Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

One by one, with the comic astonishment of a silent film, Professor Rossman would remove from his apparently bottomless briefcase perfectly ordinary objects that in his hands took on the miraculous quality of the newly invented. In his Weimar class in an unheated lecture hall, where the cold wind blew through broken windowpanes, Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, without removing his overcoat or scarf, examined as if they were pristine inventions or recently discovered treasures the most mundane tools, the kind that everyone uses every day and no one notices because their invisibility, he’d say, was the measure of their efficiency, the test of a form corresponding to a task — a form often shaped over centuries, even millennia, like the spiral of a shell or the almost flat curvature of a pebble polished by the friction of sand and water at the ocean’s edge. No books, sketches, or architectural magazines came out of Professor Rossman’s briefcase but the tools of carpenters, stonecutters, and masons, plumb lines, spinning tops, clay bowls, a spoon, a pencil, the handle of a coffee grinder, a black rubber ball that rebounded off the ceiling after popping up like a spring before the infantilized eyes of the students, an artist’s brush, a paintbrush, an Italian vase of heavy green glass, a crank of corrugated brass, a packet of cigarette papers, a lightbulb, a baby’s bottle, a pair of scissors. Reality was a labyrinth and a laboratory of objects that were prodigious but so common you easily forgot they didn’t exist in nature but were products of the human imagination. A horizontal plane, he’d say, a staircase. In nature the only horizontal plane was motionless water, the distant horizon at sea. A natural cave or a treetop can suggest the idea of a roof, a column. But what mental process first produced the concept of a staircase? In the icy lecture hall, his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, not removing his overcoat or wool gloves, Professor Rossman, who was susceptible to the cold, could spend an entire class voluptuously concentrating on the form and function of a pair of scissors, the manner in which the two sharpened arms opened like a bird’s beak or an alligator’s jaws and cut a sheet of paper perfectly, cleanly, following a straight or curved line, the sinuous profiled lines of a caricature. His coat pockets were always stuffed with everyday objects, things he would pick up from the ground, and when he probed them with his glove-covered fingers, looking for something specific, he’d usually come across another unexpected object that demanded his attention and fired his enthusiasm. The six sides of a die, dots bored into each one of them, contained the infinite possibilities of chance. Nothing was more beautiful than a well-polished ball rolling on a smooth surface. A tiny match contained the marvelous solution to the millenarian problem of producing and transporting fire. He extracted the match from its box with care, as if he were removing a dried butterfly whose wings could be destroyed if handled too casually, held it between his thumb and index finger, showed it to the students, raising it in a somehow liturgical gesture. He pondered its qualities, the delicate, diminutive pear shape of the head, the body of wood or waxed paper. The box itself, with its complication of angles and the master stroke of intuition it had been to invent two parts that adjusted to each other so effortlessly and at the same time were easy to open. When he struck the match, the tiny sound of the match head running along the thin strip of sandpaper was heard with perfect clarity in the silence of the lecture hall, and the small burst of flame seemed like a miracle. Radiant, like someone who’s successfully completed an experiment, Professor Rossman displayed the burning match. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it as naturally as if he were in a café, and only then, once he had put out the match, did those listening to his exposition emerge from the hypnotic trance they’d been led into without realizing it.

Professor Rossman was like a peddler of the most vulgar, most improbable things. He lectured as easily on the practical virtues of a spoon’s curvature as on the exquisite visual rhythms of the radii of a bicycle wheel in motion. Other professors at the School proselytized for the new, while Professor Rossman revealed the innovation and sophistication that remain hidden and yet produce results in what has always existed. He would clear the middle of the table, place on it a top he’d bought on his way to the School from some children playing in the street, start it twirling with an abrupt, skilled gesture, and watch it spin, as dazzled as if he were witnessing the rotation of a heavenly body. “Invent something like this,” he challenged the students with a smile. “Invent the top, or the spoon, or the pencil. Invent the book that can be carried in a pocket and contains the Iliad or Goethe’s Faust. Invent the match, the jug handle, the scale, the carpenter’s folding ruler, the sewing needle, the scissors. Perfect the wheel or the fountain pen. Think of the time when some of these things didn’t exist.” Then he looked at his wristwatch — he was enthusiastic about this new gadget, which had appeared, according to him, among British officers during the war — picked up his things, placed his lunatic inventor’s or junkman’s objects back in his briefcase, filled his pockets with them, and dismissed the class with a nod and a mock-military click of his heels.

“My dear friend, don’t you remember me?”

But it hadn’t been that long. In Barcelona, less than six years earlier, Professor Rossman, stouter and balder than in Weimar, in one of the suits probably cut by the same tailor who had made them for him before 1914, inspected the final details of the German pavilion at the International Exposition with bird-like gestures and an owl’s pale eyes behind his glasses. He had to be sure everything would be just right when Mies van der Rohe made his grand appearance there, wearing the monocle of a Prussian officer, chewing the long ebony holder into which he inserted cigarettes with a surgical flourish. Professor Rossman took Ignacio Abel’s arm, asked about his work in Spain, lamented that he hadn’t returned to the School now that things had improved so much and there was a new, magnificent campus in Dessau. He passed his hand over a polished surface of dark green marble to check its cleanliness, studied the alignment of a piece of furniture or a sculpture, brought his eyes close to a sign as if to make certain the typography was exact. In the austere, limpid space no one had visited yet, Dr. Rossman seemed even more anachronistic with his stiff collar, high shoes in that 1900 style, and the aloof courtesy of an imperial functionary. But his hands touched objects with the same old avidity, confirming textures, angles, curvatures, and in his eyes was the same permanent mixture of interrogation and amazement, a brazen urgency to see everything, a childish joy at incessant discoveries. Now his jovial disposition had been strengthened along with his physical presence, and he recalled with relief the not so distant past of uncertainty, inflation, hunger, days when he carried a boiled potato, his only food for the day, in his bottomless briefcase or in a coat pocket, when in the unheated lecture halls of the School it was so cold he couldn’t hold the chalk between his frostbitten fingers. “But you remember as well, my friend, you spent the winter of 1923 with us.” Now Professor Rossman looked at the future with a serenity tempered by the basic mistrust of someone who’s already seen the world drown once. “You have to come back to Germany. You won’t recognize Berlin. You can’t imagine the number of new, beautiful buildings being built. You can see them in the magazines, of course, but you know it’s not the same thing. Berlin resembles New York. You have to see the new neighborhoods with workers’ housing, the big department stores, the lights at night. Things we dreamed about at the School in the middle of the disaster seem to have become reality. A few, not many. But you know how something well made, even if small, can make a difference.”