In the Night of Time (23 page)

 

For some time the secret cultivation of her individuality allowed her to postpone acknowledgment of an error that became more serious when it proved to be inexplicable. Her commitment to personal independence, her renunciation of her studies, the drive and complicity of her mother had brought her to a circumstance for which no effort had been required: the ache in her back after sitting for many hours at a typewriter in the office, the five flights of stairs, her irritable, hermetic husband, offended by injustice, his pride wounded by the world's indifference and countless rejections from publishers. She looked around and couldn't understand how she'd reached this point, by what sum of errors, as if after a long, difficult journey she found herself in the wrong station, her suitcases on the ground, the train she'd been on disappearing in the distance and no other in sight, and nobody in the station, not even an open clerk's window where she could consult timetables or buy another ticket. No one else had put the blindfold around her eyes. She didn't even need the effort of will, the dexterity, to grope at the knot at the back of her head to untie it. The blindfold, loosening, fell off of its own accord. And one day Judith Biely found herself in a room where nothing invited her to stay or seemed to be hers, with an unattractive man who talked endlessly, gesticulating, shaking his head, holding a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers, scattering ashes, tossing the butts on the floor. The things he said weren't particularly brilliant; they weren't even his. They floated in the air, passing from one mouth to another, from one pamphlet to another, enlarged sometimes on posters, shouted in the cold passion of a political discussion in which it was urgent to annihilate the adversary, leaving him with no arguments, condemning him to an inclement darkness. Her eyes saw the man who spoke without looking at her, his hair curling over his forehead, his hands waving away the cigarette smoke in front of his face. She heard his words as a steady buzz, not distinguishing many of them. At that moment she thought she might be pregnant. She'd done the calculations on her fingers, looked at the record of previous months on the calendar. Three, four days late. While the man who was almost a stranger talked, the germ sowed by him probably was growing in her womb, a tiny clot of cells, a seed awakened in the dense blackness of the soil that it will make its way through. The enormous consequence of what? Of something she hadn't paid much attention to and that didn't give her much pleasure, only relief at its being over. Calmly she decided to conceal what she had been about to say. She would get an abortion. Soon, right away, in secret, to shorten the sadness, the crushing sorrow. The child she wanted, the robust, noble human being she sometimes glimpsed growing beside her in a vague future, shouldn't be born from so much wretchedness. She slept badly, and the next day, on her lunch hour, she had a sandwich on the steps of the Forty-second Street library. It was sunny and the air was unusually mild for the middle of March. She looked at the people around her, thinking no one could fathom her secret or share her dejection: typists, salesclerks, girls younger than she, dressed with an assurance she'd lost in the past few years, exchanging looks and laughter with the office workers on nearby benches, the marble steps and iron chairs. She finished her sandwich, closed the thermos of coffee, stood, and brushed crumbs from her skirt. A little while before, when she crossed the avenue, she'd felt dizzy, the beginning of nausea. Now, as she walked down the stairway, she noticed something in her belly, like a mild cramp, the pleasurable discharging of something. With disbelief, with sweetness, with a relief that almost raised her off the ground, she felt that her flow had begun and the yoke of regret and resignation she'd felt condemned to was dissolving, leaving before her a diaphanous future she wouldn't waste this time. She saw it clearly, effortlessly, just as she could see the traffic on Fifth Avenue, the sun on the windows and steel inlays of a recently completed skyscraper, the errors of a life she was ready to leave behind and the new future before her, all the shadows that had surrounded her with the consistency of walls or tunnels excavated from living rock suddenly dissipated like a cloud blown away by a light breeze.

 

On that morning she came toward him in the same straight line she'd taken across Fifth Avenue from the stairway of the library: her back erect, her pace the bold, determined walk of people in her city, her mouth partially open, wearing the same expectant expression Ignacio Abel saw from the table at the back of the café where he was waiting for her, or when he remained standing, not taking off his jacket and often not even his overcoat, in the room rented for the secret meetings where he saw her naked for the first time, in the semidarkness of heavy curtains and half-closed shutters through which the afternoon light filtered as faintly as the noises of the city and the sounds in the house. Each of the steps she'd taken preceded her silent walk on bare feet across the worn rug toward the man who hadn't moved or begun to undress. Only weeks earlier, a little more than a month, she'd arrived at a pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana, not knowing anyone in Madrid and exhausted after an entire night on the train that brought her from Hendaye. How different from Paris this city smelled, how different the odor in the air since she'd crossed the border. Early on that September morning, Madrid had the damp smell of an earthenware jug set to cool in a kitchen window. It smelled of paving tiles recently watered by a municipal tank pulled by two old horses; it smelled of horse manure, oil, dry dust, of the stubble on which there was still dew as the train pulled into Madrid; of rockrose and pines in the Sierra; of the damp half-light and wooden steps of the building where the pensión was located, steps scrubbed and scoured with bleach, half-light invaded by the smell of sausage and spices from a grocery store downstairs whose shutters were just being raised when she arrived, suitcase in hand, receiving as a welcome, almost an embrace, the dense aroma of the coffee the shopkeeper was grinding in the doorway. The room she was given faced a narrow street that led to the plaza. A noise rose from it that at first she couldn't identify, still disoriented by strangeness and fatigue: people chatting in groups looking for shade, peddlers, street vendors announcing repairs of umbrellas and tin pots, radio speakers in stalls selling drinks, the songs of maids cleaning, hanging clothes on the flat roofs, beating carpets or shaking out sheets on nearby balconies. Happiness settled in her: it was the sense of ample, austere space in the room, more welcoming than the increasingly smaller ones she'd been able to afford in Paris. As in the landscapes she saw at daybreak from the train window, in the room things seemed arranged in an order that defined space. In other countries in Europe, the countryside, like the cities, appeared too complete, too full, too cultivated and inhabited. In Spain empty spaces had the amplitude of America. Above the iron bed in the room was a crucifix, and a painted plaster Virgin Mary stood on a bureau in which she put her clothes, its deep drawers lined with sheets of newspaper. The walls were white, painted with lime, and had black paneling that reached as high as the window; the floor was of red clay tiles interspersed with smaller ones of polychrome ceramic. The straight bars of the bed ended in gilded tin balls that jingled when footsteps made the floor vibrate. On the bureau, next to the Virgin with a smooth bosom and blue mantle who crushed the head of a serpent with her small, unshod foot, was a kind of bronze or tin candelabrum holding candles. The electric cable crossed the wall in a straight line to a black bakelite switch above the bed and the bulb with a blue glass shade hanging from the ceiling. The top of the bed sheet was folded over a light quilt, under the pillow, with a solemn suggestion of whiteness and volume that Judith would recognize that same morning, on her first visit to the Prado, in the habits of Carthusian friars painted by Zurbarán. Opposite the bed was a bare pine table, solid, its legs resting on the tiles, with a drawer that emitted a smell of resin when it was opened. In front of the table was a chair with a straight back and a rush seat that invited you to sit down. Before she finished unpacking the suitcase, she placed her typewriter on the table, along with a folder of blank sheets, an ink bottle, her fountain pen, a blotter, a pencil case, her notebook, the small round mirror she always had at hand when she sat down to work. Each object seemed to fit with an effortless precision that anticipated writing and made it inevitable: all the things on the wooden table in the golden, slightly damp light of a Madrid morning related to one another like the random objects in the flat space of a cubist painting. The armoire, tall and gloomy, had a full-length mirror, and Judith looked at herself, benevolently studying the signs of weariness, the contrast between her foreign presence and the background of the room. The washbasin and pitcher of water on the washstand were of white porcelain with a delicate blue edge. She felt a sensation she hadn't yet experienced on her journey: an immediate affinity with the place where she found herself, a harmony that alleviated the solitude and at the same time confirmed for her the privilege of not needing anyone. On the roof opposite the window a cat lay dozing in the sun. Farther away, at a dormer window, a woman was wrapping her black hair in a towel, her eyes and face turned to the sun. A few days later, Judith had learned to identify the buildings outlined against the roofed horizon: the large tower with columns and the bronze Athena of the Fine Arts Circle, the battlements on the Palace of Communications, and above them a flag waving that had awakened in her an unwarranted affection from the moment she first saw it when she crossed the border at Hendaye—red, yellow, purple, shining in the sun with something of the proletarian boldness of the geraniums on the balconies.

 

She wanted to do everything at once, that very morning, she later told Ignacio Abel. Go out to the street, lie down on the white, fragrant sheet, write a letter to her mother, write an article about her trip: the sensation of having come to another world simply by crossing a border; of finding people with darker faces and eyes with an intensity that at first disconcerted her; of glimpsing through the train window, in the darkness, the shadows of bare rocks and precipices; of being awakened by the violent shaking of a train much slower and less comfortable than French trains and seeing at first light a level, abstract landscape in earth tones, flat and dry like a juxtaposition of autumn leaves. She wanted to read the book by Dos Passos she'd brought with her but also wanted to sit at the table with a dictionary at hand to read a novel by Pérez Galdós that her professor at Columbia had introduced her to, or go outside holding the novel and find the streets his characters had walked along. Sitting in front of the typewriter and the open window, she felt for the first time, in her consciousness and at the tips of her fingers, barely brushing the keys, the imminence of a book that would include each of the things she was feeling at that moment. It wasn't a chronicle or a travel story or a confession or a novel; the uncertainty both wounded and stimulated her; she sensed that if she stayed alert but also allowed herself to drift, she'd find a beginning as tenuous as the tip of a thread; she'd have to squeeze it between her fingers not to lose it, but if she squeezed it with a little more strength than necessary, the thread would break and she wouldn't be able to find it again. Through the window came the voices of street vendors, the cooing of pigeons, the noises of traffic, the ringing of bells. The sounds of the bells changed every few minutes or became confused with one another: the horizon over the roofs was filled with bell towers. Someone knocked at the door, startling her. A maid came in with a tray and Judith tried to explain in her awkward Spanish that there must be some mistake, she hadn't ordered anything. “It's from the landlady,” the maid said, “in case the señorita arrived with an empty stomach after traveling so much in foreign countries.” She put the tray on the table, using her elbow to move the typewriter, which didn't fail to attract her attention because she didn't associate it with a woman. “I hope you enjoy it”: a large cup of coffee, a small pitcher of milk, a toasted white-flour roll, cut in half, dripping a gold-green oil, the grains of salt on top gleaming in the light. Suddenly she discovered how hungry she was. The bread covered in oil crackled as it dissolved in her mouth, the grains of salt bursting on her palate like seeds of delight. With a checked napkin she wiped the oil from the corners of her mouth, the muzzle of cream the milk left on her lips. Everything conspired for her happiness, including her exhaustion, the sweet somnolence, the din of the church bells that provoked flights of pigeons over the roofs. She took off her shoes and sat on the bed, to massage her feet, swollen and painful after so many hours of traveling. She lay down, holding the novel by Pérez Galdós, searching its pages for place names in Madrid that wouldn't be too far away, and in less than a minute she was sleeping as soundly as she had when she was a little girl on those winter mornings when she didn't feel well and her mother brought her breakfast in bed, after the men had gone and a peaceful silence had descended on the apartment.

W
HEN HIS CHILDREN
were small, Ignacio Abel liked to make for them drawings and models, cutouts of houses, automobiles, animals, trees, ships. He'd begin by drawing a tiny dog in his sketchbook, and next to the dog a street lamp would emerge like a tall flower, and near it a window, and from there the entire house would take shape, and above the roof and chimney, beside which a cat was outlined, the moon appeared like a slice of melon. Lita and Miguel would look at those prodigious creations, their elbows on the table, leaning so close to the sketchbook they barely left him room to continue drawing, competing for a proximity they rarely enjoyed. They lived in their shared bedroom that was also their homework room and playroom, and in the back rooms where the maids reigned, not observing the severe norms of silence or things said in quiet voices that the children had to submit to when entering adult territory: in the kitchen, in the laundry room, where Miguel spent all his spare time, the maids talked loudly and the radio played all day long, and through the window overlooking an interior courtyard came the voices of the servants in other residences as they called to one another, slurring their speech in an accent Miguel imitated perfectly. In the rest of the house the children had to close and open doors gently, walk without making noise, especially near their father's study or the bedroom with closed curtains where their mother often had to withdraw because of endless headaches or ailments that rarely had a precise name or were serious enough to require the doctor's presence. In the kitchen the maids' voices and those on the radio fused with the splatters and smoke emanating from the stoves, and colorful characters would appear at the service door, delivery men from the stores, peddlers loaded down with cheeses, pots of honey, sometimes chickens or rabbits, heads down and feet tied. But the door separating the service area from the rest of the apartment had to be kept closed, and the children, above all Miguel, who had a more confused idea of his place in the world, were fascinated by this rigorous frontier that only they moved across freely. Not only faces and sounds changed but accents and odors, the odors of things and of people: on one side it smelled of oil, food, fish, the blood of a recently slaughtered chicken or rabbit, the maids' sweat; on the other side it smelled of the lavender soap their mother used to wash her hands, their father's cologne, furniture polish, the cigarettes visitors sometimes smoked.