Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The clink of a fork on President Almeida’s cut-crystal wineglass roused him from his self-absorption. Van Doren made a wry face, raising an eyebrow, with the benevolent look of someone attending a long theatrical performance, interested but always at the edge of boredom — here comes the inevitable speech, the toast. Gradually the voices died down along with the sounds of silverware and glasses, and for a moment all you could hear was the wind in the chimney. The glass of wine in his right hand, the president raised it toward Ignacio Abel. He had thin blond hair, almost white, a face crisscrossed with fine red veins radiating abundant health, like the table covered with food no one had finished, and the house filled with colonial furniture, shelves with valuable leather-bound editions, paintings and lamps and rugs, photographs on the sideboards and the mantel in which President Almeida posed with eminent public figures, smiling into the camera as he shook their hands (among them, the First Lady and President Roosevelt on one of his visits, not at all unusual, to Burton College, so close to his family home in Hyde Park). An oil portrait of President Almeida presided over the dining room. In the hall, among old landscapes in oil of the banks of the Hudson, was a drawing, clearly a sketch for the oil portrait. You had to listen to the speech with the proper expression of agreement, interest, satisfaction, your laugh ready for the jokes the president interjected and must have repeated at many similar dinners, and the seriousness when he enunciated the dim prospects of Europe and mentioned the college’s tradition of hospitality, identical to the nation’s, for three centuries a land of refuge for dissidents, molded by them, made great by spirits who had outgrown the borders of the old countries. Looking around him at this very table — he did so, turning his head slowly, his eyes enlarged behind his glasses — what did he see, he said, but the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants, with family names that declared so many diverse origins: Dutch, Scots, Huguenots, Portuguese, like his own Almeida forebears. And Spaniards, he said, looking first at Dr. Santos, and now it was time for a well-bred joke, let’s hope Dr. Santos isn’t descended from a grand inquisitor, provoking a chorus of laughter and an uncomfortable blush on the face of the woman. And finally, closing the circle of glances and allusions, President Almeida spoke to Ignacio Abel, not without demonstrating that he knew how his last name was pronounced and on which syllable the stress fell: the red face, the glass of wine raised a little higher, the brilliance of the fire and the large crystal chandelier reflecting on his smooth skin, his shirt front stretched by the size of his shoulders and chest muscles. He thinks he’s immortal, Abel thought as he smiled and waited for the end of the speech to give his thanks and dare a few sentences he’d been turning over in his mind for some time; he thinks he’ll never grow old, that no misfortune will ever befall him, that his house will never be burned, that he won’t be awakened at midnight and taken away in his pajamas to an empty lot and killed in front of headlights. President Almeida was now calling him our new colleague, distinguished guest, outstanding, leading, accomplished, but he looked sideways at Van Doren and Stevens as if asking for confirmation that the descriptions they’d put in his mouth were trustworthy. After the toast, the brief applause, the guest stood, dizzy from drink, a beginner again at his age, a guest of rather dubious standing, thinking of Judith Biely’s voice, his desire for her as immediate and physical as a pain in the joints, a desire he was conscious of as he prepared to say something, his mouth dry, walking on thin ice.

He’ll remember that as they came out of a curve, the windshield was clear for a few seconds and the headlights illuminated a house in front of which a recently fallen tree had crushed a car: a group of people lashed by the wind looked at it with an astonished air under the revolving lights of an ambulance. Without taking his eyes off the highway, Stevens spoke optimistically so as not to alarm him or to dispel his own fear: he’d heard President Almeida, he had to begin his classes and start work on the library project, in a few days his house would be ready and he’d have an office and a studio, work was the best remedy for discouragement. The way you speak to a sick man without giving him hope of a cure. Assuring him up to a certain point, don’t forget your real condition, the distance that separates you from the healthy, they will be the first to point it out (as if certain of their immunity, certain they will never die). They arrived at the guesthouse, and when Ignacio Abel got out of the car the rain had stopped. The wind, calmer now, rustled in the treetops. Helpful, implacable, ridiculous, Stevens said goodbye and reminded him that he’d come for him at nine in the morning, blowing my bugle right under your window, immune to fatigue and the predictable hangover.

He’ll remember entering the foyer and being enveloped by a darkness without limits, a total silence. He felt for the porcelain light switch, and when he finally found it he realized the power was out. The wind that an hour earlier had torn up trees by the roots must have knocked down utility poles. The house was much larger when you had to feel your way through it. Like moving through the apartment in Madrid on the nights of bombing raids. His hands brushing against the walls, his footsteps uncertain, his eyes slowly becoming used to the dark. Prudent, attentive to any eventuality, on the previous afternoon Stevens had shown him the closet next to the kitchen where brooms and defunct appliances were kept, along with an oil lamp and a supply of matches and candles. Touching the walls and bookshelves, Ignacio Abel crossed the library, reached the kitchen, tried to remember where the broom closet was. He lights the oil lamp almost by touch. The storm whistles in the distance, beyond the wooded hills and the river. He walks through the library again and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the mantel, a gray-haired man, his features exaggerated by the contrast of shadows and oily light. The grand piano, the books on the shelves, the chairs folded against the wall, the morning newspaper on the arm of an easy chair, formulate the limits of an expectation, tense in their immobility, like the face in the mirror. I’ve come so far to walk around a house at night as deserted and dark as the one I left in Madrid, empty now, perhaps, accumulating dust, abandoned to the mysterious decrepitude of places where no one lives, or destroyed by a bomb, obscenely exposed to light from the street in the half-ruined building. One night he was standing in the dark hall, and suddenly someone knocked at the door. Lost in time, in the tunnel of shadows the lamp has cast in the mirror, he slowly realizes he is hearing it not in his head, not in the past, not in Madrid, but now. Silence shattered, his heart racing, overcome with the certainty that Judith Biely stands at the door, calling him, not in a dream, not in a delirium of desire, but just a few steps away.

SHE STANDS BEFORE HIM, lit by the lamp he holds. At the open door, the damp breeze from the woods blows in his face, his eyes blinded by the headlights of a car parked in front of the house, its motor running. He looks at her and doesn’t say anything, neither one says anything, while the burbling of the motor continues and the windshield wipers click. The light strikes her face at an angle, her eyes, her damp hair now stylishly cut, shorter and not combed back but with a part and a lock of hair on one side that she brushes off her face with a gesture familiar and at the same time foreign, sudden, different. They look at each other without moving, his left hand holding the lamp, his right still on the doorknob. He looks at the car, its motor running and headlights on, in which he instantly fears there’s someone, a man, who’s come with her and at any moment will reclaim her by blowing the horn. “I thought nobody was in, I didn’t see a light,” she says in Spanish. Her voice, darker than he remembered it, has a more pronounced American accent. Pensé que no había nadie: so much time longing for this voice, the lips that form the words, not knowing how to invoke it, believing at times he’d heard it saying his name in the commotion of a street, a station, whispering close to his ear moments before waking. He takes a step toward her, or only takes his hand off the doorknob, as Judith draws back in an almost invisible gesture. He’s afraid if he moves or says anything, he’ll lose her; he’s afraid she’ll turn on her heels and get back in the car or vanish into the woods just as she’s emerged from them. Judith starts to move as if to turn but remains still, looking at him, a corner of her mouth curving into the beginning of a smile. In the faint, close light of the lamp her face is less familiar because the short hair exaggerates her features: her large mouth, the triangle of her cheekbones and chin, the line of her jaw. Ignacio Abel doesn’t move the hand that would have liked to caress her, but his eyes transmit to his fingers the sensation of touching her skin. Judith points at the car and says, now in English, “ I’d better turn it off. ”