Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

He hung up the phone and the expression Judith Biely had used remained floating in his mind like the timbre of the voice that after a few hours he’ll hear again, close to him now, brushing him with the breath that gave shape to her words, Time on our hands, for once not numbered hours, minutes dissolving like water or spilling like sand between his fingers, but days, four whole days with no goodbyes or postponed longings, secret or stolen time, unlimited, overflowing, receiving them with the clemency of a country of asylum whose border will open with just a single lie, a false passport of limited but instantaneous validity, a lie that’s not even completely false: Thursday I’m going to the province of Cádiz and I’ll be back Monday morning. The truth and the lie said with exactly the same words, as difficult to separate from one another as the chemical components of a liquid. An American client is thinking about buying a house on the coast and asked me to go and see it before he makes his decision. It was so easy and the reward so limitless that it produced an anticipatory feeling of intoxication, almost of vertigo during dinner in the lethargy of the family dining room, where time went by so slowly, time like lead on his shoulders, the funerary rhythm of the large standing clock, an ostentatious gift from Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, with its bronze pendulum in the body as deep as a coffin and its legend in Gothic letters around the gilded face, Tempus fugit. “You’re always complaining you don’t have time,” said Adela, barely looking at him, attentive instead to the plate in front of her, conscious of Miguel’s anxious vigilance, of the knee moving nervously under the table, “and now you accept another commitment. You could have taken advantage of the strike to relax with us in the Sierra.” “I can’t say no,” he improvised, encouraged by how easy it was, not lying completely, using provable facts like the malleable material used to mold the lie. “It’s the entrepreneur who offered me the assignment in the United States.” But somehow the dissimulation trapped him: when they heard him mention the United States, Miguel and Lita broke into the conversation, interrupting him to ask if all of them were going to America, when, in which of the ocean liners displayed in the windows of travel agencies on Calle de Alcalá and Calle Lista, detailed models where you could see the portholes and the lifeboats and the tennis courts drawn on deck, posters of ships with high, sharp prows cutting through the waves, columns of smoke rising from smokestacks painted red and white, beautiful international names inscribed on the black curve of the hull. Like his mother, Miguel noticed his vexed, almost agonized expression, the contretemps of not having an answer prepared when the lie had flowed so comfortably until then. But Miguel didn’t know how to interpret the incessant data his attentiveness provided, transformed for him into a confused state of alarm, the intuition of a danger that was near though he couldn’t identify it: like those adventure movies in Africa he liked so much, when an explorer wakes at night and leaves the tent and knows a wild animal or an enemy is circling the camp but can’t detect anything except the usual jungle sounds, and the leopard treads silently and is near, brushing the tall grasses with his long, muscular body, or the treacherous painted warrior approaches, raising a spear, while Miguel trembles in his seat, pulls in his legs, almost shudders, bites his nails, squeezes Lita’s arm until he hurts her. He observes the muscle that moves in his father’s closely shaved jaw, a throbbing that reveals he’s irritated. “Now isn’t the time to bother Papá with those questions. He has enough trouble at work. Will you go by car? All I ask is that you call us when you arrive. You know by now that if you’re on the road and don’t call, I can’t sleep.”

Everything so easy again, after the minor setback, he felt almost grateful to Adela, and the anger toward his son dissolved, anger provoked by that anxious question, that excessive expectation he’d planted himself and didn’t know how to encourage or impede. But if Miguel’s expectation irritated him so much, now, after three months of distance and remorse, on the train that carries him farther away from his children, he understands the senseless hope condemned by its excess to disillusion, because it resembled his own too much, because the boy’s weakness, his nervousness, presented him with a mirror he perhaps would have preferred not to look into. He too was tortured by impatience to conclude as soon as possible the impersonation of family life at dinner; he too lived perturbed by desires he didn’t know how and didn’t want to control, dazzled by expectations that were never satiated and never fulfilled, incapable of appreciating or even seeing what he had before him, restless to have the present end as soon as possible and the future arrive, whatever it might be, any of the futures he’d been pursuing like successive mirages throughout his life, without age or experience or the habit of disappointment dulling his longing or chipping its cutting edge. Let the formalities of dinner conclude immediately, the routine annoyance of sitting down to read the paper, barely glancing at the headlines, while Adela in the easy chair next to his put on the glasses that made her look older and read a magazine or a book while she listened to the nightly concert of classical music on Unión Radio, near the partially open balcony door through which a light breeze entered along with attenuated street noises. From that balcony, if they’d been listening, they could have heard the shots that ended the life of Captain Faraudo on May 7. Let the children come in to give each a goodnight kiss, Lita in her pajamas and slippers, her hair brushed smooth; Miguel secretly indignant at the unavoidable obligation of going to bed, observing with his useless sixth sense that his parents rarely looked each other in the eye when they spoke, knowing that in a while his mother would walk to the bedroom and his father to his study, with the plans and models that absorbed his life, with the letters he sometimes wrote or read and immediately put away in a drawer when interrupted, the drawer he never forgot to lock with a key, a tiny key he kept in a vest pocket. Because he liked movies about Arsène Lupin and Fantômas (in fact there wasn’t any kind of movie he didn’t like), Miguel fantasized about dedicating himself as an adult to a distinguished criminal career as a white-gloved thief, an expert in opening safes, bank vaults, drawers in desks identical to his father’s that hid under lock and key what in movies and novels were called compromising documents, perhaps the stolen letters used by an unscrupulous blackmailer to extort money from a beautiful woman of high society. Instead of the books given to him at school, the Clásicos Castellanos whose dry backs stood in a row on Lita’s shelf, Miguel read the illustrated stories in Mundo Gráfico. The heading of one story made him lose sleep now: Behind a Façade of Apparent Normality, Family Hid Shameful Secret. He reflected on this with the light off, tossing in bed, bothered by the heat, upset at not having done his homework or begun to study for the final examinations that were approaching at a terrifying speed. At least his father was leaving the next day on that trip to the province of Cádiz and wouldn’t be back until Monday: the prospect of his absence filled Miguel with an unmanageable mixture of relief and uncertainty. His father wouldn’t be at the table to draw attention to him when he made noise eating soup or jiggled his leg, wouldn’t make his half-interested, half-sarcastic inquiries about homework or tests. What if he was killed in a car accident? What if behind his apparent façade of normality he was hiding a secret as shameful as the protagonist’s in Mundo Gráfico ? “Lita,” he said, “Lita,” hoping his sister was still awake, “do you think our family is hiding some shameful secret?” But Lita was asleep, so all he could do was resign himself to the immense tedium of darkness and heat on a June night, the slowness of time, the striking of the hours on the hall clock that his father would hear just as he did, with an impatience that lengthened the waiting time even more and mixed with the fear of falling asleep and not hearing the alarm clock. It would ring at five, and at six, a little before dawn, Judith Biely would be waiting for him in the Plaza de Santa Ana, by the entrance to her pensión, a small suitcase in one hand and in the other her portable typewriter, shivering, her jacket collar pulled up against the damp cold of night’s end.