In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  When they were small, Ignacio Abel had looked at his children with distraction and alarm, too impatient to pay much attention to them. He became more interested when they began to speak. The most lasting memories he had of their early years arose from the terror their illnesses caused in him. Attacks of fever in the middle of the night, endless fierce crying, blood spurting from a nose with no way to stop it, incessant diarrhea, the cough that seemed to calm down after several hours and then started again, so deep it seemed to be tearing apart their small lungs. He vaguely imagined that Adela or the wet nurse or the maids must have had some way of controlling the danger, must have known how to provide remedies or decide when it was time to call the doctor. He felt awkward and annoyed, sick with fear and consumed with irritation. The boy had been weak since birth, following an extremely long labor when it seemed Adela or he or both would die. When the midwife came out of the bedroom she placed the baby in his arms, tiny and red, his hands so small, so wrinkled, his fingers as fine as a mouse’s, his legs and feet tiny; his purple flaccid skin, too loose for his newborn’s bones, seemed covered with scales. “He’s very small, but even if he doesn’t look it, he’s very healthy,” said the midwife as she wrapped a woolen shawl around the form who weighed almost nothing, who seemed not to breathe, who moved in an abrupt spasm. Adela spent weeks in a feverish and delirious state, and when it seemed she was recovering, it was only to succumb to a lassitude not even the boy’s helpless presence could drive away. Wet nurse, servant girls, midwives, and doctors were summoned at all hours. Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the uncle who was a priest, all invaded the house that was much smaller than the future apartment on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, roused to relentless activity, boiling pots of water, preparing baby bottles, diapers, medicines, damp compresses for Adela’s fever, household remedies for the boy’s diarrhea, as constant as his inconsolable crying, reciting the rosary and prayers for women who have given birth, the primitive incantations of old women. Ignacio Abel spent the nights lying awake beside his silent, prostrate wife, and early in the morning, relieved, exhausted, left for work. He’d applied to the Council for Advanced Studies for a grant to spend a year in Germany, at the new School of Architecture founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. He reviewed over and over the documents he’d presented at the Ministry of Education, calculating the possibility of receiving the official letter that would notify him of the grant. The boy would get better; the girl was almost three years old and had always been strong and healthy. In disbelief, he imagined himself taking a train at the North Station, leaning against the cold window as dawn broke over a landscape of green fields and gray mist while the train advanced along a wide river. He practiced German, trying to remember what he’d learned during his university studies. He read German books, looking up difficult words in the dictionary. He prepared in secret for something he wasn’t sure would happen; he wasn’t even sure he’d find the courage if the time came. Why had he supported Adela’s eagerness to become pregnant, then to have another child, frightened because she was no longer young, because she was uncertain of keeping her husband? More than a minute had gone by and the boy wasn’t crying; if he closed his eyes, perhaps he could sleep one or two uninterrupted hours tonight. But the crying returned, ever more relentless, with a muscular vigor that didn’t seem possible in an infant who had weighed less than two and a half kilos at birth. Very small but very healthy, the midwife had said, perhaps to deceive him. “We’ll have to baptize him right away,” said Don Francisco de Asís, putting his hands on the shoulders of his afflicted son-in-law, emerging from the dark corner where aunts and relatives recited the rosary in anticipation of the imminent misfortune. One night the uncle who was a priest appeared in full liturgical dress, accompanied by an altar boy, and the odor of incense mixed with the smell of medicine and the baby’s diarrhea. “It’s difficult to accept, my son, but if this angel leaves us, we must be certain he’ll go straight to heaven.” They brought holy water, a silver basin, embroidered cloths, candles on which the name of the boy was written. Not consulting him, and probably not Adela either—she was in a daze, her eyes lost on the wall opposite the bed—the maiden aunts helped the wet nurse dress the tiny baby in a long gown with blue ribbons and embroidered skirts in which his body disappeared, his chest swelling the cloth, his legs like matchsticks kicking beneath the skirts, his diminutive purple feet with the dry patches no cream could alleviate. Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the wet nurse, and the weeping maids had put on veils as if for a funeral, and Uncle Víctor stood erect in his position as godfather, though his dislike of the boy’s weakness and crying was evident, as was his conviction that the feeble blood of the paternal line had prevailed. The boy, the first grandson, had come into the world sickly and crying, more proof of how untrustworthy the intruder was, the external inseminator, as suspect in his male capabilities as in his ideas. “Courage, brother-in-law, the kid will come out of this. In our family there hasn’t been a single case of premature death.”

  In the midst of that upheaval only the girl seemed to remain calm, going from room to room, her pacifier in her mouth, observing the maid as she cleaned the baby’s bottom and washed the diapers under the tap in the kitchen, watching the wet nurse when she brought the small red face to her large, swollen white breast, the translucent skin crossed with blue veins, the enormous dark nipples, the broad hands that caressed the baby’s sweaty, flattened hair and delicately put the mouth at her nipple from which surged a rich, white thread of milk. The girl went down the long hallway and stole into the bedroom where her mother lay. She sat next to her on the edge of the bed, caressed her hands or smoothed her hair, damp with sweat, uncombed, dirty after so many days of convalescence. She seemed not to think it strange that her mother didn’t respond to her gestures of affection or give any sign she was aware of her presence. They put a white veil on the girl and had her hold a candle at her brother’s baptism, and she stood on tiptoe to watch as the priest poured water on the baby’s head and then dried it lightly with an embroidered handkerchief on which he also wiped his fingertips. That night, when her brother cried, she went to him and, instead of rocking the cradle, took his hand, and the baby calmed. From then on, the girl slept with the cradle beside her bed. When she heard the beginning of a whimper in the dark, her hand would feel its way between the bars. The boy’s tiny hand would close around his sister’s thumb, and, feeling safe, he went back to sleep. Meanwhile, awake in his bedroom, Ignacio Abel counted the seconds of silence, fearing that before he reached a minute the crying would start again. He could imagine himself dozing on a long train journey at night, autonomous and alone in a European city, as clearly as if that future were part of a memory, the way he saw himself as a boy, elbows propped on a table, in front of his notebook, the pen drawing two parallel lines on the blank page a moment before the knocking sounded on the door, in the light of the oil lamp that seemed to burn forever at the heart of time.

  12

  HOW STRANGE THAT he remained guilt-free for so long; the unshadowed gift, limitless and full of secret places, became sweeter the more he enjoyed it: dark movie theaters and open-air cafés from which one could see in an expanse as broad as a marine horizon the oak trees of the Casa de Campo and the Monte del Pardo and the hazy distances of the Sierra; the room rented by the hour in a private hotel at the end of Calle O’Donnell (streetcar bells and car horns heard faintly through heavy curtains drawn to achieve a pretense of night during the day’s working hours); and the public space of the Velázquez rooms at the Prado, early on winter mornings when the museum had just opened and before tourists had begun to come in. He awoke when it was still dark with an instinctive feeling of happiness waiting for him, and when he looked at the time on the alarm clock, he remembered he would meet her in only three hours. How strange that fear hadn’t intruded yet: the presentiment that something unexpected would happen and he wouldn’t be able to see her that day, or ever again, that she was separated from him b
y fate or because another man had taken her from him or because she herself had decided to leave, exercising the same freedom that had brought her from America to Europe and moved her to become his lover. He shaved after his shower, savoring his secret, looking in the mirror at the face of the man at whom Judith Biely would smile in a little more than two hours, and no one else would know. Time and the order of things conspired in his favor: breakfast waiting on the table, his two children healthy and obedient, his wife, who handed him his briefcase and hat in the entrance hall and told him to button up, it was foggy and damp this morning, and was satisfied, or at least seemed satisfied, with a domestic kiss that barely brushed her lips and a wave goodbye in which no smile and hardly a glance intervened. Efficient, involuntary accomplices acted on his behalf: the new elevator with its electric mechanism and gentle hydraulic brakes, the porter’s son who had gone to the garage for his car and had it ready for him at the door, the Fiat motor that in spite of the morning cold started with just a turn of the ignition key, the straight streets, still clear of traffic, that allowed him to arrive quickly at his appointment, not wasting a single minute. Even though it was early, someone was at the museum’s ticket office, ready to sell him an admission, and a sleepy porter in a blue uniform was there to tear it for him. In the light of the deserted central gallery footsteps echoed before he could see at a distance the figure they announced. One of them would arrive, and the other was waiting, feeling observed in the empty galleries by personages in the paintings, saints and kings whose names Judith Biely didn’t know, martyrs of a religion that to her was sumptuous and exotic. One of them walked down the long museum corridor in the gray illumination from the skylights, and the other arrived at the same time, appeared in a doorway and was recognized in the distance with a skipped heartbeat by sharp eyes proficient in searching. Ignacio Abel arrived first so he’d be sure to see her arrive. Judith Biely’s broad shoulders, her determined walk, her head tilted slightly to one side, and her hair covering half her face; her eyes large, and as she came closer, widely separated; her cheeks; her thin lips parted at the corners, with a suggestion of expectation, like a word or smile about to be formed; her face serious and angular and yet illuminated by the beginning of a smile, still only hinted at, like the morning light becoming more intense inside a tenuous fog, the one they’d passed through as they walked to the museum along different streets. Alone and self-confident, determined to give herself with all the deliberation of a will that both flattered and frightened him. It frightened him and aroused him just to see her walk toward him, provocative and carefree. In a corner safe from the eyes of the guards they kissed greedily, noticing the winter cold on skin, the smell of cold on breath and hair, on outer clothing damp from the fog.

  On another day he watched her approach from a distance along an avenue in the Botanical Garden, listening to the dry sound of fallen leaves blown by the wind and covering the ground under her feet, a cold, sunny morning early in December when the frost made the grass silver in the shaded areas and the air shone with ice crystals. She came muffled against the winter, the brim of her hat over her forehead, coat lapels raised, a scarf concealing her chin and mouth, showing only her bright eyes and her nose red from the cold. He wanted to go to her but remained still, his hands in his overcoat pockets and his breath cold, conscious of each step she took, the distance that separated them lessening by the second, the imminence of her body pressing against his, the two cold hands that held his face so she could keep looking at him until she closed her eyes to kiss him. Halfway through their day they would make room for a quick escape, a phone call, a taxi ride into the always-too-brief parenthesis of a meeting. How strange that it took them so long to begin to measure what was denied to them, to not be grateful for what had been granted them, what they might not have known. If there was no time for anything else and the winter weather was too inhospitable, they took refuge in one of those remote cafés frequented by office clerks, retirees, other pairs of lovers meeting in secret; cafés half empty and gloomy, in ambiguous areas of Madrid that weren’t centrally located but didn’t quite belong to the outskirts, on streets only recently urbanized that still had rows of young trees and fences around undeveloped lots with posters announcing the circus or boxing matches or political propaganda, and the final stops of streetcar lines, and corners that bordered open countryside. They had to tell each other everything, ask about everything, their entire lives up to the day a few months earlier, the first of their common memory. There was only one boundary neither of them crossed, by a silent agreement that seemed humiliating to Judith, though it took her a long time to breach it, perhaps not until she realized it was she who was telling, who asked questions: there was a boundary, like the empty space of a silhouette cut out of the center of a family photograph, a name neither mentioned. Ignacio Abel spoke occasionally of his children but never about Adela. How strange that it took them so long not to mention her name or her status—“my wife,” “your spouse”—but to sense her shadow, to remember she existed, strange that they were able for so long to wipe away with no trace, from the moment they met, the home and life he came from. For him, Judith lived in an invisible world he could reach instantaneously, as if he could cross to the other side of a mirror by virtue of a secret password he alone possessed. The password at times was a material object: he’d close the door to his study to talk to her on the phone; he kept Judith’s letters and photographs under lock and key in his desk; he turned the key on the inside of the bathroom door, and as Adela’s silhouette passed the frosted glass, he thought of Judith Biely, whom he would see shortly, as he stood under the running water. How close the other side was, the inviolable secret, a distance of a few minutes, a few hundred heartbeats, the topography of desire superimposed like a transparent sheet on the places in his daily life. He went down to the street and the porter’s son who brought his car from the garage didn’t know he was acting as his accomplice. He gave him a tip, and before he got in the car he looked up and Adela was on the balcony. She watched every morning because she was afraid: gunmen often chose the moment their victims left home to attack. (“But what ideas you have! Who’d ever think of shooting me?”) He drove to the corner of Calle de Alcalá and parked the car in front of the Moderna Barber Shop. The face he saw in the mirror while the barber, who welcomed him with a nod and respectfully said his name, leaned over him was the same one Judith Biely would look at very soon. But only he knew that. The secret was a treasure, and the crypt and palace that contained it the inviolable house of time only Judith and he inhabited. Instead of driving down Alcalá, he turned up O’Donnell and left the car a certain distance from the private hotel with a high fence enclosing a garden with palm trees and dense hedges that protected shutters as thick as jalousies and painted an intense green, with workable slats that filtered an aquatic light when partially opened. To reach the hidden other world he had only to drive a few minutes, then pass through successive doors, visible and invisible, each provided with its own password. When he crossed the last threshold, Judith Biely was already waiting for him, seated in a chair near the bed, beside a lit blue-glass lamp on the night table, in the artificial darkness of nine in the morning.

  The guilt-free intoxication corresponded to a reckless assurance: when they saw only themselves, they often behaved as rashly as if no one else could see them. At night they’d go to dimly lit bars near the large hotels, frequented for the most part by foreigners and wealthy young night owls who’d scarcely have recognized Ignacio Abel. In the cabaret at the Palace Hotel, sitting close together under the cover of a reddish half-light, they drank exotic mixed drinks that left a sweet aftertaste and conversed in Spanish and English while on the narrow floor couples danced to the rhythm of a small band. At a nearby table, surrounded by a chorus of his friends, the poet García Lorca laughed aloud, his broad face gleaming with sweat. Ignacio Abel had never been in that kind of place, hadn’t known they existed. With the apprehension of a jealous man, he saw the ease with whi
ch Judith Biely moved among those people. In reality, she resembled them much more than she did him: the Americans and the English especially, young men and women united by a strange egalitarian camaraderie and a similar tolerance for alcohol, travelers in Europe who became involved with and then disentangled from one another as casually as they passed from one country to another, from one language to another, discussing with the same ardor the expectations of the Popular Front in France and a Soviet film, shouting the names of writers not familiar to Ignacio Abel, and about whom Judith Biely held impassioned opinions. With pride and a nebulous fear of losing her, he watched her gallantly defend Roosevelt to a drunken American who’d called him a covert Communist, an imitator of the five-year plans. She was so desirable, entirely his when she gave herself to him, yet fully independent, shining before others who didn’t see him, a Spaniard of a certain age in a dark suit, a foreigner in that polyglot country of fluid borders and ambiguous norms they inhabited; for them Madrid wasn’t much more than a way station. At times Ignacio Abel saw among them men with tweezed eyebrows and light rouge on their cheeks and women dressed as men, and he felt he was witnessing a corrected version of his time in Germany.