Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Give me time. If I had time. It’s a question of time. We’re still in time. We’re out of time. In the reserved booth at the Ritz, Philip Van Doren looked at them with the magnanimity of a potentate, an oligarch of time, offering them the tempting and perhaps humiliating alms of what they most desired, so powerful he didn’t ask anything in return, not even gratitude, perhaps only the spectacle of the penury he detected in them, the subtle way in which hidden sexual passion debased them, consumed them, like respectable people subject to a secret addiction, morphine or alcohol, reaching the point where their deterioration becomes visible. I need time. How much more time do you want me to give you? Time like a solid block of calendar pages, each day an imperceptible sheet of paper, a number in red or black, the name of a weekday. Judith Biely, foreign and distinctive, inexplicably his, searching for his foot under the table as she smiled, raising the glass of wine to her lips, playing footsie, she had taught him to say. Time slow, fossilized, bogged down, solemn in the pendulum clock at the end of the hall, the one Ignacio Abel sees as he stands waiting, clutching the telephone receiver, impatient, the clock that strikes the hours with bronze resonances in the midst of his insomnia, in the dark expanse of the apartment, when he thought an eternity had gone by and he counts the strokes and it’s only two in the morning, his face against the pillow and the racing heartbeat, the rhythmic surges of blood in his temples, while Adela sleeps beside him, or is awake and pretends to be asleep just as he does, and also knows he’s not sleeping, the two of them motionless, not touching, not saying anything, their two minds physically as close as their bodies yet remote from each other, hermetic, submerged in the same disquiet, the identical agony of time. Time that doesn’t pass, as crushing as a burden, a trunk or a slab of stone. Time at dinner, when the four of them fall silent and hear only the sound of the spoon scraping against the china soup bowl and the noise Miguel makes eating it and the small thump of the heel of his shoe against the floor. The time I have left before the deadline for requesting a leave at University City or applying for a visa at the American embassy. The exquisite time Judith takes to come when he’s known how to caress her, attentive to her with his five senses, Judith’s half-open mouth, her eyes closed, breathing through her nose, her long naked body tensing, the palms of her hands on his thighs, her jaw tensing as she is about to climax. The time that always comes to an end, although the fervor of their meeting made it seem unlimited at first. Knotting his tie in front of the mirror, a quick comb through his hair, Judith sitting on the bed and pulling on her stockings, observing his hurry, his subtle gesture when he consults his watch. The time of returning in a taxi or Ignacio Abel’s car, both of them suddenly silent, far apart in the silence, already fallen back into the distance that does not separate them yet, looking through the window at illuminated clocks against the night sky of Madrid that indicate an hour always too late for him (but he doesn’t think about the other time waiting for her when she goes into her room at the pensión and looks at the typewriter where she hasn’t written anything for so long, the letters from her mother that she answers only now and then, suppressing a part of her life in Madrid, inventing in order not to tell her she’s become a married man’s lover). The time it takes for the sereno to appear after the echoing claps that call him in the nocturnal silence of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, more and more distressing, like guilt nipping at his heels; the time that goes by until the elevator arrives and then ascends very slowly and he looks at his watch again and thinks with disbelief that by now Adela must be asleep and won’t notice the smell of tobacco and another woman’s perfume, the crude odor of sex; the time for getting out on the landing, trying to prevent his footsteps from sounding too loud on the marble in the corridor, looking for the key in his pocket and making it turn in the lock, hoping no light is on in the apartment except for the altar of Our Father Jesus of Medinaceli with its small eave and two tiny electric lamps. Time will tell. Time heals. The time has come to save Spain from her ancestral enemies. The time of glory will return. If the government really intended to do it, it would still have time to head off the military conspiracy. Victorious Banners will return. I truly hope time does not pass. The Time of Our Patience Has Run Out. It is no longer the Time for Compromises or Vagueness with the Enemies of Spain. The time I have lost doing nothing, leaving urgent decisions for another day or the next few hours, imagining that passivity will make time resolve matters on its own. The time left before Judith decides to return to America or receives a job offer or simply goes to another European city less provincial and more stable, where there’s no shooting in the streets and the papers don’t publish front-page articles on political crimes. The weeks, the days, perhaps, to wait before the explosion of the military uprising everyone talks about, with suicidal fatalism, with impatience for the disaster, the social revolution, the apocalypse, whatever it may be, to finally happen, anything but this time of waiting, seeing funerals go by with coffins draped in flags, carried on the shoulders of comrades with a praetorian air, in red shirts or navy-blue shirts and military leather straps, raising open hands or clenched fists, shouting slogans, “Long live”s and “Death to”s, taking hours to reach the cemetery. The time it takes a letter recently dropped in a box to be picked up and sorted, canceled, delivered to the address indicated on the envelope; the time it takes each morning for the slow, servile clerk to distribute the mail, moving among the typists’ and draftsmen’s tables with the tray in his hands, stopping with unacceptable indolence to chat with someone, accept a cigarette; the time it takes for his greedy fingers to tear the edge and extract the sheets, for his eyes to move quickly over each line, from left to right, then return to the beginning, like the carriage of a typewriter, like the shuttle of a loom, drinking in each word as quickly as the time it took to write it, soaking up in the trickles of ink the traits of a handwriting as desired and familiar as the lines on a face, as the hand that slid across the paper writing it. You can’t say no to me. Imagine the house and us in it, we can’t turn down what Phil’s offering us, I have a right to ask this of you, only a few days.

He looks at his watch and realizes it’s been a while since the last time he looked, like the smoker who begins to free himself of his addiction and discovers that more time than ever has gone by without the temptation to light a cigarette: a few minutes after their departure, when the train had just passed the George Washington Bridge. Time on our hands. He’s heard Judith Biely’s voice on the phone, clearly recognized those words, their temptation and promise, their warning, We’re running out of time. How little time they had left, much less than he’d imagined, than fear had led him to predict: his hands suddenly empty of time, barren fingers curving to grasp air, intuiting at times, like a tactile memory of the body they haven’t caressed for three long months, the empty duration of his time without her. Running without a pause, running out of time, she said too, and he didn’t know how to understand the warning, didn’t perceive the speed of the time already sweeping them away. How much time has it been that these hands haven’t touched anyone, haven’t curved adjusting to the delicate shape of Judith Biely’s breast, haven’t pressed to him his children, who run to embrace him down the hall of the apartment in Madrid or along the gravel path in the garden in the Sierra; this right hand that rose in a fit of anger and descended like a bolt of lightning on Miguel’s face (if only it had been paralyzed in midair, pierced by pain; if only it had withered before hurting and shaming his son, who perhaps doesn’t know now whether his father is alive or dead, who’s probably already begun to forget him). His child’s hands so easily hurt by the harsh scrape of materials, paralyzed by cold on early winter mornings and warmed by Eutimio, who pressed them between his, which were so rough, scorched by plaster. “It was sad to look at your hands, Don Ignacio. I rubbed them in mine to warm them and they were like two dead sparrows.” With these hands he wouldn’t have been able to hold the pistol Eutimio showed him that morning in his office, the same one Eutimio raised and pressed to the middle of the chest of one of the men who pushed Ignacio Abel against a brick wall behind the School of Philosophy. He remembers with displeasure the sweat on his palms, as debasing as wetness in the groin. Time on our hands: time’s not used up slowly, like a great flow of water that turns into a trickle and then driblets before it’s extinguished. Time that ends suddenly, from one moment to the next you may be dead, your face in the dirt, or after a meeting someone says goodbye, someone you will never see again. The time of an encounter that seemed like any other concludes and neither of the lovers knows or suspects it will be the last. Or one of them does know and says nothing, has come to a conclusion but keeps the decision a secret and is already calculating the words that will be written in a letter, words one doesn’t dare say aloud.