Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The next morning, when he arrived at the office, Eutimio bowed his head slightly and made a gesture of greeting without looking him in the eye.

TIME ON OUR HANDS, said Judith before hanging up the phone, confirming the time they would meet, the start of the trip, an almost dreamed-of flight, so there would be no possible doubt or confusion, and he liked the poetry implicit in the common expression, as he did so often when he learned a new turn of phrase in English from Judith or explained a Spanish one to her. Time on our hands, for once overflowing cupped hands like cool water from a powerful tap where someone who can finally satisfy his thirst will joyfully plunge his face or wet his lips; whole days and nights exclusively theirs, not shared with anyone, not contaminated by the indignity of hiding, not measured out in minutes or hours, a treasure of time whose magnitude was difficult for them to imagine. But what they couldn’t imagine at all was the two of them away from Madrid, in a setting other than the city that had brought them together and imprisoned them, subjecting them to the curse of secrecy, lies, and never enough time. Time on our hands, he recalls now, repeating it in a soft voice, looking at his hands inert on his thighs, on the raincoat he didn’t take off when he boarded the train, hands good for nothing except patting his pockets in search of some document or rubbing his face each morning after shaving, clutching the sweat-darkened handle of his suitcase, fastening buttons or discovering that a button has fallen off and left only vestiges of thread, or his shoelaces are fraying, or the right pocket of his jacket is coming loose. At least we had that, he thinks, that gift, not the anticipation of something that would come later but almost a final favor before the inevitable occurred, four whole days, from Thursday to Sunday, the straight white highway unfurling before the car when they left Madrid for the south while dawn was breaking, and at the end of their journey the house on the sand escarpment, the smell of the Atlantic coming in as forcefully as the smell of the Hudson comes in now through the train window: hands filled with time, with the craving proximity of the other, undressing each other as soon as they took a few steps inside the dark of the house, not opening a window, not taking the bags out of the car, exhausted after so many hours on the road and still aching with desire, incapable of putting it off any longer. It wasn’t the same as saying tiempo de sobra: no matter how much time they had, it would never be more than enough, not even by a minute, and in any case those words didn’t express the physical sensation of an undeserved abundance that fills your hands, like the coins or diamonds of a fairy-tale treasure, tiempo a manos llenas. Hands full of time, but no matter how tightly you squeeze your fingers and press together your hands curved like a bowl, water will always escape, time trickling away second by second like tiny grains of sand, gleaming like crystals in the morning light on the beach they walked together, not seeing anyone for its entire length, sole survivors of a cataclysm that had left them alone in the world, fugitives from everything, from their lives and the names that identified them with those lives, renegades from any tie or loyalty — parents, children, spouses, friends, obligations, principles — other than the ones that joined the two of them, apostates from any belief.

If at least you’d had real courage, he thinks now, looking at his two empty hands, hands with sinuous veins and badly trimmed, slightly dirty nails, if you’d dared a real apostasy and not a semblance, a real flight and not a fiction. Even the four days now fading away into nothingness for the lovers who until then hadn’t been able to spend more than a few hours together, hadn’t known what it meant to open one’s eyes at the first light of day and find each other, to be present at the other’s contented sleep and waking. Always so little time, the hours numbered, falling away into the sand of fleeting minutes and seconds, the timepiece ticking, the noisy mechanism in the alarm clock on the night table or the subtler one on his wrist, attached to it as if it were a pillory, second by second, the tiny jaws undermining the houses of time where they hid to be together, their secret refuges almost always precarious, always in danger of being invaded, no matter how deep they wanted to hide, one beside the other and one in the other, canceling the outside world in the single-mindedness of an embrace with eyes closed. Footsteps in the hall of the house of assignation, doors that at any moment might open, voices on the other side of thin walls, the moans of other lovers, inhabitants like them of the secret city, the submerged, venal Madrid of reserved booths, rooms rented by the hour, parks at night, the sordid border territory where adultery and prostitution came together. They lived besieged by creditors, by thieves and beggars of time, by greedy moneylenders and shady traffickers in hours. Time phosphoresced on the hands of the alarm clock on the night table in the room at Madame Mathilde’s, in the low light of curtains drawn in the middle of the morning. The ticktock sounded like a taxi meter: if they were late by only a few minutes in leaving the rented room, they’d hear footsteps in the hall and knocks on the door; if they wanted more time they’d have to buy it at a higher rate. Time fled in numerical spasms like distance on the car’s odometer while they traveled south as if they never had to return. The time of each wait dilated and even halted because of uncertainty, anguish that the other wouldn’t appear. The lightning flash of arrival abolished for a few minutes the passage of time, leaving it suspended in an illusion of abundance. Illicit time had to be purchased minute by minute, obtained like a dose of opium or morphine. The scant wealth of time was lost waiting for a taxi, traveling endlessly in a very slow streetcar, driving in traffic, dialing a number on the phone and waiting for the wheel to return to its point of departure in order to dial the next one: how much time wasted waiting for an answer, listening to a bell that rings on the other end in an empty room, growing impatient because an operator takes a long time to answer or transfer a call, fingers restless as they drum on a table, his eyes vigilant in case someone approaches from the end of the hall, a hemorrhaging of time, drop by drop or in a gush. It was Philip Van Doren who gave them the four days when he offered them the house he’d bought or was about to buy on the Cádiz coast without even seeing it, knowing it only from plans and photographs. He seemed to take pleasure in sheltering them, urging them toward each other from a benevolent distance, intervening in the name of chance, as he’d done when he left them alone in his study that October afternoon. The house of time Ignacio Abel wanted to build so that only Judith and he would live in it really existed for only four days, between Thursday afternoon and the small hours of Monday: white, with cubic volumes, outlined in a horizontal on an escarpment, its forms variable in the photos Van Doren spread before him on the tablecloth at the Ritz where he’d invited them to dinner, in a reserved booth, implicitly acknowledging the advantage to Ignacio Abel of not being seen in public with his lover, while from the street, from the Plaza de Neptuno, came the muffled sounds of a battle with stones and bullets between Assault Guards and striking construction workers — whistles, breaking glass, sirens. He’d pushed the cuffs of his sweater away from his wrists with impatient gestures and placed the photos on the table as in a card game, raising his depilated eyebrows, puffing with delight on a Havana cigar, a smile on his fleshy lips, his too-small mouth, incongruous with his heavy square jaw and hairy fingers. “My dear Professor Abel, don’t feel obliged to say no. I’m not doing you a favor, I’m requesting your professional opinion, asking you for a report on a painting before I buy it. Look at the house and tell me its condition. Live in it for a few days. They assure me it’s fully stocked, but I don’t believe anyone’s lived in it yet. A German acquaintance of mine, loaded with money, had it built, and now he’s not sure it’s a good idea for him to go on living and doing business in Spain. I presume to imagine that Judith wouldn’t mind accompanying you. It’ll be good for you to escape the heat in Madrid and the more suffocating political climate. Now that there’s another strike, it won’t be prudent for you to be seen arriving every morning at University City. Do you believe the military will finally rebel, Professor Abel? Or that the left will move forward with a new dress rehearsal for a Bolshevik revolution? Or will everybody take a summer vacation and then nothing will happen, as the minister of communications told me just a few days ago?”