Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Lying in bed, he relives the sensation of cold drops on his cheeks, on a morning in October that felt like December. He thought of Negrín turning to go back to his office, thought that perhaps he too had been infected by a form of madness. The rain streamed down the tall gray façades on Calle de Alcalá, soaking the torn posters, shreds of wet paper breaking up the slogans in red letters and the figures of heroic militiamen in boots trampling swastikas, bishops’ miters, bourgeois top hats, shirt fronts with medals, workers breaking chains and advancing toward brilliant horizons of factory smokestacks. The peddlers, shoeshine boys, and habitual idlers in the Puerta del Sol took shelter from the rain under the awnings of shops and in the doorways of buildings. The city had become sullen and wintry, and smelled of wet soot, garbanzo and cabbage stew, and overheated air from the metro tunnels. He took refuge in a nearly empty café, waiting behind a window clouded with steam for the rain to let up. The odor of sawdust reminded him of another café several months earlier, equally gloomy at that same hour of the morning, of Judith Biely, who didn’t lift her head as he approached and didn’t get up when he stood beside her, her face transformed into that of a woman who didn’t know him. He couldn’t risk the safe-conduct recently signed by Negrín getting wet. How a life can depend on a sheet of paper, an official letterhead, an ink signature so easily dissolved by a few drops of water. As if they were hidden treasure, he thought of all the papers he already had in his desk drawer, the same locked drawer where he kept Judith’s letters: the documents he’s brought with him and had to present so often during his trip, obtained one by one after exhausting transactions and weeks of waiting, interrogations, lengthy inspections of each document, each stamp and signature on each letter. To apply for the transit visa through France, he had to present his American visa and ticket for the ship as well as a certificate of financial solvency. The letter of invitation from Burton College, which he needed to apply for the American visa, took months to arrive. Most of the personnel at the embassies had left the country; the few officials left were irritated, overwhelmed by applications, insolent with the growing crowd of those who came early every morning and waited for hours in front of the closed doors, each with a briefcase or folder of documents held close to the chest, longing to escape, or at least find refuge in the embassies, looking out of the corner of their eye each time a car with rifle barrels at the windows or a truckload of militiamen went by. He recognized some of the regulars on the lines and in the offices: in a hallway at the French consulate he passed an architect he knew was a rightist, and neither greeted the other; a Russian woman he’d seen several times showed him her worn czarist passport and a diploma in Cyrillic characters issued, she said, by the Imperial Conservatory of Moscow. A contract for teaching piano was waiting for her at the Juilliard School. Couldn’t he, since he looked like a gentleman, help her with a small amount, since she had all the necessary emigration documents and needed only the cost of a third-class passage?

Moreno Villa’s bony hand was cold when he shook it. “You make me envious, Abel, leaving for America, disembarking in New York. I went so many years ago, and it’s as if I had been there yesterday. When you called to say you were coming to say goodbye, I took the liberty of bringing you a present.” He had a book on the desk, and before giving it to him he wrote a dedication on the title page. That copy must be somewhere, on a shelf in a library or a used-book store, the paper brittle after so many years, slightly more valuable because it has a dedication in the cautious hand of Moreno Villa, so similar to the line in his drawings, under the red letters of the title, Proofs of New York: “For Ignacio Abel, in the hope it will be of some help as a guide on his journey, Madrid, October 1936, from his friend J. Moreno Villa.” “It’s one of those books one publishes that no one will read,” he said, as if apologizing. “The advantage is that it’s short. I wrote it on my return trip. You can read it on your trip out. You don’t know the envy I feel.” And like Negrín that morning, Moreno Villa accompanied him to the door, leading him along bare halls and rooms of rococo opulence where at times the strokes of pendulum clocks echoed. They passed several footmen in knee breeches and long coats carrying boxes of papers, followed by a soldier in uniform pushing a large trunk with wheels.

“The president is leaving,” said Moreno Villa. “He says it’s against his will.”

“He’s leaving Madrid? The situation’s that bad?”

“It seems the government doesn’t want to take any risks. But Don Manuel is suspicious and thinks they want him out of the way.”

“They’ve always said he was a fearful man.”

“I don’t think he’s afraid this time. He gives the impression of simply being tired. Sometimes he passes me and doesn’t see me. He pays no attention to what’s said to him. Not because he doesn’t care about the course of the war but because he doesn’t expect anyone to tell him the truth. Do you know his aide, Colonel Hernández Sarabia? A civilized man, fairly well read. He told me the president can barely sleep at night. The gunfire and shouting at the executions in the Casa de Campo keep him awake, just as they kept me awake at the Residence. Hernández Sarabia says that when it’s silent and the wind comes from that direction, you can hear the death throes of those who take a long time to die. In the summer, when the gunfire stopped, the frogs in the lake croaked again.”

At the end of a corridor, outlined against the tall windows of a balcony facing west, I see a motionless figure, enveloped in the gray light of a rainy morning that resembles an old black-and-white photograph. At that distance the first thing Ignacio Abel saw was the gesture of the hand that held a cigarette, while the other was bent behind the man’s body, a fleshy hand against the black cloth of a jacket. The president had walked out of his office, where he spent hours writing, to stretch his legs and smoke a cigarette while looking through the large windows toward the horizon of oak groves and the Sierra de Guadarrama, invisible now under the clouds, his manner the same as on another occasion, not long ago, when he looked into the crowd that filled the Plaza de Oriente to cheer him, shouting in chorus the syllables of his last name on the day in May when he was elected to the presidency. He’d stood at the marble balustrade, looking out at the sea of heads in the plaza, his expression a cross between remoteness and mourning. He turned his head slowly when he heard Ignacio Abel’s and Moreno Villa’s footsteps.

“Let’s greet the president.”

“Let’s not, Moreno. I don’t want to bother him.”

“He’ll ask me who you are and will be annoyed and think I brought you in behind his back and am scheming.”

President Azaña exhaled smoke, his bulbous face swelling slightly.

“Don Manuel,” said Moreno, “I’m sure you remember Ignacio Abel.”

“I once drove you in my car to inspect the construction at University City,” Abel said. “And another time I was with you at the Ritz, at the dinner for the opening of the Philosophy Building.”

“With Negrín, wasn’t it? The two of you wanted to convince me that razing those magnificent pine groves at Moncloa had been worth it.”

Azaña’s eyes were a light, watery gray. He extended his right hand and held it almost inert while Ignacio Abel shook it. It was a soft hand, colder than Moreno Villa’s. Seen up close, the president looked older than he did just a few months earlier, and somewhat unkempt, with dandruff and white hairs on the wide lapels of a funereal jacket that had the shine of wear. An air of lethargy and extreme exhaustion slackened his features, made his skin colorless.