Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“The same thing happened when you were a boy,” Eutimio was saying, his face close and slightly out of focus. “You’d stand there, thinking your thoughts, and your father, may he rest in peace, would say, ‘This boy of mine looks like he’s turning into a sleepwalker.’”

The tavern, more like a wine cellar, was dark and deep and smelled of sawdust and sour wine, casks and herring in brine. Entering felt like advancing through the half-light of the past: as a boy his father would send him to taverns like this one to buy a pint of wine or to take a message to one of the masons or artisans who worked for him. But here, soccer, bullfight, and boxing posters lined the whitewashed walls, and a large radio played behind the counter. On the gaudy print from an almanac, under a legend that proclaimed Happy 1936! the Republic was a young woman with a Phrygian cap pulled to one side of her head, her body barely covered by the folds of a tricolor flag that molded her breasts and revealed the fleshy thigh of a chorus girl or dancer.

The men drinking at the zinc bar and at the tables greeted Eutimio and examined Ignacio Abel from head to toe. Their presence and voices filled the space, and they gave off a strong sensation of vigor and weariness after work. The new arrivals sat at an isolated table, and the tavernkeeper brought them a squared flask of red wine and two low, thick glasses, still wet from the rinse water. When Eutimio sat down, the pistol in the inside pocket of his jacket bulged visibly.

“It seems unbelievable, Don Ignacio, that you and I are sitting here at the same table, when at work I have to take off my cap to speak to you and it’s not a good idea to look you in the eye.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Eutimio. Hasn’t life changed at all since my father’s time? And it’ll change even more now with the Popular Front government.”

“A government of fine bourgeois gentlemen, Don Ignacio, who ignore the workers’ vote.”

“Our party’s to blame, yours and mine. The one that hasn’t allowed a Socialist to be president. It was so difficult to bring in the Republic and now they don’t want it anymore, they don’t think it’s enough. Now they want a Soviet revolution. You were at the May Day demonstration where the Socialists paraded, and it looked as if they were on Red Square in Moscow. Red flags with the hammer and sickle, portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Our people were different from the Communists only because they wore red shirts, not sky-blue ones. Not a single flag of the Republic, Eutimio, the Republic that came in because we Socialists wanted it, because the Republicans were nothing. But these May Day Socialists didn’t cheer for the Republic, they cheered for the Red Army. To the great joy of the right, as you can imagine.”

“I already told you, Don Ignacio, the Republic’s pretty but it doesn’t feed you.”

“And do strikes with gun battles and burned churches feed you?”

“You don’t have to say that to me, Don Ignacio. I’m an old man, you know, and I’ve seen all kinds of things, but until now life hasn’t gone badly for me. I have a decent little house right near here and a small orchard in the village, and my wife and daughters sew on Singers and earn a wage that’s no worse than mine. Since I know how to read and write and have a good head for numbers, I could be a foreman, and in my house we might have hard times but not poverty. My younger boy, thanks to you, has a job as a clerk in the waterworks office, and though he doesn’t earn much, he’s hard-working. At night he’s studying to be a draftsman, and I hope he can find a job in the University City office someday soon, if you give him a hand. But other men are much worse off, Don Ignacio, and they don’t have patience and good judgment, and if they do, they can lose them when there’s no work and not much justice and they see their children die of hunger, or they lose their house because they can’t pay for it and find themselves sleeping under bridges or spending the nights in doorways.”

“It can’t all be done at once, Eutimio.” Now it was his voice that sounded false, even though he was saying something reasonable, perhaps as reasonable as it was sterile. “The Republic’s only five years old. The Popular Front won only three months ago.”

“And who are we to tell anybody to be patient? Or to wait a few months to give food to his children or take them to a doctor? Neither of us is going to bed without supper tonight, and excuse me for comparing myself to you.”

“And is setting off bombs and killing people going to solve anything? Having an armed rebellion against the Republic as they did in Asturias? Threatening every day to break the truce and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

“The working class has to defend itself, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio gestured for him to lower his voice. “If it weren’t for those boys on watch outside, you and I probably couldn’t have our quiet glass of wine.”

“You people don’t understand, Eutimio.” As soon as he said it, he realized the plural was offensive, but he was becoming inflamed, and an unpleasant but strong feeling of superiority erupted in him. “There are laws that are above everybody. There are police, there are judges. We’re not in the Wild West or Chicago, the way everybody seems to think. You don’t take up arms against the legitimate government just because you don’t like the election results. You don’t go around with a pistol taking the law into your own hands.”

“I’m not a fool, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio had left his empty glass on the table and was looking at him seriously, offended, at the same time leaning his head forward to make sure no one heard him. “What you say about the law is fine, but at this point nobody believes it anymore. Tell it to the rebellious military who never stop conspiring and the judges who let the Falangist gunmen who kill workers go free.”

“Then what should we do? Should we all arm ourselves? ‘One man, one pistol’ instead of ‘One man, one vote’?”

“I don’t know what we should do, Don Ignacio. Probably younger people whose ideals are stronger than ours will give us the solution. When I was a boy and heard Pablo Iglesias and the speakers back then talking about the classless society, tears came to my eyes. And now, instead of the classless society, what I dream about is my little orchard and not losing my wages. Maybe you didn’t imagine either when you were a boy that you’d enjoy driving a car and living in a building with an elevator in the Salamanca district—”

“We’re back to that again.”

“Don’t make me lose my patience, Don Ignacio. Or my respect either, if you’ll permit me. And don’t raise your voice — you’ll probably say something other people won’t like to hear. Young people have a spirit we don’t understand anymore. Even my boy, who never broke a dish, who always went from home to work and work to home, joined the Communist Youth last year. Upsetting for a father, but now they’ve joined with our youth groups, which makes me feel calmer. You and I will be happy if this world we know gets a little better — after all, it’s our world. But what they want is a different world. Haven’t you seen the posters? ‘We carry a new world in our hearts.’”

Literature again, he thought, but he didn’t say it for fear of offending Eutimio. Cheap literature, newspaper trash, third-rate verses, sometimes sung in anthems for greater effect. An entire country, an entire continent infected by mediocre literature, drunk on shoddy music, operetta marches, and bullfight paso dobles. In this tavern, with its poor electric light and stink of bad wine, the floor littered with wet sawdust and cigarette butts, he realized that deep in his soul he didn’t feel much sympathy for his fellow men, that he needed the vagueness and protection of a certain distance to get along with them, to become emotional over principles and words of liberation like the ones he’d heard as a boy at his father’s meetings. He thought that what he really wanted was to leave Spain: with no preparation, notification, or remorse, to put distance between himself and his country, get on a night express next to Judith Biely and wake in a port city where he’d sail that same day on a ship for America, disappear without a trace, free of any connection, as separated from the outside world and all the anguished obligations in his life as when he embraced her after undressing her and buried his face in her neck, inhaling her smell, as if he were breathing in advance the air of another country and another life, his eyes closed while the curtains filtered the workday-morning light, and muffled sounds of the city reached the brief, hired intimacy that welcomed them in the house of Madame Mathilde.