In the Night of Time (34 page)

 

The days and weeks were slipping away without his taking action or saying anything; summer was approaching and there was less and less time until his journey was a problem only because others would have to find out about it, like a bank teller who thinks his embezzlement is less of a crime because it hasn't been discovered yet. (It had been the same twelve years earlier, when he was going to leave for Germany: the boy sick, almost a newborn, Adela's collapse after the birth, and he, the letter confirming his trip in his pocket, saying nothing, waiting.) The appearance of normality was in and of itself a poor antidote to disaster. Working every day, presenting an irreproachable face to the world, confirming that the landscape of buildings and avenues on the other side of the picture windows increasingly resembled the great utopian model of University City, its abstract buildings surrounded by groves of trees and playing fields, its straight avenues and winding paths along which groups of students would walk someday, in spite of the slowness of the work, the scarcity of money, the stalled applications, the apocalyptic propagandists for the strike and the Anarchist revolution who appeared at work sites brandishing red-and-black flags and automatic pistols. Getting up each morning and having breakfast with Adela and the children, reading the paper, while through the open balconies the fresh morning air came in, perfumed by the blossoms of young acacias; while his desire for Judith throbbed in secret (he'd call her as soon as he left the house, from the first telephone booth; better yet, he'd close himself in his study right now and ask her in a low voice to meet him as soon as she could, wherever she liked, in the house of assignation, in a café, in the Retiro) and the weight of postponed decisions grew like a barely perceived tumor. The greater the upheaval, the more he was driven to give no sign, to not lose control of what others saw. Going out and not thinking about the possibility of a gunman waiting by the entrance. Staying in the office, so busy with a calculation or the correction of a drawing that not even gunfire could make him look up for more than a moment. Not going into the corridor to look for the clerk with the unctuous manner and the tray of mail. Not sitting and looking at the telephone, as if the simple effort of his attention might cause a ring that would be a call from Judith. He gathered the courage to call Dr. Negrín at the Congress of Deputies, and a secretary granted him the relief of telling him that Don Juan wasn't in but she'd give him the message. The gunfire had stopped; from a distance came the sound of an ambulance siren or an approaching Assault Guard van. His secretary entered his office without knocking, upset, speaking in a rush, almost not giving Ignacio Abel time to hide under a folder of documents the letter to Judith Biely he'd begun writing.

“The Anarchists, Don Ignacio, a picket line. They came in a car, as in the movies, to the Medical School and started shooting at the workers on the morning shift, calling them Fascists and traitors to the working class. But some boys from the Socialist militia on guard duty shot back from the windows.”

“Where were the police?”

“Where do you think? They arrived after the gunmen had fled. You should've seen the militia boys, how they fought back. The car windows were shattered. And what a pool of blood when they drove away. One of them must've been hit.”

 

They chatted about the gunfire the way they would talk on Monday mornings about the Sunday soccer games or a boxing match: only a minor injury among the workers in spite of the shooting and the broken glass, but one or two of the others must be in serious condition, judging by the blood that poured from the car they escaped in; the blood bright red, not the black liquid of the movies, but dark and quickly coagulated, absorbed by the earth, raked by laborers who covered it with sand before returning to their work, guarded by young militiamen whom they reverently called the Motorized, a fanciful name originating from the fact that in parades some of them patrolled on old motorcycles with sidecars. “At least one of them's dead, that's certain,” said the mail clerk, the tray of letters abandoned on a table, among them perhaps one that Judith Biely had written and mailed the day before, only an hour after leaving him. “Two men carried him to the car and he couldn't stand up and his face and shirt were covered in blood.” If he died, they'd bury him amid gales of banners, the coffin covered with a red-and-black flag, advancing above a mass of heads and hands anxious to touch it, to hold it high, carried like a boat on the current of a river that flooded the entire street. They'd sing anthems, shake clenched fists, shout promises of reparation and revenge, insults hurled at the closed balconies of bourgeois residences. But a shot or an explosion could provoke a wave of rage and panic in the crowd that would demolish it like a cyclone in a field of wheat: more shots, real ones now, the Assault Guard's horses neighing, broken glass, streetcars and automobiles overturned. Someone lay dead on the pavement, and the collective liturgy of death would be repeated a little more passionately: perhaps someone attending the funeral or a passerby walked in front of a bullet; a Falangist gunman who'd fired from a moving car, around which the swelling crowd soon closed. This dead man would have his funeral with an identical mob, with other anthems and other flags, with speeches in hoarse voices and “Long live”s and “Death to”s before an open grave. At the funerals of the leftist dead there were forests of red flags and raised fists and parades of young militiamen in uniform; at the other funerals the smoke of incense rose, dispensed by priests, along with a choir of voices reciting the rosary. So ironic that both sides seemed blind to the similarity between their funeral rites, their celebrations of courage and sacrifice, of martyrdom, the rejection of the material world in the name of paradise on earth or the kingdom of heaven, as if they wanted to fast-forward to Judgment Day and hated nonbelievers and agnostics much more than their professed enemies. After the funeral of Jiménez de Asúa's police escort, the crowd returning from the cemetery attacked a church that eventually was enveloped in flames; firemen who came to put out the fire were greeted by bullets. During those days in May, Madrid was a city of funerals and bullfights. Almost every afternoon, crowds walked along Calle de Alcalá to the bullfight arena or the East Cemetery.

 

“You can't go around unarmed, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio said when, at the end of the day, he told him about that morning's gunfire at the Medical School construction site. Eutimio, his senior by only a few years, looked much older, though stronger as well, with his erect posture, large hands, and dark face crossed by horizontal lines like hatchet blows in a block of wood. “You take a big chance coming alone every morning in your car and leaving in the evening when nobody's around.”

The pistol Eutimio showed him after closing the office door behind him was much larger than Negrín's, more primitive than the one Adela's brother had. It looked like a solid piece of iron hammered into summary form on an anvil. Eutimio remained standing, beret in hand. Ignacio Abel knew that asking him to sit down was useless. So he stood too, leaning against the window, uncomfortable in his own office, his custom-tailored clothes, the softness of his hands, before this man who'd known him when he was a boy and his father took him to work with his crew of masons on holidays and during school vacations. Eutimio, then an apprentice stucco worker, took care of Ignacio: he applied grease to his hands skinned raw by the work, burned by the plaster and lime, and he showed him how to hold his fingers together and blow on the tips to keep them warm in the winter dawns. Ignacio had the admiration for him a small child has for a boy who's a few years older and yet moves among adults and behaves like them. Eutimio had seen his father's face before it was covered with the sack.

“I'm nearsighted, Eutimio. I've never fired a gun in my life.”

“But didn't you do your service in Morocco?”

“I was so useless they assigned me to an office.”

“Not useless, Don Ignacio, well connected, if you'll allow me to speak frankly.” Eutimio, the beret in his hand and his head slightly lowered, had in his lively eyes a gleam both affectionate and sarcastic. “The useless ones who didn't study and couldn't pull any strings were sent to the frontlines anyway and died before anybody else.”

“If I had a pistol, I'd be a danger to everyone except the man who wanted to kill me.”

“A pistol can save your life.”

“Captain Faraudo had one in his pocket and they killed him all the same.”

“The sons of bitches came up behind him. His wife was with him. He was holding her arm.”

“It has to be the law that defends us, Eutimio.”

“Don't tell me that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth doesn't work. If they are out to kill us, we have to defend ourselves. One of them for each one of us. You know I'm not a violent man, but we have no choice.”

“That's what the other side says.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Don Ignacio, but you don't understand the class struggle.”

“You haven't become a Leninist overnight, Eutimio, have you?”

“There are things you can't understand, with all due respect.” Eutimio spoke slowly, distinctly. As a young man he'd listened to the speeches of Pablo Iglesias, and every day he read the lead articles in
El Socialista
aloud, in a clear voice. “You may have a Socialist Party card and one for the UGT, like your father, may he rest in peace, but what counts in the class struggle isn't what you've read but the shoes you wear or what your hands are like. Your father began as a bricklayer's helper, and when he had the accident he was a master builder, but we called him Señor Miguel, not Don Miguel. You, Don Ignacio, are a gentleman. Not a parasite and not an exploiter, because you earn your living with your work and your talent. But you wear shoes, not espadrilles, and if you had to use a shovel or a pick, in five minutes your hands would be covered with blisters, like when you were a little boy and your father would take you with us to the work site.”

“But Eutimio, I thought the class struggle was between owners and workers, not between one group of workers and another. When all of you start shooting, why fire at men who wear espadrilles too?”

Eutimio stood looking at him with some surprise but also with a good deal of indulgence, as when he was an awkward, chubby little boy who had to be pushed to climb up to the first plank of a scaffold.

“Just what I said, Don Ignacio—you don't understand. Probably, when people get desperate, they stop acting rationally. I'm not much good at arguing, but with this in my hand, nobody's going to silence me.”

“Not silence, Eutimio, but worse, kill you. Never mind the pistol you carry. The question is, do you have the reflexes to confront those gangsters? And if somebody's desperate because he doesn't have work or his children go hungry, I understand his holding up a store or robbing a bank, whatever. I understand those people who wait in the pine groves until nightfall to steal construction materials, or come here in the morning hoping we'll give them a day's work. It drives me crazy when the guards take them away in handcuffs, or when other workers chase them with rocks so they won't compete for the little they have. But you tell me what those gunmen wanted today, or the ones who'll probably come tomorrow to take revenge.”

“They want the social revolution, Don Ignacio. Not for workers' wages to go up but for workers to be in charge. To finally turn the tables, as they say. No more exploiters and no more exploited.”

Eutimio, who'd always had the sonorous, precise speech of Madrid's working-class neighborhoods, nourished by the quick wit of the street and by politically charged novels, expressed himself now as if he were reciting a propaganda pamphlet or a newspaper editorial. The secretary came in with a folder of papers to be signed, and the foreman looked down and adopted an instinctive attitude of docility, retreating toward the door, as if to clear away any suspicion of improper proximity to Ignacio Abel. “With your permission,” he said, bowing, both hands holding his beret. Any indication of familiarity had disappeared from his face. In an instant he'd canceled any link he might have had with the director of the office, seemed to have erased from his memory the image of the boy whose hands, stiff with cold, chafed and raw, he rubbed with grease, in the distant time at the turn of the century, on very early mornings illuminated by gaslight.

 

From the car after he left work, Ignacio Abel saw him walking alone to the distant streetcar stop, his quick step, the bag with his lunch pail over his shoulder, hands in pockets, among the groups of workers who flowed from the buildings where only custodians and armed watchmen were left, the afternoon sun on the recently installed windowpanes, motionless machines, cranes oscillating in the air crossed by swallows and swifts. Assault Guards stood here and there asking for identification and searching those leaving the construction area.

“Get in, Eutimio, I'll take you home.”

He slowed down to move alongside him, but the foreman resisted, barely turning his head, walking faster. Perhaps he didn't want other workers to see him getting into the car of the associate director of construction.

“I'll get dust all over the upholstery, Don Ignacio.”

“Don't be silly. Weren't you saying I shouldn't be so overconfident? Well, I don't like to see you walking alone here either.”

“Nothing to worry about, Don Ignacio, they won't interfere with me.” He'd dropped into the passenger seat with the weariness of an old man and had the pistol in his hand, the black barrel pointing toward Ignacio Abel. “And if one of them doesn't know who I am, I have this to make the introductions.”

“You'd better move the pistol away, otherwise you won't just get dust on my upholstery, you'll fire it by accident when we hit a pothole and blow my head off.”