Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

He said, “I won’t be back late,” and in Miguel’s neutral gaze was a disbelief all the more wounding because it was completely instinctive and revealed like an unexpected mirror the mediocre quality of his imposture, the gestures of an actor who convinces no one. But that sting of alarm and disgust with himself was quickly suppressed, wiped away by haste, by physical exaltation that carried him down the stairs, the road to the invigorating cold of the street that filled his lungs as he ran to the next corner, looking for a taxi. Standing next to the window of his room while Lita slept, Miguel was looking at the same deserted corner of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, lit by a street lamp, listening in silence to the beat of footsteps on the sidewalk, imagining they were his father’s when in fact they belonged to the watchman who checked the building entrances, striking the ground at regular intervals with the iron tip of his pike. He’d awakened in the dark, thinking he heard the elevator’s motor when it stopped, recalling something he’d read before he fell asleep, hiding the magazine under the pillow when their mother came in to say good night, an article on people buried alive, from which he learned a word that in itself frightened him — catalepsy — a word whose meaning Lita knew, of course. How many people have been buried alive? How many have consummated their agony — the most terrible one of all — in the place of their eternal rest? He was fascinated to discover that for attentive eyes and ears, there was no such thing as total darkness or total silence. As he looked at the room in shadows it became filled with light, just as when slow-moving clouds drift away from the face of the full moon. He’d read in one of the cheap magazines about crimes and wonders that the maids bought that in a secret laboratory in Moscow, scientists were developing x-ray glasses that allowed you to see in absolute darkness and a magnetic-wave pistol that killed silently. THE ENIGMA OF MYSTERIOUS RAYS THAT BRING LONG-DISTANCE DEATH. What had been at the moment he awoke an oppressive silence was transformed into a jungle of noises: Lita’s breathing, wood creaking, the vibration of the windowpane when a car passed on the street, the strikes of the sereno ’s pike, the growl of the heating pipes, the muffled echo of the opposing forces that, according to his father’s explanation, kept the entire building standing, never at rest, expanding and contracting like a great animal breathing; and farther away, or at least in a space difficult for him to locate, another sound that Miguel couldn’t define, that stopped and then started again after a while, like the sound of his blood when he rested his ear on the pillow. He sat up in bed very quietly, making certain it wasn’t the elevator he heard. He stood up slowly, the cold of the wood floor on the soles of his feet, the annoying need to urinate that would force him to go out into the hall. His father and mother reproached him for not reading, but his head, when he couldn’t sleep, was full of disturbing things he’d read in the paper. SCOTLAND YARD INVESTIGATES A CASE OF CRIMES COMMITTED BY SLEEPWALKERS. The sound of labored, intermittent breathing returned, something that never changed into a voice but did contain a lament. When he left the room he was the Invisible Man, invisible and wrapped in silence, walking barefoot, turning cooperative doorknobs. It frightened him to be a sleepwalker and be dreaming as he walked toward a victim who’d be found dead at dawn, his face contorted in terror. The clock in the living room rumbled and struck five, one strike after the other, leaving a resonance that took a long time to disappear. From the end of the hall, as long and black as a tunnel, came the double snores of the maid and the cook, as methodical as a bellows machine, with interruptions of quiet in the midst of which he still heard the other sound, the intermittent breathing, the lament. Suspended like the Invisible Man at his parents’ bedroom door, free of the force of gravity by virtue of another invention no less decisive— an anti-gravitational injection will facilitate space travel— he leaned against the door to hear better, to be certain it was his mother’s voice he was hearing, familiar and at the same time unfamiliar, a high-pitched moan that suddenly became deep, as if it had come from someone else’s throat: a long moan muffled against a pillow, a lament that broke into weeping or isolated words it was impossible to decipher. Perhaps his mother would die if he didn’t go in and wake her. Perhaps she was suffering from a horrible disease and hadn’t told anyone. He wanted to stay and he wanted to run away. He wanted to save her from the disease or an affront he couldn’t imagine, and he wanted not to hear her, not to be awake with icy feet by the door, to enjoy the tranquility of his sister’s sleep right now, immune to uneasiness and danger. Suppose his father had come back and his mother was arguing with him? With a rush of panic he saw the landing light go on beneath the entrance door and heard the elevator start up. That would be the last straw: to have his father come back and find him in the hall, standing in the dark, at five in the morning. He’d have to hurry back to his room, but that would bring him to the front door, and his bad luck would turn his retreat into a trap. What he couldn’t afford to do was stand there, paralyzed. He rushed forward blindly and closed the door of his room behind him just as the elevator stopped at the landing. His heart pounded in his chest like the beats of a kettledrum in a scary movie. His father turned the key in the lock, walked slowly down the hall in the dark, leaving a long interval between steps as unfamiliar as those of a stranger. Motionless on the bed, his feet cold, his hands crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, Miguel achieved a state of perfect catalepsy.

THERE WERE SIGNS but he didn’t see them, or rather, chose not to see them. Just a few steps removed from Judith Biely’s presence, from the fleeting time he spent with her, reality became as blurred as the background of a photograph. He is amazed at his confusion: so far from Madrid and from her, stripped of the drama of all he’d taken for granted, believed was his, now dissolved like salt in water, Ignacio Abel insists on sizing up the past, an exercise as useless for alleviating remorse as for correcting mistakes. He would have liked to know the moment when the disaster became inevitable, when the monstrous began to seem normal, as invisible as the most ordinary acts in life, when the words that encouraged the crime, which no one took seriously because they were repeated and were nothing but words, turned into crimes, when the crimes became so routine they were now part of normal life. Today the army is the foundation and spine of the nation. When civil war breaks out, we won’t accept cowardly defeat by offering our neck to the enemy. There’s one moment and not another, a point of no return; a hand holding a pistol is raised and moves to the back of someone’s neck, and a few seconds go by before the shot is fired; even when the index finger begins to squeeze the trigger, the possibility of turning back is still there, if only for a second; over months or years, water gradually seeps into the roof of a building that no one repairs and it takes only an instant for it all to come to a head, a beam splits in half and the ceiling falls; in tenths of a second the flame that almost went out revives and sets fire to a curtain or a handful of papers that will feed the blaze that will destroy everything. In the period of transition from a capitalist to a socialist society the form of government will be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Things are always on the verge of not happening, or happening in another way; very slowly or very quickly they are carried out or drift toward paralysis, but there’s a moment, just one, when a remedy can be found, when what will be lost forever can still be saved, when the irruption of misfortune, the advent of the apocalypse, can be stopped. When the inflexible justice of the people is carried out, the exploiters and their followers will die with their shoes on. A man will leave his house one morning at the usual hour and his executioners will be waiting inside a car. He will pause in the doorway to adjust his gloves and hat as the men clutch their pistols with sweaty hands. The car window will open just enough to let the cigarette smoke out and then the signal will come. The men will get ready to shoot but a truck might suddenly drive by and disrupt the whole operation. The victim will get a chance to flee, a guard’s life will be spared.