Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

In the midst of that upheaval only the girl seemed to remain calm, going from room to room, her pacifier in her mouth, observing the maid as she cleaned the baby’s bottom and washed the diapers under the tap in the kitchen, watching the wet nurse when she brought the small red face to her large, swollen white breast, the translucent skin crossed with blue veins, the enormous dark nipples, the broad hands that caressed the baby’s sweaty, flattened hair and delicately put the mouth at her nipple from which surged a rich, white thread of milk. The girl went down the long hallway and stole into the bedroom where her mother lay. She sat next to her on the edge of the bed, caressed her hands or smoothed her hair, damp with sweat, uncombed, dirty after so many days of convalescence. She seemed not to think it strange that her mother didn’t respond to her gestures of affection or give any sign she was aware of her presence. They put a white veil on the girl and had her hold a candle at her brother’s baptism, and she stood on tiptoe to watch as the priest poured water on the baby’s head and then dried it lightly with an embroidered handkerchief on which he also wiped his fingertips. That night, when her brother cried, she went to him and, instead of rocking the cradle, took his hand, and the baby calmed. From then on, the girl slept with the cradle beside her bed. When she heard the beginning of a whimper in the dark, her hand would feel its way between the bars. The boy’s tiny hand would close around his sister’s thumb, and, feeling safe, he went back to sleep. Meanwhile, awake in his bedroom, Ignacio Abel counted the seconds of silence, fearing that before he reached a minute the crying would start again. He could imagine himself dozing on a long train journey at night, autonomous and alone in a European city, as clearly as if that future were part of a memory, the way he saw himself as a boy, elbows propped on a table, in front of his notebook, the pen drawing two parallel lines on the blank page a moment before the knocking sounded on the door, in the light of the oil lamp that seemed to burn forever at the heart of time.

HOW STRANGE THAT he remained guilt-free for so long; the unshadowed gift, limitless and full of secret places, became sweeter the more he enjoyed it: dark movie theaters and open-air cafés from which one could see in an expanse as broad as a marine horizon the oak trees of the Casa de Campo and the Monte del Pardo and the hazy distances of the Sierra; the room rented by the hour in a private hotel at the end of Calle O’Donnell (streetcar bells and car horns heard faintly through heavy curtains drawn to achieve a pretense of night during the day’s working hours); and the public space of the Velázquez rooms at the Prado, early on winter mornings when the museum had just opened and before tourists had begun to come in. He awoke when it was still dark with an instinctive feeling of happiness waiting for him, and when he looked at the time on the alarm clock, he remembered he would meet her in only three hours. How strange that fear hadn’t intruded yet: the presentiment that something unexpected would happen and he wouldn’t be able to see her that day, or ever again, that she was separated from him by fate or because another man had taken her from him or because she herself had decided to leave, exercising the same freedom that had brought her from America to Europe and moved her to become his lover. He shaved after his shower, savoring his secret, looking in the mirror at the face of the man at whom Judith Biely would smile in a little more than two hours, and no one else would know. Time and the order of things conspired in his favor: breakfast waiting on the table, his two children healthy and obedient, his wife, who handed him his briefcase and hat in the entrance hall and told him to button up, it was foggy and damp this morning, and was satisfied, or at least seemed satisfied, with a domestic kiss that barely brushed her lips and a wave goodbye in which no smile and hardly a glance intervened. Efficient, involuntary accomplices acted on his behalf: the new elevator with its electric mechanism and gentle hydraulic brakes, the porter’s son who had gone to the garage for his car and had it ready for him at the door, the Fiat motor that in spite of the morning cold started with just a turn of the ignition key, the straight streets, still clear of traffic, that allowed him to arrive quickly at his appointment, not wasting a single minute. Even though it was early, someone was at the museum’s ticket office, ready to sell him an admission, and a sleepy porter in a blue uniform was there to tear it for him. In the light of the deserted central gallery footsteps echoed before he could see at a distance the figure they announced. One of them would arrive, and the other was waiting, feeling observed in the empty galleries by personages in the paintings, saints and kings whose names Judith Biely didn’t know, martyrs of a religion that to her was sumptuous and exotic. One of them walked down the long museum corridor in the gray illumination from the skylights, and the other arrived at the same time, appeared in a doorway and was recognized in the distance with a skipped heartbeat by sharp eyes proficient in searching. Ignacio Abel arrived first so he’d be sure to see her arrive. Judith Biely’s broad shoulders, her determined walk, her head tilted slightly to one side, and her hair covering half her face; her eyes large, and as she came closer, widely separated; her cheeks; her thin lips parted at the corners, with a suggestion of expectation, like a word or smile about to be formed; her face serious and angular and yet illuminated by the beginning of a smile, still only hinted at, like the morning light becoming more intense inside a tenuous fog, the one they’d passed through as they walked to the museum along different streets. Alone and self-confident, determined to give herself with all the deliberation of a will that both flattered and frightened him. It frightened him and aroused him just to see her walk toward him, provocative and carefree. In a corner safe from the eyes of the guards they kissed greedily, noticing the winter cold on skin, the smell of cold on breath and hair, on outer clothing damp from the fog.

On another day he watched her approach from a distance along an avenue in the Botanical Garden, listening to the dry sound of fallen leaves blown by the wind and covering the ground under her feet, a cold, sunny morning early in December when the frost made the grass silver in the shaded areas and the air shone with ice crystals. She came muffled against the winter, the brim of her hat over her forehead, coat lapels raised, a scarf concealing her chin and mouth, showing only her bright eyes and her nose red from the cold. He wanted to go to her but remained still, his hands in his overcoat pockets and his breath cold, conscious of each step she took, the distance that separated them lessening by the second, the imminence of her body pressing against his, the two cold hands that held his face so she could keep looking at him until she closed her eyes to kiss him. Halfway through their day they would make room for a quick escape, a phone call, a taxi ride into the always-too-brief parenthesis of a meeting. How strange that it took them so long to begin to measure what was denied to them, to not be grateful for what had been granted them, what they might not have known. If there was no time for anything else and the winter weather was too inhospitable, they took refuge in one of those remote cafés frequented by office clerks, retirees, other pairs of lovers meeting in secret; cafés half empty and gloomy, in ambiguous areas of Madrid that weren’t centrally located but didn’t quite belong to the outskirts, on streets only recently urbanized that still had rows of young trees and fences around undeveloped lots with posters announcing the circus or boxing matches or political propaganda, and the final stops of streetcar lines, and corners that bordered open countryside. They had to tell each other everything, ask about everything, their entire lives up to the day a few months earlier, the first of their common memory. There was only one boundary neither of them crossed, by a silent agreement that seemed humiliating to Judith, though it took her a long time to breach it, perhaps not until she realized it was she who was telling, who asked questions: there was a boundary, like the empty space of a silhouette cut out of the center of a family photograph, a name neither mentioned. Ignacio Abel spoke occasionally of his children but never about Adela. How strange that it took them so long not to mention her name or her status—“my wife,” “your spouse”—but to sense her shadow, to remember she existed, strange that they were able for so long to wipe away with no trace, from the moment they met, the home and life he came from. For him, Judith lived in an invisible world he could reach instantaneously, as if he could cross to the other side of a mirror by virtue of a secret password he alone possessed. The password at times was a material object: he’d close the door to his study to talk to her on the phone; he kept Judith’s letters and photographs under lock and key in his desk; he turned the key on the inside of the bathroom door, and as Adela’s silhouette passed the frosted glass, he thought of Judith Biely, whom he would see shortly, as he stood under the running water. How close the other side was, the inviolable secret, a distance of a few minutes, a few hundred heartbeats, the topography of desire superimposed like a transparent sheet on the places in his daily life. He went down to the street and the porter’s son who brought his car from the garage didn’t know he was acting as his accomplice. He gave him a tip, and before he got in the car he looked up and Adela was on the balcony. She watched every morning because she was afraid: gunmen often chose the moment their victims left home to attack. (“But what ideas you have! Who’d ever think of shooting me?”) He drove to the corner of Calle de Alcalá and parked the car in front of the Moderna Barber Shop. The face he saw in the mirror while the barber, who welcomed him with a nod and respectfully said his name, leaned over him was the same one Judith Biely would look at very soon. But only he knew that. The secret was a treasure, and the crypt and palace that contained it the inviolable house of time only Judith and he inhabited. Instead of driving down Alcalá, he turned up O’Donnell and left the car a certain distance from the private hotel with a high fence enclosing a garden with palm trees and dense hedges that protected shutters as thick as jalousies and painted an intense green, with workable slats that filtered an aquatic light when partially opened. To reach the hidden other world he had only to drive a few minutes, then pass through successive doors, visible and invisible, each provided with its own password. When he crossed the last threshold, Judith Biely was already waiting for him, seated in a chair near the bed, beside a lit blue-glass lamp on the night table, in the artificial darkness of nine in the morning.