In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Where had she come from? Recounting her life in a new language limited the amount of detail she could provide and forced her to simplify her story. Listening to herself from the perspective of this man granted her an objectivity that was liberating. Her life experiences, when told, took on something of a novel’s rigor and sense of purpose. The uncertainty of so many years acquired the curve of an arc that emerged from the murky past to rise above time and bring its far end to rest in the present moment, on the other side of the world, in Madrid during the days of October 1935, in a shadowy private booth in the Hotel Florida, in the gentle dizziness of driving along a straight, tree-lined avenue that opened like a tunnel in the headlights, her eyes half closed, seeing things through a light mist he’ll recognize afterward and want to treasure in an ordinary photo from an automatic picture booth. Images and words flow, appear, are lost, just like the treetops and façades and lights shining in the windows of the mansions along the Castellana; Judith Biely is in a car moving through Madrid but she could also be on an avenue in Paris, or in any of the European capitals she’s visited in the past two years that are becoming confused in her fatigued memory; the headlights illuminate black paving stones as brilliant as patent leather, the rails and cables of streetcars; she’s silent beside the man at the wheel, who seems much younger now than just a few hours ago, when he appeared alienated, almost frightened in the foyer of Philip Van Doren’s apartment (where Van Doren must be now; how shrewdly he’d suspected and understood, almost prophesied). She’s fallen silent, but turning over in her head is the sense of having talked a great deal; her life, as recounted, extends before her like the avenue along which the car is driving, opens up with a feeling of symmetry and purpose that she knows is false but for now doesn’t mind enjoying, like the speed of the car or the music from the radio. Ignacio Abel finds Judith’s hand and holds it gently, though she doesn’t respond, doesn’t quite acknowledge what’s happening. How strange, the play of hands at this age.

  Suddenly she sees all the distance she’s traversed. In a language she’s becoming truly familiar with only now, she recounts her life to the man who listens and looks at her attentively. In her narrative, events acquire an order she knows is false, a suggestion of inevitability that conceals but doesn’t extenuate her awareness of its improbability. She comes from a room with a low ceiling where, as a little girl, she would read by the light of a candle in the small hours; from trains to Manhattan that would disappear into tunnels and emerge into the limitless vertigo of the graceful pillars of a bridge suspended over the East River, and the sight of the oceanic bay and the steep cliffs of buildings through the windows, and beneath and beyond the vibrating framework of the Williamsburg Bridge the row of ocean liners along the piers emitting bellowing sirens and columns of smoke above funnels painted black and red, white and red. She comes from the lecture halls and grassy campus under colossal trees of a university for the children of immigrants, torn between the only world they know and the one that cast a shadow of insecurity and persecution over their lives, the remote world their parents brought with them. But she comes above all from the awareness of a mistake she can’t blame on anyone but herself, one she easily could have avoided and in which she persisted, not out of blindness or passion but out of pure, senseless pride, simply to resist pressure she’d trained herself to rebel against. How easily she squandered the treasure of her own will, not for love but to be contrary, to do what her elders asked her not to do and what consequently became the very incarnation of her freedom. She married a former college classmate somewhat older than her, and knew she was making a mistake, she told Ignacio Abel, and as she said it she recalled the image of the woman with wide hips and melancholy eyes and the girl in old-fashioned clothes and a ribbon in her hair who came up to him after his talk at the Residence; the empty seat next to the woman was the one she, Judith, had occupied; the woman looked at her for a moment, her eyes moving up and down with instinctive mistrust when Judith asked Moreno Villa to introduce her to Ignacio Abel. Who can know the reason for her actions? Before she left the desolate court building where with full knowledge she accepted the bonds of marriage, Judith Biely knew she’d made a mistake and that renouncing her last name was an unacceptable humiliation. She preferred not to see, of course. No one puts a blindfold on you by force and then knots it at the back of your neck so tightly you couldn’t take it off even if your hands weren’t tied. You’re the one who weaves the blindfold and the rope, who extends her hands voluntarily and waits until the knot is tight. No one erects the walls of the cell and locks it from the outside and makes certain the bolt is in place. You take the necessary steps, one after the other, and if anyone signals to warn you of danger, all that’s accomplished is the reinforcement of your determination to keep approaching disaster. At times you’re relieved to know you haven’t arrived yet, at others, that there’s no turning back. Doubt is transformed into disloyalty you don’t acknowledge even to yourself. She’d graduated with honors from City College; she could easily have completed her doctorate in Spanish literature under Professor Onís at Columbia and at the same time teach the language to beginning students. Henry James’s heroines who’d awakened her imagination and whom she wanted to resemble when she was fifteen or sixteen years old inherited fortunes that allowed them to travel alone in Europe. Now her model in life was Virginia Woolf’s room of her own, the emancipated solitude of a woman who earns enough money not to depend on anyone and fearlessly cultivates her enthusiasms or her talent. Her mother hadn’t had a piano, let alone her own room. The narrow cubicles held the children’s beds and she had to wait until everyone fell asleep to read her beloved Russian novels or review in silence the unbound scores that had come from St. Petersburg in a trunk more than thirty years earlier.

  But overnight what had mattered to her most was no longer of interest. She said she didn’t want to devote several years to a doctoral dissertation and then find herself buried in some girls’ college, that academic study surrounded by dusty books was less valuable in shaping her vocation than real-life experience and work. (She didn’t forgive her mother for saying that those words didn’t seem to be hers, that she, Judith, was moving her lips but someone else was speaking through her mouth.) Her own room couldn’t be in the middle of the woods or a sleepy expanse of cornfields. It had to be an austere room well insulated against interruptions, favorable to a solitary pursuit whose exact nature she couldn’t define yet; in her room she ought to hear the noises and voices of the street, the clamor of the trains, the sirens of ships at the docks and police cars and red fire trucks. She wanted to travel to Europe to learn about life and create her destiny, like Isabel Archer in the Henry James novel she’d read several times, or like the women reporters who sent articles from Paris to Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. But she also loved more than ever the moving crowds, the excitement of her native city, she omitted nothing, enjoying it all, the neon lights going on at dusk, the fog into which the tallest buildings disappeared in whirlwinds of snow, the human waves erupting from the ferry buildings, the luxury-store windows on Fifth Avenue, the crowds waving red flags and union placards in Italian and Yiddish under shade trees in Union Square, the harshness, the helplessness, the cordiality of strangers, the pleasure of not choosing and letting herself be carried along with no purpose, no urgency, with the same sense of fervor she felt whenever she read a poem by Walt Whitman aloud. At one point in her tale a man’s name came up that perhaps she’d already mentioned, or that Ignacio Abel hadn’t heard, one of those times when he was lost or absorbed in a thought that carried him far away or he disliked the idea that she’d been married and loved another man passionately enough to break with her family, abandon her teaching job and doctoral dissertation, and go live in a rented room at the top of five flights of stairs, with a communal toilet at the end of the hall, a single cold-water faucet in the sink, and a tub in the kitchen covered with a board that served as desk and dining room table. Wanting to run away to search for a room o
f her own, Judith Biely found herself in a kitchen more uncongenial than her mother’s, at times as alone as her mother had been, at other times as invaded: instead of her brothers’ anxiety about work and money and her father’s delusions, the equally masculine invasion to which she now was subjected dragged with it ill-tempered literary and political babble. The acrid cigarette smoke was the same, as was the aggression of the gestures. In the family kitchen she’d spent so many years wanting to run away from, her father and brothers celebrated the glory of capitalism like believers in a despotic god who could as easily demolish as exalt them; in her own room the guests sat on the floor and put out their cigarettes on the linoleum while they argued about revolutionary art of the future and the imminent collapse of the Great Golden Calf of America, staggering through the disaster of the Depression. The equality of men and women was one of the banners they wielded, but the women, though they smoked just as much and sat on the floor too, either didn’t speak or weren’t listened to, and when they all left, she was the one who swept the floor and picked up the glasses and the empty bottles of cheap wine and opened the windows to air out the room. Judith left the university and abandoned her dissertation and obtained a badly paid job correcting and typing stories about gangsters and crimes from morning to night for a publisher of cheap novels. The husband whose name Ignacio Abel took so long to identify was spending years completing a dense, rambling novel about New York, fragments of which he’d published in some magazines. It wasn’t unlikely that John Dos Passos had read them, but in spite of his apparently advanced ideas, Dos Passos had settled into commercial success and would never acknowledge the influence of an almost unknown author on the rhythm and general outline of Manhattan Transfer. If their paths happened to cross at a literary party in the Village, Dos Passos looked away and acted as if he hadn’t seen him. That others doubted her husband’s talent infuriated Judith so much that she ignored her own still indistinct doubts and belligerently defended him. Gradually she realized she’d married him not in spite of her parents’ and brothers’ opposition but because of it. It didn’t surprise her that her father and brothers looked on him as a despicable individual from the instant he’d walked into the apartment with her and hurried to make his political convictions known. If America was a plutocracy without hope or opportunity for the workers, they said, why didn’t he go back to the Russia his parents had come from? It hurt Judith more that her mother didn’t trust him either although he could quote in Russian from her favorite novels and had an awkward, almost sickly air that should have awakened her protective maternal instinct. What would they live on if he thought any ordinary job was a betrayal of his political principles and writer’s calling? And why did she, Judith, abandon so easily what had cost her so much, the promising position at the university, the beautiful campus at Columbia, her doctoral research? It was clear that no matter how much it hurt her, she had to break with all of them; wanting to get away was one thing, considering the way back closed was quite another. Stubborn pride sustained her. The sudden deterioration of sexual passion at first produced more perplexity than bitterness in her, and perhaps also the suspicion of not being equal to the erotic ideal debated at their gatherings as freely as the dictatorship of the proletariat, social realism, and the stream of consciousness. In the man beside her she began to find not strength but weakness, the indifference of cold skin, resentful vanity beneath his professed rebellion, and the incorruptible renunciation of temptations that in reality didn’t exist. Anger too, sometimes directed at her; again she felt panic in the face of male aggression, the rage of alcohol, fists pounding the table, hoarse voices, the loss of a sense of reality induced by narcissism and resentment. Words that, once said, couldn’t be remedied, facial expressions that forgetting couldn’t erase. The secret difference she fed between herself and the people she now moved with—her husband’s friends and comrades, artists with radically inventive projects who devoted more time to explaining them than to executing them—wasn’t it identical to what she’d felt in childhood, when she was aware of things that mattered only to her, when she liked to imagine she was not her parents’ daughter or her brothers’ sister? Just as when she was a little girl, many things moved her now that others couldn’t see. A bouquet of fresh flowers in a glass pitcher; a dress that fit close to the body and at the same time seemed to float around it; the lit sign of an Automat in daylight, the pink neon in the tube barely visible, diluted in the light like ink in water; the mystery of continual renewal and the evanescence of style crossed with similar things and things very different from one another, transforming everything in a continual yet invisible rhythm, transforming the immediate past into an anachronism. She liked some paintings she saw in avant-garde magazines but also a set of porcelain cups in a shop window, or summer sandals she tried on in a shoe store for the simple joy of feeling her feet slip into them, knowing she couldn’t afford them. She enjoyed movies based on Broadway musicals more than Soviet or German films, and abandoned herself to the prose of Henry James or a new tune by Irving Berlin. She secretly enjoyed these things but also felt guilty for a frivolity that might be a basic intellectual weakness or political indifference. And could she help pausing, when she was alone, at the windows of fashionable dress shops on Fifth Avenue or near the revolving doors of hotels from which well-dressed and perfumed women emerged along with bursts of dance-band music. Why did the cause of justice imply the choice of ugliness and a somber mood? She would spend hours walking, looking at the bronze color of a cornice outlined against the clean sky on a winter afternoon, watching a shoeshine man leaning over a pair of men’s patent leather shoes and whistling a Broadway tune. She didn’t believe those hidden enthusiasms made her exceptional, but she also didn’t want to be judged harshly because of them. Concealing them, as she had when she was a young girl, gave her the comforting sensation of living in a place only she knew about.

  For some time the secret cultivation of her individuality allowed her to postpone acknowledgment of an error that became more serious when it proved to be inexplicable. Her commitment to personal independence, her renunciation of her studies, the drive and complicity of her mother had brought her to a circumstance for which no effort had been required: the ache in her back after sitting for many hours at a typewriter in the office, the five flights of stairs, her irritable, hermetic husband, offended by injustice, his pride wounded by the world’s indifference and countless rejections from publishers. She looked around and couldn’t understand how she’d reached this point, by what sum of errors, as if after a long, difficult journey she found herself in the wrong station, her suitcases on the ground, the train she’d been on disappearing in the distance and no other in sight, and nobody in the station, not even an open clerk’s window where she could consult timetables or buy another ticket. No one else had put the blindfold around her eyes. She didn’t even need the effort of will, the dexterity, to grope at the knot at the back of her head to untie it. The blindfold, loosening, fell off of its own accord. And one day Judith Biely found herself in a room where nothing invited her to stay or seemed to be hers, with an unattractive man who talked endlessly, gesticulating, shaking his head, holding a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers, scattering ashes, tossing the butts on the floor. The things he said weren’t particularly brilliant; they weren’t even his. They floated in the air, passing from one mouth to another, from one pamphlet to another, enlarged sometimes on posters, shouted in the cold passion of a political discussion in which it was urgent to annihilate the adversary, leaving him with no arguments, condemning him to an inclement darkness. Her eyes saw the man who spoke without looking at her, his hair curling over his forehead, his hands waving away the cigarette smoke in front of his face. She heard his words as a steady buzz, not distinguishing many of them. At that moment she thought she might be pregnant. She’d done the calculations on her fingers, looked at the record of previous months on the calendar. Three, four days late. While the man who was almost a stranger talked,
the germ sowed by him probably was growing in her womb, a tiny clot of cells, a seed awakened in the dense blackness of the soil that it will make its way through. The enormous consequence of what? Of something she hadn’t paid much attention to and that didn’t give her much pleasure, only relief at its being over. Calmly she decided to conceal what she had been about to say. She would get an abortion. Soon, right away, in secret, to shorten the sadness, the crushing sorrow. The child she wanted, the robust, noble human being she sometimes glimpsed growing beside her in a vague future, shouldn’t be born from so much wretchedness. She slept badly, and the next day, on her lunch hour, she had a sandwich on the steps of the Forty-second Street library. It was sunny and the air was unusually mild for the middle of March. She looked at the people around her, thinking no one could fathom her secret or share her dejection: typists, salesclerks, girls younger than she, dressed with an assurance she’d lost in the past few years, exchanging looks and laughter with the office workers on nearby benches, the marble steps and iron chairs. She finished her sandwich, closed the thermos of coffee, stood, and brushed crumbs from her skirt. A little while before, when she crossed the avenue, she’d felt dizzy, the beginning of nausea. Now, as she walked down the stairway, she noticed something in her belly, like a mild cramp, the pleasurable discharging of something. With disbelief, with sweetness, with a relief that almost raised her off the ground, she felt that her flow had begun and the yoke of regret and resignation she’d felt condemned to was dissolving, leaving before her a diaphanous future she wouldn’t waste this time. She saw it clearly, effortlessly, just as she could see the traffic on Fifth Avenue, the sun on the windows and steel inlays of a recently completed skyscraper, the errors of a life she was ready to leave behind and the new future before her, all the shadows that had surrounded her with the consistency of walls or tunnels excavated from living rock suddenly dissipated like a cloud blown away by a light breeze.