Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The car advances along a narrow road flanked by enormous trees, and beyond them he watches autumnal woods glide past, meadows where horses graze, isolated farms, fences painted white that gleam in the declining afternoon light. On the rolling fields the oblique light reveals a faint mist rising from soil dampened and enriched by the rain and covered by the mantle of autumn leaves that will slowly rot until they turn into fertilizer. He recalls his first trips through the fertile, rain-soaked plains of Europe, misty dawns beyond a train window, daylight revealing straight lines of trees along sumptuous riverbanks, cultivated fields. What an injustice to come from the Spanish barrens, the bone-dry plains and mountains of bare rock inhabited by goats and human beings who lived in caves, who had, men and women both, skin as dark and harsh as the landscape where they barely survived by scratching at the earth, their faces deformed by goiters, injustice bending them like a curse without remedy. “No reason to despair, Abel my friend, like those ashen gentlemen of the Generation of ’98—Unamuno, Baroja, all the rest,” Negrín would say, laughing. “Two generations will be enough to improve the race without eugenics or five-year plans. Agrarian reform and healthy food. Fresh milk, white bread, oranges, running water, clean underwear. If they only give us the time, the other side and our own people…”

But they didn’t. Perhaps there never was any time to give, the real possibility of avoiding disaster never existed, and the future that the year 1931 seemed to open before us was a fantasy as foolish as our illusion of rationality. In the ditches along the recently paved avenues of University City, there are now piles of corpses; in the classrooms we hurried to have ready for the beginning of the school year, no one’s come to study; everything prepared, new benches and blackboards, echoing corridors where some of the windows have probably shattered, where cannon fire will roar very soon, and as happens now, between midnight and dawn, rifles firing at bodies against the walls. Tomorrow, within a few hours, as soon as it dawns over the plain, they’ll continue to approach, heading for Madrid as they have throughout the summer, coming up from the south along desolate straight highways like a pernicious epidemic against which there’s no antidote, no possible resistance, only immolation or flight, bewildered, poorly armed militiamen throwing themselves unprotected against canister shot or fleeing cross-country and tossing aside their rifles to run faster without even seeing the enemy, terrified by the shadows of riders on horseback or by the shouts of others as lost as they. With the pink manicured nail of an index finger — the finger that now distractedly taps the cigarette to shake off the ash while through the car window a landscape of meadows, white houses and fences, red, ocher, and yellow splashes of woods that follow one another in orderly succession — Philip Van Doren has followed on a map the line drawn by the names he read in the papers, or in who knows what reports, which reach him even before they’re published: sonorous, abstract names, Badajoz, Talavera de la Reina, Torrijos, Illescas, as conspicuous with their hard consonants and bright vowels in the music of the English language as their exotic spellings in news columns and headlines. But what does Van Doren know of what lies behind those names? And what can Professor Stevens imagine when he reads the paper or listens to the radio while he eats breakfast next to one of those large windows without shutters or curtains, before these landscapes free of sharp edges, the signs of poverty, drought, or scars of dry streams, bathed in a soft light that seems to touch things ever so delicately while the afternoon fades slowly, enduring in the clear blue of the sky and distant mountains, the dusty gold of hills covered with maples and oaks, the west sides of houses painted white? Names he remembers, places he passed on a trip, villages where he stopped to study a church tower or take photographs of a mill, a washing site, a structure devoted to labor — not even that, a stone wall crowned with tiles, the arch of a bridge over a stream. Day after day, beginning at dawn, in the terrible heat of summer afternoons, in the more temperate twilights, the armed invaders have continued to advance through those landscapes stripped of trees where no one can hide, attacking villages, each a name quickly eliminated from maps, leaving behind a harvest of corpses, a horizon of burned houses along the white strip of highway, the lines of telegraph poles and wires. They advance in military trucks, in requisitioned cars, in cavalry squads that terrorize unarmed fugitives with raised swords and shouts of primitive fury. Turbans and scimitars mixed with machine guns; trophies of cut-off hands and ears, and range finders for the artillery that demolishes with cannon fire a church tower where peasants armed with old shotguns have taken refuge, resolved to die; barbaric acts executed with the kind of precision all of you wanted to realize in the University City project, says Philip Van Doren, uncertain about the verb he’s used — it’s either too inaccurate or too vague. “How do you say to carry out in Spanish?” he asks, not looking at Ignacio Abel, or looking at him obliquely to let him know that the person who could give him the answer is not there. Both of them are thinking about her. “ Llevar a cabo, ” he says, satisfied now, relieved, Judith’s shadow invoked between them, as present as the war that’s invoked in the names of the towns the enemy continues to take, the ones that will fall tomorrow, within a few hours, when it’s still dark here but dawn in Spain: motors starting up; horses neighing; the deafening noise of weapons, of military boots on gravel (but they don’t wear boots either, or only the officers do; they wear espadrilles, just like our men, united in penury, in their destiny as cannon fodder); slaughter as an exhausting but intoxicating task, like a human hunt where without effort the astonishing number of retrieved prey multiplies, all uniform in the terror of their flight and their helplessness. The beautiful names on maps now designate cemeteries. The other country, occupied now and an enemy, spreads like a stain as the troops advance, reinforced by a retinue of blue-shirted butchers who go through villages with typed lists of those condemned, leaving behind a trail of corpses. While he waited and did nothing in Madrid, they continued to approach, while he traveled by train to Paris, dissembling in his flight, and boarded the ship and was hypnotized looking at the ocean as gray as a steel plate, writing postcards that wouldn’t reach their destinations, imagining letters he’d never write. From Navalcarnero the highway runs almost in a straight line to the outskirts of Madrid. Long before they arrive, the invaders will see in the distance the white patch of the National Palace on the cliffs of the Manzanares; they’ll see the red outline of its roofs, interrupted by the Telephone Company tower beneath the immense sky of Castilla.

“The president of the Republic has left Madrid, as you probably know,” says Van Doren, observing Ignacio Abel to be certain of what he suspects, that Abel didn’t know.

“Probably the government will leave too, if it hasn’t already done so, in secret. Your family is safe, far from Madrid? I seem to remember that the last time we saw each other you said you’d left them in the Sierra. If you’d like, perhaps we can arrange for them to join you here after a time. Other professors we’ve brought over from Europe, from Germany especially, are in a similar situation. And of course, what happened to your friend Professor Rossman?”

When he hears the name, Stevens turns his head toward them for a moment, his face red.