In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Perhaps Adela was slow to accept what Ignacio Abel now realized as he turned the album pages under the dim light of a lamp in the apartment where he was the sole inhabitant, and the figures in the photos took on a ghostly quality, as if they were people who had died long ago, so distant from the present, from Madrid in the shadow of nights of war (lit by the headlights of speeding, solitary cars that suddenly appeared at the end of a street, stopped with the motor running next to a doorway, where after a while a man would be seen coming out in an undershirt or pajamas, sometimes barefoot, dazed with sleep and panic, hands tied, moved along by kicks, guarded by pistols and rifles). Blinded by love, at first Adela wouldn’t have noticed his expression in the photos, including the ones he’d sent her as mementos when they became engaged, or the ones from their wedding day, or the portraits they’d taken together on a whim of hers in a studio on the Gran Vía soon after they were married, each seated in an antique chair in front of a painted backdrop, he with his legs crossed, showing his high-top shoes, she holding a book in one hand, her chin resting on the back of the other, wearing an indolent smile in which he could detect what neither of them knew at the time, that she was pregnant. On his face was an expression of not being altogether present, his glance fixed on a point in the middle distance, a self-absorption tinged by ennui. But perhaps he was mistaken, looking at the photographs fifteen years later; perhaps, lacking the imagination to see himself in what to all intents and purposes was another life, he attributed to the younger man a reluctance that became more apparent as he turned the pages of the albums. His entire life, watched over by Adela, by her fondness for keeping everything in its place, not only photographs but letters as well, each one he wrote during their engagement and the ones he sent during his year in Germany, arranged chronologically and held together by rubber bands, which he didn’t want to remove from their envelopes, to spare himself the humiliation of his own lies, the expressions of love in his own hand. You no longer remember how you’d complain if a letter of mine was late. He looked, hypnotized, at the photos, while outside he heard bursts of gunfire. He went through a series documenting his children’s early years and the tedious family celebrations, the changes in the face and body of Adela, who’d been more slender than he recalled. (But who could trust memory? What would Judith Biely be thinking about him now, erasing him from her new life who knew where, with what younger men, in Paris or in America?) He didn’t appear in many photographs (he must have been traveling, or working, or away on some pretext or other); in some he was present but wore an expression that separated him from the rest, resistant to the collective happiness, a celebration meant to bring them all together. In them Adela was almost always beside him, holding his arm or leaning against him a little, proud of his male presence, perhaps understanding later, when she put the photos in order and placed them in the album, or much later, when she went back to them to look for signs of what had always existed or to console herself for her loneliness and sense of deception and failure by reliving a time she remembered as happier: their early years together, the birth of Lita, the move to the new building on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, its balconies that opened on the unlimited expanse of Madrid—“Madrid modern and white,” as Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote in one of her favorite poems. Her secret malaise might still be a response to her husband’s work. He was so insistent on showing others his own worth, committing his very life to the completion of each assignment, perhaps uncertain about the position he’d achieved, wanting to prove that if he prospered it wasn’t because of the influence of his wife’s family, toward whom he displayed an increasingly dry coldness that hurt her deeply, especially because of the affection she had for her parents, her fear that her husband would hurt them with a defiant remark or sarcastic comment, or simply with the indifference that was apparent in reality and more so in photographs—even, she would realize much later, in the pictures from their wedding, and in those where Ignacio Abel held his newborn children or placed his hand on their shoulder on the day of their Communion. He raised a glass in a toast and looked away. But Adela hadn’t failed to complete her albums, to make note of exact dates, circumstances, and places in handwriting that was always the same over the years, as regular as her own presence in the photos, a mixture of passivity and childish hope, as if in spite of everything promises might eventually be kept, as if the only condition for avoiding disaster and not suffering disillusionment and even a raw lie was to maintain a serene attitude, a slight smile, raising her chin and straightening her torso, pretending she was immune to the bite of his coldness, that suspicions didn’t keep her awake, that rectitude was the best possible path. On the first page of each album Adela had written the dates it covered. The last one indicated only the beginning, September 1935. In the photos, Ignacio Abel saw not what was captured by the camera but what was already happening elsewhere and in secret: Adela, the girl, and himself on the evening of his talk at the Student Residence; the family party in the house in the Sierra on Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. The first photograph had been taken a few minutes after he’d seen her at close range and heard for the first time the name of Judith Biely. In the second he searched for the traces of Judith’s memory he invoked while someone snapped the picture: the long table filled with people and plates of food, the warm sun of an October afternoon, the already remote faces, the family life that seemed a life sentence then, and now had disappeared without a trace: Don Francisco de Asís, Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, smiling and faded, infantilized by spinsterhood and old age, the uncle who was a priest, stuffed inside his cassock (what had happened to him—he might have had time to hide if the outbreak of the war caught him in Madrid, or he might be lying in some ditch, rotting in the sun and covered with flies), his brother-in-law Víctor, his face clouded with grievance, his two children, Lita smiling happily at the camera and Miguel fragile and shy, and Adela, near them, a woman suddenly mature, older-looking and wider in that photo than in his memory, leaning toward him, her husband, an attitude that survives the irreversible changes in her state of mind, as if her body hadn’t learned what her mind knew, that the physical support sought and seemingly found is by now illusory, that things have changed though appearances remain the same. And he, in a corner, smiling this time, not on guard or absent, as in most of the photographs, with an idle smile, visible despite the shadow that covers half his face, a little sleepy from the food and wine and the sweet autumn sun. Had Adela been able to see (when she looked at it slowly after pasting it in the album, smoothing it with the palm of her hand, writing the date and place on a tag beneath it) that in the photo her husband already wore the face of his deceit, that the ease and affection he displayed and she was so grateful for were symptoms not of the return of love but of its loss? There was another photograph in the album that wasn’t pasted in and had no indication on the back of the day and place; it had been taken that same evening, beside the pond of the abandoned irrigation ditch. Miguel and Adela had argued about the Leica, and it was Miguel who in the end prevailed, but Ignacio Abel didn’t recall the moment the boy took the picture, hiding perhaps in the pines, pretending he was an international reporter, a blurred photo, perhaps because there wasn’t enough light, or because Miguel didn’t hold the camera steady: his parents sitting on the grass, close to the pond’s edge, leaning toward each other, absorbed in a conversation Ignacio Abel doesn’t remember, the two figures as calm as the water where they were partially reflected, obscured by the oblique shadow of the pines.

  20

  HE’D ALSO BEEN ORGANIZING an archive, almost from the time of their first meeting, collecting not only letters and photos but any physical object that alluded to Judith’s presence in his life: the handbill announcing his talk at the Student Residence, the newspaper clipping with the date in a corner, a day like any other that still shone for them with a radiance invisible to others, a page of the calendar he would like to have rescued from the wastebasket in his office where he’d tossed it the following mor
ning, not realizing yet what was happening to him. Every lover attempts to keep a genealogy of his love, afraid treasured memories will inevitably fade away. He wanted to keep everything, prevent one meeting from being confused with another, as he wanted not to forget any of the English words and expressions Judith had taught him. He wrote them down in a little oilskin notebook he kept in his jacket pocket, the same pocket where he kept the tiny key that locked the desk drawer. He could with no danger leave Judith’s letters in his office, but that meant separating from them: letters and photographs, telegrams sent in moments of spontaneity or impatience, with their naughty expressions in English that the telegraph operator filled with errors, a telegram sent from Toledo one morning when she was visiting with a tour group of American students, or from the central mail and telegraph office on the Plaza de Cibeles that Judith had passed, unable to resist the temptation to send him an instant message: the marvel of electrical impulses along telegraph wires, the tiny strokes translated into words, printed on a blue sheet, delivered within an hour to the office where Ignacio Abel interrupted an important meeting because the unctuous clerk had opened the frosted-glass door, holding a telegram and wearing a somber expression, the face of someone perhaps delivering grave news—the clerk was young but already moved with the solemnity of many administrative years. But Ignacio already knew the telegram was from Judith. A busy man who had to attend to so many things at the same time, he made his excuses to the others, moved a short distance away, impatience in his fingertips. And the pleasure in finding her words was more intense because he was reading them in front of others, struggling to keep a smile from appearing on his face, to maintain a frown of concern, or at least of high responsibility. I’ll be waiting for you at Old Hag’s 4 P.M. please don’t let me down please.

  A short time before he wouldn’t have known what Old Hag meant. Now it was written in a tiny hand in his notebook, a nuance of the language and also a password, because that’s what Judith called the woman who said her name was Madame Mathilde, the owner or manager of the chalet at the back of a garden near the end of Calle O’Donnell, who always received them with a fiction of reserve and distinguished hospitality, as if instead of a house of assignation she managed a literary and artistic salon. In the notebook was the date and the place and in many cases the hour of each of the times he’d been with Judith, along with a key word that alluded to something specific about each meeting. On the same pages were notes of his work appointments, technical observations, sketches of architectural details he’d seen or imagined, but he distinguished among them, sole keeper of its secret code, tenacious archivist. Leaving your little slips of paper everywhere and me finding them without wanting to when I went through the pockets of your trousers or jackets before sending them to the cleaner’s. Forgetting was wasteful, a luxury he couldn’t allow himself. Forgetting was like not looking closely at Judith when he was with her, not making an effort to fix in his memory those details that inspired love in him and excited him so much and yet afterward he couldn’t invoke, even with the help of photographs. What was the true color of her eyes, the exact shape of her chin, how did her voice sound, what were the two lines that formed at the sides of her mouth when she laughed? He didn’t see her for a few days, and in spite of letters and phone calls the brief interval destroyed everything, so that seeing her again was always a revelation, and his expectation so filled with suspense, it didn’t seem her real presence could live up to what he’d intensely desired. Seeing her naked took his breath away. Each time he kissed her open mouth, he was transfixed by the same lightning flash of desire and astonishment he’d felt on the first night in the bar at the Florida, her shameless tongue searching for his. But the thirsty man doesn’t savor the first sips of water on dry lips, doesn’t stop to appreciate the shape of the glass or how the light pierces it. He could be distracted by something, she might be nervous, badly affected by a sleepless night, dazed by the noise around them in a café, deeply affronted at having to meet her lover in a hired room, with a bidet half concealed behind a screen of faded vulgarity and an odor of disinfectant made worse by the rose perfume that attempted to disguise it. In Madame Mathilde’s house you could hear the birds in the garden, the bells of streetcars, the sound or laugh or moan from an adjoining room. Other lovers must have looked into that slightly clouded mirror in the chipped gilt frame in front of the bed. The touch of the sheets on her naked skin produced an unpleasant sensation; the sheets were clean but rumpled, washed many times, dampened many times by sweat or bodily secretions identical to theirs in their anonymity.

  Meetings reduced to cryptic scrawls—M.Mat.Fr.7.6.30; movie tickets kept between the pages of his notebook that alluded to a particular afternoon, Judith’s delicate hand advancing toward his fly in the dark, Clark Gable in a sailboat on an ocean as fictitious as his sailor’s undershirt; programs for films he didn’t remember seeing; messages written on hotel letterheads, on paper from the Student Residence or the technical office of University City; the brief archeology of their common past, the chronological trail established by canceled postage stamps and the dates in headings of letters, the long winding river of words that was the reflection and prolongation of real conversations, the ones dissipated in air. The time of being together was always too short, too distressing for them to be fully aware of what they were experiencing; they restored it, gave it form, in memory and in letters. Narrow blue envelopes Judith had bought in a Paris stationery store; sheets of a fainter blue covered on both sides by handwriting roused by speed and a tendency to boldness, the lines curving like Chinese characters, preserving the impulse of the gesture that had traced them. A forthcoming letter had something of the magnetism of Judith’s arrival, waiting for her with eyes fixed on the door of the café where her silhouette would appear, seeing her suddenly without having followed her approach on account of a blink, a momentary distraction. The fact that there was a new general strike when they returned from the coast of Cádiz, with vans of Assault Guards circulating on the empty streets, interfered with his receiving a letter from her. At the hour of the morning when he knew the clerk would be distributing mail, Ignacio Abel was alert, raising his eyes at times from the papers on his desk or drawing board, looking out at the corridor over the typewriters, the office of the utopian city, the large model of the future campus. How wonderful that among all the thousands of letters, Judith’s wasn’t lost but came to him hidden among the others, though visible to the eye skilled in distinguishing it, the blue edge, the clerk unaware of the precious gift he brought, holding the tray like a waiter at a banquet. If he was alone in his office, Ignacio Abel closed the frosted-glass door that only his secretary was authorized to open without knocking; if someone was with him or he had an urgent call, he put the letter in his pocket or in a desk drawer, saving it for later, having held it, felt its thickness, the pleasing touch of many folded sheets ceding to the pressure of his fingers with a promise of delight. The words they hadn’t had time to say during their last conversation or the ones lost in the ephemeralness of voices on the phone he now possessed without uncertainty or haste, as he would have liked to be with her one day, taking pleasure in indolence, unbuttoning, untying, removing each article of her clothing just as he carefully opened the envelope and removed the folded sheets that smelled of her, not because she put a drop of her cologne on them but because the scent of that paper resembled no other and was associated only with her. But at times his impatience was too powerful: he ripped the envelope and then had to make an effort to repair it in order to keep that letter in it, which couldn’t be in any other envelope and belonged to a specific day, visible in the cancellation stamp, to a certain hour, a particular state of mind that agitated or calmed the writing like a lively breeze on the surface of a lake. The minutes of their meeting passed, shortened by nervousness at the beginning, the speed with which the end imposed itself. But in a letter time was preserved; the phantom conversation of paper and ink evinced a tranquility that was the only sustenance fo
r absence, an effective tranquilizer, when the letter had been read the first two times, folded and placed in the envelope so it would fit in the inside pocket of his jacket. The moment fled and was impossible to recover; the letter was always there, amenable to examination by his fingers, to the intensity of his eyes, capable of being committed to memory, with no effort, after a few readings. I was going down the hall and without meaning to I saw the tip of the envelope peeking out of your jacket on the rack, how hard it must’ve been for you to leave her letters in the office if she sent them there. It was obvious you didn’t want to be away from them even for a moment. The sustenance was more like an addictive substance: ink like nicotine, words like opium, alcohol intoxicating slowly, dissolving the shapes of the external world. What would he do if the letters suddenly stopped? If Judith grew tired of what had taken both of them so long to find the courage to name (but it was she who had the courage, not he): being a married man’s lover; if she found another man, younger and more accessible, with whom she wouldn’t have to maintain a secrecy that Judith, at heart, thought shameful; if she decided it was time to return to America or to continue the European trip she hadn’t completed, an education she hadn’t thought included the skills needed to sustain a Spanish adulterous affair (but he never asked about her plans; it seemed he counted on her always being near, available, obliterating herself when away from him, existing again at the moment he walked in the door and found her there beside the bed, open, sensual as a magnificent flower).