Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

He should have spoken to Negrín some time ago but always put it off. He should have told him he’d been invited to spend the next academic year in America and hadn’t done so; he should have asked his opinion before accepting the invitation but said nothing to him; now he would have to tell him he’d accepted without requesting official permission. He hadn’t said anything to Adela and his children either. The invitation from Burton College had arrived in a long, ivory-colored envelope, and when he saw it on the mail tray he quickly put it in his pocket, then in the locked drawer where he hid Judith’s letters and photos. He responded with vague remarks when the children asked about the promised trip, the nocturnal journey in a sleeper car to Paris, the Atlantic crossing, the elevated trains and skyscrapers in New York, the Automats, which Lita had read about in encyclopedias and illustrated magazines. He put off the uncomfortable moment of reciting the explanation he’d elaborated, aware that he had put himself in the contemptible position of lying when he promised them, months earlier, something no one had asked for: it wasn’t a good idea for the children to miss a year of school, he planned to say; the salary was lower than it had seemed at first; there was no guarantee he’d be commissioned to design the library building (a clearing in a forest on the other side of the ocean, a few lines sketched on the broad sheets of a notebook, barely the shadow of a form that perhaps would never exist, as uncertain as his future). He discovered that a lie was a loan for which usurious interest accumulated in a short time, and new lies extended the time at an even higher rate and left him at the mercy of increasingly impatient creditors. Construction was advancing much more slowly than anticipated (everything so difficult, so slow, applications paralyzed in offices, machinery scant and defective, the means of delivery and transport primitive, the men unwilling, working in the sun with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, breathing heavily, saliva-soaked cigarette butts hanging from their mouths, looking around in fear of gunmen and assailants); even if the construction strike was not total, it was clear that University City would not be inaugurated in October. To leave before the end — wasn’t that disloyal to Negrín? Besides, Judith Biely took it for granted he’d travel alone to America. Ignacio Abel wasn’t lying when he told her he wanted that as much as she did, but he did lie when he led her to assume his wife and children knew about a decision that by now was irreversible. It wasn’t a complete lie, perhaps merely a truth delayed. Sooner or later that difficult familial conversation would be inevitable; he imagined it so clearly, it was almost as if it had already taken place (Miguel’s serious, aggrieved face, Adela’s expression of confirmed disillusionment, his daughter’s peeved but unshakable faith in him), as when the alarm clock rings and you dream that you’ve already gotten up and showered and the dream allows you a few more minutes of uneasy sleep.

The days and weeks were slipping away without his taking action or saying anything; summer was approaching and there was less and less time until his journey was a problem only because others would have to find out about it, like a bank teller who thinks his embezzlement is less of a crime because it hasn’t been discovered yet. (It had been the same twelve years earlier, when he was going to leave for Germany: the boy sick, almost a newborn, Adela’s collapse after the birth, and he, the letter confirming his trip in his pocket, saying nothing, waiting.) The appearance of normality was in and of itself a poor antidote to disaster. Working every day, presenting an irreproachable face to the world, confirming that the landscape of buildings and avenues on the other side of the picture windows increasingly resembled the great utopian model of University City, its abstract buildings surrounded by groves of trees and playing fields, its straight avenues and winding paths along which groups of students would walk someday, in spite of the slowness of the work, the scarcity of money, the stalled applications, the apocalyptic propagandists for the strike and the Anarchist revolution who appeared at work sites brandishing red-and-black flags and automatic pistols. Getting up each morning and having breakfast with Adela and the children, reading the paper, while through the open balconies the fresh morning air came in, perfumed by the blossoms of young acacias; while his desire for Judith throbbed in secret (he’d call her as soon as he left the house, from the first telephone booth; better yet, he’d close himself in his study right now and ask her in a low voice to meet him as soon as she could, wherever she liked, in the house of assignation, in a café, in the Retiro) and the weight of postponed decisions grew like a barely perceived tumor. The greater the upheaval, the more he was driven to give no sign, to not lose control of what others saw. Going out and not thinking about the possibility of a gunman waiting by the entrance. Staying in the office, so busy with a calculation or the correction of a drawing that not even gunfire could make him look up for more than a moment. Not going into the corridor to look for the clerk with the unctuous manner and the tray of mail. Not sitting and looking at the telephone, as if the simple effort of his attention might cause a ring that would be a call from Judith. He gathered the courage to call Dr. Negrín at the Congress of Deputies, and a secretary granted him the relief of telling him that Don Juan wasn’t in but she’d give him the message. The gunfire had stopped; from a distance came the sound of an ambulance siren or an approaching Assault Guard van. His secretary entered his office without knocking, upset, speaking in a rush, almost not giving Ignacio Abel time to hide under a folder of documents the letter to Judith Biely he’d begun writing.

“The Anarchists, Don Ignacio, a picket line. They came in a car, as in the movies, to the Medical School and started shooting at the workers on the morning shift, calling them Fascists and traitors to the working class. But some boys from the Socialist militia on guard duty shot back from the windows.”

“Where were the police?”

“Where do you think? They arrived after the gunmen had fled. You should’ve seen the militia boys, how they fought back. The car windows were shattered. And what a pool of blood when they drove away. One of them must’ve been hit.”

They chatted about the gunfire the way they would talk on Monday mornings about the Sunday soccer games or a boxing match: only a minor injury among the workers in spite of the shooting and the broken glass, but one or two of the others must be in serious condition, judging by the blood that poured from the car they escaped in; the blood bright red, not the black liquid of the movies, but dark and quickly coagulated, absorbed by the earth, raked by laborers who covered it with sand before returning to their work, guarded by young militiamen whom they reverently called the Motorized, a fanciful name originating from the fact that in parades some of them patrolled on old motorcycles with sidecars. “At least one of them’s dead, that’s certain,” said the mail clerk, the tray of letters abandoned on a table, among them perhaps one that Judith Biely had written and mailed the day before, only an hour after leaving him. “Two men carried him to the car and he couldn’t stand up and his face and shirt were covered in blood.” If he died, they’d bury him amid gales of banners, the coffin covered with a red-and-black flag, advancing above a mass of heads and hands anxious to touch it, to hold it high, carried like a boat on the current of a river that flooded the entire street. They’d sing anthems, shake clenched fists, shout promises of reparation and revenge, insults hurled at the closed balconies of bourgeois residences. But a shot or an explosion could provoke a wave of rage and panic in the crowd that would demolish it like a cyclone in a field of wheat: more shots, real ones now, the Assault Guard’s horses neighing, broken glass, streetcars and automobiles overturned. Someone lay dead on the pavement, and the collective liturgy of death would be repeated a little more passionately: perhaps someone attending the funeral or a passerby walked in front of a bullet; a Falangist gunman who’d fired from a moving car, around which the swelling crowd soon closed. This dead man would have his funeral with an identical mob, with other anthems and other flags, with speeches in hoarse voices and “Long live”s and “Death to”s before an open grave. At the funerals of the leftist dead there were forests of red flags and raised fists and parades of young militiamen in uniform; at the other funerals the smoke of incense rose, dispensed by priests, along with a choir of voices reciting the rosary. So ironic that both sides seemed blind to the similarity between their funeral rites, their celebrations of courage and sacrifice, of martyrdom, the rejection of the material world in the name of paradise on earth or the kingdom of heaven, as if they wanted to fast-forward to Judgment Day and hated nonbelievers and agnostics much more than their professed enemies. After the funeral of Jiménez de Asúa’s police escort, the crowd returning from the cemetery attacked a church that eventually was enveloped in flames; firemen who came to put out the fire were greeted by bullets. During those days in May, Madrid was a city of funerals and bullfights. Almost every afternoon, crowds walked along Calle de Alcalá to the bullfight arena or the East Cemetery.