In the Night of Time (49 page)

So close to the end of his journey he feels not relief but fear, fear and weariness, as if the distance traveled in recent weeks, the bad nights, the vibration of the trains, the sound of the ship's turbines, nausea in a poorly ventilated cabin where hot air took on an oily consistency, the effort of dragging his suitcase from one place to another—all had suddenly fallen on his shoulders in a rush of weakness. Instead of impatience to arrive, he's overwhelmed by fear of the unknown, the need to adapt to new circumstances, hold tiresome conversations with strangers, feign interest, be grateful for the favor of precarious hospitality because he has no way to reciprocate. (Perhaps Van Doren doesn't have as much influence as he implied, perhaps the project will come to nothing because it was a pretext for offering him a temporary refuge, for influencing his life from a distance, controlling time like a benevolent deity, granting Judith and him the only four consecutive days they'd spent together.) It's the same fear he felt as the end of each stage of his trip approached, the reluctance of someone who comes out of sleep in an unwelcoming light and doesn't want to wake. The train approaching Paris at daybreak over the gray horizon of industrial suburbs and brick factories; his waking in a ship's cabin and realizing it was the silence of the engines after a week of nonstop motion that dragged him out of sleep; and before that, after the first night, the surprise of reaching Valencia, the blinding light of that spring morning, as removed from the order of time as it was from the brutal winter that was to accompany the war in Madrid.

In Valencia the cafés were filled with people and the streets with traffic; had it not been for the headlines the newsboys shouted, one might have thought the war was going on in another country or was just part of a nightmare, vanished at the first light of day. In Valencia he wrote the first postcard to his children: a view of the beach in pastel colors, with white houses and palm trees. He wrote the card while sitting in a café, drinking a cold beer in the shade of an awning, near the station where his train for Barcelona and the border would leave in a few hours. He put a stamp on it and dropped it in a mailbox, trying not to think that it probably wouldn't reach its destination and he wouldn't receive an answer. Red-and-black flags and vehement Anarchist posters hung in the station's waiting room and on platforms, but in the first-class carriages the conductors were as helpful and wore blue uniforms as neatly buttoned as if the war or the revolution didn't exist. Even the militiamen who demanded documents reflexively doffed their caps to well-dressed travelers, whom a moment later they might place under arrest or drive off the train with rifle butts. Unexpected areas of the old normality remained intact in the midst of the destruction, like the balcony he'd seen one morning as he passed a bombed-out building, a balcony suspended in air, held by an invisible bar to the only wall left standing, its wrought-iron filigree perfectly preserved, as were the pots of geraniums that hung from the railing. Didn't Negrín always say that in Spain people lacked the seriousness to make a revolution? That everything was done halfway, or carelessly, or badly, from the laying of railroad track to the shooting of some poor bastard? Now Ignacio Abel understands that on the first morning of his journey in Valencia he hadn't shed his old identity, preserved as astonishingly as the balcony with geraniums hanging from the only wall left standing after a house was bombed. He was still somebody, still wore polished shoes and kept the crease in his trousers, still spoke with a clear voice and instinctive authority to conductors, porters, and ticket clerks at the windows he'd soon approach as fearfully as he walked toward the checkpoints at border crossings. Inside the suitcase his clothes were clean and orderly. He hadn't yet developed the nervous gesture of repeatedly bringing his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket to confirm that his passport and wallet were still there; when he pressed his wallet he could still feel the comfortable thickness of banknotes recently withdrawn from his account, some of which he'd changed for francs and dollars in a bank on Calle de Alcalá, where he was recognized as soon as he walked in and treated with a certain reverence.

 

While he waited for the manager to return from the safe with his money discreetly placed in an envelope, Ignacio Abel thought, looking around him, of the primitive millenarianism of Spanish revolutions: so many churches had burned in Madrid and yet it hadn't occurred to anyone to burn or even attack any of the enormous banking headquarters along Calle de Alcalá, which plunged him into architectural despair. The bank entrance was protected by sandbags and the façade covered by crude revolutionary posters; trucks of militiamen passed along the street and wagons of refugees poured in from the villages to the south, recently conquered by enemy troops, but inside the bank the same, somewhat ecclesiastical half-light endured, and employees bent over their desks or murmured among themselves against a muffled background of typewriters. Indifferent to the careless dress that had become obligatory in Madrid, the manager wore his usual gray suit, black tie, and starched collar. “And so you're leaving us, Señor Abel. Other highly valued clients have also left, as you know. We hope this doesn't last. And that your absence doesn't need to be prolonged.” He smiled and rubbed his pale hands together. When he said “as you know” and “we hope this doesn't last,” he'd looked at Ignacio Abel with caution, as if testing a possible complicity with the client who'd had a solid account for years and also wore a tie. “It won't last, you'll see,” Ignacio Abel heard himself say with a conviction he didn't have, offended by the bank manager's insinuation, his hope that Franco's troops would soon enter Madrid. “The Republic will make short work of those rebels.” The bank manager's half-smile remained frozen on his waxen face, as ecclesiastical as the light that filtered in the stained-glass windows in the ceiling. “Let's hope it is so. In any case, you know where we are.” He accompanied him to the door, suspicious now but still deferential, satisfied with having proved his influence even in these new times when he handed over, with prudence and discretion, an amount of money much higher than the sum allowed out of the country in the exceptional circumstances of the war.

 

He took off his tie when he went out. There was no point in attracting attention and risking a search when he was carrying so much money in his briefcase, carrying his passport with the visa, the letter of invitation from Burton College, and hiding in his pocket the fragile credentials of a flight that seemed more unreal to him the closer it came. The approach of his departure made time go faster, made him look more intensely at the things he soon wouldn't see, the streets of Madrid, the entrance to his building where the elevator no longer worked. The porter had traded his old uniform with the gold buttons for a blue coverall, but he still bowed, obsequious and venal, waiting for a tip, perhaps studying the possibility of denouncing as an undercover agent or spy some resident against whom he harbored an old grudge. In each trivial detail, Ignacio Abel saw an indelible sign of the time that would pass before his return, of what he might never see again. He felt not exaltation or sadness but crushing physical distress, the pressure in his chest, the weight on his shoulders, the empty hole in his stomach, the weakness in his legs. He walked through his empty apartment like a ghost, as if he were seeing the rooms and furniture not in the present or in memory but in the future of his absence that would begin the moment he closed the door and inserted the key for the last time, in the tenacious endurance of what remains in shadow, what no one looks at. Before turning on the lights, he'd closed the shutters one by one. From his bedroom window he'd looked for the last time at the darkened outline of Madrid's rooftops, the streets submerged in an abyss of shadows where one could hear only the speeding cars of guard patrols and the distant bursts of gunfire, and toward midnight the engines of invisible enemy planes flying over a city with no searchlights or antiaircraft defenses. It had turned cold and the heat didn't work. The supply of electricity was so weak the bulbs gave off a yellowish light. On his last night in the apartment, where he'd been alone for so long, a dazed Ignacio Abel went from room to room, listening to his own footsteps, seeing his image in the clouded light of mirrors. His suitcase lay open on the bed he hadn't bothered to make in recent days (but he'd never made a bed before, just as he had only a vague idea of how one lit a burner on the gas range). His suits and Adela's dresses hanging in the deep closet were phantoms or incarnations of their previous life, recognizable in their forms but lacking their former substance and reality. Clumsily he folded clothes to pack in the suitcase. He selected notebooks of drawings, a book, a photograph of the children taken one or two summers earlier; he took his architect's diploma out of its frame, rolled it up, and placed it in a cardboard tube. He'd been advised not to carry too much luggage: documents and safe-conducts might not do any good, and he might have to cross the French border on foot along a secret pass. Nothing was certain anymore. Trains weren't running from the South Station, though this was said to be temporary (but the newspapers claimed the always victorious militias had foiled an enemy attempt to cut the rail line between Madrid and Levante); he'd have to travel by truck to Alcázar de San Juan, where at some point the Valencia express would pass by. He closed the suitcase, turned off the light, decided to lie down on the bed, just to rest with his eyes closed for a few minutes; what with alarms and bombings, and his nervousness as the date of his departure approached, he hadn't slept for two or three nights. The moment he lay down on the rumpled bed, he sank into sleep like a stone in water. He knew he'd slept because the knocking on the door woke him, the voice saying his name.

Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door.

 

How much distance fit into the smooth tinted space of a map over which he slid his index finger: the cold in the back of the truck, the lapels of his raincoat raised and his hat pulled down on his head, the ailing engine, faces lit by the glow of a cigarette, and sometimes in the background the white patch of a village. At one point he heard plane engines, and the truck advanced slowly, its headlights turned off. But it took Ignacio Abel a long time to realize the true scale of the space, the expanse of the world he'd cross on his journey, made vaster because he lacked the reference points of Judith Biely and his children. He sensed it, perhaps, not with his intelligence but with his fear the night before he left, the last night, as he packed his suitcase, stood in a room or in the middle of the hall, not remembering where he was going in the large apartment he'd never really felt was his, checked his documents and money over and over again, deciding not to hide some of it in the lining of his coat or the double bottom of the suitcase; suddenly secretive, threatened, frightened, a deserter of his city and his country, a fugitive of the war in which others were fighting and dying for the same cause that nominally was his, though he no longer knew what name to give it without feeling that words were a fraud and he was being infected by the lie when he pronounced them, with or without capital letters—Republic, Democracy, Socialism, Anti-Fascist Resistance—everything out of focus unless he thought about the others, the enemy, those advancing toward Madrid from the south, the west, the north, not with flags and words and worn uniforms but with mercenary butchers determined to kill, military chaplains with pistols at their waists and crucifixes held high, well-oiled machine guns, the merciless discipline of machines; men who rode horses and hunted down peasants as if they were exterminating predatory animals; who raped women after shooting their husbands; who first bombed then attacked with bayonets the working-class outskirts of Granada and Sevilla; who from airplanes machine-gunned scores of terrified fugitives. The Madrid newspapers pushed the propaganda, and radio announcers hailed the boldness of the popular militias, as the other side continued to advance. He packed his shirts, ties, underwear, socks, the things that had always miraculously appeared folded and ironed in his drawers, in the suitcases used on trips he'd made in earlier times. He hadn't eaten supper and wasn't hungry. He took a sip of cognac and felt nauseated; in a few hours he'd have left this apartment perhaps forever. My love, my daughter, my son, my betrayed and humiliated wife, forgotten shades of my dead parents. The cognac in his empty stomach accelerated his vertigo. He lay down on the bed and slept for a few minutes, and what happened when the knocking at the door woke him had the quality of a bad dream he preferred not to remember, as the voice continued to resonate in his mind.
Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door.
At midnight the truck would be waiting at the Atocha Station. He knew it was foolish, yet he crossed Madrid on foot along secondary streets where patrol cars weren't likely to appear. When he was about to leave, the suitcase by the door, his coat and hat on, he went through all the rooms turning out the lights, making sure the faucets were closed, as if going on vacation. What seems to have lasted a lifetime and will last forever, so easily discontinued from one day to the next. In his children's room, on Lita's desk, was the atlas they'd flipped through together at the end of May or early in June, when Madrid was already hot and the balcony doors were opened wide to let the afternoon breeze in, carrying the sounds of traffic and the shrill voices of the newsboys, the whistle of swallows nesting under the eaves. In the wardrobe mirror he saw himself as an intruder and remembered with shame the time he'd slapped Miguel. My son, many regrets. Lita's books were arranged on a shelf over the desk; in the titles he could follow her apprenticeship as a reader in recent years, books about Celia, followed by Verne and Salgari, then
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights.
He touched the spines of the books, the wood of the twin desks. In Miguel's drawer the papers and notebooks were piled haphazardly, indications of the last-minute rush before leaving for the house in the Sierra, programs for movies and photographs of actors cut from film magazines, one of them the young Sabu with his torso bare and wearing a turban.
SCANDALS IN THE MECCA OF CINEMA: EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF THELMA TODD
. Reading programs for films his father hadn't given him permission to see was how Miguel must have spent many of the hours when he was told to stay in his room and study. He remembered walking in and seeing the boy quickly stuff something into a drawer or between the pages of a book. With what useless harshness he'd treated him, with what silent cruelty, especially in comparison to the girl, for whom he'd barely hidden his favoritism. But perhaps his son was already used to his absence, to the new school life he'd have on the other side of the war's border, enemy country where it was difficult to send letters and postcards. Perhaps the unfulfilled promise of a trip, false from the start, pained the father much more than it did his children, the victims of the deception.