In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “Don’t look at me that way.”

  “How am I looking at you?”

  “As if I were a ghost.”

  “I’m looking at you because I never tire of looking at you. Because I’ve missed you so much I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I’m not sure you see me when you look at me. I’ve never been sure. You would stare at me but seem to be elsewhere, lost in your world, probably thinking about your work, or wondering whether your son or daughter had a fever, or your wife, or what lie you’d tell when you got home, or the remorse you felt deceiving her. You’d look at me and then look away, though only for a second. We were kissing in that room at Madame Mathilde’s, and I saw you in the mirror across from the bed looking at the clock on the night table. Just a glance, but I noticed it. I believe in the man you are, not the one I might have dreamed you were. And when I read your letters I felt like running out and getting into bed with you, felt as dizzy as when we had those cold beers in cafés. But then, reading them again, I felt the same doubt as when I just saw you looking at me. I wasn’t sure it was me you were writing to. The letters were so vague. You talked about what you felt for me and our love as if we were living in an abstract world in which there was nothing else and no one else but us. You filled two pages telling me about the house you wanted to build for us, and I asked myself where, when. Promise me you won’t get angry with me for what I’m saying.”

  “I promise.”

  “You’ll get angry. Sometimes I thought you wrote to me reluctantly, because you felt obliged to, because I was asking you to. You made fun of those wordy articles intellectuals published in El Sol, but there was something in your letters that reminded me of them. You told me what you felt about me but didn’t answer the question I’d asked. I thought of an expression you taught me: dar largas. You were putting me off so you’d never have to address our real lives, yours and mine. And the truth was that though we spoke so much and wrote to each other so much we never spoke about anything specific. Only about the two of us, floating in space, floating in time. Never about the future, and after a while almost never about the past. You said you were in love with me but became distracted whenever I brought up my life. And if I mentioned my ex-husband, you changed the subject.”

  “It makes me jealous to think you’ve been with other men.”

  “You’d be less jealous if you’d let me tell you that my husband and those others never mattered to me half as much as you.”

  “There were more men.”

  “Of course there were. Did you think I was in a convent waiting for you to appear?”

  “I couldn’t stand the thought of you with someone else. I can’t now, either.”

  “I had to stand not the thought but the reality that after being with me you could dissimulate with no difficulty and get into bed with your wife.”

  “We hadn’t touched each other for a long time.”

  “But you were with her, not me. In the same room and the same bed. While I went back alone to my room in the pensión and couldn’t sleep, and if I turned on the light I couldn’t read, and I sat in front of my typewriter and couldn’t write, not even a letter. And if I wrote to my mother, I couldn’t tell her that her sacrifice had allowed a married Spaniard to have a younger American lover.”

  “Van Doren told me your mother died.”

  “How strange for you to ask about her.”

  “I always wanted to hear about your family.”

  “But you became distracted the minute I started talking about them. You didn’t realize it, and you don’t remember, but you were an impatient man. You were always in a hurry for one reason or another. You were nervous. You were anxious. You’d throw yourself on me in bed sometimes, and it seemed you’d forgotten you were with me. You’d open your eyes after you came and look at me as if you just awoke.”

  “Is that all you remember?”

  “No. At other times you could be very sweet. Other men don’t even make the effort.”

  “I was crazy about you.”

  “Or about someone you imagined. I reread your letters and thought they could just as easily have been written to another woman. I was flattered at the time to be the one who inspired those words in you, but sometimes I didn’t believe them. You’d look at me and I didn’t know if it was me you were looking at.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “A foreigner, an American. Like those women in the movies and the advertisements you said you’d always liked. You enjoyed looking at me. It always seemed you could have done without the talking. You were more expressive in letters.”

  “Am I looking at you now the way I did then?”

  “Now your eyes have changed. When you opened the door I didn’t recognize you. Now I’m recognizing you again, slowly, but not completely. I don’t see you sneaking a glance at your watch.”

  “Why are you going to New York?”

  “The Spanish man, asking his questions.”

  “Are you going to see your lover?”

  “Don’t talk to me that way.”

  “You used to say you couldn’t imagine yourself going to bed with another man.”

  “If I were to remind you of all the things you said to me.”

  “I wasn’t the one who disappeared. I wasn’t the one who promised to keep an appointment and then didn’t show up.”

  “Do you really want to talk about that now? I didn’t disappear. I left you a letter explaining how I felt, what I thought. Why I couldn’t see you again. I didn’t hide anything from you. I didn’t tell you any lies.”

  “You left the letter knowing I was waiting for you in the room.”

  “That doesn’t matter now.”

  “You could have stayed with me at least that afternoon. You knew I was waiting for you. You must have spoken softly so I wouldn’t hear you. I’m sure you gave Madame Mathilde a good tip.”

  “If I’d gone into the room, I probably wouldn’t have had the strength to leave.”

  “If I’d seen you that afternoon, I’d have left everything to go with you.”

  “As in that poem you couldn’t take seriously? Don’t tell me things that aren’t true. That was what offended me about you. That you told me lies. That you said yes to something when both of us knew it was no. There’s no reason to lie anymore. We’re alone in this house and I’ll be leaving soon.”

  “Did you leave Madrid that same night? Were you at Van Doren’s house?”

  “I was frightened. They stopped me at every corner to ask for my papers and I didn’t have my passport with me, why would I? I don’t know how I managed to get on a streetcar, on the running board, hanging on. I wanted to leave and I wanted to find you so you could protect me. See what happened to my decision to leave you and my yen for adventure? I reached the pensión and tried to call Phil or the embassy but the phones weren’t working, or sometimes they did and other times they didn’t. I called your house several times but you never answered.”

  “I was looking all over Madrid for you.”

  “It was better for me you didn’t find me.”

  “Would you really have stayed with me?”

  “You’re yourself again. You want me to flatter you and say yes.”

  “Now you don’t want to tell me why you’re going to New York.”

  “I’m leaving on a trip.”

  “You’re going to meet another man.”

  “Is that the only thing you can imagine in my life? Aren’t you curious to know anything else about me?”

  “And your job at the college?”

  “I left it.”

  “To go where?”

  “To Spain.”

  She answered so quickly it surprised her to hear the words she didn’t intend to say, hasn’t said to anyone yet. The immediate silence has another quality, of resonance, expectation, vigilance, while their eyes remain fixed, locked, each detecting the slightest movements in the other’s face, both aware of the silence and the sounds behind it, the
crackle of the fire in the hearth, the first sporadic drops of a light rain that will last all night, their breathing, each waiting for a sign the other will speak. They’ve been lowering their voices as they remained motionless, Judith sitting upright now that she’s said what perhaps she shouldn’t have said, Ignacio Abel serious, one hand resting on the other on the edge of the table, the bony hands that now seem as stripped of sensuality as his diminished, rigid body, his general mood of dignified capitulation. A passenger on the train they hear passing now will see in the distance, through the successive shadows of the forest, a wide lit window but won’t be able to distinguish the two silhouettes. Someone approaching in the light rain would see two motionless figures on either side of a large table, leaning slightly toward each other, as if about to tell or hear a secret. He’d enter the house and advance silently along the dark hall, and though he came close to the open door of the library, through which come the light from the fire and a current of warm air, he’d hear nothing, perhaps indistinct voices, interrupted by silences, then superimposed, isolated words in Spanish or English, the secret of their two lives, protected by the walls of the house, the isolation of the forest, the darkness of the night, the intimacy in which there’s room only for two lovers and where they’ve returned without knowing it yet, though they don’t touch, and when they look into each other’s eyes they sense a guarded secrecy not even the most shameless confession could break. They circle each other with looks and words, laying siege, testing the boundaries of their silence. Between the sound of lips separating, the first word is the emptiness of expectation. The next steps of your life, your entire future, will depend on what is said or left unsaid in an instant. Judith has taken a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, as if to give herself courage, to store up the air she will need if she wants her words to sound as clear and confident as they do in her mind.

  “I should’ve guessed.”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of it. Don’t. Any reason you can give me for not going I’ve already thought of myself and heard many times. I’m not going to change my mind. As soon as you start telling me what I already know you’re going to say, I’ll get up and go back the way I came. You have to live according to your principles. I can’t ease my conscience by occasionally attending an event in favor of the Spanish Republic or going out to the street with a money box to collect donations. I don’t want to think one thing and do another. I don’t want to read the paper or listen to the radio or see a newsreel and die of rage seeing what the Fascists are doing in Spain, and then go on living as if nothing were happening. It’s that simple.”

  “And what will you do? Madrid’s about to fall.”

  “Why are you so sure? So you’ll feel less remorse because you left? The Soviet Union’s begun to send aid. Just this morning I heard on the radio that the French are going to open the border to let armaments through. There are things the newspapers don’t publish. There are thousands and thousands of volunteers traveling to Spain right now.”

  “And what will they do when they arrive? You don’t know what it’s like. My country is nothing but an insane asylum, a slaughterhouse. We don’t have an army, or discipline. And almost no government.”

  “I never heard you use the first person plural when talking politics.”

  “I didn’t realize I was doing it. I must’ve got into the habit when I left Spain.”

  “Not everything is lost.”

  “You don’t know what war is like.”

  “Stop telling me the things I don’t know. I’m going so I’ll find out.”

  “Do you plan to join the militias?”

  “Don’t talk to me in that tone.”

  “What tone?”

  “As if I understood nothing. As if I were acting on a whim. I know very well what I’m going to do.”

  “Nobody knows. In a war nobody understands anything. The ones who seem to understand are the biggest charlatans of all, or the most demented, or the most dangerous. I’ve seen war. Nobody told me about it. I saw it in Morocco when I was young and now I’ve seen it again in Madrid, and it’s the same thing, nothing to do with two armies and a battle with advances and retreats and then a bugle blows and everything’s over and you collect the dead. In a war nobody knows what’s going on. The professional military pretend they know, but it’s not true. At best the only thing they’ve learned is to dissimulate or push others in front of them. A bomb explodes and you’re dead or bleeding to death and holding your insides in your hands, or you’re left blind or missing your legs or half your face. And you don’t even have to go to the front. You go to a café or a movie theater on the Gran Vía and when you leave a mortar shell or an incendiary bomb falls and if you’re lucky you don’t know you’re going to die. Or someone denounces you because he doesn’t like you, or because he thinks he saw you coming out of Mass once or reading the ABC, and they take you in a car to the Casa de Campo and the next morning the kids have fun with your body, putting a lit cigar in your mouth, calling you an idiot. That’s war. Or revolution, if you think that word’s more appropriate. Everything else they’re telling you is a lie. All those parades that look so good in films and illustrated magazines, the posters, the slogans—They Shall Not Pass. Brave, honorable men climb into an old truck to go to the front and the other side mows them down with machine guns, and they don’t even have time to aim the rifles that in most cases they haven’t learned to handle properly, or they have very little ammunition, or it’s not the right kind. In half an hour they can be dead or lose both arms or both legs. The ones who seem the fiercest and most revolutionary stay behind the lines and use their rifles and clenched fists to get free service in bars or whorehouses. The Fascists have machine guns mounted on their planes and amuse themselves by firing on the lines of campesinos and militiamen fleeing toward Madrid. The militiamen waste ammunition firing at the planes because, even if they know how to aim, they don’t know their guns aren’t powerful enough to reach the planes. The pilot is annoyed, and instead of continuing on his way he turns around and machine-guns them in an open field as if they were ants. The only ones who end up on the frontlines, where death is almost certain, can’t help it because they were dragged there or because they believed the propaganda and got drunk on banners and anthems. Every man who can, escapes, except the innocent and the deluded, and they’re the first to die or be mutilated or disfigured. Not on the first day but in the first minute. Some don’t even carry weapons. They think that going to war means lining up and keeping time while you follow a band playing ‘The Internationale’ or ‘To the Barricades.’ They see the enemy coming and can’t run because their legs are trembling and they shit themselves in fear. It’s not a figure of speech. Extreme fear causes diarrhea. The other side hunts them down with no difficulty. Just like hunting rabbits. Do you know what they enjoy? They get bored when it’s so easy to kill, and they look for entertainment. You can imagine what they do to women. With men they often cut off noses and ears and then slit their throats. They cut off their testicles and stuff them in their mouths. They put a head with the ears and nose cut off on a broomstick and carry it in a parade. But our men do that too sometimes. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not enemy propaganda. I saw the decapitated head of General López Ochoa marched around Madrid. The leftist parties and the unions hated him because he led the troops in Asturias in ’34. On July 18 he was in the military hospital at Carabanchel because he’d had an operation, and some brave man got the idea of killing him right there. They dragged the body through the streets and cut off his head, ears, and testicles. It was like a procession, a carnival, with a swarm of children running behind. You’re going to tell me the other side is worse. I don’t doubt that at all. I’ve also seen what they do. They rebelled, and it’s their fault the slaughter began. They deserve to lose, but we’ve done so many savage and stupid things, we don’t deserve to win.”

  “And you’re above it all?”

  “I’ve gone as far as I’ve been pushed. T
hey could have killed me in Madrid—the other side surely would have killed me if I’d stayed with my children that Sunday in the Sierra. I’m not a brave man. I’m not a passionate man. I’ve almost never had strong emotions, except for you, or sometimes for my work, imagining it. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe history has a direction or that you can build heaven on earth. And even if you could, if the price is an endless bloodbath and tyranny, I don’t think it’s worth paying. But if I’m wrong, and revolution and slaughter are necessary to bring about justice, I prefer to step aside if I have the chance, at least to save my life. It’s the only one I have. I’m not a man of action like my friend Dr. Negrín. I learned it these past few months, spending so much time alone. I hardly spoke to anyone and often couldn’t sleep and thought about what I really like, what I need. I need to do something well that is also useful and lasting and solid. People obsessed by political passions frighten me, or seem ridiculous, like those who turn red shouting at a soccer game, or the racetrack, or a bullfight. Now they also disgust me. I think there are many more despicable people than I ever imagined. The old intoxicate the young to take revenge on their youth and send them to slaughter. Many people who seem normal become savages when they see and smell blood. They see a neighbor shot who until yesterday had greeted them every morning, and if they can, they steal his wallet or his shoes. My poor friend Professor Rossman was a saint. He never hurt anyone. He’d get on a streetcar and take off his hat if there was a woman in front of him. He made his bed every morning at the pensión to save the maid work. He’d been eminent in Germany, and in Spain he earned a poor living selling pens in cafés, but I never heard him complain about the country or lose his patience. You met him. Well, they killed him like an animal because some cretin must have thought he was a spy because he spoke with a German accent or carried a briefcase filled with newspaper clippings and maps of the front. Before they killed him, they beat his face to a pulp. And I didn’t see his daughter again, either. They didn’t know anything about her at the pensión or the office where she worked. As if the earth had swallowed her. I couldn’t help either one of them. I probably didn’t have any luck or was afraid to insist too much and put myself in danger. That’s the truth. My wife’s brother came one night to ask me to hide him because they were looking for him. I didn’t open the door. If I’d let him in, I probably couldn’t have left, or I’d have had to postpone the trip again, or they’d have locked me up for helping him. Maybe they killed him that same night. He was a Falangist and a fool, but nobody deserves to go around hiding in doorways like an animal. And that’s not all. He really loved my children, and they loved him, the boy especially. He loved his uncle so much it made me jealous. And if in spite of everything he managed to escape and get to the other side, he’ll be so full of rancor he’ll become a butcher. It’s possible he goes to see my children, and they admire him all the more seeing him turned into a war hero, and he tells them their father betrayed him. I could have told him to stay and denounced him. I would have done my duty, since my brother-in-law was in one of those Falangist groups that shoot militiamen from roofs or drive in a car at top speed machine-gunning people who line up for bread or charcoal. A traitor. A saboteur. But it’s not that I felt compassion for him. I didn’t want my trip ruined because of him.”