In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  In the photographs of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes, murdered for unknown reasons during a disturbance in the crowd watching the military parade on the Day of the Republic, one can see that many of those accompanying the coffin, both military and civilian, carry unsheathed pistols. Although it’s April 16 and the leaves have come out on the trees along the Paseo de la Castellana, everyone is in dark winter clothing. From the scaffolding at a construction site, pistols and machine pistols are fired over the heads of the funeral procession, and people run in all directions, seeking shelter in gardens and behind trees, and for some minutes the coffin of Second Lieutenant Reyes is abandoned in the puddles on the pavement. When the funeral reaches the East Cemetery several hours later, it has left a trail of more than twenty corpses on the streets. “You shouldn’t be so confident, Don Ignacio. If you give me your authorization, I’ll arrange for a couple of comrades from the union to escort you when you inspect the sites.” Eutimio, the construction foreman at the Medical School, had come into Ignacio Abel’s office with his cap in hand and before speaking had closed the door. “A lot of maniacs are running loose, Don Ignacio. None of us is safe.” In the wind and rain, the crowd accompanying the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes goes up Calle de Alcalá, and when it reaches the Plaza de Manuel Becerra, a formation of Assault Guards armed with rifles bars the way. The shouts of “Long live” and “Death to” become more violent, as do the chanting of the rosary and the hymns. The crowd advances on the barrier of uniforms and the Assault Guards open fire at point-blank range. A slender, pale lieutenant with glasses and a close-fitting uniform pulls his pistol from its holster and fires into the chest of a young man with the look of a Fascist student who was advancing on him, his face red from singing a hymn. But there is a state of emergency and newspapers are censored, so the next day one can’t find a clear report of what happened or the number of casualties. Or the announcement of a funeral is published but no one understands it because it was censored a day before news of the killing was published. Besides, you’re in a hurry, you have no time and decide not to see what’s in front of your eyes. Perhaps you’re in a taxi, impatient to reach the appointment with your lover, and you pay no attention to the crowd in your way and aren’t curious to know whose funeral it is, only irritated because you’ll arrive late, because on account of that disturbance you’ll lose some of the precious minutes of your meeting with her. From the shadows of the bedroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, on the other side of the thicket, the closed shutters, the curtains, gunfire and panic at the end of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes may have been a distant background noise for Ignacio Abel as he embraces Judith Biely, naked on a red quilt. You leave hurriedly at eight-thirty in the morning to go to work and don’t see that across the street a car is parked with its windows down despite the cold and wind, and don’t hear that the engine has just started, or when you do and look up, you see the barrels of the pistols ready to shoot. The police escort throws himself on Professor Jiménez de Asúa, wanting to push him out of the way of the bullets, and is shot instead and lies dying on the sidewalk as the killers flee on foot because the driver is clumsy or nervous and floods the engine. How long did it take Adela, not to accumulate small bits of evidence and clues, but to accept what she knew, to dare see what was in front of her? How many times did she go into his study and see that he’d forgotten to lock the drawer and decide not to open it? Only a few meters from where the police officer has died in a pool of blood that stains the hands and shirt cuffs of Jiménez de Asúa, the men at a bar discuss soccer, a fruit seller raises the metal shutters of his store—no one knows what just happened. A month later, the judge who sentenced the Falangist gunmen, easy to arrest because they fled on foot after failing to start the getaway car, leaves his house one morning, barely takes a few steps on the sidewalk, raises his hand to hail a taxi, and is struck by bursts of fire from a machine pistol. At the house of the lawyer Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, a child delivers a basket of eggs with a lid in the shape of a hen, saying it comes from a grateful client. The lawyer lifts the lid and a bomb explodes that destroys half his house and leaves him uninjured.

  “Nobody wants to see anything, my friend, and the person who has seen is quiet and does everything possible to forget,” Professor Rossman said one afternoon in the Café Aquarium de Madrid, a few minutes after shots were fired in the street and a young man was left dead, blown apart on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía, his skull shattered, blood and brain matter oozing down a shop window, “and if he does say anything they ridicule him or call him crazy or accuse him of provoking the disaster by irritating those at whom he points a finger. It’s not so bad, they say, you’re exaggerating, and with your exaggerations and warnings you put us all in danger. I didn’t want to see or understand either. I saw when it was the only thing I could do. I saw and acted in time and managed to escape, but even then I was blind, I knew I was going to make another, more serious mistake but let myself be carried along, telling myself that perhaps I was wrong, perhaps my daughter was right, my daughter and her comrades. Back then, three years ago, we could have immigrated without much difficulty to America—you know that some distinguished colleagues are already there. Or we could have gone to Prague, or Paris, or come directly here, to this beautiful Madrid. I planned to write to you then. I read that the government of the Spanish Republic offered a chair to Professor Einstein and opened its arms to other exiles from Germany. But I did nothing. I didn’t heed the warnings of my instinct, and even worse, of my rational intelligence. I didn’t dare contradict my daughter. And not to contradict her, I didn’t want to see what she didn’t see. We reached the Soviet border and an official delegation boarded the train to welcome us. They embraced us, opened bottles of vodka to toast us, representatives of the anti-Fascist German people, they presented my daughter with a large bouquet of red roses. But I looked and I saw. I saw the beggars in the station, was aware of the fear in the other passengers’ eyes at the approach of my daughter’s comrades who boarded the train to welcome us, aware of their rancor when they looked at us, their panic if you spoke to them. But I didn’t want to know what I was seeing. Forgive me, a foreigner, for saying this to you: you Spaniards don’t want to see either, you pretend not to hear.”

  Perhaps that was also the afternoon when he saw the first dead body. That was why he still remembered the face, or what was left of it, with more detail than almost all the faces of the dead he saw in Madrid during the summer and the first weeks of that golden, sanguinary autumn before his flight, his anxiety-ridden and shame-filled desertion. Ignacio Abel hadn’t heard the first shot, hadn’t recognized it in the midst of the traffic noise on the other side of the large window in the café where he was talking with Professor Rossman, close to the intersection of Calle de Alcalá and the Gran Vía, at the hour when people were beginning to leave their offices. The ear must be trained: at first it doesn’t recognize gunshots. They sound more like small rockets, like a car backfiring. At a sidewalk café on Calle Torrijos, some young men fired at a group of Falangists drinking wine in the shade of an awning, and in the shooting a girl was killed who was sitting alone at a nearby table and whom no one knew. A dry, brief crack that in no way resembles gunshots in films or the pathetic click heard when someone pretends to fire a weapon on the stage. In retaliation for the attack on Calle Torrijos, a car stopped on the sidewalk in front of the General Union of Workers and some milkmen walking out of the building were riddled with bullets, the spilled milk slowly combining with blood. Ignacio Abel realized something was happening when heads looked up at the other tables in the Café Aquarium: the next series of shots was more recognizable because of the confused shouts that accompanied them, and because a moment later the traffic came to a halt—car engines, taxi horns, the high-pitched bells of streetcars. Suddenly no one was left at the outdoor tables, as if, after hearing a crash, a flock of birds had quickly taken flight. There were chairs overturned, glasses of beer and untouched cups of coffee on the rou
nd marble tables, bottles of seltzer trapping light in the shade of the awnings, lit cigarettes in the ashtrays. Behind panes of glass and at the open windows of nearby buildings, people watched in silence. Lying across the sidewalk, a body still twitching, one hand extended as if clawing at the ground, one leg trembling. He looked like a rag doll or a mannequin, wearing an impeccable suit of light-colored, lightweight fabric, a good shoe on the trembling foot, a sock with a diamond pattern. Half of his head showed the straight part in pomaded hair; the other half was a pulp of blood and brain matter. Tossed to the ground, stained with blood, their pages blowing in the gentle, late afternoon breeze of early June, were the Falangist newspapers the young man had been hawking next to the café terrace when a car stopped beside him long enough for the window to be lowered and the barrels of two pistols to appear, according to one of the few witnesses, a man whose voice trembled between gulps of cognac, surrounded by waiters and patrons as he described the scene. “Today it was their turn,” observed someone near Ignacio Abel, “and yesterday some young gentlemen from the Falange killed a man on the corner who was selling the Communist paper. One to one, like a soccer match. Tomorrow they’ll break the tie.” By then an ambulance had taken away the body and some municipal workers had cleaned the sidewalk with brooms and bursts of water from a hose, and a clerk from a hat shop passed a damp cloth over the shop window, supervised by a man in a pinstriped suit who smoked a cigar and bent toward the glass to be certain no trace of blood remained. A couple of Assault Guards in high boots and blue uniforms inspected the sidewalk where people were walking again, more numerous now and better dressed, on their way to movie theaters or coming out of them, beneath the light of the street lamps that had just been turned on, beneath the marquees with announcements of films, beside the recently lit shop windows. Ignacio Abel and Professor Rossman sat down again at their table next to the window. Under the electric light the professor seemed older, less well dressed in the same dark suit he’d worn in the winter, more singular in his misfortune, his exile, the torment of a clairvoyance that no one paid attention to and that never did him any good, never helped him avoid any error or prevent any future trouble. On the sidewalk, among the tables that were occupied again, young Falangists peddled their newspapers, some of them defiantly wielding pistols now that the Assault Guards had withdrawn, shouting slogans that erased traffic noise and that people sitting on the café terrace seemed not to hear, just as no one seemed to see the blue shirts and leather straps and the metallic gleam of weapons. On the corner of Calle de Alcalá and the Gran Vía, other Falangists watched the flow of people and traffic, on the alert to prevent another attack. Even from a distance, Ignacio Abel recognized Adela’s brother.

  Perhaps that was also the first time he heard shots so close by. And never before had he seen a dead body in the street, struck down unexpectedly, not stiff and solemn in a bed, dressed in mourning, lit by candles; not lying on the boards of a wagon, covered by empty sacks. Ignacio Abel paid for the coffees, Professor Rossman’s two glasses of anise, the ham sandwich he’d devoured, sputtering bread and bits of food as he spoke; his former teacher was undergoing a deterioration that Ignacio Abel had observed at each stage with some physical revulsion as well as remorse, an oppressive sense of responsibility. An early summer heat made the signs worse (in Madrid, summer arrived abruptly, suffocatingly, at the beginning or in the middle of May, following the rain and cold of an unpleasant spring): his bald head, the odor of stale sweat and uric acid emanating from his clothes, the bitter coffee and sweet anise on his breath. Perhaps he really hadn’t done anything to help Professor Rossman aside from listening to his ramblings; out of stinginess, distraction, or laziness, one doesn’t do for a person in desperate need what wouldn’t be difficult to do. They left the café, and in the air on the Gran Vía one could almost touch the silky quality of May twilights. “You Spaniards don’t want to see what’s happening in your country,” Professor Rossman said, as indifferent as a prophet or a visionary to the sensual realities of the world, the sweetness of the air and the beauty of the women passing by, the calligraphy of neon lights, one after another, the name of a store, a brand of soap. He too had become accustomed to the normality of exile, to being a nobody after having had a respected name and an eminent position as a professor, to living with his daughter in a squalid pensión whose rent he couldn’t always pay on time. “You Spaniards think things are solid, that what has endured until now will remain forever. You don’t know that the world can collapse. We didn’t know when the war began in ’14, we were even blinder than you, stupefied and drunk with happiness, jubilantly invading the recruitment offices, marching in step behind military bands playing patriotic anthems, parading on the way to the slaughterhouse, parents pushing their sons to enlist, women throwing flowers at them from the windows. The most illustrious writers glorifying war in the newspapers, the great crusade of German culture!” He spoke in German, as if he were giving a speech, and some passersby stared at him: the bald oval head, the suit of anachronistic mourning, between formality and filth, his voice guttural and foreign, the black briefcase clutched in his arms as if it contained something valuable, his diplomas and certificates in Gothic characters, the letters of recommendation written in several languages, the obsolete passport with a seal stamped in red on the first page—Juden–Juif—the safe-conduct passes or letters of transit typed in Cyrillic characters, copies of visa applications, disheartening notices from the American embassy in Madrid, sheaves of international newspapers dismantled with scissors, full of underlinings, exclamation points, question marks, scribbled notes in the margins. Ignacio Abel regretted inviting him to have two drinks: he’d probably eaten little or nothing during the day aside from the ham sandwich. “You’d like not to see but you do see, my dear man. You pretend you don’t hear, just like those people in the café when shots were fired. But you’re an attentive person despite yourself. I talk and talk and the only person who pays any attention at all is you. I telephone and you’re the only one who answers. When I go to an office it’s always closed or about to close, and when I go to see someone, he can’t see me, or if he makes an appointment it’s for sometime in the future, and when I arrive they tell me he isn’t in or there’s been a misunderstanding and I have to come back a week later. Except for you, no one’s at home or in the office when I call. They think I’ll grow tired or won’t come back or fall ill, but I always come back, on the day I was told and at the exact time, not because I’m obstinate but because I don’t have anything else to do. You, my dear friend, are so busy you can’t understand me. You don’t know what it is to wake in the morning and have the whole day, your whole life, before you, with no occupation other than requesting things no one is obliged to give me, or seeking out people who don’t wish to see me. Or worse, attempting to sell things no one wants to buy, except for you, my good friend, who out of pity bought I don’t know how many of those fountain pens that scratch the paper and stain everything. At least my daughter has some German students now, also thanks to you and your wife, your delightful children, and your children’s friends whom you and your wife have persuaded, I don’t know how, to study German. I should give lessons too instead of going around trying to sell pens with fake brand names, visiting offices, requesting documents, but you were my student and know me, I don’t have patience for something as slow as teaching a language. They seem a lie, those days at the School! You remember, first in Weimar, then in the new building, in Dessau. I didn’t want to know what was happening outside those clean white walls, our beautiful world of large windows and right angles. The beauty of all useful things, do you remember? The integrity of the materials, the pure forms conceived to fulfill a specific task. I don’t remember reading in the paper that Hitler had been named Reich Chancellor. Another government crisis, one of many, the same politicians going and coming, approximately the same names, and I didn’t have the time or the desire to read newspapers or listen to speeches. There were more important things to do
, practical, urgent things, classes, the administration of the School, technical problems that had to be resolved, my wife sick, my daughter causing me so much distress because she didn’t dare speak to anyone or look anyone in the eye and then suddenly became a Communist, and I couldn’t find out who infected her. People obsessed by politics seemed as incomprehensible to me as those obsessed by sports or horseracing. I thought my daughter was deranged, intoxicated by the books she was always reading, by Soviet films, by the eternal meetings often held in my house, hours and hours discussing, smoking, analyzing the articles in their newspapers after reading them aloud, her entire life from the time she woke up until she went to bed, growing paler, somnambulistic, looking at me as if I lived on another planet or were her class enemy, the Social-Fascist father more harmful than a Nazi, the hypocritical collaborator in the exploitation of the working class, the corrupt bourgeois advocating imperialist warfare. She inherited her mother’s musical talent and voice. She left the conservatory and stopped singing because opera was elitist, decadent entertainment. That was my daughter. She stopped taking care of herself and became ugly. You’ve seen her: she’s managed to be ugly and look much older than she is. Now she resembles the female guards in Soviet hotels and the typists at the Comintern. What can we do, my friend? How little is in our hands! Acting honestly, fulfilling our duty, doing our work well. And what good is it? Saying what our conscience orders us to say, though no one wants to listen and we earn the hatred not only of our enemies but also of those friends who prefer not to know the truth or see what’s in front of them. My daughter didn’t want to see what was in full view from the moment we reached Soviet customs. Neither did I, for her sake, because I saw it as being disloyal to her and to those people who offered us asylum when we had to leave Germany. And now I see the posters in Madrid and it frightens me, hammers and sickles and portraits, as if I were back in Moscow, or they’d come after us, looking for us. I saw the parade on May Day, the red shirts, the uniformed militias, the children marching in time, raising their fists, the portraits of Lenin and Stalin, that giant shield with the hammer and sickle high over the heads of people in the midst of red flags. Those people can’t imagine what their lives would be like if they’re ever unfortunate enough to have what they’ve been taught to dream of. I went there with my daughter and would have liked to leave as fast as I could, but she was hypnotized, you wouldn’t have believed it if you had seen her, after everything they did to her in Moscow, she remained at my side, clutching my arm, her eyes filled with tears when the band playing ‘The Internationale’—badly, of course—passed by, and she raised her fist, she whose Soviet comrades almost murdered her, the same ones who had welcomed her with a bouquet of red roses when we crossed the border. So there’s no cure, no one’s safe, no matter how far you think you’ve run. Listen to me, my friend, you have to escape from here as well. The blue shirts and the brown shirts and the black shirts and the red shirts are at the door, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ve infected everything. Look at the map and see all the space they’ve occupied. There’s no place for people like us. No one will defend us. Hitler has broken the Versailles Treaty and invaded the demilitarized zone with his armies, and the British and the French haven’t confronted him. I’m expecting letters from the Americas—not from the United States, not yet, though Mies and Gropius are there, and Breuer too. I write to them and they take a long time to answer. They say they’ll do what they can, but it’s difficult, you know, because of my daughter’s whim, because it’s recorded in our passports that we traveled to the Soviet Union, and for that reason they don’t trust us. Perhaps to Cuba or Mexico first, and from there it’ll be easier to enter the United States. You think there’s still time, don’t try to fool me, you hear what I say and think I’m exaggerating or beginning to lose my mind. You feel safe because you’re in your city and your country and at heart you think that I and others like me belong to another species, another race. But time’s running out, my friend, it slips away from us more and more quickly, and from you too, from those like us . . .”