Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Too formal: the suit cut by a modern tailor in Madrid is, here at Burton College, suddenly old-fashioned, almost antiquated, compared with the students’ casual clothing and the flannels and checked jackets of the professors, who project an air of rural English gentry in harmony with the vague medieval mimesis of the architecture. That’s why it’s so easy to distinguish Ignacio Abel when he leaves the Faculty Club and walks along a path in the central quadrangle of the campus. He’s more formal and moves more slowly than the rest, more leisurely with his hands in his pockets and his excessive Spanish pallor, enjoying the early afternoon sun without his raincoat or a suitcase in hand, passing groups of young men and women carrying books and briefcases and hurrying to their classes or the library, where there is no more room for books, a pseudo-Gothic building that will be abandoned as soon as the new library is built, the one that exists only as an imaginative conjecture sketched in a notebook he carries in his pocket. He observes supple bodies and healthy faces that seem never to have been brushed by the shadow of fear or distorted by cruelty or anger. The girls in light dresses on the warm October morning, in flat shoes and white socks, and the boys in brightly colored sweaters, almost all of them bareheaded, mixing in a seemingly effortless camaraderie. The quality of their teeth allows their laughter: he recalls Negrín’s judgment when he observed people’s faces in Madrid with the eyes of a physician and saw the sad signs of malnutrition and lack of hygiene. Pasteurized milk and cod liver oil, abundant calcium for rotten teeth, would be the remedies for Spain’s backwardness! He has time; they won’t be picking him up for the dinner the president of the college is giving in his honor until six. Hours seemed to sprout within hours: he finished dressing this morning and still had time to eat breakfast, write a letter, and examine the solitude of the guesthouse. In the hallways hung oil portraits of men in colonial dress or nineteenth-century frock coats, landscapes of the banks of the Hudson with blue mountains in the background and hills covered by autumnal forests, and watercolor renderings of projected college buildings. On one crudely executed, vividly detailed picture, a label with the inscription Burton College, 1823 floated above a view of a large, fortified, Gothic-looking tower rising from a clearing, as meticulous as a medieval illuminated manuscript. Like an intruder or a phantom he walked down the oak steps of the staircase that led to the foyer. In the light of day everything was different from what he’d seen the evening before. He crossed a large library with half-empty shelves, a grand piano in the center, folding chairs propped against one wall. He crossed a sitting room that overlooked a garden and had a hearth where a fire of fragrant wood crackled, and deep leather armchairs beside which hung newspapers on frames. It seemed as if someone diligent and invisible had been waiting for him to wake. He heard the sounds of plates and flatware. At the end of a long dining room table was a breakfast service. A stout black woman said a jovial good morning and asked a series of questions he understood only gradually, deciphering the obvious sounds with some delay. He agreed to everything: he wanted coffee, he wanted sugar and milk, he wanted orange juice, butter and marmalade, rye bread. The woman was at once majestic and accommodating: she said things to him that were indecipherable when he thought he was on the point of understanding them, and she observed with indulgent patience as he attempted to say something and suddenly a trivial word would escape him. She watched him eat, respectful and affable, served him more milk and more coffee and slices of dark, porous bread, and indicated with gestures that he should spread on more butter and try each of the pots of marmalade arranged on the table. She quickly gathered the breakfast things and told him with exaggerated hand movements not to worry about anything, she’d come back later to clean the house. Her expression was sad as she watched him eat and said something about the Great War and the lack of food then, and that her husband (or her son) had fought in Europe and come back sickened by poison gas. There was something wholesome in everything around him, in the construction of the house and the thickness of the slices of bread, the rich density of the milk and the heavy china of the cup, a kind of robust cordiality that was also in the woman’s presence and the size of her hands, with their pink nails and white palms.

When he was alone again the dimensions and silence of the house seemed to multiply. A murky touch of unreality was in the presence of things, the sharpness of his perceptions. Comforted by breakfast, he again crossed spaces that seemed conceived for him alone to inhabit, distant from his life and yet as hospitable as if he’d lived in them a long time and had returned now, this morning, to the rooms flooded with sun, the fire lit, the day’s newspapers on the racks next to the leather armchairs. He opened one with the fear he had felt so often, the simultaneous longing for and revulsion at finding news about Spain. It was a two-week-old New York Times, and he was about to put it back but anxiety drew him to its wide pages and tiny print. And there it was, on an inside page, the eternal curse of the bullfight’s language and cruelty: DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON — AND AT DAWN. He saw those words and knew they referred to Spain. They had to be there, “death” and “the afternoon,” as if it were an article about a bullfight and not a war, and the word “sun,” the white-hot brilliance exaggerating the colors of the national fiesta to the delight of tourists: DEATH UNDER THE SPANISH SUN — MURDER STALKS BEHIND THE FIGHTING LINES — BOTH SIDES RUTHLESS IN SPAIN. For them, both sides are the same in their exoticism and taste for blood: Elimination of Enemies by Execution Is the Rule. Who could have read the paper two weeks earlier, leaning back in the chair with broad, worn arms, the leather as noble as the logs burning in the fireplace or the marble mantel, who could have been interested in the news about executions in those arid landscapes punished by the sun while on the other side of the large window that faced the garden, a gentle, early autumn breeze would have been stirring the leaves and bringing the smell of soil and rain. What was a country at war like for someone reading the paper after breakfast: remote, cruel, doomed to misfortune, prompting perhaps a virtuous sympathy that costs nothing and strengthens the comfortable feeling of being safe, protected by distance and the civilization that permits you to take as a given the pleasures of the morning, bathing after a night of sleep, the abundance of breakfast in a spacious room illuminated by the clean light of day, the smell of coffee and of ink on the newspaper, of toasted bread and fresh butter gently melting on it. That’s how he’d read the news about Abyssinia not many months before, looked at the photographs in Ahora and Mundo Gráfico of defenseless Ethiopians with their spears and tribal robes, insolent Italian legionnaires in their epic colonial uniforms copied from bad adventure movies, their Fiat planes armed with machine guns and incendiary bombs. Now the Abyssinians are us: we are the victims of merciless invaders and those entrusted with the most rudimentary part of slaughter.

Murder Stalks Behind Fighting Lines. He put down the paper without having read the whole article and left the guesthouse, inhaling the fresh air that held the dew’s moisture and a smell of earth and fallen leaves, resin and the sap of the tall cedars or firs that edged the clearing, their tips moving gently in the breeze. A woodpecker’s rapping resonated, as powerful and clear as the knocking on a door or the echo of steps beneath a dome, the entire trunk vibrating, the wood strong and fresh. The ground covered with leaves gave gently under his feet, and the dew on the grass wet his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. On one side the road disappeared into the woods. On the other, the side of the house struck by the sun, lay a rolling landscape of pastures and cultivated fields interrupted by white fences and farmhouses and tall barns painted vivid colors. He would have liked to follow either of those roads. But he was afraid he might get lost or be late, and he went back to the guesthouse, not only as a precaution but also because he saw himself as incongruous in his European city suit and shoes. From the outside, measuring it against the scale of the trees, he admired the shape of the building, the suggestion of deep roots in the way it rested in the clearing, solid and closed in to resist the cold of winters, a structure beautifully integrated into the countryside, yet singular, the balustrade of the terrace above the columns of the portico, the large windows facing all the cardinal points, the woods, the cultivated fields, the river, and beyond, the elevated line of blue mountains. He went back to his room to polish his shoes again and the bed was already made, the fold of the sheet straight, the pillows plumped up. Sitting by the window, his back erect in the solid chair, his hand resting on the desk, on the folder of drawings and watercolors he’d brought from Madrid, he imagined letters to his children and Judith Biely, calculated the time in Spain, listened to the sound of Stevens’s car slowly approaching.