Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took one’s breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that won’t be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of Gaudí’s buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.

“How are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isn’t that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think I’m the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Communist.” Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years he’d developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. “But tell me what you’re working on now, my friend, what projects you have. I’m happy to know you’re completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.” Professor Rossman’s oval head stopped moving, and his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, focused on him with an affectionate attention that made Ignacio Abel feel bewildered as someone much younger, a student not certain he can endure the scrutiny of the professor who knows him well. What had he done in those years that could measure up to what he’d learned in Germany, to the expectations he’d had for himself and his work? The nocturnal lights and strong colors of Berlin, the calm of Weimar, the libraries, the joy of finally penetrating a language he’d handled until then only laboriously and to which his ears suddenly opened up as naturally as if he’d removed plugs of wax, the lecture halls at Weimar, those rainy nightfalls of self-reflection, lamps lit behind curtains, bicycle bells echoing in the silence. The cold, too, and the scarcity of everything, but he didn’t care or notice very much. The hooves of policemen’s horses raising sparks on the paving stones, the solemn, angry demonstrations by unemployed workers in berets and leather jackets and red armbands, the placards and red flags lit by torches, the veterans with amputated limbs begging on the sidewalks, displaying stumps under the rags of their uniforms or faces doubly disfigured by war wounds and surgeries. The young women in short skirts, eyes and lips painted, chin-length hair, sitting on the terraces of Berlin cafés with their legs crossed, smoking cigarettes on which they left red lipstick marks, walking with determination along the sidewalks without male companions, jumping onto streetcars after the offices closed, heels clicking as they hurried down the metro steps.

He didn’t think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadn’t known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didn’t count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didn’t recognize him and took frightened refuge in her mother’s arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what he’d done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruins — or, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because he’d mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where he’d been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madrid’s University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europe — he’d read something in an international magazine. “Write to me,” he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. “Let me know how everything goes. I wish you could come sometime to teach a course at the School. Let me know how your ideal city of knowledge progresses.”

But neither wrote to the other. The promises, the good things they wished each other as they were leaving, were as abundant and unreal as the stacks of German bills that filled one’s pockets and weren’t enough to buy a cup of coffee. Suddenly time accelerates, and the children have grown without your being aware of it. On land where nothing existed — where pine groves had been uprooted by steam shovels, the ground leveled, the plain subdivided by imaginary lines — there are now streets with sidewalks, but no houses, young trees, buildings emerging from the mud, some completed but still empty, some inaugurated and put to use, the School of Philosophy and Letters Building is occupied, though masons, carpenters, and painters continue to work there, though students have to cut across open country and walk around ditches and piles of building materials to reach it. Through the windows of his office he could see the red blocks of the Schools of Medicine and of Pharmacy, almost finished on the outside, the structure of the University Hospital, surrounded by swarms of laborers, donkeys, trucks carrying materials, armed guards patrolling the site. Farther on past the somber green of oaks and pines, and above that, on a more distant plane, the outline of the Sierra, its highest peaks still snow-covered. It’s almost six on the large office clock, too late to receive a visitor who doesn’t have an appointment. The calendar shows a date in May 1935, which Ignacio Abel will cross out just before he leaves. He looked up from the board on which a student had spread a plan, and the pale old man from the other world smiled at him awkwardly, his eyes watery, stretching wide a mouth filled with ruined teeth, extending his hand, the other pressing against his chest the black briefcase, as immediately recognizable as his accent and stiff comportment from another century, the briefcase in which he no longer kept dazzling objects with which he’d transmit to his students the mystery of the practical forms that make life better: now he kept documents, certificates in Gothic print and gilt seals no longer worth anything, printed requests for visas in a variety of languages, copies of letters to embassies, official letters that denied him something in neutral language or demanded yet another certificate, some insignificant but inaccessible paper, some consular stamp without which the months of waiting and delays would have been in vain.