Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Alone in Madrid, dedicated to assignments that were, for the most part, illusory — during the first months of the war he still went almost every day to his office in University City, examining plans and documents that were worthless now, inspecting abandoned construction sites — he spent the summer withdrawn into a fearful silence. The rational words he would have liked to say in a serene voice, the sweet ordinary words of his previous life, no longer mattered. At times he spoke aloud just to hear a voice in his empty house, his abandoned office; he imagined he was talking to his children, to Adela; he told them about his strange, solitary life in Madrid, the changes on the street and in people’s clothing, the new attire that didn’t exist a short while ago and yet formed part of a hallucinatory normality. He imagined conversations with Judith Biely as futilely as he wrote her letters he didn’t know where to send and often didn’t put down on paper. Perhaps there was a word he didn’t say that might have prevented Judith’s leaving Madrid. Perhaps he came close to finding her on the night of July 19 and leaping with her onto a train or persuading her not to take it. Things are about to happen but don’t. The first flame is extinguished and doesn’t cause the fire. The man grasping the pistol in his pocket doesn’t take it out because of fear or nervousness, or because he thinks he sees someone who looks like the secret police watching him. His intended victim will walk past him and never know he was about to die. On Friday, July 10, Ignacio Abel finally gets in touch with Judith, after two weeks of not hearing from her. As they talk on the phone and she agrees to meet, Lieutenant José Castillo of the Assault Guard — slim, his hair combed straight back, round glasses, impeccable uniform, leather straps and boots gleaming — is sipping his coffee. At the end of the bar he sees some strangers who look suspicious and instinctively reaches for his pistol. He frequently receives anonymous letters and knows that at any moment he could be killed, just like his friend Captain Faraudo two months earlier, yet he still has the gallantry to go out alone and on foot to his quarters, crossing the center of Madrid. The strangers finish their coffee and leave. At the very last moment they were ordered to abort the attempt on Lieutenant Castillo’s life.

He found no excuses even for himself. Having lost what mattered to him most, and knowing that he, too, could become one of the murdered, gave him no right to innocence. When did he begin to lie without effort or remorse? When did he become accustomed to hearing shots and calculating their distance and danger without going to the window? When did he see a pistol up close for the first time, not in a film, not in the holster of a police officer, but in the hand of someone he knew, bulging in a pocket, the front of a jacket, a pistol or revolver shown with almost the same ease as a lighter or fountain pen. In May, in the Café Lion, a few days after the murder of Captain Faraudo, Dr. Juan Negrín searched the pockets of his jacket, too tight for his Herculean bulk, after summarily cleaning his fingers, stained by red juice from the prawns he’d been eating, and instead of the pack of cigarettes Ignacio Abel imagined, he took out a pistol and put it on the table, next to the plate of prawns and mugs of beer, an unlikely pistol, so small it looked like a toy. “Look what I have to carry,” he said, “and I can’t even be on the street by myself anymore,” and he pointed to the plainclothes policeman sitting alone at a table near the entrance, engrossed in sucking on a toothpick. In the gangster films he went to see with Judith Biely, pistols were objects with a lacquered shine that had a symbolic, almost immaterial quality, like lamps or flashlights, providing a bewitched immobility with their brightness, an abstract death without traces, not a hole or a tear or a stain in the close-fitting suit of the character who was shot, the silky evening dress of the beautiful but deceitful woman who deserved to die in the end. Gradually pistols were becoming real, without his paying attention, without his knowing how to notice them. He went to the Congress of Deputies to look for Negrín — he left, a secretary told him with a smile, he was dying of hunger and asked me to tell you he’s waiting for you at the Café Lion — and on the counter of the checkroom he saw a wooden box filled with pistols under a neatly hand-lettered sign: The honorable deputies are reminded that it is not permitted to carry firearms inside the parliamentary area. Leafing through a copy of Mundo Gráfico in the anteroom of the dressmaker where Adela and the girl were trying on outfits, he saw the advertisement for Astra pistols among those for skin creams and pills to regulate menstruation and increase the size of one’s breasts. Protect your possessions and the security of your loved ones.

In the photographs of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes, murdered for unknown reasons during a disturbance in the crowd watching the military parade on the Day of the Republic, one can see that many of those accompanying the coffin, both military and civilian, carry unsheathed pistols. Although it’s April 16 and the leaves have come out on the trees along the Paseo de la Castellana, everyone is in dark winter clothing. From the scaffolding at a construction site, pistols and machine pistols are fired over the heads of the funeral procession, and people run in all directions, seeking shelter in gardens and behind trees, and for some minutes the coffin of Second Lieutenant Reyes is abandoned in the puddles on the pavement. When the funeral reaches the East Cemetery several hours later, it has left a trail of more than twenty corpses on the streets. “You shouldn’t be so confident, Don Ignacio. If you give me your authorization, I’ll arrange for a couple of comrades from the union to escort you when you inspect the sites.” Eutimio, the construction foreman at the Medical School, had come into Ignacio Abel’s office with his cap in hand and before speaking had closed the door. “A lot of maniacs are running loose, Don Ignacio. None of us is safe.” In the wind and rain, the crowd accompanying the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes goes up Calle de Alcalá, and when it reaches the Plaza de Manuel Becerra, a formation of Assault Guards armed with rifles bars the way. The shouts of “Long live” and “Death to” become more violent, as do the chanting of the rosary and the hymns. The crowd advances on the barrier of uniforms and the Assault Guards open fire at point-blank range. A slender, pale lieutenant with glasses and a close-fitting uniform pulls his pistol from its holster and fires into the chest of a young man with the look of a Fascist student who was advancing on him, his face red from singing a hymn. But there is a state of emergency and newspapers are censored, so the next day one can’t find a clear report of what happened or the number of casualties. Or the announcement of a funeral is published but no one understands it because it was censored a day before news of the killing was published. Besides, you’re in a hurry, you have no time and decide not to see what’s in front of your eyes. Perhaps you’re in a taxi, impatient to reach the appointment with your lover, and you pay no attention to the crowd in your way and aren’t curious to know whose funeral it is, only irritated because you’ll arrive late, because on account of that disturbance you’ll lose some of the precious minutes of your meeting with her. From the shadows of the bedroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, on the other side of the thicket, the closed shutters, the curtains, gunfire and panic at the end of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes may have been a distant background noise for Ignacio Abel as he embraces Judith Biely, naked on a red quilt. You leave hurriedly at eight-thirty in the morning to go to work and don’t see that across the street a car is parked with its windows down despite the cold and wind, and don’t hear that the engine has just started, or when you do and look up, you see the barrels of the pistols ready to shoot. The police escort throws himself on Professor Jiménez de Asúa, wanting to push him out of the way of the bullets, and is shot instead and lies dying on the sidewalk as the killers flee on foot because the driver is clumsy or nervous and floods the engine. How long did it take Adela, not to accumulate small bits of evidence and clues, but to accept what she knew, to dare see what was in front of her? How many times did she go into his study and see that he’d forgotten to lock the drawer and decide not to open it? Only a few meters from where the police officer has died in a pool of blood that stains the hands and shirt cuffs of Jiménez de Asúa, the men at a bar discuss soccer, a fruit seller raises the metal shutters of his store — no one knows what just happened. A month later, the judge who sentenced the Falangist gunmen, easy to arrest because they fled on foot after failing to start the getaway car, leaves his house one morning, barely takes a few steps on the sidewalk, raises his hand to hail a taxi, and is struck by bursts of fire from a machine pistol. At the house of the lawyer Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, a child delivers a basket of eggs with a lid in the shape of a hen, saying it comes from a grateful client. The lawyer lifts the lid and a bomb explodes that destroys half his house and leaves him uninjured.