In the Night of Time (41 page)

H
E'S ALWAYS BEEN
about to leave. He doesn't know for how many years he's been a guest in his own life, the figure in a painting, the only one in a group to turn his eyes away from what holds the attention of the others, as if to say I'm not one of them; a dubious presence who appeared out of focus in photographs or simply was missing from them (mother, children, smiling grandparents, only the father invisible: distracted, perhaps using some pretext not to pose).
You must have thought no one would notice how you hid your disapproval, but I did. I know you better than anybody, though you don't think so.
In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing, and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter, that he was dead, that the mail service, in ruins like everything else, had lost it, left it undelivered in some mail sack—how many letters must have disappeared this way throughout Spain during these months, how many are still being written?
You always had to go somewhere, you said nothing and suddenly you'd tell me, at the last minute, I'm leaving tomorrow, or I won't be home for supper tonight, or that time you went to Barcelona for a whole week to see the International Exhibition—for work, you said, even though Miguel had been running high fevers and seemed to have something wrong with his lungs. You left me alone night after night, lying awake beside the boy who was delirious. Don't think I don't remember.
He could tear up the letter right now, get rid of it as he'd done with so many things as he traveled, from the time he closed the door of his apartment in Madrid and out of habit was about to lock it but decided not to; he probably wouldn't go back and a patrol of militiamen could smash the lock at any time, that very night; he might have torn up the letter before leaving the hotel room, or better yet, not opened it when the receptionist handed it to him and after the initial surprise, then hope, and finally disillusionment he recognized the handwriting. It wasn't Judith's.
It was almost worse when you stayed here and it felt as if you were gone because it seemed as if you weren't in your own house but someone else's or in a waiting room or a hotel especially when my parents or brother or someone from my family came to visit. I wish you'd seen the face you put on for them.

 

So many grievances, all of them cited in the letter as if on the densely written pages of a formal indictment, bringing him Adela's exhausted, offended voice, vibrating and never silent in the receiver of a phone he didn't know how to move away from his ear.
Leaving or being left alone, that was all you wanted and it's what you've accomplished.
The man who'd been an intruder or a furtive guest in his own apartment became for several months its only resident; from the Saturday in July when he came back from the Sierra and searched for Judith in a Madrid inundated with crowds, lit by headlights and the sudden flare of fires, to a midnight three months later when Madrid was already a city of dark, empty streets, disciplined by fear and alarm sirens, seized by terror at the steady approach of the war, like the inexorable arrival of winter. Long before, at the end of July, in August, on hot nights when it wasn't wise to be seen on the streets, Ignacio Abel wandered aimlessly through the apartment, up and down the long hall, from one room to another, opening the glass doors between rooms with high ceilings and moldings of an opulence he disliked more and more. He wrote letters; he imagined he was writing them; laboriously he composed aloud the phrases in English he'd say to Judith Biely if he saw her again; he wound the clock in the hall, and every time it took less time for it to stop; he didn't uncover most of the furniture and lamps draped in sheets, which looked abstract now; he observed with displeasure how quickly dirt took over in the bathroom with no one there to clean it; he ventured into the kitchen to prepare himself a simple supper, a hermit's meal, whatever the porter's wife had brought up for him or he had found at the less and less well-stocked stands at the nearby market or the corner grocery that until recently had displayed a full window, now almost empty, in part because of real shortages, in part because the owner preferred to hide the goods in the cellar for fear they would be requisitioned at gunpoint.

 

How strange that he'd found an apartment like this acceptable, resigned himself to it, allowed it to be filled with furnishings as presumptuous as the dimensions of the building itself, the marble balustrades on the balconies, the drapes and rugs, not to mention the testimonies to the terrible taste of Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, their terrifying generosity and love of fake antiques, or authentically abominable antiques, carved Castilian credenzas, the pendulum clock with its Gothic inscription in Latin, the Christ of Medinaceli with its Morisco eave and tiny metal lights.
I'm an architect and I live in an apartment I think is someone else's; I'm forty-eight years old and suddenly seem to be living another man's life by mistake,
he'd written to Judith in one of his first letters, stupefied to discover that without difficulty and almost without intending to he could cross in a few minutes the invisible frontier to another identity and another life, his true life. But he didn't tell Judith or didn't want to remember the gratification he'd felt when he saw the place for the first time with Adela and the children, who were still very young, and learned the price and calculated that he could afford it: a recently completed building in the Salamanca district, close to the Retiro, with a marble entrance where two caryatids supported the great arch over curved steps leading to the elevator, and a porter in a uniform with braid and white gloves who removed his peaked cap when he greeted the ladies and gentlemen. “This is a building of true magnificence!” Don Francisco de Asís had declared, his booming voice rumbling in the marble-covered heights, and he had felt a certain pride, fortified by Adela's enthusiasm as she walked from one room to another, admiring the size, the moldings on the ceilings, incredulous that an apartment like this could be hers, almost intimidated, while the children got lost playing hide-and-seek in the back rooms, their footsteps and shrill voices echoing in the empty spaces.
You thought yourself so upright and my father so ridiculous, yet you didn't hesitate to take advantage of his friendship with the developer to get a good price on the apartment. You didn't bother to thank him even though you knew we only got this deal because of him.
On hot nights his solitude and confinement became as unbearable as the air. (The shutters had to be closed before turning on the lights, as a precaution against bombings, they said, out of fear above all of the vigilance patrols who shot at lit windows, no questions asked.) He'd hear gunfire, car motors, tires squealing around corners. He'd hear shouts sometimes when he was dozing on the sheets that nobody changed, in the bed he didn't know how to make, the large double bed with a baroque headboard, where it was strange not to find the weight and shadow, the breathing of Adela.
It seems incredible not that you've stopped loving me but that you've forgotten how much you used to love me.
He left the bedroom door partway open in case he heard footsteps at dawn on the landing or the stairs (no one had repaired the elevator since some strikers sabotaged it early in July). He heard footsteps or dreamed them and woke with a start, expecting fists or rifle butts banging on the door. He dreamed about Judith Biely, detailed erotic dreams, more like relived memories, in which she turned into a stranger, her cold stare plunging him into a deep sadness that was still there when he woke. He masturbated without pleasure, with a kind of nervous excitation, with a feeling of humiliation when he finished, unsatisfied, longing for her skilled, delicate hand. He washed, trying not to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, and dried his hands on a dirty towel.

 

In a drawer in the wardrobe he dug out albums of family photos he hadn't looked at in years, the ones Adela filled so faithfully, long hours sitting at her desk in the library with the large pages spread open, piles of photographs, glue, the scissors she used to cut small labels, the pen she used to write down dates, names, and places in the hand of a student at a nuns' academy, with a conviction that seemed intent not so much on preserving memories as on building on unimpeachable testimonies a solid structure of family life. The albums themselves were a more lasting foundation than the events reflected in the photos. Classifying them, observing the regularity with which weddings, baptisms, Communions, Christmas dinners, birthdays, saint's days, trips to the coast, and summers in the Sierra appeared in them, Adela precariously granted herself the comforting sensation of having the life she'd always wanted, the one she hadn't dared to want when she was young and began to suspect that perhaps she wouldn't find a man to marry, and her parents didn't have much hope that it would happen either. The prospect of remaining single made her sad, but the generally accepted notion that if a suitor didn't appear her life would be a failure seemed humiliating, an attack on her personal dignity. A man held his destiny in his own hands, while a woman didn't possess so much as half of hers; without a man's protection the only possible life open to her was to be a spinster or a nun, since Adela's social class wouldn't allow her to be a governess or teacher. Her tending so much to her younger brother gave her a maternal air: she saw herself in the role of proxy mother who hasn't known even the degree of personal autonomy that belongs to a wife. On both sides of her family there was a wide selection of unmarried women, affectionate aunts who were resigned and pious and soon showed themselves ready to welcome her into their sisterhood, rather faded but not completely melancholy. An ancient cloistered nun underscored the family tendency to female singleness. Adela resisted accepting so premature a fate, but she wouldn't have had the rare courage to displease her parents by telling them she wished to follow the eccentric example of those few young ladies from good families in Madrid who went to the university and endured the ignominy of sitting in lecture halls separated by a screen from their male classmates, subject less to scorn than to mockery, the whispered gossip about a kind of quirk that went beyond the simple whim of occupying male positions in life. Besides, what would she have studied? After so many years at the nuns' boarding school, the only pedagogical outcome was an exquisite though completely anachronistic handwriting and a few inadequate notions of needlework and French. During summers in the Sierra she'd become fond of long walks and reading, walks that she wasn't allowed to take by herself and books that had to be approved by her father or her uncle the priest. Adela felt deeply the humiliation of waiting and not doing anything, of seeing herself displayed on social calls and at family celebrations as a marriageable young woman whom no suitor approached, a parrot in a cage, a freak in a circus stall. But her feeling of personal affront was neutralized by love for her parents and a general benevolence or forbearance of character that made her go along with it all with little effort, preferring passive obedience to the discomfort of a scene that would end in tears and remorse and in any case wouldn't grant her any result. The resolve of her inner rebellion never provoked the slightest turbulence in the sweet, mild appearance she presented to others, interpreted as a symptom of Christian resignation to the solitary future that with the passage of time would cover her in ridicule. When she was twenty-one or twenty-two, the cabal of her aunts and mother had already determined she'd remain a spinster, and they devoted long, laborious analyses to an explanation of this inevitable fact, which was enigmatic because somehow all of them had deemed it a certainty almost from the time she left childhood behind, with no obvious reasons to support it: she wasn't at all ugly, or fat, or skinny either; she had pretty teeth; she was pleasant and considerate, though perhaps a little sad. She may have had a gravity that dampened her sparkle and made her seem older than she was, choosing dresses that weren't flattering or that exaggerated her small defects, analyzed by aunts and female cousins with subtleties worthy of a class in histology, a science made fashionable by Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Didn't she have a double chin from the time she was very young? Eyebrows that were too thick, a certain tendency to walk as if she had a weight on her shoulders which made her seem shorter? Among the girls of good family in her generation, she was one of the last to adopt the fashions that came from Europe after the Great War, and in this case not for fear of opposing her parents but because of something that might be interpreted as the negligence of a woman no longer interested in making herself attractive. In 1920 she was thirty-four years old and hadn't yet cut the long hair appropriate to a woman of another time, another age, or given up corsets, and so she seemed to belong more to the generation of maiden aunts than to her female cousins not destined for the hereditary female celibacy that in the Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo family endangered the continuance of the line. Her adaptation to the new age was gradual, guided by the caution and timidity that were character traits. At a given moment the compassionate tone used to speak of her in the family took on a hint of misgiving; her shyness stopped being attributed to a mixture of humility and sweetness and was suspected of hiding an essential arrogance. Not long before, she'd apologized for not attending as frequently as she should the ladies' entertainments organized by the aunts, on account of her extreme social awkwardness and a propensity for solitude heavy with romanticism, and also—why not say it?—with sadness because of the love that didn't come and the youth that was passing. Now it was known that on more than one occasion she'd missed a novena or a charity raffle not because she was home attending to her parents or caring for her younger brother but because she'd gone to a lecture or a theatrical performance with suspect women friends. The rumor that she wore glasses at home and read newspapers and modern novels was true, and she didn't hide them from her uncle the priest, who was one of the first to make public her shocking heterodox traits: it wasn't true (and no one who really knew her and viewed her without malevolence would have believed it) that she'd angered her father by acquiring the habit of smoking cigarettes. Nor was it true that because of modern influences her Catholic faith had weakened. She went to Mass every Sunday arm in arm with her mother, and accompanied her in prayers at the chapel of Jesus of Medinaceli, and confessed and took Communion with an inner devotion that filled her with serenity and had no hint of sanctimony.