Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“I hear them every night from here, close by,” said Moreno Villa, aged, thinner, unshaven, looking like a beggar or a martyr in a painting by Ribera.

The Residence was now a barracks for militiamen and Assault Guards. Next to the reception desk was the guardroom, a mass of armed men who came and went with rifles on their shoulders, straw mattresses spread on the floor, smelling like a pigsty, tobacco smoke everywhere, the walls full of posters covered with handwritten slogans, the floor littered with cigarette butts. In the corridor leading to Moreno Villa’s room were hospital beds occupied by wounded militiamen; the air reeked of disinfectant and blood. Yellowish, badly shaven faces turned incuriously as he passed, eyes possessed by a kind of fear unlike any other, the somber, hermetic fear of those who have seen death.

“I hear a car driving up the hill, the doors opening and closing, orders, sometimes laughter, as if it were a party. Then bursts of gunfire. By counting them I know how many they’ve killed. Sometimes they’re sloppy or drunk, then it takes longer.”

Moreno Villa in his large, ascetic room, the cell of the anchorite he’d become after not seeing anyone for so long or not venturing out for days, not even to the garden at the Residence’s entrance, now occupied by Assault Guard trucks and motorcycles. He went out only to go to work at the archives of the National Palace, with the punctuality of a dutiful official who didn’t have to be asked. The president of the Republic, who had his office near Moreno Villa’s, had suggested that he sleep at the palace. But he preferred to return every evening to the Residence, as incongruous among militiamen and the wounded as he would have been anywhere else in Madrid, in his old-fashioned suit, high shoes, and the bow tie he’d been in the habit of wearing since he came back from the United States, the trip he’d written about in a short, heartfelt book, as all of his were, a book by an author who enjoys some prestige but whom no one reads. He was just as Ignacio Abel had seen him a year earlier, surrounded by books, sitting near the window in front of a small, unfinished still life, perhaps the same one he’d started in late September, in the remote past of less than a year ago.

“By this time they’ve already taken away the bodies. A municipal crew comes in a slow garbage truck. I recognize it by the sound of the engine. They arrive a little after dawn. If your friend was here last night, he must be in the morgue by now. Rossman was his name, wasn’t it? Or still is, poor man, who knows. I remember chatting with him once.”

“Last year, in October, he came to my lecture.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it? Remembering anything that happened before all this began. Things happen and they seem inevitable, as if anyone could have predicted them. But who could have told us our Residence would be turned into a barracks? A barracks and also a hospital, a few days ago. Now, aside from the shots at night we have to listen to the moans of those poor boys. You have no idea how they scream, Abel. No medicine, no sedatives, no anesthesia, no nothing. Not even good gauze to control hemorrhages. I leave my room and find puddles of blood on the floor. We didn’t know how sticky blood is, how shocking it is, the quantity of blood a human body holds. We thought we were men with experience and judgment, but we were nothing and knew nothing. And the little we knew is ridiculous and serves no purpose. Don José Ortega stayed for a few weeks before he left Spain, like so many others. He was ill. It was painful to see him sitting in a hammock in the sun, an old man, his mouth hanging open, yellow, with that lock of hair he always carefully combed to hide his bald spot. Our great philosopher, the man who had an opinion on everything, silent, looking into the void, dying of fear, just like all of us, or more so, because he was afraid his fame would work against him and he would not be allowed to leave Spain. I don’t know if you know that some people came to ask him to sign the manifesto of intellectuals in favor of the Republic. Bergamín, Alberti, someone else, all of them with boots and leather straps, with pistols. But Don José didn’t sign. As sick as he was, feverish, scared. They left and he was much worse. I approached him to ask after his health, and he didn’t answer.”

“And they didn’t ask you to sign the manifesto?”

“I’m not famous enough. It’s the advantage of being invisible.”

“Poor Lorca didn’t have it.”

“He left Madrid because he was frightened. He took the express after they killed Lieutenant Castillo and Calvo Sotelo, July 13. I spoke with him a few days earlier. He was very frightened.”

“I saw him from a taxi. He was sitting on the terrace of a café on Recoletos, in a light suit, smoking a cigarette, as if waiting for someone. I waved to him but I don’t think he saw me.”

“Now we spend our lives trying to remember the last time we did something or saw a friend. It frightens us to think it was the last time. Before, we would say goodbye as if we were going to live forever. How many times have you and I said goodbye, Abel my friend, or passed each other if we were in a hurry with no more than a tip of the hat. When we say goodbye this time, it’s not unlikely we won’t ever see each other again.”

“It’s dangerous for you to be living here alone, so removed from everything. Come to my apartment. I’m there alone. One of the maids stayed with my family in the Sierra and the other disappeared. You’ll be safer and we can keep each other company.”

“Don’t worry about me, Abel my friend. Who’ll want to do anything to an old man?”

“You’re not that old and you aren’t safe. No one is. I saved myself at the last moment almost by accident.”

What would happen to Moreno Villa, sedentary and stubborn, determined to live as if the world hadn’t collapsed around him, alone in the Residence, wandering the hallways and classrooms where the foreign students who’d left toward the end of July wouldn’t return, where the beautiful exotic voices he loved no longer sounded? He spent sleepless nights in the dark, listening to the gunfire, the car engines, the shouting, the laughter.

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about a good deal lately, Moreno? An article you published last year about the desire everyone seemed to have to kill his adversary. I thought you were exaggerating.”

“I’ve been thinking about it too. ‘I Was Killing Them All’ was the title. Then I saw it in El Sol and was almost ashamed to have used those words, though it was meant to be ironic. Some words shouldn’t be written or pronounced. You say something without conviction or thinking, and once you’ve said it, it begins to be true.”

They said nothing else, uncomfortable in a silence they couldn’t break. A bugle sounded from the garden in front of the Residence. On the athletic fields groups of militiamen were training to the beat of a drum.

“And you, Abel, do you plan to leave?”

He took a while to answer. How could Moreno Villa believe that if he was leaving, or trying to, it was because he’d planned the trip long before the war started, because in that earlier time, already as distant as a dream, he’d been invited to spend an academic year at an American university, to give classes and perhaps design a library? Others had already left, taking advantage of privileges, inventing international missions, diseases that required treatment abroad. There were rumors that Ortega himself hadn’t really been gravely ill when he left, that at heart he sympathized with the Fascists or was in some way involved with them and feared reprisals. Ignacio Abel’s words told the truth but sounded false, even to his own ears; they sounded like the lie of someone who’s going to desert and repeats an explanation, an honorable alibi, especially when he heard himself saying that worst of all was not hearing anything from his wife and children on the other side of the front, so close and yet in another country, another world, the antithesis of this one but just as delirious. “I expected to take them with me,” he said, knowing it wasn’t quite true, knowing the lie contaminated his sorrow over the absence of his children, imagining that perhaps Moreno Villa suspected other reasons, not just his possible cowardice and intention to flee Spain, but also what he’d probably learned or been told in a Madrid so rarefied and filled with gossip, especially because he lived in the Residence and had met Judith, witnessed with the astute eyes of an easily infatuated bachelor the first meetings between her and Ignacio Abel. Out of vanity or lack of imagination, you convince yourself that others pay attention to every little thing you do. Moreno Villa’s sad, questioning eyes troubled Ignacio Abel, they probed his conscience, but as he spoke he noticed in his own voice a tone of imposture or guilt. Moreno Villa was thinking about something else, as much a prisoner of his ruminations and uncertainties as Abel was, just as perturbed by the eruption of all this madness, this bloody world he didn’t understand and couldn’t escape and couldn’t ignore.