunnels
. He took refuge in a nearly empty café, waiting behind a window clouded with steam for the rain to let up. The odor of sawdust reminded him of another café several months earlier, equally gloomy at that same hour of the morning, of Judith Biely, who didn’t lift her head as he approached and didn’t get up when he stood beside her, her face transformed into that of a woman who didn’t know him. He couldn’t risk the safe-conduct recently signed by Negrín getting wet. How a life can depend on a sheet of paper, an official letterhead, an ink signature so easily dissolved by a few drops of water. As if they were hidden treasure, he thought of all the papers he already had in his desk drawer, the same locked drawer where he kept Judith’s letters: the documents he’s brought with him and had to present so often during his trip, obtained one by one after exhausting transactions and weeks of waiting, interrogations, lengthy inspections of each document, each stamp and signature on each letter. To apply for the transit visa through France, he had to present his American visa and ticket for the ship as well as a certificate of financial solvency. The letter of invitation from Burton College, which he needed to apply for the American visa, took months to arrive. Most of the personnel at the embassies had left the country; the few officials left were irritated, overwhelmed by applications, insolent with the growing crowd of those who came early every morning and waited for hours in front of the closed doors, each with a briefcase or folder of documents held close to the chest, longing to escape, or at least find refuge in the embassies, looking out of the corner of their eye each time a car with rifle barrels at the windows or a truckload of militiamen went by. He recognized some of the regulars on the lines and in the offices: in a hallway at the French consulate he passed an architect he knew was a rightist, and neither greeted the other; a Russian woman he’d seen several times showed him her worn czarist passport and a diploma in Cyrillic characters issued, she said, by the Imperial Conservatory of Moscow. A contract for teaching piano was waiting for her at the Juilliard School. Couldn’t he, since he looked like a gentleman, help her with a small amount, since she had all the necessary emigration documents and needed only the cost of a third-class passage?