Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Negrín took a long drink of beer, and this time he wiped away the foam with a handkerchief that he then passed over his broad, sweaty brow. The police escort, more erect now, nodded from a distance at his explanations, conscious of his role, chewing on the toothpick.

“That her fiancé, in addition to caring for his lungs and studying for the profession of notary or registrar, had formed a Falangist shock troop with some friends and they were planning to assassinate me. ‘Everything anticipated,’ the poor girl said to me with that thin little voice that barely left her body, like her voice when she had to answer a question on an examination: the day, the time, the place, the weapons they would use, the getaway car, just as they’d seen it in the movies. Political ideas are more dangerous when they’re mixed up with the foolishness of movies. They planned to kill me right here, at the door of the café, on the sidewalk of Calle de Alcalá. Then this detail: they intended to let me eat supper first.”

“Have they been arrested?”

“How could I accuse them without hurting her?” Negrín guffawed. “Perhaps they realized I carried a pistol or had begun to enjoy the company of this good friend who’s now my guardian angel. Or maybe they got bored or were afraid to move from words to deeds.”

“And what happened to your student?”

“You’re not going to believe this. The next day she called again, speaking in a thread of a voice, in tears, ‘torn between conflicting feelings,’ as they say in the women’s magazines. ‘My dear Dr. Negrín, for the sake of what you hold dear, forget what I told you yesterday. They’re nothing but boys’ childish fantasies.’ Her fiancé in reality was a good person, incapable of hurting a fly. He didn’t even have a pistol, and besides, he was sick, because it seems the examinations are at the beginning of the summer, and with so much memorization of a gigantic list of topics, he didn’t take care of himself and suffered a slight relapse, so he may have to go back to the sanatorium and not sit for examinations this year. A drama more Spanish than those of Calderón. Worse yet, than those of Don Jacinto Benavente.”

“You’re too trusting.”

“What shall I do? Not leave the house? Stay shut away like Azaña since he’s been president of the Republic, taking walks in the gardens of El Pardo and thinking about what he’ll write in the journal they say he’s keeping before he goes to bed? I need people and movement, my dear Abel. I need to walk to the café from the Congress, so I’m hungrier and thirstier and enjoy the food and beer all the more. I’ve already had another and you’ve barely tasted yours. Is it true you have no vices?”

Negrín leaned his elbows on the table, and extending the thick fingers of one hand, he counted with the index finger of the other, close to Ignacio Abel and looking at him with an ironic stare that made him uncomfortable.

“You don’t smoke. That seems fine. As a cardiologist, I have no objection. You practically don’t drink. You don’t like bullfights. Good food is not your downfall, as it is mine. You don’t look as if you ever go to whores… Don’t you have a voluptuous mistress hidden away somewhere?”

Perhaps Negrín did know, as irrepressibly fond of gossip about other people’s vices as he was of food or women or great political operations. Perhaps he’d heard rumors and therefore from the beginning had worn a half-smile, suspecting that beneath his intention to go to a foreign university, Ignacio Abel was hiding not only the urgency of fleeing the disasters of Spain but a less admissible desire, a passion that gave the lie to his honorable air, his sober appearance of bourgeois, rather puritanical dignity. For a moment Ignacio Abel, examined so intently by Negrín’s eyes, was afraid he’d blush, felt the heat rising from the base of his neck, oppressed by the knot in his tie. He imagined Negrín’s sonorous laugh, his pleasure in a human weakness that would make his less exceptional. But fortunately Negrín had finished his beer and suddenly was in a hurry. He put the pistol in his pocket, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, consulted his watch, and called the waiter with two loud claps.

“Count on me for whatever you need, Abel,” he said as they were saying goodbye at the café entrance, and he looked up and down the street with rapid caution. “If you like, I’ll make sure they give you the passport and your American visa right away. Leave as soon as you can, and don’t hurry back.”

He watched Negrín cross Calle de Alcalá, his broad shoulders standing out above the heads of other people, the light summer jacket tight at the sides, advancing with great strides through the traffic, not waiting for the officer’s signal to pedestrians, walking so fast that his police escort was left behind.

HE’S ALWAYS BEEN about to leave. He doesn’t know for how many years he’s been a guest in his own life, the figure in a painting, the only one in a group to turn his eyes away from what holds the attention of the others, as if to say I’m not one of them; a dubious presence who appeared out of focus in photographs or simply was missing from them (mother, children, smiling grandparents, only the father invisible: distracted, perhaps using some pretext not to pose). You must have thought no one would notice how you hid your disapproval, but I did. I know you better than anybody, though you don’t think so. In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing, and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter, that he was dead, that the mail service, in ruins like everything else, had lost it, left it undelivered in some mail sack — how many letters must have disappeared this way throughout Spain during these months, how many are still being written? You always had to go somewhere, you said nothing and suddenly you’d tell me, at the last minute, I’m leaving tomorrow, or I won’t be home for supper tonight, or that time you went to Barcelona for a whole week to see the International Exhibition — for work, you said, even though Miguel had been running high fevers and seemed to have something wrong with his lungs. You left me alone night after night, lying awake beside the boy who was delirious. Don’t think I don’t remember. He could tear up the letter right now, get rid of it as he’d done with so many things as he traveled, from the time he closed the door of his apartment in Madrid and out of habit was about to lock it but decided not to; he probably wouldn’t go back and a patrol of militiamen could smash the lock at any time, that very night; he might have torn up the letter before leaving the hotel room, or better yet, not opened it when the receptionist handed it to him and after the initial surprise, then hope, and finally disillusionment he recognized the handwriting. It wasn’t Judith’s. It was almost worse when you stayed here and it felt as if you were gone because it seemed as if you weren’t in your own house but someone else’s or in a waiting room or a hotel especially when my parents or brother or someone from my family came to visit. I wish you’d seen the face you put on for them.

So many grievances, all of them cited in the letter as if on the densely written pages of a formal indictment, bringing him Adela’s exhausted, offended voice, vibrating and never silent in the receiver of a phone he didn’t know how to move away from his ear. Leaving or being left alone, that was all you wanted and it’s what you’ve accomplished. The man who’d been an intruder or a furtive guest in his own apartment became for several months its only resident; from the Saturday in July when he came back from the Sierra and searched for Judith in a Madrid inundated with crowds, lit by headlights and the sudden flare of fires, to a midnight three months later when Madrid was already a city of dark, empty streets, disciplined by fear and alarm sirens, seized by terror at the steady approach of the war, like the inexorable arrival of winter. Long before, at the end of July, in August, on hot nights when it wasn’t wise to be seen on the streets, Ignacio Abel wandered aimlessly through the apartment, up and down the long hall, from one room to another, opening the glass doors between rooms with high ceilings and moldings of an opulence he disliked more and more. He wrote letters; he imagined he was writing them; laboriously he composed aloud the phrases in English he’d say to Judith Biely if he saw her again; he wound the clock in the hall, and every time it took less time for it to stop; he didn’t uncover most of the furniture and lamps draped in sheets, which looked abstract now; he observed with displeasure how quickly dirt took over in the bathroom with no one there to clean it; he ventured into the kitchen to prepare himself a simple supper, a hermit’s meal, whatever the porter’s wife had brought up for him or he had found at the less and less well-stocked stands at the nearby market or the corner grocery that until recently had displayed a full window, now almost empty, in part because of real shortages, in part because the owner preferred to hide the goods in the cellar for fear they would be requisitioned at gunpoint.