Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

With clarity Ignacio Abel now relives a scene, the paused image in a documentary film: night in the apartment, the white cloth on the dining room table illuminated by the chandelier, the gold-green light reflecting on place settings and white china plates, the crystal of glasses. The time is February, a few days before the elections. He sees it from the outside, from a distance, a domestic scene glimpsed by the solitary stranger on a street in a city where he doesn’t know anyone, where nothing awaits him but a hotel room. He’s at the head of the table and Adela faces him, the children at the sides in their assigned seats, holding a quiet, trivial conversation while the maid walks down the hall after serving the soup, the maid who was now putting on a white cap and apron, ordered to do so by the señora, who was becoming more and more strict about such details, who a short while before had reprimanded the cook for going out in a hat instead of the kerchief or beret appropriate to her position. Miguel moved his left leg nervously under the table and attempted with little success not to make noise eating his soup. He observed out of the corner of his eye, in a permanent state of alert, attentive to the smallest detail or hint of danger with a sensibility much more acute than his capacity to reason, and therefore more restless. He imagined himself transformed into an invisible man like the one in the movie he’d seen a few Saturdays before with Lita and the maids, behind the back of his father, who, like a distracted, arbitrary monarch, forbade excursions to the movies whenever he heard about an epidemic of something or other in Madrid. The Invisible Man ! Miguel was easily overwhelmed when he liked a film a great deal. He couldn’t sit still; he leaned forward in his seat as if trying to be closer to the screen, to sink into it, convulsed with laughter or trembling with fear, pinching Lita, punching her, so enthralled by the film that when they left the theater he was lightheaded, agitated, and that night there was no way to keep him quiet when the lights were turned off; he wanted to keep talking to Lita about the scenes and characters, and when she fell asleep he was still too excited to close his eyes, and he relived the film, imagining variations in which he himself played a part. The chilling enigma of a scientific discovery that offers superhuman powers to the person who controls it! How marvelous to spy without anyone seeing you, to watch everything with no danger of being caught. On his way home from school he’d seen on the door of the shabby theater he was allowed to go to with Lita and the maids the ferocious poster for a film with a black silhouette holding a letter and a large magnifying glass. THE SEALED ENVELOPE ( The Secret of the Dardanelles ). COMING SOON. How fantastic that phrase was — coming soon — what excitement it unleashed in him when he simply thought about it, about the days left until the film opened, about the possibility of being sick or coming home from school with a failing grade and as punishment not being allowed to go to the movies. If his father became aware of his jiggling leg, he’d scold him, but Miguel hoped the tablecloth would hide it, and in any case he was incapable of sitting still or ordering his leg to stop. “You’re sewing on the Singer,” his father would say. “It seems the boy will have a tailor’s vocation after all.” They all acted in their predictable ways, repeated themselves, the same gestures, but Miguel was the one they all noticed — the scapegoat, he thought, feeling sorry for himself, the black sheep. He thought the Dardanelles in the title of the movie must be members of some secret society of spies or international traffickers, and Lita had laughed at him, calling him ignorant, and told him the Dardanelles was the name of a strait. “And why do you care if your son moves his leg, it’s not serious,” his mother would say, giving his father a look at once concerned and resigned, different from the one she gave the boy, with whom she had to be both indulgent and severe. Dinner became a series of increasingly difficult tests, a race of exasperating slowness, and as he weakened, tripping over obstacles, jiggling his leg without a moment’s rest under the table, unable to sit still in his chair, Lita sat across from him, gliding as if on a magic carpet, smiling and self-confident, eating her soup in silence, handling her knife and fork without leaning her elbows on the table, politely attentive to the adults’ conversation and at times asking a question or making an observation that didn’t provoke an ironic or condescending reply, the kind he’d become used to hearing from his father. He would have liked to run out, not leaving his napkin folded beside the plate, not asking permission to leave the table, just becoming invisible, floating along the hall toward the partially prohibited territory filled with promise at the back of the house, the kitchen and laundry room and tiny room the cook and the maid shared, where he could hear the sound of the radio, with Angelillo singing a song that brought tears to his eyes, the story of the gravedigger Juan Simón, who one day finds himself obliged to bury his own daughter, dead in the bloom of life:

I’m a gravedigger coming back

Oh, I’m a gravedigger coming back

From burying my own heart.

Miguel wanted to see that film at all costs. He wanted to see it because he liked the song and because the cook and maid had already seen it and told him about it in detail, both of them moved as they remembered it, pausing to recall some dramatic moment. He wanted to see it even more because his father, mother, and sister seemed to have agreed to dislike it without having seen it. His mother wouldn’t ridicule him or become angry if she caught him beside the radio, his eyes filled with tears. But she wouldn’t have defended him either. She was distressed by his lack of masculinity, by the possibility he would awaken his father’s distaste and contempt. But what hurt Miguel most was that Lita had taken the adults’ side. She, his accomplice in loving movies on the afternoons they laughed and laughed at the theater watching the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin, or shivered with fear as they watched Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, also disliked movies with flamenco songs and regional dancing, precisely the ones the maids and Miguel liked best. She’d refused to go with him to Juan Simón’s Daughter. She’d listened with an approving expression when their father said to their mother a few nights earlier during dinner:

“Look at Buñuel, who was so much a surrealist and so modern, and now he’s not embarrassed to earn a pile of money producing that piece of folkloric idiocy, Juan Simón’s Daughter. ”

Folkloric idiocy. Miguel knew he was going to say or do something wrong, and precisely because he knew it, the transgression was inevitable. How hard would it have been for him to remain silent when his father made that scornful comment about Buñuel? But he couldn’t help it, he didn’t even think about it; he knew what he was going to say, and he said it, and as he did he became aware of the inevitable reprimand he’d receive and the fact that his mother and sister weren’t going to defend him:

“Well, Herminia says it’s a picture you cry over and it has pretty songs.”

“Herminia.” His father repeated the maid’s name with burlesque seriousness. “A great cinematic authority.”

Now the song was coming from the end of the hall, and they all acted as if they didn’t hear it. Or perhaps Miguel was the only one who did, nervously shaking his leg under the table, watching his father’s face out of the corner of his eye, noting that his mother, beneath her air of absent placidity, was becoming tense, and Lita, far removed from the possibility of disaster, was recounting a recent excursion with her classmates to the Prado. He admired her as unconditionally as he had when he was little; he admired her even when he resented and despised her because she fawned over their father, when he was tempted to spill ink on her impeccable exercise notebook, or step as if accidentally on one of those school albums in which Lita glued leaves and dried flowers. If she could concentrate on everything she did, and move with so much serenity and in a straight line, it was because she wasn’t distracted or alarmed by the sounds of danger, because she lacked the invisible antennae that detected the turmoil he always provoked. His father was going to be irritated because the music on the radio was too loud, because the maid, when she left the dining room, didn’t close the door behind her, and because the kitchen door was open. That’s why it was so difficult for him to concentrate: because he was mindful of too many things at the same time, because he guessed what the others were thinking or sensed changes in their states of mind, like those barometers in school with fast-moving needles that registered atmospheric disturbances.