Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Perhaps Adela was slow to accept what Ignacio Abel now realized as he turned the album pages under the dim light of a lamp in the apartment where he was the sole inhabitant, and the figures in the photos took on a ghostly quality, as if they were people who had died long ago, so distant from the present, from Madrid in the shadow of nights of war (lit by the headlights of speeding, solitary cars that suddenly appeared at the end of a street, stopped with the motor running next to a doorway, where after a while a man would be seen coming out in an undershirt or pajamas, sometimes barefoot, dazed with sleep and panic, hands tied, moved along by kicks, guarded by pistols and rifles). Blinded by love, at first Adela wouldn’t have noticed his expression in the photos, including the ones he’d sent her as mementos when they became engaged, or the ones from their wedding day, or the portraits they’d taken together on a whim of hers in a studio on the Gran Vía soon after they were married, each seated in an antique chair in front of a painted backdrop, he with his legs crossed, showing his high-top shoes, she holding a book in one hand, her chin resting on the back of the other, wearing an indolent smile in which he could detect what neither of them knew at the time, that she was pregnant. On his face was an expression of not being altogether present, his glance fixed on a point in the middle distance, a self-absorption tinged by ennui. But perhaps he was mistaken, looking at the photographs fifteen years later; perhaps, lacking the imagination to see himself in what to all intents and purposes was another life, he attributed to the younger man a reluctance that became more apparent as he turned the pages of the albums. His entire life, watched over by Adela, by her fondness for keeping everything in its place, not only photographs but letters as well, each one he wrote during their engagement and the ones he sent during his year in Germany, arranged chronologically and held together by rubber bands, which he didn’t want to remove from their envelopes, to spare himself the humiliation of his own lies, the expressions of love in his own hand. You no longer remember how you’d complain if a letter of mine was late. He looked, hypnotized, at the photos, while outside he heard bursts of gunfire. He went through a series documenting his children’s early years and the tedious family celebrations, the changes in the face and body of Adela, who’d been more slender than he recalled. (But who could trust memory? What would Judith Biely be thinking about him now, erasing him from her new life who knew where, with what younger men, in Paris or in America?) He didn’t appear in many photographs (he must have been traveling, or working, or away on some pretext or other); in some he was present but wore an expression that separated him from the rest, resistant to the collective happiness, a celebration meant to bring them all together. In them Adela was almost always beside him, holding his arm or leaning against him a little, proud of his male presence, perhaps understanding later, when she put the photos in order and placed them in the album, or much later, when she went back to them to look for signs of what had always existed or to console herself for her loneliness and sense of deception and failure by reliving a time she remembered as happier: their early years together, the birth of Lita, the move to the new building on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, its balconies that opened on the unlimited expanse of Madrid—“Madrid modern and white,” as Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote in one of her favorite poems. Her secret malaise might still be a response to her husband’s work. He was so insistent on showing others his own worth, committing his very life to the completion of each assignment, perhaps uncertain about the position he’d achieved, wanting to prove that if he prospered it wasn’t because of the influence of his wife’s family, toward whom he displayed an increasingly dry coldness that hurt her deeply, especially because of the affection she had for her parents, her fear that her husband would hurt them with a defiant remark or sarcastic comment, or simply with the indifference that was apparent in reality and more so in photographs — even, she would realize much later, in the pictures from their wedding, and in those where Ignacio Abel held his newborn children or placed his hand on their shoulder on the day of their Communion. He raised a glass in a toast and looked away. But Adela hadn’t failed to complete her albums, to make note of exact dates, circumstances, and places in handwriting that was always the same over the years, as regular as her own presence in the photos, a mixture of passivity and childish hope, as if in spite of everything promises might eventually be kept, as if the only condition for avoiding disaster and not suffering disillusionment and even a raw lie was to maintain a serene attitude, a slight smile, raising her chin and straightening her torso, pretending she was immune to the bite of his coldness, that suspicions didn’t keep her awake, that rectitude was the best possible path. On the first page of each album Adela had written the dates it covered. The last one indicated only the beginning, September 1935. In the photos, Ignacio Abel saw not what was captured by the camera but what was already happening elsewhere and in secret: Adela, the girl, and himself on the evening of his talk at the Student Residence; the family party in the house in the Sierra on Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. The first photograph had been taken a few minutes after he’d seen her at close range and heard for the first time the name of Judith Biely. In the second he searched for the traces of Judith’s memory he invoked while someone snapped the picture: the long table filled with people and plates of food, the warm sun of an October afternoon, the already remote faces, the family life that seemed a life sentence then, and now had disappeared without a trace: Don Francisco de Asís, Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, smiling and faded, infantilized by spinsterhood and old age, the uncle who was a priest, stuffed inside his cassock (what had happened to him — he might have had time to hide if the outbreak of the war caught him in Madrid, or he might be lying in some ditch, rotting in the sun and covered with flies), his brother-in-law Víctor, his face clouded with grievance, his two children, Lita smiling happily at the camera and Miguel fragile and shy, and Adela, near them, a woman suddenly mature, older-looking and wider in that photo than in his memory, leaning toward him, her husband, an attitude that survives the irreversible changes in her state of mind, as if her body hadn’t learned what her mind knew, that the physical support sought and seemingly found is by now illusory, that things have changed though appearances remain the same. And he, in a corner, smiling this time, not on guard or absent, as in most of the photographs, with an idle smile, visible despite the shadow that covers half his face, a little sleepy from the food and wine and the sweet autumn sun. Had Adela been able to see (when she looked at it slowly after pasting it in the album, smoothing it with the palm of her hand, writing the date and place on a tag beneath it) that in the photo her husband already wore the face of his deceit, that the ease and affection he displayed and she was so grateful for were symptoms not of the return of love but of its loss? There was another photograph in the album that wasn’t pasted in and had no indication on the back of the day and place; it had been taken that same evening, beside the pond of the abandoned irrigation ditch. Miguel and Adela had argued about the Leica, and it was Miguel who in the end prevailed, but Ignacio Abel didn’t recall the moment the boy took the picture, hiding perhaps in the pines, pretending he was an international reporter, a blurred photo, perhaps because there wasn’t enough light, or because Miguel didn’t hold the camera steady: his parents sitting on the grass, close to the pond’s edge, leaning toward each other, absorbed in a conversation Ignacio Abel doesn’t remember, the two figures as calm as the water where they were partially reflected, obscured by the oblique shadow of the pines.