In the Night of Time (20 page)

 

Judith had liked listening to music on the radio as they drove across Madrid. With concealed vanity Ignacio Abel pressed the accelerator and handled the controls of the recently installed radio. The speed and the music seemed to feed on each other. In the headlights the straight rows of trees along the Castellana and the palaces behind the gates and gardens became visible; streetcar tracks gleamed on paving stones. He was lucky to have become an adult in an age of extraordinary machines, more beautiful than the statues of antiquity, more incredible than the marvels in stories. Very soon they'd all conspire to facilitate his love for Judith Biely. Streetcars and automobiles would rapidly carry him to her, prolonging the meager time of their meetings; telephones would secretly bring him her voice when he couldn't have her with him and he'd call her from his house, covering his mouth with his hand, feigning a conversation about work if anyone came near; movie theaters would welcome them in their simulacrum of hospitable darkness when they wanted to hide from the light of day; telegraph offices would remain open late so he could send her a telegram on the spur of the moment. Mechanized belts transported the letters they soon began to write to each other and canceled the stamps automatically, allowing their messages to traverse distances with more accurate speed. Thanks to a splendid Fiat motor, he'd driven from one world to another in less than two hours. Adela noticed he was talking more than usual that morning. He greeted his mother-in-law, the maiden aunts, distant relatives whose names he never remembered. The family began to prepare early for the celebration—moved back to Saturday to make it more resplendent—of Don Francisco de Asís's saint's day. From the kitchen came the bubbling aroma of the stew, along with Doña Cecilia's melodramatic voice deliberating with Adela, the maids, and Don Francisco de Asís regarding the advantages and disadvantages of starting the rice, for fear that if her son Víctor arrived late, as he so often did, he'd find it overcooked when after all he liked it so much and it was so easy for rice to be overdone and then it lost all its savor. In this family there was nothing that wasn't a tradition, a commemoration. Every time Doña Cecilia prepared her stew—“legendary” in the opinion of Don Francisco de Asís—the conflict regarding the proper moment to put in the rice was repeated almost word for word, what Don Francisco de Asís called “the burning question”: whether to add the rice to the bubbling liquid now or wait a little longer; whether to send the maid to the gate to see if Señorito Víctor was arriving from Madrid; whether to hold off at least until they heard the next train at the station. Ignacio Abel thought about Judith Biely—but he didn't have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory—and he greeted and chatted like an actor who doesn't need to make much of an effort to perform his assigned role. He listened, agreed without understanding anything, refined his capacity for resignation and self-absorption. When Víctor finally arrived—on an almost telepathic hunch Doña Cecilia had put in the rice only a few minutes earlier—it was in no way difficult for him to accept the excessive grip of his handshake and not show displeasure. He didn't even lie; he told the partial truth, explaining to Adela and the children that he'd spent all of Friday afternoon at the home of an American millionaire who lived in Madrid and had invited him to travel to America to teach some classes and design a building.

“A skyscraper?” said the boy. “Like the Telephone Company?”

“Bigger, dummy. In America skyscrapers are much taller.”

“Don't talk like that to your brother.”

“A library. In the middle of a forest. On the banks of a very wide river.”

“The Mississippi?”

“You think that's the only river in America?”

“It's the one in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
”

“The Hudson River.”

“That has its mouth right at New York.”

“She thinks she knows all about geography.”

“Will you take us with you?”

“If your mother agrees, this afternoon I'll take you to the irrigation pond—that's much closer than America.”

 

He didn't pretend. It was easy for him to talk to Adela and his children and not feel the sting of imposture or betrayal. What happened in his secret life didn't interfere with this one but transferred to it some of its sunlit plenitude. And he didn't care too much about the ominous prospect of immersion in the celebrations of his in-laws, usually as suffocating for him as the air in the places where they lived, heavy with dust from draperies, rugs, faux heraldic tapestries, smells of fried food and garlic, ecclesiastical colognes, liniments for the pains of rheumatism, sweaty scapulars. A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he'd never stopped being a stranger, an intruder. The maiden aunts swarmed in the sewing room, which had an oriel window facing south. They covered their mouths when they laughed, leaned toward one another to say things in a subdued voice, embroidered sheets and pillowcases with romantic motifs of a century ago, marked patterns with slivers of soap polished to the same shine as their faces of girls grown old. Ignacio Abel kissed them one by one and still wasn't sure of their number. The uncle who was a priest would arrive when it was time to eat, with a good appetite but a somber face, recounting tales of ungodliness or assaults against the Church, predicting the return to government—if it was true that elections would be called—of the same men who in 1931 secretly encouraged the burning of convents. Abel's recently arrived brother-in-law, Víctor, dressed for a Sierra weekend in a kind of hunting or riding outfit, extended his hand with the palm on the diagonal, turned partially downward, in a gesture he must have thought athletic or energetic. “Ignacio, how good to see you.” His thin hair, lying close to his scalp, formed a widow's peak. He was younger than he looked; what aged him was a rather perpetual scowl and the shadow of a beard on his bony, prominent chin, the hardness of his features, a product of his determination to display manliness without weaknesses or cracks. His Hispanic, virile brother-in-law's cordiality contrasted with a deep distrust of Ignacio Abel that was only in part ideological: Víctor gave the impression of lying in wait, looking for some threat to the honor or well-being of his sister, toward whom he felt protective although ten years her junior. Adela treated him with the limitless indulgence and docility of a pliant mother, which irritated Ignacio Abel. Víctor carried a pistol and a blackjack. Sometimes he came to eat at his parents' house in the shirt and leather straps of a Falangist centurion. Adela was both submissive and protective: “He always liked uniforms, and the pistol doesn't even have bullets.” He raised his chin as he shook Ignacio Abel's hand and looked into his eyes, searching for signs of danger, not suspecting anything. He showed them the gift he'd brought for his father: a pseudo-antique
Quijote
bound in leather, with gilt letters and edges and reproductions of Doré. The family possessed an insatiable appetite for atrocious objects, fake antiquities, Gothic calligraphy on parchment, luxury bindings, and illusory genealogies. On the façade of the house, behind the two granite columns that held up the terrace, were embedded the heraldic coats of arms of the two family names, those of Don Francisco de Asís and of Doña Cecilia: Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo. In the family the distinctive traits of each of the two branches were passionately debated: My son Víctor has the unmistakable Ponce-Cañizares nose; you can tell the girl came into this world with a pure Salcedo character. From the time they were born, the children of Ignacio Abel and Adela were picked up by their grandfather, the maiden aunts, Abel's brother-in-law Víctor, and the uncle who was a priest, and scrutinized as they discussed to which of the two lines a nose or a type of hair or dimples belonged, from which Ponce or Cañizares or Salcedo the baby had inherited the tendency to cry so loudly—those strong Cañizares lungs! No sooner had the child taken a few hesitant steps than the exact resemblance to some especially graceful ancestor was recognized, or its Ponce or Ponce-Cañizares or Salcedo origin vehemently argued over with the attention to detail of philologists debating an obscure etymology. In the heat of these gratifying diatribes they tended to forget the inevitable genetic contribution of the children's father, unless they could relate it to the hint of a defect: The boy seems to have inherited his father's eccentricity, one of them would say. At family meals Adela would look at her husband out of the corner of her eye and become irritated with herself for not knowing how to overcome the stress of imagining what he must be thinking, what he must be seeing.
You despise my parents, who love you like a son, who love you even more because your parents aren't alive. You see them as foolish and ridiculous and don't realize they're not young anymore and are developing the manias of old people like the ones you or I will have when we're their age. You think my brother is a Fascist and a parasite, and when he says something to you your answer is so dismissive even I feel embarrassed. You can't see any goodness or generosity in them, or how much they love your children and how much your children love them. You can't imagine how they suffer when they hear about the horrible things your people or the people you think are your people are doing in Madrid, and they're in distress just like me and your children at not knowing where you are or if those savages have done something to you. I think they make you angry and jealous. You don't know how happy each of your professional accomplishments makes them. They respect you and don't care if you're a Republican and a Socialist and don't go to Mass on Sunday or want our children to have a religious upbringing, as if my opinion didn't matter. You despise them just because they're Catholic and vote for the right and go to Mass and recite the rosary every day, even though they don't hurt anybody. But you didn't turn down the money my father gave us when we didn't have anything, or the commissions you received thanks to him, and when you got it into your head to go to Germany even though the children were so young, you didn't think twice about asking my father to let us live in his house while you were away because that would allow you to leave with no sense of guilt, besides saving you money as you wouldn't have been able to live for a whole year in Germany on the grant the Council for Advanced Studies gave you. You aren't grateful to them for accepting you with open arms even though other people in my family and from our class told them you didn't have a cent when you courted me and were the son of a Socialist construction foreman and a caretaker on Calle Toledo. They're reactionaries as all of you call them but they've always been much more generous with you than you've been with them. Had it not been for them and our children I would have rotted with loneliness all these years. What would I do without them now that you have gone back to Madrid even though you knew as well as we did that something very bad was going on there, you cared more about seeing your mistress than staying with your own children.

 

But he wouldn't have been able to explain to his wife that the antagonism he felt toward her family was due not to ideological but to esthetic differences, the same silent antagonism he felt toward the inexhaustible Spanish ugliness of so many commonplace things, a kind of national depravity that offended his sense of beauty more deeply than his convictions regarding justice: the stuffed heads of bulls over the bars in taverns; the paprika red and saffron-substitute yellow of bullfight posters; folding chairs and carved desks that imitated the Spanish Renaissance; dolls in flamenco dresses, a curl on their forehead, which closed their eyes when leaned back and opened them as if resuscitated when they were upright again; rings with cubic stones; gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children—
he rose to heaven, he joined the angels
—and their tragic white coffins; baroque moldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera; funeral announcements in the
ABC
or
El Debate;
photographs of King Alfonso XIII hunting, just a few days before he left the country, indifferent or blind to what was happening around him, leaning on his rifle beside the head of a dead deer, or erect and jovial next to a sacrifice of partridges or pheasants or hares, surrounded by gentlemen in hunting outfits and gaiters and servants in poor men's berets and espadrilles and smiles diminished by toothless mouths. He sometimes thought his excessive anger had more to do with esthetics than ethics, with ugliness than injustice. In the rotunda of the Palace Hotel monarchist gentlemen raised their teacups and extended their little fingers adorned with a small ring and a very long polished nail. In the most successful movies characters profaned the marvelous technology of sound by breaking into folksongs, dressed in awful regional outfits, mounted on donkeys, leaning against window grilles hung with flowerpots, wearing broad-brimmed hats or berets or rustic bandannas. The
Heraldo
reported with patriotic fervor that at the beginning of the great bullfight for the festival of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza the matador's team had performed the promenade to the vibrant rhythms of the “Himno de Riego,” the national anthem. In the house of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo family, at the end of a gloomy hallway, tiny electric candles burned in the small lamps framing a full-color print of Jesus of Medinaceli that had an artistic roof of Mudéjar inspiration and a small railing simulating an Andalusian balcony. In the Renaissance armchair in the dining room filled with dark wood furniture that imitated a style between Gothic and Moorish and had inlaid medallions of the Catholic sovereigns, Don Francisco de Asís Ponce-Cañizares, retired member of the Honorable Provincial Delegation of Madrid, read aloud in a grave voice the lead articles and parliamentary accounts in the
ABC,
and Doña Cecilia listened to him, half bewildered and half impatient, and said “Good” or “Of course” or “How shameful” each time Don Francisco de Asís concluded a paragraph in the cavernous tone of a sacred orator and at the same time noted the pangs of emotion and those of stomach upset, about which he'd inform the family in detail. Don Francisco de Asís was intoxicated by the apocalyptic prose of Calvo Sotelo's speeches in Parliament and of reporters who spoke of Asiatic hordes or mobs filled with Bolshevik resentment or the virile martial joy of German youth cheering the Führer, waving olive branches, raising their right arms in unison in the stadiums. He liked words like “horde,” “mob,” “vortex,” “collapse,” and “collusion,” and as he read and became more emotional, his voice deepened and he accompanied his reading with oratorical gestures, angry blows on the table, an accusatory index finger. He loved sonorous verbal turns and expressions in Latin:
alea iacta est; sic semper tyrannis;
he who laughs last laughs best; better to die with honor than to live in shame; better honor without ships than ships without honor; the clarions of destiny; the moment of truth; the straw that broke the camel's back. The fervent articles by correspondents in Germany and Italy and the Falangist publications his son Víctor brought home provided him with a poetic prose somewhat less old-fashioned but just as intoxicating and allowed him the gratification of feeling in tune with the youthful dynamism of the new day. But it was true that toward Ignacio Abel he'd always demonstrated a resounding affection of bear hugs and kisses that included a curious mixture of admiration and indulgence: admiration of his son-in-law's brilliance and the tenacity with which he overcame the difficulties of his origins and the early deaths of his parents; indulgence of his political convictions, which he attributed, if he thought about them at all, more to a sentimental loyalty to the memory of his Republican and Socialist father than to real personal radicalism. How could he be an extremist and still be so fond of well-cut suits and good manners? If Ignacio Abel was a Socialist, he had to be one in the civilized, semi-British mode of Don Julián Besteiro or Don Fernando de los Ríos. But according to the uncle who was a priest, he shouldn't let himself be deceived, because those Socialists were the worst ones, the most insidious! Who but Fernando de los Ríos, with all his unctuous manners, had devised the blasphemous divorce law when he was minister of justice? Deep down, Don Francisco de Asís must have compared the perseverance and integrity of his son-in-law, who came from nothing and created himself, with the uselessness of his own son, who always had everything but couldn't complete his law degree and spent years bouncing from one job to another, not understanding anything, his head filled with stupidities, becoming involved in futile projects and dubious business schemes, dazzled now by a Falangist enthusiasm that in Don Francisco de Asís's heart provoked not sympathy but alarm and distrust. He was afraid something awful would happen to his son, that he'd take part in a conspiracy and be sent to prison, or that one day he'd end up dead in the street after one of those gunfights between Falangists and Communists, he was always so inept, as a boy so easily intimidated in spite of his bravado.