In the Night of Time (17 page)

 

But it was her mother who made the trip possible, encouraged her, assisted her when she felt most lost; who observed her with worried expectation during the years when she saw her adrift, in danger of eventually being buried forever, as she had been, wanting to warn her and not knowing how. What good was her insight into the character and weaknesses of her daughter if she, her mother, was powerless to prevent the disaster? How easily she tied herself down, someone very young who'd never had any obligations, who didn't know the magnitude of the treasure she was squandering for no reason other than her stubbornness, and not even because passion blinded her. In 1930, instead of completing her doctorate, Judith Biely married a classmate who worked ten hours a day in an office that published cheap detective novels. In 1934 she called her mother and told her she'd been divorced, that perhaps she'd accept a job taking care of children or giving English lessons in Paris, and from there she would travel to Spain, where she'd wanted to go ever since she was a little girl reading Washington Irving. She wanted to revive her Spanish, which she'd studied in high school and then in college, perhaps take up again a doctoral dissertation in Spanish literature. They'd seen little of each other in recent years: her father, mother, and brothers, who tended to argue furiously about everything, had agreed, though for different reasons, that her marriage was a mistake and her husband undesirable, and Judith had broken angrily with all of them. She and her mother agreed to meet at a large, noisy cafeteria on Second Avenue in Manhattan, decorated with posters and photographs of actors in the Yiddish theater. Her mother came in with a black leather handbag held tightly inside her coat, an elegant, worn handbag brought from Russia. She'd been working as a seamstress in recent years, had saved her money and chosen a piano. But when she looked at it in the store and extended her hands over the keys, she realized it was too late: her fingers, which had been strong and flexible, were now clumsier than she'd imagined, their joints swollen by arthritis. Her scores had accustomed her to music that was now only in her head, just as she listened to the sweet Russian phonetics of the novels she read in silence, sitting in the kitchen wearing the eyeglasses she now had to use all the time. She moved the coffee cups and cake plates to one side of the table and on it she placed her handbag with the bulky bills in perfect order, which constituted her personal savings of the past thirty years. “For your trip,” she said, pushing the bag toward Judith, “so you don't come back until you've spent it all.”
Down to the very last cent,
she said, Judith repeating this to Ignacio Abel, feeling only then, long afterward, the relief of restitution, the certainty of having learned to return her mother's tenderness with no disloyalty to her father, who would never have done anything like that for her.

 

I see her more clearly now, not as a silhouette outlined in black. I see her face, luminous with expectation in the photograph taken in an automatic booth on a street in Paris, the face and look of someone who hopes for something intensely, not because she can't see the shadows but because she had the courage to overcome misfortune and a spiritual health resistant to both deceit and desolation. But perhaps that face belongs to the past now, or continues to exist only in the chemical illusion of the photograph: it's the face of a stranger Ignacio Abel hasn't seen yet and might very well never see, someone who perhaps no longer resembles her and has entered another life, who at this moment speaks and looks and breathes in a hostile place where he'll never find her, where she dedicates herself to erasing him from her life, effortlessly, as you erase things written on a blackboard when you enter a room to teach a class, white chalk dust falling to the floor and speckling one's fingers, a physical trace much more tangible than the faded presence of the lover she left in the middle of July, in another city, another country, another continent—if in fact she's returned to America—in another time.

H
E DOES NOTHING,
he only waits, letting the train carry him. He waits and is afraid, but most of all he abandons himself to the momentum of the train, the inertia of being carried and not deciding, leaning back against the worn upholstery, his face turned to the window, his hat on his lap, his hands on his knees, his entire body registering the rhythmic bump of the wheels on the rails, the abruptness of a curve. This was how he spent six days on the ship that crossed the Atlantic, absolved of all obligation and all uncertainty for the first time in who knows how long, from the moment he saw with relief how the coast of France was disappearing and before the uneasiness about his arrival in America began, six days of not showing documents or responding to lists of questions, without the torment of having to decide anything, the past and the future as clear and empty as the ocean's horizon, lying on a hammock on deck feeling all the weariness stored up in his body, a weariness much deeper than he'd imagined, in the weight of his eyelids, his arms and hands, his feet swollen after whole nights on trains when he couldn't remove his shoes, his body exhausted inert matter demanding its own immobility after hurrying so much from one place to another.

 

He thinks of a convalescent opening her eyes as she emerges from unconsciousness or anesthesia, and turning her head that rested on a pillow toward the window of the hospital room; the image becomes more precise and it's Adela. Beyond the window is a landscape of dark groves of pine and oak, flecked by the large white flowers of rockrose. The window is partially open, and a soft breeze scented with rockrose and resin enters and gently brushes a gray lock of hair off her pale face. He doesn't know if the gray strands have just come out or if she's been careless about dyeing her hair; maybe the color has faded because of her immersion in water where she almost drowned. He looks at her and knows nothing about her. She's his wife, he's lived with her almost every day for the past sixteen years, and she's as unfamiliar and anonymous as the sanatorium room or the bed with white bars she's lying in. Farther away, toward a Madrid barely silhouetted in the distance, the air has a chalky light that vibrates in a fog of suffocating heat. When he came in, Ignacio Abel closed the door, took a few steps toward the bed, but remained standing, his hat in one hand, in the other the small bouquet of flowers he hasn't yet resolved to give her, perhaps because he doesn't know how. How do you give flowers to a woman who didn't move at all when she saw him come in but simply looked at him for a moment and then turned her eyes back to the window, both arms next to her body, on top of the cover, her hands doing nothing to take the flowers.
You stood next to the door as if you were making an obligatory call. You didn't even come to put your arms around me and say you were glad I was all right. Who knows if maybe you would have preferred that they hadn't saved me. You would be rid of the obstacle.
Leaning against the window, noting the vibration of the glass against his forehead, he doesn't know whether what he remembers is Adela's voice that day in June or lines from the letter he carries in his pocket and should have torn up. Maybe he's projecting onto her silent image the written words he imagined in her voice, the ones Adela wanted to say to him that day but didn't, or the ones she murmured in the half-sleep of her fever and then, without relief or consolation, wrote down much later, when the outbreak of the war had already separated them like a great geological fault, he in Madrid and she in the Sierra house with the children and her parents, back inside that familial cocoon where she felt so protected and perhaps should never have left, except that then she wouldn't have had those two children who'd welcomed her with such sweetness when she came home after a week in the hospital, not asking questions about what everyone in the family was calling “the accident,” filling her with remorse for what she'd attempted.
If there is anything I regret, it's not having thought about them when I was blinded by my desire to hurt you. They are the ones who would have really suffered. Not you. You would have been spared my presence. Your path would have been cleared. And yet, deep down I didn't want to hurt you, fool that I am. I was simply mad with love and couldn't bear the thought of you leaving me.
It's not really her voice, they're words written in a kind of long, unrelenting paroxysm, perhaps on a sleepless night, by the light of an oil lamp, possibly hearing like the muffled noise of a storm the shelling at the front that couldn't have been very far away. The children sleeping, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia snoring in their room, the village with all its lights out, perhaps a small lantern in the narrow window of a barn, the railroad station dark, no trains going back and forth to Madrid for over a month, not since the day in July when Ignacio Abel left as he would have done on any other Sunday afternoon that summer, like so many men who leave their families in the Sierra and return to the city to work, in his light suit, holding his briefcase, waving goodbye with his hat on the other side of the gate.
You must have thought I didn't notice your impatience when you wanted to leave. You didn't dare say so because you promised the children you'd stay until early Monday morning but I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it. What called you was so strong you didn't care about the news from Morocco and Sevilla and the danger in Madrid with so much gunfire and horrible crimes. All you cared about was that the train not leave without you so you could meet that woman waiting for you.
She wrote so quickly her handwriting lost its regularity and straight lines and took up all the space on the paper. She crossed out words carelessly, leaving ink stains and scrapes at the places where the almost dry pen point became clogged, like a mouth without saliva, possessed by the impulse to say what she'd never said, to break immodestly with her timidity and sense of propriety,
she must do things to you it would disgust me to do. It seems that's what all you men want. That's why you go to those indecent houses.
That's what she must have been thinking when he entered the room at the sanatorium and saw her turned toward the window, indifferent to his presence, letting herself be carried away by exhaustion, complete surrender, pure physical inertia, obedience to the weight of her body, its immobility after asphyxia, the turbid water that entered her nose and mouth and flooded her lungs: still water where her body was reflected, outlined against the sky before she took that step into the void, letting herself fall like a sack of clay, relieved at last of the awkward, sweaty burden of herself.

 

The train moves forward along the river that pulls in the opposite direction, toward the sea, great barges loaded with minerals or mountains of scrap metal or garbage, and light sailboats suspended over the water, tossing like paper boats, white sails agitated by the wind in undulations similar to those on the surface where, half submerged like the back of an alligator, an enormous tree trunk is floating, perhaps torn away from the bank, gulls flapping over its thatch of roots. If someone were to jump into the water here, rescue would be impossible. He would prefer simply to observe: not to have memories or desires or regrets (desires for what will not be granted him now, regrets for what he can no longer remedy), not to calculate the time remaining in the trip, not to feel nervous about missing the station or not being ready to get off when the train arrives because the conductor told him the stop is brief and he ought to walk to the exit door ahead of time. But he hasn't been traveling very long. He looks at his watch as often as anxious men puff on or light cigarettes; he looks at it and so little time has passed since he last looked, he thinks time has stopped and brings the watch up to his ear in a gesture of alarm. A pronounced curve of the train tracks now allows him to see the entire breadth of the river and the two banks at the same time, and above them, as light as a drawing or a mirage, the most beautiful bridge he's ever seen, its columns and arches and the metal framework of its two towers shining in the sun like a weightless structure of steel plates, the cables prominent against the blue or almost disappearing in the blinding light like the silk threads of a spider's web vibrating in the wind. He recognizes the George Washington Bridge, more perfect in reality than in photographs and plans, with the radiance of a recently completed Gothic cathedral, still white, as in Le Corbusier's evocations, but more beautiful than any cathedral, delicate in its formidable scale, in its form, as pure as a mathematical axiom, as necessary as those marvelous everyday objects placed on the table in the lecture hall by Professor Rossman, who will never know the emotion of seeing the bridge in the distance. He presses his face to the window for a better view. For his saint's day two years earlier he bought his son Miguel a Meccano kit of the George Washington Bridge, and the boy was so excited, so overwhelmed by the gift that he couldn't assemble it: all the pieces fell when it finally seemed he'd begun to succeed, and he burst into tears. The inverted bow of the cables cross from one bank to the other with the exactness of a compass curve drawn in blue ink on white Bristol board. There's no stone facing to hide or ennoble the structure: light passes through the towers like the geometrical filigrees of a latticed shutter. The naked towers, pure prisms of steel, their verticality as firm as the lightly bent horizontal that extends with only their support between the two banks, the cables like bows and the double strings of a harp, vibrating in the wind. Mathematical purity: two vertical lines crossed by a horizontal, a bow inverted at approximately thirty degrees, its far ends at the points of intersection of the horizontal and the verticals. Gradually, as the train approaches, lightness is transformed into weight, into the tremendous gravitation of steel girders on the gigantic columns that support them, sunk into the living rock beneath the riverbed and the mud, their granite blocks pounded by waves created by a freighter as it passes under the bridge, but the train immediately pulls ahead of it. Perhaps he chose the wrong occupation. An architect's work has room for frivolities and whims that the ascetic art of engineering doesn't allow (“You architects, aren't you really decorators?” the engineer Torroja had said to him, and it wasn't entirely a joke): no building can be more beautiful than a bridge, a form purer and at the same time more artificial, superimposed on nature's lack of moderation like a sheet of transparent paper where a sketch has been traced. For a few seconds he can appreciate up close, through the window, the carved surface of the large ashlars as magnificent as those in a Florentine or Roman palace, or the blocks of primitive rock the size of the tightened bolts along the length of the girders; he has the sensation of touching the rough spots and cracks on the coat of paint worn away by the weather, its texture as rich as the bark of a great tree; he tilts his head in an attempt to take in the height of the columns and feels the dizziness of their gravitation. The scale of the bridge is measured against that of the river, as wide and powerful as a sea, the palisades, the woods the train enters, faster now that the city has been left behind. He'll send his children a postcard in color, like the ones he's already sent of the Brooklyn Bridge and the ocean liners along the docks against a backdrop of skyscrapers, and of the Chrysler Building, a postcard like the one of the Empire State Building he forgot to mail though he'd already put a stamp on it. He'll mark a dot at the bottom of one of the towers of the George Washington Bridge to give them an idea of the size of a human figure, as small as an insect, lost in a colossal world and at the same time exalted in intelligence and imagination because nothing of what overwhelmed him belonged to the realm of nature. Equally diminutive men had conceived of the bridge, imagined it, drawing indecisive lines in a sketchbook; they had calculated stress and resistance with great precision, then drilled into the earth with machines, gone underwater in diving suits and lead shoes, climbed oscillating metal structures to solder girders, tighten cables, pound rivets with powerful hammers. Human work was sacred: the courage to confront icy winds, fatigue, and vertigo, not in the name of any ideal or passion but to complete a job and earn one's daily bread; the unanimous commitment to erecting something where nothing existed before—a bridge, the rails and ties of train tracks nailed one by one into the earth, a house, a library at the top of a hill. Building something and knowing that from the moment the work is completed, time and the elements are already beginning to undermine it, wear it out with the expansion of heat or the aggression of wind and rain, with insidious damp, the oxidation of iron, the decay of wood, the slow pulverization of brick, the corrosion of stone, the sudden disaster of fire. Teams of men up on the cables, black dots like notes on a score or birds on telegraph wires, repairing something, perhaps repainting, because the most solid paint would degrade quickly in this climate attacked by the ocean's saltpeter, cracked by extreme cold and ice, softened by the unforgiving summer heat. But it was time that completed the work; the passage of time, heat and cold, constant use; time that revealed and consumed the beauty of a brick wall eroded by weather, or flights of stairs worn by footsteps, or a wooden railing burnished by the constant slide of hands. So many years driven by an obsession to finish things immediately, to leap from one minute to the next as if leaping between cars on a moving train. Only now does he begin to realize that perhaps what he'd lacked wasn't speed but deliberation, patience and not perplexed agitation.