In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “Why are we talking as if we didn’t know each other?” said Judith. “I hear your voice but it doesn’t sound like your voice. And I recognize mine even less. I’ve thought a great deal about the things I’d say to you if I saw you again, but now I don’t like having said any of it. We talk and words betray us. You think of them and when you say them out loud they mean something else. What the words say has nothing to do with us. They become harsher, less true. Even though they tell the truth, it would be better not to have said them. You know who I am and I know who you are. We talk as if we didn’t know each other, but what we’ve experienced together can’t be gone, so there must be a lie in what we’ve said.”

  “But you’ve decided to break with me.”

  “I haven’t decided it. I’ve looked squarely at the facts. I was prepared to live with you. The only thing you had to do not to lose me was act according to the feelings you said you had for me. But I’m not reproaching you. I think I know you well enough and can see things through your eyes. Do you remember Salinas’s poem? I don’t know how long it took me to decipher the syntax. Que hay otro ser por el que miro el mundo . . .”

  “. . . porque me está queriendo con sus ojos . . .”

  “It’s the first time I’ve heard you recite a poem.”

  “Only those lines. I learned them listening to you.”

  “I asked you to read them for me to be sure of the accents. Do you remember?”

  “I remember everything. I have all the times we were together marked down in a notebook. The day, the place, the time.”

  “I understand the love you feel for your children and the difficulty in leaving them. But in your country there’s a divorce law. People who are in love, and certain of their love, marry. And to do it, sometimes they have to get divorced first. It’s painful but fair. To win something, you have to lose something. The harm you might have done by staying can be greater than the harm you’ve done by leaving. I don’t want to think about the person I would have become if I hadn’t divorced, the poison I’d have inside me. I don’t want to think and feel one way and act in another. I liked going to bed with you, but I would have liked it much more if afterward I could have walked quietly in Madrid holding your arm or stopped for you at your office. You thought our meeting secretly was romantic. You say you’re not interested in literature, but in this you were much more literary than I was. It struck me that what we were doing is called ‘having an adventure’ in Spanish. I didn’t like hiding. I didn’t see any adventure in going to that house of assignation or those sad, empty cafés you took me to where nobody would know you. I only did it because I was so in love.”

  “You were in love.”

  “I still am. More than I thought. If I’d known how vulnerable I was, I wouldn’t have come. You see, I’m not hiding anything from you. But it’ll pass in time, when I leave here and have no expectation of seeing you.”

  “So you can think and feel one way and act another.”

  “What I think and feel is that I don’t want to have an adventure with a married man even if I’m in love with him. But I also don’t want to spoil the memory of what I’ve experienced. I can’t reproach you for anything. You didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. If we’d continued as lovers for a little longer, everything would have been debased. It was already beginning, and you and I knew it. Think of that morning in that awful café when you came from the hospital and your wife was still in a coma. We were no longer worthy of what we’d been. We were like those seedy couples we saw at other tables. Old men with young girls. Lovers who looked as embittered and bored as married couples. We looked at each other for a while, not recognizing each other, reproaching ourselves. It was dirtier than making love in a bed that belonged to Madame Mathilde. If I couldn’t have you for myself, the best thing was for me to leave, and then at least the memory would remain intact.”

  He understood with a strange sense of relief, looking into her eyes, that Judith was absolutely right: there was no longer any reason, any excuse, for not telling the truth. By examining the past with clarity, what they were doing was restoring it, seeking shelter in it. What they didn’t say now they probably would never say. They would have to be careful that their true words didn’t mean something unintended or acquire on their own an edge of resentment or injury. Her suitcase was by the library door. Tomorrow it would be as easy for her to put it in the back seat of the car as it had been for her to bring it in. With an ease he’d never have if he sat on the floor, Judith hugged her knees and leaned her chin on them, her feet, projecting from her wide trousers, close together. He hasn’t known anyone who looks and listens so attentively, with such longing to learn, as alert to words as to silences and subtle gestures, exercising with the same passionate intensity both her intuition and her reason, asking, guessing, examining herself with a lucidity as incorruptible as her curiosity. But now her gaze, her questions, didn’t frighten him. An advantage of having lost everything was that there no longer was anything to lose. Just as it had once been, their conversation wasn’t composed only of words: their eyes were a part of it, the proximity of their bodies, pure physical presence their magnet, the timbre of their voices and the darkness around them, the movements of Judith’s lips, the corners of her mouth, the faint music on the radio and the rain on the windowpanes, the night that was advancing and yet seemed halted, begun long ago and without a visible ending, without a dawn.

  He told her that throughout the summer in Madrid his longing for her had been much more intolerable than for his children; that he recalled each meeting in the tiny notes coded to seem like work-related appointments and went back to the places where they’d been together as humiliated as a dog searching for a lost trail; that in everything and in spite of his guilt it had been a relief not to have to face Adela’s permanent expression of sacrifice and affront; that in the disorder and irresponsibility of the war he’d found a kind of unspeakable liberation; that he masturbated almost every night in the large double bed with the dirty sheets thinking of her, looking at her photographs, reading her letters. He told her that when the militiamen stopped him in University City and took him to a wall of the Philosophy Building to shoot him, they had to lift him because his legs didn’t hold him and he pissed down his trousers and the urine soaked one of his shoes, and as he walked he heard the liquid squishing at each step he took; and when he got home he took a shower and no matter how much he soaped himself he still smelled of urine and fear; and while they searched his briefcase filled with plans and technical reports and asked if they weren’t maps of the front meant to guide the enemy in their advance toward Madrid, what he feared was that they’d discover her letters and photos and take them; he didn’t feel terror at dying but passive indifference, an acceptance disturbed only by the sorrow of thinking he wouldn’t see her again, wouldn’t see his children become adults. Judith looked at him, against the fire, her eyes bright, the changing light of the flames molding the delicate bones beneath her skin, and he swallowed and kept talking. Behind him dance music played on the radio as if from a distant, large, empty ballroom, the band playing and the filigrees of the clarinet followed by the singer’s guileless, high-pitched voice, scattered applause, and the announcer’s excessive enthusiasm as he recited song titles and commercials. He told her he’d taken it for granted that the sexual upheaval he experienced for the first time with his Hungarian lover in Weimar when he was in his thirties would never be repeated. The women who’d offered themselves in Madrid, painted and livid beneath the gaslights in certain alleys when he was young, had excited him and at the same time produced panic in him, and a revulsion not so much toward them as toward himself, toward his instinctual desire for them and the shame that made him blush and walk faster if they called to him. He hadn’t believed a woman could really feel pleasure with him. Adela would ask him to turn off the light and she’d remain motionless, perhaps moan faintly in the heavy darkness of their bedroom; his Hungarian lover squeezed her eyelids s
hut and rhythmically stroked herself while he labored on top of her, as irrelevant as the insect that pollinates a flower, joined to each other and both self-absorbed and busy with their own lust. He told Judith that the first time he touched her he’d noticed a vibration both delicate and powerful that he didn’t know existed. He found her hand and instead of moving it away she pressed his, and it was as if they were embracing (they both remembered: in the car, driving up the Castellana, the radio playing, his left hand on the wheel, the right caressing Judith’s thighs, the headlights illuminating groves of trees and fences and the façades of palaces); as he discovered her, he’d been discovering himself, being touched, kissed, nibbled, explored, guided by her. He’d never had friends, he told her, or real conversations with anyone, least of all sexual conversations, which, he observed, other men were so fond of. Only when he met her did he realize the solitary life he’d always led, from the time he was a child and his parents didn’t let him leave the porter’s quarters except to go to school, for fear he’d get lost in the hustle of the neighborhood, or the violent boys from the outskirts would hit him, or he’d catch a disease. The only child of parents who were too old; his father dead when he was thirteen; keeping vigil over his dead mother when he was twenty-one and returning on foot to the empty apartment on Calle Toledo from the distant East Cemetery, his feet aching in tight boots, enveloped in the derby hat and black cape that had belonged to his father; so young and a figure from the last century, with a burden of excessive responsibilities that would never be alleviated; his course of study, the inhuman privations to finish it, using up his father’s legacy; then examinations, the weight of his engagement, the new burden quickly made heavier by children. Strange, but now was the first time he felt something resembling relief, though it was inseparable from the feeling of dispossession. He wouldn’t hold anything back, he told Judith, sitting across from her, sunk like an invalid into the leather armchair, his palms rubbing the worn part of the upholstery. Only with her had he discovered and now regained what he’d never known could be so pleasurable, the habit of conversing, explaining himself to himself, confirming immediate affinities in what until then he’d thought of as solitary sensations and thoughts. Always his fear of inconveniencing, his slowness in finding the exact words and the courage to say them, always the temptation of silence and conformity, the permanent frustration of feeling like a guest in his own house and in a life that was the only one he had and yet had never belonged to him. Because Judith listened, he’d learned to explain himself to another person. When she disappeared, as oppressive as her absence was the great bell jar of silence falling over him again when he’d already lost the habit of living inside it, of looking at everything from behind the glass of indifference, distance, and bitterness. But now he’d lost even the more or less unconscious scrupulousness about saying things she’d like to hear, that would make her fall in love. With no hope of seducing her again, almost convinced not only of the uselessness but also the moral baseness of attempting to, he said what he thought, what he was, and what he often didn’t acknowledge even to himself. Remorse for having left wasn’t strong enough to provoke in him a real longing for Spain, he told her. The weight of responsibility had for too many years been as oppressive as the burden of his ambition, including his dark, unconfessed vanity, and at that moment, he told her, on that night, he felt relieved of all three—vanity, responsibility, ambition—though he didn’t know for how long or when guilt or nostalgia would overpower him and make him distort both memories and desires. He didn’t want to cause grief. He didn’t want to pretend he’d have preferred to be in Madrid now, impotently witnessing the destruction of his city, the disaster of a delirious revolution that burned churches and left banks intact, the carnival of parades and murders, the cold villainy and the squandered heroism. He didn’t believe that Salinas, in his comfortable position as a visiting professor at Wellesley College, felt as much anguish as he showed when he talked to her, basically flattered by the cordiality of so young and attractive a woman who spoke Spanish with that clear accent between American and Madrilenian, and who flattered him with an admiration that must act like a balm to his professor’s vanity, a shell of his former brilliance. Of course he’d like the Republic to win, he told her, but he wasn’t sure what kind of republic there’d be in Spain when the war was over, or whether he’d be permitted to return, or whether he wanted to. Everything destroyed with so much fury had to be rebuilt; the trees uprooted by bombs or cut down for firewood replanted; systems of pipes that had been blown up and railroad tracks twisted in the air above mountains of paving stones relaid; bridges dynamited by retreating armies reconstructed; telephone posts and lines that had cost so much to install raised again. But who would resuscitate the dead or return arms or legs to the mutilated, paint the lost canvases or print the unique books burned in bonfires, palliate mourning or hatred, reconstruct the libraries and churches and laboratories and apartment buildings so difficult to build and demolished in the course of an afternoon, a single night. And how could Spain be governed by the same fools, criminals, and misguided men who’d dragged her to disaster, each with his degree of irresponsibility and irrationality, all, with few exceptions, immune to remorse and the bitter wisdom of those who’ve learned from experience. There was something his work had taught him: it takes a long time to bring a building to completion, because no matter how much effort you put into it, things grow with organic slowness; but the instantaneousness of destruction is resplendent, the spurt of gasoline and the flame that rises devouring everything, the shot that fells a man as strong as a tree. He told her that what astonished him most was to have been so wrong about everything, especially the things he was surest of; to have trusted the solidity of everything that collapsed overnight, without drama, almost effortlessly; to have been so wrong about himself, believing he was a rationalist, a pragmatist, a sarcastic witness to the ideological ravings of those who predicted with all seriousness the coming of the dictatorship of the proletariat or Libertarian Communism, those convinced that by abolishing money and taking up nudism or Esperanto or free love, paradise would be established on earth, the idolaters of Stalin or Mussolini, those who roared with a clenched fist or an open hand; believing himself to be a skeptic, he’d been more deluded than any of them, imagining he was concerned only with what could be calculated and measured, what produced a modest but indisputable benefit, some progress. But progress was precisely what was being denied in Spain: not the abolition of property and money, apparently advanced successfully in certain towns in Aragón, not the great Soviet theater of giant posters of Lenin and Stalin hanging in the streets and proletarian battalions parading with arrogant, unanimous discipline, but tangible progress, the methodical, gradual development of technical inventions, everything that to him had seemed earthbound and undeniable, far from the verbose nonsense of visionaries, what he’d discussed so often with Negrín—good nutrition, daily milk in schools to strengthen the bones of poor children, spacious, airy housing, and health education so women would not be encumbered by unwanted children. No other dream had turned out to be more foolish; common sense was the most discredited of the utopias. But how was it possible not to have believed in progress, believed the present and future were the luminous country where one belonged, unlike the sad inhabitants of the past, confined to a decrepit realm he knew well because he’d spent the first part of his life there. You don’t know what I remember, he told her: the Madrid of the last century, women in black shawls and men with beards and large mustaches and capes covering their mouths in winter, streetcars pulled by mules, and carts with creaking wooden wheels slowly climbing the slope of Calle Toledo. Progress hadn’t been an illusion of brains overheated by verbal vapors: he’d witnessed the explosion of electric streetcars and automobiles, telephones and movie projectors, all the things that disconcerted or terrified his parents, who, after all, were inhabitants of the somber country of the past, his mother especially, who’d lived a few years longer, who at th
e end of her life didn’t dare cross the street for fear of speeding vehicles, who was frightened each time the phone that had been installed in the porter’s lodging rang, who didn’t venture beyond the Plaza Mayor for fear of everything, even the glare of illuminated signs that made her dizzy, who never got in a car or took an elevator. Progress had the inevitability of a river’s abundant current. Buildings were taller, and because of electric lights, night didn’t plunge the city into darkness. Progress was more undeniable because he’d seen it with his own eyes when he traveled in Europe. What already existed in Paris or Berlin wouldn’t take long to reach Madrid. He’d disbelieved the political and visionary fervor of some of his teachers in Weimar, but not the luminous reality of the architectures and forms he learned from them. Human intelligence exploded in the austere model of a house, or in one of those ordinary objects whose internal laws Professor Rossman demonstrated to them, or in the drawings as faint as dreams in appearance and yet as precise as the typographies Paul Klee designed in his classes. My children were going to have a life better than mine, just as I’d had a life better than my parents’, he told her. The Republic had come thanks not to any conspiracy but to the natural impulse of things, by virtue of which the monarchy was an antique as decrepit as silent movies or the mule drivers’ carts swept off the Cava Baja by the eruption of trucks and buses. But now, when night fell, Madrid was darker and more dangerous and emptier than a medieval forest, and human beings behaved like jackals, like primitive hordes armed not with sticks or axes or stones but with rifles. He told her about the sensation of emerging onto the Gran Vía from a metro station after a bombing and finding himself lost between two narrow passes of darkness, treading on broken glass, tripping over rubble, among frightened shadows in doorways, and with ordinary people transformed into fugitive beasts or hunters and executioners. He’d been wrong about everything, but especially about himself, his place in time. All his life thinking he belonged to the present and the future, and now beginning to grasp that he felt so out of place because his country was the past.