Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The guilt-free intoxication corresponded to a reckless assurance: when they saw only themselves, they often behaved as rashly as if no one else could see them. At night they’d go to dimly lit bars near the large hotels, frequented for the most part by foreigners and wealthy young night owls who’d scarcely have recognized Ignacio Abel. In the cabaret at the Palace Hotel, sitting close together under the cover of a reddish half-light, they drank exotic mixed drinks that left a sweet aftertaste and conversed in Spanish and English while on the narrow floor couples danced to the rhythm of a small band. At a nearby table, surrounded by a chorus of his friends, the poet García Lorca laughed aloud, his broad face gleaming with sweat. Ignacio Abel had never been in that kind of place, hadn’t known they existed. With the apprehension of a jealous man, he saw the ease with which Judith Biely moved among those people. In reality, she resembled them much more than she did him: the Americans and the English especially, young men and women united by a strange egalitarian camaraderie and a similar tolerance for alcohol, travelers in Europe who became involved with and then disentangled from one another as casually as they passed from one country to another, from one language to another, discussing with the same ardor the expectations of the Popular Front in France and a Soviet film, shouting the names of writers not familiar to Ignacio Abel, and about whom Judith Biely held impassioned opinions. With pride and a nebulous fear of losing her, he watched her gallantly defend Roosevelt to a drunken American who’d called him a covert Communist, an imitator of the five-year plans. She was so desirable, entirely his when she gave herself to him, yet fully independent, shining before others who didn’t see him, a Spaniard of a certain age in a dark suit, a foreigner in that polyglot country of fluid borders and ambiguous norms they inhabited; for them Madrid wasn’t much more than a way station. At times Ignacio Abel saw among them men with tweezed eyebrows and light rouge on their cheeks and women dressed as men, and he felt he was witnessing a corrected version of his time in Germany.

Reasons for returning home later came easily and without remorse — a delayed appointment or some last-minute work — and when he hung up the phone he promptly forgot the hint of reluctant disbelief in Adela’s voice. With Judith Biely everything happened to him for the first time, the exaltation of the night beginning at an hour when not long before he’d resigned himself to domestic somnolence, the taste of her mouth or the dense sweetness of entering her or the gratitude and surprise of feeling how her body tensed like a bow when she came with a generous abandon that didn’t resemble anything he’d known in his experience of lovemaking. Guided by her, he discovered worlds and lives he’d never imagined in the city that was his and yet became a promising, unknown place on the nights when he explored it beside her. (The lie hadn’t stained them yet. Between his old life and the one he led with her there were no dark zones or points of friction. He passed from one to the other as easily as he jumped from a streetcar a short time before it stopped, adjusting his jacket or hat, perhaps blinking to adapt his eyes to the sudden abundance of sun.) But he was also the same man he’d always been, the one he’d be again after a few hours or the next morning (breakfast at the dining room table, the children ready to go to school; the agitation of typewriters and ringing telephones in the drafting room at University City, plans on the drawing tables, crews of men on scaffolds and in trenches, going up in cranes to the terraces of buildings almost completed), and yet he was another man, younger, passionate, dazed, not fully responsible for actions he sometimes observed with alarm, as if looking at himself from the outside while he let himself be carried away by an impulse he didn’t want to resist. Holding Judith’s hand, he went down narrow steps to basements filled with music and smoke, occupied by pale faces in a semidarkness that was greenish, bluish, reddish, in a submerged Madrid that left no traces in the light of day, that didn’t know his secret and to which he gained access by crossing hostile doors, passageways so dimly lit he would have been lost if Judith Biely hadn’t led him. He’d been one of those daytime men for whom night falls earlier and earlier in their lives: the return home after work, the key in the lock, the familiar voices and smells coming to receive him from the end of the hall, supper at the table, heads bent over plates in the light of the lamp, the somnolence of conversation punctuated by domestic sounds, the light squeak of a fork’s tines on porcelain, a spoon against the side of a glass. From the window of his conjugal bedroom, Madrid was a far-off country whose bright lights were lost in the distance and from which he occasionally could hear, in the silence and in his insomnia, bursts of laughter from people out late, car engines, hands clapping for the sereno, the watchman, then the sound of his pike against the paving stones. Now the night expanded before him like those spacious landscapes that dominated dreams, or revealed labyrinths extending beneath or to the other side of the city he’d always known as he knew metro tunnels and the galleries of subterranean pipelines. A simple lie was the password that gave him partial access to the guiltless paradise of a Madrid that was his own and more foreign than ever, where the presence of Judith Biely walking with him and holding his arm granted him an unaccustomed right to citizenship. It took very little drink (or none at all, just breathing the damp, cold night air, looking at the constellations of neon signs and their reflections on the hoods of cars) for him to become giddy, just as he didn’t need more than a certain glance or the brush of her hand or her mere proximity to awaken desire. In those places the light was always more subdued, the faces paler, the heads of hair shinier, the voices more foreign. Sexual tension and alcohol blurred everything, and matters flowed with the swift broken rhythm of the music. Judith knocked on an apartment door in a building with a marble staircase on Calle Velázquez, and as soon as they entered they were submerged in a dark space crossed by shadows, where the sound of conversations in English mixed with smoke that had a resinous aroma, and the lit ends of cigarettes illuminated young faces that seemed to nod in time to the pulsations of music that could be heard from the street. Under the low light of a private room in a flamenco tavern, a woman wearing a great deal of makeup stamped her heels — and seen more closely turned out to be a man. Under the bare brick arches of an American bar installed in a basement behind the Gran Vía (a flickering light shaped like a red owl lit the doorway) he saw with alarm that Judith Biely was embracing a stranger with a shaved head wearing a dinner jacket. It was Philip Van Doren, who said something to him but the music was too loud, the drumbeats as dry and fast as the heels pounding the wooden platform in the flamenco tavern. Ignacio Abel felt Judith’s hand squeezing his in a visible, proud affirmation of her love for him. “I hope you’ve made your decision,” Van Doren said close to his ear, and it took Abel a moment to realize he was referring not to Judith but the invitation to travel to Burton College. Van Doren looked sideways at their clenched hands, at Ignacio Abel’s bold gesture when he put his arm around Judith’s waist. He smiled approvingly, with the air of a conspirator or an expert in human weakness, pleased by the success of his prediction. He asked them to join the other guests at his table and summoned a waiter with the same cold, peremptory gesture he used with his valet. “How nice to see you, Professor, you make me envious. You’ve become younger since I last saw you. Can it be expectations of an electoral victory by your Socialist comrades?” Suddenly Ignacio Abel thought that Judith and Van Doren had been lovers and were still seeing each other. The drinking and his jealousy filled him with unseemly suspicion: wasn’t there something mocking in that approving smile, something condescending? Judith and Van Doren spoke in English and there was too much noise for him to hear what they said. He looked at her lips moving, curving to inhale a cigarette that Van Doren lit with a flat gold lighter. In the oppressive atmosphere under the low ceiling the alcohol made him as dizzy as the music, the voices, the too-near faces of strangers who elbowed their way to the bar. Someone was talking to him in a loud voice, yet he couldn’t hear: a redheaded man with glasses in Van Doren’s group, a secretary at the American embassy who had just given Abel his card and insisted on holding a formal conversation. “Do you believe, Professor, that the Popular Front has any chance of winning the elections?” He responded vaguely as he looked past the man: still holding her glass, Judith was dancing with Van Doren on the tiny floor; facing each other, they made identical gestures. Her tousled hair covered half her face, the twirl of her skirt revealed her knees burnished by silk stockings. The undaunted secretary was commenting on the Spanish government’s diplomatic responses to the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Ignacio Abel watched Judith dance, consumed with desire and pride, jealous of Van Doren and the other men who looked at her. The League of Nations had once again demonstrated its lamentable irrelevance, the secretary said self-importantly. The trumpet and saxophone hurt Abel’s ears. Did he think there was a real threat in Spain of a new revolutionary uprising like the one in Asturias, this time more violent and better organized and perhaps with more likelihood of success? Judith whirled around, led by Van Doren, her skirt lifted and revealed her thighs. And if the left won next February’s elections, which seemed possible, wouldn’t that cause a military coup? Drum rolls and the metallic crash of cymbals buffeted the inside of his skull. The American government would view with pleasure the formation in Spain of a stable parliamentary majority regardless of its political identification. A final drum roll and applause ended the dance. Her face glowing with perspiration and her hair disheveled, Judith Biely came toward him and looked at him as if no one else were there.