In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  I’m a gravedigger coming back

  Oh, I’m a gravedigger coming back

  From burying my own heart.

  Miguel wanted to see that film at all costs. He wanted to see it because he liked the song and because the cook and maid had already seen it and told him about it in detail, both of them moved as they remembered it, pausing to recall some dramatic moment. He wanted to see it even more because his father, mother, and sister seemed to have agreed to dislike it without having seen it. His mother wouldn’t ridicule him or become angry if she caught him beside the radio, his eyes filled with tears. But she wouldn’t have defended him either. She was distressed by his lack of masculinity, by the possibility he would awaken his father’s distaste and contempt. But what hurt Miguel most was that Lita had taken the adults’ side. She, his accomplice in loving movies on the afternoons they laughed and laughed at the theater watching the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin, or shivered with fear as they watched Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, also disliked movies with flamenco songs and regional dancing, precisely the ones the maids and Miguel liked best. She’d refused to go with him to Juan Simón’s Daughter. She’d listened with an approving expression when their father said to their mother a few nights earlier during dinner:

  “Look at Buñuel, who was so much a surrealist and so modern, and now he’s not embarrassed to earn a pile of money producing that piece of folkloric idiocy, Juan Simón’s Daughter.”

  Folkloric idiocy. Miguel knew he was going to say or do something wrong, and precisely because he knew it, the transgression was inevitable. How hard would it have been for him to remain silent when his father made that scornful comment about Buñuel? But he couldn’t help it, he didn’t even think about it; he knew what he was going to say, and he said it, and as he did he became aware of the inevitable reprimand he’d receive and the fact that his mother and sister weren’t going to defend him:

  “Well, Herminia says it’s a picture you cry over and it has pretty songs.”

  “Herminia.” His father repeated the maid’s name with burlesque seriousness. “A great cinematic authority.”

  Now the song was coming from the end of the hall, and they all acted as if they didn’t hear it. Or perhaps Miguel was the only one who did, nervously shaking his leg under the table, watching his father’s face out of the corner of his eye, noting that his mother, beneath her air of absent placidity, was becoming tense, and Lita, far removed from the possibility of disaster, was recounting a recent excursion with her classmates to the Prado. He admired her as unconditionally as he had when he was little; he admired her even when he resented and despised her because she fawned over their father, when he was tempted to spill ink on her impeccable exercise notebook, or step as if accidentally on one of those school albums in which Lita glued leaves and dried flowers. If she could concentrate on everything she did, and move with so much serenity and in a straight line, it was because she wasn’t distracted or alarmed by the sounds of danger, because she lacked the invisible antennae that detected the turmoil he always provoked. His father was going to be irritated because the music on the radio was too loud, because the maid, when she left the dining room, didn’t close the door behind her, and because the kitchen door was open. That’s why it was so difficult for him to concentrate: because he was mindful of too many things at the same time, because he guessed what the others were thinking or sensed changes in their states of mind, like those barometers in school with fast-moving needles that registered atmospheric disturbances.

  Then the telephone rang, just as Miguel was swallowing a mouthful of water, so focused on not making noise that the first ring startled him and made him choke. Sitting across from him, Lita put her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. The telephone didn’t stop ringing, shrill in the silence that had fallen after his coughing had stopped. How was it possible that his father and sister didn’t hear it? His father, rigid with anger, concentrated meticulously on chewing. With an abrupt gesture his mother placed her fork and knife on her plate and left the dining room, and a moment later the ringing stopped and her voice was heard in the hall, uneasy because it was unusual for people to call so late: “Who’s calling? Who? One moment.” She returned to the dining room unhurriedly, seemed more serious and more tired than a moment earlier, looking at his father in a strange way when she gave him the message.

  “It’s for you. From your office, a woman who sounds foreign.”

  “Well, it’s a fine time for people to be calling,” said Lita, unaware of what Miguel’s eyes saw but his mind couldn’t decipher, innocent of all uncertainty, of any suspicion of danger, sure in the world.

  Inside his apartment, Ignacio Abel crossed the invisible border to his other life, walking down the dark hallway to the phone on the wall, to the unexpected voice of Judith Biely, leaving behind the family scene in the dining room, interrupted and blurred on the other side of the glass that filtered light and voices. In a few seconds and in so small a space, his heart pounding in his chest, he took on his other identity; he stopped being a father and husband to become a lover; his movements became more secretive, less confident; his voice was changing to become the one Judith would hear—hoarse, anxious, altered by a mixture of bewilderment, happiness, and the sudden fear that it wasn’t she who called, breaking an unspoken agreement for a reason that must be serious. His hand trembled when he picked up the earpiece, still swaying against the wall; his voice sounded so low and rasping that Judith, equally anxious in the telephone booth in a café whose location she didn’t know, at first didn’t recognize it. She too spoke quietly, quickly, in English and a moment afterward in Spanish, short phrases, murmured so close to the mouthpiece that Ignacio Abel heard her breathing and could almost feel on his ear the brush of her lips. “Please come and rescue me. Casi no sé dónde estoy. Unos hombres venían siguiéndome. I want to see you right away.”

  He’ll always long for that voice, even when he can no longer recall it at will and has stopped hearing it in the unpredictability of certain dreams or turning when he thinks he’s heard her saying his name. During the demented, bloody summer in Madrid, when he went about like a shadow, what he missed most was not the reasonable certainty of not being murdered, or the solid routine of a former life that had disintegrated overnight, but something more secret, more his own, more irretrievably lost: the possibility of dialing a certain number and hearing Judith Biely’s voice, the miracle that somewhere in Madrid, at the end of an automobile or streetcar ride, an impatient walk, Judith Biely would be waiting for him, much more desirable than in his imagination, surprising him with the joy of her presence, as if no matter how persistently he tried, he could never remember how much she meant to him.

  “It was a secretary, a new girl,” he said, back in the dining room, not looking at anyone in particular, putting on his jacket, reckless, a liar, indifferent to the mediocrity of his performance. “There was an emergency at a construction site. A scaffold collapsed.”

  “Call if you see you’ll be back late.”

  “I don’t think it’s all that important.”

  “Papá, are you going in the car? Will you take me with you?”

  “What ideas you have, child,” Adela said. “You’re just what your papá needs now.”

  “I’ll take a taxi and get there faster.”

  Just a few minutes earlier the night had been closed off for him, the predictable, dull night of family routine: supper, conversation, the distant sounds of the street, the resignation to the details of tedium. The warmth from the heating system, the lethargic, enveloped life, lined in the felt of house slippers and pajamas, the tenaciously won comfort of a house protected against the winter cold. And now the unexpected happened, stillness was transformed into motion, warmth into the knife wound of cold when he stepped out of the building, resignation into temerity, Madrid at night opening like a limitless countryside he’d cross at top speed in a taxi to meet Judith Biely, so
the promise would be kept, enunciated not in her words but in the tone of her voice: the desire, the urgency, the certainty of embracing her and kissing her a few minutes later. Through the taxi window he saw the city as if he were dreaming it. Light fog swaddled the lights and made the paving stones and trolley tracks glow with a damp luster. He looked at the solitary displays in store windows, lit in empty streets, the large windows of cafés, the electric light in dining rooms where family suppers were taking place, identical to the one he’d just left and that now seemed like a painful episode in a uniform servitude he’d escaped. Not forever, of course, and not for the whole night, but any measure of time was enough for him now, two hours, even just one hour. There was no currency of minutes his covetousness wouldn’t be thankful for, minutes and seconds that decreased with the clicking sound of the numbers as they changed on the meter, with the accelerating beat of his heart. Election posters covered the façades in the Puerta del Sol. In the drizzle, violent searchlights lit the gigantic round face of the candidate Gil Robles, occupying an entire building, crowned with involuntary absurdity by a neon advertisement for Anís del Mono: Grant Me Your Vote and I’ll Return a Great Spain to You. He recalled Philip Van Doren’s fixed stare and sarcastic tone amid the smoke and the noise of a jazz band: “Do you believe, Professor Abel, like your coreligionist Largo Caballero, that if the right wins the elections, the proletariat will start a civil war?” The icy wind shook the cables from which the streetlights were suspended, lengthening convulsive shadows on the sidewalk. The taxi moved slowly toward the Calle Mayor, making its way through a labyrinth of streetcars. His imagination anticipated illusions of what was now imminent: the arches and gardens of the Plaza Mayor, the lanterns at the corners of Calle Toledo, the café where Judith Biely waited for him, her profile standing out in spite of the smoke inside and the steam that covered the glass, the young woman, alone and foreign, whom the men looked at brazenly and approached, almost touching her, to say things in a low voice. In the city where one has always lived, ordinary trips can be equivalent to profound journeys in time: crossing Madrid to meet his lover one inauspicious night in February, Ignacio Abel traveled from his present life to the streets of his distant childhood, to which he almost never returned, along which he’d never walked with her. The impulse of the taxi in the direction of the future returned him to the past, and along the way he got rid of so many years to reach her with the truest part of himself. He erased what at this moment didn’t matter to him at all, what he would have given without hesitation for the time with Judith Biely: his career, his dignity, his bourgeois apartment in the Salamanca district, his wife, his children. Before the end of the trip he was searching his pockets for coins to pay the driver, leaning forward to see the exact corner and the café, the silhouette of Judith Biely. He was surprised to find himself moving his left leg as nervously as Miguel, who’d looked at him so seriously when he left the dining room, adjusting his tie, making sure the keys were in his pocket.

  He said, “I won’t be back late,” and in Miguel’s neutral gaze was a disbelief all the more wounding because it was completely instinctive and revealed like an unexpected mirror the mediocre quality of his imposture, the gestures of an actor who convinces no one. But that sting of alarm and disgust with himself was quickly suppressed, wiped away by haste, by physical exaltation that carried him down the stairs, the road to the invigorating cold of the street that filled his lungs as he ran to the next corner, looking for a taxi. Standing next to the window of his room while Lita slept, Miguel was looking at the same deserted corner of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, lit by a street lamp, listening in silence to the beat of footsteps on the sidewalk, imagining they were his father’s when in fact they belonged to the watchman who checked the building entrances, striking the ground at regular intervals with the iron tip of his pike. He’d awakened in the dark, thinking he heard the elevator’s motor when it stopped, recalling something he’d read before he fell asleep, hiding the magazine under the pillow when their mother came in to say good night, an article on people buried alive, from which he learned a word that in itself frightened him—catalepsy—a word whose meaning Lita knew, of course. How many people have been buried alive? How many have consummated their agony—the most terrible one of all—in the place of their eternal rest? He was fascinated to discover that for attentive eyes and ears, there was no such thing as total darkness or total silence. As he looked at the room in shadows it became filled with light, just as when slow-moving clouds drift away from the face of the full moon. He’d read in one of the cheap magazines about crimes and wonders that the maids bought that in a secret laboratory in Moscow, scientists were developing x-ray glasses that allowed you to see in absolute darkness and a magnetic-wave pistol that killed silently. THE ENIGMA OF MYSTERIOUS RAYS THAT BRING LONG-DISTANCE DEATH. What had been at the moment he awoke an oppressive silence was transformed into a jungle of noises: Lita’s breathing, wood creaking, the vibration of the windowpane when a car passed on the street, the strikes of the sereno’s pike, the growl of the heating pipes, the muffled echo of the opposing forces that, according to his father’s explanation, kept the entire building standing, never at rest, expanding and contracting like a great animal breathing; and farther away, or at least in a space difficult for him to locate, another sound that Miguel couldn’t define, that stopped and then started again after a while, like the sound of his blood when he rested his ear on the pillow. He sat up in bed very quietly, making certain it wasn’t the elevator he heard. He stood up slowly, the cold of the wood floor on the soles of his feet, the annoying need to urinate that would force him to go out into the hall. His father and mother reproached him for not reading, but his head, when he couldn’t sleep, was full of disturbing things he’d read in the paper. SCOTLAND YARD INVESTIGATES A CASE OF CRIMES COMMITTED BY SLEEPWALKERS. The sound of labored, intermittent breathing returned, something that never changed into a voice but did contain a lament. When he left the room he was the Invisible Man, invisible and wrapped in silence, walking barefoot, turning cooperative doorknobs. It frightened him to be a sleepwalker and be dreaming as he walked toward a victim who’d be found dead at dawn, his face contorted in terror. The clock in the living room rumbled and struck five, one strike after the other, leaving a resonance that took a long time to disappear. From the end of the hall, as long and black as a tunnel, came the double snores of the maid and the cook, as methodical as a bellows machine, with interruptions of quiet in the midst of which he still heard the other sound, the intermittent breathing, the lament. Suspended like the Invisible Man at his parents’ bedroom door, free of the force of gravity by virtue of another invention no less decisive—an anti-gravitational injection will facilitate space travel—he leaned against the door to hear better, to be certain it was his mother’s voice he was hearing, familiar and at the same time unfamiliar, a high-pitched moan that suddenly became deep, as if it had come from someone else’s throat: a long moan muffled against a pillow, a lament that broke into weeping or isolated words it was impossible to decipher. Perhaps his mother would die if he didn’t go in and wake her. Perhaps she was suffering from a horrible disease and hadn’t told anyone. He wanted to stay and he wanted to run away. He wanted to save her from the disease or an affront he couldn’t imagine, and he wanted not to hear her, not to be awake with icy feet by the door, to enjoy the tranquility of his sister’s sleep right now, immune to uneasiness and danger. Suppose his father had come back and his mother was arguing with him? With a rush of panic he saw the landing light go on beneath the entrance door and heard the elevator start up. That would be the last straw: to have his father come back and find him in the hall, standing in the dark, at five in the morning. He’d have to hurry back to his room, but that would bring him to the front door, and his bad luck would turn his retreat into a trap. What he couldn’t afford to do was stand there, paralyzed. He rushed forward blindly and closed the door of his room behind him just as the elevator stopped at the landing. His heart po
unded in his chest like the beats of a kettledrum in a scary movie. His father turned the key in the lock, walked slowly down the hall in the dark, leaving a long interval between steps as unfamiliar as those of a stranger. Motionless on the bed, his feet cold, his hands crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, Miguel achieved a state of perfect catalepsy.