In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

“My friend hasn’t done anything. They took him away because they can take anybody away. I don’t think that’s justice.”

  “If he’s innocent, and for me your word is guarantee, you can be sure they’ll release him.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  Bergamín remained pensive, his elbows on the large mahogany desk, his eyes half closed.

  “Are you absolutely sure your friend hasn’t called attention to himself in any way? Is it possible he had contact with the German embassy?”

  “He had to leave the country when Hitler came to power. If they didn’t put him in prison, it was because he had earned the Iron Cross in the war.”

  “He was a man of clear anti-Fascist sympathies?”

  “Why do you say ‘was’?”

  “A manner of speaking. Anything specific about the car they took him away in?”

  “Nothing. They didn’t show his daughter any credentials, either.”

  “In these times, who thinks about credentials? You don’t realize the urgency of the struggle. We can’t allow our enemies to escape us in the name of some outdated legality.”

  “Professor Rossman isn’t an enemy.”

  “If he isn’t, why have they detained him?”

  Ignacio Abel swallowed, shifted uncomfortably in the chair with its faux-medieval filigree, in the office of noble woods and weapons displays that would have impressed his father-in-law.

  “Because they detain anybody. They go around in requisitioned cars, imagining they’re gangsters in a movie, and the names they’ve given themselves—Eagles of the Republic, Dawn Patrol, Red Justice. Don’t tell me that’s any way to do things, Bergamín. No police, no Assault Guards? They stop you on the street, they put a rifle to your chest, and sometimes they can’t even read the name on the card.”

  “Do you consider yourself superior to a soldier of the people because you had the privilege of being taught to read and write? It’s the people who impose their law now, and we, people like you and me, have the option of joining them or disappearing along with the class into which we were born. The people are so generous in their victory that they are giving us a possibility of redemption as radical as the one Jesus Christ brought in his day.”

  “What victory? Each day that passes, the enemy is closer to Madrid.”

  He wanted to add: I wasn’t born into the same class as you; your father was a minister in King Alfonso XIII’s court and mine a construction foreman; you were born in a big house on the Plaza de la Independencia and I in a porter’s apartment on Calle Toledo. But he said nothing. He swallowed again, sat erect in the carved chair, the knot of his tie pressing against his neck. Bergamín wiped his nose, rubbed his hands together gently, looked at Ignacio Abel for a moment over the baroque expanse of his desk, with its leather cover and pseudo-antique writing materials—false inkwells and silver pens and letter openers shaped like Toledan daggers—and piles of proofs under the title The Blue Coverall. He spoke as if he were reciting one of the lead articles he dictated each day to a secretary, pacing from one side of the office to the other, pleased by the creak of his leather boots, sometimes pausing, lost in thought, beside the leaded-glass window that overlooked the palace courtyard.

  “I respect you, Abel. I like the articles you’ve written for us, and my brother has spoken highly of your work and assured me you’re an absolute Republican. But don’t place your trust in that. Nowadays there’s no room for the niceties and finickiness of the old bourgeois politics with its tepidities and legalisms. It wasn’t the people who set the bonfire in which all of Spain is burning today, but it will be the people who emerge triumphant from this battle and will dictate the terms of victory. There’s no place for defeatists, no coddling of the lukewarm. Are errors and excesses committed? Of course. They’re inevitable. They were committed in the French Revolution and in the Russian. When a great river overflows its banks, it carries away everything in its path. Those great canals and hydroelectric plants being built right now in the Soviet Union can’t be made without destroying something. And what sacrifices won’t be necessary to complete the collectivization of agriculture, which we can’t dare to imagine here yet. The Republic attempted a modest agrarian reform and look at how the landowners were up in arms about it, along with their usual servants, the military and the priests. It was the blindness of their own egoism that unleashed their ruin. They began to spill blood, and now blood is falling on them. Think of the passage in the Bible: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’”

  “But you don’t achieve justice by killing innocents.”

  “You’re speaking to me about a legalistic justice of individual innocence and blame. But the forces of history act on a much larger scale, that of the great class struggle. In nature, individuals don’t count, only species. You or I are nothing in isolation, and our personal destiny signifies little unless we join one of the great currents colliding now in Spain. What were we all doing before April of ’31, each absorbed in his own affairs, elaborating chimeras, imagining we were conspiring against the king? Added to the force of the people on April 14, we became part of the flood that overthrew the monarchy. We’re either the people or we’re nothing, the remains of a species destined to perish . . .”

  The telephone rang. Bergamín turned to answer it, nodding as he listened, covering his mouth when he spoke. He hung up and seemed to have difficulty remembering who was sitting across from him. He stood, thin, awkward in an aviator’s leather jacket, incongruous in the office in the late August heat.

  “Will you help me find Professor Rossman?”

  “Don’t worry. If your friend hasn’t done anything wrong, he’ll show up eventually. I’m not the one to do it, but I give you my word.”

  Bergamín must have rung a bell under his desk, because the uniformed secretary with the pistol at her waist appeared at the door.

  “Abel,” said Bergamín, not raising his voice, still standing, his thin hands resting on the desk. “Come back soon. We can’t do without men like you. You must help us save the artistic patrimony of the Spanish people. Those savages are destroying it ruthlessly. Besides, the way things are right now, it would be to your advantage to make it obvious where your loyalties lie.”

  30

  PERHAPS HE WAS ALREADY dead while I was listening to Bergamín, he thinks now, remembering the somewhat high-pitched, monotonous voice in a half-light of leaded glass, remembering the long clammy hand, the hand of a man susceptible to the cold, awkward in his aviator’s leather jacket, who looked into his eyes for a moment and then lowered his gaze to continue talking while his thin fingers played with a letter opener shaped like a Toledan sword which must have been expropriated from the evicted owners of the palace. Perhaps Professor Rossman was already dead or waiting to be killed in a basement or the damp wine cellar of one of those palaces converted into prisons or barracks for the militias, or into places of execution, and I might have arrived in time to save him if I’d been more astute or more aggressive or hadn’t been discouraged from continuing the search or trusted so uselessly in Bergamín’s help or had been more insistent with Negrín, who managed to save so many people, including his own brother, a friar he helped escape to France—“and not without difficulty,” Negrín had told him, “as if the poor man were a conspirator or a fifth columnist, my brother, who hadn’t left his convent in twenty years.” He had to wait, Bergamín said to Ignacio Abel, looking into his eyes for a moment from the cavern of his own, shadowed by heavy eyebrows, but he didn’t accompany him to the door of the pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Mudéjar office; he had to have confidence, not believe the lies of enemy propaganda that had filled foreign newspapers with reports of crimes and excesses committed in our territory, with doctored photographs of churches being desecrated and militiamen pointing their rifles at innocent priests, as if they were the martyrs of a new persecution of Christianity, they who’d been the first to betray the evangelical message and encourage and bless the spilling of innocent blood, said B
ergamín. He raised his voice slightly, but not too much because he was hoarse, to give instructions to his secretary: “Mariana, take Comrade Abel’s address and phone number, and connect me right away with the director general of security.” He smiled a feeble smile from the other side of the enormous desk, carved, Abel noticed, with the depraved self-indulgence of rich Spaniards, with the brutal Spanish display of money, then raised his handkerchief again to his nose, as thin as a bird’s beak, sneezing behind the closed door while Ignacio Abel gave his phone number and address to the secretary, an attractive young woman possessed of a severe beauty, light eyes, and short hair combed back with a part. Perhaps he’d met her before and didn’t remember; perhaps her militiawoman’s trousers and shirt and the pistol at her waist made her a stranger to him. “Ask for me when you call. Mariana Ríos. I’ll write down my number for you. Though you know you can’t always get a connection.” He must have taken a wrong turn when he looked for the exit and found himself crossing a large hall with aristocratic coats of arms and standards on the walls, an enormous fireplace with medieval pretensions, probably authentic suits of armor in the corners, some with militiamen’s caps placed at a slant over the helmets. On a long dining table pushed against the wall and transformed into a stage, a small band rehearsed a burlesque waltz with syncopated trills on the saxophone and trumpet and rolls on the drum. Young workers carried in large trunks and left them open on the parquet floor, exchanging jokes and cigarettes with the girls kneeling in front of them, who with preening gestures pulled out evening gowns, old dress uniforms, tailcoats, hats with ostrich feathers. A militiaman marched up and down carrying a halberd on his shoulder and wearing a diplomat’s three-cornered hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a lit cigarette in his mouth. The band began to play a foxtrot, and two of the girls went up onstage, keeping time with a loud stamping of their heels that resonated in the coffered ceiling, one of them wearing a tiara of feathers and fake diamonds above her small round face. A clatter of typewriters came from somewhere, a powerful cadence of Linotypes working. The smell of ink mixed with the odor of camphor and dust from the clothing recently exhumed from the large trunks, which had gilt fittings and labels from international hotels and ocean liners. The hall was cluttered with mountains of books, paintings leaning against the walls, piles of recently printed newspapers and posters. With a hammer and chisel a militiaman forced open the doors of an armoire, and out tumbled an avalanche of footwear, men’s, women’s, patent leather, satin, shoes, boots, mules, everything in perfect condition, spilling onto the floor covered with dust and papers and cigarette butts. In the palace courtyard, in front of the entrance stairway, the poet Alberti pointed his small camera at a group of dignitaries with a foreign air—round glasses, carefully trimmed goatees, looks of irritation or impatience. He asked them to stand closer together, gesturing a great deal, giving instructions in precarious French.

  He returned home at dusk after looking in vain for Negrín at the Workers’ Cooperative and the Café Lion (where they told him he hadn’t come back from the Sierra; someone repeated the rumor that there’d be a new government and Negrín would be appointed minister of something). He opened the door, exhausted, and Señorita Rossman was waiting, as if she hadn’t moved since he left her in the morning, sitting on the edge of the chair, the glass of water before her untouched, her hands in her lap, staring into the fading light of the empty dining room, the sounds of the street and the whistles of martins and the crackle of distant gunfire filling the air. He invented hope, vague measures taken in administrative offices that would undoubtedly have a favorable outcome. He offered to accompany Señorita Rossman to the pensión, unless she preferred to spend the night in his apartment, where there were more than enough bedrooms. Señorita Rossman blushed slightly when she said no: thanks to her job, she had a safe-conduct to move freely around Madrid, and there was time to get back before dark.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ignacio Abel, hearing the lack of conviction in his own voice. “It doesn’t look like anything serious.”

  “But do you know where they’re holding him?”

  He looked at her before responding, seeking the right tone so his negative reply wouldn’t sound completely discouraging.

  “You know the situation we’re in, things are complicated. But your father is not in irresponsible hands. Influential people have assured me that everything possible’s being done to find him. Remember—your father has an international reputation.”

  “So did García Lorca.”

  “But the other side killed García Lorca. There’s a difference.”

  Señorita Rossman looked at him, offered her strong hand, her rough palm. She left with her head down, took the stairs, passed through the front door, went out to the street, and only then looked up, suspecting she was being followed, hoping to find a streetcar that would take her to the center of the city, a woman alone, a foreigner, conspicuous despite her efforts to keep invisible. And as Ignacio Abel saw her walk away, watching from a balcony (the plants withered, the soil hard in the pots Adela tended so carefully), Professor Rossman perhaps was already dead, on the cement floor of a basement or in a ditch or ravine or beside a wall on the outskirts of Madrid, dead and nameless, with no identification documents in his pockets, only things no one would bother to steal from a corpse: the torn half of a movie ticket, a copper coin caught in an almost inaccessible fold, a book of matches, a small red-and-blue pencil, sharpened at both ends, a stub but still serviceable, the kind used to underline—any of the trivial objects that continued to fascinate Professor Rossman with the humble mystery of their usefulness and form. But he, whose fingers had always been busy, examining by touch what his myopic eyes couldn’t, automatically playing with anything on the table or in his pocket, died with his hands tied behind his back with a coarse piece of twine that sank into his swollen, violet-colored skin. How strange to have come to a country to die like this, he must have thought, with the gentle fatalism of those who let themselves be pushed into the back of a truck, then get out on their own and follow their executioners to a wall peppered with bullet holes and bloodstains or to the edge of a ravine, their eyes squinting to avoid the glare of headlights, the faint silhouettes readying their weapons. What must he have seen in those last few seconds: the shadows of the pines in the Casa de Campo, perhaps, the sky covered in stars, a blue-black night in early September, a cool night.

  “If your friend hasn’t done anything wrong, he’ll show up eventually,” Bergamín had said in his high-pitched, composed voice. As he rubbed his hands together when he rose to his feet behind the desk in his office, perhaps Professor Rossman had already been dead for several hours. Or was still alive and was killed on the night his daughter arrived at the pensión and locked herself in the room no one had straightened in her absence, and Ignacio Abel closed the balcony door after watching her walk to the corner of Calle O’Donnell. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day, just a cone of roasted peanuts he’d bought from the vendor on the Paseo de Recoletos after leaving the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. In the kitchen he found a can of sardines in oil and ate them sitting at the table, placing a double sheet of newspaper under the can, dipping pieces of hard bread into the thick oil, scraping the bottom of the can with his fork. There was something primitive in the act of eating alone, in his reluctance to lay a tablecloth and look for a napkin. He wiped his fingers on the stained sheet of newspaper, and on it he left the empty can and the fork with brilliant drops of oil. He paid attention only to his clothes, which the doorman’s wife washed and ironed for him once a week. The porter had suggested that once in a while his wife could clean the house, until the situation had been resolved, though it didn’t seem as if all this could last much longer, two or three weeks and it would be over, and the señora and the children and the two maids would be back from the other side of the Sierra. But he didn’t like the idea of the two of them spying on him, or was simply too embarrassed to let them se
e the disrepair, the dust, the newspapers strewn everywhere, the dirty sheets on the bed he never made, the bad smell and grime in the kitchen and bathroom. He tried to telephone Negrín, the phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He dialed the number Bergamín’s secretary had given him, and when he was about to hang up he heard a woman’s voice asking, in a loud voice, who was calling, a clamor of voices and music in the background. Mariana Ríos wasn’t there, neither was Comrade Bergamín, best to call again first thing tomorrow morning. He thought about Judith Biely as he sat by his desk, imagining the letters he could write but wouldn’t know where to send. Resentful, he sees himself fading from her memory on the very night that Professor Rossman waits in a dark basement or lies dead, anonymous, his body unclaimed. He turned on the radio and an announcer with a sonorous voice proclaimed yet again the reconquest of Aragón and the unstoppable advance of the people’s militias toward Zaragoza. He turned down the volume to look for one of the enemy’s stations, and on Radio Sevilla a similar though more distant voice, besieged by whistles, announced the heroic resistance of the Alcázar de Toledo against whose Numantian fortress the waves of Marxist hordes shattered in vain. When all this was over, not only rubble and dead bodies will have to be cleared away, but words as well, a rigorous national abstention from adjectives: unstoppable, uncontainable, imperishable, unpardonable, unavoidable, inflammatory, frenzied, heroic. He heard footsteps and turned off the radio, then the light. Standing motionless in the dark, he heard voices, among them the doorman’s. They knocked at a door on the other side of the landing. He tiptoed down the long hallway. The wall clock had stopped, he hadn’t wound it in a long time. He reached the door and pressed his face to the peephole but saw no light on the landing, heard nothing. Beyond the shutters, Calle Príncipe de Vergara and Madrid’s roofed horizon were an impenetrable darkness, full of terrors, like the forests in the stories he read to his children when they were little. Flashes of headlights, sirens. In the silence, someone’s footsteps, a conversation, the click of a cigarette lighter. He threw himself onto the unmade bed without taking off his clothes or shoes, fell asleep, then woke with a filthy aftertaste of sardines in oil, his heart pounding in his chest. The bed, the lamp on the night table, the entire house shook, and for a moment he had no idea where that prolonged crash of thunder came from. Then, the sirens: enemy planes flying low and leisurely bombing targets in a city with no antiaircraft defenses except for rifles and pistols firing from rooftops at the German Junkers. Motionless, on his back, with lethargy stronger than fear, he felt the ground vibrate less and less as the sound of the planes’ engines faded away. They bomb poor neighborhoods, not this one. They know many people here are on their side. And what an air force we have, only some French discards from the Great War, no powerful alarms that can actually shake the air but pitiful sirens, which some Assault Guards have mounted on their motorcycles and turn with one hand while they hold on to the handlebars with the other. The whistle and roar of the bombs, a long silence, broken by ambulance sirens and fire engine bells. When he’s still half asleep, an unexpected and vivid memory of Judith begins to take shape, her body tensing, her eyes closed, her heels rubbing against the sheet, her hands guiding his fingers, making him slow down, she moans softly in his ear. In the darkness of the conjugal bedroom, on wrinkled, dirty sheets where there was no trace of Adela’s scent, he tried to imagine that it was Judith’s hand touching him, that when he masturbated with a brusque, mechanical urge he was invoking her delicate body. But it was useless, a spasm and it was over, leaving him with only a rankling, sterile longing, a feeling of absurdity, almost embarrassment, a fifty-year-old man jerking off in the insomnia of war. It was growing light when he fell asleep, a cold, wet drop on his stomach, filled with remorse for not having gone out in search of Professor Rossman.