In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  How difficult the first step in the conception of what doesn’t exist yet: the line of a sketch that might contain in germ the final work, an angle that will engender the complete drawing, not obeying any external purpose but guided by an impulse toward organic growth. Where there’s nothing, there has to be something. From a blank page the first form of a library must emerge. From a hole dug into the side of a hill and quickly covered by vegetation that replaces what was gutted or cut down, walls will rise, staircases, balustrades, windows. The form sketched in the notebook will be glimpsed through the groves of trees and may be seen from sailboats or barges with blunt prows and rusted hulls that pass along the river. Ignacio Abel has the notebook open on his knees and a pencil in his hand but hasn’t drawn anything yet. He is seated on the partially hollow trunk of a tree that fell perhaps many years ago, its roots in the air, the surface burrowed by insects that in some areas have reduced the wood to soft powder. He hears cracking noises, the sounds of animals he can’t see, the flapping of birds over his head that stir brief eddies of fallen leaves. This area of the woods hasn’t been cleared out in a long time. Fragments of trunks, packed-down dry branches, and sheets of bark mix together on the ground under a carpet of many autumns’ leaves, the oldest the color of the earth and in part blended with it, crumbled by insects juxtaposing their shapes and colors like disordered pieces in a mosaic, with a variety of ribs and symmetries he would have liked to decipher by drawing them in the notebook, or better still, picking them up and pressing them between its pages. From the river comes the muffled noise of a train, the sound of a foghorn he heard in his dreams last night. The fallen trunks, covered with lichen, remind him of the ruins in the Roman Forum: grass and wild mustard, broken columns, the marble on the capitals so eroded and porous it has become pure debris and turned a calcareous white like animal bones. He understands that the sketches he’s made are useless. The building can’t have existed in his imagination with that diamond-like perfection he’s admired so much when he saw Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona—admired with envy of something he knew he wouldn’t be capable of achieving, feeling mediocre, limited, provincial. How would a prism of steel and glass look, surging before the eyes of someone coming up the road between the trees, or seen from other buildings on the campus when night fell, shining in the distance like an illuminated lighthouse. The imminence of work generates in him both excitement and dejection: sloth, almost panic, the vertigo of a void he isn’t sure he’ll know how to confront. A squirrel with a rounded body and lustrous fur approaches with a succession of brief movements and picks up an acorn, examines it, suspended between its front paws. He doesn’t move, so as not to frighten it, and the squirrel turns its back, brushing one of his shoes with a tail as soft and full as a shaving brush, moves away in silent leaps, divested of weight, making a sound in the leaves as faint as the damp breeze that makes them tremble. The sky has clouded over, the air is cooler, and the leaves are falling in more frequent gusts of wind. A round drop dampens the middle of the page in the notebook where he hasn’t drawn anything. He raises his head and Philip Van Doren looks at him, smiling, his arms crossed, leaning against a tree.

  “I see you managed to free yourself from Stevens. But you should be careful in these woods, Ignacio. As a city dweller, you don’t know its dangers.”

  “Are there wild animals?”

  “Something worse, that I don’t believe you have in Spain. Poison ivy.”

  “Hiedra venenosa?”

  “Right now you’re sitting close to it. You can’t imagine the itching. But it’s fantastic to see you wearing your suit from Madrid in our American wilderness. I wish Judith could see you.”

  They look at each other across the clearing, not saying anything now that the name’s been spoken. A light rain has begun to fall. From an athletic field comes a burst of scattered applause and the sharp repeated sound of a whistle. Ignacio Abel has closed the notebook and put it in a jacket pocket, expectant for no reason, alarmed because he’s heard Judith’s name, the evidence of her objective existence.

  “You want to ask me whether I know anything about Judith, but you can’t bring yourself to. Like that night in Madrid, don’t you remember? The city was burning and all you could think of was finding her. You’re reserved, something I approve of. Given my Lutheran upbringing, so am I. But I don’t like your distrust of me. I’ve given you proof of my loyalty. It wasn’t easy getting you out of Spain and arranging for you to come to America, to Burton College.”

  “I regret not having thanked you.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  Now the sky was a darker gray that accentuated the shadows deep in the forest. Ignacio Abel swallowed.

  “Were you her lover when you lived in Paris?”

  “Splendid Spanish jealousy.” Van Doren looked at him, smiling fondly, almost indulgently. “I imagined you took it for granted I don’t find women attractive.”

  “Probably only Judith attracted you.”

  “Don’t say it in the past tense. I find Judith very attractive. More than any other woman and more than a lot of men. I was drawn to her from the moment I saw her, on the deck of the ship that had just taken off from America. In that regard you and I are alike. We both saw in her a desire to experience everything, to enjoy everything, without irony, like a model student, which is what she should have been. You need a good deal of nobility to feel real enthusiasm. Judith’s doctorate was Europe. Everything in Europe—architecture, museums, paintings. I don’t think anyone has spent more time or been happier at the Louvre, or the Jeu de Paume, or the Uffizi, or the Prado. She felt the same rapture sitting in a café and writing a card or a letter and putting Paris in the return address. The letters she wrote to her mother, do you remember? Pages and pages, telling her everything, like class exercises where she demonstrated how much she’d learned. The Americans who come to Paris settle into a café on Saint-Germain-des-Prés as soon as they can and put on a weary look that says they’ve already seen it all and don’t have to go on playing the tourist. Being a tourist is a humiliating condition. But Judith didn’t have those reservations. She wanted to climb the Eiffel Tower and attend a Gregorian Mass in Notre-Dame and ride at night in a Bateau Mouche along the Seine. She also wanted to go to Shakespeare and Company and spend hours looking at the books she longed to read and standing watch in case James Joyce or Hemingway put in an appearance. Judith is the great American enthusiast. Even more American because her parents are Russian Jews who speak English with a terrible accent. Her mother, as you know, sacrificed everything so she could make this trip, and Judith had to show her that she was taking advantage of every penny. One invests hard-earned money and expects a profit. To squeeze every penny of it dry. She’d be offended if she heard me say it, but it’s a very Jewish idea of return on your money. Very Jewish and very American. Money doesn’t provoke in us the modesty you have in Europe, especially in Spain. Every cent her mother kept in a tin box, hiding it in the kitchen, was a small act of prowess when you think what the past few years have been like in my country for people of the class Judith belongs to. Penny by penny, the sound of copper in the tin box, the worn dollar bills. But your life wasn’t very different when you were young, if I’m not mistaken. I have a gift for imagining what other people are living or have lived through. That’s my only talent. Just as you have a gift for seeing what doesn’t exist yet.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Lovers, Judith and I? If it were true, you wouldn’t need to ask. Judith would have told you. American honesty. Full disclosure, we say. Just to set the record straight. In Paris what I liked most about her was not so much Judith herself as the enthusiasm she radiated, the light that was in her. She’d go into a café filled with smoke on one of those horrible black rainy afternoons, and it seemed she was followed by the spotlight in a theater. But I fell more in love in Madrid. Not with Judith but with your love for her, what you were seeing when you looked at her and what
she saw in you. I wanted to be you when I saw her looking at you. I remember it all so well. I saw how you came into my apartment in Madrid and almost blushed when you discovered Judith among my guests that afternoon. A coup de foudre if I’ve ever seen one. You probably assume it’s inevitable that I like opera, with all its falseness that’s truer the more exaggerated and unbelievable it is. You were Tristan the moment he takes the cup away from his lips and looks at Isolde. Operas should be performed in street clothes and ordinary places, Tristan and Isolde or Pelléas and Mélisande meeting in a café after walking through a revolving door. Drinking an icy martini instead of a medieval cup of poison. But I’ll understand if you’ve grown to hate Wagner. Perhaps Debussy is more tolerable. I was in Bayreuth two years ago and saw Tristan. When everybody was seated, waiting for the curtain to rise, there was a rush of uniforms and evening clothes because Chancellor Hitler had just entered the box of honor, but I didn’t come to see him. It doesn’t matter. I lack the ability to tell something in a straight line. You don’t discipline yourself as a narrator if your entire life is spent surrounded by people who have to listen to you. You and Judith didn’t know it yet, but the moment you saw each other the two of you were lost. I was dying of envy. The magnetic current between you passed through me, crossed the air in my house. I wanted to be each of you. Few things that have happened to me have shaken me as much. Nothing, in fact. The world seems to me a very expensive theatrical production mounted exclusively for me. All alone in a box in an enormous empty theater, like Ludwig of Bavaria attending the premiere of an opera by Wagner. He couldn’t permit himself that, and ended up bankrupt. But I can. And what I like is not to watch a performance but real life. Actors are vain and venal, and if you approach them, you see the unpleasant makeup that melts on their faces under the heat of the lights and their sweat. I do no harm by observing real lives. I don’t stoop to paying for others to pretend to love me. I prefer to see other people’s genuine love, or any passion that ennobles them. Judith in Paris, looking at Manet’s Olympia up close, or in Madrid when she went to one of those tiresome flamenco dance performances, or when she once showed me that empty museum you’d taken her to, the Academy of San Fernando, happy to show me something that was almost a secret and not those rooms in the Prado filled with foreigners. Or you a moment ago, so deep in your notebook you didn’t hear me arrive. I’ve never learned how to do anything. My passion is observing the passions of others. If they consent, or if they don’t know, who gets hurt?”

  “You spied on us in the house on the beach. You offered it so you could follow us.”

  “Don’t give me so little credit, Ignacio. I wasn’t drooling in the next room, watching through a crack. It was enough for me to imagine you on those days. To see you from a certain distance. A telescope is the most useful of inventions.”

  It has started to rain. Tiny drops gleam on Van Doren’s shaved head and he continues to stare at Ignacio Abel, his gestures passing from irony to the appearance of affection or complicity or sadness.

  “I hope you’re not offended. Judith didn’t ask me to, but I did everything I could to bring you here. Not that it was difficult. Your name carries weight, even this deep in the woods. I needed to find a solution, if only a provisional one, a breather for you both. I knew your work and that’s why I invited you, but then it was no more than a project, like so many others that go nowhere. As for Judith, she couldn’t go on postponing her return to America. Her mother’s savings weren’t going to last forever. I had to bring both of you here.”

  “To continue to spy on us?”

  “So you’d have a part of the life you both deserved. So that thanks to your talent, Burton College will have a beautiful, modern library, and something I can do will objectively benefit the order of the world.”

  Van Doren turns when he hears a car coming up the muddy road. Stevens puts his head out the window, looking distressed, blows the horn with triumphant vehemence, as if he were sounding trumpets. He’d been looking for them for he doesn’t know how long, he says, getting out of the car with an umbrella; he’s been everywhere, afraid something had happened, that Professor Abel was lost. First he escorts Van Doren, opens the back door for him, comes back to Ignacio Abel, reminds him that in less than an hour they must be at the college president’s house, and under no circumstances can they be late. The rain lashes the windshield when Stevens turns the car to go back to the campus, fat drops drumming on the leather top. Ignacio Abel looks at Van Doren—who’s wiping his head and face with a handkerchief and looking out at the woods—as if he didn’t remember his presence. But he has to decide, in spite of his cowardice, his fear of not knowing and his fear of knowing.

  “Do you know where Judith is now?”

  “Finally you ask me. You’re a proud man.”

  “I’ll ask it as a favor if you like.”

  “I heard her mother died of cancer this summer. Then I was told she found a job as an assistant professor at Wellesley College. Not far from here, a trip of a few hours. I wrote to tell her you were coming, but she hasn’t answered my letter. She’s like you. Too full of pride.”

  34

  HE’LL REMEMBER THIS NIGHT’S storm, the rain pounding against the windshield and drumming on the roof of the car when Stevens took him back to the guesthouse after the dinner with the president of Burton College. He had too much to drink; he was nervous and didn’t know what to say, what to do with his hands; he drank to give himself the courage to speak English and confront strangers. He’ll remember the dizziness he felt on the curves, the windshield wipers moving at top speed in a back-and-forth fan, and on both sides of the road, large tree branches flung about by the wind. Stevens drove cautiously: from time to time a gust of wind shook the car as if to overturn it, and he clutched the steering wheel tighter and leaned forward. But now he remembered having seen him drinking before dinner no less avidly than he, and guzzling glasses of wine at the table. Perhaps Stevens was nervous too, doubly insecure in the presence not only of Van Doren but of the other authority figure before whom he bowed with such assiduous courtesy. Stevens was a man who seemed destined to serve, who suffered the anguish of not knowing to what extent his actions merited the inscrutable benevolence of his superiors. Take it from me, he told Ignacio Abel when they were walking to the car and he obsequiously held the umbrella over him, you’ve made quite an impression on the president, identifying with Ignacio in the precariousness of a position that depended on the favor of omnipotent men. Ignacio grew lightheaded in the car simply by remembering the conversations, the dishes with French names pronounced with punctilious correctness by the president’s wife to whose right he was seated at the table, the strangers coming up to him, the names he heard and forgot or couldn’t decipher. The president’s sumptuous name was Jonathan Joseph Almeida, but he asked to be called Jon, shaking his hand and placing his other hand on top as if to confirm his welcome, his admiration for Abel’s work, perhaps also sympathy for the afflictions of the Spanish Republic, which had, according to another dinner guest, a professor of medieval English literature, not much more than forty-eight hours left. He’d heard on the radio or read in the paper something he repeated as if he’d memorized a headline: “The rebels appear to be less than a day’s march from Madrid.” As he said it, he stared at Ignacio Abel as if doubting he was who he said he was, or curious to see the face of someone who before long wouldn’t have a country to go back to. Through cigarette smoke and his growing alcoholic haze, faces approached Ignacio Abel and receded, or rather faded away, like the names and cordial phrases expressed and the visiting cards offered that he looked at appreciatively then put in his pocket, apologizing for not being able to reciprocate. He’d left his cards in Spain, was his excuse, but as he said it, he imagined he wouldn’t be believed, and that no one, not only the funereal medievalist, took seriously the role he had to play that night, incompetently, or the awkward English that alcohol made even harder to understand. Across the table, with his partially protective,
partially ironic air, Van Doren observed him, intervening at times to help him out of a linguistic difficulty, repeating Ignacio Abel’s credentials as if to confirm his identity: Professor Abel, Van Doren explained, spent years directing the most ambitious university construction project in Europe, and had studied with Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius in Germany. And though what he said was approximately true, the portion of calculated exaggeration made it suspect, at least to the vigilant ears of Abel himself, more alert and insecure because he was engaged in several conversations at the same time and felt himself observed by pairs of eyes on whose scrutiny his future depended, above all the eyes of President Almeida, forceful behind round tortoise-shell glasses, his gaze arrogant and cool, as solidly protected against uncertainty as his large healthy body and his house, with its stone foundation and solid walls, were protected against the storm. He remembered an expression Judith Biely had taught him: walking on thin ice. He was feeling his way and walking on very thin ice. Observed by others, he was afraid they might discover his inner lack of substance, detect the discomfort behind his smile or the fear that had gradually become his natural state. The sullen professor of medieval English and a pastor or chaplain in a black suit and clerical collar looked at him as if suspecting a character flaw or secret vice or some kind of complicity in the burning of churches and killing of priests in the early days of the war, about which they seemed to have unlimited information. The president’s wife sighed as she lifted her hand to her bosom, recalling the photographs of children in Madrid after bombing raids. He had to smile at the excessive gestures, keep himself upright to give the impression of personal integrity, accept pity as charity, knowing that at some point gratitude might be inseparable from humiliation. (Where would he go when the school year ended if it was true that Madrid was on the verge of falling?) He had to search in vain for clear, strong words to explain to the red-faced pastor in the black suit and clerical collar that the Republican government did not persecute priests, and though there were several Communist ministers, they were not planning to collectivize agriculture. He spoke, the heat rising in his face, the anxiety of the impostor who at any moment may be discovered; he swallowed and reached for his glass. A waitress approached from behind and filled it with wine. Over the noise of the general conversation, President Almeida asked him a question in his well-modulated voice, as if subjecting him to an examination: if Hitler and Mussolini were helping the rebels so shamelessly, did he believe the democracies would intervene at the last minute to save the Republic, or at least guarantee an armistice? “But there’s no more time,” the medieval scholar said, not without satisfaction, shaking his napkin, “they’re lost.” He leaned across the table to look at Ignacio Abel more closely and observe the effect of his question: “Do you see yourself being allowed to return to Spain any time soon, Professor?”