Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

What surprised her most about Ignacio Abel was his dark suit, so European and old-fashioned, and how thin he was, his eyes sunk into their sockets. An attempt to bridge the distance between them causes an imperceptible retreat. Not a step back but a subtle gesture, little more than the dilation of a pupil, the bat of an eyelid. How strange to have once been so intimate with this middle-aged stranger whom she might now pass on any street without turning her head. They don’t know how to act, what to say. Nothing dissolves as swiftly as physical intimacy. The gulf between them at the café in Madrid where they met for the last time is now in the doorway of this house, the slash of a knife in the space between their two bodies.

“ I’d better turn it off ”: Ignacio Abel deciphered the words only once he sees them demonstrated by her actions. As Judith turns her back and walks to the car, he recognizes the self-confidence, the movement of her shoulders, her hands. He registers her face and presence as slowly as the words. The pride in her shoulders, the slight inclination of her head, her hips hugged by trousers. Her haircut modifies her face as it did when he’d see her wearing it pulled back, and she was more herself and at the same time another Judith, whom he desired even more because she was unexpected. She returns from the car, and as she climbs the stone steps, she reenters the circle of light from the lamp. Now she almost smiles at him when she says something he translates after hearing it: “ Aren’t you going to ask me in? ” He looks at her as if gradually recognizing the features he’d touched in the dark, when he breathed in the smell of her skin and hair with his eyes closed. She smells of herself and her old cologne and fatigue and the tension of many hours’ traveling. She smells of the lipstick she put on a few minutes ago. Ignacio Abel looks at her face, at the details memory did not preserve and that were not reflected in the partial lie of photographs. Under her blouse and the wide-bottom trousers that narrow to encircle her waist, her beautiful tired body, so close to him, inaccessible now to his hands and eyes. The opened button on her blouse, the décolletage in shadow, the quiver of her breathing, red lips, gleaming in the light, the fatigued face she observed in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car, still motionless behind the wheel. A feeling of pity for him has taken her by surprise, lowered her guard. A troubling pity that would offend him if he ever suspected it, and a beginning of tenderness that doesn’t resemble what she felt in the old days, the inexplicable past of only a few months ago. Then, Ignacio Abel looked no more than forty. When he opened the door, and even more so when she came back from the car, she saw a man much older, awkward, as if frightened, staring at her as he rigidly held up the oil lamp. The dark pinstriped suit, the double-breasted jacket with the wide lapels — wasn’t it the one he wore the day of his talk at the Residence, and again at Van Doren’s house? — now looks secondhand. The loosened tie encircles a neck that is almost an old man’s. She sees his awkwardness, his alarm, not the yearning for closeness he had then, the physical affirmation of male desire, the instinctive arrogance. He looks shorter, but it’s because now, unlike then, his shoulders are slightly rounded and his posture diminished and no doubt exaggerated by how loose his suit is. She wants to tell him not to hunch over, to straighten his shoulders. She could extend her hand and touch his face, noting the rough stubble of beard that was there by the time they’d meet in the late afternoon. She recovers the sensation of burying her fingertips in his thick hair, now grayer and lacking the sheen it had when he wore it combed back. “ Me dejarás entrar? ” she says, changing to Spanish, and the open smile on her face is a truce, almost a welcome to the side of the world where they find themselves now. “I’m dying to use the bathroom.”

He hears her footsteps upstairs. He pays attention: he hears her urinate, then the water in the pipes, the sink faucet. Lying in bed, he’d listen to her wash in the wretched bathroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, then turn his face to see her appear naked in the doorway, smelling of the soap and cologne she’d brought in her toiletries bag. She closed the door and turned on the faucet before sitting down to urinate: she told him it embarrassed her to have him hear her. Sexual excitement returns like a surprise, retrieved by memory and by Judith’s presence on the floor above in this large house where only a few minutes ago no human closeness seemed possible, only the creaking and chafing of the wood floors, the gurgle of steam in the heating pipes. She told him she was cold and hungry. While he listens to her in the bathroom, he has stirred up the fire in the library and looked for something to eat in the pantry and refrigerator. The flames fill the library with a red glow where shadows oscillate like plants under water. The windowpanes are mirrors where Ignacio Abel moves accompanied by his shadow, looking for things with a male lack of confidence: sliced salami, rye bread, an apple, the tablecloth the maid spread out for his breakfast, a fork and a knife, a glass of water. He finds a beer in the refrigerator and nervously looks through drawers for an opener. Doing something has calmed him, given him a sense of reality as he waits for Judith to come down from the second floor and listens to her footsteps: the water in the sink is turned off and the door to the bathroom is closed; she walks slowly along the hall, her way lit by a small candle; she descends the stairs. She sees him standing by the fire and would like to shake him, wake him up, if only to see the man she had left with so great an effort of courage and pride, the man who told her lies or half-truths she chose to believe, closing her eyes as deliberately as she let herself be driven by him in his car, her self-respect suspended, just like so many undertakings in her life, her body abandoned in the seat as his right hand searched for hers or caressed her between her thighs while music played on the radio. Her anger with him gave her a confidence she misses now. If there’s no trace of danger in him, the responsibility and remorse for her own past actions, for what almost happened, are hers alone: the woman with wide hips and gray in her hair who tried to drown, the humiliation of discovering a deception that she, Judith, was complicit in, for she had acceded to a lie no love could shroud. When she saw them together that time at the Residence, she thought Ignacio Abel was younger than Adela. Now in the library she sees him in the light of the fire and thinks that by some strange shortcut in time he’s reached his wife’s age and belongs to the same world, the bureaucratic Catholic middle class of Madrid she’d seen leaving churches on Sunday mornings, going to tearooms on the Carrera de San Jerónimo, the married couples so serious, men and women in dark clothing, the women wearing veils. She wants to shake him, to feel the danger again and be capable of rejecting it, or to spare herself the pity she feels for him, the self-pity she sees in him, the humiliation of having lost her and not being desired by her; the precarious thread from which hung the fiction of his masculinity, further undermined by the fear and suffering of war. It’s also the war she sees in his eyes, she thinks, in the weakening of his shoulders and arms, the loose skin under his chin.

“I look at you and I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I’ll leave soon.”

“Then why did you come?”

“It was on my way. A detour.”

“You’ll stay the night. There are plenty of rooms.”

“And what would your colleagues think if they saw me leave here in the morning? You don’t know what these places are like. Wellesley’s the same way. They know everything and gossip. Like a novel by Galdós, but with professors as protagonists.”