In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Meanwhile, at the back of his mind throbbed the name Van Doren had mentioned, Judith’s name and the name of the place he could reach in a few hours by train. And another face and identity acquired a precise contour in spite of his confusion, exacerbated by his not being accustomed to drinking alcohol, a woman who looked American and spoke Spanish with a strange accent but who was a Spaniard: Miss Santos, the always useful Stevens told him, and then corrected himself, Doctor Santos, the head of the Department of Romance Languages, who was happy to greet a compatriot, she said, though she had been in America for so many years she was no longer sure where she came from. Van Doren had mentioned Judith Biely’s name and the name of Wellesley College, then remained silent and devoted himself to observing the effect of his confidence, studying Ignacio Abel from his corner of the dinner table where Ignacio had Dr. Santos on his right, more aseptic and American in her gestures, taking small sips of water, never wine. It was she who named the place, not because Ignacio Abel had asked but because someone spoke of the many European professors, Germans in particular, coming to American universities. They spoke of Einstein at Princeton, of Thomas Mann settling in California, and Dr. Santos said to Ignacio Abel, assuming no one else would recognize the name, “I’m not sure you’re aware that Pedro Salinas is at Wellesley College. Do you know him personally?”

  The names, pronounced innocently, had a chemical effect. Everything became more unreal, as if out of focus, the dining room lit by a large chandelier, the faces, the voices, and the storm that rattled the windows. He reacts suddenly, shaken to his nerve endings not by the imminent expectation of satisfaction but only by the enunciation of its possibility: Judith Biely doesn’t belong to the irretrievable past; she’s not an invention; she has a life apart from him, she’s returned to America, she perhaps was at her dying mother’s bedside; she might be attending a dinner like this one, with its tedium of courtesies; she’s in a place he could travel to by train or car in a few hours; she’s on the same plane of existence as the poet Salinas, whom Dr. Santos has mentioned so casually, not knowing that by doing so she has extended another thread to Judith, Salinas’s student last year at the School of Philosophy. Judith had a book of his poems he’d signed; sometimes she asked Ignacio Abel to read verses aloud so she could hear the intonation and asked him the meaning of difficult words. (How strange to read those poems and think they could have been inspired by Señora de Salinas, one of Adela’s good friends, though somewhat older, as fond as Adela of English-style teas and lectures for ladies at the Lyceum Club; even stranger to recall the Lyceum Club and think it had ever existed, not in the remote past but a year ago, not even that, in the city that Hitler’s and Mussolini’s planes are flying over tonight, Franco’s rebel troops tightening their grip around three sides of Madrid, said the newspaper Ignacio Abel leafed through nervously this very morning at the Faculty Club, providing no details, dryly enunciating the course of destiny.) “My wife and his are good friends,” he said, returning to the conversation, conscious of the inattentiveness Dr. Santos would have noticed, and to compensate he forced himself to continue talking, relieved he could rest from English. From the window in his office at University City he’d watch Professor Salinas drive by every morning on the way to the Philosophy Building, and more than once they’d run into each other in the hallway. Dr. Santos listened, leaning forward with her pale Spanish face and American gestures, not suspecting that Ignacio Abel wasn’t speaking to her but to himself, Judith’s name now almost on his lips, because when he told her about running into Pedro Salinas in the Philosophy Building, he was invoking Judith without naming her, thinking about one of those times when resignation and decency and the normal order of life were overturned, as in the middle of some task when the phone rang and it was Judith calling him. As she left one of Salinas’s seminars, she saw the row of telephone booths recently installed in the lobby and couldn’t resist the temptation. He said he’d meet her right away and hung up so quickly he forgot to ask where she’d be waiting. He put on his jacket and crossed the office, eluding those who approached to consult with him. What excuse would he invent if he ran into someone he knew? He’d see Judith in a lobby filled with people or in the cafeteria and have to control himself so as not to embrace her. The impulse that guided his feet down the stairs had nothing to do with his will. In a few minutes he drove the distance between his office and the Philosophy Building, and as he climbed the staircase he saw in the distance the dean, García Morente, with his owl’s glasses and absurd sideburns, and he looked away so he wouldn’t have to stop and greet him. In the high, translucent stained-glass windows, the morning sun was transformed into a silvery brilliance that filled the lobby, reflecting the beautiful polished surfaces, the tiles on the walls and the banisters, the marble flagstones on which students’ footsteps resonated, the hammering of workmen, the din of voices. After looking for Judith in the cafeteria, he went back to the lobby and in a flash of inspiration jumped on one of the automatic elevators. He found her on the terrace, leaning against the railing, her hair pushed back and her face turned toward the gentle March sun, her back to a Guadarrama horizon exaggerated by the distance, the peaks still covered with snow, her legs bare in short white socks. I like that you look for me without knowing whether you’ll find me.

  He could get up right now from the table, fold his napkin, and go out to look for her, without hope or dignity, not encouraged by any promise but only by the words that have continued acting on him like the drops of a drug entering his bloodstream and going straight to his brain. From across the table Philip Van Doren observes him, smoking, hardly having tasted the dinner, watching and watching over him, intrigued by the consequences of his words, the dosage of information he’d administered just a few hours before, impatient to know what the president’s wife could be saying to Ignacio Abel, who’s turned toward her after conversing with Dr. Santos. He could get up without remorse, leaving her in midsentence, and go look for Judith, as shameless as on other occasions when he left a meeting in the office or a family dinner: though Judith hasn’t called him or may not wish to see him, he is summoned not by her desire but by the fact of her existence. If you were to call me, she read aloud from the book, with its austere cover, signed by Salinas, in which she’d underlined the many words she didn’t know and made notes in the margins. But Ignacio Abel didn’t believe those lines, in part because of his general indifference to poetry and because he didn’t associate those ecstasies of love with Señora Bonmati de Salinas. Too much the professor, he told Judith, lowering the level of his skepticism so as not to annoy her; too self-involved to lose his head over a woman and too busy with all those official tasks he was involved in. I would leave it all, throw it all away. And she said, “If you’re so sure Salinas is lying, it’s because you’re just like him”—suddenly irritated in Madame Mathilde’s house one very hot morning at the end of May, close to the end, turning her back to him, her skin glowing with sweat. Now he has nothing, nothing he’d need to leave behind to go away with her. The president’s wife compassionately inquires about his wife and children, doesn’t he know anything about them, are they in danger. He nods and puts on the required expression of sorrow, and at the same time feels in the beating of his heart, in the pit of his stomach, that he was ready to leave right away and drive for hours to look for Judith or sit on a bench in the station waiting for a train that would take him to Wellesley College. Without hope, almost without purpose, simply letting himself be carried along, seized by the undeniable fact of Judith Biely’s presence in the world. “I’m sure we can find a way for them to join you soon. I can imagine how you must feel after so much time away from your children, your wife.” Alcohol made self-pity easy, the imposture Van Doren didn’t fail to notice, catching loose threads of the conversation, willfully joining in, pulling his shirt cuffs back from his hairy wrists, his neck muscles constrained by his tie; he’d need to use his influence with the International Red Cross, he said, looking Ignacio Abel in the eye, enthu
siastically seconded by Stevens, who if necessary would appeal to his contacts in the State Department. And as Van Doren spoke, he was silently asking Ignacio Abel whether he really wanted to reunite with his wife and children or was he capable of acknowledging to himself that the only thing he wanted was to see Judith Biely again.

  The clink of a fork on President Almeida’s cut-crystal wineglass roused him from his self-absorption. Van Doren made a wry face, raising an eyebrow, with the benevolent look of someone attending a long theatrical performance, interested but always at the edge of boredom—here comes the inevitable speech, the toast. Gradually the voices died down along with the sounds of silverware and glasses, and for a moment all you could hear was the wind in the chimney. The glass of wine in his right hand, the president raised it toward Ignacio Abel. He had thin blond hair, almost white, a face crisscrossed with fine red veins radiating abundant health, like the table covered with food no one had finished, and the house filled with colonial furniture, shelves with valuable leather-bound editions, paintings and lamps and rugs, photographs on the sideboards and the mantel in which President Almeida posed with eminent public figures, smiling into the camera as he shook their hands (among them, the First Lady and President Roosevelt on one of his visits, not at all unusual, to Burton College, so close to his family home in Hyde Park). An oil portrait of President Almeida presided over the dining room. In the hall, among old landscapes in oil of the banks of the Hudson, was a drawing, clearly a sketch for the oil portrait. You had to listen to the speech with the proper expression of agreement, interest, satisfaction, your laugh ready for the jokes the president interjected and must have repeated at many similar dinners, and the seriousness when he enunciated the dim prospects of Europe and mentioned the college’s tradition of hospitality, identical to the nation’s, for three centuries a land of refuge for dissidents, molded by them, made great by spirits who had outgrown the borders of the old countries. Looking around him at this very table—he did so, turning his head slowly, his eyes enlarged behind his glasses—what did he see, he said, but the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants, with family names that declared so many diverse origins: Dutch, Scots, Huguenots, Portuguese, like his own Almeida forebears. And Spaniards, he said, looking first at Dr. Santos, and now it was time for a well-bred joke, let’s hope Dr. Santos isn’t descended from a grand inquisitor, provoking a chorus of laughter and an uncomfortable blush on the face of the woman. And finally, closing the circle of glances and allusions, President Almeida spoke to Ignacio Abel, not without demonstrating that he knew how his last name was pronounced and on which syllable the stress fell: the red face, the glass of wine raised a little higher, the brilliance of the fire and the large crystal chandelier reflecting on his smooth skin, his shirt front stretched by the size of his shoulders and chest muscles. He thinks he’s immortal, Abel thought as he smiled and waited for the end of the speech to give his thanks and dare a few sentences he’d been turning over in his mind for some time; he thinks he’ll never grow old, that no misfortune will ever befall him, that his house will never be burned, that he won’t be awakened at midnight and taken away in his pajamas to an empty lot and killed in front of headlights. President Almeida was now calling him our new colleague, distinguished guest, outstanding, leading, accomplished, but he looked sideways at Van Doren and Stevens as if asking for confirmation that the descriptions they’d put in his mouth were trustworthy. After the toast, the brief applause, the guest stood, dizzy from drink, a beginner again at his age, a guest of rather dubious standing, thinking of Judith Biely’s voice, his desire for her as immediate and physical as a pain in the joints, a desire he was conscious of as he prepared to say something, his mouth dry, walking on thin ice.

  He’ll remember that as they came out of a curve, the windshield was clear for a few seconds and the headlights illuminated a house in front of which a recently fallen tree had crushed a car: a group of people lashed by the wind looked at it with an astonished air under the revolving lights of an ambulance. Without taking his eyes off the highway, Stevens spoke optimistically so as not to alarm him or to dispel his own fear: he’d heard President Almeida, he had to begin his classes and start work on the library project, in a few days his house would be ready and he’d have an office and a studio, work was the best remedy for discouragement. The way you speak to a sick man without giving him hope of a cure. Assuring him up to a certain point, don’t forget your real condition, the distance that separates you from the healthy, they will be the first to point it out (as if certain of their immunity, certain they will never die). They arrived at the guesthouse, and when Ignacio Abel got out of the car the rain had stopped. The wind, calmer now, rustled in the treetops. Helpful, implacable, ridiculous, Stevens said goodbye and reminded him that he’d come for him at nine in the morning, blowing my bugle right under your window, immune to fatigue and the predictable hangover.

  He’ll remember entering the foyer and being enveloped by a darkness without limits, a total silence. He felt for the porcelain light switch, and when he finally found it he realized the power was out. The wind that an hour earlier had torn up trees by the roots must have knocked down utility poles. The house was much larger when you had to feel your way through it. Like moving through the apartment in Madrid on the nights of bombing raids. His hands brushing against the walls, his footsteps uncertain, his eyes slowly becoming used to the dark. Prudent, attentive to any eventuality, on the previous afternoon Stevens had shown him the closet next to the kitchen where brooms and defunct appliances were kept, along with an oil lamp and a supply of matches and candles. Touching the walls and bookshelves, Ignacio Abel crossed the library, reached the kitchen, tried to remember where the broom closet was. He lights the oil lamp almost by touch. The storm whistles in the distance, beyond the wooded hills and the river. He walks through the library again and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the mantel, a gray-haired man, his features exaggerated by the contrast of shadows and oily light. The grand piano, the books on the shelves, the chairs folded against the wall, the morning newspaper on the arm of an easy chair, formulate the limits of an expectation, tense in their immobility, like the face in the mirror. I’ve come so far to walk around a house at night as deserted and dark as the one I left in Madrid, empty now, perhaps, accumulating dust, abandoned to the mysterious decrepitude of places where no one lives, or destroyed by a bomb, obscenely exposed to light from the street in the half-ruined building. One night he was standing in the dark hall, and suddenly someone knocked at the door. Lost in time, in the tunnel of shadows the lamp has cast in the mirror, he slowly realizes he is hearing it not in his head, not in the past, not in Madrid, but now. Silence shattered, his heart racing, overcome with the certainty that Judith Biely stands at the door, calling him, not in a dream, not in a delirium of desire, but just a few steps away.