Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

From the time she was very young, her urge to express herself had been as powerful as her desire to learn. Writing letters was an exercise of talent that hadn’t found its true channel until then, not in the literary attempts she showed no one, not in her journals, not in the articles she sent to the Brooklyn paper that asked her for more political analyses and fewer observations on the daily life of Spaniards. When she wrote letters she felt the new exaltation of having an interlocutor with whom there would be no misunderstandings, because his intelligence was a challenge and a complement to hers, and because basically they resembled each other a great deal, a fact they hadn’t needed more than a few minutes to recognize. Everything was memorable and new and deserved to be celebrated; wandering through Madrid produced euphoria. Explaining in a letter to the man she hadn’t known until a short time ago the most secret ambitions in her life and the nuances of the sexual passion it seemed they’d awakened to together was for her an unsurpassed experience: her hand flew over the paper, ink flowed from the pen, forming volutes of words in which her will almost didn’t intervene, words erupting with the memory of something that had occurred barely a few hours earlier, desire reborn in its invocation as it was sometimes in a distracted caress that made them return unexpectedly from the edge of exhaustion. (The book was somehow also in those letters. The book was in everything she did, yet it slipped away when she began looking for it consciously, when she sat in front of the typewriter searching, hoping for a first word that would unleash everything.) They told each other what they’d done and what they’d felt, and anticipated what they’d do when they met again, all they hadn’t dared to suggest or ask for aloud. A letter was a confession and an account of desire and also a brazen way of inciting passion in the other: as you’re reading, do what I imagine doing to you, let your hand move, guided by mine; let it be my hand caressing you though you’re not with me. How strange that it took them so long to become aware of the danger, to discover there was a price and damage and no remedy for the affront once it was committed. Each word an injury, the thread of ink a trail of poison.

“Where do you keep the letters?”

“You’ve asked me that before. In a desk drawer.”

“At home or in the office?”

“Where I have them closest to me.”

“Your wife can find them.”

“I always lock the drawer with a key.”

“One day you’ll forget.”

“Adela never looks at my papers. She doesn’t even come into my study.”

“How strange that you’ve said her name.”

“I didn’t realize I hadn’t said it.”

“You don’t realize a lot of things. Tell me your wife’s name again.”

“You’re my wife.”

“When you divorce and marry me. Meanwhile your wife’s Adela.”

“You never say her name either.”

“Promise me something — burn my letters, or keep them in your office, in your safe. But please don’t have them at home.”

“Don’t call it my home.”

“There’s nothing else to call it.”

“I don’t want to be away from your letters. I wouldn’t burn a single one, or a postcard, or a movie ticket.”

“You keep movie tickets too?”

“Finally I’m seeing you laugh this afternoon.”

“I don’t want her to read what I’ve written to you. It embarrasses me. It frightens me.”

“I always have the key with me.”

“When she suspects something, she’ll break the lock. Or she won’t have to. She’ll pull the drawer and that day you’ll have forgotten to lock it.”

“I know her very well — she doesn’t suspect anything.”

“You don’t know her. I ask you things about her and you can’t answer. You become uncomfortable.”

“She’s in her world and we’re in ours. We always said there was a barrier between the two.”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“What we had was enough.”

“Only for a while. Now it’s enough for you.”

“You know I want to live with you always.”

“I know that’s what you say. I also know what you don’t do.”

“I’m going to America with you after the summer.”

“You’ve really told your wife and children?”

“You know I have.”

“You’ve told me you have. What if you’re lying?”

“You don’t trust me anymore.”

“I’m getting to know your voice, the way you look when something makes you uneasy. I see your face right now. I see you don’t want to go on with this conversation.”

“I’m going to America with you.”

“What if I don’t want to go back so soon? What if I’d rather stay in Spain a little longer?”

“Spain is becoming a very dangerous place.”

“I still have some money left. I can keep traveling a while longer in Europe.”

“You don’t want to be with me anymore.”

“And will you hide me when you’re at Burton College too? Will I have to wait for you to come and see me in New York?”

“You wanted me to make that trip.”

“And you didn’t?”

“What I want is to be with you. I don’t care where or how.”

“But I do. I care where and how.”

“You said you wouldn’t ask me for anything.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Your feelings have changed.”

“I don’t want to see you in secret. I don’t want to share you with anybody else.”

“You don’t share me.”

“You sleep with Adela every night, not with me.”

“I can’t remember the last time I touched her.”

“It makes me ashamed. It makes me sad for her. Even if she doesn’t know, the sadness I feel for your wife humiliates her.”

“She doesn’t know you exist.”

“She looked at me that day at the Residence and realized something. As soon as she saw me, she didn’t trust me.”

“But we’d just met.”

“It doesn’t matter. A woman in love senses danger.”

“You thought she was in love?”

“I saw how she looked at you while you were giving your talk. I was sitting next to her. I think about it now and can’t believe it. Next to your wife and daughter.”

“She’s less suspicious than you imagine.”

“She saw how you were looking at me. Don’t keep the letters at home. Don’t call me from there.”

“You’ve called me.”

“With a good deal of embarrassment, because I was frightened. Only once.”

“You gave me life that night.”

“But then you went back to your home. We were in bed in Madame Mathilde’s house and I saw you in the mirror looking at your watch.”

“You didn’t say you wanted us to spend the whole night together.”

“I didn’t want you to say no.”

“I wish you’d asked.”

“She knows you’re with me. She’s watching you. Please, burn the letters, hide them somewhere else.”

“I don’t want to be away from them.”

“And what will you do when you finish the semester in America? Will you go back to Madrid, and will I have to wait for you to write to me?”

“There’s no reason to talk about what’s so far away.”

“I don’t want my entire life to depend on you.”

“You knew what mine was like when we met.”

“I didn’t know I’d fall so much in love.”

But before the shame and guilt emerged they knew that paradise was lost, that they’d left it, or stopped deserving a state of grace as remote from their wills as a favorable wind that would have lifted them above the daily accidents and limitations of their lives and now, like wine, had come to an end. Their desire was no less intense but now it had an edge of exasperation. As soon as it was satisfied, it dissolved into solitude, not gratitude, infected not with reluctance but with a secret disappointment, a kind of disrepute. The house of assignation no longer offered its usual sanctuary: like a remembered affront, they saw the bordello extravagance of Madame Mathilde’s room, the wounding vulgarity of the painted paper on the walls, the loose threads in the carpet; they smelled the cheap disinfectant, saw the unclean bathroom behind the Oriental screen partially covered by a manila shawl. They returned from the too-transient days in the house by the sea and Madrid’s June heat was unbreathable, its dry air like the breath of an oven, the immense weariness on suffocating cloudy days, the hostility in the glances of people on the street, sullen bodies sweating inside streetcars. For the first time they both could imagine a future when love would no longer illuminate them. In fleeting moments of lucidity and remorse, they saw each other again as if they’d never met, secretly ashamed of themselves, exhausted by the dejection of excitement sustained without pause for too long. Perhaps they should give themselves breathing space, free themselves for a while from their unhealthy obsession with being together, with writing so many letters and constantly waiting for them to arrive.