In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  35

  SHE STANDS BEFORE HIM, lit by the lamp he holds. At the open door, the damp breeze from the woods blows in his face, his eyes blinded by the headlights of a car parked in front of the house, its motor running. He looks at her and doesn’t say anything, neither one says anything, while the burbling of the motor continues and the windshield wipers click. The light strikes her face at an angle, her eyes, her damp hair now stylishly cut, shorter and not combed back but with a part and a lock of hair on one side that she brushes off her face with a gesture familiar and at the same time foreign, sudden, different. They look at each other without moving, his left hand holding the lamp, his right still on the doorknob. He looks at the car, its motor running and headlights on, in which he instantly fears there’s someone, a man, who’s come with her and at any moment will reclaim her by blowing the horn. “I thought nobody was in, I didn’t see a light,” she says in Spanish. Her voice, darker than he remembered it, has a more pronounced American accent. Pensé que no había nadie: so much time longing for this voice, the lips that form the words, not knowing how to invoke it, believing at times he’d heard it saying his name in the commotion of a street, a station, whispering close to his ear moments before waking. He takes a step toward her, or only takes his hand off the doorknob, as Judith draws back in an almost invisible gesture. He’s afraid if he moves or says anything, he’ll lose her; he’s afraid she’ll turn on her heels and get back in the car or vanish into the woods just as she’s emerged from them. Judith starts to move as if to turn but remains still, looking at him, a corner of her mouth curving into the beginning of a smile. In the faint, close light of the lamp her face is less familiar because the short hair exaggerates her features: her large mouth, the triangle of her cheekbones and chin, the line of her jaw. Ignacio Abel doesn’t move the hand that would have liked to caress her, but his eyes transmit to his fingers the sensation of touching her skin. Judith points at the car and says, now in English, “I’d better turn it off.”

  What surprised her most about Ignacio Abel was his dark suit, so European and old-fashioned, and how thin he was, his eyes sunk into their sockets. An attempt to bridge the distance between them causes an imperceptible retreat. Not a step back but a subtle gesture, little more than the dilation of a pupil, the bat of an eyelid. How strange to have once been so intimate with this middle-aged stranger whom she might now pass on any street without turning her head. They don’t know how to act, what to say. Nothing dissolves as swiftly as physical intimacy. The gulf between them at the café in Madrid where they met for the last time is now in the doorway of this house, the slash of a knife in the space between their two bodies.

  “I’d better turn it off”: Ignacio Abel deciphered the words only once he sees them demonstrated by her actions. As Judith turns her back and walks to the car, he recognizes the self-confidence, the movement of her shoulders, her hands. He registers her face and presence as slowly as the words. The pride in her shoulders, the slight inclination of her head, her hips hugged by trousers. Her haircut modifies her face as it did when he’d see her wearing it pulled back, and she was more herself and at the same time another Judith, whom he desired even more because she was unexpected. She returns from the car, and as she climbs the stone steps, she reenters the circle of light from the lamp. Now she almost smiles at him when she says something he translates after hearing it: “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” He looks at her as if gradually recognizing the features he’d touched in the dark, when he breathed in the smell of her skin and hair with his eyes closed. She smells of herself and her old cologne and fatigue and the tension of many hours’ traveling. She smells of the lipstick she put on a few minutes ago. Ignacio Abel looks at her face, at the details memory did not preserve and that were not reflected in the partial lie of photographs. Under her blouse and the wide-bottom trousers that narrow to encircle her waist, her beautiful tired body, so close to him, inaccessible now to his hands and eyes. The opened button on her blouse, the décolletage in shadow, the quiver of her breathing, red lips, gleaming in the light, the fatigued face she observed in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car, still motionless behind the wheel. A feeling of pity for him has taken her by surprise, lowered her guard. A troubling pity that would offend him if he ever suspected it, and a beginning of tenderness that doesn’t resemble what she felt in the old days, the inexplicable past of only a few months ago. Then, Ignacio Abel looked no more than forty. When he opened the door, and even more so when she came back from the car, she saw a man much older, awkward, as if frightened, staring at her as he rigidly held up the oil lamp. The dark pinstriped suit, the double-breasted jacket with the wide lapels—wasn’t it the one he wore the day of his talk at the Residence, and again at Van Doren’s house?—now looks secondhand. The loosened tie encircles a neck that is almost an old man’s. She sees his awkwardness, his alarm, not the yearning for closeness he had then, the physical affirmation of male desire, the instinctive arrogance. He looks shorter, but it’s because now, unlike then, his shoulders are slightly rounded and his posture diminished and no doubt exaggerated by how loose his suit is. She wants to tell him not to hunch over, to straighten his shoulders. She could extend her hand and touch his face, noting the rough stubble of beard that was there by the time they’d meet in the late afternoon. She recovers the sensation of burying her fingertips in his thick hair, now grayer and lacking the sheen it had when he wore it combed back. “Me dejarás entrar?” she says, changing to Spanish, and the open smile on her face is a truce, almost a welcome to the side of the world where they find themselves now. “I’m dying to use the bathroom.”

  He hears her footsteps upstairs. He pays attention: he hears her urinate, then the water in the pipes, the sink faucet. Lying in bed, he’d listen to her wash in the wretched bathroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, then turn his face to see her appear naked in the doorway, smelling of the soap and cologne she’d brought in her toiletries bag. She closed the door and turned on the faucet before sitting down to urinate: she told him it embarrassed her to have him hear her. Sexual excitement returns like a surprise, retrieved by memory and by Judith’s presence on the floor above in this large house where only a few minutes ago no human closeness seemed possible, only the creaking and chafing of the wood floors, the gurgle of steam in the heating pipes. She told him she was cold and hungry. While he listens to her in the bathroom, he has stirred up the fire in the library and looked for something to eat in the pantry and refrigerator. The flames fill the library with a red glow where shadows oscillate like plants under water. The windowpanes are mirrors where Ignacio Abel moves accompanied by his shadow, looking for things with a male lack of confidence: sliced salami, rye bread, an apple, the tablecloth the maid spread out for his breakfast, a fork and a knife, a glass of water. He finds a beer in the refrigerator and nervously looks through drawers for an opener. Doing something has calmed him, given him a sense of reality as he waits for Judith to come down from the second floor and listens to her footsteps: the water in the sink is turned off and the door to the bathroom is closed; she walks slowly along the hall, her way lit by a small candle; she descends the stairs. She sees him standing by the fire and would like to shake him, wake him up, if only to see the man she had left with so great an effort of courage and pride, the man who told her lies or half-truths she chose to believe, closing her eyes as deliberately as she let herself be driven by him in his car, her self-respect suspended, just like so many undertakings in her life, her body abandoned in the seat as his right hand searched for hers or caressed her between her thighs while music played on the radio. Her anger with him gave her a confidence she misses now. If there’s no trace of danger in him, the responsibility and remorse for her own past actions, for what almost happened, are hers alone: the woman with wide hips and gray in her hair who tried to drown, the humiliation of discovering a deception that she, Judith, was complicit in, for she had acceded to a lie no love could shroud. When she saw them together that time at
the Residence, she thought Ignacio Abel was younger than Adela. Now in the library she sees him in the light of the fire and thinks that by some strange shortcut in time he’s reached his wife’s age and belongs to the same world, the bureaucratic Catholic middle class of Madrid she’d seen leaving churches on Sunday mornings, going to tearooms on the Carrera de San Jerónimo, the married couples so serious, men and women in dark clothing, the women wearing veils. She wants to shake him, to feel the danger again and be capable of rejecting it, or to spare herself the pity she feels for him, the self-pity she sees in him, the humiliation of having lost her and not being desired by her; the precarious thread from which hung the fiction of his masculinity, further undermined by the fear and suffering of war. It’s also the war she sees in his eyes, she thinks, in the weakening of his shoulders and arms, the loose skin under his chin.

  “I look at you and I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I’ll leave soon.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “It was on my way. A detour.”

  “You’ll stay the night. There are plenty of rooms.”

  “And what would your colleagues think if they saw me leave here in the morning? You don’t know what these places are like. Wellesley’s the same way. They know everything and gossip. Like a novel by Galdós, but with professors as protagonists.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come.”

  “I’ll go as soon as I’ve eaten something and rested a bit. I can be in New York in two hours.”

  “Don’t you have to teach class tomorrow?”

  “I’ve left that job.”

  “But I thought they just hired you.”

  “Philip tells you everything.”

  “Is it true you’re working with Salinas?”

  “Worked. I know you don’t like him, but he does remind me of you.”

  “Will his wife and children be joining him soon?”

  “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know whether his contract will be renewed for next year. He’s discouraged when he doesn’t get letters or news from Spain, and even more discouraged when he does. It’s easy in these places to become isolated.”

  “I just arrived yesterday and already it seems I’ve been here a long time.”

  “Poor Professor Salinas tells me he misses Madrid a great deal. Whenever he can he escapes to New York for the weekend. But he says the hardest thing for him is getting used to eating without wine.”

  “Does he have any hope of going back to Spain?”

  “What about you? You left not long ago. You’re better informed than he is.”

  “I read the papers here and listen to the radio and everybody seems convinced that Franco’s about to enter Madrid.”

  “He hasn’t entered yet. With a little luck he never will.”

  “And what do you know? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I don’t believe the American newspapers or radio networks are telling the truth. They belong to the big corporations, and their owners have supported Franco from day one, just like the Catholic Church.”

  “This doesn’t sound like you. More like the talk at a meeting the other day in New York.”

  “Were you there? Last Saturday? In Union Square?”

  “I looked at the faces of all the women, hoping to see yours.”

  “The last thing I’d have expected would’ve been to run into you.”

  “I’ve been hoping to run into you since the day you walked out of the café.”

  “It was moving, all those people filling the square. Some climbed the trees and the statue of George Washington. I saw the Republican flag and heard the ‘Himno de Riego’ and ‘The Internationale’ and couldn’t stop crying.”

  “Good intentions, but no one’s helping. They look at us as if we had the plague, as if we were lepers. In a hotel in Paris they didn’t want to give me a room when they saw my Spanish passport. They probably thought I’d fill the bed with lice. Civilized opinion seems to be that it’s a good idea to leave us alone so we can keep killing one another until we grow tired of it. They look at us like those tourists who go to bullfights, ready to be excited or horrified, to enjoy being horrified in order to feel more civilized than us. And the fact is, they’re not altogether wrong, given the spectacle we’re offering them.”

  “It isn’t right for you to say that. The military and the Falangists rebelled against the Republic. They haven’t been defeated yet only because they have the help of Mussolini and Hitler.”

  “You’re talking again as if you were at a meeting.”

  “Aren’t I speaking the truth?”

  “The truth is so complicated nobody wants to hear it.”

  “If you know it, explain it to me.”

  “I probably left so I wouldn’t see it. Truth seen up close is an ugly thing.”

  “I don’t think you can live with your eyes closed.”

  “And why not? Most people do and it’s not hard. I’m not talking about people outside Spain, who after all may not know about the war, or read about it in the paper and care less than they do about a soccer game. Even in Madrid I know many people who’ve managed not to know what’s happening or at least act as if they didn’t. They lead perfectly normal lives, believe it or not. They adopt the new style and the new vocabulary. But I imagine I’d get used to it if I had stayed, at least if I was lucky and they didn’t kill me.”

  “Why would they kill you?”

  “For any reason. On a whim, or by mistake, or for no reason, by chance. Killing an unarmed, peaceful person is the easiest thing in the world. You don’t know how easy—like putting out a candle. Unless the executioner is clumsy or gets nervous or doesn’t know how to handle a rifle. Then it can seem endless. Like bullfights when the butchers miss with the sword or dagger.”

  “The newspapers here publish terrible lies about what’s going on in Madrid.”

  “Some of those lies are true. The worst ones.”

  “The others commit worse crimes. They started it. They’re to blame.”

  “Reason and justice are on your side.”

  “I don’t like such abstractions. You didn’t use them before.”

  “You did. That afternoon we talked for hours in the bar at the Hotel Florida. I was struck by how seriously you took it. It annoyed you when Philip Van Doren spoke contemptuously about the Republic and praised the Soviet Union and Germany in his snobbish way. You said you were Republican because you believed in reason and justice. I liked your passion.”

  “I didn’t remember our talking about those things.”

  “Don’t you think the same way anymore?”

  “What I think is that killing doesn’t bring about reason and justice.”

  “If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself.”

  “And do you have the right to kill innocents?”

  “I was afraid something might’ve happened to you.”

  “Then you didn’t think everything they were saying was a lie.”

  “And you came close?”

  “You could’ve written and asked.”

  “I’m asking now.”

  “I was saved by accident, at the last moment. You’ll understand if I don’t really feel like going back.”

  They have to learn to speak to each other again, to adjust the tone of their voices, to smooth away the strangeness, to move close to each other gradually, naturally, slowly, the way one learns to walk again after recovering from an accident, when you discover that it took no time for your legs to lose their muscle tone and the habit of taking steps. Evasive eyes no longer know how to hold a stare; with greater difficulty mouths form words in another language that were once habitual. Perhaps it’s not that they have become strangers in so short a time, but that they see each other for the first time in a light not clouded by desire. It’s not the changes that have occurred during their separation but the reality not seen when it was there every day. They felt their way at first, asking neutral questions. I see
you’ve had a haircut; this morning, before I left on the trip, do you like it? Of course I do; you don’t like it; I have to get used to it; you always wore it longer and curlier; I didn’t have time to go to a hairdresser. Neither one has said the other’s name yet. Silence follows each question; they almost count the seconds it takes for words to arrive again, as if they didn’t depend on the will of either one. A nuance, a barely suggested tone of intimacy miscarries. An isolated phrase sounds as if it had been memorized for a performance, an overly literal exercise in good manners in a language class. “May I use the bathroom?” she said when she finally came in, when he closed the door and they found themselves alone in the house. While she ate, he observed her in silence as he sat on the other side of the table in the library, in the somewhat incongruous formality of his dark suit and tie, relieved she wasn’t looking at him, a healthy young woman unhurriedly satisfying her hunger after having driven for several hours, drinking from the bottle of beer, more American than he remembered now that he sees her in her own country. She’s put salami between two slices of bread and eats it in vigorous mouthfuls. His desire for her is more of a pain than pure sexual appetite. It’s the pain in his joints, the pit of his stomach. Since he hasn’t set out napkins, Judith wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. What he finds unfamiliar and distant in her must have to do with the presence of another man. Jealousy is a physical snakebite, a toxic substance circulating in his blood. In photographs, in memories, Judith’s beauty had a blurred quality, as if he were looking at her through a faint gauze filter. The word “beautiful” can’t exactly be applied to the woman Ignacio Abel sees before him, with her short hair and simple shirt, her ringless hands that hold the sandwich of rye bread and salami and open the bottle of beer with such ease. There’s something more carnal, raw, excessive in the peremptoriness of her features: her nose, large mouth, pronounced chin, the hard shape of bone beneath the skin. He likes her even more, and more than ever. He especially likes what’s taken him by surprise because he didn’t see it before and sees it now. Lack of hope and the certainty he’d lost her allow him to enjoy a painful objectivity. Her existence is enough: the unexpected gift of having her near.