Antonio Molina: In the Night of Time

But that moment hasn’t arrived yet, it belongs to a time that doesn’t yet exist, the future of a few hours away. In the dark where Judith has brought her lips to his ear to whisper the syllables of his name, Ignacio Abel can’t estimate the time, how long before the night ends. There are no pendulum clocks in the house, and no matter how attentive he is, he doesn’t hear church bells. He dreamed about them in the unusual silence of the ship’s cabin, and what he heard was the bell of a buoy. When he was a child he’d have sleepless nights, and at each hour he’d hear the metal of different bells in the churches of Madrid, and knew dawn was approaching when he heard on the paving stones the echoing hooves of the horses and mules on Calle Toledo, pulling carts loaded with produce. Under the blankets in his room, so small he could touch the cold stone ceiling with his hand, he’d hear his father, who got up long before dawn to go to construction sites. Wrapped in his cape, his cap pulled down over his face, a cigarette in his mouth, happy his son could stay in bed until daybreak, preparing his books and notebooks before leaving for school, dressed and combed like a rich man’s son, his boy who wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did or live when he was an adult in the unhealthy rooms of a porter’s lodging. Miguel, when he was little, was frightened of the dark. So frightened he continued to wet the bed until he was six or seven years old, when he would stretch out his hand looking for Lita’s and grasp it as he did in the first days of his life. His fever would shoot up, his scant hair glued to his forehead, and his chest, weak and convulsive, as agitated as a bird’s, his ribs visible beneath his helpless flesh. How far away everything was, and how near. When Ignacio was a boy, he was afraid to go down to the cellar with the low vaulted ceiling in his apartment building on Calle Toledo. He’d open the door and from the first stone step begin the descent into a dense, damp darkness where he could hear the rats’ scratching. On this night the building residents have gone down to take shelter in the cellar he hasn’t visited for more than thirty years, and when the bombs fell close by, the floor and walls would reverberate and the dirty bulb hanging from the ceiling, its light reduced to the red glow of the filament, would tremble like a candle and go out, dissolving into darkness the silhouettes huddled together, whispering, moaning. The night is a bottomless well where everything seems lost and everything continues to live and endure, at least for a certain time, as long as the memory remains clear and the mind lucid in the person lying with eyes open, attentive to the sounds taking shape in what seemed to be silence, trying to guess by the breathing if the other person’s still awake or has been carried away by the somnolence of satisfied desire. In the hospital room, beside her mother’s bed, Judith would doze in spite of the uncomfortable chair, and at the very moment she fell asleep she would wake with a start, hearing slurred speech or a moan caused by the gradual tapering off of the effect of morphine, or worse, alarmed by the silence, missing her mother’s ragged breathing, fearing she’d died alone while Judith was sleeping, that her mother had called or moaned and she hadn’t awakened. The dead haven’t yet left the house where they lived, and their slow disappearance into the dark has already begun; they’re already strangers. Ignacio Abel approached the open coffin his father lay in, and when he looked he no longer knew him. In the light of the candles, his father’s face was yellow and swollen, as if his mouth and nose had been lightly flattened under glass; the hands that emerged from the cuffs of his shirt and were crossed on his chest were those of another man: bloodless, an old man’s hands, the nails prominent and the fingers curved and thin, the opposite of his father’s hands, broad, blunt, solid, dark, his father who hasn’t appeared in his dreams for many years, so distant, like the gas lamps that lit Calle Toledo and like the Madrid Ignacio Abel doesn’t want to think about now and Judith won’t recognize when she returns and finds no lights, all of Madrid in darkness and silence like the bottom of the sea, perhaps crossed by headlights and flashlights that pierce the thick blackness like divers’ lamps. In the New York night, neon signs floated in the dark, pink or yellow or blue silhouettes of steaming cups of coffee, or spirals of cigarette smoke, or bubbles ascending from glasses of champagne. Between sleep and consciousness images dissolve without becoming completely formed, and the border between memory and imagination is as fluid as the one that joins and separates bodies wrapped in an embrace composed equally of weariness and desire. Judith’s voice that said his name so clearly in his ear might also have sounded in a half-sleep or a dream, at the exact moment Ignacio Abel has fallen asleep, as if floating in the serene immobility of time. It’s Judith who remains awake, watching over him, the man who’s become more attentive and more fragile, who was almost murdered without her knowing it. I see her in profile, more clearly as dawn breaks, sitting against the back of the bed, restless now, fearful, anxious, impatient, resolved, as clearheaded as if she’d never feel the need to sleep, listening to the freight trains, the masculine breathing beside her, the wind in the trees, the call of a bird, discovering the first, still uncertain signs of dawn, the first gray light of the first day of her journey, of a tomorrow she can’t make out and I can’t imagine, her future unknown and lost in the great night of time.

ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA is the author of more than a dozen novels, among them Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has also been awarded the Jerusalem Prize and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize, among many others. He lives in Madrid and New York City.

EDITH GROSSMAN is the acclaimed translator of major Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. She has received the PEN / Ralph Manheim Medal for translation and other honors.