In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Godino told me the story, not without promising that he would tell me others even juicier. The figures on the float, like almost all the figures displayed during Holy Week, had been carved by the celebrated maestro Utrera, who according to Godino was one of the most important artists of the century but hadn’t received the recognition he deserved because he had chosen to stay in our hospitable though isolated city. Because he was such a genius, Utrera was naturally a dedicated bohemian, and he was always consumed by debts and pursued by creditors, one of whom, the most persistent and also the one man to whom Utrera owed the most, was that same tailor on Calle Real who made Utrera’s monogrammed shirts, his closely fitted waistcoats, the suits as snug as Fred Astaire’s, even the floating robes Utrera wore in his studio. Whenever the debt reached an unacceptable level, the tailor would present himself at the Royal Café, where the authors and artists’ club headed by Utrera met every afternoon, and would publicly call the sculptor a reprobate and a thief, shaking a sheaf of unpaid bills in his face. Very dignified, small, ramrod-straight, packaged, as it were, in the elegant Fred Astaire–model suit he had not paid for and had no intention of ever paying for, the sculptor would gaze at a different part of the room while waiters and friends subdued the tailor, whose eyes were bulging and face was dripping sweat from anger, and who ended up leaving as empty-handed as he had come, though not without having ignominiously recovered from the floor of the café the bills that had fallen from his hands in the heat of his tirade, as valuable proof of an insult he threatened to rectify in court. Imagine everyone’s shock, Godino told me, anticipating the punch line with a broad smile that lighted his clever and jovial face, when a few weeks later, the first Wednesday of Holy Week, at the first appearance of the newly carved Last Supper (the old one, like almost everything else, had been burned by the Reds during the war), the tailor saw with his own eyes what malevolent gossips had already told him, the news that was flashing around the city, in Godino’s words, “like a trail of gunpowder.” The contorted face of Judas, the green face that turned away from the kind but accusing face of the Redeemer to examine, in his greed, the badly hidden pouch of coins, was the tailor’s living likeness, exact and faithful despite the cruel exaggeration of the caricature: the same bulging eyes that had looked at the sculptor in the café as if wanting to bore holes in him. “Or petrify him, like the eyes of the Medusa,” said Godino, who as he warmed up to his tale would utter his favorite words ... “And the Semitic nose!” With that adjective Godino would make a face and thrust his head forward, looking as the tailor must have looked when he discovered his likeness on the figure of Judas, and would twist or wrinkle his nose, which was small and turned up, as if merely pronouncing the word “Semitic”—which gave him so much pleasure that he repeated it two or three times—had the virtue of making his nose as prominent as that of the tailor and of Judas, as the nose of all the cruel soldiers and Pharisees of the Holy Week floats: the Jews spit on the Lord, as we children used to say when we played our games of floats and parades. In the paved and dirt streets of our day, we held our juvenile versions of Holy Week and paraded playing small plastic trumpets and drums made from large empty tins; we even pulled floats fashioned from wood or cardboard boxes and wore capes made of old newspapers.

  BOTH MEN HAVE BEEN DEAD a long time now, the irascible tailor and the morose, bohemian sculptor, but the vengeful joke one played on the other survives in the grim, still green-lit features of the Judas of the Last Supper, even though with every Holy Week there are fewer people who can identify them as the tailor’s or who remember the stories of the past that Godino spins, whether inventing them out of whole cloth or just embroidering them, I don’t know. Nor would there be many who recognize the other real model for the apostles, the Saint Matthew who is turned toward Christ, half devout, half frightened, his raised eyebrows underscoring the amazement in his eyes, because this is the moment when the Master has just said that one of the twelve will betray him that night and everyone is alarmed and scandalized, gesturing wildly, asking, “Master, is it I?” In the midst of that uproar no one pays attention to the green, rancorous face of Judas or notices the swollen pouch of coins that our mothers pointed out to us when we were children and they held us up in their arms as the float passed by in the procession.

  I didn’t need Godino to explain to me that the noble Saint Matthew, straight of back and red of cheek, was the living image of Mateo Zapatón, who thus had his instant of public glory on the same night of Holy Week that the bill-collecting tailor was covered with ridicule. After the sculptor Utrera, when he had money or the prospect of collecting some, had the measurements for a new suit taken in the tailor shop, he would cross Calle Real and order hand-cobbled shoes from Mateo, or during hard times he would bring old pairs to be repaired. But unlike the tailor, Mateo Zapatón never reminded Utrera of past-due bills, partly because of the man’s somewhat cowardly nature, which made him inclined to accept half measures, but partly too because he had a fervent admiration for the sculptor, which swelled to the point of abject gratitude every time the maestro came by his shop and stayed several hours to chat with him, offering him his blond-tobacco cigarettes and telling him stories of his travels through Italy and of his life in the artistic circles of Madrid before the war.

  “Friend Mateo,” the sculptor would say, “you have a classic head that deserves to be immortalized by art.” Said and done. Mateo never charged Utrera a cent, but he considered the debt canceled when, with a surge of vanity and modesty, he saw his unmistakable face among those of the apostles, as well as his husky shoulders in a very typical posture: looking sideways and upward from the low cobbler’s bench where he spent his life. Being a penitent and a board member of the brotherhood of the Last Supper, could he imagine a greater honor than inclusion among those who supped with the Savior? Every characteristic, the entire persona of the evangelist saint, was of a prodigal fidelity, except for the beard, which the flesh-and-blood Mateo did not have, although at times he seemed to be on the verge of letting it grow, an inconceivable daring in those years of carefully tended mustaches and shaved faces. The tailor shop sat almost directly across from the cobbler’s shop, but whenever the aggrieved tailor met Mateo on the opposite sidewalk, he would lower his head or look away, his face greener and his nose more Semitic than ever, and Mateo, like so many others, would have to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from exploding with laughter, his cheeks flaming a bright red more appropriate for a giant figure in Valencia’s festivals than for the image of a pious evangelist.

  IT GAVE ME A LITTLE START of pleasure to see that face in the middle of a hostile city, a face tied to the sweetest memories of my hometown and childhood. When I was a boy, my mother often sent me to the door of Mateo Zapatón, who without knowing anything at all about me used to pat my cheek and call me Sacristan. “Mercy, Sacristan, this pair of half soles didn’t last very long this time!” “Tell your mother I don’t have change, Sacristan. She can pay me when she comes by.” The shop was very narrow and high-ceilinged, almost like a closet, and it opened directly onto the street by way of a glass door, which Mateo closed only on the most severe winter days. All the available space, including the sides of the chest he used as a worktable and counter, was covered with posters of bullfights and of Holy Week, the two passions of this master cobbler, glued-on posters, yellowed by the years, some pasted over others, announcements of corridas celebrated at the beginning of the century or at last year’s fair, all in a confusion of names, places, and dates that fed Mateo’s chatty erudition. He was almost always surrounded by his troop of friends, with a cigarette or tack between his lips, or both at once, a tireless narrator of historic anecdotes from the world of bulls and famous taurine maneuvers, which he knew at first hand because the presidents of the corridas often asked him to act as an official adviser. His voice would break and his eyes ill with tears when he was recalling the doleful afternoon when he watched from a row of seats on the sunny side of the bullring in Linares as the
bull Islero charged Manolete. “He’s going to hook you, don’t get so close,” he had shouted from his seat, and he bent forward as if he were in the plaza and cupped his hands to make a megaphone, his face tragic with anticipation, living once again the instant when Manolete could still have saved himself from the fatal goring, “the fateful goring,” as Godino always said when he imitated the madly waving arms of the impassioned cobbler as he told that tale. Godino always promised some great and mysterious story about Mateo, a secret about which only he knew the most delicious details.

  I WENT UP TO MATEO there in Chueca Plaza, and he looked at me with the same broad, benevolent smile he had worn when he welcomed the shoppers and the circle of friends who gathered at his cobbler’s shop. I was moved to think that he recognized me despite how much I’d changed since the last time we saw each other. Just then another coincidence came to mind that linked him to my oldest memories and, without his knowing, made him a part of my childhood. In the space next to Mateo Zapatón’s was the barbershop my father used to take me to, the one where my grandfather always got his haircut and shave, Pepe Morillo’s shop, which was doing less and less business as his oldest customers died off and young people were letting their hair grow. Now his door was closed as tightly as Mateo Zapatón’s and the Judas-face tailor’s, like so many of the shops on Calle Real that once had been busy, before people gradually forgot to go by there, turning it, especially at night and on rainy days, into a ghostly, abandoned street. But in those days Pepe Morillo’s barbershop was as animated as Mateo Zapatón’s shoe repair, and often, on mild April and May afternoons, the clients of both shops would take chairs out on the sidewalk and smoke and talk in one single gathering, which was observed from the other side of the street, from the darkness of his empty shop, by the brooding tailor, who would wring his hands behind the counter and sink his head deeper between his shoulders, ever more closely resembling the Judas of the Last Supper, the misanthrope with the green face and hooked nose slowly pushed toward bankruptcy by the unremitting advance of mass-produced clothing.

  My father, holding my hand, used to take me to Pepe Morillo’s barbershop (back then “hair salon” was a woman’s word), and I was so small that the barber had to put a little stool on the seat in order for me to see myself in the mirror and for him to be comfortable as he cut my hair. His face smelled of cologne and his breath of tobacco when he bent close with the comb and scissors, and he shaved my neck with a little electrical machine. I could hear his strong, fast breathing and feel the touch of capable adult fingers on the nape of my neck and on my cheeks, the rare pressure of hands that weren’t those of my mother or father, familiar yet strange hands, suddenly brusque when he doubled my ears forward or made me bend way over by pushing the back of my head. Every time he trimmed my hair, almost at the end, Pepe Morillo would say, “Close your eyes tight,” and I knew he was going to trim the bangs to just above my eyebrows, cutting toward the middle of my forehead. Damp hair would fall on my eyelids, tickle my plump cheeks and tip of my nose, and the cold blades of the scissors would brush my eyebrows. When Pepe Morillo told me I could open my eyes now, I would be surprised by the round, unfamiliar face in the mirror, with protruding ears and straight bangs above the eyes, and also by my father’s smile as he looked approvingly at my reflection.

  I remembered all this as if I were reliving it when I unexpectedly ran into Mateo Zapatón in Chueca Plaza ... and something else that until that moment I hadn’t known was in my memory. Once, as I was waiting my turn and reading a comic book my father had just bought for me, I felt thirsty and asked Pepe Morillo’s permission to get a drink. He pointed to a small, dark interior patio at the rear of the barbershop, through a glass door and down a dark corridor. When you’re a boy, the farthest places can be reached in only a few steps. As I pushed open the door, I think I was a little dizzy; maybe I was getting a fever and that was why I was so thirsty. The paving tiles were white and gray, with reddish flowers in the center, and they echoed as I walked across them. In a corner of the tiny patio, where a number of plants with large leaves added to the humidity, there was a pitcher on a shelf covered with a crocheted cloth, one of those clay water pitchers they had back then, a brightly colored, glazed jug in the shape of a rooster, made, I remember precisely, by potters on Calle Valencia. I took a drink, and the water had the consistency of broth and the taste of fever. I went back down the hallway, and suddenly I was lost. I wasn’t at the barbershop but in a place it took some time to identify as the cobbler’s shop, and the person I saw was the flesh-and-blood apostle Saint Matthew, although he was wearing a leather apron and not the tunic of a saint or a member of the brotherhood, and he was beardless, with the stub of an unlit cigarette in one corner of his mouth and a tack in the other. “Mercy, Sacristan, what in the world are you doing here? You gave me quite a turn.”

  JUST AS I HAD THEN, I looked at Mateo and didn’t know what to say. Up close he seemed much older, he no longer resembled the eternal Saint Matthew of the Last Supper. Neither his gaze nor his smile was directed at me: they stayed absolutely the same when I spoke his name and held out my hand to greet him, and when I clumsily and hastily told him who I was and tried to remind him of my parents’ names and the nickname my family had back then. Limply holding my hand, he nodded and looked at me, although he didn’t give the impression that he was focusing his eyes, which until a moment before had seemed observant and lively. His hat, more than tilted to one side, was skewed on his head, as if he had jammed it on at the last moment as he left the house or put it on with the carelessness of someone who can’t see himself well in the mirror. I reminded him that my mother had always been a customer in his shop—then shops had patrons, not customers—and that my father, who like him was also a great fan of the bulls, had often been present at his gatherings, and at those in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, which communicated with his via an interior patio. Mateo listened to those names of persons and places with the look of one who doesn’t completely connect with things so far in the past. He bowed his head and smiled, although I also thought I noticed an expression of suspicion or alarm or disbelief in his face. Maybe he was afraid that I was going to cheat him, or assault him, like many of the thugs who hung around that area—you saw them all the time, kneeling in clusters beside the entrance to the metro and dealing in God knows what. I had to go, I was very late for an appointment that was probably futile in the first place, I hadn’t had breakfast, my car was double-parked, and Mateo Zapatón was still holding my hand with distracted cordiality and smiling, his mouth half-open, his lower jaw dropped a little, with the gleam of saliva at the corners of his lips.

  “You don’t remember, maestro?” I asked him. “You always called me Sacristan.”

  “Of course I do, man, yes,” he winked and stepped a little closer, and it was then I realized that now I was the taller. He put his other hand on my shoulder, as if in a benevolent attempt not to disappoint me. “Sacristan.”

  But the word didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though he kept repeating it, still holding the hand that now I wanted to get free, feeling trapped and nervous about continuing on my way. I pulled back but he didn’t move, the hand with the soft, moist palm that had clutched mine still slightly raised, the hat with the tiny green feather twisted around on his forehead, standing there alone like a blind man, in the middle of the plaza, supported on the great pedestal of his large black shoes.

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  About the Author

  ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA is the author of more than a dozen novels, among them Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has also been awarded the Jerusalem Prize and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize, among many others. He lives in Madrid and New York City.

  About the Translator

  EDITH GROSSMAN is the acclaimed translator of major Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Varg
as Llosa. She has received the PEN / Ralph Manheim Medal for translation and other honors.