Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

The closer he came, the more afraid he was. He wanted to move time ahead and leaned forward in his seat, his right leg moving rhythmically, feeling on his face the warm air that came in the window when they began to drive faster. He searched for signs of what was going to happen to him in a few minutes, prophecies of the immediate future, possible outcomes. He enters the house and Judith has just left. He walks behind the silent maid down the dimly lit corridor, opens the door to the room, and sees Judith sitting on the bed, wearing her high-heeled shoes and street dress, as if she’s just arrived. He gets out of the taxi, pushes the gate, and finds it locked. He rings the bell, whose faint echo reaches him from inside the house, and the sound that had so often announced a meeting with Judith is now a warning. The maid opens the door, and before she has time to say anything, he understands that Judith hasn’t come. Panic seized him. A young woman, alone, whom he saw through the window as the taxi slowed down, was, for a moment, Judith leaving Madame Mathilde’s house after waiting for an hour. Her features dissolved as rapidly as the driver’s chatter or the blurred spectacle of a street disturbance in the center of the city. He paid quickly with a wrinkled bill and got out. At the end of Calle O’Donnell, wide and unobstructed, with an open horizon where the rows of trees and streetcar tracks and electric wires disappeared, Madrid was once again the deserted city of Sunday afternoons in the summer, paralyzed by a dusty heat that the rows of too-young trees didn’t alleviate, submerged in a silence of closed balconies. Without a hat he felt insecure and unprotected on the street. He passed his hand over his hair, adjusted his tie, brushed off his trousers. Madame Mathilde’s maid sees him with his head uncovered and a bruise on his face, shakes her head in disapproval, and opens the door. Each step he took was bringing him closer to the undeniable; whatever it was, it would abolish the torment of uncertainty. The gate opened without resistance. In the garden stood a fountain with a basin but no water, topped by a small statue of a nymph. As soon as he climbed a few steps and pressed the bell that triggered a muffled sound of chimes, he’d know what his ultimate fate would be. He wasn’t asking for a lasting future without distress, only a moment to look at her, hear her voice. He wouldn’t even try to embrace her; it would be enough for him to be at her side and tell her what he needed to say and hadn’t said clearly before. He pressed the bell. No one came to the door. The house wasn’t empty; he could hear echoes of a radio broadcast. He rang again and the maid’s suspicious face appeared in an opening between the frame and the door, narrower than on previous occasions. If she said nothing and led him to the usual room, it meant Judith was waiting for him. The servant wore a black dress and cap, and on Madame Mathilde’s specific instructions had no makeup on her eyes or lips. She closed the door and with the same faint smile and silent docility she’d displayed at other times indicated that he should follow her. He didn’t ask whether Judith had come; saying something would have risked frightening away a fragile hope. At the door the servant lowered her head and moved to one side. When he didn’t dare to look inside, the maid’s voice confirmed his fear. “If the señor wishes, I can serve you a drink while you’re waiting for the señorita to arrive.”

The ice had dissolved in the glass of whiskey when steps that weren’t Judith’s approached the door and someone knocked. He’d been sitting in the red easy chair by the window, not moving, or moving just enough to take an occasional sip, noting the gradual warming of the drink and the aftertaste of alcohol, watching the progress of nightfall. Like the ice in the glass, his anxiety had gradually dissolved into despair, into the simple inertia not of waiting but of maintaining the immobility of the wait, because of fatalism or reluctance or the inability to make a decision or do anything other than continue to sit, glass in hand, submerging himself in the growing darkness, occasionally seeing himself from the side in the mirror when he turned his head. He could have pressed the bell on the night table to request more ice or ask if there was a call, a message from Judith. But he did nothing. He simply prolonged the wait, putting off the acceptance of what in reality he’d known, surmised not with his intelligence but with the ache in his stomach, the pressure of sorrow in his throat and chest, the warning of the unacceptable. He continued to wait as if the force of his obstinacy would influence Judith’s actions and will. Unmoving and alert, he listened for sounds in the house, the silence of an abandoned place that didn’t resemble the habitual hideout of adulterous plans and sexual appointments of specified duration. He didn’t hear muffled bells, brief rings, footsteps near the door or above him. From the adjoining rooms came no heavy breathing, bursts of laughter, disconnected words, stifled shouts. Only the radio somewhere, broadcasting misled voices and music, announcements. And in the background the remote sounds of Madrid, beyond the sonorous birds in the garden, coming in through the shutters along with a breeze, a hot breath released by the soil and pavement upon the arrival of nightfall. Embers of light remained on the venal red of the bedspread, in the mirror, on the porcelain of the bidet and sink. In memory Judith’s body had the same spectral quality as that dissolving light. How wretched to have brought her so often to a place like this, not to have paid attention to the vileness of almost every object in the room, the vulgarity, the depraved taste of a bourgeois bedroom from the turn of the century replicated in a brothel. Her young skin had touched those shiny, threadbare fabrics impregnated with the smell of tobacco and cheap cologne; her bare feet had stepped on the rug with a worn pastoral scene; when she leaned back, her tousled head had rested on that wall with drawings of flowers and a dark trail of grease. He saw her astride him, her hair over her face and her torso brilliant with sweat in the reddish light of a lamp that transformed the working hours of a Monday morning into night. He saw her kneeling, still dressed, removing his shoes while he sat in that same chair on one of the days when he arrived exhausted from work. Judith untying his shoelaces, taking off his socks, caressing his feet. She raised one of his feet and rested it on her breasts, leaning over to kiss it. He was going to say something and Judith put her index finger to his lips.

The approaching footsteps made him wake from his self-absorption. How long had he been in the dark? He turned on a light and stood, attempting to straighten his tie and shirt collar. After a few short knocks on the door, the old painted face of Madame Mathilde appeared, an envelope in her hand. His sentence would be on the sheet of paper inside, held by wrinkled hands wearing bracelets and rings. No matter how much I want to, I can’t be your docile lover, the mistress you keep at a distance while you go on living with your family. It’s better if I go and try my best to forget you. Madame Mathilde inspected the room with an expert glance and immediately put on her affable face of discreet complicity, saddened now, the bearer, perhaps, and an unwilling one, of bad news. “Forgive the young lady’s confusion, she’s a beginner.” Madame Mathilde spoke as if she managed a respectable household with servants, and a good deal of protocol, a boarding school or strict social club where few first names and no last names were spoken. “I told the girl to let me know when you arrived so you wouldn’t have to wait for no reason. The señorita came this afternoon and gave me this letter for you, asked me to say she was very sorry she couldn’t come back later, as she wanted to, because it was urgent that she leave Madrid. Which doesn’t surprise me at all, considering how things are going, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Ignacio Abel looked at her in bewilderment, nodding, as Madame Mathilde handed him the letter. He read it sitting on the bed, in the dim light of the lamp on the night table, drinking a whiskey he didn’t remember ordering, facing the mirror where he’d so often seen Judith Biely naked on the red bedspread. If we can’t have each other without hiding and if I have to share you with a woman you don’t love but whom we made suffer and almost die, I’d rather be alone. Shouts and car horns sounded in the distance, military marches and announcements from a radio playing in the house, something he didn’t recall ever occurring before. The night air no longer moved past the shutters. Sweat dampened the edge of his shirt collar, tight against his skin, and instead of relaxing him the whiskey had left a throbbing pain in his temples. What good is it for you to say you were thinking of me if last night you slept with her in the same bed and this afternoon you kissed her goodbye when you left and took the train to come be with me.