Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

What was it like to have experienced that Sunday, that entire week? How many people are left who still remember, who preserve a precious image like a fragile relic, one not added to in retrospect, not induced by knowledge of what was about to occur, what no one foresaw in its monstrous scale, its irrationality, lasting so long no one would remember normal life or have the strength to miss it, life already in hopeless disarray though there’s not a single sign of change in the things Ignacio Abel saw when he left the house, after closing the squeaking gate and using a handkerchief to wipe the rust from his sweaty hand. I want to imagine, with the precision of lived experience, what happened twenty years before I was born and what no one will remember anymore in just a few years: the brightness of those few distant days in July and the darkness of time, that very afternoon, the days that preceded it; to do this I’d need an impossible sixth sense to perceive a past that precedes memory itself: I’d need to be innocent of the future, ignorant of what is imminent in the present, in each of these people’s lives, their astonishing, uniform blindness, like one of those ancient epidemics that erased millions. But if I could reach out my hand across the frontier of time, touch things, not merely imagine them, not merely see them in museum display cases or by staring hard at the details in photographs: touch the cool surface of that pitcher of water a waiter has just left on the table in a café in Madrid; walk along the Gran Vía or the Calle de Alcalá and feel the bright sunlight vanish in the shade provided by striped awnings whose colors can’t be distinguished in black-and-white photos; touch the fleshy geranium leaves seen around a window frame in the photograph of a station in the Sierra very similar to the one close to the house where Ignacio Abel’s family spends the summers. The most trivial thing would be a treasure: getting into a taxi in Madrid on a July day in 1936, the odor of the worn, sweaty leather, of the hair pomade men used in those days, of the back seat, a smell of tobacco that must be very different from what can be breathed in now because everything’s minutely specific and everything’s disappeared, or almost everything, just as almost everything I could see looking out the window, if I were granted the gift of riding in that taxi, has disappeared except the topography of the streets and the architecture of a certain number of buildings — everything demolished by a great cataclysm, more efficient and more tenacious than war, one that occurs each minute and has carried away all the automobiles, all the streetcars with their advertisements faded by the weather, all the awnings and all the store signs, that has submerged paving stones in asphalt and before that torn up the tracks of the streetcars, the mannequins in the shop windows in their summer dresses and bathing costumes and the large smiling heads in the hat stores, all the posters pasted on façades, faded by the rain and sun, torn off in strips, posters for political meetings and bullfights and soccer games and boxing matches, posters for contests to choose the most beautiful señorita at the festival of Carmen, election posters from the February campaign that display categorical statements of victory by candidates who were then defeated. To see, touch, smell: one hazy morning late in May, as I pass by the fence of a country manor half in ruins, I smell the dense, delicate aroma of poplar blossoms from a gigantic tree that has prospered in abandonment and weeds, and the aroma is undoubtedly identical to what someone might have smelled when passing this same spot seventy-three years earlier. I touch the pages of a newspaper — a bound volume of the daily Ahora from July 1936—and it seems I’m touching something that belongs to the substance of that time, but the paper leaves the feel of dust, like dry pollen, on my fingertips, and the pages break at the corners if I don’t turn them with the necessary care. It isn’t hard for me to conjecture that Ignacio Abel would read that Republican, politically moderate paper, with excellent graphics, an abundance of brief articles in tiny print that after three-quarters of a century continue to transmit, like the buzz of a honeycomb, a powerful, distant drone of lost words, voices extinguished long ago. He bought the paper on Sunday, July 12, when he got off the train in the station at nightfall, back from the Sierra, and probably glanced at it and put it in his pocket or left it in the taxi that took him to the center of the city, to the Plaza de Santa Ana, with the carelessness that characterizes how most ordinary things are handled and lost, things that are everywhere every day and yet disappear without a trace after a short time, or are preserved by pure chance because someone used the pages of that day’s paper to line a drawer, or because the paper was left in a trunk no one opened again for seventy years, along with a little notebook that had a few dates written in it, a packet of postcards, a box of matches, a coaster from a cabaret on which a red owl is drawn, seeds of a time that will bear fruit in the imagination of someone not yet born. He was going to the Plaza de Santa Ana in the hope of seeing Judith. Three days earlier she’d agreed by phone to meet him when she returned from her trip to Granada, so frequently postponed, on condition he not look for her, not call her, not write to her. She didn’t say when she’d go to Granada or when she’d return and had no reason to give him that information. She’d be waiting for him in Madame Mathilde’s house on Sunday, the nineteenth, then perhaps she’d leave to take some literature courses at the International University of Santander. Ignacio Abel agreed with the urgency of an addict ready to lose everything in exchange for a single dose of guaranteed pleasure. He hung up the phone and began to count the days until he’d see her. On Saturday morning, the eleventh, he left the car at a repair shop on Calle Jorge Juan and went by train to the Sierra. He chatted with Don Francisco de Asís, the uncle who was a priest, the maiden aunts; he said the construction strike couldn’t last much longer and it wasn’t true that gangs of threatening strikers were breaking into grocery stores; he denied that he himself was in any danger; he’d received a few anonymous letters like everyone else, but the police assured him he had nothing to worry about, so he’d dispensed with the armed guard who came to pick him up each morning, to the disappointment of Miguel, who found it worthy of a novel that no one could tell the serious young man was carrying an automatic pistol under his jacket; his brother-in-law Víctor had told them it would be impossible for him to come to the family dinner that Sunday, and so Doña Cecilia’s rice and chicken could be enjoyed without the uncertainties and surprises of almost every summer Sunday, though Doña Cecilia couldn’t stop wondering where that boy would eat, in some inn or tavern or whatever, especially considering how much he liked her rice, which in the judgment of Don Francisco de Asís had no equal in the best restaurants in Madrid. Adela was present for everything, calm and withdrawn, a little drowsy because of the pills prescribed for her when she’d been discharged from the sanatorium. She accepted with a forced smile her husband’s new deferential treatment; Miguel, observing her, was surprised the smile was so affected, that there was in her an even more meager sense of authenticity than in his father’s conjugal attentions: adjusting the cushion at the back of her wicker chair, filling her glass with water. When he arrived on Saturday, Ignacio Abel had brought her a bouquet of flowers. Adela thanked him, saying they were pretty, but she didn’t look at them once after she’d handed the bouquet to the maid to put in a vase. Beneath a façade of normality the family hid an unspeakable secret. After the rice, and coffee in the shade of the trellis, Ignacio Abel seemed to have dozed off for a while in the rocking chair, but the hands resting on the curved arms couldn’t abandon themselves to rest. Miguel saw the tension in the knuckles beneath the skin, the movement of the eyeballs beneath the lids. Detectives at Scotland Yard solve seemingly unsolvable mysteries by studying the most insignificant details at the crime scene. It was enough for the sound of a train to approach for his father to open his eyes, to dissemble as he consulted his watch. It was amazing how little capacity for pretense adults had, so predictable and yet so pompous, so sure their actions would awaken no suspicions. A few minutes before the six o’clock train for Madrid arrived, Miguel saw his father cross the garden in his light suit and summer hat, his briefcase under his arm, walking to the gate where he’d turn to say goodbye before he disappeared for several days. He holds his briefcase tightly to let us know that what he carries inside is very important and he has to leave. He turns after he’s opened the gate and doesn’t wait to be lost from sight before erasing from his face any indication of still being here.