Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“I hope he doesn’t also imitate the prison camps.”

“Or the racial laws.”

“Dear Judith, in that regard I’m afraid you have an insurmountable prejudice.”

It took Ignacio Abel a moment to understand what they were saying. He observed that Judith Biely had turned red, and that Van Doren was enjoying his own cold vehemence, the sense that he was controlling the conversation. He wasn’t accustomed to the North American ease in combining courtesy with crudeness.

“Do you mean I despise Hitler because I’m a Jew?”

“I mean that things have to be considered in their exact proportions. I don’t have prejudices, as you well know. If you wanted to leave the position you have now in a university that in my opinion is mediocre, I would recommend immediately that you be offered a contract at Burton College. How many Jews were there in Germany two years ago? Five hundred thousand? How many of them will have to leave? And if there’s no place for all of them in Germany, why don’t their coreligionists and friends in France, England, or the United States rush to take them in? How many Russian aristocrats and parasites had to leave the country, voluntarily or by force, when the Soviet Union began to be created in earnest? And the Spaniards, didn’t they burn churches and expel the Jesuits when they started out? How many Germans found themselves forced to leave the land where they were born so that Beneš and Masaryk could have their beloved Czech homeland complete? In America, we also expelled thousands of Britons, a great many colonists who were as American as Washington or Jefferson but preferred to continue as subjects of the English crown. It’s a question of proportion, my dear, not individual cases. As we say in our country, there’s no free lunch. Everything has a price.”

Van Doren had been glancing sideways at his watch as he spoke. He inspected in dry flashes of attention everything that happened around him, what he could deduce from the gaze, the gestures, the silence of his interlocutor. There was a suggestion of imposture in his conviction, as if he were capable of defending with the same intensity the opposite of what he was saying, laying a trap to find out their hidden thoughts. The servant in the short jacket and carrying a tray came in silently and leaned over to whisper in his ear. Ignacio Abel suspected he came in at a prearranged hour to interrupt a meeting that shouldn’t be prolonged. In Judith’s eyes he saw a complicity that hadn’t existed when they entered the room: something that had been said there placed them on the same side. Her sharing with him something that excluded Van Doren not only flattered him, it produced an intense sexual desire, as if they’d dared an unexpected physical closeness that no one else saw. Van Doren looked at his watch again and spoke to the servant, detached from what was happening between them. Or perhaps not — nothing escaped his cynicism or his astuteness, his habit of controlling, subtly or rudely, the lives of others.

“You don’t know how sorry I am, but I have to leave. An unexpected appointment at the Ministry of Information. The question is whether the minister will still be minister when I get there… Seriously, my dear Ignacio, I’m sorry we talked about politics. It’s always a waste of time, especially when there are more serious things to be discussed. Judith, how do you say to make a long story short in Spanish?”

“ Ir al grano. To get right to the point.”

“An admirable woman. To get right to the point, Ignacio, I’m authorized to offer you a position as visiting professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Architecture at Burton College next year, the fall semester if that’s convenient, and if University City is inaugurated on time, which I hope with all my heart. And during that time I’d like you to study the possibility of designing the new library, the Van Doren Library. The project will have to be approved by the board, of course, but I can guarantee you’ll be able to work with absolute freedom. You’re a man of the future, and if the future, by your calculation, doesn’t belong to Germany or Russia, perhaps the best thing for you is the future in America. Now I have to go, if you’ll both forgive me. Make yourselves at home. This is your house. I’ll be waiting for your reply, my dear Ignacio. À bientôt, my dear Judith.”

Van Doren stood, extended his arms, and with no effort put on the sports jacket the servant held for him. In the sharp, acute look of his eyes, in the movement of his depilated eyebrows, was a quick suggestion of obscenity, as if offering to Judith Biely and Ignacio Abel the room he was about to leave, as if he’d already guessed and taken as certain what they themselves still didn’t dare to think.

JUDITH BIELY SITS at a piano, her face and hair lit by the late afternoon sun. It is September 29, 1935; she’s a silhouette crossing the bluish light that emanates from a slide projector, the hurried handwriting on the envelope Ignacio Abel keeps in one of his pockets, in the luggage of one who possesses only what he carries with him, a fugitive or deserter, one who doesn’t know how long his journey will take or even if he’ll return to the country in ruins that he left only two weeks before. Judith Biely’s is the explosive writing on the pages of that letter, which Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive, dated in Madrid, less than three months earlier, and not entrusted to the mail but left with somebody who handed it to him with the combined slyness and delight of one who knows she’s offering the pain of a knife blade. He saw the hands offering it to him in the vestibule of the house of assignation where they’d agreed to meet one last time, the red nails and arthritic fingers like stains on the envelope where Judith’s hand had written his name with a formality that did not bode well, Sr. D. Ignacio Abel. A letter can be a delayed curse; someone for whom it wasn’t intended opens a drawer and sees it by mistake, and if that person dares to read it, it’s as if her hand had been thrust into a scorpion’s hole; the drawer can’t be closed again; the letter can’t not be removed from the envelope, it can’t not be read, deciphering that writing, those words that will burn in her memory for a long time. Someone finds it many years later, in a suitcase covered with dust or in a university’s archive, and the letter continues to preserve its ardor or its hurtfulness even though the one who wrote it and the one who received it are dead by then. Sr. D. Ignacio Abel: as if suddenly they no longer knew each other, as if the past nine months hadn’t existed. Right now Judith Biely is a woman seen from behind who turned around, an irreparable absence haunting the man who leans his face against the train window looking at the breadth of the Hudson River, his eyes half closed, his mind dissolving in fatigue and contemplation. I see his black shoes wrinkled in the shape of his foot and by the way he walks. Traces of the dust of Madrid and mud from the construction at University City. In his hotel room in New York he found a needle and thread in a small box and attempted to darn a hole in his sock, discovering he didn’t know how, that his hands were useless. He didn’t know how to sew a button back on a shirt and had spotted with alarm that the right pocket of his jacket was beginning to shred. Materials deteriorate in a subtle way; the pockets of a man with no fixed address become misshapen because he keeps too many things in them; a few loose threads, like an almost invisible crack in a wall, are the first sign of the next phase of ruin. He remembers when clothing would appear miraculously clean and ironed in his closet, in the drawers of the dresser with an oval mirror in which the somber double bed was reflected, its headboard of wood carved in imitation Spanish Renaissance fashion, the time-honored style of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo family. You don’t know how to do anything; you’d die of hunger if you had to earn a living with your hands or cook a meal. When he was a boy, his father would make fun of him when he saw his vertigo climbing even the lowest scaffold, his clumsiness in carrying out the simplest manual tasks. “Eutimio, either this son of mine becomes a rich kid or he’ll die of hunger,” he’d say to the apprentice who looked after Ignacio like an older brother each time his father took the boy to a site. Professor Rossman at least was dexterous and managed to eke out a poor living during his worst times in Madrid by repairing pens, selling them on commission in the cafés, coming across them in his pockets or his bottomless briefcase as if by surprise, like a magician who keeps repeating old tricks. He hadn’t carried the briefcase with him when they took him out of the pensión in a gruff but not violent or brutal way and put him in the back seat of a confiscated car, a Hispano-Suiza, his daughter recalled. With no political slogans painted on the doors or hood, no mattresses on the roof as a slapdash precaution against snipers or shrapnel from enemy planes. The doors still bore the noble coat of arms of the aristocrat from whom it had been confiscated and who probably had fled the country or was dead. Serious men who didn’t waste time or make a fuss or imitate film gangsters, who had a signed search warrant with an official-looking purple stamp that Señorita Rossman couldn’t make out. Professor Rossman’s pockets were filled with things (as were Ignacio Abel’s now on the train, bulging, fraying). The men had given Professor Rossman time to put on his jacket but not his vest or hard collar, which in any case he wouldn’t need in the Madrid heat. Either they didn’t allow him to put on his German boots with the worn-down heels, or he was so frightened he forgot to put them on, and left wearing his socks and old felt slippers. In the morgue on Calle Santa Isabel, one of Professor Rossman’s feet still had a slipper on, and the big toe of his other foot, yellow, rigid, the nail like a contorted claw, jutted out of the sock. The morgue smelled of death and disinfectant, and all the bodies had numbered cards hung around their necks. The corpses’ shoes were missing. Looters were up by daybreak to steal shoes and watches from the dead, tie pins, even gold teeth. Some were more difficult to identify because their faces had been blown away or their wallets stolen. “It’s the people’s justice,” said Bergamín, looking at Ignacio Abel with ecclesiastical misgiving from the other side of the desk in his office, a hall with a Gothic ceiling in the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, his hands together at the height of his mouth as he surreptitiously sniffed his nails. “A flood that levels everything, that washes away everything. But it was the others in their uprising who opened the sluice gates of the flood where they now perish. Even Señor Ossorio y Gallardo, who’s as Catholic as I and much more conservative, has understood this and put it in writing: it’s the logic of history.” Individual lives didn’t count now, he said, and neither do ours. Perhaps he was protecting his own in an office instead of risking it closer to the front, Ignacio Abel wanted to say, though he had been close to dying too, interrogated a few times during the summer, the barrels of old rifles pointing at him, pushing into his chest. The rifles could have easily gone off, as the men who held them barely knew how to use them, and one night he’d been shoved in front of some headlights a few seconds before the voice that saved him pronounced his name. He still looked like a bourgeois, even if as a precaution he always went out not wearing a tie or hat, feeling as unprotected at first as when one dreams of going out on the street naked. When one has been on the verge of dying, the world acquires an impersonal quality: whatever one looks at would still exist even if a few minutes earlier a bullet had blown one’s head or chest open. He thinks with detachment, with the objectivity of a camera with no eye behind it: I could be dead and not sitting on this train, next to the window where a view flashes by, a sight that overwhelms these Spanish eyes, accustomed to dry lands and shallow streams. “The uncontrollable flood of the people’s just anger, Bergamín wrote,” he said aloud in a faint, muffled voice. Ignacio Abel knows beyond any doubt that he could have died at least four or five times that summer, and Judith and his children wouldn’t have known. They might have thought or assumed he was dead; maybe he is dead in a way and doesn’t know it. Erased into oblivion by others’ forgetfulness while he imagines his identity remains intact. The terror, to think that at this very instant, in some unknown place, memory is working against me, slowly fading away, he has written to Judith, but he doesn’t know if she will ever see those words. If I’d died in Madrid, this river, this horizon would speed past this window at this exact moment without anyone looking at it. I’d have been taken to a morgue inundated with nameless corpses piled in hallways and even in broom closets, beneath a buzzing cloud of flies, around my neck a crumpled card with a registration number. Whatever had not been stolen from my corpse by daybreak would have been placed in a filing cabinet by someone after he’d typed a list with several carbon copies.