In the Night of Time (24 page)

As she grew older, the girl ventured across the frontier less and less frequently, for the most part in order to remain true to the character of a distinguished intellectual señorita she'd invented for herself, and instead of flamenco verses about jealousy and crimes and great black eyes playing on the kitchen radio, Lita listened with her mother to symphonic broadcasts on Unión Radio. While Miguel, enthralled, read about film stars and advertisements for exorcisms and astrological remedies in the cheap magazines the maids bought (
LOVE
and
LUCK
are yours
FREE OF CHARGE
if you possess the mysterious
RADIATING FLOWER
prepared in accordance with the millenarian rites of
PAMIR
and the immutable astrological principles of the
MAGI OF THE ORIENT
), Lita read novels by Jules Verne, knowing she'd earn her father's approval, and interpreted for the family the popular ballads she learned to sing at school. But both had felt attracted to their father's study, whose mysterious spaces their childish imaginations had enlarged. He was fast and sure with the pencil, as absorbed as his children in what he was doing. He would shade the outlines of the drawing and add the form of a foldable base, then cut everything out, house, tree, balloon, animal, automobile with its convertible top and headlights, the radii of the wheels perfectly detailed, even the profile of a chauffeur in a visored cap at the wheel, a Western outlaw on horseback, a motorcycle with the driver leaning forward, wearing a leather jacket and aviator goggles. Once he drew an airplane, and when he finished cutting it from the sketchbook, flew it between his fingers above the heads of the children, each desperate to hold it first. In stationery stores he looked for cutouts of famous buildings, bridges, trains, ocean liners; he taught them to handle scissors, in which their pudgy child's fingers became entangled, to follow with cautious precision the edges of a drawing, to distinguish between cutting and folding lines, to gently squeeze the bottle of glue so that only the small drop that was needed came out. And when they became impatient or gave up, he'd take the scissors and show them again how to cut out a drawing, recalling Professor Rossman, his teacher in Weimar, who would go into a comic ecstasy when he heard the sound and observed the resistance of the sheet of paper he was cutting.

 

He brought them old models from the office, drew cutouts of buildings he'd studied in international magazines. When they were older, perhaps they'd remember that as children they played with models of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower, which they liked more because it resembled a lighthouse and a castle tower. But it wasn't that Ignacio Abel condescended to entertain his children or showed them praiseworthy patience. His own love of architecture had a portion of self-absorbed childish play. He liked to cut and fold. The flexible angles of an empty pillbox gave him immediate tactile pleasure, pure forms as perceptible with one's fingertips as with one's eyes: angles, stairways, corners. How strange the invention of the staircase, a concept of something so remote from any inspiration in nature, space folding over itself at right angles, a single broken line on blank paper, as limitless in principle as a spiral, or those parallel lines whose definition had overwhelmed him at school: “No matter how far they extend, they will never meet.” So close one to the other, yet condemned never to meet by an unexplained curse. From his able hands, from the shadows of words and childish fears, an emotion receded to the bottom of time: as if advancing along a very long passage toward a faint light, he saw the boy he had been, sitting in a room with a low ceiling, bent over a notebook, wielding a cheap pen, dipping it into an inkwell, objects near him erased beyond the small circle of the oil lamp. The sun didn't come in the basement window, but the sound of people's footsteps did, and animals' hooves, and wagon wheels, the permanent yelling of street vendors, the monotonous chant of blind men singing. One night hooves and wheels stopped at the window. Someone knocked at the door and he remembered that his mother had gone out and he had to go up and open the street door. In the wagon was a shape covered with sacks.

 

He made a small building and told his children it was a house for fleas; next to it a tree, an automobile, a bridge a little farther away, its raised arch identical to the one in the Viaducto, or the one the engineer Torroja had designed to save the gully of a stream in University City; the marquee of a train station, its clock hanging from the beams, the tiny Roman numerals drawn inside the sphere with a pencil he'd sharpened to an extremely fine point. With the same joy he studied the scale model of University City that had been growing in one of the drafting rooms at his office, a replica of the space visible through the windows, at first not a blank page but a wasteland of bare earth covered with the stumps of thousands of pines. Like Gulliver in Lilliput he supervised a diminutive city where his footsteps would have reverberated like seismic shocks, the city that had begun as cardboard and ink, glue, blocks of wood, the faithful model of a fragment of the world that was three-dimensional but didn't exist yet or was being created slowly, too slowly. On the other side of the windows, steam shovels opened great trenches in the barren earth, lifting roots like manes of hair, like naked branches of trees that would have grown in the subsoil (to build, one first had to clear away and cut down, clean out and flatten, make the earth as smooth and abstract as a sheet of paper spread on a drawing table). Laborers swarmed along the esplanades, on the embankments; with agility they climbed the scaffolding of buildings under construction, thronged in corridors and future lecture halls, applying cement, installing tiles, completing a row of bricks, beginning another; monarchs of their trades, experts in giving real form to what began as capricious fantasy in a sketchbook, copper-colored men in berets with cigarettes glued to their lips; powerful dump trucks and droves of donkeys that transported loads of plaster or jugs of water in their panniers; armed guards who patrolled the construction sites to chase away the crowds of laid-off workers who demanded jobs or tried to overturn or burn the machines that had replaced them and condemned them to starvation. Primitives and millenarians, like them, deluded now not by the expectation of the End of Days but by Libertarian Communism. With a slight effort of his rational imagination, Ignacio Abel could see the completed buildings when bricklayers were still hard at work on their scaffolding and cranes with electric motors swayed over them: beautiful blocks of red brick shining in the sun, along with the exact visual rhythm of the windows, against the dark green background of the Sierra's spurs. He saw avenues with large trees that now were little more than weak shoots or not even that, cardboard trees he'd cut out himself and glued to the sidewalk of a model. The School of Philosophy students crossed felled trees to reach their building, inaugurated in a rush (in the lecture halls one could still hear the workers' shouts and pounding hammers). He imagined the students arriving in high-speed streetcars along the straight, wide avenues, strolling in the shade of the trees, lindens or oaks, dispersed on the grass that would grow someday on that bare ground: young, well-fed men and women with strong bones, children of privilege but also workers' children, educated in solid public schools where knowledge wouldn't be corrupted by religion and merit would prevail over family background and money. He preferred the vigor of sap to boiling Spanish blood, botany to politics, irrigation projects to five-year plans. Running water, electric streetcars, trees with broad, dense foliage, ventilated spaces. “Abel, for you the social revolution is a question of public works and gardening,” Negrín once said to him, and he replied, “And it's not for you, Don Juan?” He could almost see his daughter, in a few years' time, destined for the School of Philosophy and Letters, good-natured and mature, jumping off the streetcar, books under her arm, her hair under a beret slanted to one side, her raincoat open, still an uncommon sight among groups of male students. The future wasn't a fog of the unknown or a projection of senseless desires, not the predictions of cards or lines on one's hand, not preachers' sinister prophecies of the end of the world or paradise on earth. The future was foreseen in the blue lines on plans and in the models he'd helped to build, seeing something in a single glance, understanding with one's eyes, guessing at a form with the touch of one's fingers. Ignacio Abel loved the blocks of wood in his children's building sets, the typography in the books of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poetry of right angles in Le Corbusier. The flat outskirts of Madrid were a clear drawing table on which the future city could be laid out beyond the plans for the university. Straight perspectives that would dissolve in the horizon of the Sierra, vanishing lines of streetcar tracks and electric cables, the workers' district and its white houses with large windows surrounded by plazas and gardens. To the same extent that he distrusted the vagueness of words, he loved concrete acts and tangible, well-made constructions. A school with bright, comfortable classrooms, a spacious playground, a well-equipped gymnasium; a bridge built with solidity and beauty; a rationally conceived house with running water and a bathroom—he could not imagine more practical ways of improving the world.

 

He had accomplished things that could be measured and judged, that had an undeniable lasting presence in reality. How unsettling the thought that time would run out, that he wouldn't have the intellectual clarity or presence of mind or courage to carry out what he dreamed of: a house where he and Judith Biely would live both in the world and separate and safe from it, a library in a clearing in the woods beside a great river. The tiny human figures he'd placed on the model to give an idea of scale—he saw them as animated and enlarged to the size of adults, young men and women carrying books, his own children. He was impatient for that future to arrive sooner. He'd heard Juan Ramón Jiménez speak of
an unhurried hurry,
of
joyful work.
He wanted to see them concluded: the University Hospital, the School of Medicine, the School of Sciences, the School of Architecture (so close to completion); he wanted that open ground with trenches like scars and harsh brambles to be an athletic field; he wanted the sticks of trees to grow and give more shade to the barren land of Madrid (other trees had been cut down earlier, other walls demolished by pickaxes and steam shovels, but in a short time the wounds in the landscape would heal, and what existed before would be forgotten). How painful the slowness of the work, what impatience with administrative procedures, with the dilatoriness of the human effort required for any task, even more so with such primitive methods of construction. Picks, hoes, shovels scratching at the hard earth of Castilla, malnourished laborers in filthy berets, with ruined mouths from which hand-rolled cigarettes hung. Early on Monday the work would start up with a show of energy, and a week later all was left hanging because of a government crisis or because another construction strike had been called.

 

Sometimes he thought: you could have been one of them, your son could have been born to earn a scant wage as a bricklayer in University City or to throw rocks at the mounted guards and not study for a career. (What would Miguel study? What would he be suited for?) As a boy he'd worked with his hands during school vacations with the crews under his father, the foreman respected by his bricklayers because even if he'd prospered enough to wear a vest and jacket, he still had a face burned by weather and blunt, hard hands, and was more skilled than anyone in tracing the line of a wall with squinting eyes and no more help than a cord and a lead weight. Accompanying his father as a boy, he'd learned the physical effort demanded by each shovelful of cement and moved earth, each paving stone in its precise place, each brick in its identical row. Everything was easy, dazzling on the plan: the lines of ink and patches of watercolor culminated in a building in a couple of afternoons of joyful work, an entire city invented in a few days. Avenues crossing at right angles, receding to the vanishing point; trees in the tender greens of watercolor; small human figures to indicate scale. But in reality the figure seen through the windows of the drafting room is a man who tires easily and isn't well fed; who left his wretched living quarters in an outlying suburb before dawn to walk to work and save the few céntimos a streetcar or the metro would have cost; who at midday eats a poor stew of garbanzos boiled in a broth made from an old bone; who could fall from a scaffolding or be crushed by an avalanche of bricks or stones and become an invalid and spend the rest of his life lying on a straw mattress in a room at the end of a foul-smelling hall while his wife and children go hungry and find themselves condemned to the humiliation of public charity. When he inspected a construction site, passively observing the physical effort of other men, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his well-cut suit, his body fresh from his morning shower and absolved from the brutality of labor, his shoes dirtied by dust, the shoes the bricklayer bent over in a trench would see at eye level when he passed: gentlemen's shoes, so insulting to the man who wears espadrilles. “You don't understand the class struggle, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio had told him, the foreman who forty years earlier had been an apprentice on his father's crew. “Class struggle is when a few drops of rain fall and your feet get wet.” He felt shame and relief, wished for social justice, and feared the rage of those hoping to make it happen through the violence of a bloody revolution. How many men had died in the Asturias uprising, how many suffered torture and prison? For what? In the name of what apocalyptic prophecies translated into the language of tabloids, at the hands of such brutal uniformed avengers, drunk on other degraded words, or not even that, mercenaries paid as miserably as the rebels they hunted down. He feared that cruelty or misfortune would crush his children, dragging them into the penury from which he'd escaped but that was still so close, like a certain, visible threat: in the scabby, barefoot children who circled the site looking for something to steal or approached the workers to beg for something to eat, who walked with their heads down, holding the hand of a father who'd been laid off. He wanted his children to become strong, to learn something about the harshness of real life, particularly the boy, so weak and vulnerable, but he also wanted to protect them beyond any uncertainty, save them forever from evil and sorrow. Sometimes he took the children to the office, especially after he'd bought the car. He took them for rides along the future avenues, pointed out the places where perhaps they would study. He'd accelerate so the wind would hit them in the face, drive to the dusty green of the Monte del Pardo, then return to University City. Their mother had dressed them as if they were going to a baptism: the boy with straight bangs across his forehead, his small man's jacket, his loose-fitting trousers; the girl's hair arranged with a part and a ribbon, wearing patent leather shoes and socks. He'd continue working after the other employees had left and the children played like giants in the model of the city. At home, the maids were surprised to see the señor take care of the children while the señora attended her social gatherings, the lectures and expositions at the Lyceum Club, or spent the entire day in the darkened bedroom; surprised that he would go down on all fours with the children in the hallway, or move aside the papers on his worktable to make room for their constructions of paper and cardboard and their toy car races.