In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  14

  THERE WERE SIGNS but he didn’t see them, or rather, chose not to see them. Just a few steps removed from Judith Biely’s presence, from the fleeting time he spent with her, reality became as blurred as the background of a photograph. He is amazed at his confusion: so far from Madrid and from her, stripped of the drama of all he’d taken for granted, believed was his, now dissolved like salt in water, Ignacio Abel insists on sizing up the past, an exercise as useless for alleviating remorse as for correcting mistakes. He would have liked to know the moment when the disaster became inevitable, when the monstrous began to seem normal, as invisible as the most ordinary acts in life, when the words that encouraged the crime, which no one took seriously because they were repeated and were nothing but words, turned into crimes, when the crimes became so routine they were now part of normal life. Today the army is the foundation and spine of the nation. When civil war breaks out, we won’t accept cowardly defeat by offering our neck to the enemy. There’s one moment and not another, a point of no return; a hand holding a pistol is raised and moves to the back of someone’s neck, and a few seconds go by before the shot is fired; even when the index finger begins to squeeze the trigger, the possibility of turning back is still there, if only for a second; over months or years, water gradually seeps into the roof of a building that no one repairs and it takes only an instant for it all to come to a head, a beam splits in half and the ceiling falls; in tenths of a second the flame that almost went out revives and sets fire to a curtain or a handful of papers that will feed the blaze that will destroy everything. In the period of transition from a capitalist to a socialist society the form of government will be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Things are always on the verge of not happening, or happening in another way; very slowly or very quickly they are carried out or drift toward paralysis, but there’s a moment, just one, when a remedy can be found, when what will be lost forever can still be saved, when the irruption of misfortune, the advent of the apocalypse, can be stopped. When the inflexible justice of the people is carried out, the exploiters and their followers will die with their shoes on. A man will leave his house one morning at the usual hour and his executioners will be waiting inside a car. He will pause in the doorway to adjust his gloves and hat as the men clutch their pistols with sweaty hands. The car window will open just enough to let the cigarette smoke out and then the signal will come. The men will get ready to shoot but a truck might suddenly drive by and disrupt the whole operation. The victim will get a chance to flee, a guard’s life will be spared.

  During a raw spring of gales and rainstorms that decimated the recently flowering branches of chestnut trees and acacias and peppered the pavements with seeds like white elm petals, almost every day Professor Rossman sent Ignacio Abel newspaper clippings heavily underlined with pencils of different colors and punctuated with exclamation points and question marks: reports of shootings or assaults cut off in the middle by censors, delirious statements amplified by the size of the headlines and by the volume of loudspeakers booming at meetings above the fervor of the crowds in bullrings. When we take to the streets for the second time, let there be no talk of generosity and no blame if revolutionary excesses go to the extreme of not respecting lives. Professor Rossman went around Madrid, his briefcase full of newspapers in several languages and handbills with senseless proclamations picked up on the streets, obsessed by the magnitude of the collective madness, the lies of German or Italian or Soviet propaganda. The USSR is the bright watchtower that lights our way, a free people that suffers neither exploitation nor hunger, a liberated people, marching in the vanguard of the working masses. Professor Rossman realized that the very scale of the lies was overwhelming. In cafés he’d begin a conversation, try to explain international politics that no one understood or cared about. But he’d seen with his own eyes, he knew the lies firsthand, and yet no one believed his status as witness, no one asked him about what he’d seen first in Germany and then in the Soviet Union. They looked at him with disbelief, at the most with impatience or annoyance or suspicion. Ignacio Abel looked at the tray with the mail in the foyer when he came home from work and almost always found an envelope with Professor Rossman’s writing, often containing only a clipping of a small square lost among the columns of some Spanish or European newspaper, which no one but he would have noticed: a political assassination in a distant province, a gunfight between Socialist and Anarchist fishermen in the port of Málaga, an administrative measure taken against Jewish professors at a German university, an obscure statement by Stalin at the Komsomol Congress, an article about the Japanese infiltration of Manchuria, an article by Luis Araquistáin in the journal Claridad predicting the imminent fall of the bourgeois Republic in Spain and the inevitable advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a photo of the tiny king Victor Emmanuel III declaring himself emperor of Abyssinia before a backdrop of Roman splendor from a movie set. Sometimes the envelopes hadn’t been stamped: Professor Rossman preferred to deliver them in person to the porter’s office in Ignacio Abel’s building so his former student could see them without delay. Priests and nuns swarm over the surface of the country like flies in a village that smells of putrefaction. The banner of the Spanish right has as an essential tenet the restoration of Christian spirituality in the face of efforts—dominated by hidden international forces that correspond to the symbols of the hammer and sickle, the Masonic triangle, and the Judaic golden calf—to make society materialistic. Yet Professor Rossman restrained from phoning Ignacio Abel or going to his office or to his apartment when he met his daughter after German lessons. Armed with scissors and pencils, he hunched over the newspapers lying open on a café table, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head, and when he was finished, he stuffed everything into his large black briefcase and went out with pointless urgency to meet someone or visit one of the offices or embassies where he had applications pending, to sound the alarm about the state of the world while it was still possible to do something about it.

  But who stops the fire when it has already started and flames climb the walls and heat shatters the windowpanes? Who can quench the fury of someone who has been injured or stop the spiraling casualties? Who will keep count or make the alphabetical list of names growing by the minute like the telephone directory of an immense city, the Spanish city of the dead still expanding—as the train moves north along the banks of the Hudson River and its wheels pound rhythmically on the rails—in the distant night of Madrid, in open country and in the ditches, on both fronts, though it is difficult to imagine and seems impossible, looking at the broad serenity of the river, the expanse of copper and gold in the woods on the other side of the window, that at this very moment darkness and crime are swooping down on an entire country where night fell several hours ago. On sinister summer nights in Madrid, Ignacio Abel waited in vain for sleep to come; from the dark bedroom he could hear bursts of gunfire and the engines of cars racing along the deserted streets, rebelling with belated and useless rage against the inevitable, against the fatalistic necessity of disaster. Humiliated by his own impotence, in his mind he insisted on altering the course of the past: he alone, debating with phantoms, changing his own actions and those of the people he knew and even of public figures, rising up against his own blindness and feeling ashamed of it too late, passionately contradicting someone he hadn’t wanted to argue with months earlier, someone he heard saying the same thing everybody said, that in reality nothing was going on and the situation wasn’t all that serious and not worth worrying about, or perhaps that something terrible would happen, though nobody knew what, but it was too late now to avoid it, and maybe it was better this way because a torrential rain is preferable to the oppressiveness of an imminent storm that doesn’t arrive and makes the air increasingly hard to breathe. You can’t stop the implacable March of History, they said—Now or Never; Not One Step Back; Revolution or Death; Crush the Bolshevik Hydra; Workers Will Give Birth with Blood and Pain to a Glorious New Spain; The Army Mu
st Once Again Be the Backbone of the Nation. Posters with large red or black letters recently posted on walls; muscular arms, violent jaws, open hands, clenched fists; swastikas, fasces and arrows, sickles and hammers, eagles with outstretched wings; advertisements for brandy; bullfight posters; effigies of giants painted on huge canvases that covered building façades and proclaimed the coming of the revolution or the opening of a film about Andalusian bandits. The radio played political anthems and military marches ad nauseam, a flamenco-style, shrill voice singing “My Pony” or “Juan Simón’s Daughter,” and the hoarse proclamations of orators rebounding in a bullfight arena: Let us tear down everything to make room for the flowering of the liberating revolution! Let us destroy those who, by simply thinking about destroying us, have joined the struggle! From the blood of our martyrs who fall under the vicious bullets of Bolshevik assassins the vigorous seed of a new Spain will grow!

  He lived like everyone else, bewildered and worried, suffering attacks of disgust and fear as well as tedium, trapped by his obligations and desires, with no time to look around, perhaps seeing some signs but not stopping to reflect on what they foretold. It’s the time for liquidations, and these must be total and absolute. What could he know or remedy if he saw nothing, if he hadn’t even been able to keep Adela from finding the small key in the lock of his desk drawer, if for several months he hadn’t seen her face change day after day, the tone of her voice, the way she looked at him. What might have been avoided couldn’t be remedied. Let no traitor hope for clemency, because there will be none, not for any of them. On March 12 at eight-thirty in the morning, the police escort José Gisbert looks at the Socialist professor Luis Jiménez de Asúa, whose life he’s just saved by throwing himself against the man to shield him from the bullets; before dying, a gush of blood bursting from his open mouth, Gisbert says with a kind of astonishment, as he clutches the lapels of the professor’s overcoat with both hands, “They killed me, Don Luis.” The already-dead were a minority compared to all those who would inevitably have to die. Second Lieutenant Reyes, a fifty-year-old Civil Guard about to retire, attends the parade for the Day of the Republic in civilian clothes and stands close to the presidential stand, when suddenly a few men he doesn’t know shoot him down and disappear in the crowd. No one can identify the killers. On the hot night of May 7, Captain José Faraudo, a well-known Republican and Socialist, goes out with his wife after supper for a stroll along Calle de Lista; at the corner of Alcántara some young men come up behind him and shoot him point-blank. An avalanche or landslide or earthquake, all obey their own dynamic laws. After a certain catastrophic point, a fire doesn’t cease until it has consumed the material that feeds it. Diminutive human figures gesticulate at the edges of its glare, throw water that evaporates before it reaches the flames or even enlivens them, shout as loud as they can, but the roar of the fire obliterates their voices. Captain Faraudo fell face-down on the ground, close to the illuminated window of the travel agency where Lita Abel and her brother looked every afternoon at the model of a Hamburg–New York ocean liner like the one they imagined would carry them to America early in the fall. Ignacio Abel first felt the sensation of physical alarm at words magnified by typography or amplified by microphones soon after his arrival in Germany in 1923; words written on posters and signs at demonstrations, filling entire squares with a deafening sound he’d never experienced before; words like weapons discharging, waking the roar of a crowd or silencing it, bursting above it with the metallic violence of enormous loudspeakers, multiplied and omnipresent on radios. When he left for Germany there were few radios in Spain, and those weren’t powerful. In Berlin and then in Weimar, his initial difficulty with the language and his ignorance of the country’s circumstances transformed political parades into spectacles of a threatening, primitive crudity: gales of flags, war-like anthems played by bands, millions of steps at a martial pace, crowds of veterans in old uniforms displaying the horrifying variety of their mutilations, and on a balcony, in the rear, almost invisible, a gesticulating doll who could barely be seen but whose shouts were exaggerated by loudspeakers above unmoving heads and then lost in the distance like the echoes of a distant battle. Thirteen years later, Ignacio Abel saw with horror his city and country inundated by that same flood. In the bullfight arena in Zaragoza, in the heat of a May noon, the feverish, hoarse voices of Anarchist orators proclaim the imminent approach of free love, the abolition of the state and of armies, and Libertarian Communism. In the bullfight arena in Madrid, in a vast eddy of red flags, before a huge portrait of Lenin, Don Francisco Largo Caballero, acclaimed by tens of thousands of throats as the Spanish Lenin, foresees, like an old apocalyptic prophet, the advent of the Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, the collectivization of land and factories, the annihilation of the bourgeoisie and man’s exploitation of man.

  Alone in Madrid, dedicated to assignments that were, for the most part, illusory—during the first months of the war he still went almost every day to his office in University City, examining plans and documents that were worthless now, inspecting abandoned construction sites—he spent the summer withdrawn into a fearful silence. The rational words he would have liked to say in a serene voice, the sweet ordinary words of his previous life, no longer mattered. At times he spoke aloud just to hear a voice in his empty house, his abandoned office; he imagined he was talking to his children, to Adela; he told them about his strange, solitary life in Madrid, the changes on the street and in people’s clothing, the new attire that didn’t exist a short while ago and yet formed part of a hallucinatory normality. He imagined conversations with Judith Biely as futilely as he wrote her letters he didn’t know where to send and often didn’t put down on paper. Perhaps there was a word he didn’t say that might have prevented Judith’s leaving Madrid. Perhaps he came close to finding her on the night of July 19 and leaping with her onto a train or persuading her not to take it. Things are about to happen but don’t. The first flame is extinguished and doesn’t cause the fire. The man grasping the pistol in his pocket doesn’t take it out because of fear or nervousness, or because he thinks he sees someone who looks like the secret police watching him. His intended victim will walk past him and never know he was about to die. On Friday, July 10, Ignacio Abel finally gets in touch with Judith, after two weeks of not hearing from her. As they talk on the phone and she agrees to meet, Lieutenant José Castillo of the Assault Guard—slim, his hair combed straight back, round glasses, impeccable uniform, leather straps and boots gleaming—is sipping his coffee. At the end of the bar he sees some strangers who look suspicious and instinctively reaches for his pistol. He frequently receives anonymous letters and knows that at any moment he could be killed, just like his friend Captain Faraudo two months earlier, yet he still has the gallantry to go out alone and on foot to his quarters, crossing the center of Madrid. The strangers finish their coffee and leave. At the very last moment they were ordered to abort the attempt on Lieutenant Castillo’s life.

  He found no excuses even for himself. Having lost what mattered to him most, and knowing that he, too, could become one of the murdered, gave him no right to innocence. When did he begin to lie without effort or remorse? When did he become accustomed to hearing shots and calculating their distance and danger without going to the window? When did he see a pistol up close for the first time, not in a film, not in the holster of a police officer, but in the hand of someone he knew, bulging in a pocket, the front of a jacket, a pistol or revolver shown with almost the same ease as a lighter or fountain pen. In May, in the Café Lion, a few days after the murder of Captain Faraudo, Dr. Juan Negrín searched the pockets of his jacket, too tight for his Herculean bulk, after summarily cleaning his fingers, stained by red juice from the prawns he’d been eating, and instead of the pack of cigarettes Ignacio Abel imagined, he took out a pistol and put it on the table, next to the plate of prawns and mugs of beer, an unlikely pistol, so small it looked like a toy. “Look what I have to carry,” he said, “and I can’t even be on
the street by myself anymore,” and he pointed to the plainclothes policeman sitting alone at a table near the entrance, engrossed in sucking on a toothpick. In the gangster films he went to see with Judith Biely, pistols were objects with a lacquered shine that had a symbolic, almost immaterial quality, like lamps or flashlights, providing a bewitched immobility with their brightness, an abstract death without traces, not a hole or a tear or a stain in the close-fitting suit of the character who was shot, the silky evening dress of the beautiful but deceitful woman who deserved to die in the end. Gradually pistols were becoming real, without his paying attention, without his knowing how to notice them. He went to the Congress of Deputies to look for Negrín—he left, a secretary told him with a smile, he was dying of hunger and asked me to tell you he’s waiting for you at the Café Lion—and on the counter of the checkroom he saw a wooden box filled with pistols under a neatly hand-lettered sign: The honorable deputies are reminded that it is not permitted to carry firearms inside the parliamentary area. Leafing through a copy of Mundo Gráfico in the anteroom of the dressmaker where Adela and the girl were trying on outfits, he saw the advertisement for Astra pistols among those for skin creams and pills to regulate menstruation and increase the size of one’s breasts. Protect your possessions and the security of your loved ones.