Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“We’ll have to stop, Don Ignacio. We have to put water in the radiator. The motor’s burning out.”

“Do you have any idea where we are?”

“I’m a disaster. I’m lost.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll ask in the village. We’ll find a road back to Madrid around here.”

“But we have to go to Illescas, Don Ignacio. They entrusted us with a mission.”

“Our mission right now is to not get killed.”

“Did you see the Fascists? Did you see the Moors’ sabers shining?”

“Slow down. The village seems empty.”

“They must’ve evacuated it.”

Never having learned the name of the village, Ignacio Abel remembered it as a phantom site. There was a fountain with several spouts at the entrance, and Miguel Gómez stopped the truck beside it. The three militiamen jumped down from the back, shaking their legs, telling jokes. Whose idea was it to send them for paintings, as if they worked for a moving company instead of killing Fascists? They were young; the evidence of danger and the spectacle of death were lost on them. “What do we do now, comrade? Go to Madrid without the paintings and not take any insurgents back with us?” Past the fountain, the only street in the village curved toward a small, arcaded square where the church stood. Not a single tree, no shade. Ignacio Abel washed his face in the fountain, drying it with the handkerchief he hadn’t forgotten to fold that morning into the breast pocket of his jacket. Miguel Gómez had unscrewed the radiator cap and was letting the engine cool before putting in water. The militiamen had taken out lunch pails and a bota of wine. They left their rifles leaning against the fountain wall and sat down in the sun to eat. Ignacio Abel moved away from the group, impatient to be alone, to find someone who’d tell him where they were and what would be the best way back to Madrid. He walked down the middle of the street. A little farther on a woman’s shawl, an open suitcase filled with tableware, folders of what seemed to be legal documents. He saw a door ajar and, after knocking on it a few times, pushed it open. He entered a kitchen, its walls curved like a cave and black with soot, where embers smoldered in a stove and a cooking pot sat nearby. The air held a residual odor of boiled garbanzos and rancid bacon. Something moving at the edge of his field of vision caused a rush of alarm: a canary in a cage, fluttering about, bumping into the wire sides. Back on the street, the vertical sun hit his eyes. Ignacio Abel was about to go back when he saw something projecting from the next corner: a shoe, the bottom edge of corduroy trousers, a man against the wall covered with bulletholes and spattered blood, in the middle of his chest a black hole of torn flesh and coagulated blood. He was lying face-up, but next to him was another man with his face to the ground, and a little beyond them two or three more piled up, and a barefoot woman with broad white thighs, her dress soaked in blood. Flies buzzed around their wounds, mouths, eyes. The air smelled of excrement and intestines. A vertical swaying shadow was projected onto the whitewashed wall: in a hayloft a man had been hanged from a hook on a pulley. His eyes were bulging, his swollen tongue sticking out of his mouth. At his feet a puddle of urine, both of his ears cut off.

He tested his back against the wall, close to the legs of the hanged man. He felt rough wood: a door. He slipped inside. It was a stable. He stepped in manure. A hen looked at him with a severe air as she sat on a straw nest on top of a sack of wheat. We’re lost on the other side of the lines, he thought. No sign, no border. Madrid suddenly a place as unreachable as America. They kill as they advance, methodically eradicating with a pitiless efficiency no one can stop. They’ll discover the truck and in a few seconds they’ll have machine-gunned those three boys playing at war and poor Miguel Gómez, who won’t be able to get his hand on his pistol. An oblique thread of sun traversed the ground in the stable; a shadow crossed it, and then another. Ignacio heard with absolute clarity the metallic sound of a rifle on a shoulder. Then an engine starting up, the neighing of a horse, the sound of hooves, first on paving stones, then on the ground. In the silence, the minutes had the inconsistency of time in dreams. He was struck by fear that the engine he’d heard was the truck’s. But Miguel would never leave without me. He went out to the street, staying close to the wall, and when he reached the corner, he heard at his back the mechanism of a rifle bolt and a gruff voice ordering him to halt. Fear was a stab wound in the middle of his spine. He turned his head slowly and the person aiming at him was one of the three militiamen, pale in the wounding light of midday and as frightened as he was, and just as much a stranger. “Don Ignacio,” said Miguel Gómez, “where have you been?”

They advanced along stray highways, unsure whether they were approaching the enemy or had already met him on the other side of the shifting frontline, whether at any moment they would fall into an ambush. The empty fields were a threat. No signs at the crossroads. They tried to be guided by the position of the sun and head north, but the roads seemed to go only west and south; in that direction lay Talavera de la Reina, and there the enemy certainly was advancing. But then where had they been when they came to that nameless village? Had they come across a regiment or just a scouting party? “They cut off her nose and ears,” said Miguel Gómez. Before or after raping her. Ignacio Abel was driving now. Miguel had agreed with no resistance, relieved really, leaning against the seat, holding on to the door handle, unable to forget the woman’s face, the enormous purple feet of the hanged man. The motor vibrated and roared beneath the sole of the foot stepping on the accelerator. Soon it would begin smoking again. A little faster, taking maximum advantage of the truck’s scant power and crude machinery. A little faster, but where? Along the harsh plain where they didn’t cross paths with anyone, a country uninhabited as if after a plague, barren fields and solitary houses, their roofs fallen in, vineyards disappearing into the distance on the reddish earth.

“It was a miracle they didn’t see us. And those three idiots joking and making noise as if nothing was going on.”

“Or maybe they thought there were more of us and ran away.”

“How scared I was not to see you, Don Ignacio. How could I face my father if anything happened to you?”

A sign carved into a boundary stone finally indicated the road: TO MADRID, 10 LEAGUES. They want Anarchist communism and we haven’t gotten as far as the decimal metric system. The road led to the national highway, and the slow river of refugees moving toward Madrid forced them to slow down. The multitude looked at the red banner with the emblem of the Fifth Regiment, didn’t move out of the way when the horn sounded. They had the air of fatigued, solemn poverty, of a primitive exodus, a universal migration leaving deserted lands behind. The mules, the donkeys, the carts with crude wooden wheels, the old men, fathers with children on their shoulders, women in black skirts and shawls, herds of goats, the cry of a newborn searching for its mother’s dry breast, the dust and silence enveloping everything, the unanimity of the flight, the urgency lessened by the exhaustion of walking since before dawn, leaving everything or almost everything behind, dropping on the road what became too heavy or unnecessary, like a trash heap the length of the highway, traces of shipwrecks in the dirty foam left by the sea when it recedes. They flee from an army of legionnaires, Moors, and Falangists who’ve been advancing toward Madrid since the end of July, fatigued from their killing spree. Now they lift their eyes and see Madrid for the first time, in the distance, as fantastic as the shapes of clouds, the formidable buildings, the terrifyingly wide streets they won’t dare cross for fear of the cars, the great yellow Telephone Company tower that Ignacio Abel and Miguel Gómez were grateful to see, shining in the sun above the rooftops.