In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Before he left, Ignacio Abel used a red pencil to cross out the date on the calendar behind his desk, next to the one for the following year, on which only one date was highlighted, the day in October marked for the inauguration of University City, when the model and the real landscape would mirror each other. Black and red numbers measured the white calendar space that was his daily life, imposing a grid of working days and a line as straight as an arrow’s trajectory, at once distressing and calming. Time so swift, work so slow and difficult, the process by which the neat lines of a plan or the weightless volumes of a model were transformed into foundations, walls, tiled roofs. The time that vanished day after day for the past six years: numbers lodged in the identical squares of each calendar day, on the curvature of a clock’s sphere, the watch he wore on his wrist and the clock on the office wall, which now showed six o’clock. “The president of the Republic wants to be certain an inauguration will take place before the end of his term,” Dr. Negrín, the secretary of public works, had yelled on the telephone. Then bring in more machines, hire more workers, speed up the deliveries, don’t let everything come to a standstill with each change of government, Ignacio Abel thought but didn’t say. “We’ll do what we can, Don Juan,” he said, and Negrín’s voice sounded ever more peremptory on the phone, his Canarian vowels as powerful as his physical presence. “Not what you can, Abel. You’ll do what has to be done.” Ignacio Abel imagined him slamming down the phone, his large hand covering the entire receiver, an emphatic vigor in his gestures, as if he were walking against the wind on the deck of a ship.

  He liked that moment of stillness at the end of the day: the deep stillness of places where people have worked hard, the silence that follows the rumble and vibration of machinery, the ringing of telephones, the shouts of men; the solitude of a place where a crowd rushed through seconds before, people busy with their tasks, fulfilling their duties, doing their part in the great general undertaking. The son of a construction foreman, accustomed since childhood to dealing with masons and working with his hands, Ignacio Abel maintained a practical, sentimental affection for the specific trade skills that were transformed into the character traits of the men who cultivated them. The draftsman who inked a right angle on a plan, the bricklayer who spread a base of fresh mortar and smoothed it with the trowel before placing the brick on top of it, the woodworker who sanded the curve of a banister, the glazier who cut the exact dimensions of the pane of glass for a window, the master craftsman who verified with a plumb line the verticality of a wall, the stonecutter who cut a paving stone or the stone block for a curb or the plinth of a column. Now his hands were too delicate and couldn’t have endured the roughness of the materials, and they never had acquired the wisdom of touch he’d observed as a boy in his father and the men who worked with him. His fingers brushed soft Bristol board and paper, handled rulers, compasses, drawing pencils, watercolor brushes, moved quickly on a typewriter, skillfully dialed phone numbers, closed around the curved black lacquer of his fountain pen as he inked signatures on paperwork. But somewhere he’d kept a tactile memory that longed for the feel of tools and objects in his hands. He had an extraordinary ability to assemble and disassemble his children’s Meccano sets and toys; on his worktable there were always paper houses, boats, birds; he took photos with a small Leica to document each phase in the construction of a building and developed them himself in a tiny darkroom he’d installed at home, to the excitement and admiration of his children, especially Miguel, who, unlike his sister, possessed a whimsical imagination, and when he saw his father’s camera decided that when he grew up he was going to be one of those photographers who traveled to the far corners of the world to capture images that appeared as full-page spreads in magazines.

  With a pleasant feeling of fatigue and relief, of work accomplished, he crossed the empty space of the office and went outside, feeling on his face a cool breeze from the Sierra with its hint of autumn. The scents of pine and oak, of rockrose, thyme, and damp earth. To prolong the enjoyment, he left the window of his small Fiat open when he started the engine. A short distance from Madrid, University City would have both the geometrical harmony of an urban design and a breadth of horizons outlined by tree-covered slopes. In a few more years the luxuriant growth of trees would provide a counterpoint to the straight lines of the architecture. The mechanical rhythm of construction work, the impatience to impress upon reality the forms of models and plans, corresponded to the unhurried pace of organic growth. What had recently been completed achieved true nobility only with use and a constant resistance to the elements, the wear caused by wind and rain, the passage of humans, the voices that at first resound with too-raw echoes in spaces still permeated by the smell of plaster and paint, wood, fresh varnish. Partial to technical novelties, Ignacio Abel had a radio in the car. But now he preferred not to turn it on, so nothing would distract him from the pleasure of driving slowly along the straight, empty avenues of the future city, looking over construction work and machines, the progress of recent days, allowing himself to be carried along by a mixture of attentive contemplation and daydreaming, because he saw with an expert eye what was in front of him as well as what did not yet exist, what was complete in the plans and in the large model installed in the center of the drafting room. The School of Philosophy stood out all the more in the chaos of the construction site. Opened barely two years earlier, the building still had the radiance of the new, the light stone and red brick shining in the sun as brightly as the banner on the façade and the clothes of the students who went in and out of the lobby, the girls especially, with their short hair and tight skirts, their summery blouses against which they pressed books and notebooks. In a few years his daughter Lita would probably be one of them.

  He watched their brightly colored figures become smaller in the rearview mirror as he drove toward Madrid, though he was in no hurry and didn’t choose the fastest route. He liked to go around the edge of the city to the west, then to the north, driving the length of the Monte del Pardo along the suddenly limitless plain and the beginning of the highway to Burgos, over which the Sierra extended like a formidable, weightless mass, dark blue and violet, crowned by motionless waterfalls of clouds. Madrid, so close, disappeared into the plain and emerged again as a rustic horizon of low, whitewashed houses, empty stretches, church spires. He passed only a few cars on the highway, a straight line brighter than the dull terrain on which it had been laid out with saplings along its edges. Rows of hovels beside the highway, long whitewashed earthen walls, doors as dark as the mouths of caves beside which were gathered disheveled women and children with shaved heads who watched the car go by with mouths hanging open. Columns of smoke rising from kilns in the brickyards and emanating from the garbage fermenting in the mountains. To isolate himself from the stink, he closed the window. In the radiant expanse of the sky, the first flocks of migratory birds flew south. The late September sun made dry stalks in fallow fields glow. The first signs of autumn produced a state of hopeful expectation in Ignacio Abel that had no specific cause and perhaps was nothing more than the reverberation in time of a distant schoolboy’s joy in new notebooks and pencils, the innocent pull of an unblemished future that emerged in childhood, maintained until the first failures of adult life.

  Now the highway took on a more precise meaning, defined by rows of electric and telephone wires. In the flat, unpopulated outskirts of Madrid, the avenues of its future expansion stretched with the abstract rigor of a drawn plan. Settlements of small hotels emerged like islands among the desert-like lots and cultivated fields along the sinuous lines of streetcar cables, fragile urban outposts in the middle of nothing. He could imagine districts of white apartment buildings for workers among wooded areas and sports fields, the kind of housing he’d seen in Berlin ten years earlier, in a less rugged climate and with gray, low skies—tall towers among fields of grass, as in the cities of Le Corbusier. Architecture was an effort of the imagination to see what doesn’t exist more clearly than
what you have before your eyes, the rundown buildings that have endured for no reason other than the obstinacy of their materials, just as religion or malaria endures, or the pride of the strong, or the misery of the deprived. Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! As he drove he saw, along with the high mirages of clouds over the peaks of the Sierra, the public housing that already existed in his sketchbooks, with large windows, terraces, athletic fields, playgrounds, plazas with community centers and libraries. He saw luminous patches of green—an orchard, a line of poplars along a stream—in the midst of treeless barrens and slopes cracked by erosion, scarred by dry avalanches. More irrigation and fewer words, more trees with roots that can hold down the fertile soil, more pipelines of clean, fresh water, more rail lines brilliant in the sun, along which trolleys painted in bright colors will glide. He saw shacks, garbage dumps where the indigent swarmed, farmhouses with caved-in roofs, wastelands devoured by brambles, a dog tied to a tree with too short a rope cutting into his neck, a shepherd dressed in rags or animal hides guarding a flock of goats as if in a biblical desert—all within two kilometers of the center of Madrid.

  He saw the future in its isolated signs: in the energy of what was being built, solidly in the earth, on the still barren plain, broken by the right angles of future avenues, the framework of sidewalks, the lines of streetlights and trolley cables, and pierced by tunnels and underground transport. On the bare horizon the huge outline of a wall rising beneath its scaffolding. In the not too distant future, it would be referred to as the new government offices. Another, more transparent city that wouldn’t resemble Madrid, though it would continue to bear its name, would soon extend through those cleared fields in the north. Pockets of the future: to his left, on the other side of the sweeping extension of wasteland, above the row of saplings that delineated like broad ink strokes the extension to the north of La Castellana Boulevard, the Student Residence crowned an undeveloped hill shaded by poplars, at the foot of which stood the School of Engineering and the exaggerated dome of the Museum of Natural Sciences. Diminutive white figures were prominent on the gray-brown expanse of athletic fields. The sun of late September burned with golden brilliance on the windows facing west. Suddenly he remembered that he had to give an answer to José Moreno Villa, who had asked him weeks earlier to give a talk on Spanish architecture. A kind, solitary man, very formal in his dress and manner, older than most of his acquaintances. Moreno Villa would appreciate a letter or personal visit much more than a phone call. He lived in his room at the Residence as if it were a cell in a comfortable lay monastery, surrounded by paintings and books, enjoying with the melancholy of an old bachelor the proximity of foreign students, girls who flooded the halls with the clicking of high heels, sonorous laughter, and conversations in English.

  Without giving it another thought, Ignacio Abel turned left and drove up the hill to the Residence. At a snack bar among the poplars—still open, though it was late in the season—the radio played dance music at top volume, but there was almost no one at the iron tables. At the reception desk he was told that Señor Moreno Villa was probably in the auditorium. As he walked toward it, he heard muffled piano music and singing on the other side of the closed door. Perhaps he shouldn’t have opened it, at the risk of interrupting what might be a rehearsal. He could have turned away but didn’t. He opened the door softly, barely putting his head inside. A woman turned when she heard the door open. She was young and undoubtedly foreign. The sun shone on her light chestnut hair, which she brushed aside. She stopped singing but finished the phrase on the piano. Ignacio Abel murmured an apology and closed the door. As he walked away, he continued to hear a melody at once sentimental and rhythmic.

  3

  DULL FOOTSTEPS echoing down the hall, getting closer, urgent knocking on the door, like the footsteps of someone looking for something in a hurry, the leather shoes creaking as they walked on the tiles: someone under the pressure of an assignment, unlike him, José Moreno Villa, who felt no urgency about anything and often would find himself forgetting what he was looking for, or searching for something different from what he originally had in mind. Almost nothing touched his heart; he held no conviction about anything. At times he was ashamed of his apathy, and at other times relieved—if it often took away his drive, it also saved him from suffering and mistakes he would later regret. He’d had a passionate love affair late in life and lost her, largely because of his own apathy; when he realized he wasn’t going to win her back, the sorrow he felt was tinged with relief. He felt a certain joy at finding himself alone again, as he settled into his cabin on the ship that would sail from New York and carry him back to Spain, leaving behind the woman he’d been about to marry; what a relief, after all the emotional turmoil, to settle down again among his possessions in his simple room at the Residence. So much fury in Spain, so much harshness, passionate crimes and savage Anarchist uprisings drowned in blood, crude barracks proclamations; so many saints, martyrs, fanatics, like the paintings in the Prado in which the skin of ascetics seems as torn as the sackcloth they wear, their eyes rendered unforgiving by a vision of purity incompatible with the real world; and the throats raw from shouting so many “long live”s and “death to”s, the aggressive vulgarity that has been taking over his beloved Madrid, where he ventures less and less frequently, with the displeasure of a man no longer young who experiences change like a personal insult. The coarse ways of politics, the desecration of ideas that, after all, no one had asked him to believe in, though for a time they warmed his heart, as full of rational promises and esthetic dreams as the tricolor flags waving at the tops of buildings against a blue as clean and new as the flags themselves. How typical of him that his political convictions, so easily attenuated by his skepticism—about the selfishness of the human soul, the triviality and profound misery of Spanish life—were so closely associated with esthetic whim, with his preference for the tricolor rather than for the vulgar red-and-yellow flag of the scoundrel king for whom no one yearned, or the red-and-black that for some incomprehensible reason was shared by the Fascists and the Anarchists, or the entirely red flag with a hammer and sickle so favored by some of his friends, sudden enthusiasts for the Soviet Union, for photographic collages of workers, soldiers in greatcoats holding bayonets, tractors and hydroelectric plants, sky-blue shirts, leather straps, clenched fists. Perhaps he didn’t understand or, worse, didn’t believe in the sincerity or substance of their attitudes because they were younger than him, or because they were more successful; he saw them stand up to sing anthems at the end of literary banquets, and what he felt wasn’t ideological disagreement but embarrassment for them. He’d never known how to participate in public enthusiasm without observing himself from the outside. He was a bourgeois, of course, and not only that, he had independent means and was a bureaucrat. But some of them, his old friends, were more bourgeois, idle rich men who’d never really worked but spoke with extraordinary gravity about the dictatorship of the proletariat as they crossed their legs, a whiskey in hand, on the terrace of the Palace Hotel after having a haircut in the barbershop. They predicted the imminent fall of the Republic, crushed by the social revolution, and at the same time they prospered by going abroad on official lecture tours or receiving salaries justified by vague cultural assignments.

  But Moreno Villa didn’t like his own sarcasm, his inclination toward bitterness; he distrusted lucidity that was born of resentment. As for his own integrity, what merit did it have if it had never been tested by temptation? No diva of the theater had asked him to write a play to the measure of her own success, as Lola Membrives or Margarita Xirgú had done with Lorca; not one of them had ever been interested in reciting his poems, like that irritating Berta Singermann, who filled theaters by grimacing and shouting in a Buenos Aires accent the verses of Antonio Machado, or Lorca, or Juan Ramón Jiménez. And he never would be in a position to turn down a government job offer and dedicate himself body and soul to his writing. No one was going to co
nsider him for the post of general secretary of the Summer University in Santander, as they had with Pedro Salinas, who complained so much about the lack of quiet and time but looked so pleased with himself in photographs of official engagements. It isn’t at all difficult for me to imagine him, José Moreno Villa, used to the benevolent hospitality of the Student Residence, a man close to fifty, often no more than a secondary guest in photographs of other, more important people, always discreet, elusive, formal, at times not even identified by name, unrecognized, without the open smile or arrogant pose the others display as if their place in posterity could be taken for granted. He isn’t young and doesn’t dress as if he were, doesn’t have the air of a literary figure or professor but rather of what he actually does for a living: a functionary in a certain position, not a clerk but not a high-ranking employee either, perhaps an attorney or a person of some means in a provincial capital who doesn’t attend Mass or hide his Republican sympathies but would never go out without a tie and hat; a man who looked older than he was long before his hair turned gray, who at the age of forty-eight supposes with a mixture of melancholy and relief that no great changes in his life await him.