In the Night of Time (18 page)

 

Yet building something is so arduous. There's a silent resentment against the effort, a destructive underground current, the impulse of the child who tramples his recently completed sandcastle at the beach, the joy of flattening towers with the sole of the foot, destroying walls with a kick; Miguel crying in his room, red-faced, surrounded by the ruins of the Meccano, too much crying for his age, his sister looking at him with annoyance from her desk; teams of dynamiters in the late July heat and the first hallucinatory days of the war attempting to blow up the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Los Angeles Hill, bringing large augers and hammer drills on trucks from Madrid, squads of militiamen firing their rifles in successive volleys at the enormous statue, its arms spread wide; the crowd illuminated by the brilliance of the flames, eyes shining, the unanimous uproar that burst from open mouths on the night of July 19 when they saw the dome of a church collapse amid brilliant embers and a lava of melted lead. In the heat of the summer night the fire, like blasts from a furnace, made the air tremble. How much time, how much labor, how much ingenuity had gone into building that dome a little more than two centuries ago, how many men breaking stone, how many mules and oxen dragging huge blocks from the quarry, how many trees and how many axes needed to prepare the rafters, how many callused hands skinned, tugging on pulley ropes, in which furnaces was lead molded for the roofs or the red clay and glazed tiles baked? But everything burned so quickly; the fire sucked in hot air to keep feeding its own voracity; around Ignacio Abel men and women danced as if celebrating the apotheosis of a primitive deity, some shooting rifles or pistols into the air, as intoxicated by fire as by words or anthems, celebrating not the literal collapse of a church dome in Madrid but the imaginary downfall of an old world that deserved to perish. He recalls the sensation of the fire stinging the skin on his face, the smell of gasoline, the suffocating smoke after a gust of wind, the taste of ash in his mouth, and afterward the stink of smoke on his clothes. The other side destroys with more modern methods, not with the fire of medieval apocalypses but with Italian and German planes that machine-gun refugees on the roads and drop bombs from a comfortable height over a Madrid that lacks not only antiaircraft defenses but also effective searchlights and sirens. Our side executes crudely, with fury, the other side with the methodical deliberation of butchers, shooting from a distance and with infallible marksmanship at terrified militiamen who run away, then using sharpened bayonets up close. Neither side rests at night. At night the designated victim offers even less resistance. He waits motionless, apathetic, like an animal transfixed by the headlights of the car that will knock it down. On both sides, headlights are the last thing those who are going to be executed see. As for Professor Rossman, whose glasses had been stomped on, the light must have hurt his poor colorless eyes. In the darkness Ignacio Abel heard a voice saying his name, and it took him a moment to realize that if he didn't see anything, it was because he was covering his eyes with both hands.

 

He looks at his watch again, though he looked at it only a minute ago, like the smoker who doesn't remember that he has a cigarette and anxiously lights another. If they haven't attacked the city yet, it's likely that the engines of the planes can already be heard in the frightened silence of a night without lights. Moreno Villa must hear them behind the closed window in his room at the Residence, where on other nights he's heard the orders and guns of nearby firing squads, the purr of cars that light the scene and wait with their motors running for the job to be over. Perhaps the planes fly in from the north and Miguel and Lita hear them passing over the peaks of the Sierra, knowing they're going to bomb Madrid, imagining their father is still in the city, or has died, that they won't see him again, their last image of him a badly made photo that disappears in the developing fluid, the light suit, the black briefcase, the summer hat waving on the other side of the gate as the train whistle sounds again.

 

With a whistle like a ship's siren the train moves away from the riverbank and plunges at higher speed into the tunnel of yellow, ocher, orange, blue, and red leaves of a forest so dense the afternoon light can barely penetrate. The wind caused by the power of the train raises eddies of leaves that flutter like clouds of agitated butterflies, collide with the window, and are rapidly left behind. Leaves of oak, maple, elm, trees he's never seen, still plentiful at the treetops and floating through the air or covering the ground like a great snowstorm of reds, yellows, ochers, among tree trunks as extravagant as primitive columns and impenetrable thickets where it seems primordial nature has been preserved only a few steps from the train, like the river's oceanic current that breaks in diminished waves against the bank adjacent to the rails. His eyes are lost in the density of the woods, as if suddenly there were no traces of the city only a few minutes behind them, or the bridge that testifies to a proximate human presence, as if the continent had closed in on itself in a flood of rivers and forests, erasing the scars of the invaders' presence. The ruins of an abolished civilization might be concealed under vegetation this dense. Coming in through the window now isn't the smell of algae and the ocean but the odor of leaves, damp earth, and fertile soil where vegetable matter rots in the shade of impenetrable undergrowth. Entire forests of pine groves in the Sierra Morena and the Sierra de Cazorla were cut down to build the ships of Philip II's armada, which a storm sank in just a few hours near the English coast. Dead animals, birds without shelter, rain washing away soil on slopes the tree roots had held in place, finally thankless bare rock, the harsh homeland of goatherds, rachitic peasants, the ecstatic, determined to cut and burn more and leave no refuge even for scorpions.

 

He took Judith Biely for a walk in the Royal Botanical Garden the second time they met. She recognized American trees, the identical fall colors, though it surprised her that the forest ended abruptly and they immediately came upon the straight paths, fences, and pergolas of a French garden. She walked by his side and both were silent, listening to the rustle of dry leaves under their feet. They'd done no more than caress and kiss with apprehensive awkwardness in the greenish half-light of the bar at the Hotel Florida, and then in the car when Ignacio Abel drove her for the first time to her boarding house, the two of them surprised and silent following their boldness. They hadn't seen each other naked. Conversation had distracted them from the fact of being together and permitted them to suspend the connection affecting them behind their words. They'd agreed to meet at the entrance to the Botanical Garden, and the impulse for one to go to the other had been halted in the prelude to physical intimacy. Indecisive or diffident, they didn't kiss or take each other by the hand. A renewed timidity wiped away the closeness of their first meeting; it seemed impossible that they'd embraced and kissed at length. They had to begin again, probe the reestablished limits one more time, the invisible restraints of good manners. How strange that all of it had occurred, that only a year had gone by since then, that the October afternoon light was almost identical, like the smell and colors of the leaves. “And the strangest thing of all is that I feel so at home in Madrid,” Judith had said just before she fell silent, her hands in the pockets of her light coat, her head bare, looking around as calmly as on the first day they were together on the street, on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía when they'd left Van Doren's apartment, in front of the movie posters covering the façade of the Palacio de la Prensa. In the Garden, on a cool, damp October morning with the subtle scent of smoke and fallen leaves in the air, they read the labels with the names of the trees in Latin and Spanish. Judith pronounced them aloud, uncertain, allowing herself to be corrected, taking pleasure in names that alluded to distant origins: the elm of the Caucasus, the weeping pine of the Himalayas, the giant sequoia of California. She told him she felt more at home in Madrid than in any European city she'd visited in the past year and a half, and it had been true from the moment she got off the train in the North Station and went out to a sunny, damp street in the first light of a September morning and took a taxi to the Plaza de Santa Ana, filled with produce and flower stands covered by awnings, the shouts of vendors and the warbling of birds for sale in their wire cages, the cries and flutes of knife grinders and the sound of conversations coming through the wide-open doors of the cafés. Her New York neighborhood had been like that when she was a girl, she said, but perhaps with a more anguished vitality, a more visible fury in the daily search for sustenance or profit, in the harshness of social relationships, men and women from remote places in the world having to earn a living from the first day and without anyone's help in a city that for them was strange and overwhelming beyond the familiar streets where immigrants crowded together, dressed as they had dressed in the villages and ghettos of the far eastern reaches of Europe, surrounded by signs, shouts, and cooking odors that reproduced those of the old country. In Madrid the street peddler standing on a corner or the patron leaning on the bar in a tavern gave Judith the impression of always having been there, inhabiting an uneventful indolence, like that of the men in dark suits who looked out at the street through the large windows of cafés or the drowsing guards in the rooms of the Prado. He asked her whether, in the matter of Oriental indolence, she'd tried the clerks in public offices yet, gone at nine to take care of some transaction and waited until after ten, and found herself looking, beyond the arc of a small window, at a face both embittered and impassive, a nicotine-stained index finger moving back and forth, negating something, or pointing accusingly at a missing stamp on a document, a seal, the signature of someone you'd have to look for in another, more obscure office where the window for serving the public wasn't open yet.

“Don't mistake backwardness for exoticism,” Ignacio Abel said, uncertain at having used the familiar form of address, as if it were an inappropriate move, not daring merely to touch her but to desire her fully. “We Spaniards have the misfortune of being picturesque.”

“You seem and don't seem Spanish,” said Judith, and she stopped, looking at him with a smile of recognition, more adventurous than he, impatient, wanting to let him know she did remember that what happened the last time wasn't forgotten.

“Do I seem American to you?”

“More American than anybody.”

“Phil Van Doren would have his doubts. His family came to America three centuries ago, and mine thirty years ago.”

He didn't like her saying that name, Van Doren, and even less the casual name Phil. He thought of the fixed, sarcastic eyes under depilated brows, the blunt, hairy hands with rings pressing Judith's waist, the moment when, just having walked out of his study and leaving them alone, he looked in again, pushing the door abruptly as though he'd forgotten something.

“For him we Spaniards must be something like Abyssinians. He talks about his trips through the interior of the country as if he had to take along native carriers.”

He realized his hostility was a deep personal ill will caused by his jealousy of a link between Van Doren and Judith from which he was excluded and about which he didn't dare question her—what right did he have? If Van Doren didn't like women, why did he touch her so much? How could Ignacio Abel feel confident next to her when they were alone, if he didn't dare touch her or look her in the eyes? He heard train whistles in the nearby station, and car engines and horns on the Paseo del Prado, muffled by the dense trees, like the rustle of the dry leaves beneath their feet that sank slightly into the damp earth, only a year ago, a year and a few days, in another city, another continent, another time. And if she had regrets or simply considered it unimportant, or thought there was something embarrassing or ridiculous in the eagerness of a well-known married man with children, a man in his late forties who couldn't risk being seen in public with a woman who wasn't his wife, a foreign younger woman observed by the vigilant faces of Madrid in taverns and cafés. What was he doing, he must have asked himself when they both fell silent and conversation no longer stretched the ruse of a pretext beneath them like a net, leaving the office much earlier than he should have, making a date with Judith with an excuse of almost pathetic puerility, showing her the Botanical Garden, his favorite place in Madrid, he told her, the best of Spain, better than the Prado, better than University City, his motherland full of statues of naturalists and botanists, not bloody generals or cretinous kings, his island of civilization dedicated to the knowledge and patience to classify nature according to the scale of human intelligence. Then Judith stopped, facing him on the other side of one of those basin fountains where red fish swam and a weak jet of water rose, and before she said anything, he knew she'd refer to what hadn't been mentioned so far, the other night in the bar at the Florida.

“I wasn't sure you'd call me.”

“How could I not call you?” Ignacio Abel felt himself blushing slightly. He spoke so softly it was difficult for her to understand what he was saying. “What made you think that? I haven't stopped thinking about you.”

“You were so serious while you were driving, not saying anything, not looking at me. I thought you must have regretted it.”

“I couldn't believe I dared kiss you.”

“Will you dare now?”

“How do you say
me muero de ganas
in English?”

“‘I'm dying to.'”

 

But in the boldness he'd felt on the afternoon of their first meeting, there was not only desire but also alcohol, the clear liquid in the cone-shaped glasses served in Van Doren's apartment by the waiter following his employer's instructions, his subtle, imperious gestures. The intoxication of drink, the novelty of words, the same song playing again on the phonograph, his own voice slightly changed, the October sky over the roofs of Madrid, the faces of the guests, most of them American, the works by Klee and Juan Gris, the blank, diaphanous space that took him back to his time in Germany, just as his desire for Judith wakened the part of him that had been sleeping since his affair with his Hungarian lover. He said, looking at his watch when Van Doren had left them alone in his office, “Now I really do have to go,” and was grateful as if for a disproportionate gift when Judith replied that she did, too, and would leave with him, and in the elevator she sighed with relief, arranging her hair in the mirror. Out on the street they'd walked together for the first time, in the light of day and among people, with no need for caution, even when it was time to say goodbye and nothing happened, time for each of them to walk away into the crowd on the Gran Vía at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, store windows and large, hand-painted canvas banners on the façades of movie theaters, honking, the sun shining on the silvery metal of automobiles, a present without a future, the inevitable future unleashed by a word that might not be said. He could say what was true, that it was urgent for him to go back to the office, to documents and blueprints and urgent calls he had to answer. He felt lightheaded: if he drove with the window down, the air would clear his mind. At each moment possible futures unfolded that burn like flares in the darkness and a second later are extinguished. He wanted to go on listening to her voice, the peculiar way her Spanish vowels and consonants sounded, to prolong the state of gentle physical intoxication, her proximity the powerful imminence of something, the exciting, mysterious ambit of the feminine. Judith stood looking with a smile of recognition at the sunlight on the terraces of the tallest buildings, the limpid blue of the sky against which the tower of the Capitol Theater was outlined.