In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “In the bullring?”

  “Where else, Abel? You’re a monomaniac about the bulls.”

  “Architecture determines people’s moods, Don Juan. Look at those stadiums where Hitler gives his speeches. In a bullring the sun softens brains and the public develops its instinct for seeing blood and demanding that ears be cut off.”

  “I see you’re a real determinist . . . The fact is, we had to stop the meeting and take refuge in the infirmary to keep our dear comrades from lynching us. When we were leaving, a mob with sticks and stones surrounded us, calling us all kinds of names and shouting ‘Long live’s for Russia and communism. A crowd of our young people mixed with members of the Communist Youth groups, whom they’ve joined now, to the great joy of the weakest minds in our party. Believe it or not, I had to fire into the air so our comrades would let us get away, fleeing for our lives along those roads. If the Civil Guard hadn’t helped us, they’d have finished us off. No need to stress the historic irony.”

  Negrín drained his beer, wiping away the foam with a broad sweep of his arm, then banging the stein down on the marble tabletop, next to the tiny pistol. The mocking expression was still on his face when the look in his eyes changed abruptly, along with his conversation, or the thread of his monologue.

  “They hate us, Abel my friend. I’m not surprised you want to leave. They hate you and me. They hate us inside and outside the party. The reactionaries who can’t get over losing the February elections hate us, and so do many we thought were our people because they supported the Popular Front. They hate those of us who don’t believe that demolishing the current world will make a better one possible, or that destruction and assassination can bring justice. It isn’t a question of ideas, as some think on our side and the other side. You and I know that abstract ideas don’t amount to much in practical life. In each case we face specific problems, and we don’t resolve them with fuzzy ideas but with knowledge and experience. I in my laboratory, you at your drawing board. If we come down from the stratosphere of ideas, things are fairly clear. What’s needed to keep a building from falling down? What do our compatriots need? You don’t have to do more than go out to the sidewalk and look at the people going by. They need to be better fed. They need better shoes. They need to drink more milk as children so they don’t lose their teeth. They need better hygiene, and they need to bring fewer children into the world. They need good schools and jobs with decent pay, and affordable heat in winter. Would it be so difficult to achieve a rational organization of the country to facilitate all that? Once everybody eats every day, and there’s electricity and clean running water, I say that would be the moment to begin talking about the classless society, or the glories of the Spanish race, or Esperanto, or eternal life, or whatever you like. Notice I’m not talking about socialism or emancipation or the end of man’s exploitation of man. I make no professions of faith, and I don’t believe you do either. I don’t see much difference between making a pilgrimage to Moscow or Mecca or the Vatican or Lourdes. What bothers the religious believer most is not the believer in another religion, not the atheist, but someone worse, the skeptic, the person who’s lukewarm. Have you noticed that in speeches and editorials, the word ‘neutral’ has been transformed into an insult? Well, of course I’m neutral, though from time to time the blood does rush to my head. I don’t want to be burned, and I don’t want anybody or anything burned either. We had enough bonfires with the Holy Inquisition. Now I see many people who say they’ve lost faith in the Republic. Faith in the Republic! As if they’d prayed to a saint or a virgin asking for a miracle that hasn’t been granted. They pray to the Popular Front to bring not only amnesty but agrarian reform, communism, happiness on earth, and because a few months have passed since the elections and there’s been no miracle, they lose faith and want to do away with the legality of the Republic, as if they wanted to throw the font at the saint who didn’t bring them rain after their prayers. Not to mention those others who are involved in something more than prayers and uprisings. Praying to God, not sparing the rod. There they are, conspiring more brazenly than ever, in the view of everyone except the government, which acts as if it hasn’t heard a thing. Rich young monarchists go to Rome for the pope’s blessing, pay their respects to His Majesty Don Alfonso XIII, then cash the check Mussolini gives them to buy weapons. Ready for the reconquest of Spain, as they put it. Insane. Furious because the Republic has expropriated a couple of barren estates or doesn’t let them preach in the public schools or permits a man and a woman who’ve spent their lives hating each other to go their separate ways. Enraged because this poor Republic that doesn’t have enough to pay teachers’ salaries has retired on full pay all the thousands of officers who lazed around their barracks and thought it a good idea to apply for a pension, and it asked for nothing in exchange, not even an oath of loyalty. Do you know why I had to buy this pistol and why that man you see there looking so bored and chewing on a toothpick has to accompany me? Let me guess what you’re thinking. It isn’t that the pistol and the bodyguard look as if they offer much security—why kid ourselves. Though Jiménez de Asúa’s escort saved his life . . . But this is the country we have, my friend, and it doesn’t give much of itself for good or for ill. Half of Spain hasn’t gone past feudalism, and our comrades who write for Claridad want to do away with a bourgeoisie that barely exists. Even the conspiracies are of little account, my dear Abel; they’re the hooliganism of rich boys who can’t keep a secret. There’s a girl, a student of mine, not brilliant but very diligent, who was doing research with me in the laboratory before I lost my head completely and left everything to get involved in politics. This girl, modern but a little awkward, had a fairly ordinary fiancé who came to pick her up every afternoon at the Residence and greeted me courteously, one of those men who aspire to being a registrar or a notary and out of sheer listlessness end up having to spend several years in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Sierra. Nothing to object to. As soon as they were formally engaged, she left the laboratory because it wouldn’t be proper if a señorita already spoken for, as they say in those families, were to continue working in a place filled with men. Instead of biochemistry, where she could have done something worthwhile over the years, she would no doubt dedicate her efforts to bearing children and saying rosaries in the stupor of the province where they’d send her husband when he finally regained enough strength to sit for his examinations. I saw her from time to time after that, and she never forgot to send a card for my saint’s day or greetings at Christmas. On this the day of your saint I wish you and your loved ones every happiness and include you in my prayers, the poor thing wrote to me last year. But not long ago she called one night, her voice shaking as if she were afraid someone might hear her. I asked if anything was wrong and she said no, not with her, but she had to see me urgently and please don’t tell anyone she’d called. She came to my house the next morning, Sunday, before Mass, with the little veil on her head, more awkward than when she wore the white coat in the laboratory, not daring to look me in the eye. I thought she must be pregnant and had come to ask for help in getting a secret abortion. And do you know what she wanted to tell me?”

  Negrín took a long drink of beer, and this time he wiped away the foam with a handkerchief that he then passed over his broad, sweaty brow. The police escort, more erect now, nodded from a distance at his explanations, conscious of his role, chewing on the toothpick.

  “That her fiancé, in addition to caring for his lungs and studying for the profession of notary or registrar, had formed a Falangist shock troop with some friends and they were planning to assassinate me. ‘Everything anticipated,’ the poor girl said to me with that thin little voice that barely left her body, like her voice when she had to answer a question on an examination: the day, the time, the place, the weapons they would use, the getaway car, just as they’d seen it in the movies. Political ideas are more dangerous when they’re mixed up with the foolishness of movies. They planned to kill me right here, at
the door of the café, on the sidewalk of Calle de Alcalá. Then this detail: they intended to let me eat supper first.”

  “Have they been arrested?”

  “How could I accuse them without hurting her?” Negrín guffawed. “Perhaps they realized I carried a pistol or had begun to enjoy the company of this good friend who’s now my guardian angel. Or maybe they got bored or were afraid to move from words to deeds.”

  “And what happened to your student?”

  “You’re not going to believe this. The next day she called again, speaking in a thread of a voice, in tears, ‘torn between conflicting feelings,’ as they say in the women’s magazines. ‘My dear Dr. Negrín, for the sake of what you hold dear, forget what I told you yesterday. They’re nothing but boys’ childish fantasies.’ Her fiancé in reality was a good person, incapable of hurting a fly. He didn’t even have a pistol, and besides, he was sick, because it seems the examinations are at the beginning of the summer, and with so much memorization of a gigantic list of topics, he didn’t take care of himself and suffered a slight relapse, so he may have to go back to the sanatorium and not sit for examinations this year. A drama more Spanish than those of Calderón. Worse yet, than those of Don Jacinto Benavente.”

  “You’re too trusting.”

  “What shall I do? Not leave the house? Stay shut away like Azaña since he’s been president of the Republic, taking walks in the gardens of El Pardo and thinking about what he’ll write in the journal they say he’s keeping before he goes to bed? I need people and movement, my dear Abel. I need to walk to the café from the Congress, so I’m hungrier and thirstier and enjoy the food and beer all the more. I’ve already had another and you’ve barely tasted yours. Is it true you have no vices?”

  Negrín leaned his elbows on the table, and extending the thick fingers of one hand, he counted with the index finger of the other, close to Ignacio Abel and looking at him with an ironic stare that made him uncomfortable.

  “You don’t smoke. That seems fine. As a cardiologist, I have no objection. You practically don’t drink. You don’t like bullfights. Good food is not your downfall, as it is mine. You don’t look as if you ever go to whores . . . Don’t you have a voluptuous mistress hidden away somewhere?”

  Perhaps Negrín did know, as irrepressibly fond of gossip about other people’s vices as he was of food or women or great political operations. Perhaps he’d heard rumors and therefore from the beginning had worn a half-smile, suspecting that beneath his intention to go to a foreign university, Ignacio Abel was hiding not only the urgency of fleeing the disasters of Spain but a less admissible desire, a passion that gave the lie to his honorable air, his sober appearance of bourgeois, rather puritanical dignity. For a moment Ignacio Abel, examined so intently by Negrín’s eyes, was afraid he’d blush, felt the heat rising from the base of his neck, oppressed by the knot in his tie. He imagined Negrín’s sonorous laugh, his pleasure in a human weakness that would make his less exceptional. But fortunately Negrín had finished his beer and suddenly was in a hurry. He put the pistol in his pocket, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, consulted his watch, and called the waiter with two loud claps.

  “Count on me for whatever you need, Abel,” he said as they were saying goodbye at the café entrance, and he looked up and down the street with rapid caution. “If you like, I’ll make sure they give you the passport and your American visa right away. Leave as soon as you can, and don’t hurry back.”

  He watched Negrín cross Calle de Alcalá, his broad shoulders standing out above the heads of other people, the light summer jacket tight at the sides, advancing with great strides through the traffic, not waiting for the officer’s signal to pedestrians, walking so fast that his police escort was left behind.

  19

  HE’S ALWAYS BEEN about to leave. He doesn’t know for how many years he’s been a guest in his own life, the figure in a painting, the only one in a group to turn his eyes away from what holds the attention of the others, as if to say I’m not one of them; a dubious presence who appeared out of focus in photographs or simply was missing from them (mother, children, smiling grandparents, only the father invisible: distracted, perhaps using some pretext not to pose). You must have thought no one would notice how you hid your disapproval, but I did. I know you better than anybody, though you don’t think so. In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing, and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter, that he was dead, that the mail service, in ruins like everything else, had lost it, left it undelivered in some mail sack—how many letters must have disappeared this way throughout Spain during these months, how many are still being written? You always had to go somewhere, you said nothing and suddenly you’d tell me, at the last minute, I’m leaving tomorrow, or I won’t be home for supper tonight, or that time you went to Barcelona for a whole week to see the International Exhibition—for work, you said, even though Miguel had been running high fevers and seemed to have something wrong with his lungs. You left me alone night after night, lying awake beside the boy who was delirious. Don’t think I don’t remember. He could tear up the letter right now, get rid of it as he’d done with so many things as he traveled, from the time he closed the door of his apartment in Madrid and out of habit was about to lock it but decided not to; he probably wouldn’t go back and a patrol of militiamen could smash the lock at any time, that very night; he might have torn up the letter before leaving the hotel room, or better yet, not opened it when the receptionist handed it to him and after the initial surprise, then hope, and finally disillusionment he recognized the handwriting. It wasn’t Judith’s. It was almost worse when you stayed here and it felt as if you were gone because it seemed as if you weren’t in your own house but someone else’s or in a waiting room or a hotel especially when my parents or brother or someone from my family came to visit. I wish you’d seen the face you put on for them.

  So many grievances, all of them cited in the letter as if on the densely written pages of a formal indictment, bringing him Adela’s exhausted, offended voice, vibrating and never silent in the receiver of a phone he didn’t know how to move away from his ear. Leaving or being left alone, that was all you wanted and it’s what you’ve accomplished. The man who’d been an intruder or a furtive guest in his own apartment became for several months its only resident; from the Saturday in July when he came back from the Sierra and searched for Judith in a Madrid inundated with crowds, lit by headlights and the sudden flare of fires, to a midnight three months later when Madrid was already a city of dark, empty streets, disciplined by fear and alarm sirens, seized by terror at the steady approach of the war, like the inexorable arrival of winter. Long before, at the end of July, in August, on hot nights when it wasn’t wise to be seen on the streets, Ignacio Abel wandered aimlessly through the apartment, up and down the long hall, from one room to another, opening the glass doors between rooms with high ceilings and moldings of an opulence he disliked more and more. He wrote letters; he imagined he was writing them; laboriously he composed aloud the phrases in English he’d say to Judith Biely if he saw her again; he wound the clock in the hall, and every time it took less time for it to stop; he didn’t uncover most of the furniture and lamps draped in sheets, which looked abstract now; he observed with displeasure how quickly dirt took over in the bathroom with no one there to clean it; he ventured into the kitchen to prepare himself a simple supper, a hermit’s meal, whatever the porter’s wife had brought up for him or he had found at the less and less well-stocked stands at the nearby market or the corner grocery that until recently had displayed a full window, now almost empty, in part because of real shortages, in part because the owner preferred to hide the goods in the cellar for fear they would be requisitioned at gunpoint.

  How strange that he’d found an apartment like this acceptable, res
igned himself to it, allowed it to be filled with furnishings as presumptuous as the dimensions of the building itself, the marble balustrades on the balconies, the drapes and rugs, not to mention the testimonies to the terrible taste of Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, their terrifying generosity and love of fake antiques, or authentically abominable antiques, carved Castilian credenzas, the pendulum clock with its Gothic inscription in Latin, the Christ of Medinaceli with its Morisco eave and tiny metal lights. I’m an architect and I live in an apartment I think is someone else’s; I’m forty-eight years old and suddenly seem to be living another man’s life by mistake, he’d written to Judith in one of his first letters, stupefied to discover that without difficulty and almost without intending to he could cross in a few minutes the invisible frontier to another identity and another life, his true life. But he didn’t tell Judith or didn’t want to remember the gratification he’d felt when he saw the place for the first time with Adela and the children, who were still very young, and learned the price and calculated that he could afford it: a recently completed building in the Salamanca district, close to the Retiro, with a marble entrance where two caryatids supported the great arch over curved steps leading to the elevator, and a porter in a uniform with braid and white gloves who removed his peaked cap when he greeted the ladies and gentlemen. “This is a building of true magnificence!” Don Francisco de Asís had declared, his booming voice rumbling in the marble-covered heights, and he had felt a certain pride, fortified by Adela’s enthusiasm as she walked from one room to another, admiring the size, the moldings on the ceilings, incredulous that an apartment like this could be hers, almost intimidated, while the children got lost playing hide-and-seek in the back rooms, their footsteps and shrill voices echoing in the empty spaces. You thought yourself so upright and my father so ridiculous, yet you didn’t hesitate to take advantage of his friendship with the developer to get a good price on the apartment. You didn’t bother to thank him even though you knew we only got this deal because of him. On hot nights his solitude and confinement became as unbearable as the air. (The shutters had to be closed before turning on the lights, as a precaution against bombings, they said, out of fear above all of the vigilance patrols who shot at lit windows, no questions asked.) He’d hear gunfire, car motors, tires squealing around corners. He’d hear shouts sometimes when he was dozing on the sheets that nobody changed, in the bed he didn’t know how to make, the large double bed with a baroque headboard, where it was strange not to find the weight and shadow, the breathing of Adela. It seems incredible not that you’ve stopped loving me but that you’ve forgotten how much you used to love me. He left the bedroom door partway open in case he heard footsteps at dawn on the landing or the stairs (no one had repaired the elevator since some strikers sabotaged it early in July). He heard footsteps or dreamed them and woke with a start, expecting fists or rifle butts banging on the door. He dreamed about Judith Biely, detailed erotic dreams, more like relived memories, in which she turned into a stranger, her cold stare plunging him into a deep sadness that was still there when he woke. He masturbated without pleasure, with a kind of nervous excitation, with a feeling of humiliation when he finished, unsatisfied, longing for her skilled, delicate hand. He washed, trying not to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, and dried his hands on a dirty towel.