Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

WHERE HAD JUDITH come from, bringing with her a different world, bursting into his life like someone who abruptly enters a room, someone unexpected who opens the door and is followed by cold outside air that in a few seconds has altered the closed atmosphere. Her very presence was an upheaval, the new arrival who rings the bell brusquely and makes all eyes look. Judith Biely always moved quickly among much slower people, like an emissary of herself, detached from her will and character, the luminous advance of something that might be a promise of another life in another, less harsh country whose colors were less gritty or mournful, a tangible woman and at the same time the illusion and synthesis of what Ignacio Abel found was most desirable in women, in the very substance of the feminine: changing, unpredictable, entering unexpectedly, leaving so quickly that trapping an image of her on his retina, one that would remain fixed in memory, was as impossible as stopping time, or suspending it so a secret meeting might last longer. Judith Biely was like that in the only photograph of her Ignacio Abel keeps in his wallet, slightly out of focus because she was turning to one side at the moment the automatic camera shot the picture, a faint mist around her eyes, her smiling mouth, responding with a lighthearted expression to something that attracted her attention and forgetting for an instant that she was posing for a photograph, the precise instant captured in it. She must have been waiting uncomfortably for the flash to go off inside the booth on the street when something or someone made her turn her face slightly and smile, and the light exploded on her chin and cheeks, the curls in her hair, her slightly smudged eyes where a gleam of light stands out, as does one on her lips. It’s the imperfection of the photo that appeals to Ignacio Abel: the impersonal quality of chance causes Judith to be more present without the interference of a photographer’s eye and intention, as if she were really there, in that rescued moment. And to make the photo even truer, it’s not of the Judith he remembers but the one who hadn’t yet traveled to Madrid, the one not yet distorted by familiarity or the obsession of desire, intact in her distance and as much herself as when she burst into his life a few months later, in a future about which she still knows nothing when she smiles in the photograph, because she doesn’t know she’s about to receive the offer that will make her change her plans by moving forward the trip to Spain.

Where had she come from? Recounting her life in a new language limited the amount of detail she could provide and forced her to simplify her story. Listening to herself from the perspective of this man granted her an objectivity that was liberating. Her life experiences, when told, took on something of a novel’s rigor and sense of purpose. The uncertainty of so many years acquired the curve of an arc that emerged from the murky past to rise above time and bring its far end to rest in the present moment, on the other side of the world, in Madrid during the days of October 1935, in a shadowy private booth in the Hotel Florida, in the gentle dizziness of driving along a straight, tree-lined avenue that opened like a tunnel in the headlights, her eyes half closed, seeing things through a light mist he’ll recognize afterward and want to treasure in an ordinary photo from an automatic picture booth. Images and words flow, appear, are lost, just like the treetops and façades and lights shining in the windows of the mansions along the Castellana; Judith Biely is in a car moving through Madrid but she could also be on an avenue in Paris, or in any of the European capitals she’s visited in the past two years that are becoming confused in her fatigued memory; the headlights illuminate black paving stones as brilliant as patent leather, the rails and cables of streetcars; she’s silent beside the man at the wheel, who seems much younger now than just a few hours ago, when he appeared alienated, almost frightened in the foyer of Philip Van Doren’s apartment (where Van Doren must be now; how shrewdly he’d suspected and understood, almost prophesied). She’s fallen silent, but turning over in her head is the sense of having talked a great deal; her life, as recounted, extends before her like the avenue along which the car is driving, opens up with a feeling of symmetry and purpose that she knows is false but for now doesn’t mind enjoying, like the speed of the car or the music from the radio. Ignacio Abel finds Judith’s hand and holds it gently, though she doesn’t respond, doesn’t quite acknowledge what’s happening. How strange, the play of hands at this age.

Suddenly she sees all the distance she’s traversed. In a language she’s becoming truly familiar with only now, she recounts her life to the man who listens and looks at her attentively. In her narrative, events acquire an order she knows is false, a suggestion of inevitability that conceals but doesn’t extenuate her awareness of its improbability. She comes from a room with a low ceiling where, as a little girl, she would read by the light of a candle in the small hours; from trains to Manhattan that would disappear into tunnels and emerge into the limitless vertigo of the graceful pillars of a bridge suspended over the East River, and the sight of the oceanic bay and the steep cliffs of buildings through the windows, and beneath and beyond the vibrating framework of the Williamsburg Bridge the row of ocean liners along the piers emitting bellowing sirens and columns of smoke above funnels painted black and red, white and red. She comes from the lecture halls and grassy campus under colossal trees of a university for the children of immigrants, torn between the only world they know and the one that cast a shadow of insecurity and persecution over their lives, the remote world their parents brought with them. But she comes above all from the awareness of a mistake she can’t blame on anyone but herself, one she easily could have avoided and in which she persisted, not out of blindness or passion but out of pure, senseless pride, simply to resist pressure she’d trained herself to rebel against. How easily she squandered the treasure of her own will, not for love but to be contrary, to do what her elders asked her not to do and what consequently became the very incarnation of her freedom. She married a former college classmate somewhat older than her, and knew she was making a mistake, she told Ignacio Abel, and as she said it she recalled the image of the woman with wide hips and melancholy eyes and the girl in old-fashioned clothes and a ribbon in her hair who came up to him after his talk at the Residence; the empty seat next to the woman was the one she, Judith, had occupied; the woman looked at her for a moment, her eyes moving up and down with instinctive mistrust when Judith asked Moreno Villa to introduce her to Ignacio Abel. Who can know the reason for her actions? Before she left the desolate court building where with full knowledge she accepted the bonds of marriage, Judith Biely knew she’d made a mistake and that renouncing her last name was an unacceptable humiliation. She preferred not to see, of course. No one puts a blindfold on you by force and then knots it at the back of your neck so tightly you couldn’t take it off even if your hands weren’t tied. You’re the one who weaves the blindfold and the rope, who extends her hands voluntarily and waits until the knot is tight. No one erects the walls of the cell and locks it from the outside and makes certain the bolt is in place. You take the necessary steps, one after the other, and if anyone signals to warn you of danger, all that’s accomplished is the reinforcement of your determination to keep approaching disaster. At times you’re relieved to know you haven’t arrived yet, at others, that there’s no turning back. Doubt is transformed into disloyalty you don’t acknowledge even to yourself. She’d graduated with honors from City College; she could easily have completed her doctorate in Spanish literature under Professor Onís at Columbia and at the same time teach the language to beginning students. Henry James’s heroines who’d awakened her imagination and whom she wanted to resemble when she was fifteen or sixteen years old inherited fortunes that allowed them to travel alone in Europe. Now her model in life was Virginia Woolf’s room of her own, the emancipated solitude of a woman who earns enough money not to depend on anyone and fearlessly cultivates her enthusiasms or her talent. Her mother hadn’t had a piano, let alone her own room. The narrow cubicles held the children’s beds and she had to wait until everyone fell asleep to read her beloved Russian novels or review in silence the unbound scores that had come from St. Petersburg in a trunk more than thirty years earlier.