Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

But overnight what had mattered to her most was no longer of interest. She said she didn’t want to devote several years to a doctoral dissertation and then find herself buried in some girls’ college, that academic study surrounded by dusty books was less valuable in shaping her vocation than real-life experience and work. (She didn’t forgive her mother for saying that those words didn’t seem to be hers, that she, Judith, was moving her lips but someone else was speaking through her mouth.) Her own room couldn’t be in the middle of the woods or a sleepy expanse of cornfields. It had to be an austere room well insulated against interruptions, favorable to a solitary pursuit whose exact nature she couldn’t define yet; in her room she ought to hear the noises and voices of the street, the clamor of the trains, the sirens of ships at the docks and police cars and red fire trucks. She wanted to travel to Europe to learn about life and create her destiny, like Isabel Archer in the Henry James novel she’d read several times, or like the women reporters who sent articles from Paris to Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. But she also loved more than ever the moving crowds, the excitement of her native city, she omitted nothing, enjoying it all, the neon lights going on at dusk, the fog into which the tallest buildings disappeared in whirlwinds of snow, the human waves erupting from the ferry buildings, the luxury-store windows on Fifth Avenue, the crowds waving red flags and union placards in Italian and Yiddish under shade trees in Union Square, the harshness, the helplessness, the cordiality of strangers, the pleasure of not choosing and letting herself be carried along with no purpose, no urgency, with the same sense of fervor she felt whenever she read a poem by Walt Whitman aloud. At one point in her tale a man’s name came up that perhaps she’d already mentioned, or that Ignacio Abel hadn’t heard, one of those times when he was lost or absorbed in a thought that carried him far away or he disliked the idea that she’d been married and loved another man passionately enough to break with her family, abandon her teaching job and doctoral dissertation, and go live in a rented room at the top of five flights of stairs, with a communal toilet at the end of the hall, a single cold-water faucet in the sink, and a tub in the kitchen covered with a board that served as desk and dining room table. Wanting to run away to search for a room of her own, Judith Biely found herself in a kitchen more uncongenial than her mother’s, at times as alone as her mother had been, at other times as invaded: instead of her brothers’ anxiety about work and money and her father’s delusions, the equally masculine invasion to which she now was subjected dragged with it ill-tempered literary and political babble. The acrid cigarette smoke was the same, as was the aggression of the gestures. In the family kitchen she’d spent so many years wanting to run away from, her father and brothers celebrated the glory of capitalism like believers in a despotic god who could as easily demolish as exalt them; in her own room the guests sat on the floor and put out their cigarettes on the linoleum while they argued about revolutionary art of the future and the imminent collapse of the Great Golden Calf of America, staggering through the disaster of the Depression. The equality of men and women was one of the banners they wielded, but the women, though they smoked just as much and sat on the floor too, either didn’t speak or weren’t listened to, and when they all left, she was the one who swept the floor and picked up the glasses and the empty bottles of cheap wine and opened the windows to air out the room. Judith left the university and abandoned her dissertation and obtained a badly paid job correcting and typing stories about gangsters and crimes from morning to night for a publisher of cheap novels. The husband whose name Ignacio Abel took so long to identify was spending years completing a dense, rambling novel about New York, fragments of which he’d published in some magazines. It wasn’t unlikely that John Dos Passos had read them, but in spite of his apparently advanced ideas, Dos Passos had settled into commercial success and would never acknowledge the influence of an almost unknown author on the rhythm and general outline of Manhattan Transfer. If their paths happened to cross at a literary party in the Village, Dos Passos looked away and acted as if he hadn’t seen him. That others doubted her husband’s talent infuriated Judith so much that she ignored her own still indistinct doubts and belligerently defended him. Gradually she realized she’d married him not in spite of her parents’ and brothers’ opposition but because of it. It didn’t surprise her that her father and brothers looked on him as a despicable individual from the instant he’d walked into the apartment with her and hurried to make his political convictions known. If America was a plutocracy without hope or opportunity for the workers, they said, why didn’t he go back to the Russia his parents had come from? It hurt Judith more that her mother didn’t trust him either although he could quote in Russian from her favorite novels and had an awkward, almost sickly air that should have awakened her protective maternal instinct. What would they live on if he thought any ordinary job was a betrayal of his political principles and writer’s calling? And why did she, Judith, abandon so easily what had cost her so much, the promising position at the university, the beautiful campus at Columbia, her doctoral research? It was clear that no matter how much it hurt her, she had to break with all of them; wanting to get away was one thing, considering the way back closed was quite another. Stubborn pride sustained her. The sudden deterioration of sexual passion at first produced more perplexity than bitterness in her, and perhaps also the suspicion of not being equal to the erotic ideal debated at their gatherings as freely as the dictatorship of the proletariat, social realism, and the stream of consciousness. In the man beside her she began to find not strength but weakness, the indifference of cold skin, resentful vanity beneath his professed rebellion, and the incorruptible renunciation of temptations that in reality didn’t exist. Anger too, sometimes directed at her; again she felt panic in the face of male aggression, the rage of alcohol, fists pounding the table, hoarse voices, the loss of a sense of reality induced by narcissism and resentment. Words that, once said, couldn’t be remedied, facial expressions that forgetting couldn’t erase. The secret difference she fed between herself and the people she now moved with — her husband’s friends and comrades, artists with radically inventive projects who devoted more time to explaining them than to executing them — wasn’t it identical to what she’d felt in childhood, when she was aware of things that mattered only to her, when she liked to imagine she was not her parents’ daughter or her brothers’ sister? Just as when she was a little girl, many things moved her now that others couldn’t see. A bouquet of fresh flowers in a glass pitcher; a dress that fit close to the body and at the same time seemed to float around it; the lit sign of an Automat in daylight, the pink neon in the tube barely visible, diluted in the light like ink in water; the mystery of continual renewal and the evanescence of style crossed with similar things and things very different from one another, transforming everything in a continual yet invisible rhythm, transforming the immediate past into an anachronism. She liked some paintings she saw in avant-garde magazines but also a set of porcelain cups in a shop window, or summer sandals she tried on in a shoe store for the simple joy of feeling her feet slip into them, knowing she couldn’t afford them. She enjoyed movies based on Broadway musicals more than Soviet or German films, and abandoned herself to the prose of Henry James or a new tune by Irving Berlin. She secretly enjoyed these things but also felt guilty for a frivolity that might be a basic intellectual weakness or political indifference. And could she help pausing, when she was alone, at the windows of fashionable dress shops on Fifth Avenue or near the revolving doors of hotels from which well-dressed and perfumed women emerged along with bursts of dance-band music. Why did the cause of justice imply the choice of ugliness and a somber mood? She would spend hours walking, looking at the bronze color of a cornice outlined against the clean sky on a winter afternoon, watching a shoeshine man leaning over a pair of men’s patent leather shoes and whistling a Broadway tune. She didn’t believe those hidden enthusiasms made her exceptional, but she also didn’t want to be judged harshly because of them. Concealing them, as she had when she was a young girl, gave her the comforting sensation of living in a place only she knew about.