In the Night of Time (26 page)

 

In the midst of that upheaval only the girl seemed to remain calm, going from room to room, her pacifier in her mouth, observing the maid as she cleaned the baby's bottom and washed the diapers under the tap in the kitchen, watching the wet nurse when she brought the small red face to her large, swollen white breast, the translucent skin crossed with blue veins, the enormous dark nipples, the broad hands that caressed the baby's sweaty, flattened hair and delicately put the mouth at her nipple from which surged a rich, white thread of milk. The girl went down the long hallway and stole into the bedroom where her mother lay. She sat next to her on the edge of the bed, caressed her hands or smoothed her hair, damp with sweat, uncombed, dirty after so many days of convalescence. She seemed not to think it strange that her mother didn't respond to her gestures of affection or give any sign she was aware of her presence. They put a white veil on the girl and had her hold a candle at her brother's baptism, and she stood on tiptoe to watch as the priest poured water on the baby's head and then dried it lightly with an embroidered handkerchief on which he also wiped his fingertips. That night, when her brother cried, she went to him and, instead of rocking the cradle, took his hand, and the baby calmed. From then on, the girl slept with the cradle beside her bed. When she heard the beginning of a whimper in the dark, her hand would feel its way between the bars. The boy's tiny hand would close around his sister's thumb, and, feeling safe, he went back to sleep. Meanwhile, awake in his bedroom, Ignacio Abel counted the seconds of silence, fearing that before he reached a minute the crying would start again. He could imagine himself dozing on a long train journey at night, autonomous and alone in a European city, as clearly as if that future were part of a memory, the way he saw himself as a boy, elbows propped on a table, in front of his notebook, the pen drawing two parallel lines on the blank page a moment before the knocking sounded on the door, in the light of the oil lamp that seemed to burn forever at the heart of time.

H
OW STRANGE THAT
he remained guilt-free for so long; the unshadowed gift, limitless and full of secret places, became sweeter the more he enjoyed it: dark movie theaters and open-air cafés from which one could see in an expanse as broad as a marine horizon the oak trees of the Casa de Campo and the Monte del Pardo and the hazy distances of the Sierra; the room rented by the hour in a private hotel at the end of Calle O'Donnell (streetcar bells and car horns heard faintly through heavy curtains drawn to achieve a pretense of night during the day's working hours); and the public space of the Velázquez rooms at the Prado, early on winter mornings when the museum had just opened and before tourists had begun to come in. He awoke when it was still dark with an instinctive feeling of happiness waiting for him, and when he looked at the time on the alarm clock, he remembered he would meet her in only three hours. How strange that fear hadn't intruded yet: the presentiment that something unexpected would happen and he wouldn't be able to see her that day, or ever again, that she was separated from him by fate or because another man had taken her from him or because she herself had decided to leave, exercising the same freedom that had brought her from America to Europe and moved her to become his lover. He shaved after his shower, savoring his secret, looking in the mirror at the face of the man at whom Judith Biely would smile in a little more than two hours, and no one else would know. Time and the order of things conspired in his favor: breakfast waiting on the table, his two children healthy and obedient, his wife, who handed him his briefcase and hat in the entrance hall and told him to button up, it was foggy and damp this morning, and was satisfied, or at least seemed satisfied, with a domestic kiss that barely brushed her lips and a wave goodbye in which no smile and hardly a glance intervened. Efficient, involuntary accomplices acted on his behalf: the new elevator with its electric mechanism and gentle hydraulic brakes, the porter's son who had gone to the garage for his car and had it ready for him at the door, the Fiat motor that in spite of the morning cold started with just a turn of the ignition key, the straight streets, still clear of traffic, that allowed him to arrive quickly at his appointment, not wasting a single minute. Even though it was early, someone was at the museum's ticket office, ready to sell him an admission, and a sleepy porter in a blue uniform was there to tear it for him. In the light of the deserted central gallery footsteps echoed before he could see at a distance the figure they announced. One of them would arrive, and the other was waiting, feeling observed in the empty galleries by personages in the paintings, saints and kings whose names Judith Biely didn't know, martyrs of a religion that to her was sumptuous and exotic. One of them walked down the long museum corridor in the gray illumination from the skylights, and the other arrived at the same time, appeared in a doorway and was recognized in the distance with a skipped heartbeat by sharp eyes proficient in searching. Ignacio Abel arrived first so he'd be sure to see her arrive. Judith Biely's broad shoulders, her determined walk, her head tilted slightly to one side, and her hair covering half her face; her eyes large, and as she came closer, widely separated; her cheeks; her thin lips parted at the corners, with a suggestion of expectation, like a word or smile about to be formed; her face serious and angular and yet illuminated by the beginning of a smile, still only hinted at, like the morning light becoming more intense inside a tenuous fog, the one they'd passed through as they walked to the museum along different streets. Alone and self-confident, determined to give herself with all the deliberation of a will that both flattered and frightened him. It frightened him and aroused him just to see her walk toward him, provocative and carefree. In a corner safe from the eyes of the guards they kissed greedily, noticing the winter cold on skin, the smell of cold on breath and hair, on outer clothing damp from the fog.

 

On another day he watched her approach from a distance along an avenue in the Botanical Garden, listening to the dry sound of fallen leaves blown by the wind and covering the ground under her feet, a cold, sunny morning early in December when the frost made the grass silver in the shaded areas and the air shone with ice crystals. She came muffled against the winter, the brim of her hat over her forehead, coat lapels raised, a scarf concealing her chin and mouth, showing only her bright eyes and her nose red from the cold. He wanted to go to her but remained still, his hands in his overcoat pockets and his breath cold, conscious of each step she took, the distance that separated them lessening by the second, the imminence of her body pressing against his, the two cold hands that held his face so she could keep looking at him until she closed her eyes to kiss him. Halfway through their day they would make room for a quick escape, a phone call, a taxi ride into the always-too-brief parenthesis of a meeting. How strange that it took them so long to begin to measure what was denied to them, to not be grateful for what had been granted them, what they might not have known. If there was no time for anything else and the winter weather was too inhospitable, they took refuge in one of those remote cafés frequented by office clerks, retirees, other pairs of lovers meeting in secret; cafés half empty and gloomy, in ambiguous areas of Madrid that weren't centrally located but didn't quite belong to the outskirts, on streets only recently urbanized that still had rows of young trees and fences around undeveloped lots with posters announcing the circus or boxing matches or political propaganda, and the final stops of streetcar lines, and corners that bordered open countryside. They had to tell each other everything, ask about everything, their entire lives up to the day a few months earlier, the first of their common memory. There was only one boundary neither of them crossed, by a silent agreement that seemed humiliating to Judith, though it took her a long time to breach it, perhaps not until she realized it was she who was telling, who asked questions: there was a boundary, like the empty space of a silhouette cut out of the center of a family photograph, a name neither mentioned. Ignacio Abel spoke occasionally of his children but never about Adela. How strange that it took them so long not to mention her name or her status—“my wife,” “your spouse”—but to sense her shadow, to remember she existed, strange that they were able for so long to wipe away with no trace, from the moment they met, the home and life he came from. For him, Judith lived in an invisible world he could reach instantaneously, as if he could cross to the other side of a mirror by virtue of a secret password he alone possessed. The password at times was a material object: he'd close the door to his study to talk to her on the phone; he kept Judith's letters and photographs under lock and key in his desk; he turned the key on the inside of the bathroom door, and as Adela's silhouette passed the frosted glass, he thought of Judith Biely, whom he would see shortly, as he stood under the running water. How close the other side was, the inviolable secret, a distance of a few minutes, a few hundred heartbeats, the topography of desire superimposed like a transparent sheet on the places in his daily life. He went down to the street and the porter's son who brought his car from the garage didn't know he was acting as his accomplice. He gave him a tip, and before he got in the car he looked up and Adela was on the balcony. She watched every morning because she was afraid: gunmen often chose the moment their victims left home to attack. (“But what ideas you have! Who'd ever think of shooting me?”) He drove to the corner of Calle de Alcalá and parked the car in front of the Moderna Barber Shop. The face he saw in the mirror while the barber, who welcomed him with a nod and respectfully said his name, leaned over him was the same one Judith Biely would look at very soon. But only he knew that. The secret was a treasure, and the crypt and palace that contained it the inviolable house of time only Judith and he inhabited. Instead of driving down Alcalá, he turned up O'Donnell and left the car a certain distance from the private hotel with a high fence enclosing a garden with palm trees and dense hedges that protected shutters as thick as jalousies and painted an intense green, with workable slats that filtered an aquatic light when partially opened. To reach the hidden other world he had only to drive a few minutes, then pass through successive doors, visible and invisible, each provided with its own password. When he crossed the last threshold, Judith Biely was already waiting for him, seated in a chair near the bed, beside a lit blue-glass lamp on the night table, in the artificial darkness of nine in the morning.

The guilt-free intoxication corresponded to a reckless assurance: when they saw only themselves, they often behaved as rashly as if no one else could see them. At night they'd go to dimly lit bars near the large hotels, frequented for the most part by foreigners and wealthy young night owls who'd scarcely have recognized Ignacio Abel. In the cabaret at the Palace Hotel, sitting close together under the cover of a reddish half-light, they drank exotic mixed drinks that left a sweet aftertaste and conversed in Spanish and English while on the narrow floor couples danced to the rhythm of a small band. At a nearby table, surrounded by a chorus of his friends, the poet García Lorca laughed aloud, his broad face gleaming with sweat. Ignacio Abel had never been in that kind of place, hadn't known they existed. With the apprehension of a jealous man, he saw the ease with which Judith Biely moved among those people. In reality, she resembled them much more than she did him: the Americans and the English especially, young men and women united by a strange egalitarian camaraderie and a similar tolerance for alcohol, travelers in Europe who became involved with and then disentangled from one another as casually as they passed from one country to another, from one language to another, discussing with the same ardor the expectations of the Popular Front in France and a Soviet film, shouting the names of writers not familiar to Ignacio Abel, and about whom Judith Biely held impassioned opinions. With pride and a nebulous fear of losing her, he watched her gallantly defend Roosevelt to a drunken American who'd called him a covert Communist, an imitator of the five-year plans. She was so desirable, entirely his when she gave herself to him, yet fully independent, shining before others who didn't see him, a Spaniard of a certain age in a dark suit, a foreigner in that polyglot country of fluid borders and ambiguous norms they inhabited; for them Madrid wasn't much more than a way station. At times Ignacio Abel saw among them men with tweezed eyebrows and light rouge on their cheeks and women dressed as men, and he felt he was witnessing a corrected version of his time in Germany.

 

Reasons for returning home later came easily and without remorse—a delayed appointment or some last-minute work—and when he hung up the phone he promptly forgot the hint of reluctant disbelief in Adela's voice. With Judith Biely everything happened to him for the first time, the exaltation of the night beginning at an hour when not long before he'd resigned himself to domestic somnolence, the taste of her mouth or the dense sweetness of entering her or the gratitude and surprise of feeling how her body tensed like a bow when she came with a generous abandon that didn't resemble anything he'd known in his experience of lovemaking. Guided by her, he discovered worlds and lives he'd never imagined in the city that was his and yet became a promising, unknown place on the nights when he explored it beside her. (The lie hadn't stained them yet. Between his old life and the one he led with her there were no dark zones or points of friction. He passed from one to the other as easily as he jumped from a streetcar a short time before it stopped, adjusting his jacket or hat, perhaps blinking to adapt his eyes to the sudden abundance of sun.) But he was also the same man he'd always been, the one he'd be again after a few hours or the next morning (breakfast at the dining room table, the children ready to go to school; the agitation of typewriters and ringing telephones in the drafting room at University City, plans on the drawing tables, crews of men on scaffolds and in trenches, going up in cranes to the terraces of buildings almost completed), and yet he was another man, younger, passionate, dazed, not fully responsible for actions he sometimes observed with alarm, as if looking at himself from the outside while he let himself be carried away by an impulse he didn't want to resist. Holding Judith's hand, he went down narrow steps to basements filled with music and smoke, occupied by pale faces in a semidarkness that was greenish, bluish, reddish, in a submerged Madrid that left no traces in the light of day, that didn't know his secret and to which he gained access by crossing hostile doors, passageways so dimly lit he would have been lost if Judith Biely hadn't led him. He'd been one of those daytime men for whom night falls earlier and earlier in their lives: the return home after work, the key in the lock, the familiar voices and smells coming to receive him from the end of the hall, supper at the table, heads bent over plates in the light of the lamp, the somnolence of conversation punctuated by domestic sounds, the light squeak of a fork's tines on porcelain, a spoon against the side of a glass. From the window of his conjugal bedroom, Madrid was a far-off country whose bright lights were lost in the distance and from which he occasionally could hear, in the silence and in his insomnia, bursts of laughter from people out late, car engines, hands clapping for the
sereno,
the watchman, then the sound of his pike against the paving stones. Now the night expanded before him like those spacious landscapes that dominated dreams, or revealed labyrinths extending beneath or to the other side of the city he'd always known as he knew metro tunnels and the galleries of subterranean pipelines. A simple lie was the password that gave him partial access to the guiltless paradise of a Madrid that was his own and more foreign than ever, where the presence of Judith Biely walking with him and holding his arm granted him an unaccustomed right to citizenship. It took very little drink (or none at all, just breathing the damp, cold night air, looking at the constellations of neon signs and their reflections on the hoods of cars) for him to become giddy, just as he didn't need more than a certain glance or the brush of her hand or her mere proximity to awaken desire. In those places the light was always more subdued, the faces paler, the heads of hair shinier, the voices more foreign. Sexual tension and alcohol blurred everything, and matters flowed with the swift broken rhythm of the music. Judith knocked on an apartment door in a building with a marble staircase on Calle Velázquez, and as soon as they entered they were submerged in a dark space crossed by shadows, where the sound of conversations in English mixed with smoke that had a resinous aroma, and the lit ends of cigarettes illuminated young faces that seemed to nod in time to the pulsations of music that could be heard from the street. Under the low light of a private room in a flamenco tavern, a woman wearing a great deal of makeup stamped her heels—and seen more closely turned out to be a man. Under the bare brick arches of an American bar installed in a basement behind the Gran Vía (a flickering light shaped like a red owl lit the doorway) he saw with alarm that Judith Biely was embracing a stranger with a shaved head wearing a dinner jacket. It was Philip Van Doren, who said something to him but the music was too loud, the drumbeats as dry and fast as the heels pounding the wooden platform in the flamenco tavern. Ignacio Abel felt Judith's hand squeezing his in a visible, proud affirmation of her love for him. “I hope you've made your decision,” Van Doren said close to his ear, and it took Abel a moment to realize he was referring not to Judith but the invitation to travel to Burton College. Van Doren looked sideways at their clenched hands, at Ignacio Abel's bold gesture when he put his arm around Judith's waist. He smiled approvingly, with the air of a conspirator or an expert in human weakness, pleased by the success of his prediction. He asked them to join the other guests at his table and summoned a waiter with the same cold, peremptory gesture he used with his valet. “How nice to see you, Professor, you make me envious. You've become younger since I last saw you. Can it be expectations of an electoral victory by your Socialist comrades?” Suddenly Ignacio Abel thought that Judith and Van Doren had been lovers and were still seeing each other. The drinking and his jealousy filled him with unseemly suspicion: wasn't there something mocking in that approving smile, something condescending? Judith and Van Doren spoke in English and there was too much noise for him to hear what they said. He looked at her lips moving, curving to inhale a cigarette that Van Doren lit with a flat gold lighter. In the oppressive atmosphere under the low ceiling the alcohol made him as dizzy as the music, the voices, the too-near faces of strangers who elbowed their way to the bar. Someone was talking to him in a loud voice, yet he couldn't hear: a redheaded man with glasses in Van Doren's group, a secretary at the American embassy who had just given Abel his card and insisted on holding a formal conversation. “Do you believe, Professor, that the Popular Front has any chance of winning the elections?” He responded vaguely as he looked past the man: still holding her glass, Judith was dancing with Van Doren on the tiny floor; facing each other, they made identical gestures. Her tousled hair covered half her face, the twirl of her skirt revealed her knees burnished by silk stockings. The undaunted secretary was commenting on the Spanish government's diplomatic responses to the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Ignacio Abel watched Judith dance, consumed with desire and pride, jealous of Van Doren and the other men who looked at her. The League of Nations had once again demonstrated its lamentable irrelevance, the secretary said self-importantly. The trumpet and saxophone hurt Abel's ears. Did he think there was a real threat in Spain of a new revolutionary uprising like the one in Asturias, this time more violent and better organized and perhaps with more likelihood of success? Judith whirled around, led by Van Doren, her skirt lifted and revealed her thighs. And if the left won next February's elections, which seemed possible, wouldn't that cause a military coup? Drum rolls and the metallic crash of cymbals buffeted the inside of his skull. The American government would view with pleasure the formation in Spain of a stable parliamentary majority regardless of its political identification. A final drum roll and applause ended the dance. Her face glowing with perspiration and her hair disheveled, Judith Biely came toward him and looked at him as if no one else were there.