Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“There’s Malraux.”

Why had he foolishly allowed himself to be persuaded, taking Bergamín at his word? Why, instead of climbing into the truck that would take him to an uncertain and probably dangerous destination, didn’t he leave the Alliance and keep looking for Professor Rossman, who might still have been alive that morning? The militiamen taking the sun at the entrance, sitting in wing chairs removed from the palace — smoking, chatting on the sunny sidewalk, their rifles across their laps — wouldn’t have done anything to stop him. Problems have a solution for a certain period of time, almost always brief, and then they are irreparable. He went into the courtyard and a militiaman told him the truck was ready, its motor running, the men prepared. Bergamín’s secretary came down the marble staircase, heels clicking, to give him a folder with documents whose contents she reviewed quickly with him, not giving him time to ask questions. How strange to have lost so easily the almost arrogant feeling of control that had become a character trait when he made decisions and gave orders at the construction sites in University City. The band was playing somewhere, he could hear the Linotype machines at work, orders and shouts around him, raucous engines and horns in the courtyard, boot heels pounding, weapons firing. In the rooms where only two months earlier liveried servants and maids in black uniforms and white caps went about their work, a disorderly crowd swarmed: unshaven men in blue coveralls, rifles over their shoulders, and women in militia caps, pistols at their waists. The war was a state of improvisation and urgency, a reckless, convulsive theatricality in which he was caught up, knowing that he shouldn’t allow himself to be persuaded, that he lacked the courage or simple adroitness to resist. He remained motionless, like an animal caught in the headlights. When he did nothing, the danger increased; if he did something, it was futile, wrong, and he knew it, but he couldn’t overcome his own incompetence. In one of the improvised jails in Madrid, in a dark basement where prisoners crammed together could barely see one another’s faces, Professor Rossman might be waiting for a door to open and someone to say his name, aware that in all of Madrid Ignacio Abel was the only one who could save him. That morning he should have turned again to Negrín, even more influential and activist, just named a minister. Through large open doors came the sound of the bugle that announced war dispatches on the radio, and people came from all directions to gather around a radio as ostentatious as the palace’s carved doors, desks, and credenzas. Militiamen, clerks, workers, musicians who interrupted their rehearsal, girls dressed in eighteenth-century ball gowns and wigs. Beside Ignacio Abel stood Bergamín’s attentive secretary. The first solemn, blaring measures of the Republican anthem sounded, and the voice of the announcer declaimed: “Attention, Spaniards! The victory government has been formed!” Applause rang out each time the name of one of the new ministers, Socialists and Communists now, was announced, but almost none when the name of Juan Negrín López, minister of finance, came up. Silence was restored with difficulty, and the rhetorical voice announced a speech from the new prime minister, Don Francisco Largo Caballero. As had happened so often in his life, Ignacio Abel found himself surrounded by a fervor he would have liked to share, yet it merely accentuated his feeling of distance, his sense of being an outsider. How strange that on those young faces, Largo Caballero’s unpolished oratory, his way of speaking in front of a microphone — an old man, disconcerted by modern inventions — should awaken unanimous attention and enthusiasm. The unbreakable unity of all the organizations in the Popular Front guaranteed the imminent defeat of the Fascist aggressors. The enemy retreated on all fronts, desperately trying to resist fierce attacks by the workers’ heroic militias. The Spanish people would expel the Moorish mercenaries and the invaders sent by German Nazis and Italian Fascists, just as it had expelled Napoleon’s armies in the War of Independence. To each “ Viva ” pronounced by Largo Caballero, the people grouped around the radio responded with a “ Viva ” that resounded in the hall. They stood up and raised their fists and sang “The Internationale,” played by the band. Ignacio Abel raised his fist too, with an involuntary yet true emotion awakened by the music and the beautiful words learned as a child at the Socialist meetings his father took him to: Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! They think the revolution is now reality, that they’ve triumphed just because they occupy the palaces of Madrid and march in parades with bands and red flags. They’re intoxicated by words and anthems, as if they were breathing air too rich in oxygen and didn’t know it. But perhaps it was he who was mistaken, his lack of fervor proof not of lucidity but the mean-spirited hardening of age, favored by privilege and his fear of losing it.

He left the Alliance, obeying the militiaman’s brusque orders when he should have gone to find Negrín, who must have been in the office of the prime minister at the foot of the Castellana, so close he could have walked there in less than fifteen minutes. Nothing could shock Negrín. In exceptional circumstances he unleashed, knowledgeably and without hesitation, his formidable capacity for action. Too late now: they were beside the small truck, its motor running, and the militiaman who’d accompanied him jumped in the back where his comrades were, sitting in the shade of the canvas, laughing as they passed around a bota of wine, perched on gasoline drums and lighting cigarettes. War was a job for the young. Older people who took part did so with the cold sordidness of propagandists, or were themselves caught up in a delirium of imbecilic rhetoric and monstrous vanity. The driver waited in front, younger than the rest, bareheaded, with an overgrown boy’s round face, round glasses, and curly hair flattened by combing it back with pomade. The war was an obscene slaughterhouse of defenseless people and very young men. Dressed in bizarre military fashion — officer’s shoes, worker’s trousers, peasant’s jacket, leather straps, a pistol — the driver seemed a recruit destined for the battalion of the dimwitted.

“Don Ignacio, don’t you remember me?”

In the young face he could see enduring signs of a childhood that had been familiar to him. The driver blushed as he smiled.

“Miguel Gómez, Don Ignacio. Eutimio’s son, the foreman at the School of Medicine…”

“The Communist?”

“Did my father tell you that? With the Unified Young Socialists, for now.”

“Miguelito…”

Ignacio Abel put both hands on his shoulders, resisting the temptation to pull him close, as he would have done not many years before. He must be twenty-one now, twenty-two at most, but he was still chubby and hadn’t grown much. Only his eyes had the intensity of an adult, anguished life, fevers fed by reading until the small hours of the morning, debilitating arguments about philosophy and politics. “My kid’s turned out to be a reader on me, like you turned out on your father, may he rest in peace,” Eutimio once told him. That the boy had the same name as his own father and son caused a rush of tenderness in Ignacio Abel: he’d been the boy’s godfather, and Eutimio had asked his permission to name him after the elder Miguel. He recognized him fully when he saw him climb awkwardly into the driver’s seat, the pistol’s holster catching on the door handle. This Miguel had been a late child, the last of Eutimio’s five or six, weak when he was little, and several times it seemed he might die of a fever or develop lung disease. He started driving the truck with an abrupt acceleration that provoked laughter and falls in the rear, intimidated perhaps by Ignacio Abel, who’d been a mysterious presence in his childhood, the godfather he was sometimes taken to visit in a building with an elevator and marble stairs that seemed immense to him, though he and his father didn’t walk on them or take the elevator, they climbed up the narrow, dark service staircase; the distant protector from whom came toys and books on his saint’s day; the man who’d intervened when he was a little older so that instead of going to work as an apprentice in construction like his other brothers, he could study for his high school diploma (perhaps Ignacio Abel had used his influence to get the boy enrolled in a good school free of charge, or had taken on the payments without telling anyone). A maid would open the door for Eutimio and Miguel and show them to a room that had a window overlooking an interior courtyard. They waited in silence, Eutimio stiff in a chair, uncomfortable in the boots he seldom wore and that squeaked when he walked and pinched his feet; Miguel’s chair was so high his feet barely touched the floor. Just as when he was a child, it was difficult for Miguel to look into his godfather’s eyes and speak to him. “Thank Don Ignacio,” his father would say. “Nice and loud, we can hardly hear you.” He was a careful driver, conscious of Ignacio Abel’s presence, afraid of seeming clumsy or making a mistake, his chest over the wheel, his glasses sliding down his nose at each jolt of the truck. The former child was now a man with the beginnings of a beard and had a pistol at his waist and his own convictions. Ignacio Abel liked saying the name aloud, Miguel, like my father who died so many years ago, like my son, whom I don’t know when I’ll see again, and if I do see him, he’ll already have made a huge stride in time that will take him out of childhood and away from me, even more irreversibly than physical distance.