Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

He can calculate how many days his trip has lasted, his flight. But he knows his desertion didn’t begin three weeks ago in Madrid, when he closed the door of his apartment and didn’t bother to insert the key — the key that jingles in his trouser pocket along with some Spanish, French, and American coins, the same pocket where he keeps the train ticket and the receipt from the cafeteria where he had a cup of coffee and a pastry this morning — but much earlier, more than two months earlier, on Sunday, July 19, to be precise, a few minutes before five in the afternoon, at the exact moment he closed the iron gate at the house in the Sierra and heard the train whistle nearby. Weak, almost a hiss, scaled to the Spanish penury in things, not like the deep vibration of a ship’s siren with which this American train announces its approach, resounding in the river and the woods, the woods that just a step from the tracks have a jungle’s untamable density. He looked at his watch, two minutes to five, for once the train would be on time. He began to walk quickly along the dirt path, past the adobe walls of other summer houses, beneath the vertical sun of the July siesta, even though he had more than enough time since the station was very close, the little station where two or three weeks earlier Adela had arrived at about the same time on the train from Madrid, when the men who played cards in the tavern were surprised to see her on the platform alone, wearing high-heeled shoes and a small-brimmed hat tilted over her face. The same men would stare at him when he arrived on the platform, deserted in the lethargy of noon. A couple of Civil Guards walked along the platform, their uniforms old, their primitive muskets on their shoulders, their dark features contracting in the heat beneath their three-cornered hats. One of them asked Ignacio Abel for his identity card and whether he was going to Madrid. Under the marquee the station clock had stopped, its glass broken. On the list of scheduled arrivals and departures, written in chalk on a blackboard, there were two or three spelling mistakes. The July heat crushed the will and made things unravel, anesthetizing consciousness under the blinding sunlight and the cicadas’ chirping. The train pulled in and the coal locomotive filled the air with black smoke. Inside the carriage he trembled with impatience, with disbelief; he looked at his watch as he settled onto the hard wooden seat. For the first time in many days he’d meet Judith Biely not in a café, not at a park corner, but in the house of Madame Mathilde, in the rented bedroom where the curtains would be closed, where he’d see her naked, coming toward him, Judith recovered, offering herself again, resisting her own decision, tied to him by a need more powerful than remorse or decency. In spite of it all you were dying to get back to Madrid. You couldn’t care less about your children, and me even less. You were lucky to catch the last train to the city. You probably don’t remember how the children liked to watch the trains go by, anticipating your arrival. So strange not to hear the trains come and go anymore. I don’t have to tell you what would have happened to you had you stayed.

He’d walked away from the house along the garden path, brushing against the rockrose, the overnight bag in his hand, resisting the temptation to look at his watch, to quicken his pace while still in sight of everyone, trying to control his impatience and haste, at least until he heard the gate close behind him. It was then that he took one last look at the house; the family had resumed their conversation in the shade of the grapevine, as if they had already forgotten his existence. The scene couldn’t have been more distant or insular had he been looking at a photo of a stranger’s family on their Sierra vacation. People were frozen in a casual manner while keeping their distance from each other: the older man in an undershirt, who at any moment will doze in his rocking chair, a straw hat down over his eyes; the white-haired woman in a dark apron, the matriarch of the house, sitting in a low chair, sewing or embroidering or holding in her hands what might be a rosary; the corpulent priest with his legs wide apart and the collar of his cassock unfastened; the frail unmarried ladies, their hair arranged in an outdated style; the other younger woman still attractive in spite of the gray streaks in her hair and the glasses on her broad, placid face which she wears to read a book, and who appears to be lost in her reading and not looking at the man in the light suit who walks down the path, his back to her, attempting not to quicken his pace in too obvious, too shameless a way; going to a place, a person, in spite of his awkward promises, his contrition that’s false not because he’s lying but because there is nothing to be done, because the irreparable has already taken place. As she watched him leave, she knew he’d turn when he reached the gate. Between shadow and light, the back of a figure holding a tray: for the person who sees the photograph after years have passed, that face will remain hidden; the young maid, a white apron over her dark dress and the cap the señora insists she wear even though they’re in the Sierra, holding on the tray a large pitcher of fresh lemonade and some glasses: when she moves between shadow and light projected by the trellis, the sun shines for a few seconds on the yellow-green liquid, turning it golden. He should have had a glass of lemonade before he left; Adela offered it, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, but he couldn’t take the risk. Now he was thirsty, and when he turned at the gate he felt that the soft collar of his summer shirt was too tight. In the photo, perhaps in a blur, the figure of his daughter, who, after accompanying her father halfway across the garden and giving him two kisses and telling him to come back soon, sat on the swing and began to sway back and forth, more childish in the house in the Sierra than in Madrid because she’s closer to her little-girl memories, the treasured memory of so many identical summer vacations, the same garden and the same swing with its rusty hinges, her father walking away, his briefcase in his hand, the sleepy voices of the family gathering behind her as she begins to swing, the solemn voice of her grandfather, the chirping-bird titters of the maiden aunts. She’ll call her brother to come and give her a push, now that they no longer fight as they did only a few years ago about who’d sit on the swing first, they won’t count aloud the number of times each pushes the other, and it won’t be necessary for their mother or father to come and order a rigorous taking of turns. In the photograph, in memory, the boy is a figure separate from the others, sitting on the highest step at the entrance to the house beside one of the squat granite columns that support the veranda on the upper floor, in front of the area of densest shade from the portico where flies buzz. The boy does nothing, he simply looks at his father, who’s leaving; he is suddenly grown, taciturn, with a shadow of thin facial hair on his upper lip, having entered adolescence, aggrieved because his father’s going to a life he doesn’t know and his mother and sister don’t share; watching him leave with the old rankling mixture of relief, resentment, and nostalgia, the son who hasn’t stopped watching his mother since they brought her home from the hospital, where she spent a week after an accident no one explained and only he knows, imagines, has to do with his father, with his father’s unfamiliar, terrified face on the night he saw him standing in the center of his study, in front of the overturned drawer, among disordered papers and photographs on the floor. There are things he sees so clearly yet others seem not to notice, and this disconcerts him and draws him into himself, something that is not obvious in photos from previous summers but is captured in this image, existing only in Ignacio Abel’s mind, fixed there because of his own guilt. A child changes so rapidly at that age, he must already have pimples, his voice must be deepening, and if his father heard it now, after only three months, perhaps he wouldn’t recognize it. What school would he be attending, if any schools are open on the other side, in the enemy zone, his son, so fond of movies and magazines, who failed half his exams in June, though his father and mother didn’t pay much attention to a setback that in other circumstances would have angered them, his mother in the hospital and then convalescing in the bedroom where the curtains were always closed, his father so distracted by his work at University City, leaving the house at dawn and coming home in the middle of the night, picked up at the entrance to the building by a car in which someone he trusted traveled with him and, Miguel and Lita knew, carried a pistol, a bodyguard like the ones in movies, though he wore a mason’s cap, not a gangster’s hat, and had a cigarette in a corner of his mouth.