In the Night of Time
Page 14
But it was her mother who made the trip possible, encouraged her, assisted her when she felt most lost; who observed her with worried expectation during the years when she saw her adrift, in danger of eventually being buried forever, as she had been, wanting to warn her and not knowing how. What good was her insight into the character and weaknesses of her daughter if she, her mother, was powerless to prevent the disaster? How easily she tied herself down, someone very young who’d never had any obligations, who didn’t know the magnitude of the treasure she was squandering for no reason other than her stubbornness, and not even because passion blinded her. In 1930, instead of completing her doctorate, Judith Biely married a classmate who worked ten hours a day in an office that published cheap detective novels. In 1934 she called her mother and told her she’d been divorced, that perhaps she’d accept a job taking care of children or giving English lessons in Paris, and from there she would travel to Spain, where she’d wanted to go ever since she was a little girl reading Washington Irving. She wanted to revive her Spanish, which she’d studied in high school and then in college, perhaps take up again a doctoral dissertation in Spanish literature. They’d seen little of each other in recent years: her father, mother, and brothers, who tended to argue furiously about everything, had agreed, though for different reasons, that her marriage was a mistake and her husband undesirable, and Judith had broken angrily with all of them. She and her mother agreed to meet at a large, noisy cafeteria on Second Avenue in Manhattan, decorated with posters and photographs of actors in the Yiddish theater. Her mother came in with a black leather handbag held tightly inside her coat, an elegant, worn handbag brought from Russia. She’d been working as a seamstress in recent years, had saved her money and chosen a piano. But when she looked at it in the store and extended her hands over the keys, she realized it was too late: her fingers, which had been strong and flexible, were now clumsier than she’d imagined, their joints swollen by arthritis. Her scores had accustomed her to music that was now only in her head, just as she listened to the sweet Russian phonetics of the novels she read in silence, sitting in the kitchen wearing the eyeglasses she now had to use all the time. She moved the coffee cups and cake plates to one side of the table and on it she placed her handbag with the bulky bills in perfect order, which constituted her personal savings of the past thirty years. “For your trip,” she said, pushing the bag toward Judith, “so you don’t come back until you’ve spent it all.” Down to the very last cent, she said, Judith repeating this to Ignacio Abel, feeling only then, long afterward, the relief of restitution, the certainty of having learned to return her mother’s tenderness with no disloyalty to her father, who would never have done anything like that for her.
I see her more clearly now, not as a silhouette outlined in black. I see her face, luminous with expectation in the photograph taken in an automatic booth on a street in Paris, the face and look of someone who hopes for something intensely, not because she can’t see the shadows but because she had the courage to overcome misfortune and a spiritual health resistant to both deceit and desolation. But perhaps that face belongs to the past now, or continues to exist only in the chemical illusion of the photograph: it’s the face of a stranger Ignacio Abel hasn’t seen yet and might very well never see, someone who perhaps no longer resembles her and has entered another life, who at this moment speaks and looks and breathes in a hostile place where he’ll never find her, where she dedicates herself to erasing him from her life, effortlessly, as you erase things written on a blackboard when you enter a room to teach a class, white chalk dust falling to the floor and speckling one’s fingers, a physical trace much more tangible than the faded presence of the lover she left in the middle of July, in another city, another country, another continent—if in fact she’s returned to America—in another time.
8
HE DOES NOTHING, he only waits, letting the train carry him. He waits and is afraid, but most of all he abandons himself to the momentum of the train, the inertia of being carried and not deciding, leaning back against the worn upholstery, his face turned to the window, his hat on his lap, his hands on his knees, his entire body registering the rhythmic bump of the wheels on the rails, the abruptness of a curve. This was how he spent six days on the ship that crossed the Atlantic, absolved of all obligation and all uncertainty for the first time in who knows how long, from the moment he saw with relief how the coast of France was disappearing and before the uneasiness about his arrival in America began, six days of not showing documents or responding to lists of questions, without the torment of having to decide anything, the past and the future as clear and empty as the ocean’s horizon, lying on a hammock on deck feeling all the weariness stored up in his body, a weariness much deeper than he’d imagined, in the weight of his eyelids, his arms and hands, his feet swollen after whole nights on trains when he couldn’t remove his shoes, his body exhausted inert matter demanding its own immobility after hurrying so much from one place to another.