In the Night of Time (25 page)

 

It hadn't always been this way. For a long time he wished they hadn't been born, during anguished nights of crying and fever when he felt suffocated under the weight of his responsibility. He went far away, but with distance guilt became sharper. In Weimar, each time he saw his wife's handwriting on a letter he was afraid he would find out that one of them was sick (surely the boy, not only younger but more fragile). At times he'd walk along the street enjoying the silence after a day of hard work and study and suddenly have the presentiment that when he reached the pensión the landlady would hand him an urgent telegram. He feared misfortune, and punishment even more. For having gone away, for not feeling homesick. For surrendering to the embrace of his Hungarian lover, who, when they had finished, pushed him away, lit a cigarette, and seemed to forget his existence. For having applied for the study grant without consulting Adela and putting off the moment of telling her in the cowardly hope he'd be turned down, avoiding both the need for courage and the certain melodrama. He was afraid of telegrams, unexpected phone calls, knocks on the door, the signs that he'd soon learn something that would ruin everything.

 

The wagon with wooden wheels and iron reinforcements had stopped at the low window of the porter's lodging, and the hooves of a horse had struck the paving stones, but he didn't look up from the notebook where he was copying an exercise in geometrical drawing, going over in ink the lines he'd previously drawn in pencil (two parallel lines, regardless of how far they extend, never meet), wetting just the tip of the nib in the inkwell to avoid the error of a blot on the white paper. It was another time, almost another century, and he was thirteen years old in the winter of 1903. (The king had been crowned a few months earlier. Ignacio Abel had seen him go by in a carriage surrounded by golden shakos with crests of feathers and noticed that he wasn't much older than himself: the king had the long, pale face of a boy beneath the visor of his high military shako.) There was knocking at the entrance door and he didn't look up because his mother was the one who took care of the porter's lodging. There was more knocking, louder this time, and then he remembered that his mother had gone out, telling him to look after things. A stranger wearing a beret and a bricklayer's smock asked for her and looked at him when he said she wasn't in, and he was her son. He was still holding the pen with the wooden shaft when he approached the wagon where the shape covered in empty plaster sacks lay. Wagon wheels will leave two parallel lines that will never meet as they carry on bare boards that bounce over potholes a dead body covered with a sack. His father, always so agile, so impatient with his son who had vertigo when he climbed a foot or two, had broken his neck falling from a scaffold. After many years Ignacio Abel still sometimes dreamed he had to move aside the cloth of the dusty sack with the large, dark stain to see the face underneath. In the soft palm of his child's hand the shaft of the pen broke in two, a sharp splinter piercing his sweaty skin. His guilt as a father mixed with his fear of misfortune. Vertigo in the face of those fragile lives to whom he was tied by an overwhelming responsibility was revived by his retrospective compassion for the boy who had bent his head over a notebook in that poorly lit room moments before the knocking at the door, ignorant of the fact that he was now the only child of a widowed mother, an exemplary student at the neighborhood Piarist school, rescued from a sentence to manual labor thanks not only to his intelligence but to the money his father had saved for so many years, knowing he wasn't well, knowing he'd leave a defenseless child too delicate to earn his living as he'd done. He had been ill. When he fell from the top of the scaffolding, it wasn't because he tripped or because of a loose board but because his heart burst.

 

Slowly, Ignacio Abel had been coming to terms with the presence of his two children and discovered, as time went on, that they were the most luminous part of his life. Watching them grow taught him to mistrust disappointment and be thankful for the unexpected. What real life imposed on his desire and the project were not only limitations but also possibilities, the gifts of risk and the unforeseen. The anonymous masters of architecture had worked with what they had closest to hand, not with materials they'd selected but with those provided by chance, stone or wood or clay for adobe bricks. His father would touch a dressed stone of granite with his large open palm as if he were stroking an animal's back. There was discipline, a pride in the struggle to execute a project exactly according to plan. In 1929 he'd traveled to Barcelona expressly to see the German pavilion at the International Exposition, and as he studied with Professor Rossman the rooms of marble and steel and glass walls, he'd discovered in himself, beneath the admiration, an element of rejection. The perfection that only a few years earlier would have seemed indisputable disturbed him now for its coldness, over which it seemed the human presence would slide without leaving a trace. He loved the reinforced concrete, the extensive sheets of glass, the firm, flexible steel, but he envied the talent and skill when he saw at the side of a road a melon patch with a watchman's shack made of straw and reeds, woven with an art that had existed four thousand years ago in the salt marshes of Mesopotamia, or a simple wall built with stones of different sizes and shapes that fit solidly together with no need for mortar. There was no plan so perfect that uncertainty could be discarded. Only the test of time and the elements revealed the beauty of a construction, ennobled by weather and worn by the movement of human lives, just as a tool handle was worn by use, or the treads of a staircase. And if the fulfillment of what he'd desired when he was very young resulted in disappointment and wariness over the years, the best he had was the consequence of the unexpected: the Hungarian woman who pressed her flat belly and meager hips against him in an unheated room in Weimar; Judith Biely; Lita and Miguel, who perhaps are forgetting his face and the sound of his voice or think he's dead and are beginning to erase him from their lives, strengthened by a will to survive despite his absence.

 

No sign warned him of the appearance of Judith Biely. He'd never dreamed of or wished for children, who arrived by chance in the inertia of his marriage. No project, no fulfilled desire, not even those that without much hope inspired him at the age of thirteen or fourteen in the porter's lodging (his schoolbooks and notebooks on the oilcloth-covered table with the built-in foot warmer, the inkwell and pencils, the oil lamp always lit in the damp basement apartment, the photograph of his dead father on the fireplace mantel, a black ribbon at a corner of the frame), had offered him as much happiness as watching his daughter grow, an unexpected masterpiece in which he could take pleasure with no hint of vanity or fear of disappointment. She lived in a self-determined, autonomous way, born of parents but independent of them, with a vague family resemblance—her hair identical to that of the Ponce-Cañizares clan, her rounded nose as unquestionably Salcedo as the hazel color of her eyes. From whom had she inherited her serenity, her consideration of people over and above the familial or the social, her equable instinct, her balance between a sense of duty and a disposition for joy? She'd inherited none of that from him, of course, or from Adela or her family, whom she nonetheless adored, especially her grandfather Don Francisco de Asís. As a little girl she'd been protective of her brother, tender with him, perhaps because the boy was younger and rather frail. Adela was frequently ill after Miguel's birth. The wet nurse fed him and kept him clean, the maids hovered over him, but it was his sister who from the start concerned herself with caring for him, teaching him to play, urging him to walk, guessing his desires, understanding his language. She cared for her brother with the same satisfaction she took in jumping rope or cutting out a childish figure or arranging the furniture in her dollhouse. When he was a baby she'd take him in her arms, pressing him firmly against her and placing her hand at the back of his neck to protect his tender head. She cradled him, pressing her chubby cheeks against the boy's pale little face, kissing him with a spontaneity her parents lacked. From early on, the boy admired her, and was as unconditional in his love as a dog to his owner, from whom he expects all good things and to whom he attributes all powers. It was she who helped him take his first steps and wiped away his tears and snot every time he fell. She played school and sat her brother in a low chair, in the same row as the dolls to whom she gave sums to do, or dictations, writing with chalk in her neat round hand on a blackboard the Three Kings had brought for her. The boy grew up adoring her, imitating her, so close to her in age and at the same time small and docile enough to obey her and learn from her. But he didn't learn her social skills, her capacity for making friends and establishing intense relationships, as rich in embraces and promises of eternal friendship as in dramatic fights and reconciliations.

 

When they were small, Ignacio Abel had looked at his children with distraction and alarm, too impatient to pay much attention to them. He became more interested when they began to speak. The most lasting memories he had of their early years arose from the terror their illnesses caused in him. Attacks of fever in the middle of the night, endless fierce crying, blood spurting from a nose with no way to stop it, incessant diarrhea, the cough that seemed to calm down after several hours and then started again, so deep it seemed to be tearing apart their small lungs. He vaguely imagined that Adela or the wet nurse or the maids must have had some way of controlling the danger, must have known how to provide remedies or decide when it was time to call the doctor. He felt awkward and annoyed, sick with fear and consumed with irritation. The boy had been weak since birth, following an extremely long labor when it seemed Adela or he or both would die. When the midwife came out of the bedroom she placed the baby in his arms, tiny and red, his hands so small, so wrinkled, his fingers as fine as a mouse's, his legs and feet tiny; his purple flaccid skin, too loose for his newborn's bones, seemed covered with scales. “He's very small, but even if he doesn't look it, he's very healthy,” said the midwife as she wrapped a woolen shawl around the form who weighed almost nothing, who seemed not to breathe, who moved in an abrupt spasm. Adela spent weeks in a feverish and delirious state, and when it seemed she was recovering, it was only to succumb to a lassitude not even the boy's helpless presence could drive away. Wet nurse, servant girls, midwives, and doctors were summoned at all hours. Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the uncle who was a priest, all invaded the house that was much smaller than the future apartment on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, roused to relentless activity, boiling pots of water, preparing baby bottles, diapers, medicines, damp compresses for Adela's fever, household remedies for the boy's diarrhea, as constant as his inconsolable crying, reciting the rosary and prayers for women who have given birth, the primitive incantations of old women. Ignacio Abel spent the nights lying awake beside his silent, prostrate wife, and early in the morning, relieved, exhausted, left for work. He'd applied to the Council for Advanced Studies for a grant to spend a year in Germany, at the new School of Architecture founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. He reviewed over and over the documents he'd presented at the Ministry of Education, calculating the possibility of receiving the official letter that would notify him of the grant. The boy would get better; the girl was almost three years old and had always been strong and healthy. In disbelief, he imagined himself taking a train at the North Station, leaning against the cold window as dawn broke over a landscape of green fields and gray mist while the train advanced along a wide river. He practiced German, trying to remember what he'd learned during his university studies. He read German books, looking up difficult words in the dictionary. He prepared in secret for something he wasn't sure would happen; he wasn't even sure he'd find the courage if the time came. Why had he supported Adela's eagerness to become pregnant, then to have another child, frightened because she was no longer young, because she was uncertain of keeping her husband? More than a minute had gone by and the boy wasn't crying; if he closed his eyes, perhaps he could sleep one or two uninterrupted hours tonight. But the crying returned, ever more relentless, with a muscular vigor that didn't seem possible in an infant who had weighed less than two and a half kilos at birth. Very small but very healthy, the midwife had said, perhaps to deceive him. “We'll have to baptize him right away,” said Don Francisco de Asís, putting his hands on the shoulders of his afflicted son-in-law, emerging from the dark corner where aunts and relatives recited the rosary in anticipation of the imminent misfortune. One night the uncle who was a priest appeared in full liturgical dress, accompanied by an altar boy, and the odor of incense mixed with the smell of medicine and the baby's diarrhea. “It's difficult to accept, my son, but if this angel leaves us, we must be certain he'll go straight to heaven.” They brought holy water, a silver basin, embroidered cloths, candles on which the name of the boy was written. Not consulting him, and probably not Adela either—she was in a daze, her eyes lost on the wall opposite the bed—the maiden aunts helped the wet nurse dress the tiny baby in a long gown with blue ribbons and embroidered skirts in which his body disappeared, his chest swelling the cloth, his legs like matchsticks kicking beneath the skirts, his diminutive purple feet with the dry patches no cream could alleviate. Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the wet nurse, and the weeping maids had put on veils as if for a funeral, and Uncle Víctor stood erect in his position as godfather, though his dislike of the boy's weakness and crying was evident, as was his conviction that the feeble blood of the paternal line had prevailed. The boy, the first grandson, had come into the world sickly and crying, more proof of how untrustworthy the intruder was, the external inseminator, as suspect in his male capabilities as in his ideas. “Courage, brother-in-law, the kid will come out of this. In our family there hasn't been a single case of premature death.”