Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Then the telephone rang, just as Miguel was swallowing a mouthful of water, so focused on not making noise that the first ring startled him and made him choke. Sitting across from him, Lita put her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. The telephone didn’t stop ringing, shrill in the silence that had fallen after his coughing had stopped. How was it possible that his father and sister didn’t hear it? His father, rigid with anger, concentrated meticulously on chewing. With an abrupt gesture his mother placed her fork and knife on her plate and left the dining room, and a moment later the ringing stopped and her voice was heard in the hall, uneasy because it was unusual for people to call so late: “Who’s calling? Who? One moment.” She returned to the dining room unhurriedly, seemed more serious and more tired than a moment earlier, looking at his father in a strange way when she gave him the message.

“It’s for you. From your office, a woman who sounds foreign.”

“Well, it’s a fine time for people to be calling,” said Lita, unaware of what Miguel’s eyes saw but his mind couldn’t decipher, innocent of all uncertainty, of any suspicion of danger, sure in the world.

Inside his apartment, Ignacio Abel crossed the invisible border to his other life, walking down the dark hallway to the phone on the wall, to the unexpected voice of Judith Biely, leaving behind the family scene in the dining room, interrupted and blurred on the other side of the glass that filtered light and voices. In a few seconds and in so small a space, his heart pounding in his chest, he took on his other identity; he stopped being a father and husband to become a lover; his movements became more secretive, less confident; his voice was changing to become the one Judith would hear — hoarse, anxious, altered by a mixture of bewilderment, happiness, and the sudden fear that it wasn’t she who called, breaking an unspoken agreement for a reason that must be serious. His hand trembled when he picked up the earpiece, still swaying against the wall; his voice sounded so low and rasping that Judith, equally anxious in the telephone booth in a café whose location she didn’t know, at first didn’t recognize it. She too spoke quietly, quickly, in English and a moment afterward in Spanish, short phrases, murmured so close to the mouthpiece that Ignacio Abel heard her breathing and could almost feel on his ear the brush of her lips. “Please come and rescue me. Casi no sé dónde estoy. Unos hombres venían siguiéndome. I want to see you right away.”

He’ll always long for that voice, even when he can no longer recall it at will and has stopped hearing it in the unpredictability of certain dreams or turning when he thinks he’s heard her saying his name. During the demented, bloody summer in Madrid, when he went about like a shadow, what he missed most was not the reasonable certainty of not being murdered, or the solid routine of a former life that had disintegrated overnight, but something more secret, more his own, more irretrievably lost: the possibility of dialing a certain number and hearing Judith Biely’s voice, the miracle that somewhere in Madrid, at the end of an automobile or streetcar ride, an impatient walk, Judith Biely would be waiting for him, much more desirable than in his imagination, surprising him with the joy of her presence, as if no matter how persistently he tried, he could never remember how much she meant to him.

“It was a secretary, a new girl,” he said, back in the dining room, not looking at anyone in particular, putting on his jacket, reckless, a liar, indifferent to the mediocrity of his performance. “There was an emergency at a construction site. A scaffold collapsed.”

“Call if you see you’ll be back late.”

“I don’t think it’s all that important.”

“Papá, are you going in the car? Will you take me with you?”

“What ideas you have, child,” Adela said. “You’re just what your papá needs now.”

“I’ll take a taxi and get there faster.”

Just a few minutes earlier the night had been closed off for him, the predictable, dull night of family routine: supper, conversation, the distant sounds of the street, the resignation to the details of tedium. The warmth from the heating system, the lethargic, enveloped life, lined in the felt of house slippers and pajamas, the tenaciously won comfort of a house protected against the winter cold. And now the unexpected happened, stillness was transformed into motion, warmth into the knife wound of cold when he stepped out of the building, resignation into temerity, Madrid at night opening like a limitless countryside he’d cross at top speed in a taxi to meet Judith Biely, so the promise would be kept, enunciated not in her words but in the tone of her voice: the desire, the urgency, the certainty of embracing her and kissing her a few minutes later. Through the taxi window he saw the city as if he were dreaming it. Light fog swaddled the lights and made the paving stones and trolley tracks glow with a damp luster. He looked at the solitary displays in store windows, lit in empty streets, the large windows of cafés, the electric light in dining rooms where family suppers were taking place, identical to the one he’d just left and that now seemed like a painful episode in a uniform servitude he’d escaped. Not forever, of course, and not for the whole night, but any measure of time was enough for him now, two hours, even just one hour. There was no currency of minutes his covetousness wouldn’t be thankful for, minutes and seconds that decreased with the clicking sound of the numbers as they changed on the meter, with the accelerating beat of his heart. Election posters covered the façades in the Puerta del Sol. In the drizzle, violent searchlights lit the gigantic round face of the candidate Gil Robles, occupying an entire building, crowned with involuntary absurdity by a neon advertisement for Anís del Mono: Grant Me Your Vote and I’ll Return a Great Spain to You. He recalled Philip Van Doren’s fixed stare and sarcastic tone amid the smoke and the noise of a jazz band: “Do you believe, Professor Abel, like your coreligionist Largo Caballero, that if the right wins the elections, the proletariat will start a civil war?” The icy wind shook the cables from which the streetlights were suspended, lengthening convulsive shadows on the sidewalk. The taxi moved slowly toward the Calle Mayor, making its way through a labyrinth of streetcars. His imagination anticipated illusions of what was now imminent: the arches and gardens of the Plaza Mayor, the lanterns at the corners of Calle Toledo, the café where Judith Biely waited for him, her profile standing out in spite of the smoke inside and the steam that covered the glass, the young woman, alone and foreign, whom the men looked at brazenly and approached, almost touching her, to say things in a low voice. In the city where one has always lived, ordinary trips can be equivalent to profound journeys in time: crossing Madrid to meet his lover one inauspicious night in February, Ignacio Abel traveled from his present life to the streets of his distant childhood, to which he almost never returned, along which he’d never walked with her. The impulse of the taxi in the direction of the future returned him to the past, and along the way he got rid of so many years to reach her with the truest part of himself. He erased what at this moment didn’t matter to him at all, what he would have given without hesitation for the time with Judith Biely: his career, his dignity, his bourgeois apartment in the Salamanca district, his wife, his children. Before the end of the trip he was searching his pockets for coins to pay the driver, leaning forward to see the exact corner and the café, the silhouette of Judith Biely. He was surprised to find himself moving his left leg as nervously as Miguel, who’d looked at him so seriously when he left the dining room, adjusting his tie, making sure the keys were in his pocket.