Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? You look rested,” said Negrín, laughing. “In the Madrid of consumptives, you look healthier than a mountain climber.”

But it wasn’t possible to look at someone in the same way when you knew he was carrying a pistol in a holster tight against his left side, glimpsed when his jacket opened after an abrupt gesture, or showing a bulge you might not have noticed if you weren’t certain this well-dressed, ordinary man had a firearm, or held by his belt, crudely thrust between trousers and shirt, or as bulky as a stone in the right pocket of the foreman Eutimio Gómez, next to his tobacco pouch and tinder lighter, or recklessly kept anywhere, the way Dr. Juan Negrín patted his pockets and vest to show Ignacio Abel the small pistol after using a napkin to wipe his broad fingers stained with the juice of langostinos and prawns.

“It’s Czech,” Negrín said, producing a metallic crack as he adjusted something on it with an expert gesture, “the latest model.”

Then he forgot about it, as if it were a cigarette lighter, leaving it on the wet marble table with the tray of shells, the steins of beer, the ashtray, the crumpled napkins; his bulk had quickly occupied all the space, as it did anywhere he happened to be, whether at an office desk or a laboratory counter. Dr. Juan Negrín lived in perpetual physical discord with a world whose meager dimensions didn’t correspond to his formidable breadth, whose rhythms were always unacceptably slow in contrast to his tireless energy. In Negrín’s presence Ignacio Abel always noticed errors of scale, as on a plan or drawing where the proportions of some element have been badly calculated. Enormous overcoats became skimpy if he put them on, well-cut suits were too tight for him, hats that seemed large enough in his hand or hanging on a rack became too small on his head. He stood to receive Ignacio Abel in a private dining room at the Café Lion, and the vaulted ceiling of the cellar became so low he had to stoop; beneath the marble table he had to keep his knees pressed together so his legs would fit. His voice thundered with rich acoustics that demanded more ample spaces. His fingers cracked the shells of prawns with ease. He crisscrossed Madrid — his old laboratory, the Café Lion, the Congress of Deputies, University City — turning vigorously against the reduced dimensions of things, against successive carapaces that limited his movement. He should have lived in a larger country with taller people, wider highways, faster trains, much shorter official ceremonies, more expeditious functionaries, fewer sluggish waiters. He traveled by air whenever he could, more often than not in the diminutive planes of the Spanish Postal Transport Airlines, which presented another challenge to his corpulence. He accumulated job titles and political responsibilities with the same Pantagruelian spirit he brought to ordering trays piled high with shellfish, plates of ham, bottles of wine, steins of beer running over with foam. He called the waiter with two resounding claps and ordered more beer for Ignacio Abel and himself and a platter of fried fish. When the waiter took away the tray of discarded shells and the empty steins, the pistol stood out more clearly on the table, as incongruous and toxic as a scorpion.

“So you want to go away to one of those opulent American universities,” he said, avoiding preambles, the languid waste of time of Spanish circumlocution. “I won’t be the one to stop you.”

“It’s only for a semester. And only with your authorization.”

“You don’t have to pretend with me, Abel. Don’t talk as if you didn’t think much of it. You want out, like anyone with a little common sense. Leave this place for a while, see things from a distance, have your family safe. If only I could. Doing your work well, with the current in your favor instead of having to fight against it. All that, not to mention the small advantage of going outside and not being afraid some visionary will shoot you in the name of the social revolution or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or that you’ll get in the way of a bullet aimed at somebody else.”

“Things will calm down, I imagine.”

“Or not. Or they’ll get worse. Did you hear Prieto’s speech in Cuenca on May 1 on the radio?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Didn’t you read it in the paper?” Negrín laughed out loud. “Abel, I’m afraid that even for an architect your stay in the ivory tower, or on the beach where you got that tan, has lasted too long. Are you sure you didn’t go to Biarritz for a few days with some girlfriend? What Don Indalecio said, aside from many sensible and fairly sad things, is that a country can tolerate everything, including revolution, but not permanent, senseless disorder. Of course, to say this he had to go to Cuenca, and me with him, as if I were his squire, because here in Madrid, as you know, our beloved comrades in the Bolshevik wing of the party would have lynched him. Do you still have your Socialist Party card, Abel?”

“And my dues are paid.”

“Aren’t you tempted to tear it up?”

“And replace it with what?”

“At heart you’re sentimental, just like me. Except you’re much more intelligent and haven’t allowed yourself to be dragged into the vortex where I find myself now and, frankly, don’t know how to get out of. In fact, I don’t know how I got into it. I’m even catching the oratorical fever, come to think of it. I’ve never said the word ‘vortex’ before.”

“You have a political vocation, Don Juan.”

“A political vocation? The only vocation I have is being a scientist, my dear friend. Politics, what they call politics, either exasperates me or bores me to death, no middle ground. Azaña has a political vocation, or Indalecio Prieto, or poor Don Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, whom we threw out of the presidency of the Republic with a kick that most certainly was indecorous. What I like is to see things accomplished— to get things done, as the Americans say, with that pragmatism they have. But here politics is nothing but words, forests of words, hectares of speeches with subordinate clauses. Have you seen how Azaña listens to himself, how he rounds off a paragraph as if he were making a long flourish of the cape in front of a bull? The only thing missing is that from the bleachers in Congress instead of ‘Bravo’ they shout ‘Olé,’ lengthening the vowels a good deal: Oooooleeeeeé. And even so, from time to time Azaña says things of some substance. But what did Don Niceto say in all his kilometric speeches, aside from quoting the classics with an Andalusian ‘s’ instead of a Castilian lisp? And the illustrious Don José Ortega y Gasset, how many afternoons did he put us to sleep in Congress with his flowery prose? Ultimately he became disenchanted with the Republic as well and didn’t offer his services as a deputy again, otherwise I’d have been tempted to go much farther away than you to avoid hearing him. Like Don Miguel de Unamuno, the worst defect Don José Ortega sees in the Republic is his not being named president for life. I watched him speaking in his seat as if he were explaining introductory philosophy to his students. Do you believe one should trust a philosopher who colors his gray hair with cheap dye and makes so great an effort to hide his baldness when he has no chance of success?”

“He also seems to wear lifts in his shoes.”

“As an architect, you notice the structural details! I’ll stay with the ornamentation.”

Negrín could eat and speak at top speed and at the same time guffaw, or acquire a serious frown when he imagined a gloomy future. But that apprehension never discouraged his activism or diminished his energy; instead it excited them. Beside him, Ignacio Abel easily felt guilty of passivity, languor. This man who was an internationally eminent scientist, and at some point would inherit a fortune, had chosen to dedicate his life and talent and his astonishing reserves of energy to improving a harsh, impoverished country where he may never receive any recompense, any show of gratitude. His generosity was undoubtedly mixed with a potent dose of pride, a kind of reagent without which he wouldn’t have acted. As for the vigor of his character, perhaps it was as hereditary and removed from his will as his colossal physical size or the unlimited sexual appetite about which rumors circulated throughout Madrid. Nevertheless, Ignacio Abel found in Negrín a moral conviction that he didn’t possess, a capacity that occasionally struck him as histrionic but essentially seemed much healthier than his own tendency to dissimulate and be reserved, to observe in silence and nourish rancorous irony, with no risk of being refuted and no effect on the reality of things.