Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Ignacio Abel has been traveling that distance on the maps for more than two weeks, assaulted by illusions, by his desire for the woman he looks for among the foreign faces and whom he may have lost, knowing he hadn’t done everything possible to stay in touch with Adela and his children on the other side of the frontlines. He could have crossed them, at least in the early days when you could still move with relative ease from one zone to another, before the fronts were defined and the war became something more than terror, uncertainty, and confusion, when the word hadn’t come up yet — war — with its strange, primitive obscenity. Wars, like misfortunes, happen to other people; wars are in history books or on the international pages of newspapers, not on the street you go down to every morning and where you can now find a corpse or a hole left by a bomb or the debris of a fire. He leans his face against the train window and spots in his eye sockets the fatigue of the countless landscapes he’s seen slip by since leaving Madrid, all joined now in a single sequence, like a film of unimaginable length that keeps going. He’s seeing the autumn woods Judith talked about so much, but he doesn’t have the energy to focus on them: reds and yellows vibrating in the sun like flames, leaves raised by the rush of the locomotive floating in the air like crazy butterflies, flying into the glass, then disappearing; thickets of reeds emerging from the cobalt-colored water; flocks of aquatic birds rising with a metallic gleam of wings. He remembers what Judith had said to him the first afternoon they were together, drinking and talking in the bar of the Hotel Florida until they lost track of time: those colors were what she missed most about America in the Madrid autumn. Now that he finally sees them, they seem to form part of his personal catalogue of the things he’s lost. Along the riverbank the woods extend to the horizon in waves of hills, and at their tops he can see a country house, isolated and solemn like an ancient temple in a painting by Poussin, the glass pierced by the gentle October sun. How would it have been to hide in a house like that with Judith Biely, not just four days but a lifetime; how will the library building at Burton College look from a distance if it ever comes into existence? (In the most recent letters and telegrams no one has mentioned the assignment. Perhaps he has traveled so far only to arrive at nothing, without so much as an excuse that might give a little dignity to his flight.) He’ll reach his destination soon, and it becomes impossible for him to imagine his old life or remember with any certainty a time when he wasn’t going from place to place, when his permanent state wasn’t solitude, his natural environment wasn’t trains, stations, border crossings, daybreak in odd cities, hotel rooms, life suspended each day. How strange it will be to have an office again, schedules, a studio, a drawing board. But even stranger to have been the man who returned home every day at roughly the same time and sat down to read the paper in the same chair molded by the shape and weight of his body and worn by the rubbing of his elbows; the man who one afternoon opened an atlas on his knees to imagine with his children the itinerary of a future trip, though a fictitious one, with an accurate timetable and a return date.

As disconcerting as how easily everything that seemed solid collapsed in Madrid in the course of two or three days in July was his own skill in adjusting without complaint or much hope to this transitional state. How quickly one becomes used to being a nobody and having nothing, reduced to the face and name on a passport and visa, to the few possessions that can fit into one’s pockets and a suitcase, stuffed with papers and dirty clothes and his toiletries case, the only vestige of another existence, another way of traveling, restful and bourgeois, a comfortable parenthesis of movement between two fixed points. The leather case, a gift from Adela, matches the suitcase — made of hide, with chrome fittings and compartments where toiletry items fit, held in by straps: the badger-bristle shaving brush, the silver-plated bowl for lather, the razor with its ivory handle and a supply of rustproof steel blades, the flat flask for cologne, the comb, the shoehorn, the clothing brush. Each thing in its precise place, in its pocket or leather opening, the careful order of a former time, of a life fading in his memory.

So close to the end of his journey he feels not relief but fear, fear and weariness, as if the distance traveled in recent weeks, the bad nights, the vibration of the trains, the sound of the ship’s turbines, nausea in a poorly ventilated cabin where hot air took on an oily consistency, the effort of dragging his suitcase from one place to another — all had suddenly fallen on his shoulders in a rush of weakness. Instead of impatience to arrive, he’s overwhelmed by fear of the unknown, the need to adapt to new circumstances, hold tiresome conversations with strangers, feign interest, be grateful for the favor of precarious hospitality because he has no way to reciprocate. (Perhaps Van Doren doesn’t have as much influence as he implied, perhaps the project will come to nothing because it was a pretext for offering him a temporary refuge, for influencing his life from a distance, controlling time like a benevolent deity, granting Judith and him the only four consecutive days they’d spent together.) It’s the same fear he felt as the end of each stage of his trip approached, the reluctance of someone who comes out of sleep in an unwelcoming light and doesn’t want to wake. The train approaching Paris at daybreak over the gray horizon of industrial suburbs and brick factories; his waking in a ship’s cabin and realizing it was the silence of the engines after a week of nonstop motion that dragged him out of sleep; and before that, after the first night, the surprise of reaching Valencia, the blinding light of that spring morning, as removed from the order of time as it was from the brutal winter that was to accompany the war in Madrid.

In Valencia the cafés were filled with people and the streets with traffic; had it not been for the headlines the newsboys shouted, one might have thought the war was going on in another country or was just part of a nightmare, vanished at the first light of day. In Valencia he wrote the first postcard to his children: a view of the beach in pastel colors, with white houses and palm trees. He wrote the card while sitting in a café, drinking a cold beer in the shade of an awning, near the station where his train for Barcelona and the border would leave in a few hours. He put a stamp on it and dropped it in a mailbox, trying not to think that it probably wouldn’t reach its destination and he wouldn’t receive an answer. Red-and-black flags and vehement Anarchist posters hung in the station’s waiting room and on platforms, but in the first-class carriages the conductors were as helpful and wore blue uniforms as neatly buttoned as if the war or the revolution didn’t exist. Even the militiamen who demanded documents reflexively doffed their caps to well-dressed travelers, whom a moment later they might place under arrest or drive off the train with rifle butts. Unexpected areas of the old normality remained intact in the midst of the destruction, like the balcony he’d seen one morning as he passed a bombed-out building, a balcony suspended in air, held by an invisible bar to the only wall left standing, its wrought-iron filigree perfectly preserved, as were the pots of geraniums that hung from the railing. Didn’t Negrín always say that in Spain people lacked the seriousness to make a revolution? That everything was done halfway, or carelessly, or badly, from the laying of railroad track to the shooting of some poor bastard? Now Ignacio Abel understands that on the first morning of his journey in Valencia he hadn’t shed his old identity, preserved as astonishingly as the balcony with geraniums hanging from the only wall left standing after a house was bombed. He was still somebody, still wore polished shoes and kept the crease in his trousers, still spoke with a clear voice and instinctive authority to conductors, porters, and ticket clerks at the windows he’d soon approach as fearfully as he walked toward the checkpoints at border crossings. Inside the suitcase his clothes were clean and orderly. He hadn’t yet developed the nervous gesture of repeatedly bringing his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket to confirm that his passport and wallet were still there; when he pressed his wallet he could still feel the comfortable thickness of banknotes recently withdrawn from his account, some of which he’d changed for francs and dollars in a bank on Calle de Alcalá, where he was recognized as soon as he walked in and treated with a certain reverence.