In the Night of Time (78 page)

“The newspapers here publish terrible lies about what's going on in Madrid.”

“Some of those lies are true. The worst ones.”

“The others commit worse crimes. They started it. They're to blame.”

“Reason and justice are on your side.”

“I don't like such abstractions. You didn't use them before.”

“You did. That afternoon we talked for hours in the bar at the Hotel Florida. I was struck by how seriously you took it. It annoyed you when Philip Van Doren spoke contemptuously about the Republic and praised the Soviet Union and Germany in his snobbish way. You said you were Republican because you believed in reason and justice. I liked your passion.”

“I didn't remember our talking about those things.”

“Don't you think the same way anymore?”

“What I think is that killing doesn't bring about reason and justice.”

“If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself.”

“And do you have the right to kill innocents?”

“I was afraid something might've happened to you.”

“Then you didn't think everything they were saying was a lie.”

“And you came close?”

“You could've written and asked.”

“I'm asking now.”

“I was saved by accident, at the last moment. You'll understand if I don't really feel like going back.”

 

They have to learn to speak to each other again, to adjust the tone of their voices, to smooth away the strangeness, to move close to each other gradually, naturally, slowly, the way one learns to walk again after recovering from an accident, when you discover that it took no time for your legs to lose their muscle tone and the habit of taking steps. Evasive eyes no longer know how to hold a stare; with greater difficulty mouths form words in another language that were once habitual. Perhaps it's not that they have become strangers in so short a time, but that they see each other for the first time in a light not clouded by desire. It's not the changes that have occurred during their separation but the reality not seen when it was there every day. They felt their way at first, asking neutral questions. I see you've had a haircut; this morning, before I left on the trip, do you like it? Of course I do; you don't like it; I have to get used to it; you always wore it longer and curlier; I didn't have time to go to a hairdresser. Neither one has said the other's name yet. Silence follows each question; they almost count the seconds it takes for words to arrive again, as if they didn't depend on the will of either one. A nuance, a barely suggested tone of intimacy miscarries. An isolated phrase sounds as if it had been memorized for a performance, an overly literal exercise in good manners in a language class. “May I use the bathroom?” she said when she finally came in, when he closed the door and they found themselves alone in the house. While she ate, he observed her in silence as he sat on the other side of the table in the library, in the somewhat incongruous formality of his dark suit and tie, relieved she wasn't looking at him, a healthy young woman unhurriedly satisfying her hunger after having driven for several hours, drinking from the bottle of beer, more American than he remembered now that he sees her in her own country. She's put salami between two slices of bread and eats it in vigorous mouthfuls. His desire for her is more of a pain than pure sexual appetite. It's the pain in his joints, the pit of his stomach. Since he hasn't set out napkins, Judith wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. What he finds unfamiliar and distant in her must have to do with the presence of another man. Jealousy is a physical snakebite, a toxic substance circulating in his blood. In photographs, in memories, Judith's beauty had a blurred quality, as if he were looking at her through a faint gauze filter. The word “beautiful” can't exactly be applied to the woman Ignacio Abel sees before him, with her short hair and simple shirt, her ringless hands that hold the sandwich of rye bread and salami and open the bottle of beer with such ease. There's something more carnal, raw, excessive in the peremptoriness of her features: her nose, large mouth, pronounced chin, the hard shape of bone beneath the skin. He likes her even more, and more than ever. He especially likes what's taken him by surprise because he didn't see it before and sees it now. Lack of hope and the certainty he'd lost her allow him to enjoy a painful objectivity. Her existence is enough: the unexpected gift of having her near.

“Don't look at me that way.”

“How am I looking at you?”

“As if I were a ghost.”

“I'm looking at you because I never tire of looking at you. Because I've missed you so much I can't believe you're here.”

“I'm not sure you see me when you look at me. I've never been sure. You would stare at me but seem to be elsewhere, lost in your world, probably thinking about your work, or wondering whether your son or daughter had a fever, or your wife, or what lie you'd tell when you got home, or the remorse you felt deceiving her. You'd look at me and then look away, though only for a second. We were kissing in that room at Madame Mathilde's, and I saw you in the mirror across from the bed looking at the clock on the night table. Just a glance, but I noticed it. I believe in the man you are, not the one I might have dreamed you were. And when I read your letters I felt like running out and getting into bed with you, felt as dizzy as when we had those cold beers in cafés. But then, reading them again, I felt the same doubt as when I just saw you looking at me. I wasn't sure it was me you were writing to. The letters were so vague. You talked about what you felt for me and our love as if we were living in an abstract world in which there was nothing else and no one else but us. You filled two pages telling me about the house you wanted to build for us, and I asked myself where, when. Promise me you won't get angry with me for what I'm saying.”

“I promise.”

“You'll get angry. Sometimes I thought you wrote to me reluctantly, because you felt obliged to, because I was asking you to. You made fun of those wordy articles intellectuals published in
El Sol,
but there was something in your letters that reminded me of them. You told me what you felt about me but didn't answer the question I'd asked. I thought of an expression you taught me:
dar largas.
You were putting me off so you'd never have to address our real lives, yours and mine. And the truth was that though we spoke so much and wrote to each other so much we never spoke about anything specific. Only about the two of us, floating in space, floating in time. Never about the future, and after a while almost never about the past. You said you were in love with me but became distracted whenever I brought up my life. And if I mentioned my ex-husband, you changed the subject.”

“It makes me jealous to think you've been with other men.”

“You'd be less jealous if you'd let me tell you that my husband and those others never mattered to me half as much as you.”

“There were more men.”

“Of course there were. Did you think I was in a convent waiting for you to appear?”

“I couldn't stand the thought of you with someone else. I can't now, either.”

“I had to stand not the thought but the reality that after being with me you could dissimulate with no difficulty and get into bed with your wife.”

“We hadn't touched each other for a long time.”

“But you were with her, not me. In the same room and the same bed. While I went back alone to my room in the pensión and couldn't sleep, and if I turned on the light I couldn't read, and I sat in front of my typewriter and couldn't write, not even a letter. And if I wrote to my mother, I couldn't tell her that her sacrifice had allowed a married Spaniard to have a younger American lover.”

“Van Doren told me your mother died.”

“How strange for you to ask about her.”

“I always wanted to hear about your family.”

“But you became distracted the minute I started talking about them. You didn't realize it, and you don't remember, but you were an impatient man. You were always in a hurry for one reason or another. You were nervous. You were anxious. You'd throw yourself on me in bed sometimes, and it seemed you'd forgotten you were with me. You'd open your eyes after you came and look at me as if you just awoke.”

“Is that all you remember?”

“No. At other times you could be very sweet. Other men don't even make the effort.”

“I was crazy about you.”

“Or about someone you imagined. I reread your letters and thought they could just as easily have been written to another woman. I was flattered at the time to be the one who inspired those words in you, but sometimes I didn't believe them. You'd look at me and I didn't know if it was me you were looking at.”

“Who else would it be?”

“A foreigner, an American. Like those women in the movies and the advertisements you said you'd always liked. You enjoyed looking at me. It always seemed you could have done without the talking. You were more expressive in letters.”

“Am I looking at you now the way I did then?”

“Now your eyes have changed. When you opened the door I didn't recognize you. Now I'm recognizing you again, slowly, but not completely. I don't see you sneaking a glance at your watch.”

“Why are you going to New York?”

“The Spanish man, asking his questions.”

“Are you going to see your lover?”

“Don't talk to me that way.”

“You used to say you couldn't imagine yourself going to bed with another man.”

“If I were to remind you of all the things you said to me.”

“I wasn't the one who disappeared. I wasn't the one who promised to keep an appointment and then didn't show up.”

“Do you really want to talk about that now? I didn't disappear. I left you a letter explaining how I felt, what I thought. Why I couldn't see you again. I didn't hide anything from you. I didn't tell you any lies.”

“You left the letter knowing I was waiting for you in the room.”

“That doesn't matter now.”

“You could have stayed with me at least that afternoon. You knew I was waiting for you. You must have spoken softly so I wouldn't hear you. I'm sure you gave Madame Mathilde a good tip.”

“If I'd gone into the room, I probably wouldn't have had the strength to leave.”

“If I'd seen you that afternoon, I'd have left everything to go with you.”

“As in that poem you couldn't take seriously? Don't tell me things that aren't true. That was what offended me about you. That you told me lies. That you said yes to something when both of us knew it was no. There's no reason to lie anymore. We're alone in this house and I'll be leaving soon.”

“Did you leave Madrid that same night? Were you at Van Doren's house?”

“I was frightened. They stopped me at every corner to ask for my papers and I didn't have my passport with me, why would I? I don't know how I managed to get on a streetcar, on the running board, hanging on. I wanted to leave and I wanted to find you so you could protect me. See what happened to my decision to leave you and my yen for adventure? I reached the pensión and tried to call Phil or the embassy but the phones weren't working, or sometimes they did and other times they didn't. I called your house several times but you never answered.”

“I was looking all over Madrid for you.”

“It was better for me you didn't find me.”

“Would you really have stayed with me?”

“You're yourself again. You want me to flatter you and say yes.”

“Now you don't want to tell me why you're going to New York.”

“I'm leaving on a trip.”

“You're going to meet another man.”

“Is that the only thing you can imagine in my life? Aren't you curious to know anything else about me?”

“And your job at the college?”

“I left it.”

“To go where?”

“To Spain.”

 

She answered so quickly it surprised her to hear the words she didn't intend to say, hasn't said to anyone yet. The immediate silence has another quality, of resonance, expectation, vigilance, while their eyes remain fixed, locked, each detecting the slightest movements in the other's face, both aware of the silence and the sounds behind it, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the first sporadic drops of a light rain that will last all night, their breathing, each waiting for a sign the other will speak. They've been lowering their voices as they remained motionless, Judith sitting upright now that she's said what perhaps she shouldn't have said, Ignacio Abel serious, one hand resting on the other on the edge of the table, the bony hands that now seem as stripped of sensuality as his diminished, rigid body, his general mood of dignified capitulation. A passenger on the train they hear passing now will see in the distance, through the successive shadows of the forest, a wide lit window but won't be able to distinguish the two silhouettes. Someone approaching in the light rain would see two motionless figures on either side of a large table, leaning slightly toward each other, as if about to tell or hear a secret. He'd enter the house and advance silently along the dark hall, and though he came close to the open door of the library, through which come the light from the fire and a current of warm air, he'd hear nothing, perhaps indistinct voices, interrupted by silences, then superimposed, isolated words in Spanish or English, the secret of their two lives, protected by the walls of the house, the isolation of the forest, the darkness of the night, the intimacy in which there's room only for two lovers and where they've returned without knowing it yet, though they don't touch, and when they look into each other's eyes they sense a guarded secrecy not even the most shameless confession could break. They circle each other with looks and words, laying siege, testing the boundaries of their silence. Between the sound of lips separating, the first word is the emptiness of expectation. The next steps of your life, your entire future, will depend on what is said or left unsaid in an instant. Judith has taken a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, as if to give herself courage, to store up the air she will need if she wants her words to sound as clear and confident as they do in her mind.