In the Night of Time (27 page)

 

He remembered her most clearly walking toward him, and memory became even more precious when he realized he wouldn't see her again. He imagined her, saw her coming from the bathroom in the room in Madame Mathilde's house, from the vanishing point at the end of the gallery in the Prado, from the revolving door of a café, or in places where they'd never been, Judith Biely in the hallway of his apartment in Madrid, which had been taken over by solitude and disorder in the course of the summer, in the turbulent time when the word “war” was not yet current. Judith outlined against the window of the auditorium in the Student Residence, where he'd seen her for the first time less than a year ago, the room where the piano was now covered and pushed into a corner of the stage on which she'd walked, heels clicking, because the space was now occupied by hospital beds. She came toward him from a distance and he watched her, eager, concentrated in his desire, avidity in his eyes, sitting on the divan in a café where he'd arrived early, not only because he was impatient to be with her but also because he loved to see her arrive, coming in from the street, slim and foreign, disoriented by the semidarkness, and he saying, as he stood to welcome her, with the out-of-date courtesy of a man older than she, “I never tire of looking at you.”

 

The Madrid they saw when they were looking for each other or were together was only partially the city each would have lived in if they hadn't met. Before she arrived, Madrid had been a fantasy for Judith Biely, resplendent with promise and literature, the city of books and a language she loved; for Ignacio Abel, Madrid was the city he'd lived in reluctantly since he was born and for which he felt an uncomfortable mixture of frustration and tenderness. He wanted to leave Madrid—and, if possible, Spain—with the same intensity he wanted to engage in urban design projects that, in spite of gradual skepticism and accommodation to the bourgeois life into which he'd settled, continued to be nourished by his impulse toward social justice and improvement of the world and the lives of ordinary people. The city Judith Biely had imagined by studying maps and photographs, and by reading Galdós at the university with the same passion she had brought to reading Washington Irving when she was in school, became interwoven with the one Ignacio Abel rediscovered because he was showing it to her and looking at it through her wondering eyes. He thought of his own experience when he had arrived in Germany, about the celebratory quality the most trivial acts had for him, buying a newspaper and laboriously reading it in a café, exchanging polite words with the landlady at his pensión; about the permanent joy of learning something new, a word or turn of phrase in German, a secret of the art of drawing or geometry explained by Paul Klee, the rational miracle of an ordinary object suddenly revealed in the hands of Professor Rossman. He understood Judith Biely's love of Spain by recalling the man he'd been, by wanting to recover the part of himself that contained the best of his spirit and had become lethargic since his return. The intensity of his desire for Judith brought back the enthusiasm that sustained him during his time in Germany: the charm of expectation, the sensation of having before him something tangible and at the same time without limits, of once again looking through a wide window in his life that later closed. He understood Judith without her having to explain: as free in Madrid of the weight of the past as he'd been in Berlin and Weimar, the present took on a dazzling sensory quality for her. She'd just turned the age he'd been when he went to Germany: love and the desire to know made her even younger. Infected by her, Ignacio Abel now perceived differently the texture and density of life in familiar places, prepared to love things as she saw them—free of shadows from the past, the regrets of memory, and associated with her love for him. Madrid was the joyful present in which she, too, lightened almost all the weight of her personal identity. She was what Ignacio Abel saw in her, what she herself told him, and more so because when she spoke Spanish she became in part a new person, temporarily divesting herself not only of her usual language but of her former existence. Still immune to suspicion and guilt, though later she didn't know whether it had been a state of innocence or insensitivity—she was grateful it lasted as long as it did but also reproached herself for the pain inflicted, her sordid complicity in deception, she who'd been so honest until then, her conscience so clear—she observed her own life in another country and language as if it were a novel, her immersion in the book she was always about to write: similar to when she'd been an adolescent and stopped reading or came out of a movie theater but continued to reside inside the fiction that had so powerfully bewitched her. What happened to her in that other existence was real, but like events in a film, it had no consequence in the outside world and wasn't governed by its rules. Walking through this city where she knew no one and where nothing had associations in her memory, finding herself in it with a lover she was never sure of seeing again, were acts that belonged to an order of things as distant from her life in America as the episodes of a novel: a novel that continued to unfold without anyone writing it, in which she was the protagonist and only reader; a film shown in a theater where she was the only spectator, a film that absorbed her so much it canceled what it was hard to believe still existed—the wounding light of day, the harsh, hostile weather of the outside world.

 

But in Madrid novels bore a closer resemblance to truth. Judith Biely attended Professor Salinas's classes on
Fortunata y Jacinta,
and the names of places that in her earlier readings had seemed improbable and fantastic she now found on metro maps and corner street signs. She read on the streetcar, and when she got off at the Puerta del Sol and took just a few steps, she was already in the heart of the novel. The streetcar's route, the walking, the street noise made the book come to life for her. Calle de Postas, Plaza de Santa Cruz, Plaza de Pontejos existed, incredibly, with the same exquisiteness as the Alhambra of Washington Irving and the Manchegan plains John Dos Passos had traveled in search of Don Quijote's fictional trail. On the Plaza de Pontejos, Assault Guard vans and police wearing high boots and blue uniforms with gold buttons moved back and forth. Election posters pasted one over the other covered the walls and reached as high as the first balconies in a chaotic melodrama of typographies and the signs and symbols of political parties. From the novel she recognized the gloomy shops that sold fabrics and images of saints and religious objects, the street peddlers shouting under the arcades on the Plaza Mayor, and at one of its corners she looked for the pharmacy that served as the entrance to the house where Fortunata lived. On Calle Toledo she followed in the footsteps of the garrulous Estupina. At the foot of the granite buttress of the Arco de Cuchilleros, she read the description of the arrival of Juanito Santa Cruz to the tenement where he was about to see the girl who would change the course of his life. Young women as beautiful as that fictional character hawked in shrill voices the things they sold at street stalls: swarthy, with eyes as dark and faces as sensual as the paintings of saints by Velázquez and Zurbarán at the Prado, hair disheveled, wearing wide black skirts and shawls over their shoulders, some sitting on a step and casually revealing the swollen white breast on which a child with a red round face and blessed sleep on his eyelids was nursing. Madrid became suburban and rustic: an odor of esparto grass and leather came from mysterious stores of agricultural implements and harnesses for animals. Hammer blows and clouds of smoke from metal submerged in water reached her from the dark mouth of a blacksmith's shop in whose interior glowing coals and white-hot tips of metal gleamed. Peasants' somber faces behind the windows of a bus, wagons pulled by mules beaten mercilessly by drivers in sheepskin coats shouting obscenities, cars honking, the monotonous chant of blind men who sang ballads in the doorways of taverns, flamenco songs and advertisements played at top volume on radios, barefoot boys with shaved heads who had fistfights over a cigarette butt. A car with two loudspeakers on its roof blared “The Internationale,” and the air filled with leaflets that fluttered in the wind like an invasion of white butterflies.
MADRILEñOS! VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATES OF THE POPULAR FRONT!
The anthem was interrupted to make way for a voice that declared with deficient metallic amplification over the street noises:
FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE WRONGFULLY IMPRISONED HEROES OF OCTOBER, FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF THE ASTURIAS EXECUTIONERS, FOR THE TRIUMPH OF THE WORKING CLASS.
Attentive to everything, a foreigner, stared at, her head uncovered and a novel under her arm, Judith Biely discovered Madrid, and the streets of New York rose in her memory: on the other side of the ocean, and at an even greater distance in time, she recognized cadences of shouts, the poverty-stricken density of human lives, the stink of manure and rotten fruit and frying grease, the juxtaposition of voices, signs, businesses, trades, the anxieties of survival, perhaps less anguished here, just as the crowds of people were less suffocating, perhaps because the climate was more benign.

 

She was moving through a real city, the plot and subject matter of a novel, and the oldest part of the memory of the man she loved. On that February afternoon Judith walked, carried along by joy and curiosity, on the same streets where her lover had been a boy at the end of another century, in a city of streetcars pulled by mules and street lamps lit by gas. In the book she had to write, there would also be the resonance of that memory: although it didn't belong to her, it had turned out to be extremely intimate. She would have liked to walk with him here, asking questions: on the far side of the square she saw the entrance to the Plaza Mayor through the Arco de Cuchilleros and recalled his telling her that he had used it as a guide so as not to get lost the first few times he went to school by himself, a boy not very different from the ones she saw now playing in the street, with gray shorts and espadrilles and shaved heads, scarves and berets and faces red with cold, approaching her, attracted by her foreignness, like the men who stood looking at her and muttering in low voices words she didn't understand, as she moved faster past the doors of taverns. She savored the street names, pronouncing them softly to practice her Spanish and underlining them on the pages of the novel. Ignacio Abel thought it strange that Judith found so much beauty in them, surprised at her discovery, uncomfortable when she insisted on asking him things he had long forgotten: the address of the house where his mother had worked as a porter, the location of the window through which a perpetual gray light entered the basement where he studied feverishly in the light of an oil lamp, listening to people's footsteps and horses' hooves on the paving stones, and the wheels of wagons like the one that brought his father home dead. He was awkward or reluctant when remembering; what excited him was what he saw in front of his eyes or what didn't exist yet. He didn't ask Judith about her past so that he wouldn't have to imagine her with other men. Of his own past he recalled with her his first trip through Europe, the year he spent in Germany, and the trunk filled with books and magazines he brought back when he returned and that still nourished him. “Like you now in Madrid, almost as young as you.” He wasn't the one who told her about the two buildings erected in recent years that filled him with a pride too private to degrade by talking about them or becoming arrogant. It was Philip Van Doren, whom he distrusted so intensely, feeling himself observed, judged by eyes where an intelligence gleamed, at once piercing and cold, which he found unsettling because he couldn't understand it, the intelligence of someone who knows he has enough money to buy anything and perhaps imagines he can control from a distance the lives of others: his life and Judith's. It was Philip Van Doren who showed Judith photographs of the public school and the marketplace designed by Ignacio Abel for the neighborhood where he'd been born. That afternoon she looked for the two buildings as intently as she had followed the trail of Galdós's characters. Each imposed its presence in a different way, suddenly appearing on a square or around a corner, singular and at the same time blending with the tenements, the modest rows of balconies, the horizon of tiled roofs. The school was all right angles and large picture windows: the children in their blue smocks flooded out when she stopped in front of the building, imagining the care Ignacio Abel must have used in selecting the exact color of the bricks, the forms of the letters carved into the white stone over the entrance:
SPANISH REPUBLIC. NATIONAL COEDUCATIONAL SCHOOL “PÉREZ GALDÓS.”
The concrete roof arched against dark tiles and chimneys like a great animal emerging from the water. She recognized him here, just as she did in the abrupt strokes of his handwriting, the turbulence repressed and concealed beneath his correct manners, beneath his crushing formality, in his impatience when he undressed her the minute they were alone, and kissed and bit her, probed her as feverishly with his eyes as with his fingers and lips. Right angles, wide picture windows, concrete and brick already bruised and ennobled by the weather, massive tensions supported on the buoyancy of a mathematical key, on the pure force of gravity and the solidity of foundations driven into the earth: where others saw a market filled with people and loud voices, filthy with refuse, occupied by mountains of produce and butchered animals oozing blood on white tile counters under the wounding light of electric lamps, she found a personal confession, the hidden lines of a self-portrait.

 

Night had fallen. The last doors of the market closed with a clang of metal shutters. On the ground slippery with rotten fruit and fish scraps, the typography of political leaflets stood out, spiked with symbols and exclamation points. She'd become disoriented and was walking down a narrow street where the only light was a dim bulb at the far corner. With her head erect and eyes looking straight ahead she crossed the stain of dirty electric light from a tavern that exuded an odor of acidic wine and the sounds of drunkards' conversations. A shadow brushed against her at the same time as a fetid breath. A rough, roguish male voice said something she didn't understand but that instinctively made her walk faster. At her back, very close, someone called to her, footsteps echoed hers. A woman alone and young, in high heels, her head uncovered, a foreigner: she quickened her pace and the shadow following her lagged behind and the voice fired an insulting interjection, but a moment later the footsteps approached and with them the breath and the filthy muttered words that frightened and offended her, alone in a strange city that had suddenly become hostile, doors closed the length of the street, and behind the windows covered with shutters and curtains, sounds of conversations, dishes and glasses at suppertime. She wanted to run but her legs felt heavy as in a dream. If she attempted to escape, she'd be acknowledging the proximity of danger, she'd provoke her pursuer and achieve nothing but trouble, the terror of physical harm. A shadow, or perhaps two shadows, now she wasn't sure, footsteps to her right and to her left, as if to keep her from running, a touch that provoked revulsion, of rage at the insolence, the sexual pursuit. She could confront them, shout insults, call for help at the closed doors and the windows screened by curtains. If only he'd come, if only he'd appear at the end of the street, his silhouette tall and strong against the light at the corner, his open arms offering her refuge and enclosing her in caresses, at first so timid, so incredulous, the caresses of a man grateful for love who can't fully understand that it has been granted him. They were drunk, alcohol made them bold and weakened them too. Beyond the corner, the street widened into a little square, and on the other side she saw the large windows of a café frosted with steam. A rough hand squeezed her arm, the drunken voice came so close to her ear she felt on her neck the damp touch of breath or saliva. She shook off the hand without looking back and ran across the street, dodging a cold blast of wind and the horn of a car she hadn't seen coming. Inside the café she was enveloped in air thick with voices and smoke. Male eyes lingered on her, she felt them on her back and the nape of her neck as she walked to the rear, to the arch covered with a curtain behind which must be the lavatory and a telephone booth. She knew his home number by heart but had never used it. She asked for a token, not hiding her urgency, the intensity of her fear. She imagined him in the interior of his other life, as if she'd walked down a dark street and looked through a wide, tall window where a domestic scene took place in silence. She wasn't going to leave the café until he came for her, wouldn't abandon the protection of the telephone booth. Impatient, drumming her nails on the glass, trying to catch her breath, she listened to the rings. Someone picked up and Judith paused as she was about to say his name. In silence, the earpiece in her hand, holding her breath, she heard a curious voice asking who it was, Adela's voice, which she'd heard only once, long before, at the start of everything, the voice of the woman she'd met briefly at the Student Residence.