In the Night of Time (12 page)

T
HE SAME MUSIC
had brought him to Judith for a second time. In the echoing corridor of an office building in Madrid, a distant song had invoked a feeling of familiarity at first, clarinet and piano becoming more distinct, then fading as if the wind had changed. He looked at the numbered doors of offices where he heard the ringing of telephones and the clatter of typewriters, and it took him a while to identify where the sudden vibration of recognition came from; he'd heard the same song just before he opened the door to the auditorium in the Residence, expecting to find Moreno Villa, on that afternoon whose date he was certain of because it was the day of San Miguel. But he didn't know the song had stayed with him. He knew it now, as the isolated thread of the melody joined the two images he had of Judith and wakened a vague expectation of seeing her again. Even after seeing her again at the Residence and desiring her, he could have forgotten her in the end. During that period of obsessive immersion in his work, his states of mind were as transient as the shapes of clouds. Beyond his drawing board and the large model of University City, the external world was a confused hum, like a landscape in the window that becomes more blurred as the speed of the train increases. Political passion, which had never put down deep roots in him, had been dampened over the years, tempered by skepticism and a distrust of exaggerated emotions, guttural manifestoes, and Spanish torrents of words. As distractedly as he looked over newspaper headlines or listened to the eight o'clock news on the radio, he withstood erratic squalls of dejection or impatience, familial annoyance, remorse with no visible motive, longing with no object. Urgency carried him from one place to another, as isolated in his tasks as he was inside the small Fiat he drove fast across Madrid. With no effort the attraction he'd felt for the foreign woman he saw in profile, crossing the projector's beam of light, had weakened—the attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by Judith's proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimensions of a great area of darkness. In the promise was a portion of nostalgia for what had never happened, and regret for what probably wouldn't happen now. Life could not be only what he already knew; something or someone had to be waiting for him down the road, just around the corner, in the narrow swaying streetcar he watched coming up an avenue, tracks shining in the sun on the paving stones, or behind the revolving door of a café, something or someone in the mists of the future, as soon as tomorrow or the next minute. No longer believing, he continued to wait; the loss or decline of faith didn't eliminate expectation of the miracle. Something would come leaping over everything: the project for a building that would resemble no other; the richer, denser life of excitements and textures he'd glimpsed, almost touched, in Germany for barely a year, the time that had seemed the start of his true existence and turned out to be simply a parenthesis that disappeared with the passage of the years, the delayed conclusion to his youth. Slim, independent, foreign, talking to a group of men with a naturalness that would have been unusual in a Spanish woman, Judith Biely had attracted him perhaps because she reminded him of the young women in Berlin and Weimar, coming out in groups in the late afternoon from department stores and office buildings, typists, secretaries, salesclerks, leaving behind them a scent of lipstick and the sweet smoke of American cigarettes, the brims of their hats tilted down to their eyes, their light clothing and athletic strides, dashing fearlessly across streets and past automobiles and streetcars. What excited him most was that easy confidence he'd never seen in Spain, which stimulated and intimidated him at the same time. When he was in his thirties, an architect and a family man, with a grant from the government to study abroad, dressed somberly in the Spanish manner, the women who walked along the streets or chatted in cafés with their cigarettes and drinks, their short skirts, crossed legs, and red lips, tossing their straight hair as they gestured, awakened in him an excitement and fear very similar to those of adolescence. Sexual desire was indistinguishable from enthusiasm for what he was learning and the tremors of discovery: night lights, the sound of the trains, the joy of truly submerging himself in a language and beginning to master it, his ears opening as well as his eyes, his mind overflowing with so many stimuli he didn't know how to avoid, and when he spoke German with a little fluency, without realizing it he acquired an identity that was not completely the one so tediously his, but lighter, like his body when he went out each morning, ready to take in everything, giving himself over to the clamor of Berlin or the tranquility of the heavily tree-lined streets of Weimar where he would pedal his bicycle on the way to the School, delighting in the sound of tires on the paving stones and the soft wind on his face. In the unheated lecture halls of the Bauhaus almost half the students were women, all of them much younger than he. At a party, a woman named Mitzi had kissed him, putting her tongue in his mouth and leaving in his saliva an aftertaste of alcohol and tobacco. Later she sneaked back with him to his room at the pensión, and when he turned around after looking for the book he'd promised to lend her, she was naked on the bed, slim, white, shivering with cold. Never before had a woman undressed in front of him like that. He'd never been with so young a woman, who took the initiative with a spontaneity at once delicate and obscene. Under the blankets she seemed about to come apart in his arms, as open and succulent as her mouth had been a few hours earlier at the party. She said she came from a large family in Hungary that had been ruined. She communicated by moving at will from German to French, and he heard her murmuring incomprehensible words in Hungarian, like phonetic splatters in his ear. She'd begun studying architecture, but at the School discovered that photography mattered more to her. She searched in nature and in ordinary places for the abstract visual forms her compatriot Moholy-Nagy, who also was or had been her lover, taught her to see. She gave herself in love with her eyes open and as if offering herself for a human sacrifice in which she was both priest and victim. When she took the initiative, she'd come with a shudder as if in a methodical trance that was somewhat distracted, even indifferent. Afterward she'd light a cigarette and smoke stretched out on the bed, her legs open, a knee raised, and just by looking at her he'd be consumed again with desire. The presumed Hungarian ex-countess or ex-marquise lived in a basement that had only a straw mattress and an open suitcase with her clothing, and above that a sink and mirror. In a corner, on an imposing porcelain stove that rarely gave off adequate heat, a pot of potatoes simmered. No salt, no butter, nothing, only boiled potatoes that she ate in an anarchic way throughout the day or night, piercing them with a fork and blowing to cool them before she began chewing. He remembered her sitting on the mattress with his overcoat around her thin shoulders, hair disheveled, leaning over the pot and stabbing a potato with the fork, a lit cigarette in her other hand, chewing with a purr of contentment. What most disconcerted Ignacio Abel was her lack of any trace of modesty. She burst into laughter the first night when he tried to turn off the light. For years he became inconsolably excited on sleepless nights as he lay next to Adela's wide, sleeping body, remembering the intoxicated smile that sometimes was in her eyes when she raised her head between his thighs to catch her breath or see in his face the effect of what she was doing to him with her tongue and thin lips, where the line of color had been erased; what no woman had done to him before and, he imagined, what wouldn't happen to him again; what she did with the same surrender and indifference, he soon discovered with an attack of rustic Spanish jealousy, to other students at the School in addition to her professor of photography. At some point Mitzi disappeared, and he, humiliated and ridiculous, went looking for her. He was wounded in particular by the astonishment and slight mockery with which she listened to his old-fashioned, offended lover's complaints expressed in awkward German. No one had an exclusive right to her. Had she put any conditions on him, ever asked him to turn the photo of his wife and two children on the night table to the wall? How was he so sure he was enough to satisfy her? When he tried to hold her she got away, slipping her sweaty, agile body out of his coarse male embrace like a swimmer kicking free of an undulating underwater plant that was entangling her feet. Perhaps Mitzi went to bed with other men to sleep occasionally in less inhospitable rooms than his, or eat something other than potatoes, or smoke cigarettes less toxic than the ones she bought on the street from war veterans missing an arm or leg or half a face who rolled them with tobacco from the butts they picked up from the ground. Perhaps that was why she'd gone to bed with him, who found his hands full of enormous bills worth millions of marks each time he changed a few francs of his paltry Spanish scholarship. Hunger exaggerated the collective hallucination and heightened the brilliance of bright nocturnal lights and the cascades of pearl necklaces on women who descended from black cars as long as gondolas at the doors of luxury restaurants. There was a sexual palpitation in the air that corresponded to a kind of perpetual rutting that drove him, when he was alone, to wander the streets where there were cabarets and brothels from which came bursts of syncopated music and splashes of light in strong colors, reds, greens, blues sometimes blurred by fog. Women with platinum hair and long legs, bare in spite of the cold, turned out to be men with shadowy chins and deep voices when he passed close to them, looking away and ignoring their invitations. At two or three in the morning he'd rap his knuckles on the little window of the basement where she lived, caress and open her in the darkness, and never know whether she was completely awake or moaned and murmured and laughed in her dreams as she held his waist with thin, supple thighs. Then he'd lie next to her, oppressed by stupefaction at himself and his own fury, now placated, with its share of Catholic remorse. But other times he looked for her and couldn't find her, or, even worse, saw light in the dirty window and knocked but obtained no reply, and what became physically intolerable was the certainty that she was in bed at that moment with another man, the two of them lying there in silence, looking at the shadow on the glass, she placing her index finger on her painted lips, mockery on her face. In ten years Ignacio Abel hadn't felt anything resembling that physical upheaval and hadn't forgotten any of its details. He told no one of his adventure; he always stayed silent in men's conversations about sex. But several years after his return from Germany, he saw his own derangement in a film of Buñuel's shown privately in a small room at the Lyceum Club, not without great embarrassment on the part of the ladies. In the film a young woman, whom he found easy to confuse with his transient Hungarian lover, voluptuously sucked the foot of a marble statue; the two Buñuel lovers looked for each other, and when they found each other were separated again and harassed again and desired each other so much they dropped to the ground, embracing, not noticing the scandal they caused around them. He returned to Madrid early in the summer of 1924, and things and people seemed at a standstill, exactly where he had left them a year earlier. Even his former spirit was waiting for him, like a suit from several seasons ago hanging in a closet. He realized, like someone coming out of a drunken binge, that in Germany he'd sunk feverishly into a collective state of delusion and vigilance. As soon as he crossed the Spanish border, presenting his passport to Civil Guards with the surly faces of the poor under their three-cornered hats, and climbed into a train, excessive stimulation turned into dejection. He found strength only in the suitcase filled with books and magazines he'd dragged like a stone through the stations of Europe; they'd be nourishment for his mind in the years of intellectual penury that were approaching. In Madrid it was as hot as a desert and the streets in the city's center were filled with the slow, baroque Corpus Christi procession: canons in heavy capes raising crosses and swinging ornate silver censers; women in black mantillas, with African down on their fleshy lips (among them his own mother-in-law, Doña Cecilia, and the unmarried sisters of his father-in-law, Don Francisco de Asís); soldiers in full-dress uniforms presenting arms to the Holy Sacrament. He went into his house and the air had the dense smell of the muscle ointment Adela's father used and the garlic soup he enjoyed when he came over during her husband's absence. Miguel, his face red, cried constantly, and Adela listed the symptoms of a possible intestinal infection, as if Ignacio Abel or his absence were responsible for it. The girl, four years old now, was frightened and threw herself into her mother's arms when she saw the tall stranger who left two enormous suitcases in the entrance and came down the hall reaching for her, his big arms spread wide.

 

After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn't name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction of everything he'd achieved. In some German or French magazines he'd sometimes see photographs by his lover of so many years ago, signed with a short, clear pseudonym. Very calmly he pondered the asymmetry of memory: what had mattered so much to him was probably nothing to her. Time had erased his resentment and male suspicion of ridicule, leaving him with secret gratitude. He continued searching because of a youthful habit of his spirit transformed now into a character trait, separate from the expectations of his real life, which had flattened as it became more solid, stripped of risk and also of surprise, like a project that acquires a firm, useful presence when it materializes and at the same time loses the originality and beauty that were such powerful possibilities at the start, when it was no more than a sketch, a play of lines in a notebook, or not even that: the lightning flash of an intuition, the vacant space where foundations will not be dug for a long time to come. Somehow what was accomplished was frustrated, the work finished but omitting the best of what might have been. Perhaps the cutting edge of his intelligence had dulled, just as his sight was weaker and his movements clumsier, his body heavier and blunter, not pierced for so long by the stab of true desire. The tension of expectation remained unchanged, but it was likely that what awaited him in the future would not be much more than what had happened to him in the past. He wouldn't feel again the suspense of the unknown, the feeling of unlimited possibility he'd had during the time he spent in Germany, so luminous and brief in memory. He had put his talent and ambition into his work and tended to his personal life distractedly, like someone who delegates to others the subordinate details of a complex assignment. Moving up with almost no one's help—with only his enterprising illiterate mother, his prematurely dead father, and the decision his father never expressed but arranged for efficiently and in secret: his son would have a future less harsh than his—studying first for the bachelor's degree and then the diploma in architecture, living with a kind of fanatical asceticism, had required so great a degree of concentration and energy that by comparison the rest of his life seemed a long period of idleness. Once he'd achieved the diploma and obtained his first position, constantly doing what was required or expected of him had demanded no more effort than allowing himself to be carried along with a certain strategic cleverness in the general direction of respectability. Perhaps, when the two of them were young, he'd been fonder of Adela than he remembered now. Their engagement, marriage, children, a girl and then a boy, had followed one another at decent intervals. With a combination of calculation and private irritation he'd complied with the norms of Adela's family—attended his children's baptisms, confirmations, and laying on of scapulars, languished through countless family celebrations, weddings and saints' days and Christmas and New Year's dinners, adopting a well-bred and increasingly absent air that everyone accepted as proof of his oddity, perhaps his talent, and maybe as a remnant of the indelicacy typical of his plebeian origins, to which no one alluded but no one forgot. In spite of his being the son of a woman who worked as a porter on Calle Toledo and a mason who'd done well, they were magnanimous enough to accept him as one of their own; they'd presented him with the most distinguished (though somewhat frayed) daughter of their irreproachable family and facilitated his access to the first rungs of a profession to which he otherwise could not have aspired no matter how many academic honors and diplomas in architecture he might have. They expected him to fulfill his responsibilities, to pay in regular installments and for the rest of his life the formidable interest on his debt: dignified behavior, observable conjugal ardor, rapid fatherhood, a profitable and brilliant display of his abilities, in principle only theoretical, by virtue of which he'd been accepted without too many reservations into a class that wasn't his.