In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Now that distances have become much shorter, we feel farther and farther apart. Who doesn’t remember those endless hours on the midnight express, in the second-class coaches that brought us to Madrid for the first time and deposited us, done in from fatigue and lack of sleep, in the unwelcoming dawn of Atocha Station, the old one, which our children never knew, although some of them, just kids, or still in their mama’s womb, spent arduous nights on those trains that carried us south during the Christmas vacations we looked forward to so much, or during the short but cherished days of Holy Week, or of our strange late fair that falls at the end of September, when the men of our parents’ generation picked the most delicious grapes and pomegranates and figs and allowed themselves the luxury of attending the two bullfights of the fair: the one on Saint Michael’s day, which opened the fair, and the one on the day of Saint Francis, which was the most splendid, the “big day,” our parents called it, but also the saddest because it was the last, and because the autumn rain often spoiled the corrida and forced the mournful closing of the few carousels we had in those days, completely covered over with wet canvas.

  TIME LASTED LONGER THEN, and the kilometers were longer. Not many people had a car, and if you didn’t want to spend the whole night on the train, you got on the bus we called the Pava, which took seven hours, first, because of all the twists and turns on the highway toward the north of our province, and also because of the cliffs and tunnels of Depeñaperros, which were like the entrance into another world, the frontier, where our part of the world was left behind on the last undulating hillsides of olive trees, and then the endless plains of La Mancha, so monotonous that sleep seemed to bleed into exhaustion and prevail over discomfort and you fell fast asleep and with a little luck didn’t open your eyes again until the bus was approaching the lights of Madrid. What a thrill it was to see the capital from afar, the red tile roofs and, high above them, the tall buildings that impressed us so strongly: the Telephone Building, the Edificio España, the Torre de Madrid!

  But it was another emotion that moved us most, especially when our illusions about the new life awaiting us in the capital began to wane, or when we simply began to get used to that life, the way you get used to everything and, as you do, lose your taste for it, the way liking turns into boredom, tedium, hidden irritation. We preferred the emotion of that other arrival, the slow approach to our home country, the signs that announced it to us, not kilometer markers on the highway but certain familiar indications seen from the small window of the train or bus: a roadside inn, the red color of the soil along the banks of the Guadalimar River, and then the first houses, the isolated street lamps on the corners, if we arrived at night, the sensation of already being there and the impatience of not quite having arrived, the sweet feeling of all the days that lay ahead, of vacations begun and yet still intact.

  There was in those days one last house, I remember now, where the city ended on the north, the last one you left behind as you traveled toward Madrid and the first you saw on the return, an ancient little hotel with a garden, called La Casa Cristina, which was often the meeting place for the crews of olive pickers and also the place where we bade the Virgin farewell when at the beginning of September her image was returned to the sanctuary of the village from which she would be brought the following year, at the time of the busy pilgrimage in May, the Virgin to whom, as children, we came to pray on late-summer afternoons.

  Maybe the limits of things were drawn more clearly then, like the lines and colors and names of countries on the maps that hung on the schoolhouse walls: that small hotel with its tiny garden and its yellow street lamp on the corner was precisely where our city ended. One step farther and the country began, especially at night when the lamp glowed at the edge of the darkness, not lighting it but revealing it in all its depth. A few years ago, when I was on a trip with my children, who were still small—I remember that the second one was holding my hand—I tried to take them to see La Casa Cristina, and along the way I was telling them that it was near that hotel that the owner of the olive groves would hire my mother and me to work as pickers. I told them how icy cold it was as we walked through the dark city in heavy wraps: I wearing my father’s corduroy cap and wool gloves, my mother in a shawl that completely enveloped her and covered her head. It was so cold that my ears and hands were frozen, and my mother had to rub my hands with hers, which were warmer and rougher, and blow her warm breath on my fingertips. I would get choked up when I told them about those times, and about my mother, whom they had scarcely known. I made them see how much life had changed in such a short time, because it was nearly unimaginable for them to think that children their age had to spend the Christmas vacations earning a daily wage in the olive groves. Then I realized that I had been talking for a long time and wandering around without finding La Casa Cristina, and I thought I’d lost my way because of all the talking I was doing, but no, I was right at the place I’d been looking for: what wasn’t there was the house. A man I asked told me it had been torn down several years before, when they widened the old Madrid highway. Whatever the case, even if La Casa Cristina had still been on that corner, the city wouldn’t have ended there: new neighborhoods had grown up, monotonous block after brick block, and there was a multisports complex and a new commercial center the man showed me with pride, as if pointing out impressive monuments to a foreigner. Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

  My wife says that I live in the past, that I feed on dreams like the idle old men who hang around playing dominoes at our social center and attend the lectures and poetry readings that Godino organizes. I tell her that I am like them, more or less, as good as unemployed, almost permanently “between jobs,” as they say now, no matter how hard I try to start business deals that don’t come to anything, or accept nearly always short-lived, often fraudulent jobs. What I don’t tell her is that at this point I would really like to live in the past, to sink into it with the same conviction, the same voluptuousness, that others do, like Godino, who when he eats morcilla stew, or remembers some joke or the nickname of one of our paisanos, or recites a few lines from our most famous poet, Jacob Bustamante, flushes with enthusiasm and happiness, and is always planning what he’s going to do when Holy Week comes, and counting the days till Palm Sunday, and especially till the night of Ash Wednesday, when it’s time for the procession he participates in as a member of the brotherhood and also as director. “Just like our renowned Mateo Zapatón, who’s retired now in La Villa y Corte,” says Godino, who knows an unbelievable number of our paisanos by their proper names and nicknames although he has lived his whole life in Madrid, and calls everyone “illustrious,” “esteemed,” “distinguished,” hitting that uished so hard, the way they do in our town, that more than once he’s sprayed saliva as he says it.

  It’s true, many of us would like to live in the immutable past of our memories, a past that seems to live on in the taste of some foods and those dates marked in red on the calendars, but without realizing it we’ve been letting a remoteness grow inside us that no quick trip can remedy or increasingly infrequent telephone calls ease—forget the letters we stopped writing years ago. Now that we can make the three-hour trip swiftly and comfortably on the expressway, we go back less and less. Everything is much closer, but we’re the ones drifting farther away, even though we repeat the old familiar words and stress our accent and though we still get emotional when we hear the marches of our religious association or recite poems by the “distinguished bard who gives meaning to the word,” as he is introduced by Godino—who is flattering and admiring him but at the same time pulling his leg—the poet Jacob Bustamante, who apparently paid no attention to the siren song of literary celebrity and chose not to come
to Madrid. He’s still there, in our city, collecting prizes and accumulating benefits because he’s a civil servant, as is another of our local glories, maestro Gregorio E. Puga, a composer of note who also ignored the siren song scorned by Godino in his day. They say (actually, Godino says) that maestro Puga concluded his musical studies in Vienna brilliantly, and that he could have found a position in one of the best orchestras of Europe had the pull of his hometown not been so strong, but he returned instead with all his diplomas for excellence in German, in Gothic lettering, and very quickly and very easily, in a competitive examination, earned the position of band director.

  WE LIKED TO COME BACK with our children when they were small, and we were proud to find that they were fond of the same things that had enchanted us in our childhoods. They looked forward to Holy Week, when they could wear their costumes as little penitents, the child’s cape that left the face uncovered. Almost as soon as they were born, we enrolled them as members in the same associations our fathers had enrolled us in. When they were a little older, they would get antsy in the car, asking, from the moment we left, how many hours till we got there. Born in Madrid, they spoke with an accent different from ours, but it made us proud to think, and to tell one another, that they belonged to our land as much as we did, and when we took them by the hand on a Sunday morning and led them down Calle Nueva, just as our parents had led us, and lifted them up as a float passed so they could get a better look at the donkey Jesus rode as he entered Jerusalem, or the green, sinister face of Judas on the Last Supper float, we were consoled by the sense that life was repeating itself, that time didn’t pass in our city, or that it was less cruel than the nerve-racking and jumbled pace of life in Madrid.

  But the children have been growing up without our realizing it, turning into strangers, unsociable guests in our own homes, locked in rooms that have become dark dens from which sounds of insufferable music issue, and smells and noises we prefer not to identify. Now they don’t want to go back, and if one of us tells them something, they look at him the way they would at a pitiful old man, at some worthless bum, as if it were a snap for a person to find a secure and decent job after the age of forty-five. And they’ve forgotten all the things they liked so much, the thrill of the tunics and hoods (Godino insists that our word is cowls) that covered their faces like storybook masks, the noise of the trumpets and drums, the taste of the candy cigarettes that were sold only in Holy Week and the red caramel pirulís on a stick, spiraled with sugar, that we bought at the street stall of a small man appropriately nicknamed Pirulí; he died a few years ago, even though to those of us who’d been seeing him since we were children, he seemed as frozen in time as Holy Week itself. Our children are no longer drawn to the attractions of the fair, and it’s as if only we, their parents, have retained some trace of nostalgia and gratitude for the modest carousels of all those years ago, the merry-go-rounds, as we called them as children and as we taught our children to say. Nothing we like has meaning for them now, and when from time to time they stand and stare at us with pity, or indifference, making us feel ridiculous, we see ourselves through their eyes: worn-out old-timers whom they don’t feel the need to thank for anything, who irritate and bore them more than anything, nobodies they walk away from as if wanting to rid themselves of the dirty, dusty cobwebs of the time to which we belong: the past.

  TO LIVE BACK THEN, in the past, what more could I want? But a person no longer knows where he lives, not in what city, not in what time, he’s not even sure that his is the house he returns to in the late afternoon with the sensation that he’s a nuisance, even though he may have set out very early, not knowing precisely where he was going or for what reason, looking for God knows what job that would allow him to feel he was once again doing something useful, something necessary. At one of the last meals held by the association, the one we had for the purpose of awarding Jacob Bustamante our Silver Medal, Godino scolded me affectionately because it had been two years since I came home for Holy Week. I explained to him that I was going through a difficult phase, hoping that he, a man of so many resources and acquaintances, might offer a helping hand, but of course I didn’t ask for his help straight out, because of my pride and the fear of losing face in his eyes. My dejection and wounded honor kept me more removed than usual from the activities of our regional association, though I tried never to miss the meetings of the board and was scrupulous in paying my monthly dues. I wandered from morning to night, not myself, from one place to another in Madrid, from one job to another, following promises that never came to anything, opportunities where for some reason or other I always failed, meaningless jobs that lasted a few weeks, a few days. I spent hours waiting, doing nothing, or had to rush to get to something that eluded me by a few minutes.

  One morning, while I was crossing Chueca Plaza with my heart in my fist and my eyes straight ahead in order not to see what was around me—the drug dealers, the people with terrible diseases, the spectacle of sleepwalking men and women with faces of the dead and the shamble of zombies—I ran into my paisano Mateo Chirino, the man who was called Mateo Zapatón when I was young, not only because of his trade as a cobbler but also because of his size; he was much larger than most men in those days and, as I remember, wore huge black heavy-soled shoes, legendary shoes he must have spent a lifetime repairing. I noticed that he seemed to be wearing the same enormous shoes, although now they’d been stretched out of shape by his bunions. I was wearing the dark suit I wore for job interviews and carrying my black briefcase and files. I had been accepted, on trial, as a commissioned salesman of supplies for driving schools. Planted in the middle of Chueca Plaza, in an oversized overcoat and a dark green Tyrolean hat outfitted with the obligatory feather, Mateo Zapatón stood staring benevolently at something, the very picture of a robust, lazy fellow with time on his hands, and he rose from those black shoes as from the pedestal of a statue or the stump of an olive tree, so deeply rooted he seemed in the neighborhood of Madrid where he was living and where he gave the impression of being as comfortable as he had been in our distant, shared hometown.

  His face, too, was just as I remembered it, as if impervious to the wear of time. To a child, all adults are more or less old, so when you grow older and see those persons again after years have gone by, it seems as if they haven’t changed at all. It was a cold winter morning, one of those disagreeable workday mornings in Madrid when the facades of buildings are the same dirty gray as the cloudy but rainless sky. I was rushing as always, harried from running late to meet a client, the owner of a driving school on Calle Pelayo. I’d made the mistake of coming in my car, and the little bit of time I’d left for having a cup of coffee was lost looking for a parking place in impossible streets filled with traffic, pedestrians, unshaven transvestites, thugs, drug addicts, distributors, and trucks loading and unloading, blocking the sidewalk and provoking a blare of horns that were the last straw for my already shattered nerves.

  It was late, I hadn’t eaten, I’d left my car so badly parked that it would probably be towed, but seeing Mateo Zapatón, and the pleasure of the recollections that seeing him awoke in me, was stronger than my haste. As tall as ever, erect, with the same placid expression, big nose, and slightly bulging eyes, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health, though sagging with age, his step as firm as when he used to march in his penitent’s robe ahead of the Last Supper float, guiding the huge cart sponsored by the association’s board of directors.

  That float was one of the most spectacular of all Holy Week, and it had the most figures: the twelve apostles seated around a linen-covered table, with Christ standing at one end, one hand on his heart and the other raised in a gesture of benediction. The gold fringe encircling his head vibrated with every majestic turn of the wheels over the cobbled or paved streets of that time, with the same slight shiver that flickered the flames in tulip-shaped globes and rippled the white tablecloth on which the bread and the wine were arranged for the liturgical sacrifice. All the apostles were looking towa
rd Jesus, and each had a small white light focused on him that dramatically illuminated his face. Everyone except Judas, whose head was turned away in a gesture of remorse and greed, focused on the pouch that held the coins of his betrayal, half-hidden behind his chair. The light that struck Judas in the face was green, the bilious green of liver dysfunction, and everyone in town knew that those features, which we children despised as much as those of the villains in the moving pictures, were those of a tailor who had his workshop on the corner of Calle Real, very near the cubby of Mateo Zapatón.