Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

She was moving through a real city, the plot and subject matter of a novel, and the oldest part of the memory of the man she loved. On that February afternoon Judith walked, carried along by joy and curiosity, on the same streets where her lover had been a boy at the end of another century, in a city of streetcars pulled by mules and street lamps lit by gas. In the book she had to write, there would also be the resonance of that memory: although it didn’t belong to her, it had turned out to be extremely intimate. She would have liked to walk with him here, asking questions: on the far side of the square she saw the entrance to the Plaza Mayor through the Arco de Cuchilleros and recalled his telling her that he had used it as a guide so as not to get lost the first few times he went to school by himself, a boy not very different from the ones she saw now playing in the street, with gray shorts and espadrilles and shaved heads, scarves and berets and faces red with cold, approaching her, attracted by her foreignness, like the men who stood looking at her and muttering in low voices words she didn’t understand, as she moved faster past the doors of taverns. She savored the street names, pronouncing them softly to practice her Spanish and underlining them on the pages of the novel. Ignacio Abel thought it strange that Judith found so much beauty in them, surprised at her discovery, uncomfortable when she insisted on asking him things he had long forgotten: the address of the house where his mother had worked as a porter, the location of the window through which a perpetual gray light entered the basement where he studied feverishly in the light of an oil lamp, listening to people’s footsteps and horses’ hooves on the paving stones, and the wheels of wagons like the one that brought his father home dead. He was awkward or reluctant when remembering; what excited him was what he saw in front of his eyes or what didn’t exist yet. He didn’t ask Judith about her past so that he wouldn’t have to imagine her with other men. Of his own past he recalled with her his first trip through Europe, the year he spent in Germany, and the trunk filled with books and magazines he brought back when he returned and that still nourished him. “Like you now in Madrid, almost as young as you.” He wasn’t the one who told her about the two buildings erected in recent years that filled him with a pride too private to degrade by talking about them or becoming arrogant. It was Philip Van Doren, whom he distrusted so intensely, feeling himself observed, judged by eyes where an intelligence gleamed, at once piercing and cold, which he found unsettling because he couldn’t understand it, the intelligence of someone who knows he has enough money to buy anything and perhaps imagines he can control from a distance the lives of others: his life and Judith’s. It was Philip Van Doren who showed Judith photographs of the public school and the marketplace designed by Ignacio Abel for the neighborhood where he’d been born. That afternoon she looked for the two buildings as intently as she had followed the trail of Galdós’s characters. Each imposed its presence in a different way, suddenly appearing on a square or around a corner, singular and at the same time blending with the tenements, the modest rows of balconies, the horizon of tiled roofs. The school was all right angles and large picture windows: the children in their blue smocks flooded out when she stopped in front of the building, imagining the care Ignacio Abel must have used in selecting the exact color of the bricks, the forms of the letters carved into the white stone over the entrance: SPANISH REPUBLIC. NATIONAL COEDUCATIONAL SCHOOL “PÉREZ GALDÓS.”The concrete roof arched against dark tiles and chimneys like a great animal emerging from the water. She recognized him here, just as she did in the abrupt strokes of his handwriting, the turbulence repressed and concealed beneath his correct manners, beneath his crushing formality, in his impatience when he undressed her the minute they were alone, and kissed and bit her, probed her as feverishly with his eyes as with his fingers and lips. Right angles, wide picture windows, concrete and brick already bruised and ennobled by the weather, massive tensions supported on the buoyancy of a mathematical key, on the pure force of gravity and the solidity of foundations driven into the earth: where others saw a market filled with people and loud voices, filthy with refuse, occupied by mountains of produce and butchered animals oozing blood on white tile counters under the wounding light of electric lamps, she found a personal confession, the hidden lines of a self-portrait.

Night had fallen. The last doors of the market closed with a clang of metal shutters. On the ground slippery with rotten fruit and fish scraps, the typography of political leaflets stood out, spiked with symbols and exclamation points. She’d become disoriented and was walking down a narrow street where the only light was a dim bulb at the far corner. With her head erect and eyes looking straight ahead she crossed the stain of dirty electric light from a tavern that exuded an odor of acidic wine and the sounds of drunkards’ conversations. A shadow brushed against her at the same time as a fetid breath. A rough, roguish male voice said something she didn’t understand but that instinctively made her walk faster. At her back, very close, someone called to her, footsteps echoed hers. A woman alone and young, in high heels, her head uncovered, a foreigner: she quickened her pace and the shadow following her lagged behind and the voice fired an insulting interjection, but a moment later the footsteps approached and with them the breath and the filthy muttered words that frightened and offended her, alone in a strange city that had suddenly become hostile, doors closed the length of the street, and behind the windows covered with shutters and curtains, sounds of conversations, dishes and glasses at suppertime. She wanted to run but her legs felt heavy as in a dream. If she attempted to escape, she’d be acknowledging the proximity of danger, she’d provoke her pursuer and achieve nothing but trouble, the terror of physical harm. A shadow, or perhaps two shadows, now she wasn’t sure, footsteps to her right and to her left, as if to keep her from running, a touch that provoked revulsion, of rage at the insolence, the sexual pursuit. She could confront them, shout insults, call for help at the closed doors and the windows screened by curtains. If only he’d come, if only he’d appear at the end of the street, his silhouette tall and strong against the light at the corner, his open arms offering her refuge and enclosing her in caresses, at first so timid, so incredulous, the caresses of a man grateful for love who can’t fully understand that it has been granted him. They were drunk, alcohol made them bold and weakened them too. Beyond the corner, the street widened into a little square, and on the other side she saw the large windows of a café frosted with steam. A rough hand squeezed her arm, the drunken voice came so close to her ear she felt on her neck the damp touch of breath or saliva. She shook off the hand without looking back and ran across the street, dodging a cold blast of wind and the horn of a car she hadn’t seen coming. Inside the café she was enveloped in air thick with voices and smoke. Male eyes lingered on her, she felt them on her back and the nape of her neck as she walked to the rear, to the arch covered with a curtain behind which must be the lavatory and a telephone booth. She knew his home number by heart but had never used it. She asked for a token, not hiding her urgency, the intensity of her fear. She imagined him in the interior of his other life, as if she’d walked down a dark street and looked through a wide, tall window where a domestic scene took place in silence. She wasn’t going to leave the café until he came for her, wouldn’t abandon the protection of the telephone booth. Impatient, drumming her nails on the glass, trying to catch her breath, she listened to the rings. Someone picked up and Judith paused as she was about to say his name. In silence, the earpiece in her hand, holding her breath, she heard a curious voice asking who it was, Adela’s voice, which she’d heard only once, long before, at the start of everything, the voice of the woman she’d met briefly at the Student Residence.