In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  But that moment hasn’t arrived yet, it belongs to a time that doesn’t yet exist, the future of a few hours away. In the dark where Judith has brought her lips to his ear to whisper the syllables of his name, Ignacio Abel can’t estimate the time, how long before the night ends. There are no pendulum clocks in the house, and no matter how attentive he is, he doesn’t hear church bells. He dreamed about them in the unusual silence of the ship’s cabin, and what he heard was the bell of a buoy. When he was a child he’d have sleepless nights, and at each hour he’d hear the metal of different bells in the churches of Madrid, and knew dawn was approaching when he heard on the paving stones the echoing hooves of the horses and mules on Calle Toledo, pulling carts loaded with produce. Under the blankets in his room, so small he could touch the cold stone ceiling with his hand, he’d hear his father, who got up long before dawn to go to construction sites. Wrapped in his cape, his cap pulled down over his face, a cigarette in his mouth, happy his son could stay in bed until daybreak, preparing his books and notebooks before leaving for school, dressed and combed like a rich man’s son, his boy who wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did or live when he was an adult in the unhealthy rooms of a porter’s lodging. Miguel, when he was little, was frightened of the dark. So frightened he continued to wet the bed until he was six or seven years old, when he would stretch out his hand looking for Lita’s and grasp it as he did in the first days of his life. His fever would shoot up, his scant hair glued to his forehead, and his chest, weak and convulsive, as agitated as a bird’s, his ribs visible beneath his helpless flesh. How far away everything was, and how near. When Ignacio was a boy, he was afraid to go down to the cellar with the low vaulted ceiling in his apartment building on Calle Toledo. He’d open the door and from the first stone step begin the descent into a dense, damp darkness where he could hear the rats’ scratching. On this night the building residents have gone down to take shelter in the cellar he hasn’t visited for more than thirty years, and when the bombs fell close by, the floor and walls would reverberate and the dirty bulb hanging from the ceiling, its light reduced to the red glow of the filament, would tremble like a candle and go out, dissolving into darkness the silhouettes huddled together, whispering, moaning. The night is a bottomless well where everything seems lost and everything continues to live and endure, at least for a certain time, as long as the memory remains clear and the mind lucid in the person lying with eyes open, attentive to the sounds taking shape in what seemed to be silence, trying to guess by the breathing if the other person’s still awake or has been carried away by the somnolence of satisfied desire. In the hospital room, beside her mother’s bed, Judith would doze in spite of the uncomfortable chair, and at the very moment she fell asleep she would wake with a start, hearing slurred speech or a moan caused by the gradual tapering off of the effect of morphine, or worse, alarmed by the silence, missing her mother’s ragged breathing, fearing she’d died alone while Judith was sleeping, that her mother had called or moaned and she hadn’t awakened. The dead haven’t yet left the house where they lived, and their slow disappearance into the dark has already begun; they’re already strangers. Ignacio Abel approached the open coffin his father lay in, and when he looked he no longer knew him. In the light of the candles, his father’s face was yellow and swollen, as if his mouth and nose had been lightly flattened under glass; the hands that emerged from the cuffs of his shirt and were crossed on his chest were those of another man: bloodless, an old man’s hands, the nails prominent and the fingers curved and thin, the opposite of his father’s hands, broad, blunt, solid, dark, his father who hasn’t appeared in his dreams for many years, so distant, like the gas lamps that lit Calle Toledo and like the Madrid Ignacio Abel doesn’t want to think about now and Judith won’t recognize when she returns and finds no lights, all of Madrid in darkness and silence like the bottom of the sea, perhaps crossed by headlights and flashlights that pierce the thick blackness like divers’ lamps. In the New York night, neon signs floated in the dark, pink or yellow or blue silhouettes of steaming cups of coffee, or spirals of cigarette smoke, or bubbles ascending from glasses of champagne. Between sleep and consciousness images dissolve without becoming completely formed, and the border between memory and imagination is as fluid as the one that joins and separates bodies wrapped in an embrace composed equally of weariness and desire. Judith’s voice that said his name so clearly in his ear might also have sounded in a half-sleep or a dream, at the exact moment Ignacio Abel has fallen asleep, as if floating in the serene immobility of time. It’s Judith who remains awake, watching over him, the man who’s become more attentive and more fragile, who was almost murdered without her knowing it. I see her in profile, more clearly as dawn breaks, sitting against the back of the bed, restless now, fearful, anxious, impatient, resolved, as clearheaded as if she’d never feel the need to sleep, listening to the freight trains, the masculine breathing beside her, the wind in the trees, the call of a bird, discovering the first, still uncertain signs of dawn, the first gray light of the first day of her journey, of a tomorrow she can’t make out and I can’t imagine, her future unknown and lost in the great night of time.

  sacristan

  WE HAVE MADE OUR LIVES far away from our small city, but we just can’t get used to being away from it, and we like to nurture our nostalgia when it has been a while since we’ve been back, so sometimes we exaggerate our accent when talking among ourselves, and use the common words and expressions that we’ve been storing up over the years and that our children can vaguely understand from having heard them so often. Godino, the secretary of our regional association—which has been rescued from its dismal lethargy thanks to his enthusiasm and dynamism—regularly organizes meals where we enjoy the food and recipes of our homeland, and if we are disgruntled that our gastronomy is as little known by foreigners as our monumental architecture or our Holy Week, we like having dishes that no one knows about, and giving them names that have meaning only to us. Oh, there’s nothing like our gordal and cornezuelo olives! Godino exclaims, the plump ones and the long, pointed ones! Our rolls, our borrachuelos—we dream of those sugar-sprinkled pastries with a light touch of brandy—our layered pasta, our Easter cakes, our morcilla—our sausage has rice, not onion—our typical gazpacho, which is nothing at all like Andalusian gazpacho, and our wild-artichoke salad ... In the private room of the Museo del Jamón, where those of us on the directors’ council often meet, Godino gluttonously hacks off a piece of bread and before dipping it into the bowl of steaming morcilla makes a gesture like a benediction and recites these lines:

  Morcilla, blessed lady,

  worthy of our veneration.

  The owner of the Museo is a countryman of ours who, as Godino says, often personally oversees the catering of our feasts, in which there isn’t a single ingredient that hasn’t come from our city, not even the bread, which is baked in La Trini’s oven, the very oven that to this day produces the mouthwatering madeleines and the Holy Week cakes with a hard-boiled egg in the center that we loved so much when we were kids. Now, to tell the truth, we realize that the oily dough sits a little heavy on our stomachs, and though in our conversations we keep praising the savor of those hornazos, which are absolutely unique in the world and no one but us knows the name of, if we start eating one, we quit before we’re through, even though it’s painful to waste food—something our mothers always taught us. We remember the early days in Madrid, when we used to go to the bus station to pick up a food package sent from home: cardboard boxes carefully sealed with tape and tightly tied with cord, bringing from across all that distance the undiluted aroma of the family kitchen, the delicious abundance of all the things we have missed and yearned for in Madrid: butifarros and chorizos, sausages from the recent butchering, borrachuelos sparkling with sugar, even a glass jar filled with boiled red pepper salad seasoned with olive oil, the greatest delicacy you can ask for in a lifetime. For a while the dim interior of the armoire in our boardinghouse room would take on the su
cculent and mysterious penumbra of those cupboards where we kept food in the days before the advent of refrigerators. (Now when I tell my children that back when I was their age there was no refrigerator or television in my house, they don’t believe it, or worse yet, they look at me as if I were a caveman.)

  We had been away from our homes and our city for long, long months, but the smell and taste of them offered the same consolation as a letter, the same profound happiness and melancholy we felt after talking on the phone with our mothers or sweethearts. Our children, who spend the whole day glued to the telephone, talking for hours with someone they’ve seen only a short while before, can’t believe that for us, not only in our childhood but our early teens as well, the telephone was still a novelty, at least in ordinary families, and because the system wasn’t as yet automated, calling from one city to another—ringing someone up, as we said then—was a rather difficult undertaking that often meant standing in line for hours, waiting your turn in a public telephone office crammed with people. I’m not exactly an old man (although at times my wife says I seem ancient enough), but I remember when I had to call my mother at a neighbor’s house and wait until they went to get her, all the while hearing footsteps in the wooden booth at the telephone company on the Gran Vía. Finally I would hear her voice and be overcome by an anguish I have felt only rarely since, a sensation of being far away and of having left my mother to grow old alone. We both would be nearly tongue-tied, because we used that exotic instrument so seldom that it made us very nervous, and we were consumed by the thought of how much we were paying for a conversation in which we barely managed to exchange a few formalities as trite as those in our letters: Are you well? Have you been behaving? Don’t forget to wear your overcoat when you go out in the morning, it’s getting cold. You had to swallow hard to work up the nerve to ask the person you were talking with to send a food package, or a money order. You hung up the telephone and suddenly all that distance was real again, and with that, besides the desolation of going outside on a Sunday evening, there was the contemptible relief of having put behind you an uncomfortable conversation in which you had nothing to say.