In the Night of Time (48 page)

 

She'd heard the trembling of the badly fitted glass in the café door and knew he was coming in but preferred not to raise her head, expecting she'd find in his eyes the remorse and fatigue of the previous night, and above all the refutation of a feeling that had begun to desert them in recent days, though neither had acknowledged it. Time had ended; it had collapsed for them like a tower or sandcastle since the last night they'd spent in the house by the sea. Fleeing from anguish to revived desire, from desire to insomnia, to waiting for dawn on a Monday when their parting would be crueler than on other occasions precisely because they'd been together a longer time. It was necessary to pay, but they didn't know the price; love was built on someone else's destruction. Sitting in the café, her eyes fixed on the round marble tabletop, smoke from her cigarette rising to one side of her face, Judith imagined the other woman's pain like a knife thrust with crude obstinacy into her abdomen. Ignacio Abel stood across from her, his tie crooked, hat in hand, as if he didn't dare sit down. What was gained in one dazzling minute is just as easily lost. The glitter of desire in a pair of eyes can be extinguished just as it illuminated them. After spending a sleepless night at the sanatorium in the Sierra, Ignacio Abel had driven back to Madrid and hadn't had time to shower or change. His hair was dirty, flat against his skull, his unshaven cheeks dark, the skin under his chin flabby, and his hat left a mark across the middle of his forehead, made tender by the heat.

“Have you been waiting a long time?”

“I don't know. I didn't look at my watch.”

“I couldn't come any earlier.”

“Shouldn't you have stayed with her?”

“She's out of danger. I'll go back this afternoon. She was still unconscious.”

“We almost killed her, you and I. We pushed her over the edge.”

“It's still not certain it wasn't an accident. No one saw her jump in the water. She was wearing high heels, and the stone at the edge was wet. She might have slipped.”

“Do you really want to believe that?” Now Judith was looking at him, her light eyes dilated, a stranger to him, rejecting the lie, the attenuation of deserved shame. “Can you convince yourself, or are you only trying to convince me?”

Her voice was cold, sharp, with a sarcastic edge, a rigidity that denied him closeness. He had seen hints of this side of her before, heard this tone of voice, in passing, when she grew irritated and familiarity between the two of them seemed gone. Perhaps it wasn't fair, now that what he'd feared was happening, when he was beginning to lose her because of her guilt over Adela's unhappiness. Perhaps they'd begun to lose each other earlier, worn out by all the secrecy, by the simple movement and friction of things, unworthy of a love that abandoned them as gratuitously as a bird flying away one quiet afternoon, the same love that a few months ago had come to rest on them without their having sought it or done anything to deserve it. Suddenly it was intolerable to go on living, to leave the café like two strangers, face the inhospitable Madrid morning, turn a corner, and perhaps never see each other again.

“You're not to blame,” he said.

“Of course I am, as much as you. More than you, because I'm a woman. She didn't do anything to me and I almost killed her.”

“She was the one who chose to take the train and throw herself into the pond. It wasn't a sudden impulse. She had time to think. She changed her clothes. She put on her gloves and her pearl necklace. She put on lipstick.”

“Would it have been less serious if she'd thrown herself off the balcony in a housedress?”

“She might have thought about her children.”

“Did
you
think about them?”

“I didn't do anything to leave them without a father.”

“Do they know anything?”

“Their grandparents came to stay with them last night. We told them their mother fainted in the street and they can't visit her right now because the doctors have her under observation.”

“They're bright. They'll suspect something. What did you do with the letters?”

“There's no danger. I locked them up.”

“That's what you said before.”

“It won't happen again.”

“I want you to burn them. I want you to promise me you'll burn them. The letters and the photographs.”

“Then what would I have left of you?”

 

He heard his own voice: he was talking as if he'd already lost her. He extended his hand and Judith's hand drew back automatically. If she got up from the divan and he didn't hold her back, he'd lose her forever. He saw her glance at her watch, measuring the time she still had, calculating her flight.
Time on our hands.
In the next half hour he had to go to his house, call the office, talk to his children, subject himself to his in-laws' questions and affronted looks, take a shower, put on clean clothes, drive back to the Sierra, to the sanatorium where Adela perhaps was awake, her brother standing guard, filled with anger, he too looking at his watch, to measure the added insult.

“I have to go,” she said. “My students are waiting for me. They're waiting for their final grades.”

“Tell me when I'll see you again.”

“You have to take care of your wife.”

“Don't call her my wife.”

“I'll call her that for as long as you're married to her.”

“She wanted revenge. She wanted to hurt us.”

“She's crazy about you. Can't you see? You said she didn't care about anything, just marriage and appearances. You don't notice anything.”

“If you leave me, I'll die.”

“Don't be childish.”

She said
childish:
the thirty-two-year-old woman looked at the man of almost fifty with the ironic disbelief she'd have shown to the theatrical outburst of a student claiming to be in love with her. She repeated in her foreign voice, drawn back into her language, the other life in which he didn't exist:
I really have to go,
gathering up her things, as if she were no longer in Madrid but in New York, back home, accustomed to a faster rhythm, unhesitating, unceremonious, the dry, unadorned frankness that was one of the many traits put on hold recently. He was losing her. Watching her stand up dissuaded him from trying to hold her, her hair on her cheeks as she moved her face away so he couldn't kiss her, as distant from him as from the gloomy setting of the café. She gave him a smile that was more wounding because only her lips were part of it, not her eyes, a smile that said it all.

“When will I see you again?”

“Leave me alone for a while. Don't call me. Don't follow me.”

“I can't live without you.”

“Don't say things that aren't true.”

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Go back to the sanatorium and take care of Adela.”

The name, spoken aloud, accentuated the presence they could no longer pretend didn't exist. He watched Judith leave, her back very straight, her dress clinging to her slim figure, her head bent, the heels of her white-and-black shoes echoing on the dirty wooden floor. He didn't see her chin tremble or the hand brush hair away from her face, wincing on the street in the violent light of the summer morning, so close to the ending and the disaster, he thinks now on the train traveling up the Hudson, his face against the glass, so hopeless, neither of them knowing this unceremonious farewell would be their last.

P
ERHAPS WAITING
and traveling will be his natural state from now on. He no longer has the feeling that his journey has been a phase, a more or less broken line between a place of departure and another of arrival, solidly there on the map despite the great distance separating them, Madrid and the small town that in less than an hour will cease to be merely a name, Rhineberg, where strangers will be waiting for him on the platform, prepared to welcome him, to return part of the identity that has been eroding as the days have passed, wearing away in its brush with inclement weather like poor-quality material. In one of the school atlases Lita liked so much, Ignacio Abel had traced for her and Miguel the itineraries they'd follow on the adventure he promised them for the following school year, knowing that if he went to America he'd do it alone and meet Judith Biely there, but still incapable of dispelling the deception he himself had fed. His two children leaned over him, in the living room with the balconies open to the twilight air, while his index finger ran in a straight line over the coated paper of the atlas, from Madrid to Paris, Paris to Saint-Nazaire or Bordeaux, the Atlantic ports from where ships sailed regularly for New York, ships whose names Lita and Miguel knew by heart after checking them in nearby travel agencies, the Cook agency on Calle de Alcalá, the other on Calle Lista at the corner of Alcántara: the
Île de France,
the SS
Normandie,
as alluring as the name of the train they'd take to Paris, its cars painted dark blue with gold letters,
L'Étoile du Sud,
the title of a Jules Verne novel, the headlight on its locomotive illuminating the night. In the window of the Cook agency, next to the color posters of coastal landscapes in the north of Spain and the Côte d'Azur, was a splendid model of an ocean liner, as detailed as those of University City, and Miguel and Lita looked at the details, pressing their faces to the glass: lifeboats, smokestacks, hammocks on the first-class deck, the swimming pool, the tennis courts with lines clearly marked on their green surfaces and tiny nets. Putting off the moment when he'd tell them the truth, Ignacio Abel fed to his children a dream that was a fraud and would end in a disappointment he couldn't confront. The tip of his index finger effortlessly crossed flat colored spaces, left behind borders that were lines of ink and cities reduced to a tiny circle and a name, navigated the luminous blue of the Atlantic Ocean. The outside world was a tempting geography of postcards with exotic stamps, and full-color posters of international railways and maritime crossings displayed in the shop window of a travel agency. Lita, always meticulous, an expert in adventure novels, took measurements with a ruler and calculated the real distances to scale, to the great annoyance of Miguel, who grew bored with the arithmetical deviation from the game and even more tired of his sister's permanent flaunting of her knowledge to their father. Now the awful grind was demonstrating that she excelled not only in language and history and literature but in mathematics too—what next?

 

Ignacio Abel has been traveling that distance on the maps for more than two weeks, assaulted by illusions, by his desire for the woman he looks for among the foreign faces and whom he may have lost, knowing he hadn't done everything possible to stay in touch with Adela and his children on the other side of the frontlines. He could have crossed them, at least in the early days when you could still move with relative ease from one zone to another, before the fronts were defined and the war became something more than terror, uncertainty, and confusion, when the word hadn't come up yet—war—with its strange, primitive obscenity. Wars, like misfortunes, happen to other people; wars are in history books or on the international pages of newspapers, not on the street you go down to every morning and where you can now find a corpse or a hole left by a bomb or the debris of a fire. He leans his face against the train window and spots in his eye sockets the fatigue of the countless landscapes he's seen slip by since leaving Madrid, all joined now in a single sequence, like a film of unimaginable length that keeps going. He's seeing the autumn woods Judith talked about so much, but he doesn't have the energy to focus on them: reds and yellows vibrating in the sun like flames, leaves raised by the rush of the locomotive floating in the air like crazy butterflies, flying into the glass, then disappearing; thickets of reeds emerging from the cobalt-colored water; flocks of aquatic birds rising with a metallic gleam of wings. He remembers what Judith had said to him the first afternoon they were together, drinking and talking in the bar of the Hotel Florida until they lost track of time: those colors were what she missed most about America in the Madrid autumn. Now that he finally sees them, they seem to form part of his personal catalogue of the things he's lost. Along the riverbank the woods extend to the horizon in waves of hills, and at their tops he can see a country house, isolated and solemn like an ancient temple in a painting by Poussin, the glass pierced by the gentle October sun. How would it have been to hide in a house like that with Judith Biely, not just four days but a lifetime; how will the library building at Burton College look from a distance if it ever comes into existence? (In the most recent letters and telegrams no one has mentioned the assignment. Perhaps he has traveled so far only to arrive at nothing, without so much as an excuse that might give a little dignity to his flight.) He'll reach his destination soon, and it becomes impossible for him to imagine his old life or remember with any certainty a time when he wasn't going from place to place, when his permanent state wasn't solitude, his natural environment wasn't trains, stations, border crossings, daybreak in odd cities, hotel rooms, life suspended each day. How strange it will be to have an office again, schedules, a studio, a drawing board. But even stranger to have been the man who returned home every day at roughly the same time and sat down to read the paper in the same chair molded by the shape and weight of his body and worn by the rubbing of his elbows; the man who one afternoon opened an atlas on his knees to imagine with his children the itinerary of a future trip, though a fictitious one, with an accurate timetable and a return date.

 

As disconcerting as how easily everything that seemed solid collapsed in Madrid in the course of two or three days in July was his own skill in adjusting without complaint or much hope to this transitional state. How quickly one becomes used to being a nobody and having nothing, reduced to the face and name on a passport and visa, to the few possessions that can fit into one's pockets and a suitcase, stuffed with papers and dirty clothes and his toiletries case, the only vestige of another existence, another way of traveling, restful and bourgeois, a comfortable parenthesis of movement between two fixed points. The leather case, a gift from Adela, matches the suitcase—made of hide, with chrome fittings and compartments where toiletry items fit, held in by straps: the badger-bristle shaving brush, the silver-plated bowl for lather, the razor with its ivory handle and a supply of rustproof steel blades, the flat flask for cologne, the comb, the shoehorn, the clothing brush. Each thing in its precise place, in its pocket or leather opening, the careful order of a former time, of a life fading in his memory.