Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Two hours later, at about six, they saw her get off the train at the village station on the other side of the Sierra. The sky was as overcast as in Madrid, but the heat was not as overwhelming. The stationmaster, who’d known her since he was a little boy, was surprised to see her dressed in city clothes, and even more surprised to see her alone, without a suitcase, in high-heeled shoes that would make it difficult for her to take the shortcut from the station to the road to her house and then into pine groves after leaving the village. Some of the men playing cards and drinking wine in the tavern must have seen her too, the ones who fell silent and looked out the window each time a train pulled in. Though it was hot, the summer families hadn’t begun to arrive. The men saw her walk away on the narrow path past rockrose bushes — they’d just bloomed, with yellow pistils among white petals and sticky, glistening leaves — maintaining with difficulty the regularity of her steps on the pebbled path. They must have assumed she’d come to inspect the house before the family moved in, but it was strange for her to come alone, without the maids, and dressed in that formal manner. She stopped for a moment at the fence and didn’t go in. Or if she did go in, she came out again quickly, leaving everything the way it was, not even opening the shutters, as if she’d decided not to touch anything, not to disturb the tranquility of things kept in darkness all winter.

She continued along the dirt path, looking dignified in her city hat and the handbag held tightly in her hand, though it turned out that there was virtually nothing in it aside from the change purse, empty after she had given money to the blind man with the violin and paid the cab fare, and a one-way train ticket. The path climbed gently west, toward the slopes of pines and oaks and the pastures, separated from one another by low stone walls. It was the same path that led to the irrigation pond they’d walked to since her children were small. In the mornings, after breakfast, or after their siesta as the heat began to ease, though at that height it was unusual for at least a little breeze not to blow. The children at first held by the hand, then, year after year, running ahead of them, impatient to reach the pond and jump into the clear icy water. How could she not have noticed how fast they were leaving childhood? And they, Ignacio Abel and Adela, watching them from a distance, sitting in the folding chairs on the shore, in the shade of the pines, conversing more impersonally as the years passed. Persevering in spite of the heat, as if she’d shaken off some of the weight that made her walk more slowly in recent years, Adela followed the path — which became less defined in the pines, the serene endurance of things indifferent to human presence — distracted and at the same time self-possessed, finally armed with a purpose, clutching the bag in which there was only a ticket stub and an empty change purse. The Sierra air plunged her into her most treasured memories, into the warm waves of summers that retreated past the childhood of her children into the distance of her own early years. She reached the pond, and its motionless depth made the silence more dense. The light gray sky beyond the somber arch of the tops of the pine trees was reflected in the pond’s smooth surface. For a moment she thought she wasn’t alone, but there was no one at the shutterless windows of the abandoned power station. To the south, beyond the foggy horizon, was Madrid. To the west, between rocks and oak groves, she could see the blurred silhouettes of the domes of El Escorial. Not a single detail had changed in the landscape of tenuous lines and faint smudges of color she’d been looking at since she was a girl. She took a few steps along the retaining wall and stood still at the edge of the water, looking at her own image, her thick knees and wide hips, the light dress she’d never known how to wear with elegance, her hat. She closed her eyes and stepped into the emptiness, clutching her bag in both hands, as if afraid she might lose it.

AS SOON AS HE SAW her sitting at the usual table in the back of the café, he realized her face was not the same face and her eyes would not look at him in the same way. It was she who suggested they meet in the café—that morning, the idea of going to Madame Mathilde’s house produced a physical revulsion in her. She didn’t look up, though she must have heard the glass door opening in the almost empty café. She wasn’t reading the open book in her hand. She was smoking, unusual for her at that time of day. She hadn’t touched the coffee in front of her. For one painful instant she was a stranger, a woman he wouldn’t recognize when she raised her head and to whom he’d apologize for mistaking her for someone else. Ignacio Abel saw himself in the mirror behind the red divan where she was sitting. His face wasn’t the same either, and not only because he hadn’t slept the previous night, most of it spent in the sanatorium, sitting by a closed door behind which he couldn’t make out a sound no matter how closely he listened. Sometimes the door to her room opened to let in a nurse, who closed it immediately, or the doctor with the somber expression, who at first gave him no hope and only later, at daybreak, told him the patient had responded to the treatment to revive her. Probably, though it was too soon to say so with any certainty, she’d recover with no aftereffects. The doctor never asked what had happened; he looked at Ignacio Abel with an air of reserve that perhaps hid an accusation, the same look as in the fatigued eyes of the nurse as she closed the door without letting him look in on Adela. In the silence Ignacio Abel thought he heard violent retching, guttural sounds that in the strangeness of the sleepless night seemed the product of his imagination. But after a few minutes the nurse came out carrying a pail, half filled with something that resembled dirty water and smelled of plumbing mains and vomit, and a clinical device ending in a black rubber tube.

“The doctor’s given her a shot of a sedative. What she needs now is rest.”

“When can I see her?”

“You’ll have to ask the doctor.”

Daylight was flooding the windows when they let him enter the room. Adela’s brother was guarding the head of the bed, pale, eyes glassy, lids swollen, unshaven, staring straight into his eyes.

“You’ll have to explain how you arranged for them to keep me out,” Ignacio Abel said.

“You’re the one who has some explaining to do.”

Víctor pointed to his sister, who was sleeping, her broad face ashen against the white sheet. Her mouth was open and her lips had traces of lipstick. Her damp hair spread in a graying tangle on the pillow. Ignacio Abel remained silent, just as he had the night before on the phone when Víctor accused him of something unintelligible, not bothering to tell him what had happened to Adela or where she was.

“You’re to blame for this. You don’t fool me.”

“Blame for what?”

“My sister almost drowned.”

A chill ran through his body, a wave of nausea. He thought: he knows what happened, knows Adela found the letters and photos. But that was impossible, he quickly realized, when he learned she was unconscious in a room at the tuberculosis sanatorium. The caretaker at the abandoned power station, who made his rounds at about that time of day, heard what he thought was the sound of a body dropping into the water. He didn’t see anyone at first, only the rings expanding on the surface that always was motionless. Someone or something, perhaps an animal leaning over to drink, had fallen into the deep water, but it was strange that it wasn’t struggling to reach the surface. He ran down to the edge, to where a vertical string of bubbles had appeared. The late afternoon sun pierced the layers of water: he saw a woman sinking or, already having reached the bottom, beginning to rise, then suspended as if trapped in the underwater vegetation, her hair floating like a tangle of algae, her arms motionless at her sides. He leaped into the water, attempted to bring her to the surface, but she was heavy and seemed to be pulling him down and struggling not to lean against him. “We both could’ve drowned,” he said afterward, in the tavern at the station, to the men who’d seen Adela walking along the platform at the hottest, emptiest hour of the afternoon, with her handbag and gloves, her small hat, her city clothes, advancing awkwardly on high heels. At first the caretaker didn’t know who she was, didn’t recognize the woman he’d known for many summers: the bluish face, the closed eyes, the flattened, streaming hair. He ran to the road and miraculously saw the forest warden’s truck approaching. The only place nearby where she could be cared for was the sanatorium. A doctor recognized her when he saw the stretcher come in, the doctor who’d treated Víctor during one of his rest cures and was an acquaintance, perhaps a Falangist connection, Ignacio Abel thought, observing his rather flashy, defiant air, imagining a blue shirt beneath his white coat.