In the Night of Time (42 page)

 

Those glimpses of strangeness would have become the tolerable eccentricities of a woman trained for spinsterhood from the time she was young, but they were nothing compared to the seismic perplexity provoked by the great news of her engagement, which went against the laws not only of probability but also of nature. Who could have imagined that a fiancé would turn up when she was in her thirties? It would have been less unbelievable if she'd grown a beard, like those women in the circus to whom she compared herself in her younger years of meekness and humiliation. And not just any fiancé—though he wasn't entirely free of suspect attributes, beginning with origins that part of the family surmised were undesirable—but Don Francisco de Asís accepted him more willingly than anyone, not because by this time he was prepared to consider any candidate as suitable, but by virtue of a good-natured lack of practical prejudices that often did not correspond to the Paleolithic obstinacy of what he called his “body of principles.” The suitor of the woman they still called “the girl” turned out to be an architect younger than she, without a personal inheritance but, according to Don Francisco de Asís, with a promising future, recently hired by the municipal government, the only child of a widowed mother, having lost his father at the age of fifteen.

 

The fact that the widowed mother had also been the porter in a working-class building and the father little more than a shrewd, ambitious bricklayer were additional merits, according to Don Francisco de Asís's point of view, or lamentable drawbacks according to other family members who had the opportunity to congratulate the newly engaged fiancée and her parents as if really offering condolences, alleviating the vexation of having to accept in their cousin and niece a happiness they hadn't counted on. It was a harsh obligation, from one day to the next, to envy someone who until then had been the recipient of their compassion, the drama of poor Adela who'd passed the age of thirty without waking the interest of any man.
I don't know how much you love that woman and I don't care either but I do remember how much you loved me and I've kept all the letters you wrote to me.
But there was no need to lose hope: the good news could still be undone; the fiancé might not be as honest as he seemed. Didn't they say he was a Republican? Even worse, a Socialist, or a Bolshevik, just like his father, the late bricklayer who rose to master builder, owing his position with the municipal government not to merit but to influence, the machinations of left-wing councilmen avid to place one of their own. But as it turned out, the possible reprobate or dowry hunter had excellent manners, learned no one knew where, and a strangely mild way of showing, or rather hiding, his leftist sympathies, because from the beginning he fulfilled to the satisfaction of the most punctilious observer each of the family's obligations and rituals, and didn't have the slightest objection to expressly accepting that his children, when they were born (but wasn't Adela too old to conceive, wasn't it possible for a woman past thirty whose health had never been outstanding to suffer a difficult delivery or give birth to some genetic aberration?), would be baptized with the required pomp by the uncle who was a priest, and brought up in the Catholic faith. And speaking of ideas, hadn't Jesus Christ been, as Don Francisco de Asís argued in a moment of polemical audacity, the first Socialist? Wasn't the evangelical message—properly understood and applied according to the Social Doctrine of the Church—the best antidote to godless revolution? Besides, the fiancé's parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters, which spared everyone the embarrassing formality of having to deal with individuals of obvious social inferiority, whose presence, though picturesque, would have been offensive at an offer of marriage and more so at a wedding ceremony worthy of the family's position, which would probably merit an article in the society section of the
ABC
—a modest article, of course, certainly with no photo, but everyone knew that in the
ABC
the snobbery of noble titles prevailed, especially since the founder had received one, though he'd begun his career as a soap manufacturer. Since when was soap nobler than cement and brick? Don Francisco de Asís asked in his stentorian voice. With no father or mother or close relatives, Ignacio Abel's origins lost much of their vulgarity and projected a certain shadow of mystery, a dark background against which his elegant figure stood out, veiled by a degree of reserve behind which he could hide the memory of the years of perseverance and sacrifice it had cost him to study for a career and learn manners that were irreproachable even to the most suspicious and demanding gaze. In the eyes of the family, Adela acquired a new and on occasion piercing luminosity; from the first days of her engagement she exhibited an almost indecent amount of happiness. She looked ten years younger. The aunts and cousins said she was as mad with love as the film stars who sighed with their eyes turned to heaven and their hands clasped, glimpsing in the clouds the face of their beloved, thanks to an optical effect that at the time was widely reproduced on postcards.
Think of how you called on me, the things you said to me, it isn't possible you were lying.
The languidly slow pace that had marked the progress of her spinsterhood gave way to a liveliness appropriate to the new age and the technical competence of the fiancé, who aside from his undemanding municipal occupation was beginning to receive substantial commissions, celebrated, not without some exaggeration, by Don Francisco de Asís, who at heart had always sinned on the side of naïveté and reckless enthusiasm. After less than a year's engagement the wedding date was agreed on, and this speed, which wouldn't have required an evil disposition to regard as haste, did not fail to raise suspicions, dissipated only when a careful accounting of the time passed between that date and the first birth revealed the undeniable legitimacy of the newborn. Adela, who seemed so sluggish, had been in a hurry for no reason other than to make up for lost time, with an impatience and a passion more suited to the heroine of a risqué novel than a woman of her years. But neither did she have any scruples about going to live with her husband in a small apartment in an unfashionable Madrid neighborhood where her only help was a maid.
I do remember how happy we were even though I had to climb four flights in all the heat that summer so pregnant with the girl it seemed impossible I could swell up any more.
Don Francisco de Asís let it be known admiringly that his son-in-law hadn't wanted to accept the help he offered to rent a house centrally located and in better condition: accustomed to earning his living by his own efforts, Ignacio Abel was grateful for any hand extended to him but preferred not to have recourse to it unless required by a critical situation that endangered the welfare of his wife or the heir Don Francisco de Asís soon was proud (and relieved) to announce. For her part, Doña Cecilia, more stubborn or less of a dreamer, would have preferred that between the wedding and the birth a period had gone by that wasn't more decent but certainly more dignified and leisurely and more suited to individuals who didn't give themselves over to their conjugal duty with more enthusiasm than required to fulfill the purpose of the sacrament.
I still remember, if you don't, how I trembled when I heard you run up the stairs.

 

That a girl was the firstborn was a setback but not a disappointment. Don Francisco de Asís's male child was, after all, the one designated to assure the continuation of the family name, and the girl was born strong, big, and healthy in spite of a difficult labor: during two days of anguish the worst family predictions regarding Adela's advanced age seemed to be confirmed. But mother and daughter came through, and it soon was obvious that the rumors originating nobody knew where and spread by the malevolence of nobody knew who regarding the possible retardation of the newborn were without foundation, though the aunts on their visits looked at the cradle with an expression of condolence. The proud father, as they said in the birth announcements in the newspaper, asked Don Francisco de Asís to be godfather at the baptism of his first grandchild. Before the frantic scrutiny of the family, and the close vigilance of the uncle who was a priest and officiated at the sacrament, Ignacio Abel's behavior in church was as respectful toward the rite as it had been on his wedding day, when everyone had seen him take Communion with exemplary devotion and kneel with eyes closed and head bowed as the sacred wafer dissolved on his tongue (reviving a childhood memory when it stuck to the roof of his mouth, leaving the strange, forgotten taste of flour with no leavening on his palate). The girl would be named Adela, like her mother.
It was you who wanted her to have my name and whispered so in my ear.
That the boy, when he came, was named Miguel, for his dead paternal grandfather, and not Francisco de Asís, was a disappointment to his other grandfather, but like a gentleman he rose above it, taking refuge in the hope, by then somewhat faint, that any day now the grandson born to his male child would be the one to perpetuate not only his family name but his first name too, and in the rather more solid prospect of his son-in-law and Adela continuing to expand the family, and if they had another boy they'd undoubtedly call him Francisco de Asís. In certain cases he knew of, hadn't a change in the order of family names been authorized in the civil registry so as not to lose the memory of an illustrious lineage? In the photos of the baptism, he smiled as he held his grandson, though less broadly than at the girl's baptism because he was concerned by the baby's extreme fragility. How carefully Adela had classified them, album after album, from the formal studio photographs in the early years to the ones taken with the Leica she'd given her husband on one of his more recent birthdays, which he generally used to photograph works in progress. (It was the camera he took on his four-day trip south with Judith Biely, whose pictures he kept in the locked desk drawer.)

 

Perhaps Adela was slow to accept what Ignacio Abel now realized as he turned the album pages under the dim light of a lamp in the apartment where he was the sole inhabitant, and the figures in the photos took on a ghostly quality, as if they were people who had died long ago, so distant from the present, from Madrid in the shadow of nights of war (lit by the headlights of speeding, solitary cars that suddenly appeared at the end of a street, stopped with the motor running next to a doorway, where after a while a man would be seen coming out in an undershirt or pajamas, sometimes barefoot, dazed with sleep and panic, hands tied, moved along by kicks, guarded by pistols and rifles). Blinded by love, at first Adela wouldn't have noticed his expression in the photos, including the ones he'd sent her as mementos when they became engaged, or the ones from their wedding day, or the portraits they'd taken together on a whim of hers in a studio on the Gran Vía soon after they were married, each seated in an antique chair in front of a painted backdrop, he with his legs crossed, showing his high-top shoes, she holding a book in one hand, her chin resting on the back of the other, wearing an indolent smile in which he could detect what neither of them knew at the time, that she was pregnant. On his face was an expression of not being altogether present, his glance fixed on a point in the middle distance, a self-absorption tinged by ennui. But perhaps he was mistaken, looking at the photographs fifteen years later; perhaps, lacking the imagination to see himself in what to all intents and purposes was another life, he attributed to the younger man a reluctance that became more apparent as he turned the pages of the albums. His entire life, watched over by Adela, by her fondness for keeping everything in its place, not only photographs but letters as well, each one he wrote during their engagement and the ones he sent during his year in Germany, arranged chronologically and held together by rubber bands, which he didn't want to remove from their envelopes, to spare himself the humiliation of his own lies, the expressions of love in his own hand.
You no longer remember how you'd complain if a letter of mine was late.
He looked, hypnotized, at the photos, while outside he heard bursts of gunfire. He went through a series documenting his children's early years and the tedious family celebrations, the changes in the face and body of Adela, who'd been more slender than he recalled. (But who could trust memory? What would Judith Biely be thinking about him now, erasing him from her new life who knew where, with what younger men, in Paris or in America?) He didn't appear in many photographs (he must have been traveling, or working, or away on some pretext or other); in some he was present but wore an expression that separated him from the rest, resistant to the collective happiness, a celebration meant to bring them all together. In them Adela was almost always beside him, holding his arm or leaning against him a little, proud of his male presence, perhaps understanding later, when she put the photos in order and placed them in the album, or much later, when she went back to them to look for signs of what had always existed or to console herself for her loneliness and sense of deception and failure by reliving a time she remembered as happier: their early years together, the birth of Lita, the move to the new building on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, its balconies that opened on the unlimited expanse of Madrid—“Madrid modern and white,” as Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote in one of her favorite poems. Her secret malaise might still be a response to her husband's work. He was so insistent on showing others his own worth, committing his very life to the completion of each assignment, perhaps uncertain about the position he'd achieved, wanting to prove that if he prospered it wasn't because of the influence of his wife's family, toward whom he displayed an increasingly dry coldness that hurt her deeply, especially because of the affection she had for her parents, her fear that her husband would hurt them with a defiant remark or sarcastic comment, or simply with the indifference that was apparent in reality and more so in photographs—even, she would realize much later, in the pictures from their wedding, and in those where Ignacio Abel held his newborn children or placed his hand on their shoulder on the day of their Communion. He raised a glass in a toast and looked away. But Adela hadn't failed to complete her albums, to make note of exact dates, circumstances, and places in handwriting that was always the same over the years, as regular as her own presence in the photos, a mixture of passivity and childish hope, as if in spite of everything promises might eventually be kept, as if the only condition for avoiding disaster and not suffering disillusionment and even a raw lie was to maintain a serene attitude, a slight smile, raising her chin and straightening her torso, pretending she was immune to the bite of his coldness, that suspicions didn't keep her awake, that rectitude was the best possible path. On the first page of each album Adela had written the dates it covered. The last one indicated only the beginning, September 1935. In the photos, Ignacio Abel saw not what was captured by the camera but what was already happening elsewhere and in secret: Adela, the girl, and himself on the evening of his talk at the Student Residence; the family party in the house in the Sierra on Don Francisco de Asís's saint's day. The first photograph had been taken a few minutes after he'd seen her at close range and heard for the first time the name of Judith Biely. In the second he searched for the traces of Judith's memory he invoked while someone snapped the picture: the long table filled with people and plates of food, the warm sun of an October afternoon, the already remote faces, the family life that seemed a life sentence then, and now had disappeared without a trace: Don Francisco de Asís, Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, smiling and faded, infantilized by spinsterhood and old age, the uncle who was a priest, stuffed inside his cassock (what had happened to him—he might have had time to hide if the outbreak of the war caught him in Madrid, or he might be lying in some ditch, rotting in the sun and covered with flies), his brother-in-law Víctor, his face clouded with grievance, his two children, Lita smiling happily at the camera and Miguel fragile and shy, and Adela, near them, a woman suddenly mature, older-looking and wider in that photo than in his memory, leaning toward him, her husband, an attitude that survives the irreversible changes in her state of mind, as if her body hadn't learned what her mind knew, that the physical support sought and seemingly found is by now illusory, that things have changed though appearances remain the same. And he, in a corner, smiling this time, not on guard or absent, as in most of the photographs, with an idle smile, visible despite the shadow that covers half his face, a little sleepy from the food and wine and the sweet autumn sun. Had Adela been able to see (when she looked at it slowly after pasting it in the album, smoothing it with the palm of her hand, writing the date and place on a tag beneath it) that in the photo her husband already wore the face of his deceit, that the ease and affection he displayed and she was so grateful for were symptoms not of the return of love but of its loss? There was another photograph in the album that wasn't pasted in and had no indication on the back of the day and place; it had been taken that same evening, beside the pond of the abandoned irrigation ditch. Miguel and Adela had argued about the Leica, and it was Miguel who in the end prevailed, but Ignacio Abel didn't recall the moment the boy took the picture, hiding perhaps in the pines, pretending he was an international reporter, a blurred photo, perhaps because there wasn't enough light, or because Miguel didn't hold the camera steady: his parents sitting on the grass, close to the pond's edge, leaning toward each other, absorbed in a conversation Ignacio Abel doesn't remember, the two figures as calm as the water where they were partially reflected, obscured by the oblique shadow of the pines.