Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

LULLED TO SLEEP by the rhythm of the train, he saw his children vividly in the lightning flash of a dream. Perhaps he heard their voices too, because now he remembers that they were close, somewhat weakened, like voices in an open space, perhaps the garden of the house in the Sierra or the edge of the irrigation pond; voices heard in the late afternoon, with an echo of withdrawal and anticipated distance; the past and present collapsed, the recovered voices and the sound of the train filtering into his half-sleep, lit by an alloy of light from the Hudson and the Sierra de Madrid. A voice no longer heard fades away in memory, after a few years it’s forgotten, as, they say, people who lose their sight gradually forget colors. Ignacio Abel can no longer remember his father’s voice and doesn’t even know when he forgot it. His mother’s he can invoke in association with words or phrases peculiar to her: the way she shouted I’m coming when an impatient tenant called for her from the doorway, when someone knocked on the glass of the porter’s lodging. He does remember that: the vibration of the frosted glass, the ringing of the bell, and his mother’s footsteps, slower and slower as she aged and grew heavier and clumsier because of arthritis, yet she preserved a sharp, young tone and streetwise inflection in her voice. I’m coming, she shouted, adding, under her breath, We’re not airplanes.

He wonders whether his children will begin to forget his voice as well, his face gradually replaced by the frozen image in a photograph. Distance makes his return that much more difficult. Minutes, hours, days, kilometers, distance multiplied by time. Right now, immobile, leaning back in the train, his face next to the window, he continues to leave, to go away. Distance is not a fixed, stable measurement but an expansive wave that pulls him in its centrifugal current, its icy vacuum of unlimited space. Trains, ocean liners, cabs, subway cars, rambling steps to the end of unknown streets. Hotel room after hotel room always at the end of similar flights of steep stairs and narrow halls with identical smells, a universal geography of desolation. But his children, like Judith Biely, are also moving away at the same velocity in different directions, and each instant and each step added to the distance makes his return more improbable. There’s no way to undo the kind of destruction that can sweep away and overturn everything, no way to overcome the accelerated course of time. Doors closing behind him, rooms where he’ll never sleep again, corridors, customs barriers, nautical miles, kilometers traveled north by the train carrying him to another unknown place, just a name now, Rhineberg, a hill in a forest beside steep banks and a white building that doesn’t yet exist, whose initial sketches are in his briefcase: rough, essentially reluctant drafts of a project that might never be built. Constantly going forward, never going back, adding distances, geographical accidents, plains, mountain ranges, cities, battlefronts, countries, entire continents, oceans, modest hotel rooms.

Memory, like any construction material, has degrees or indices of resistance that in theory one should be able to calculate. How long does it take to forget a voice and not be able to invoke it at will, its unique, mysterious timbre, its tone when it says certain words, whispers in one’s ear or calls from a distance, at once intimate and remote in a telephone receiver, saying everything when it pronounces a name, sweet words it had not spoken to anyone until then. Or perhaps it has: perhaps others remember that same voice, unknown men who haunt like shadows the unexplored country of the past, the earlier lives of Judith Biely, the one she must be living now; eyes that also rested on her naked body, hands and lips that caressed her and to which she surrendered with abandon. To whom else had she said those words, even more singular and exciting because they belonged to another language, honey, my dear, my love. To whom was she saying them now, to whom had she said them in the three months she’d been away from Spain, back in America or perhaps wandering again through European cities, gradually forgetting him, not contaminated by the Spanish misfortune, free of it just by crossing the border, equally immune to the suffering of love and the mourning of a country that, after all, isn’t hers. As spontaneously as she’d decided to become his lover one early October afternoon in Madrid, she decided to break things off a little more than eight months later, toward the middle of July, with a determination that left no room for ambiguity or remorse, and perhaps has also made her immune to pain. So little time, if you stop to think about it. Ignacio Abel continues to see her in his dreams but doesn’t hear her voice. Perhaps it was Judith Biely’s voice he heard saying his name so clearly in Pennsylvania Station, and yet a moment later he couldn’t identify or remember it. Without the photographs, the voice fades before the face. The photo is absence, the voice is presence. The photo is the pain of the past, the fixed point left behind in time: the frozen image, invariable in appearance, yet more and more distant, more unfaithful, the semblance of a shadow vanishing almost as rapidly on photographic paper as in memory. Feeling his pockets, tormented by the thought of losing any of the few things he now possesses, Ignacio Abel finds his wallet and with his fingertips seeks the photo Judith Biely gave him shortly after they met. In it she smiles just as she’ll smile at him only a few weeks later, with confidence, not holding anything back, openly showing the plenitude of her expectations. The photo awakened Ignacio Abel’s jealousy of Judith’s earlier life in which he didn’t exist and about which he preferred not knowing, not asking, fearing the inevitable male shadows that were there. Perhaps what made her smile and turn, forgetting about the automatic click of the camera, was a man’s presence. What had excited him most about her from the start was what made him most afraid and what had eventually taken her away from him: the strength of her will, which he’d not seen in any other woman, manifested in each of her gestures as clearly as her physical beauty. The flash in the automatic photo booth gleamed on her curly hair, teeth, shining eyes; it rebounded off the line of her cheekbones. That photo was the same one Adela had held in her hands, bewildered, in a kind of fog that threw her features out of focus, and was about to tear up but merely dropped to the floor, along with two or three letters, leaning against the desk in his study whose drawers Ignacio Abel had forgotten to lock.

Unlike Judith’s voice, Adela’s remains intact in his memory. He’s often heard it calling to him, as she sometimes called to him when she had a bad dream and clung to him in bed, her eyes closed, to be certain he was near. He’s heard it coming from the end of the hall in the apartment in Madrid, as clear in wakefulness as in dreams, on summer nights when the noises of war were gradually becoming routine, waking him at times with the feeling that Adela had come back, crossed the front line, returned to claim him and demand an explanation. How dirty the house was, how disordered the rooms. (There were no longer maids who came in to clean, no cook to prepare food for the señor, soon there wouldn’t even be food.) Too bad he’d let the plants on the balcony die. What a shame he hadn’t made more of an effort to get in touch with his wife and children. The complaints written in the letter he should have torn up or at least left behind in the hotel room in New York, those remembered and the ones imagined, intertwine in the monotonous sound of a voice that belongs to Adela and to his own guilty conscience. How strange not to have felt in her voice that she suspected, that she knew. How could she not have known? How strange not to be able to see oneself from the outside, in the looks of others, those who are closest and suspect though they would have preferred not to find out, who discover without understanding. The boy so serious in the last few months, so withdrawn, observing, standing at the door of his room when his father lowered his voice to speak on the phone in the hall. Ignacio Abel turned to wave a last goodbye after the gate closed at the house in the Sierra, and Miguel, standing next to his mother and sister at the top of the steps, looked and didn’t look at him, as if not wanting to believe that gesture of farewell, as if wanting to let him know he wasn’t deceived, that he, his scorned twelve-year-old son, knew with incongruous lucidity about his father’s impatience, his desire to leave, the relief he felt getting into the car or quickening his pace on the way to the station so as not to miss the train that would take him back to Madrid. His mother, next to him, remained enveloped in a fog of sorrow that rarely lifted, and Miguel could not grasp her motives no matter how much he scrutinized her; Lita became quite emotional, uncharacteristically so, and perhaps somewhat superficially, just as she did when she saw her father arrive and ran out to embrace him and tell him right away the grades she’d received, the books she’d read.