Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“The government of the Republic obeys the law and puts criminals and killers in prison.”

“The government of the Republic is a Marxist puppet.”

Suddenly Ignacio Abel saw the inanity of the conversation in which he’d made himself an accessory with unnecessary vehemence. Just listening to the gibberish was degrading. He saw his brother-in-law not as a Fascist but as what he’d always seemed, an idiot. An idiot in a blue shirt, black leather straps, and absurd riding boots, besotted by cheap newspaper lyricism, impassioned barracks harangues, and pieces of poetic prose badly translated from German or Italian. An idiot who perhaps at heart wasn’t a bad person, who felt real affection for his sister, his niece and nephew, for whom he always brought presents, comic books about war or cowboys for the boy, princesses for the girl, a ball, a doll that cried when you bent it, who’d sat them on his knees to tell them stories when they were little and been eager to help when one of them fell sick. Or perhaps he really was a thug, in which case Ignacio Abel made the mistake of not taking him seriously.

And now the great idiot or great thug was holding his son’s arms from behind and teaching him to aim with a pistol, bigger and more obscene in his delicate hands, almost translucent like the skin at his temples, hands that didn’t have the strength to hold a soccer ball or grasp the climbing rope in gym class, hands that when Miguel was born were as fragile and soft as a gecko’s feet. Watching his weak chest rise and fall on feverish nights, he’d feared his son had pneumonia or tuberculosis. Stronger boys hit him in the schoolyard of the Institute School when his sister wasn’t around to defend him. So awkward in sports, so likely to come home from excursions with sunstroke or bruises from falling, because he was clumsy or because other children pushed him and he didn’t know how to defend himself; living in the clouds, so dependent on Lita, with whom he shared games and movie magazines when he should have been with boys his own age, too fond of spending time with the maids, listening to the plebeian songs they sang at top volume. He didn’t acknowledge to himself the degree to which this disapproval tarnished his feelings for his son. He disliked the boy’s weakness and at the same time felt an urgent need to protect him; he watched him on the sly, alarmed by something he couldn’t define. Miguel felt his father’s presence, and knowing he was being observed made him all the more insecure and awkward, or produced in him an outburst of audacity or capriciousness that seemed calculated to make his father lose patience. And so instead of lowering the pistol when he saw him appear in the mirror or handing it to his uncle to avoid disaster, Miguel aimed it at his father, and a moment later took a step back and cowered, trembling, closed his eyes, feeling the blow of the slap that hadn’t yet struck his pale face, instantly red, burning as if in a sudden attack of fever.

Watching his son’s face and his brother-in-law’s so close together, Ignacio Abel saw a resemblance between them. Not just some features, sketched in the boy and crudely visible in the adult, but a deeper resemblance, perhaps the secret weakness that would explain their resentment of him, the demanding father and disdainful brother-in-law, mother’s spouse, sister’s spouse, an intruder who couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t want Miguel to grow up resembling his uncle, having the same aquiline curve in his nose, the same scant, curly down on his upper lip, the same stare between sly and myopic, as if a part of him had retreated deep inside. Víctor took the pistol from the boy and said to Ignacio Abel, “Come on, man, don’t be like that, we were only playing.” Ignacio felt the rage growing in him, uncontrolled and yet as cold as the palms of his hands. He was going to slap his son, and while part of him was ashamed, another part moved ahead, animated by the boy’s fear, offended by his instinctive gesture of seeking refuge in his uncle, turning to Víctor to feel protected from his own father. He was aware of the physical impulse that sustained and propelled his rage but did nothing to contain it, and his son’s evident weakness, the tremor of his wet lower lip, instead of dissuading him, angered him more. Miguel took a step or two back, looking at his uncle, who’d moved away after placing the pistol in his shoulder holster and buttoning his jacket, as if to make it more invisible, intimidated or perhaps sensing that the more the boy wanted to take refuge in him, the greater his father’s rage would be. “Come on, man,” he repeated, but with a curt gesture Ignacio Abel silenced him, and Víctor moved to one side, all his manliness gone, fearful, in spite of his boots and leather straps and the pistol in its leather holster, that the punishment would fall on him as well.

He looked Miguel in the eye as the boy backed into the closet mirror where a few seconds earlier he’d seen himself as a movie hero. At what moment does one reach the point of no return, the hateful thing that can no longer be erased? Towering over his son, he raised his right hand, thought about leaving the room, slamming the door, and joining the obnoxious family celebration, perhaps shouting at his brother-in-law, demanding that if he ever wanted to set foot in his house again it would have to be without a pistol and a blue shirt. But that’s not what he did. He didn’t spare himself the future shame or indignity of hiding from Judith Biely the kind of act she wouldn’t have forgiven, that would have made her see in him the shadow of someone she didn’t know. His hand came down, cutting through the air, open and violent, as heavy as a weapon, the palm much wider and harder than the boy’s face. He hit him noticing the sting on his palm and the flush of heat on his face. His son’s face turned to the wall. The boy’s eyes filled with tears, looked up at him from below, as if from the interior of a burrow, fear replaced by resentment, his cheek scarlet, a trickle of urine rolling down one of his thin legs. As Ignacio Abel turned to leave the room, he saw his daughter standing motionless by the door where she kept her school notebooks. She had seen it all.

ISOLATED GUNFIRE ON a fresh morning in May, the air perfumed with mountain aromas: thyme, rosemary flowers, white petals with yellow pistils among the bright rockrose leaves. The forest cut down a few years earlier to level the ground for University City was coming back to life on the cleared land and inclines of unfinished construction sites, the open spaces that weren’t playing fields yet. The whistles of bullets blended with the whistles of swallows; gunshots like hollow explosions of fireworks at a distant fair, beyond the clattering typewriters and open windows of the drafting office, where draftsmen and typists looked out with more curiosity than alarm, trying to determine where the shots were coming from. The air still clean, the ashtrays and wastebaskets empty, the secretaries’ lips and nails bright red. He liked that time of morning, the entire day ahead, the impulse to work still not exhausted by fatigue or tedium. Perhaps the mail clerk had been distracted by the commotion and delivery would be late: he’d come at his slow pace, his expression both self-important and servile, holding the large tray, and when he entered the office, ceremoniously requesting permission to do so, perhaps Ignacio Abel would recognize among the official letters an envelope with Judith’s handwriting. As soon as they parted they began writing to each other. They wanted to relieve with written words the emptiness of their time apart, prolong a conversation they never grew tired of. More gunfire now, not pistols but rifles. At what moment had his ear grown accustomed, begun to differentiate? Better to behave as if he’d heard nothing: not look up from the desk, the drawing board, keep busy each minute of the morning, dictating letters, receiving calls, insisting against all odds that construction would go on; he’d tell his secretary to return to her typewriter instead of spreading rumors about gunfire; he’d call the Assault Guard barracks and request that they send reinforcements, though it would be more practical to call Dr. Negrín, who’d bring to bear his political influence. Much more vigilance would be required night and day at the building sites now that the Anarchists of the National Confederation of Labor wanted to declare another construction strike.