Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

“Don Ignacio, these comrades, they’ve come for a routine search.”

The man in charge looked askance at him.

“Papers,” he said.

“I told you the señor is trustworthy,” the doorman said.

“Haven’t you heard? There are no more señores here.”

As if they’d entered a church, the militiamen looked at the size of the rooms, the soaring door frames, the high ceilings with wreathed moldings, the polished parquet floors, though weeks had passed since the maids waxed them. The clerk made a slight gesture of recognition toward Ignacio Abel and nearly bowed his head, as he did when he left the mail on his desk and asked if he desired anything else. The one who seemed most directly under the command of the patrol leader took off his tasseled cap to wipe away sweat. Ignacio Abel saw that on his closely shaved nape he’d left in stubble the initials FAI. In the men’s presence he saw his own house with discomfort, irritation, almost with fear, the unnecessary spaciousness of a reception room where no reception had ever been held, the rich folds of curtains that fell luxuriously to the floor, the rooms that followed one after the other through double-paned glass doors. But they didn’t seem to search with much zeal or be in a hurry to find something compromising.

“You stay here,” the leader told the doorman, who, like an uncomfortable visitor, didn’t move from the entrance hall, while Ignacio Abel showed the militiamen each of the rooms, opening closets whose farthest corners, behind the hanging clothes, they examined with flashlights.

“So large an apartment just for you?”

“I don’t live alone. My wife and children are on vacation in the Sierra.”

“On our side or theirs?”

“On theirs, I think.”

“Well, don’t worry, you can join them before long.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“You’re not hoping their side wins.”

“You’ve seen my identification.”

“These days anybody can arrange to get a union card, but not an apartment like this.”

The short one spoke, the one with the round glasses and clean shirt; the others watched and nodded. Ignacio Abel tried to make eye contact with the ex-clerk but didn’t, wanted to remember his name but couldn’t. Their witnessing the disorder in the kitchen, the dishes piled up in the sink, upset him. They searched the maids’ room, the leader supervising from the doorway, directing them to lift up the mattresses and open a trunk against the wall. He didn’t recall ever having looked in the room. When one of the men turned on the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, he was surprised the room was so narrow: two bunk beds, the trunk, a shelf lined with newspaper, a tiny window with a flowered curtain, photos of movie stars tacked to the wall, an old night table that must have been discarded many years ago by Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, and on it a small copper Virgin. He felt embarrassment rather than remorse, but he understood he wouldn’t have felt this way if he hadn’t been afraid. The patrol leader looked around, said nothing. Ignacio Abel led them to his office and stood to one side after turning on the light.

“And whose room is this?”

“My office.”

“It looks like the office of a minister.”

“I work here. It’s my study.”

“You can call anything work.”

“And these two in the picture? Old servants?”

“They’re my parents.”

“Are they in the Sierra with the insurgents too?”

“They died many years ago.”

“And all these maps? Maybe you use them to find out if the enemy’s nearby.”

“They’re not maps. They’re plans. I work at University City. You know that.”

“Don’t use formal address with us — we’re all friends.”

It was hot in the house with all the shutters closed. The former clerk, with calculated impertinence, looked through papers on the desk and let them fall to the floor; he averted his eyes when Ignacio Abel looked at him and exchanged a glance with the other man. Then he opened the drawers one by one and let them fall to the floor. When he found the last one locked, he signaled to the leader.

“Why do you keep that one locked?”

“No particular reason. Here’s the key.”

“Are you getting nervous?”

“I have no reason to.”

“Smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re used to better tobacco?”

“No, it’s just that I don’t smoke.”

“Okay, we’re going.”

For a moment he felt relief, a weakness in the muscles more revelatory than his dignity would allow him to recognize. Then he saw the eyes of the patrol leader and the smile of the former clerk and understood that the plural included him. Okay, we’re going. The one in the tasseled cap stepped on something and Ignacio Abel heard glass breaking and wood cracking. The framed photo of Lita and Miguel on the swing was no longer on his desk.

“Just a moment,” he said, noticing the difference fear had made in the sound of his voice. “There must be some misunderstanding.”

“No misunderstanding,” said the leader, the cigarette in his left hand, on his wrist an expensive watch that Ignacio Abel hadn’t spotted before. “Don’t think you fooled us with all your cards and your photographs with Republican reactionaries. Nobody gives us orders. To us you’re nobody, worse than nobody. The comrades in construction remember you well. You hired strikebreakers and invited the Assault Guards every time a strike was called. Now you’re going to pay.”

The clerk took him by the left arm and the one in the tasseled cap by the right; in the grip of their large hands his own weak muscles embarrassed him. Without pushing or pulling him they led him across the hall, and they passed the doorman, still standing like a humble visitor. He thought of Calvo Sotelo on the night just a few weeks earlier when they’d come for him: how they said in surprise that he didn’t resist, didn’t assert his immunity as a deputy to those arresting him. He remembered the neighbor from the apartment across the landing, tiny in the peephole in his pajamas, and the woman on her knees clutching awkwardly at the trousers of the man taking him away. He was still in his building and also far away. As they reached the landing on a lower floor he heard a door closing and understood that a neighbor must be peering through the peephole, grateful not to be the one arrested. The black vehicle that would take him away started up as soon as the entrance door opened. It was a rather small van, on its roof a panel with a drawing of a bar of soap from which bubbles rose. LÓPEZ SOAPS. The clerk, forcing him to bend to get into the van, squeezed his head hard, pressing his fingers into his skull. Dear Miguel and Lita, dear Judith, dear Adela. With the street lamps out and the windows shuttered, Calle Príncipe de Vergara was a tunnel of darkness opening before the van’s headlights. He was in the back seat. Nobody would shoot him in the back of the head without his realizing it, without his knowing he’d die, the way Calvo Sotelo had been shot, twice. He asked where they were taking him. He asked in a voice so low the sound of the engine erased it, and he had to swallow and clear his throat to repeat the question.

“Weren’t you really proud of your job? Weren’t you in a hurry to finish the construction? Where better than your University City?”

He was crowded in the back seat between the two militiamen, the clerk to his left, smiling with his fleshy mouth, and the tassel on the cap of the one to his right swinging back and forth. After a ride through darkened streets and lots whose duration he couldn’t measure, he recognized beyond the illumination of the headlights the shapes of the first buildings in University City. There was a checkpoint before they reached it. Militiamen with flashlights and rifles signaled for them to stop.