Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

He turned off the twin lamps on the two desks and left the room stealthily, as he had in the days when he’d hope they had fallen asleep. Suddenly he felt suffocated by all the absences that filled the apartment, at once expelling him and blocking his path. With the caution of a thief he walked out, uneasy at having forgotten something important, closing the door slowly, not locking it, going down the marble stairs in the dark, fearful he might run into someone or be seen by the porter, who’d be surprised to see him going out at this hour with a suitcase and perhaps would inform one of the patrols that came from time to time to search the apartments, looking for suspects and snipers in a bourgeois district where most of the residents had been lucky enough to be away on vacation when the revolution broke out.

A solitary figure walking close to the buildings, under the moonlight, in the city with closed windows and street lamps turned off, wearing his hat, his travel raincoat, suitcase in hand, his steps resolute and at the same time full of caution, alert to the strokes of the clock in a tower indicating he had more than enough time to reach the Atocha Station, where a safe-conduct signed by Dr. Juan Negrín would allow Ignacio Abel to occupy a place in a truck leaving for Valencia and carrying an unspecified cargo of official documents guarded by men in uniform. At first it was difficult for him to get used to the permanent uncertainty, the discomfort of trying to sleep bundled against the cold, resting his head on the suitcase, his body subjected to vibrations and braking, or lying on a wooden bench, or on cold marble in the waiting room of a station; to opening his eyes at dawn and not knowing where he was; to not knowing whether his documents would be approved by the guard or police officer or gendarme or border official or customs clerk who scrutinized them interminably. Each departure was a relief, the end of a wait; each arrival, each approach to a new destination brought an uneasiness that gradually turned to anguish. Patience was pure physical inertia: lines of people waiting for a window to open, for a traveler’s interrogation to end, for a guard to examine each item of clothing and each toilet article and each trivial memory contained in a suitcase. In waiting rooms, at control barriers and border posts, Ignacio Abel had joined a new variety of the human species: passengers in transit, people carrying scuffed suitcases and dubious credentials, nomads in shoes with rundown heels whose documents had many stamps and an air of falsification. The train that had taken him from Barcelona to the second or third day of his journey stopped in Port Bou at nightfall; the passengers advanced in silence and formed a line in front of a sentry box at the border crossing. On the other side a French gendarme paced, protected from the drizzle by a short oilskin cape. A few steps from the French flag, on this side, was the flag not of the Spanish Republic but an enormous red-and-black banner with the Anarchist initials in the center. What would Negrín think if he saw that usurpation, if he had to submit his deputy’s identity card and his diplomatic passport to two militiamen armed with Mauser rifles, pistols at their waists, cartridge belts across their chests, red-and-black handkerchiefs tied around their necks, wearing the sideburns of bandits in romantic lithographs and interrogating the passengers one by one. As a precaution, Ignacio Abel had removed his tie before getting off the train and put his hat in the suitcase. He wasn’t yet proficient in the new trade of waiting and patience. He presented his passport opened to the page with the photograph, looking for a moment into the small red eyes of a militiaman who chewed on a cigarette butt, so bored or so tired he didn’t bother to relight it. Sitting on a bench against the wall, a woman who’d been denied passage was crying under a poster portraying a foot in a peasant espadrille flattening a serpent with three heads: Hitler, Mussolini, and a bishop. The other travelers glanced at her with no trace of sympathy, looking away when the woman raised her head, as if not wanting to be contaminated by her misfortune. The weary militiaman spat out the butt and turned the pages of Ignacio Abel’s passport, wetting his thumb with the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t imagine how many similar inspections he’d have to undergo in the next few weeks, how many times an inquisitorial gaze would look up from the photo in the passport to search his face, as if it were necessary to establish the veracity of each feature to eliminate the possibility of an imposture, or perhaps merely to cause a delay, so the suspect foreigner would miss the next train or be late or more exhausted in his flight.

The impassive, aggressive harshness of the Spanish militiamen was less wounding than the coldness of the French gendarmes in neat uniforms, shouting obscenities at the Spanish peasant women who feared them so much and didn’t understand their orders. Taller than the people around him, better dressed, able to answer the gendarmes in French, Ignacio Abel knew he was included in the same contempt, and that awareness gave him a feeling of fraternity. He too was a sale espagnol; the only difference was that he could understand the insults, and the greatest of them didn’t need to be formulated because it became clear as soon as one crossed the border: the tidy station; the clean-shaven gendarmes in their impeccable hard collars, the glow of good food on their cheeks; the posters showing beaches along the Côte d’Azur and transatlantic cruises, not revolutionary slogans; the large window of a restaurant; the neon sign of a hotel. By crossing the border he discovered the weight of the Spanish disease he might escape, but for which perhaps there was no cure, though it was possible for him to hide the symptoms, to distance himself from his compatriots, who couldn’t elude the hostile looks or hide the stigmata of their foreignness and poverty: berets, unshaven faces, black shawls, funereal underskirts, bundles of clothing on their backs, infants nursing at sagging breasts, Spanish refugees leaving third-class cars and camping like Gypsies on station platforms. But he’d traveled first class; he could go into a restaurant on the square and have supper at the window and drink a bottle of excellent wine; behind the restaurant’s curtains he could while away the time until the Paris train, savoring a glass of cognac, looking at his compatriots crowding the station steps as they shared pieces of bacon, dark bread, cans of sardines. Over the years he’d lost his instinct for frugality and his fear of tomorrow, lost the ability to measure out his money or renounce the privileges that had made his life comfortable for so long. Social distance still protected him. He began to realize it had been stripped away that same night, on the express to Paris, where no first-class tickets were available and he had to sit without a reservation in a second-class seat from which he was turned out at the first stop, when an irritated traveler entered the compartment and claimed the seat that wasn’t his, by the intangible right of a French citizen. The train’s corridors were also filled with people, and it took several hours before he could find a place to sit on the floor and doze off on his suitcase. He woke up to an indifferent kick from the gendarme, which continued to hurt his pride for many days, perhaps the first lesson of his new life, when he had not yet learned how to accept humiliation and be grateful to those who could otherwise harm him.

Judith Biely suddenly leaped from the sadness of memory to the imminence of the future, the one unfolding before him as well as a phantom parallel future, the trip to America they’d planned together, suspended now between memory and imagination with the radiance of a timeless illusion. And the desire for her fed his jealousy: which men had she been with before meeting him, a young, free woman dazzled by Europe, as forgetful of her own attractiveness as she was ignorant of the ideas men could have about her when they took her American self-assurance for sexual availability; which men had she met now that she’d left Madrid, relieved not only of love but of the guilt and indignity of their deception? If your wife had died, if she’d drowned in that pond because of us, I’d never have forgiven myself.