In the Night of Time (65 page)

 

“If your friend hasn't done anything wrong, he'll show up eventually,” Bergamín had said in his high-pitched, composed voice. As he rubbed his hands together when he rose to his feet behind the desk in his office, perhaps Professor Rossman had already been dead for several hours. Or was still alive and was killed on the night his daughter arrived at the pensión and locked herself in the room no one had straightened in her absence, and Ignacio Abel closed the balcony door after watching her walk to the corner of Calle O'Donnell. He realized he hadn't eaten anything all day, just a cone of roasted peanuts he'd bought from the vendor on the Paseo de Recoletos after leaving the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. In the kitchen he found a can of sardines in oil and ate them sitting at the table, placing a double sheet of newspaper under the can, dipping pieces of hard bread into the thick oil, scraping the bottom of the can with his fork. There was something primitive in the act of eating alone, in his reluctance to lay a tablecloth and look for a napkin. He wiped his fingers on the stained sheet of newspaper, and on it he left the empty can and the fork with brilliant drops of oil. He paid attention only to his clothes, which the doorman's wife washed and ironed for him once a week. The porter had suggested that once in a while his wife could clean the house, until the situation had been resolved, though it didn't seem as if all this could last much longer, two or three weeks and it would be over, and the señora and the children and the two maids would be back from the other side of the Sierra. But he didn't like the idea of the two of them spying on him, or was simply too embarrassed to let them see the disrepair, the dust, the newspapers strewn everywhere, the dirty sheets on the bed he never made, the bad smell and grime in the kitchen and bathroom. He tried to telephone Negrín, the phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He dialed the number Bergamín's secretary had given him, and when he was about to hang up he heard a woman's voice asking, in a loud voice, who was calling, a clamor of voices and music in the background. Mariana Ríos wasn't there, neither was Comrade Bergamín, best to call again first thing tomorrow morning. He thought about Judith Biely as he sat by his desk, imagining the letters he could write but wouldn't know where to send. Resentful, he sees himself fading from her memory on the very night that Professor Rossman waits in a dark basement or lies dead, anonymous, his body unclaimed. He turned on the radio and an announcer with a sonorous voice proclaimed yet again the reconquest of Aragón and the unstoppable advance of the people's militias toward Zaragoza. He turned down the volume to look for one of the enemy's stations, and on Radio Sevilla a similar though more distant voice, besieged by whistles, announced the heroic resistance of the Alcázar de Toledo against whose Numantian fortress the waves of Marxist hordes shattered in vain. When all this was over, not only rubble and dead bodies will have to be cleared away, but words as well, a rigorous national abstention from adjectives: unstoppable, uncontainable, imperishable, unpardonable, unavoidable, inflammatory, frenzied, heroic. He heard footsteps and turned off the radio, then the light. Standing motionless in the dark, he heard voices, among them the doorman's. They knocked at a door on the other side of the landing. He tiptoed down the long hallway. The wall clock had stopped, he hadn't wound it in a long time. He reached the door and pressed his face to the peephole but saw no light on the landing, heard nothing. Beyond the shutters, Calle Príncipe de Vergara and Madrid's roofed horizon were an impenetrable darkness, full of terrors, like the forests in the stories he read to his children when they were little. Flashes of headlights, sirens. In the silence, someone's footsteps, a conversation, the click of a cigarette lighter. He threw himself onto the unmade bed without taking off his clothes or shoes, fell asleep, then woke with a filthy aftertaste of sardines in oil, his heart pounding in his chest. The bed, the lamp on the night table, the entire house shook, and for a moment he had no idea where that prolonged crash of thunder came from. Then, the sirens: enemy planes flying low and leisurely bombing targets in a city with no antiaircraft defenses except for rifles and pistols firing from rooftops at the German Junkers. Motionless, on his back, with lethargy stronger than fear, he felt the ground vibrate less and less as the sound of the planes' engines faded away. They bomb poor neighborhoods, not this one. They know many people here are on their side. And what an air force we have, only some French discards from the Great War, no powerful alarms that can actually shake the air but pitiful sirens, which some Assault Guards have mounted on their motorcycles and turn with one hand while they hold on to the handlebars with the other. The whistle and roar of the bombs, a long silence, broken by ambulance sirens and fire engine bells. When he's still half asleep, an unexpected and vivid memory of Judith begins to take shape, her body tensing, her eyes closed, her heels rubbing against the sheet, her hands guiding his fingers, making him slow down, she moans softly in his ear. In the darkness of the conjugal bedroom, on wrinkled, dirty sheets where there was no trace of Adela's scent, he tried to imagine that it was Judith's hand touching him, that when he masturbated with a brusque, mechanical urge he was invoking her delicate body. But it was useless, a spasm and it was over, leaving him with only a rankling, sterile longing, a feeling of absurdity, almost embarrassment, a fifty-year-old man jerking off in the insomnia of war. It was growing light when he fell asleep, a cold, wet drop on his stomach, filled with remorse for not having gone out in search of Professor Rossman.

 

He woke thinking it was late, but it was not yet eight o'clock. He took a shower, brushed his teeth, shaved the gray and white stubble of his beard, avoiding his eyes in the mirror. At least there was still running water and he still had clean and pressed clothes in the closet. He'd go back to see Bergamín. He'd ask again at the offices and requisitioned palaces and militia barracks he'd visited the previous day. He'd go to the State Security Office, the Workers' Cooperative, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Europa movie house, the Beatriz movie house—he'd been told that since the basements were full, they held some prisoners, their hands tied, in theaters. He was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror in the entrance hall when the telephone rang. It was Señorita Rossman, begging his pardon for calling so early, silent for a moment when he told her he still had no information, but she shouldn't worry, he was about to leave the house to continue the search. He called the number for Bergamín's secretary, but no one answered. The urgency of war didn't change office hours. He remembered a poster in the metro:
EVERYONE TO THE FRONT! DEATH BEFORE RETREAT! THE RED BULLETS REGIMENT CALLS ON YOU!
(Registration from 9 to 1 and from 4 to 7.)
Not even for Death Before Retreat were administrative hours expanded. He went for breakfast to a nearby dairy store on Calle Don Ramón de la Cruz. It looked closed. He knocked on the metal blinds and the owner, who knew him, let him in, looking up and down the street, then closing the blinds again. In his old life, the owner would come up the service stairs early each morning carrying the milk and butter his children liked best, and in the summer he sold delicious meringue ice cream. The counter and walls preserved their usual white brilliance, but a calendar with the Virgin of Almudena, and a framed print of the Christ of Medinaceli, had disappeared from the walls. “I open up for you because I know and trust you, Don Ignacio, but tell me what I should do if one of those patrols with muskets shows up and requisitions several days' worth of stock. They take a hundred-liter can of milk they say is for militiamen at the front or for orphaned children and pay me with a voucher on a scrap of paper, and you tell me what good that is to me, or they raise their fists and boom:
UHP! Unite, brothers of the proletariat!
They say they're all proletarian brothers, and what am I, a bourgeois? Haven't I been getting up at four in the morning every day since before my head reached the counter? He who doesn't work doesn't eat, they always say. And if they take what's mine away from me, what am I to eat while I work myself to death? And what work are they doing if they are not at the front? What committee or what International Red Aid will feed my children if I have to close the store because they steal everything from me, or if it occurs to them one morning to collectivize my business, or pronounce me an insurgent, and I end up filled with bullets at a cemetery wall in Almudena or on the San Isidro meadow or wherever it is they kill people? Excuse me for letting off steam, Don Ignacio, but you're a decent man, and if I stay here all day without talking to anybody, I think my head will explode. How much longer do you think all this can go on? Because if things don't get better soon, in a few days I won't have any milk or coffee left, and the reserves of sugar are running out. Wouldn't you like another coffee, on the house?” The shop owner was a fat, gentle man with a soft double chin, as if nourished by the same excellent butter and thick cream he was proud to sell to his distinguished clientele, almost all gone now, fled or in hiding, and some turned out of their houses after midnight and executed not far away, on some empty lot. He spoke to Ignacio Abel and at the same time was attentive to the cup of coffee and the expression with which this rare patron, who hadn't left Madrid and didn't seem frightened, sipped it, and every few seconds his restless eyes went to the partly open door when he heard footsteps or the sound of a car engine on the street. The jolly merchant who ceremoniously greeted the señoras of the neighborhood and knew the names of all the maids now crouched in the store he had refused to abandon or close, the redoubt with the white counter and tiles into which he'd put the effort of a lifetime, the inhuman small hours of the morning, the céntimo-by-céntimo saving, the servility toward ladies and gentlemen who insisted on being called Don or Doña or Señora de and Señora Marquesa and yet sometimes didn't pay their dairy bills; and now, without understanding why, he who'd never been political had to live in fear, he said, lowering his voice, in fear that somebody would come and take away his life's work or shoot him. Then his eyes filled with fear as it dawned on him that his trust in Ignacio Abel was without foundation. Well-known, respectable-looking neighbors were not above accusing others if it meant saving themselves or staying in the good graces of a gang of killers. Besides, how could a man of his rank still live so comfortably in this neighborhood without being in cahoots with those killers? The same affable expression was on his face but now doubt had passed like a shadow across his eyes, and they became evasive as he charged Ignacio Abel for the coffee and thanked him for the tip. One had to look closely to read fear, because everyone knew that showing it openly could be interpreted as a sign as clear as buying batteries of a certain size to tune in enemy stations, or slipping, early on a Sunday morning, into the side door of a church, not yet converted into a garage or warehouse, where Masses were still being said.

But fear also had a subtle hue on the faces of those who felt relatively safe: the doorman, for instance, proud in his blue coverall and leather straps and raising his fist when parades passed by, remembered defending, among a group of deliverymen and maids from the neighborhood, what he called the forces of order and celebrating the Foreign Legion's victory against the rebellious Asturian miners in 1934. Somebody else might also remember. Ignacio Abel saw a familiar face approaching (perhaps a neighbor, making a clumsy attempt to hide his bourgeois status, unshaven, without a tie, wearing a beret instead of a hat), saw the fear in those eyes as they evaded him. He couldn't see it in his own face but felt its effect and imagined that same look, unfamiliar and frightened, persisting in an impossible pretense when an armed patrol came toward him, or a car stopped abruptly beside him, or at night when footsteps raced up the marble stairs of his overly opulent building. But who would acknowledge the terror, even in secret, deep down inside, each with his share of the great universal, unnamed fear one learned to hide in the light of day but unraveled when night fell and the streets emptied.

He walked along the street on the second day of his search for Professor Rossman, and in every face he recognized a different gradation of fear, more obvious the more it was hidden, the more it was wrapped in euphoria, lightheartedness, or feigned indifference. He saw fear in the families of fleeing campesinos who walked along Calle Toledo; he saw it in people coming out of the metro, getting off a streetcar at the last stop, at the empty lots where he began to look that morning for Professor Rossman among the corpses; on the faces of the dead fear had dissolved or hardened into a grotesque grimace. But fear was also in those who went there for the pleasure of walking among the bodies and pointing at postures they found comic or ridiculous, and with a foot turning up a face that had fallen into the dirt. There was fear in their laughter as well as in their silence, in the fatigued indifference of municipal workers who loaded corpses into trucks, and in the meticulousness of the court officials who prepared death certificates and consulted their watches to make a note of the time the bodies were found.
Unidentified male, bullet wounds in the head and chest, perpetrator or perpetrators unknown.
He went to see Bergamín again, but he was not in his office yet, and the secretary, not the one he had met before, knew nothing about measures taken to resolve the disappearance of Professor Rossman, but she made a note just in case, along with Ignacio Abel's address and telephone number. He climbed on a moving streetcar going up the Castellana and got off at the Museum of Natural Sciences and the road to the Student Residence. Was it Negrín who'd told him that the bodies of the executed appeared there too, every morning? “On our playing fields, my dear Abel, against the museum walls, steps from my laboratory, which has been closed for who knows how long.”