Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Stevens was flushed, recently showered, resplendent, as if not only the gold frame and lenses of his glasses had been polished but also his light blue eyes, his nails, his teeth, his shoes of creaking leather that transported him from the car at almost the same speed as he’d been driving. He smelled of cologne and mint toothpaste. When Ignacio Abel sat down beside him, Stevens started the car and looked at his watch, impatient to make use of his time, to complete each of the tasks he’d planned for the morning, jumping arbitrarily from English to a Spanish so heavily accented it was unintelligible, gesturing to show him the points of interest around the campus, more at ease this morning, more sure of himself because he wasn’t subjected to the intimidating presence of Philip Van Doren. They stopped at buildings that had an air between Gothic and rural and contained overheated offices. The secretaries or typists smiled when they shook Ignacio Abel’s hand and paid close attention to hear his foreign name clearly, demonstrating by their high-pitched voices the enthusiasm they felt at meeting him, especially when Stevens listed his accomplishments, then showing a pained compassion when Stevens mentioned the war in Spain and the difficulties Professor Abel had to overcome to leave the country. He had to fill out forms, show documents, answer questions, nod even if he was confused, didn’t understand what he’d been asked, couldn’t find his passport or the document he’d put in a pocket moments before in another office. He had to get in the car again and continue the rest of the tour: meadows, patches of forest, rural paths, churches, classroom buildings, dormitories, athletic fields, more overheated offices and introductions, then again the fresh air with the smell of forest and lawn, the car backing up abruptly and Stevens looking at his watch, the labyrinth of goings and comings shrinking, reassuringly, to one scenario, the irregular quadrangle around which the principal buildings of the campus were organized: another University City, not half in the planning stage and left hanging and abandoned before it had come into existence, not erected on a tabula rasa of desert-like fields and eradicated pine groves, but having grown gradually, first as pioneer settlements in clearings in those forests long ago, then taking on a form both haphazard and organic, with visual similarities to British universities: Gothic towers, expanses of lawn, ivy-covered walls, and always — it seemed to Ignacio Abel, a newly arrived guest to this peculiar slowness of time, a convalescent from Spanish cataclysms — a serenity that corresponded to the immemorial cycles of the world, the passing of the seasons and the course of the river close by, gradual building rather than fits of rapture as sudden as disasters. At one of their stops, Stevens opened a door, preceded him up a spiral staircase, crossed a corridor with a low ceiling and stone ribs, opened a door that led to a small, comfortable room, and said, to Abel’s surprise, that this would be his office. In another room he was introduced to a group that welcomed him eagerly, it is so exciting to finally have you here as part of our faculty, and a moment later Stevens unceremoniously tugged on his sleeve and took him downstairs to a windowless room that was a photography studio. In the few minutes before the next undertaking, he ought to have his picture taken for his college identity card. The photographer had him sit on a stool before a black curtain and worked hard to get him into the correct position, making jokes Ignacio Abel didn’t understand but that provoked in the photographer hilarity not shared with Stevens, who kept glancing at his watch because soon they were to have lunch with a group of professors at the Faculty Club, and before that, a visit to the site of the future library. It was Mr. Van Doren’s special wish, he’d told him that very morning, that Professor Abel see the spot and make his preliminary notes on the terrain. That photograph must be somewhere in the archives of Burton College, the file card with his name typed in, faded because of the passage of time, the corners worn or folded, the attempt at a smile by an overly serious man who that morning looked older than his age, his face baffled, worried, unfamiliar, his lips curving rigidly at the corners.

Now he doesn’t have to smile, or nod, or make an effort to understand what’s said to him, or follow Stevens’s hurried steps. Stevens begged his pardon for leaving him, he had to teach a class. Would Ignacio Abel manage on his own for the next few hours? Would he like a student to accompany him or drive him back to the guesthouse? But nothing appeals to Ignacio Abel more than being alone with his thoughts. He’s discovered that in reality everything is close: the car made distances seem longer. He knows now that it takes less than fifteen minutes to walk to the guesthouse that seemed so deep in the woods. This morning the tree branches hit the windows of Stevens’s car when it ascended the narrow road that led to the clearing of the first excavation for the future library, abandoned years earlier. Such a long trip to reach this destination: a hole in the ground half covered by weeds, fallen trunks, and dry leaves over several autumns, the edges raked by the teeth of steam shovels. After imagining it so often, Ignacio Abel hadn’t been able to look fully at what he at last had before his eyes. To really see something, he’s always needed to be alone. Only Judith’s presence expanded his capacity for seeing, opened his eyes to things he wouldn’t have noticed without her. Madrid was a different city because he discovered it through her eyes. Stevens was beside him, and even when he was quiet, his mere presence distracted and irritated him. The excavation extended from the top of the hill to the middle of a slope. To one side were the campus buildings at the end of the road, grouped against the landscape extending to the horizon, and at the same time spaced out, with a haphazard appearance that when closely observed revealed an axis, an organizing principle, around the quadrangle Stevens called the Commons. To the west, beyond the red and ocher and yellow undulation of the treetops, the river was a broad metal plate attenuated by blue mist where the sun reverberated, the white sails of boats suspended in it like butterflies. Stevens pointed out mountains or buildings in the distance, mentioned their names, cited dates of construction and the exact dimensions of the plot on which the library would be built. “And the river view,” he said, like a guide longing to persuade a group of tourists of the value of the place he’s sharing with them. He looked at his watch, impatient for the visit to fit into the amount of time allotted it, unable to be still and silent. It was twelve-fifteen, he said; at twelve-thirty they had a table reserved at the Faculty Club.

Now he follows the road up the slope, in the enormous shade of the trees, maples and oaks, which he thinks he recognizes, and others whose names he doesn’t know in Spanish or in English, and he thinks of the labels on the trees in the Botanical Garden in Madrid, and of Judith Biely’s surprise when she recognized some, like friends you meet unexpectedly in a foreign country, their sumptuous autumn colors standing out even more in a city of earth tones and dusty greens. But here they’re much taller in this dark soil, fed by the rain, covered by fallen leaves, then snow during the long winters, infused by slim, secret threads of water when the thaw begins. He thinks with nostalgia, with melancholy, of the young trees planted along the avenues in University City, so fragile in Madrid’s extreme temperatures, always threatened by the cold that comes down from the snow-covered peaks of the Guadarrama or by the heat of summer, their trunks almost as slender as those on the wire trees he sometimes put on maquettes, cutting foliage for them out of green-colored cardboard. Some mornings, when he drove to the office to check on the progress of construction, he found the trees broken, knocked down by vandals, the rancor against trees of people from dry, barren lands who fear the roots will rob them of already scarce water. But now he knows that the mere weakness of something encourages its destruction, and perhaps for that reason he’s even more astonished that these trees have grown for several centuries, older than the buildings that can be glimpsed through the groves, perhaps more enduring than the future library, with branches so long they intersect over his head like the ribs of a vault that barely filters the sun’s rays and sheds, at the least breath of wind, a cloud of leaves; branches that no one prunes, at least not with the rage he’s seen so often in the axes wielded against the trees in Madrid. But I didn’t care either, when construction of University City began, that the trees of Moncloa would be cut down, the pines with long trunks and rounded tops that succumbed to axes and power saws, roots like heads of hair torn out by steam shovels, streams buried with dirt then rerouted. We leveled everything to start as if on a blank page, on the flattened scars of what had existed before. Walking up the road between trees that gleam with flaming reds and yellows when the sun shines on them, Ignacio Abel remembers Manuel Azaña’s face, not on the recent day when he said goodbye to him, but on an afternoon no more than four years ago. A cold, cloudy afternoon in November, the Sierra submerged in a gray-blue fog of rain. Azaña was prime minister then and had come almost on the spur of the moment to view the construction, probably urged to do so by Negrín, who brought him in his own car. Ignacio Abel waited for them with the director of University City, the architect López Otero, who’d been a friend of Alfonso XIII and didn’t much like the Republic, not to mention the prime minister. “Don’t leave this afternoon, Abel,” Negrín had said, “we have an important official visit.” But the visitors, whom they received at the temporary construction management office, arrived late in a small yellow car that pulled up with a screech of brakes. Negrín got out first on the driver’s side and walked around to open the other door, holding it like a chauffeur, hat in hand, as the prime minister emerged from the car, awkwardly and slowly, his normally colorless face red with the effort, encased in an ostentatious overcoat, so heavy he couldn’t detach himself without help from the low seat. Supporting himself on Negrín’s strong hand, finally on his feet, Azaña ran his fingers through his thin, disheveled hair before putting on his hat, recovering his ministerial dignity, extending his hand — indifferent and fleshy, slightly damp — for them to shake. The group walked for a while among the skeletons of buildings, observed at a distance by some straggling laborers. While López Otero and Negrín acted as guides, moving their arms to conjure completed installations that would rise one day in that immense space still bare of recognizable forms, Ignacio Abel observed Azaña’s expression, a mixture of boredom and affront, his watery eyes following the procedure without much interest, then fading, or meeting his, perhaps seeking assurance that nothing was expected of him. Azaña stopped, looked around, and the others stopped too, close to the foundation of what would be the Philosophy Building. “What did you do with all the pine groves that grew here? Half of Spain is desert. Why did you have to build your University City on the spot where there were woods?” López Otero cleared his throat and swallowed. “Your Excellency will remember that it was His Majesty Don Alfonso XIII who ceded at no charge the property that belonged to the crown.” Ignacio Abel noticed the tension in Negrín, the vibration in the clenched jaw. Beneath the eyelids that partially veiled his eyes, perhaps Azaña assessed the unseemliness of López Otero’s words, the possible lack of respect. Why “His Majesty” and not “Alfonso XIII” without the ceremonious “Don,” or simply “the king,” or “the former king”? “We’ll have a campus like those at American universities, Don Manuel. People will come to stroll here as they strolled in the Moncloa pine groves. There’ll be better groves.” Azaña had a way of staring as he listened and at the same time remaining distant, as if he saw his interlocutor only vaguely. “I repeat my observation, Don Juan, and believe me, I’m as determined as you to complete University City. The fact that it began as a whim of Alfonso XIII—‘His Majesty,’ as Señor López Otero calls him — doesn’t detract from its merit. But why cut down the best trees in Madrid to plant new ones? It may be egotism on my part. No matter how quickly they grow, I won’t be here to see them.”