In the Night of Time (35 page)

“What an idea, Don Ignacio. As you get older you're more and more like your late father. I always say, if there were more gentlemen like you, the world would be a different place.”

“Aren't you getting tired of calling me a gentleman? Aren't I a worker? Remember what the constitution says: Spain is a republic of workers of every class.”

“Sounds nice, if only it were true.” Eutimio leaned back in the seat, caressed the leather upholstery appreciatively with his broad fingertips, brushing the instrument panel with them, the ivory buttons on the car radio, carefully, as if afraid of damaging them. “But you can't eat the constitution. You know what the landowners say who'd rather lose the harvest than pay decent wages to their workers.”

“‘Eat the Republic.'”

“Exactly. They step on people and are shocked when those they've stepped on turn around and bite them.”

“But that wasn't what we were talking about.”

“Now you're angry with me, Don Ignacio, because I called you a gentleman, but you shouldn't be. I haven't called you an exploiter, God forbid. You haven't robbed or deceived anybody, and you're as much a Socialist as I am, or at least as Don Julián Besteiro and Don Fernando de los Ríos are, and they don't have calluses on their hands either, as far as I know. The masses you gentlemen like best are the ones in the head, as Prieto says. But things are the way they are, and from what I understand, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us to see them as they are, without cobwebs over our eyes, according to the principles of materialism.”

“Now you're the one who resembles Besteiro, with that talk.”

“It's clear, if you'll forgive me, that you drive a car and I walk, or ride a streetcar at best. You wear a hat and I wear a beret, Don Ignacio, and if it rains you don't get wet, because along with driving in your car you wear new shoes with soles that don't get soaked with water, and your feet don't get cold like a man wearing old boots with holes in the bottoms. You work hard, of course you do, but under a roof, and with heat, and when it's hot you work in the shade, not in the sun. If one of your children gets sick, God forbid, you don't have to take him to the welfare hospital, where he'll get worse as soon as he breathes the air that smells of misery and death, and if he gets a little worse a good doctor comes right away and prescribes the medicines he needs and you can pay for, and if he needs it there'll be a place for him in a sanatorium where they heal lungs with good food and the Sierra air. That's the truth, Don Ignacio, and you know it. Would you like it if things were different? Of course you would. But it's a law of nature that you don't have the same desires or the same urgency as a workman. Sorry, as a
worker,
to use the correct term. And let's be clear: I have no quarrel with you and wouldn't permit anyone to speak ill of you in my presence. I've known you since you were a boy. I know how much you had to struggle to go on with your studies, when you and your mother were alone after your father's accident, may he rest in peace. There's your merit and talent, but there's your father's too. He sacrificed to give you school instead of having you work with him at the sites, which is what another, less enlightened father would've done, one less able to move ahead in his trade and earn a little money, and if what happened to him hadn't happened, I always say Señor Miguel would've ended up as one of the great builders in Madrid. Anyway, you're as good as gold, Don Ignacio, and you remember what it means to work with your hands, but you're on the side of the gentlemen and I'm on the side of the workers, as clear as the fact that you live in the Salamanca district and I'm in Cuatro Caminos. And let's be clear: I'm not like some others, you know me, I don't feel resentful toward anybody, and I don't think that to bring social justice we have to cut off heads like they do in Russia. I wish I'd had a father like yours and not a poor bricklayer who put me to work as an apprentice at the age of eight. I wish a child of mine had been born with the talent God or natural selection gave you—there's an opinion about everything. But the way I see Spain, really awful things can happen, and I often wonder which side you'll be on when the dike breaks.”

“There's no reason it has to break, Eutimio.”

“That's what you and I think, each from our place in life, because we're reasonable people, and forgive me for comparing myself to you. Though I have much less education than you do, I've learned something reading the papers and all the books I can, and studying people since I began to earn a living in your father's crew. But everybody isn't like us, Don Ignacio. Let's not kid ourselves, you live like what you are, like a bourgeois, and me, for better or worse, have my needs covered for now. We're both calm, it seems to me, but others who come pushing from behind have much more quarrelsome blood, and there's not a lot of good sense on your side or mine.”

“Aren't we on the same side? Aren't we in the same party?”

“You see how they shoot each other inside the party. I open
El Socialista
or
Claridad
and I have to put it down right away so I won't read the terrible things some comrades write about others. If we use up so much anger fighting our own people, how much will be left to face the enemy? There's a lot of bad blood, Don Ignacio. The crops are rotting in the fields because this year it rained more than usual and the owners would rather lose the harvest than pay a pittance in wages. Some men are born vermin and others become that way because they're driven to get more or were treated like vermin from the time they were born.”

 

As he spoke, Eutimio became more impassioned, breathing more deeply, not looking at Ignacio Abel, his eyes on the road. This man awakened in him a kind of tenderness he no longer felt for anyone, returned him to a time and a part of himself that were accessible only through the presence of Eutimio. His archaic oratory is what he'd listened to when men held meetings on Saturday nights in the small living room of the porter's lodging, filled with voices and tobacco smoke. Thanks to Eutimio, the thought of his father acquired an intensity and lucidity he rarely experienced anymore, or only in dreams—his father and the overprotected boy, the boy who was now older than his dead father. Eutimio belonged to that time (the very early mornings, the weariness at the end of the day, the rough solemnity of the Socialist meetings where men dressed in dark smocks addressed one another with the formal
usted
and raised a hand to speak), and when he relived it, somehow his place in the present was turned upside down, the stable, solid life that seemed inevitable and yet might not have happened because there wasn't any link between it and the life he'd led during that past time, whose only witness now was Eutimio. Nothing back then foretold the present. The boy, studying at the table with the built-in foot warmer in the light of an oil lamp when the wheels of a wagon stopped near the small street-level window, had nothing to do with the gray-haired man with confident gestures who now drove a car along the outer boulevards of Madrid toward Calle de Santa Engracia and the traffic circle of Cuatro Caminos. But Eutimio, sitting beside him, knew; capable of establishing connections with his clear memory and sharp intelligence, he could recognize in Ignacio Abel's serious profile traits from his childhood, as well as the faces of his parents slowly revealed by age; the only thing that remained of them was a blurred, solemn photograph of pale tinted faces, as primitive as their postures or her embroidered collar and topknot and his slicked-down hair divided by a center part, his mustache with waxed ends. “They're your paternal grandparents,” he'd once explained to his children, who looked at the photo as surprised as if they had seen people not only from another century and social class but of another species. But memories were not all that Eutimio brought him. There were also physical sensations that invoked his father's presence: his hard hands, his gestures, the smell of corduroy trousers.

“You can drop me off here, Don Ignacio. You continue on your way home. I can take a streetcar from here.”

“Door-to-door service,” he said with a smile and shrugged, confounded by a feeling of shyness he wouldn't admit to anyone, not even Judith Biely. “Let's see if I can corrupt you with the comforts of bourgeois life.”

“The people in the CNT are calling me a strikebreaker as it is.”

“That can't be anything to worry about.”

They went up Calle de Santa Engracia, past the magnificent Water Tower, rising above the city like a Persian funerary monument before the distant blue curtain of the Sierra. Ignacio Abel drove in silence, listening to Eutimio, observing out of the corner of his eye the change in the other man's posture as they approached his neighborhood: uncomfortably erect, knees together, unwilling to abandon himself to an intimacy as easily withdrawn as granted. Before it reached its limits, Madrid expanded into rural spaciousness, rows of low houses in front of which women embroidered in the sun, sitting on rush chairs in large lots surrounded by plank fences covered with faded election posters. A dusty, village light floated above the Cuatro Caminos traffic circle: ragpickers' wagons, herds of goats, cowbells and the bells of streetcars, circling a waterless fountain that looked like a stage set, a fountain dislodged from the bourgeois promenade for which it was built. The strongest notes of color were the green and red of geraniums on the balconies. A group of children kicking a ball made of rags in the middle of the street interrupted their game to run alongside the car. They winked and made mocking faces, almost pressing their noses to the windows. One ran with a crippled leg, leaning on a crutch; on the head of another a rash of ringworm was turning white.

“Be careful, Don Ignacio, these kids could throw themselves under the wheels.”

Behind grilles, from balconies and the doorways of small workshops, taverns, and grocery stores, suspicious, attentive eyes observed the car's passing. Three men approached, dressed in white shirts and old jackets, caps above their faces, legs far apart. In the waistband of one of them was the black butt of a pistol. They stood motionless in front of the car in the middle of the street, looking at Ignacio Abel, who kept the engine running and, with instinctive caution, had both hands still and visible on the steering wheel, his eyes alert and at the same time avoiding their questioning, defiant stares.

“Don't worry, Don Ignacio, these are good boys.”

“What do they want?”

“They're on watch.”

Eutimio lowered his window and signaled to the one wearing a pistol, who examined the interior of the car, a contemptuous expression at the corner of his mouth where a cigarette burned. A boy's nose was flattened against each window, open mouths fogging the glass with their breath, their eyes looking inside as if into an aquarium.

“You can trust this gentleman, comrade,” said Eutimio, avoiding the other man's eyes, which were close, the smoke of his cigarette in his face. “He's my boss at work and I'll answer for him.”

The men spoke briefly among themselves, then moved aside to allow them to pass, coming together again to watch the car, like watching a train or ship move away. In his rearview mirror, Ignacio Abel saw the men recede and let out a sigh of relief not as inaudible as he imagined.

“They frightened you a little, Don Ignacio. Nothing to worry about. You have to understand that in this neighborhood, when you see a car like yours, it means something bad's going to happen.”

“The Falangists?”

“Or the monarchists. Or the boys from Young Popular Action. They speed up Santa Engracia and run over whatever's in front of them. They shoot and don't care who they hit. Last week they killed a poor woman sweeping at her front door. The class struggle, Don Ignacio. They lean their heads out of car windows, stretch out their arms, and shout ‘
Arriba España!
' Then they turn into Cuatro Caminos and nobody can find them.”

 

Now Ignacio Abel observed more attentively his expressions and glances, as well as the mixture of discomfort and confidence Eutimio felt when he was recognized close to home. The confined space of the car and their physical proximity had favored an ease of manner that would vanish as soon as Eutimio got out, with a gesture of farewell that would conceal the intention to shake hands instead of thanking him by bending his head slightly as he stood on the sidewalk, having removed his beret. A blind at a balcony moved to one side; a woman's hand shook a curtain of cheap cloth; some boys playing leapfrog interrupted their game, and one turned his head to look at the car with an expression at once serious and adult; the rope some girls were jumping, colored ribbons in their hair, remained motionless on the pounded earth; young men in shirtsleeves approached the door of a tavern.

“I'm inviting you to have a glass of wine and get the fear out of your body, Don Ignacio.”

“Eutimio, come on, this wasn't anything to worry about.” Having shown his alarm so obviously embarrassed Ignacio Abel. Affectionate, almost paternal, Eutimio still took some pleasure in the weakness of a superior, more evident because when he got out of the car, Ignacio Abel found himself without defenses in unfamiliar territory. “I'll have a glass if you let me invite you.”

He had plenty of time: he didn't have an appointment with Judith Biely and had no desire to return home on a May evening that seemed to have halted in a luminosity not yet dimmed by twilight. When he returned home he'd permit himself the consolation of telling Adela the truth—this would soothe the conscience of a recent, still inexpert liar—but she'd probably think his conversation with a foreman in a tavern in Cuatro Caminos was a lie, one of many she didn't bother to pretend she believed. Distracted, happy, almost virtuous, as if today's truth somehow would compensate for deceit on so many other occasions, he wouldn't even notice Adela's incredulity.