In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  In a drawer in the wardrobe he dug out albums of family photos he hadn’t looked at in years, the ones Adela filled so faithfully, long hours sitting at her desk in the library with the large pages spread open, piles of photographs, glue, the scissors she used to cut small labels, the pen she used to write down dates, names, and places in the hand of a student at a nuns’ academy, with a conviction that seemed intent not so much on preserving memories as on building on unimpeachable testimonies a solid structure of family life. The albums themselves were a more lasting foundation than the events reflected in the photos. Classifying them, observing the regularity with which weddings, baptisms, Communions, Christmas dinners, birthdays, saint’s days, trips to the coast, and summers in the Sierra appeared in them, Adela precariously granted herself the comforting sensation of having the life she’d always wanted, the one she hadn’t dared to want when she was young and began to suspect that perhaps she wouldn’t find a man to marry, and her parents didn’t have much hope that it would happen either. The prospect of remaining single made her sad, but the generally accepted notion that if a suitor didn’t appear her life would be a failure seemed humiliating, an attack on her personal dignity. A man held his destiny in his own hands, while a woman didn’t possess so much as half of hers; without a man’s protection the only possible life open to her was to be a spinster or a nun, since Adela’s social class wouldn’t allow her to be a governess or teacher. Her tending so much to her younger brother gave her a maternal air: she saw herself in the role of proxy mother who hasn’t known even the degree of personal autonomy that belongs to a wife. On both sides of her family there was a wide selection of unmarried women, affectionate aunts who were resigned and pious and soon showed themselves ready to welcome her into their sisterhood, rather faded but not completely melancholy. An ancient cloistered nun underscored the family tendency to female singleness. Adela resisted accepting so premature a fate, but she wouldn’t have had the rare courage to displease her parents by telling them she wished to follow the eccentric example of those few young ladies from good families in Madrid who went to the university and endured the ignominy of sitting in lecture halls separated by a screen from their male classmates, subject less to scorn than to mockery, the whispered gossip about a kind of quirk that went beyond the simple whim of occupying male positions in life. Besides, what would she have studied? After so many years at the nuns’ boarding school, the only pedagogical outcome was an exquisite though completely anachronistic handwriting and a few inadequate notions of needlework and French. During summers in the Sierra she’d become fond of long walks and reading, walks that she wasn’t allowed to take by herself and books that had to be approved by her father or her uncle the priest. Adela felt deeply the humiliation of waiting and not doing anything, of seeing herself displayed on social calls and at family celebrations as a marriageable young woman whom no suitor approached, a parrot in a cage, a freak in a circus stall. But her feeling of personal affront was neutralized by love for her parents and a general benevolence or forbearance of character that made her go along with it all with little effort, preferring passive obedience to the discomfort of a scene that would end in tears and remorse and in any case wouldn’t grant her any result. The resolve of her inner rebellion never provoked the slightest turbulence in the sweet, mild appearance she presented to others, interpreted as a symptom of Christian resignation to the solitary future that with the passage of time would cover her in ridicule. When she was twenty-one or twenty-two, the cabal of her aunts and mother had already determined she’d remain a spinster, and they devoted long, laborious analyses to an explanation of this inevitable fact, which was enigmatic because somehow all of them had deemed it a certainty almost from the time she left childhood behind, with no obvious reasons to support it: she wasn’t at all ugly, or fat, or skinny either; she had pretty teeth; she was pleasant and considerate, though perhaps a little sad. She may have had a gravity that dampened her sparkle and made her seem older than she was, choosing dresses that weren’t flattering or that exaggerated her small defects, analyzed by aunts and female cousins with subtleties worthy of a class in histology, a science made fashionable by Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Didn’t she have a double chin from the time she was very young? Eyebrows that were too thick, a certain tendency to walk as if she had a weight on her shoulders which made her seem shorter? Among the girls of good family in her generation, she was one of the last to adopt the fashions that came from Europe after the Great War, and in this case not for fear of opposing her parents but because of something that might be interpreted as the negligence of a woman no longer interested in making herself attractive. In 1920 she was thirty-four years old and hadn’t yet cut the long hair appropriate to a woman of another time, another age, or given up corsets, and so she seemed to belong more to the generation of maiden aunts than to her female cousins not destined for the hereditary female celibacy that in the Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo family endangered the continuance of the line. Her adaptation to the new age was gradual, guided by the caution and timidity that were character traits. At a given moment the compassionate tone used to speak of her in the family took on a hint of misgiving; her shyness stopped being attributed to a mixture of humility and sweetness and was suspected of hiding an essential arrogance. Not long before, she’d apologized for not attending as frequently as she should the ladies’ entertainments organized by the aunts, on account of her extreme social awkwardness and a propensity for solitude heavy with romanticism, and also—why not say it?—with sadness because of the love that didn’t come and the youth that was passing. Now it was known that on more than one occasion she’d missed a novena or a charity raffle not because she was home attending to her parents or caring for her younger brother but because she’d gone to a lecture or a theatrical performance with suspect women friends. The rumor that she wore glasses at home and read newspapers and modern novels was true, and she didn’t hide them from her uncle the priest, who was one of the first to make public her shocking heterodox traits: it wasn’t true (and no one who really knew her and viewed her without malevolence would have believed it) that she’d angered her father by acquiring the habit of smoking cigarettes. Nor was it true that because of modern influences her Catholic faith had weakened. She went to Mass every Sunday arm in arm with her mother, and accompanied her in prayers at the chapel of Jesus of Medinaceli, and confessed and took Communion with an inner devotion that filled her with serenity and had no hint of sanctimony.

  Those glimpses of strangeness would have become the tolerable eccentricities of a woman trained for spinsterhood from the time she was young, but they were nothing compared to the seismic perplexity provoked by the great news of her engagement, which went against the laws not only of probability but also of nature. Who could have imagined that a fiancé would turn up when she was in her thirties? It would have been less unbelievable if she’d grown a beard, like those women in the circus to whom she compared herself in her younger years of meekness and humiliation. And not just any fiancé—though he wasn’t entirely free of suspect attributes, beginning with origins that part of the family surmised were undesirable—but Don Francisco de Asís accepted him more willingly than anyone, not because by this time he was prepared to consider any candidate as suitable, but by virtue of a good-natured lack of practical prejudices that often did not correspond to the Paleolithic obstinacy of what he called his “body of principles.” The suitor of the woman they still called “the girl” turned out to be an architect younger than she, without a personal inheritance but, according to Don Francisco de Asís, with a promising future, recently hired by the municipal government, the only child of a widowed mother, having lost his father at the age of fifteen.

  The fact that the widowed mother had also been the porter in a working-class building and the father little more than a shrewd, ambitious bricklayer were additional merits, according to Don Francisco de Asís’s point of view, or lamentable drawbacks according to other family members wh
o had the opportunity to congratulate the newly engaged fiancée and her parents as if really offering condolences, alleviating the vexation of having to accept in their cousin and niece a happiness they hadn’t counted on. It was a harsh obligation, from one day to the next, to envy someone who until then had been the recipient of their compassion, the drama of poor Adela who’d passed the age of thirty without waking the interest of any man. I don’t know how much you love that woman and I don’t care either but I do remember how much you loved me and I’ve kept all the letters you wrote to me. But there was no need to lose hope: the good news could still be undone; the fiancé might not be as honest as he seemed. Didn’t they say he was a Republican? Even worse, a Socialist, or a Bolshevik, just like his father, the late bricklayer who rose to master builder, owing his position with the municipal government not to merit but to influence, the machinations of left-wing councilmen avid to place one of their own. But as it turned out, the possible reprobate or dowry hunter had excellent manners, learned no one knew where, and a strangely mild way of showing, or rather hiding, his leftist sympathies, because from the beginning he fulfilled to the satisfaction of the most punctilious observer each of the family’s obligations and rituals, and didn’t have the slightest objection to expressly accepting that his children, when they were born (but wasn’t Adela too old to conceive, wasn’t it possible for a woman past thirty whose health had never been outstanding to suffer a difficult delivery or give birth to some genetic aberration?), would be baptized with the required pomp by the uncle who was a priest, and brought up in the Catholic faith. And speaking of ideas, hadn’t Jesus Christ been, as Don Francisco de Asís argued in a moment of polemical audacity, the first Socialist? Wasn’t the evangelical message—properly understood and applied according to the Social Doctrine of the Church—the best antidote to godless revolution? Besides, the fiancé’s parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters, which spared everyone the embarrassing formality of having to deal with individuals of obvious social inferiority, whose presence, though picturesque, would have been offensive at an offer of marriage and more so at a wedding ceremony worthy of the family’s position, which would probably merit an article in the society section of the ABC—a modest article, of course, certainly with no photo, but everyone knew that in the ABC the snobbery of noble titles prevailed, especially since the founder had received one, though he’d begun his career as a soap manufacturer. Since when was soap nobler than cement and brick? Don Francisco de Asís asked in his stentorian voice. With no father or mother or close relatives, Ignacio Abel’s origins lost much of their vulgarity and projected a certain shadow of mystery, a dark background against which his elegant figure stood out, veiled by a degree of reserve behind which he could hide the memory of the years of perseverance and sacrifice it had cost him to study for a career and learn manners that were irreproachable even to the most suspicious and demanding gaze. In the eyes of the family, Adela acquired a new and on occasion piercing luminosity; from the first days of her engagement she exhibited an almost indecent amount of happiness. She looked ten years younger. The aunts and cousins said she was as mad with love as the film stars who sighed with their eyes turned to heaven and their hands clasped, glimpsing in the clouds the face of their beloved, thanks to an optical effect that at the time was widely reproduced on postcards. Think of how you called on me, the things you said to me, it isn’t possible you were lying. The languidly slow pace that had marked the progress of her spinsterhood gave way to a liveliness appropriate to the new age and the technical competence of the fiancé, who aside from his undemanding municipal occupation was beginning to receive substantial commissions, celebrated, not without some exaggeration, by Don Francisco de Asís, who at heart had always sinned on the side of naïveté and reckless enthusiasm. After less than a year’s engagement the wedding date was agreed on, and this speed, which wouldn’t have required an evil disposition to regard as haste, did not fail to raise suspicions, dissipated only when a careful accounting of the time passed between that date and the first birth revealed the undeniable legitimacy of the newborn. Adela, who seemed so sluggish, had been in a hurry for no reason other than to make up for lost time, with an impatience and a passion more suited to the heroine of a risqué novel than a woman of her years. But neither did she have any scruples about going to live with her husband in a small apartment in an unfashionable Madrid neighborhood where her only help was a maid. I do remember how happy we were even though I had to climb four flights in all the heat that summer so pregnant with the girl it seemed impossible I could swell up any more. Don Francisco de Asís let it be known admiringly that his son-in-law hadn’t wanted to accept the help he offered to rent a house centrally located and in better condition: accustomed to earning his living by his own efforts, Ignacio Abel was grateful for any hand extended to him but preferred not to have recourse to it unless required by a critical situation that endangered the welfare of his wife or the heir Don Francisco de Asís soon was proud (and relieved) to announce. For her part, Doña Cecilia, more stubborn or less of a dreamer, would have preferred that between the wedding and the birth a period had gone by that wasn’t more decent but certainly more dignified and leisurely and more suited to individuals who didn’t give themselves over to their conjugal duty with more enthusiasm than required to fulfill the purpose of the sacrament. I still remember, if you don’t, how I trembled when I heard you run up the stairs.

  That a girl was the firstborn was a setback but not a disappointment. Don Francisco de Asís’s male child was, after all, the one designated to assure the continuation of the family name, and the girl was born strong, big, and healthy in spite of a difficult labor: during two days of anguish the worst family predictions regarding Adela’s advanced age seemed to be confirmed. But mother and daughter came through, and it soon was obvious that the rumors originating nobody knew where and spread by the malevolence of nobody knew who regarding the possible retardation of the newborn were without foundation, though the aunts on their visits looked at the cradle with an expression of condolence. The proud father, as they said in the birth announcements in the newspaper, asked Don Francisco de Asís to be godfather at the baptism of his first grandchild. Before the frantic scrutiny of the family, and the close vigilance of the uncle who was a priest and officiated at the sacrament, Ignacio Abel’s behavior in church was as respectful toward the rite as it had been on his wedding day, when everyone had seen him take Communion with exemplary devotion and kneel with eyes closed and head bowed as the sacred wafer dissolved on his tongue (reviving a childhood memory when it stuck to the roof of his mouth, leaving the strange, forgotten taste of flour with no leavening on his palate). The girl would be named Adela, like her mother. It was you who wanted her to have my name and whispered so in my ear. That the boy, when he came, was named Miguel, for his dead paternal grandfather, and not Francisco de Asís, was a disappointment to his other grandfather, but like a gentleman he rose above it, taking refuge in the hope, by then somewhat faint, that any day now the grandson born to his male child would be the one to perpetuate not only his family name but his first name too, and in the rather more solid prospect of his son-in-law and Adela continuing to expand the family, and if they had another boy they’d undoubtedly call him Francisco de Asís. In certain cases he knew of, hadn’t a change in the order of family names been authorized in the civil registry so as not to lose the memory of an illustrious lineage? In the photos of the baptism, he smiled as he held his grandson, though less broadly than at the girl’s baptism because he was concerned by the baby’s extreme fragility. How carefully Adela had classified them, album after album, from the formal studio photographs in the early years to the ones taken with the Leica she’d given her husband on one of his more recent birthdays, which he generally used to photograph works in progress. (It was the camera he took on his four-day trip south with Judith Biely, whose pictures he kept in the locked desk drawer.)