Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“And where’s this Alliance?”

Negrín burst into laughter and made a sharp turn at the corner of the Plaza de Santa Bárbara to head west along the avenues.

“For God’s sake, Abel, you don’t know anything! The cream of the anti-Fascist intelligentsia has installed itself in the palace of the marquises of Heredia Spinola, one of the best in Madrid. They make war by editing a little newspaper with revolutionary poems, and to rest from their labors they give masquerade balls using the wardrobe of the marquises, who may have fled or died, I don’t know which… Forgive me for not taking you there, but I’m pulled in the opposite direction, and I would like to reach the Sierra in time for supper.”

He hadn’t walked so much in Madrid in a long time, not since he was young and conscientiously saved the few céntimos of carfare. Perhaps that was why he remembered the long walk he took from the cemetery after his mother’s funeral on what had then been the uninhabited edge of the city; one step after another, just like now, head down, with the solitary determination to get somewhere and be somebody. He’d felt fatigue but also energy, the mad euphoria of oxygen pumped into his brain by the muscular effort and rhythm of his steps; the sensation of being a transient stripped of any resemblance to the people who passed by and never saw him, alone in the world, as he’d been then, walking through a city that was his own but also alien to him, just as he had passed the windows of toy stores or bookstores or clothing stores and stared at things inaccessible to him. As a child he looked with horror at the world around him, a world of death and hunger, the curse of poverty, bare feet in winter, bare heads white with ringworm, bodies crippled, deformed, as if they belonged to another species yet living a few minutes away from his home. With a childish sense of empathy, but also relief, he was just as aware of his similarity to those unfortunate boys at the margins of society as he was of the privilege that saved him from sharing their fate. But he was not aware of how different he was from the others, those who received electric trains, regiments of lead soldiers in brilliantly colored uniforms, toy theaters, magic lanterns: those children he saw playing, watched over by uniformed maids, in the gardens of the Eastern Palace or riding in a cart pulled by a goat wearing a bridle with bells; those who looked at him with a smile of curiosity or disdain when he shared a classroom with them in the Piarist Academy, whispering behind his back that he was a porter’s son. Some, in time, he met again in the School of Architecture, and the smile hadn’t changed, or it appeared when someone new got wind of the gossip: his mother had been a porter — or even worse, a washerwoman — in the Manzanares (she did that when she was young, long before he was born), his father a construction foreman or a mason or one of those mule drivers who transported rubble from demolitions to garbage dumps. One of Adela’s relatives had called him a fugitive from the scaffolding. A fugitive now from he didn’t know what or whom, on the sidewalk of the Glorieta de Bilbao where Negrín had dropped him, carried along by circumstances, like so many people in Madrid and in all of Spain, from one side to the other of fractured battlefronts, as unpredictable as chasms in an earthquake, carried down the stairs to the tunnels of the metro by the crowd, rushing to the doors that opened when the train arrived, bodies too close repelled him, jammed together in a hostile silence, everyone afraid, resistant to propaganda, even less believable in this subterranean world than in the open air and light of day. Carried along by forces beyond his control, he still didn’t feel that he had any excuse or that his powerlessness gave him an alibi. Always a fugitive deep down, but now more than ever: eager to recover his children even if he had to cross the lines to the other side (the children he’d abandoned on the afternoon of July 19); eager to leave Spain and escape the general disaster or at least the ultimate fate of so many others — Professor Rossman, perhaps, if he didn’t find him — as if they were in a sinister lottery. His mind whirled in a monologue accelerated by a sense of feverishness; he was wearing himself out circling around Madrid. He emerged from the metro on the corner of the Bank of Spain, which he’d passed only an hour earlier, the great granite edifice covered up past the gratings by a flood of posters. JOIN THE PEOPLE’S GLORIOUS AND INVINCIBLE BATALLION AND IT WILL CARRY YOU TO VICTORY! Silhouettes of tall Soviet blast furnaces, hammers and sickles, a fist crushing a plane adorned with a swastika, an army officer wearing gold braid, a Falangist with the mouth of an ogre. WORKER! BY JOINING THE COLUMN OF IRON YOU STRENGTHEN THE REVOLUTION. Around the entrance to the metro swarmed a crowd of beggars, peddlers of lottery tickets and cigarettes and lighter flints, of revolutionary color pictures mixed with the old religious ones, of postcards and rumpled pornographic magazines, barefoot boys hawking the first afternoon papers with the usual report of the imminent capture of the Alcázar de Toledo. TO ATTACK IS TO CONQUER! EVERYONE TO THE ATTACK LIKE A SINGLE BODY! WITH OUR BLOOD WE WILL WRITE THE MOST SUBLIME PAGE IN THE GLORIOUS HISTORY OF MADRID! Among the people strolling that afternoon through the gardens and sitting at café tables beneath the plantain trees, he recognized the proud back and neck of his brother-in-law Víctor. Instead of crossing the street where Negrín had told him he’d find the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, he rushed to catch up with Víctor, who had turned his head to one side, as if he’d sensed someone following him. With his skin tanned and a beard of several days, Víctor was hard to recognize.

“You gave me a fright, brother-in-law. Keep walking. What’s going on?”

“What are you still doing in Madrid?”

“What about you?”

“I’m looking for a friend.”

“Walk faster. Aren’t you going to denounce me?”

“I thought you would have left.”

“It’s not worth it anymore. Our forces will be here soon. And those of us still here have a great deal to do.”

“What a fool you are. You could hide.”

“It’s what I’m doing right now, if you don’t get in the way. In the light of day and among people, I’m in no danger. You wouldn’t want me to hide like a rabbit in his burrow, waiting for them to hunt me down.”

“Do you have any news of the family?”

“Don’t stop, damn it, keep walking! Don’t look to the side. A patrol is on the corner asking for papers.”

“Do you have any?”

“I’m sure you do, now that your side’s in charge.”

Out of the corner of his eye Ignacio Abel saw the militiamen at the end of the path. Turning around now would be dangerous for Víctor. Perhaps if they continued walking and he showed his credentials, they wouldn’t suspect his companion. A rowdy group of children surrounded a peanut vendor’s cart pulled by a little donkey. From a small brass pipe wafted the delicious aroma of freshly roasted peanuts. The vendor advertised his merchandise by singing outlandish rhymes as he mixed the contents of the portable oven with a small scoop or filled narrow cones of wrapping paper. One of the militiamen held a rifle horizontally. The other examined the documents of a couple with their arms entwined. The smoke from the peanut cart drifted into Ignacio Abel’s face when he took out his wallet. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them Víctor was no longer beside him.

“The revolution is a necessary surgery,” Bergamín said to him, his palms held together before his lean, closely shaven face, in a gloomy office with collections of weapons and leather-bound books on shelves of dark wood, where, when the door was closed, you could barely hear the noise of typewriters and voices in other offices and the constant rhythm of the printing presses.