Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Judith listened attentively. She had the gift of listening. She asked questions: she didn’t want to lose the meaning of any word, just as she wrote down in a notebook the beautiful names, Arabic- or Roman-sounding, of the villages they drove past. The urgent need to write revived forcefully in her; the feeling of something that wouldn’t resemble anything she’d done before, the attempts that almost never left her feeling satisfied but only regretful, because of her sense of fraudulence, of squandering for unknown reasons the impulse that had brought her to Europe, the goal of giving herself an education, of living up to her mother’s gift. The physical exaltation of traveling in a car next to him and of having the days and nights before them was linked to the proximate writing of the book that had appeared to her so often as a dazzling intuition about to be revealed; the audacity of love would be with her when she placed a blank sheet of paper in front of her and touched the round polished keys of the typewriter, white letters on a black background, its body so light, its mechanism so fast: additional spurs to the speed her writing would have, touched with a transparent sharpness, a clarity like the one she noted in her own attentiveness and alert gaze during the trip. She would have to recount what she was seeing with a fluidity that would contain the passing images and sensations: the dry plain, the blue background of mountains it seemed they would never reach, the precipices where torrents resounded and great eagles flew in slow circles, the straight rows of olive trees undulating as if on a static sea of reddish hills until they vanished in another, bluer, still more distant horizon. She would have to mix into the flow of the account the austere splendor of the landscapes and the affront of backwardness and human poverty, the dignity of the lean, dry faces that remained fixed as the car passed, motionless in front of white walls, looking out of shadowy doorways. As they left a village that didn’t seem to have a name, or trees, or almost any inhabitants, only dogs panting in the sun on a dusty street, Ignacio Abel abruptly put on the brakes, forcing her to look straight ahead. A hammer and sickle had been painted in large brushstrokes on the half-collapsed wall of a drinking trough. In front of the car a line of men obstructed the highway. They wore berets and straw hats against the sun, and espadrilles and corduroy trousers tied at the waist with straps or lengths of rope. One or two wore a red armband with political initials, perhaps UHP. Two of them, one at each end of the line, held, but didn’t aim, hunting shotguns. Yet there was no hostility in their eyes; curiosity, perhaps, because of the rarity of the car model, its body painted brilliant green, the chrome fittings of the handles and headlights, the folded-down leather top, the men’s curiosity intensified by Judith’s visibly foreign air. And a gruff obstinacy as well, the instinctive offense at the polished car in the gritty desolation of the village outskirts, the rage of promises never kept, the messianic dreams of social revolution. “They won’t do anything to us,” said Ignacio Abel, looking into the eyes of the man who approached and holding Judith’s hand that had reached toward the wheel, searching for his. She didn’t understand what the man said; he spoke with a strange accent, in a hoarse voice, barely parting his lips. There was no work in the village, the man said. The bosses had refused to plant, and they had decided that the scant barley and wheat harvest would be left in the fields. We’re not bandits, the man said, and not beggars either. So that their children wouldn’t die of hunger, they were asking for a voluntary contribution. As the man talked to Ignacio Abel, the others looked at Judith. She would have to write about those black eyes in dark faces, their chins unshaven; the toothless smile of the man who had the fog of mental deficiency in his eyes; the harsh surface of everything under a vertical sun; the faces, the black cloth of the berets, their hands, the barrels and butts of the shotguns; the anticipation of a possible threat; the way all their eyes stared at Ignacio Abel’s soft leather wallet and white city hands, the glitter of his gold watch. When Ignacio Abel handed over some bills, one of the men stepped forward and grasped his wrist, examining the watch. Alarmed, Abel sensed that the men’s request for a contribution was the pretext for a holdup. He didn’t do anything, didn’t try to free himself from the man’s grip. “We’re revolutionaries, not bandits”—Judith understood the words of the man who’d first approached, the shotgun now resting on his shoulder, pulling at the other man so he’d release Ignacio Abel’s wrist. He said it, she thought, in a joking tone, but not completely, a joke that didn’t eliminate the threat. She’d have to write about her fear and also her remorse at feeling it; the uncomfortable awareness of her privileged status, offensive to those men, and with that her desire to get away. But how could she dare to write that her abstract love of justice was less powerful than the instinctive physical repugnance at those men, her relief that the car was accelerating and they were letting them pass, staying behind, in a cloud of dust, in their desert poverty?

Though he hadn’t heard the typewriter for some time, he realized it only now. He called to her, her beautiful name echoing in the empty house. In the typewriter a blank sheet of paper moved almost imperceptibly in the air, fragrant with algae, that entered through the open balcony. The written pages on one side of the machine, the blank sheets on the other. He called her again and his voice sounded strange. The electricity had gone off. He looked for her in the house, holding the oil lamp, calling her again, noticing the seamless transition from surprise to anguish. She couldn’t be far, nothing could have happened to her, but her absence suddenly turned everything unreal, the white walls and the staircase lit by the oil lamp, the loneliness of the house on the escarpment, the presence of the two of them in it, the noise of the ocean. He couldn’t calculate how much time had passed since he last saw her, when he stopped hearing the typewriter as he leaned on his elbows at the window, looking at the white, sinuous line of the waves, the beam of the lighthouse in the western sky where red streaks were fading behind violet fog like embers under ash. He went through the rooms one by one and Judith wasn’t in any of them. He walked silently, barefoot on the clay tiles. In the kitchen, on the wooden table, was a glass half full of water, a plate with a knife and the skin of a peach. Through the window he could see the beach and ocean lit by the full moon, beyond the tall dry grass along the edge of the escarpment. Below, where the wooden stairs ended, he could make out, with great relief, the silhouette of Judith Biely’s back, her clear shadow projected by the moon on the sand, smooth and shining as the tide withdrew. He called to her, leaving the house, the wooden stairs trembling and creaking under his weight. He wanted to reach her and, as if in dreams, had a sensation of impossible slowness that worsened when he touched the dry, sifting sand at the bottom. He barely moved forward. He called but could not hear his own voice, weakened by the heightened crashing of the sea. Judith turned slowly toward him, as if she’d known he was approaching. The wind blew the hair from her face, widening her forehead, fastening to her slim body the silk of her robe. In her welcoming smile was something both fragile and remote that hadn’t been there an hour or two earlier, when she’d offered herself to him and claimed him with fierce determination: an air of resignation, as if that very moment already belonged to a distant past. Confused in his male way, Ignacio Abel stood in front of her, still breathing in relief at having found her. He dared to embrace her only when he saw she was shivering, the skin on her arms bristling in the damp chill of the wind. “Where will we be tomorrow night at this time?” Judith said, trembling even more when he hugged her, her face cold against his, her hips pressing against him. “Where will we be tomorrow and the next day and the day after that?” But if she’d said it in Spanish, the words wouldn’t have had the same prison-sentence monotony: tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow.