In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He recalled the click of the keys filtering into his dream, like a nearby noise of rain falling on tiles or hollow zinc gutters; he recalled dreaming he was in the office listening to the click-clacking of the secretaries’ typewriters. He opened his eyes and it was day; Judith wasn’t beside him in bed. Through the shutters came a ray of sunlight and the powerful sound of the ocean. He’d have preferred not to think so soon that it was the last day, Sunday, and that very early the next morning they had to return to Madrid. He noted his body aching from making love, areas where his flesh had swelled, the overly tender, damp skin becoming irritated and red. Electrical current reached the house irregularly. He recalled Judith’s body gleaming with sweat in the light of an oil lamp resting on the floor, a lock of damp hair adhering to her face, her mouth half open, turning to look at him over her shoulder, knees and elbows resting on the unmade bed. They taught each other the names of things, the ordinary words that designated the most intimate acts and sensations of love, the most desired parts of the body. They pointed in order to find out, as if they had to name everything in the new world where they’d hidden, and the exploration by index finger turned into a caress. New words, never applied before to a body born and reared in another language, childish terms, vulgar, shameless, sweetly crude, with a subtlety of nuance that acquired the carnal dimension of what was being named. They exchanged words as if they were fluids and caresses; Spanish words he never imagined he’d be able to say aloud were transformed into immodest passwords; it was enough to say again in order to request what would have had another name, less precise and less brazenly sexual as well, what perhaps neither of them would have dared to say to someone brought up in their own language.

  The sound of the typewriter woke him. He was naked and didn’t have on his wristwatch. In the unfamiliar light, he couldn’t imagine the time. Nine, midday, two in the afternoon. Since their arrival at the house, time had expanded before them as if encompassing the ocean’s horizon and the length of beach whose two extremes couldn’t be seen in the distance that vanished in violet mist beyond the escarpments, demarcated in the west at nightfall by the intermittent beam of a lighthouse. As they approached the house, they’d passed a fishing village as horizontal as the landscape. From a distance he’d pointed out to Judith the beauty of the architecture, the white houses like blocks of salt against the greenish blues and silvery glint of the sea. On the beach, the rust-colored cliffs rose like dunes partially toppled by the force of the waves. He could hear them now, assaulting, undermining the base of the escarpments as gulls screeched and the typewriter clicked in the next room, the living room, with a large, wide window divided in half by the line of the horizon, where they’d found when they arrived an inexplicable bouquet of fresh roses. The interior spaces of the house had a mixture of elemental primitivism and modern asceticism: red clay tiles, whitewashed walls, broad panes of glass, railings of nickel-plated steel pipes. Ignacio Abel relives the smell of the ocean and the sound of Judith Biely’s typewriter, sees her in an involuntary, and for that reason true, flash of memory, absorbed in her writing, wrapped in a silk robe with broad drawings of flowers, her hair carelessly tied back with a blue ribbon to keep it away from her face. She types quickly, not looking at the keyboard and barely looking at the paper; the carriage reaches the end of the line, ringing a little bell, and she returns it to the beginning with an instinctive gesture. He looks at her more closely now that she isn’t aware of his presence. Her absolute concentration, the speed with which she types, the expression of serene intelligence on her face, cause him to desire her even more. Hair uncombed, barefoot, her robe loose around her shoulders, yet she has put on lipstick, not for him but for herself, just as she probably washed her face in cold water to be completely clear-minded when she begins to write; she uses the calm of dawn and the clean light that fills the house where they’ve been living since the middle of Thursday afternoon as if on an island, an island in time surrounded by the flat horizon of entire days that for the first time they’ve been able to share, as spacious as the rooms they walk through without being entirely accustomed to the idea that there’ll be no one else but them, no voices or footsteps or words but theirs, partially unrecognizable in a place where the echoes are very clear, the house where it doesn’t seem anyone else has lived or can live, so instantly has it become their own, made for the two of them as much as each was made for the other, as this moment was made, when Judith Biely in profile types on her portable Smith-Corona before a bay window, for Ignacio Abel to see the scene in full detail, standing in the doorway, desiring her again, waiting for the gesture when Judith will raise her head and notice his presence, seeing the smile that will form on her lips, the gleam in her eyes. A whole day ahead of them, he recalls, calculating, a whole day and night, and beyond that what he didn’t want to see, what’s there on the other side of the fog and the horizon of salt marshes crossing the highway in a straight line, the penance of Monday morning and the drive back, the probable silence, he driving and Judith lost in her thoughts, looking out the open window, the wind in her face, the hermetic expression behind her sunglasses, the residue of used-up time trickling out of empty hands.

  Judith looked up and burst into laughter when she saw him as probably no one had ever seen him, dazed with sleep, unshaven, his hair uncombed, the man who’d been so guarded the first few times he pulled back when she approached him, as naked now as when his mother brought him into the world, according to the incontrovertible Spanish expression that made her think of Adam. Ignacio was immodest and even a little arrogant, with a male bravura he hadn’t known himself capable of, which had been awakened by Judith and wouldn’t exist without her. Only now did she have the feeling she knew him, now that he’d been sleeping beside her for entire nights, arms around her, breathing heavily with his mouth open, sprawled on the bed, the only piece of furniture in the bedroom aside from a full-length mirror leaning against the wall. There was a provisional air in the house that made it more hospitable. Sometimes they’d looked at themselves in the mirror sideways, surprised at what they saw, not recognizing themselves, uncertain whether they were the man and woman intertwined, examining themselves, offering themselves, wiping the sweat on their faces or moving hair away from their eyes to see better so nothing would fail to be observed, the mirror like the deepest space they’d inhabited and where there was room only for the two of them, the most secret room in the labyrinth of the house, with no windows or decorations, nothing to distract them from themselves. For the first time love wasn’t a parenthesis conditioned and frustrated by haste. When they lay exhausted and satisfied beside each other for the first time they’d granted themselves the privilege of falling asleep, wet, sticky, letting the light breeze from the balcony soothe their bodies, the open balcony they never stood on. The house was a desert island with abundant provisions for a long period of being stranded, like the novels about maritime adventures Ignacio Abel read in early adolescence. In the icebox in the kitchen two blocks of ice hadn’t begun to melt yet, as if someone left them there just when they arrived, the same invisible visitor who left the bouquet of roses on the table where Judith had put her typewriter. They didn’t see anyone during the four days. From time to time Ignacio Abel was troubled by an uneasy desire to go to the village and find a phone so he could call Madrid, but he was afraid his other life would irritate or dishearten Judith. In the shameless fervor of mutual surrender there was a seed of reserve, as there was a portion of exasperation in desire. Each revealed to the other what had never been shown to anyone else, and they did, or allowed to be done, what shame wouldn’t have permitted them to conceive of, yet there were regrets or complaints or silent outbreaks of anguish they both concealed. On the second night Ignacio Abel woke and Judith was sitting up in bed, her back to him, erect, looking toward the window. He was going to say her name or extend his hand to her, but the suggestion of self-absorption emanating from her motionless body, from the breathing he couldn’t hear, stopped him. What will h
appen when we go back? How much time do I have left? How would they let me know whether something happened, whether misfortune struck one of my children, a car out of control on the way to school, the horrible, always lurking dangers you don’t want to think about, a sudden fever, a stray bullet in the tumult of a demonstration? Adela waiting for the requested and promised call, the one that wouldn’t have been so difficult, the one he wasn’t going to make. Four days and four nights that would last forever and crumble into nothingness. He was leaning on his elbows at the bedroom window, enjoying the coolness of the night after a long hot Sunday, looking at the full moon that had risen from the ocean like a great yellow balloon, when he realized he didn’t hear the typewriter. He went out to the living room and saw with a start that Judith wasn’t there. Insects flew around the lighted lamp on the table next to the typewriter and the handful of pages the breeze was disarranging. She was writing an article, she told him, about the things she’d seen on the drive from Madrid, the beauty that took her breath away and made her feel she was living in the fantastic landscapes of Washington Irving, John Dos Passos, romantic lithographs, and the miserable poverty it was impossible to look away from. Leaving Madrid for the south at first light had meant becoming lost in another world for which nothing had prepared her, though she recognized its literary lineage. The dry, treeless expanse of La Mancha in the June morning, cool at first and then burning hot, was identical to the descriptions of Azorín and Unamuno and the color illustrations in a 1905 Quijote she’d found in the public library when she was fifteen or sixteen: the images made more of an impression on her because she barely knew Spanish and had stared at them in order to understand something of the story. But he, driving without taking his eyes from the dusty road, attempted to dissuade her from those dreams: she should forget about the Castilian ecstasies of Azorín and Unamuno, Ortega’s vague observations; there was nothing mystical, nothing beautiful in the bare plain those writers had celebrated, no mystery related to the essence of Spain; there was ignorance, senseless economic decisions, the cutting down of trees, the dominance of huge estates and great flocks of sheep owned by feudal lords, grossly rich parasites dependent on the labor of peasants crushed by poverty, uneducated, malnourished, subjugated by the superstitions of the Church. What she saw wasn’t nature, he said, taking one hand from the wheel, gesturing with an indignation that by now was a character trait; the uninhabited wastelands, the expanses of wheat fields and vineyards, the barren horizons where a bell tower rose above a cluster of squat, earth-colored houses, were the consequence of fruitless labor and the exploitation of one man by another that was blessed by the Church. The precipices of Despeñaperros brought to Judith’s mind the stagecoach journeys of romantic chroniclers and the fantastic lithographs of Gustave Doré; driving slowly along the narrow, dangerous highway, car tires squealing on gravel at the edges of ravines, Ignacio Abel spoke at length and in a loud voice about the need for the Republic to favor literary verbiage less and the engineering of roads, railways, canals, and ports more. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her taking photographs with the small Leica she wore around her neck. He attempted to dissuade her from the deceitful seduction of the picturesque: that barefoot boy wearing a straw hat who waved at them as he rode on a tiny donkey was probably destined never to set foot in school; the slow multitude of sheep that obliged them to stop and crossed the road enveloped in a storm of dust might remind Judith of the adventure in which Don Quijote, in his delirium, confuses flocks and armies, giving her the idea of a country halted in time, where things written in a book more than three centuries before continued to be real—shepherds whistling to their dogs, holding staffs from which bags of esparto grass and water gourds hung, their helpers using slings and hurling stones with the dexterity of Neolithic herders. Wouldn’t it be better if that fallow land the sheep passed over were plowed, cultivated with the necessary technical skill, turned over with tractors and not hoes, distributed in sufficiently large parcels to those who cultivated it? No doubt, when night fell, the shepherds would light fires and tell one another primitive stories or sing ballads passed down from the Middle Ages for the satisfaction of Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the scholars at the Center for Historical Studies whom Judith so admired. But rather than singing ballads, perhaps it would be better for them to listen to songs on the radio and have the opportunity to sleep in a bed and work six days a week for a reasonable wage.

  Judith listened attentively. She had the gift of listening. She asked questions: she didn’t want to lose the meaning of any word, just as she wrote down in a notebook the beautiful names, Arabic- or Roman-sounding, of the villages they drove past. The urgent need to write revived forcefully in her; the feeling of something that wouldn’t resemble anything she’d done before, the attempts that almost never left her feeling satisfied but only regretful, because of her sense of fraudulence, of squandering for unknown reasons the impulse that had brought her to Europe, the goal of giving herself an education, of living up to her mother’s gift. The physical exaltation of traveling in a car next to him and of having the days and nights before them was linked to the proximate writing of the book that had appeared to her so often as a dazzling intuition about to be revealed; the audacity of love would be with her when she placed a blank sheet of paper in front of her and touched the round polished keys of the typewriter, white letters on a black background, its body so light, its mechanism so fast: additional spurs to the speed her writing would have, touched with a transparent sharpness, a clarity like the one she noted in her own attentiveness and alert gaze during the trip. She would have to recount what she was seeing with a fluidity that would contain the passing images and sensations: the dry plain, the blue background of mountains it seemed they would never reach, the precipices where torrents resounded and great eagles flew in slow circles, the straight rows of olive trees undulating as if on a static sea of reddish hills until they vanished in another, bluer, still more distant horizon. She would have to mix into the flow of the account the austere splendor of the landscapes and the affront of backwardness and human poverty, the dignity of the lean, dry faces that remained fixed as the car passed, motionless in front of white walls, looking out of shadowy doorways. As they left a village that didn’t seem to have a name, or trees, or almost any inhabitants, only dogs panting in the sun on a dusty street, Ignacio Abel abruptly put on the brakes, forcing her to look straight ahead. A hammer and sickle had been painted in large brushstrokes on the half-collapsed wall of a drinking trough. In front of the car a line of men obstructed the highway. They wore berets and straw hats against the sun, and espadrilles and corduroy trousers tied at the waist with straps or lengths of rope. One or two wore a red armband with political initials, perhaps UHP. Two of them, one at each end of the line, held, but didn’t aim, hunting shotguns. Yet there was no hostility in their eyes; curiosity, perhaps, because of the rarity of the car model, its body painted brilliant green, the chrome fittings of the handles and headlights, the folded-down leather top, the men’s curiosity intensified by Judith’s visibly foreign air. And a gruff obstinacy as well, the instinctive offense at the polished car in the gritty desolation of the village outskirts, the rage of promises never kept, the messianic dreams of social revolution. “They won’t do anything to us,” said Ignacio Abel, looking into the eyes of the man who approached and holding Judith’s hand that had reached toward the wheel, searching for his. She didn’t understand what the man said; he spoke with a strange accent, in a hoarse voice, barely parting his lips. There was no work in the village, the man said. The bosses had refused to plant, and they had decided that the scant barley and wheat harvest would be left in the fields. We’re not bandits, the man said, and not beggars either. So that their children wouldn’t die of hunger, they were asking for a voluntary contribution. As the man talked to Ignacio Abel, the others looked at Judith. She would have to write about those black eyes in dark faces, their chins unshaven; the toothless smile of the man who had the fog of mental defici
ency in his eyes; the harsh surface of everything under a vertical sun; the faces, the black cloth of the berets, their hands, the barrels and butts of the shotguns; the anticipation of a possible threat; the way all their eyes stared at Ignacio Abel’s soft leather wallet and white city hands, the glitter of his gold watch. When Ignacio Abel handed over some bills, one of the men stepped forward and grasped his wrist, examining the watch. Alarmed, Abel sensed that the men’s request for a contribution was the pretext for a holdup. He didn’t do anything, didn’t try to free himself from the man’s grip. “We’re revolutionaries, not bandits”—Judith understood the words of the man who’d first approached, the shotgun now resting on his shoulder, pulling at the other man so he’d release Ignacio Abel’s wrist. He said it, she thought, in a joking tone, but not completely, a joke that didn’t eliminate the threat. She’d have to write about her fear and also her remorse at feeling it; the uncomfortable awareness of her privileged status, offensive to those men, and with that her desire to get away. But how could she dare to write that her abstract love of justice was less powerful than the instinctive physical repugnance at those men, her relief that the car was accelerating and they were letting them pass, staying behind, in a cloud of dust, in their desert poverty?