In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “I don’t think that’s a bad idea.”

  “It’s a matter of generations, Adela.” The esthete suddenly became philosophical, speaking with an unfamiliar tone of equanimity, repeating the verbal food that nourished him. “Your husband’s a very intelligent man but he’s from another day. I know that and pay no attention. You have to be young to keep up with a time that struggles to be young, as José Antonio always says. You’re right about one thing, Ignacio, and it’s that ideas change just like clothes. There are people who still wear an old-fashioned frock coat, a beard, high shoes, a pince-nez. They’re still in the days of the horse and carriage and don’t know we’re in the age of the automobile and the airplane. I don’t blame you, you’re from a different time. We’re in the twentieth century—”

  “Extraordinary.” Ignacio Abel stood, sending away with an authoritarian gesture the maid who was carrying in the dessert tray. “Now it’ll turn out I’m old-fashioned and you’re progressive. This is extraordinary.”

  “Old-fashioned or progressive, left or right, they’re all anachronistic concepts, brother-in-law. You’re either with youth or with age, with what’s born or what dies, with strength or with weakness.”

  “Uniforms are a fairly old-fashioned style.”

  “What’s old are uniforms with decorations and crests, the ones used to indicate the privileges of powerful men! Now our uniform stresses equality, over and above individualistic stupidities and effeminacies. The worker’s shirt, the loose, practical clothing of the athlete, the pride of everyone beating with the same heart!”

  “And the pistols?”

  “To defend ourselves, brother-in-law, because we’d be peaceful people if they hadn’t declared war on us. We salute with an open hand, not with a clenched fist. An open hand for everyone, because we don’t believe in parties or classes. The boys who’d go out to sell our newspapers were shot down by the Communists until we learned to shoot too. This degenerate government attacks our headquarters and locks up Falangists while it lets the red militias do whatever they please.”

  “The government of the Republic obeys the law and puts criminals and killers in prison.”

  “The government of the Republic is a Marxist puppet.”

  Suddenly Ignacio Abel saw the inanity of the conversation in which he’d made himself an accessory with unnecessary vehemence. Just listening to the gibberish was degrading. He saw his brother-in-law not as a Fascist but as what he’d always seemed, an idiot. An idiot in a blue shirt, black leather straps, and absurd riding boots, besotted by cheap newspaper lyricism, impassioned barracks harangues, and pieces of poetic prose badly translated from German or Italian. An idiot who perhaps at heart wasn’t a bad person, who felt real affection for his sister, his niece and nephew, for whom he always brought presents, comic books about war or cowboys for the boy, princesses for the girl, a ball, a doll that cried when you bent it, who’d sat them on his knees to tell them stories when they were little and been eager to help when one of them fell sick. Or perhaps he really was a thug, in which case Ignacio Abel made the mistake of not taking him seriously.

  And now the great idiot or great thug was holding his son’s arms from behind and teaching him to aim with a pistol, bigger and more obscene in his delicate hands, almost translucent like the skin at his temples, hands that didn’t have the strength to hold a soccer ball or grasp the climbing rope in gym class, hands that when Miguel was born were as fragile and soft as a gecko’s feet. Watching his weak chest rise and fall on feverish nights, he’d feared his son had pneumonia or tuberculosis. Stronger boys hit him in the schoolyard of the Institute School when his sister wasn’t around to defend him. So awkward in sports, so likely to come home from excursions with sunstroke or bruises from falling, because he was clumsy or because other children pushed him and he didn’t know how to defend himself; living in the clouds, so dependent on Lita, with whom he shared games and movie magazines when he should have been with boys his own age, too fond of spending time with the maids, listening to the plebeian songs they sang at top volume. He didn’t acknowledge to himself the degree to which this disapproval tarnished his feelings for his son. He disliked the boy’s weakness and at the same time felt an urgent need to protect him; he watched him on the sly, alarmed by something he couldn’t define. Miguel felt his father’s presence, and knowing he was being observed made him all the more insecure and awkward, or produced in him an outburst of audacity or capriciousness that seemed calculated to make his father lose patience. And so instead of lowering the pistol when he saw him appear in the mirror or handing it to his uncle to avoid disaster, Miguel aimed it at his father, and a moment later took a step back and cowered, trembling, closed his eyes, feeling the blow of the slap that hadn’t yet struck his pale face, instantly red, burning as if in a sudden attack of fever.

  Watching his son’s face and his brother-in-law’s so close together, Ignacio Abel saw a resemblance between them. Not just some features, sketched in the boy and crudely visible in the adult, but a deeper resemblance, perhaps the secret weakness that would explain their resentment of him, the demanding father and disdainful brother-in-law, mother’s spouse, sister’s spouse, an intruder who couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t want Miguel to grow up resembling his uncle, having the same aquiline curve in his nose, the same scant, curly down on his upper lip, the same stare between sly and myopic, as if a part of him had retreated deep inside. Víctor took the pistol from the boy and said to Ignacio Abel, “Come on, man, don’t be like that, we were only playing.” Ignacio felt the rage growing in him, uncontrolled and yet as cold as the palms of his hands. He was going to slap his son, and while part of him was ashamed, another part moved ahead, animated by the boy’s fear, offended by his instinctive gesture of seeking refuge in his uncle, turning to Víctor to feel protected from his own father. He was aware of the physical impulse that sustained and propelled his rage but did nothing to contain it, and his son’s evident weakness, the tremor of his wet lower lip, instead of dissuading him, angered him more. Miguel took a step or two back, looking at his uncle, who’d moved away after placing the pistol in his shoulder holster and buttoning his jacket, as if to make it more invisible, intimidated or perhaps sensing that the more the boy wanted to take refuge in him, the greater his father’s rage would be. “Come on, man,” he repeated, but with a curt gesture Ignacio Abel silenced him, and Víctor moved to one side, all his manliness gone, fearful, in spite of his boots and leather straps and the pistol in its leather holster, that the punishment would fall on him as well.

  He looked Miguel in the eye as the boy backed into the closet mirror where a few seconds earlier he’d seen himself as a movie hero. At what moment does one reach the point of no return, the hateful thing that can no longer be erased? Towering over his son, he raised his right hand, thought about leaving the room, slamming the door, and joining the obnoxious family celebration, perhaps shouting at his brother-in-law, demanding that if he ever wanted to set foot in his house again it would have to be without a pistol and a blue shirt. But that’s not what he did. He didn’t spare himself the future shame or indignity of hiding from Judith Biely the kind of act she wouldn’t have forgiven, that would have made her see in him the shadow of someone she didn’t know. His hand came down, cutting through the air, open and violent, as heavy as a weapon, the palm much wider and harder than the boy’s face. He hit him noticing the sting on his palm and the flush of heat on his face. His son’s face turned to the wall. The boy’s eyes filled with tears, looked up at him from below, as if from the interior of a burrow, fear replaced by resentment, his cheek scarlet, a trickle of urine rolling down one of his thin legs. As Ignacio Abel turned to leave the room, he saw his daughter standing motionless by the door where she kept her school notebooks. She had seen it all.

  16

  ISOLATED GUNFIRE ON a fresh morning in May, the air perfumed with mountain aromas: thyme, rosemary flowers, white petals with yellow pistils among the bright rockrose leaves. The fore
st cut down a few years earlier to level the ground for University City was coming back to life on the cleared land and inclines of unfinished construction sites, the open spaces that weren’t playing fields yet. The whistles of bullets blended with the whistles of swallows; gunshots like hollow explosions of fireworks at a distant fair, beyond the clattering typewriters and open windows of the drafting office, where draftsmen and typists looked out with more curiosity than alarm, trying to determine where the shots were coming from. The air still clean, the ashtrays and wastebaskets empty, the secretaries’ lips and nails bright red. He liked that time of morning, the entire day ahead, the impulse to work still not exhausted by fatigue or tedium. Perhaps the mail clerk had been distracted by the commotion and delivery would be late: he’d come at his slow pace, his expression both self-important and servile, holding the large tray, and when he entered the office, ceremoniously requesting permission to do so, perhaps Ignacio Abel would recognize among the official letters an envelope with Judith’s handwriting. As soon as they parted they began writing to each other. They wanted to relieve with written words the emptiness of their time apart, prolong a conversation they never grew tired of. More gunfire now, not pistols but rifles. At what moment had his ear grown accustomed, begun to differentiate? Better to behave as if he’d heard nothing: not look up from the desk, the drawing board, keep busy each minute of the morning, dictating letters, receiving calls, insisting against all odds that construction would go on; he’d tell his secretary to return to her typewriter instead of spreading rumors about gunfire; he’d call the Assault Guard barracks and request that they send reinforcements, though it would be more practical to call Dr. Negrín, who’d bring to bear his political influence. Much more vigilance would be required night and day at the building sites now that the Anarchists of the National Confederation of Labor wanted to declare another construction strike.

  He should have spoken to Negrín some time ago but always put it off. He should have told him he’d been invited to spend the next academic year in America and hadn’t done so; he should have asked his opinion before accepting the invitation but said nothing to him; now he would have to tell him he’d accepted without requesting official permission. He hadn’t said anything to Adela and his children either. The invitation from Burton College had arrived in a long, ivory-colored envelope, and when he saw it on the mail tray he quickly put it in his pocket, then in the locked drawer where he hid Judith’s letters and photos. He responded with vague remarks when the children asked about the promised trip, the nocturnal journey in a sleeper car to Paris, the Atlantic crossing, the elevated trains and skyscrapers in New York, the Automats, which Lita had read about in encyclopedias and illustrated magazines. He put off the uncomfortable moment of reciting the explanation he’d elaborated, aware that he had put himself in the contemptible position of lying when he promised them, months earlier, something no one had asked for: it wasn’t a good idea for the children to miss a year of school, he planned to say; the salary was lower than it had seemed at first; there was no guarantee he’d be commissioned to design the library building (a clearing in a forest on the other side of the ocean, a few lines sketched on the broad sheets of a notebook, barely the shadow of a form that perhaps would never exist, as uncertain as his future). He discovered that a lie was a loan for which usurious interest accumulated in a short time, and new lies extended the time at an even higher rate and left him at the mercy of increasingly impatient creditors. Construction was advancing much more slowly than anticipated (everything so difficult, so slow, applications paralyzed in offices, machinery scant and defective, the means of delivery and transport primitive, the men unwilling, working in the sun with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, breathing heavily, saliva-soaked cigarette butts hanging from their mouths, looking around in fear of gunmen and assailants); even if the construction strike was not total, it was clear that University City would not be inaugurated in October. To leave before the end—wasn’t that disloyal to Negrín? Besides, Judith Biely took it for granted he’d travel alone to America. Ignacio Abel wasn’t lying when he told her he wanted that as much as she did, but he did lie when he led her to assume his wife and children knew about a decision that by now was irreversible. It wasn’t a complete lie, perhaps merely a truth delayed. Sooner or later that difficult familial conversation would be inevitable; he imagined it so clearly, it was almost as if it had already taken place (Miguel’s serious, aggrieved face, Adela’s expression of confirmed disillusionment, his daughter’s peeved but unshakable faith in him), as when the alarm clock rings and you dream that you’ve already gotten up and showered and the dream allows you a few more minutes of uneasy sleep.

  The days and weeks were slipping away without his taking action or saying anything; summer was approaching and there was less and less time until his journey was a problem only because others would have to find out about it, like a bank teller who thinks his embezzlement is less of a crime because it hasn’t been discovered yet. (It had been the same twelve years earlier, when he was going to leave for Germany: the boy sick, almost a newborn, Adela’s collapse after the birth, and he, the letter confirming his trip in his pocket, saying nothing, waiting.) The appearance of normality was in and of itself a poor antidote to disaster. Working every day, presenting an irreproachable face to the world, confirming that the landscape of buildings and avenues on the other side of the picture windows increasingly resembled the great utopian model of University City, its abstract buildings surrounded by groves of trees and playing fields, its straight avenues and winding paths along which groups of students would walk someday, in spite of the slowness of the work, the scarcity of money, the stalled applications, the apocalyptic propagandists for the strike and the Anarchist revolution who appeared at work sites brandishing red-and-black flags and automatic pistols. Getting up each morning and having breakfast with Adela and the children, reading the paper, while through the open balconies the fresh morning air came in, perfumed by the blossoms of young acacias; while his desire for Judith throbbed in secret (he’d call her as soon as he left the house, from the first telephone booth; better yet, he’d close himself in his study right now and ask her in a low voice to meet him as soon as she could, wherever she liked, in the house of assignation, in a café, in the Retiro) and the weight of postponed decisions grew like a barely perceived tumor. The greater the upheaval, the more he was driven to give no sign, to not lose control of what others saw. Going out and not thinking about the possibility of a gunman waiting by the entrance. Staying in the office, so busy with a calculation or the correction of a drawing that not even gunfire could make him look up for more than a moment. Not going into the corridor to look for the clerk with the unctuous manner and the tray of mail. Not sitting and looking at the telephone, as if the simple effort of his attention might cause a ring that would be a call from Judith. He gathered the courage to call Dr. Negrín at the Congress of Deputies, and a secretary granted him the relief of telling him that Don Juan wasn’t in but she’d give him the message. The gunfire had stopped; from a distance came the sound of an ambulance siren or an approaching Assault Guard van. His secretary entered his office without knocking, upset, speaking in a rush, almost not giving Ignacio Abel time to hide under a folder of documents the letter to Judith Biely he’d begun writing.

  “The Anarchists, Don Ignacio, a picket line. They came in a car, as in the movies, to the Medical School and started shooting at the workers on the morning shift, calling them Fascists and traitors to the working class. But some boys from the Socialist militia on guard duty shot back from the windows.”

  “Where were the police?”

  “Where do you think? They arrived after the gunmen had fled. You should’ve seen the militia boys, how they fought back. The car windows were shattered. And what a pool of blood when they drove away. One of them must’ve been hit.”

  They chatted about the gunfire the way they would talk on Monday mornings about the Sunday soccer games or a boxing m
atch: only a minor injury among the workers in spite of the shooting and the broken glass, but one or two of the others must be in serious condition, judging by the blood that poured from the car they escaped in; the blood bright red, not the black liquid of the movies, but dark and quickly coagulated, absorbed by the earth, raked by laborers who covered it with sand before returning to their work, guarded by young militiamen whom they reverently called the Motorized, a fanciful name originating from the fact that in parades some of them patrolled on old motorcycles with sidecars. “At least one of them’s dead, that’s certain,” said the mail clerk, the tray of letters abandoned on a table, among them perhaps one that Judith Biely had written and mailed the day before, only an hour after leaving him. “Two men carried him to the car and he couldn’t stand up and his face and shirt were covered in blood.” If he died, they’d bury him amid gales of banners, the coffin covered with a red-and-black flag, advancing above a mass of heads and hands anxious to touch it, to hold it high, carried like a boat on the current of a river that flooded the entire street. They’d sing anthems, shake clenched fists, shout promises of reparation and revenge, insults hurled at the closed balconies of bourgeois residences. But a shot or an explosion could provoke a wave of rage and panic in the crowd that would demolish it like a cyclone in a field of wheat: more shots, real ones now, the Assault Guard’s horses neighing, broken glass, streetcars and automobiles overturned. Someone lay dead on the pavement, and the collective liturgy of death would be repeated a little more passionately: perhaps someone attending the funeral or a passerby walked in front of a bullet; a Falangist gunman who’d fired from a moving car, around which the swelling crowd soon closed. This dead man would have his funeral with an identical mob, with other anthems and other flags, with speeches in hoarse voices and “Long live”s and “Death to”s before an open grave. At the funerals of the leftist dead there were forests of red flags and raised fists and parades of young militiamen in uniform; at the other funerals the smoke of incense rose, dispensed by priests, along with a choir of voices reciting the rosary. So ironic that both sides seemed blind to the similarity between their funeral rites, their celebrations of courage and sacrifice, of martyrdom, the rejection of the material world in the name of paradise on earth or the kingdom of heaven, as if they wanted to fast-forward to Judgment Day and hated nonbelievers and agnostics much more than their professed enemies. After the funeral of Jiménez de Asúa’s police escort, the crowd returning from the cemetery attacked a church that eventually was enveloped in flames; firemen who came to put out the fire were greeted by bullets. During those days in May, Madrid was a city of funerals and bullfights. Almost every afternoon, crowds walked along Calle de Alcalá to the bullfight arena or the East Cemetery.