Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

If he hurried, if he was lucky, perhaps he could still save Professor Rossman. He knocked on the doors of quasi-official agencies and elegant houses that had been seized and, he’d been told, were now secret prisons. In the courtyards, car engines roared and men in civilian clothes armed with rifles and large pistols tucked diagonally between the shirt and waistband of their trousers blocked his path and subjected him to interrogations that didn’t always end when he opened his wallet to show his credentials: his Socialist Party and General Union of Workers membership cards, the safe-conduct issued to him so he could continue visiting the suspended construction sites at University City. He said Professor Rossman’s name, explained his status as an eminent foreign anti-Fascist refugee in Spain, and showed the photograph his daughter had given him. He caught looks of possible recognition, gestures of complicity. He put the photo away after receiving a negative reply and continued searching: perhaps he ought to ask at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the State Security Office, at the police station on Calle Fomento. “This guy has the face of a dead man,” someone said to him, laughing. “You should look for him in the morgue, or on the San Isidro meadow. They have a picnic there every night.” He knocked on the doors of palaces decorated now by red or red-and-black flags, their façades covered with layer upon layer of propaganda posters. He made his way along narrow corridors filled with tobacco smoke, saw fatigued, garrulous, unshaven men talking on the phone, dictating lists of names to secretaries, all of them pulled along by a nervous urgency in which the presence of Ignacio Abel was an inconvenience: his insistence on making inquiries regarding someone no one knew anything about, repeating a name he had to spell over and over again, showing a photo that elicited an automatic negative response. In a salon with large balconies overlooking the Paseo de la Castellana, he approached with instinctive meekness a table with legs carved into lion’s claws, where a harried group of men, some wearing a suit and tie and with an official air and flanked by stenographers, judged or heard cases and examined papers. They passed around the photograph of Professor Rossman as if doubting its authenticity. One of them handed it back, shook his head, and gestured to an armed man in plain clothes sitting on a balcony. The guard seized Ignacio Abel’s arm and forced him out of the hall. “If I were you, I’d stop asking so many questions. Maybe this friend of yours turns out to be an insurgent and gets you in trouble.” As he walked down the staircase, he passed a group of militiamen pushing a man in handcuffs up the stairs, hitting him. For a moment their eyes met. In the man’s eyes was a plea for help; Ignacio Abel looked away.

He returned to the Workers’ Cooperative, and the sentry at the door told him Negrín had just left but had gone to a place nearby, the Socialist commissary on Calle Gravina. Negrín was loading cardboard boxes filled with foodstuffs and beverages into his car, wiping away sweat with a handkerchief, which he then stuffed into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Help me, Abel, don’t just stand there,” he said with a peremptory gesture, not surprised to see him.

The two of them filled the trunk with canned food, sausages, sacks of potatoes. On the back seat were cases of beer and demijohns of wine wrapped in blankets.

“Don’t think badly of me, Ignacio. I’m not seizing all this food, and I won’t pay the comrades in the commissary with IOUs, like our heroic revolutionary patrols.”

The manager handed Negrín a long bill, and Negrín went over it with the point of a tiny pencil held between his large fingers. From a wallet held together by a rubber band he took out a handful of banknotes and paid the manager. He was already in the car and had started the motor when he told Ignacio Abel to get in and said goodbye to the commissary manager by holding his arm out the window with his fist clenched, in the same efficient way he’d extend it to signal a turn.

“Do you want me to drop you somewhere, Abel? I’m off to the Sierra to bring some food to the boys in the regiment my son Rómulo enlisted in. It’s a disgrace — there are no regular supplies of anything. They send those brave kids to the front and then don’t remember to bring them ammunition or food or blankets. If they don’t have enough trucks for food and ammunition, how come they’re still parading them through Madrid?” Boxed into a space that was too small, Negrín gestured over the wheel as he drove with abrupt accelerations and stops on the narrow streets, carried along by a mixture of indignation and enthusiasm. “So instead of despairing and wasting time by calling and asking the authorities to do something, I decided to take drastic action and do it myself. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, and besides, it keeps me busy. Come to think of it, how about helping me with your car?”

“It was requisitioned, Don Juan. I left it at the mechanic’s a few days before all this began and haven’t seen it since.”

“You’ve used precisely the right phrase: ‘all this.’ What are we living through? A war, a revolution, sheer absurdity, a variation on traditional Spanish summer fiestas? ‘All this.’ We don’t even know what name to give it. Did you hear what Juan Ramón Jiménez called it? When he was safe and sound in America, of course. A ‘mad tragic fiesta,’ that’s what Juan Ramón called it. The people’s great triumph. But he and Zenobia, just in case, rushed to put some distance between themselves and ‘all this.’ Do you know they were about to take him for a ride, as we say now? It’s a shame how things like this enter our vocabulary.”

“They were going to kill Juan Ramón Jiménez? What could they have suspected him of?”

“Suspected? Nothing. He had the same name as somebody else they were looking for, or he resembled him. His good teeth saved him.”

“So he bit his way out of it? He’s quick-tempered.”

“It’s no joke. The militiamen were sure of only one detail about the man they were looking for: he had false teeth. When Juan Ramón insisted they had the wrong man, they began to have their doubts. One of them figured they could just pull on his teeth and find out. Now you know that Juan Ramón has the best teeth in all of Madrid. A patrol almost arrested Don Antonio Machado because they thought he looked like a priest. But tell me, how long ago did they arrest your friend? It would be an international disgrace for us if anything happened to him. Yet another one.”

“I don’t know where to begin looking for him.”

“You don’t and neither does anybody else. It seemed we were going to abolish the bourgeois state, and now each party and union has its own jail and police force in addition to its own militias. What a great step forward. I suppose our enemies are delighted with us. In the Anarchist militias they vote on whether it’s a good idea to attack the enemy, in ours they shoot the few military commanders we have left for sabotage if an offensive fails. The miracle is that in the Sierra we’ve been able to contain the insurgents, and from the south they haven’t reached Madrid yet. And what about the Aragón front? If the brave columns of Catalán Anarchists keep breaking through and crushing the enemy’s defenses, how come they never reach Zaragoza? And if every day we’re about to take the Alcázar de Toledo, why haven’t we taken it yet? From what you tell me, I assume the people who picked up your friend were Communists. They wouldn’t have killed him right away, they would’ve wanted to interrogate him. Didn’t he live for a time in the Soviet Union? Go talk to Bergamín, at the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. You know that one way or another he’s connected to everybody. Leave me a message at home if you find out anything. As soon as I get back from the Sierra tonight, I’ll look with you.”