In the Night of Time (8 page)

 

He was a passenger like any other in second class, still relatively well dressed, though carrying only one small suitcase made him somewhat unusual. Was a person traveling so far with so little luggage completely respectable?
You may encounter problems at the border no matter how many documents you show,
Negrín had warned him on the eve of his departure, with sad sarcasm, his face swollen from exhaustion and lack of sleep,
so you're better off not carrying much luggage in case you have to cross to France over the mountains. You know very well that in our country nothing's certain anymore.
As the ship left the pier, the war's stigmas were left behind, the pestilence of Europe, at least for the time being, faded from his memory as water dissolves writing and leaves only blurred stains on blank paper. In a way, the war had reached the French border, the cafés and cheap hotels where Spaniards met, like sick people brought together by the shame of a vile infection that when shared perhaps seemed less monstrous. Spaniards fleeing from one side or the other, in transit to who knows where, or appointed more or less officially to dubious missions in Paris, which in some cases allowed them to handle unusual sums of money—to buy weapons, to arrange for newspapers to publish reports favorable to the Republican cause—grouped around a radio trying to decipher news bulletins that mentioned the names of public figures or places in Spain, waiting for the afternoon papers in which the word “Madrid” would appear in a headline, but almost never on the front page. They had stormy arguments, slamming their fists on marble-topped tables and waving their hands through the clouds of cigarette smoke, rejecting the city where they found themselves, as if they were in a café on Calle de Alcalá or the Puerta del Sol and what lay before their eyes didn't interest them in the least, the prosperous, radiant city without fear where their obsessive war didn't exist, where they themselves were nothing, foreigners similar to others who talked louder and had darker hair, darker faces, gruffer voices, and the harsh gutturals of a Balkan dialect. On the two nights he had to spend in a Paris hotel, waiting to have his transit visa and ticket to America confirmed, Ignacio Abel did his best not to run into anyone he knew. It was rumored that Bergamín was in Paris on an obscure cultural venture that perhaps disguised a mission to buy weapons or recruit foreign volunteers. But Bergamín was probably in a better hotel. The one where Ignacio Abel stayed, with a profound feeling of distaste, was largely populated by prostitutes and foreigners, the various castoffs of Europe, among whom the Spaniards preserved their noisy national distinction, intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others, those who'd left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless, carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-Fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exile or furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by the identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn't guarantee much and bureaucratic decisions always delayed, the hostility of hotel employees and the violent searches by the police. With his passport in order and his American visa, with his ticket for the SS
Manhattan,
Ignacio Abel had eluded the fate of those wandering souls, whom he would pass in the narrow hallway to the toilet or hear groaning or murmuring in their equally foreign languages on the other side of his room's thin wall. Professor Rossman could have been one of them if, on his return from Moscow in the spring of 1935, he'd remained with his daughter in Paris instead of trying his luck at the Spanish embassy, where the clerks in charge of residency permits had seemed more benevolent or indifferent or venal than the French. At times during those days in Paris, Ignacio Abel thought he saw Professor Rossman in the distance, his arms around a large black briefcase, or holding the arm of his daughter, who was taller than he, as if he'd continued to have a parallel existence not canceled by the other, the one that took him to Madrid and nomadic penury, gradual loss of dignity, then the morgue. If Professor Rossman had remained in Paris, he'd be living now in one of these hotels, visiting embassies and consular offices, persistent and meek, always smiling and removing his hat when he approached a clerk's window, waiting for a visa to the United States or Cuba or any country in South America, pretending not to understand when a bureaucrat or shopkeeper called him
sale boche, sale métèque
behind his back.

 

Professor Rossman no longer had to wait for anything. He'd been buried with several dozen other corpses and hurriedly covered by lime in a common grave in Madrid, infected without reason or fault by the great medieval plague of Spanish death, spread indiscriminately by the most modern and most primitive means alike, everything from Mauser rifles, machine guns, and incendiary bombs to crude ancestral weapons: pocketknives, harquebuses, hunting shotguns, cattle prods, even animal jawbones if necessary, death that descended with the roar of airplane engines and the neighing of mules, with scapulars and crosses and red flags, with rosary prayers and the shouting of anthems on the radio. In the tucked-away cafés and rundown hotels of Paris, Spanish emissaries from both sides closed deals on weapon purchases that would allow them to finish off their compatriots with greater speed and efficiency. In the midst of this carnival of Spanish death, the pale face of Professor Rossman appeared to Ignacio Abel in dreams and in the light of day, producing in him a shudder of shame, a wave of nausea, like the one he felt the first time he saw a dead body in the middle of the street under the relentless sun of a summer morning. If he overheard a conversation in Spanish at the cheap restaurant where he ate in Paris, he maintained a neutral expression and tried not to look, as if that would save him from contagion. In the Spanish newspapers, the war had been a daily typographic battle: enormous, triumphant, and colossally untrue headlines printed haphazardly on bad paper, on scant sheets, spreading false reports about victorious battles while the enemy continued to approach Madrid. In the Parisian papers, solemn and monotonous as bourgeois buildings, and secured in their burnished wooden holders under the soothing half-light of cafés, the war in Spain was an exotic, frequently minor matter, news of sheer savagery in a distant, primitive region of the world. He recalled the melancholy of his first trips out of the country, the feeling of leaping in time as soon as he crossed the Spanish border. He relived the shame he'd felt as a young man when he saw pictures of bullfights in a French or German newspaper: miserable horses, their bellies gored open, kicking in agony in a quagmire of guts, sand, and blood; bulls vomiting blood, their tongues hanging out and a sword running through the nape of their necks, turned into red pulp by the failed efforts to kill them with a single thrust. Now it was not dead bulls or horses he saw in Parisian newspapers or in newsreels at a movie theater where he longed for Judith Biely; this time it was men, men killing one another, corpses tossed like bundles of rags into ditches, laborers wearing berets and white shirts, their hands raised, herded like cattle by soldiers on horseback, filthy soldiers wearing grotesque uniforms, cruel, arrogant, driven by a senseless enthusiasm, as exotically sinister as bandits in daguerreotypes and lithographs from the last century, so alien to the worthy European public who had witnessed from a distance the massacre of Abyssinians holding shields and spears and who for months and with perfect impunity had been gunned down and bombed from the air by Mussolini's Italian expeditionary forces. For a time the Abyssinians appeared in newspapers, in illustrated magazines, in newsreels, but once they'd played their transitory part as cannon fodder, as extras in the great masquerade of international scandal, they became invisible again. Now it's our turn, he thought as he leafed through the newspaper in the restaurant, lowering his head behind the large sheets for fear a Spaniard at one of the nearby tables might recognize him.
ESPAGNE ENSANGLANTÉE—ON FUSILLE ICI COMME ON DÉBOISE
. Among the French words, rebounding like pebbles in the dense typography of the paper, were the names of Spanish towns, the geography of the enemy's inexorable advance toward Madrid, where the flamenco music that played on the radio, broadcast by loudspeakers in the cafés, would be interrupted from time to time by a cornet fanfare and a resonant voice that announced increasingly glorious and unlikely new victories that were received by the public with applause and bullfight
olés.
DES FEMMES, DES ENFANTS, FUIENT SOUS LE FEU DES INSURGÉS
. In a blurred, dark photograph he recognized a straight, white highway, figures advancing, laden animals, a peasant woman holding a nursing child whom she tried to protect from something that came down from the sky. He calculated the enemy's distance from Madrid, probably reduced now by the rapid advance of recent days. He imagined the repetition of what he'd seen with his own eyes: wagons, donkeys, cars overturned in ditches, militiamen tossing aside rifles and cartridge belts to run faster through the countryside, officers shouting orders no one understood or obeyed. The highway was an overflowing river of human beings, animals, and machines pushed forward by the seismic upheaval of an enemy that was close but still invisible. Beside him, in the back seat of the official automobile caught in a traffic jam of trucks and peasant wagons, among which, absurdly, a flock of goats wandered, Negrín contemplated the disaster with an expression of dejected fatalism, his profile morose against the window, his chin thrust into his fist, while the uniformed driver uselessly blew the horn in an attempt to inch forward. A little beyond the highway stood a white house with a grape arbor, a gentle slope of dark earth recently tilled for autumn planting. In the background, against the clear afternoon sky, rose a great column of thick, black smoke that gave off a smell of gasoline and burned tires. “They're much closer than we thought,” said Negrín. Hostile or terrified faces pressed against the car windows trying to peer inside. Furious fists and rifle butts struck the roof and sides. “I don't think they'll let us get through, Don Juan,” said the militiaman who was their bodyguard and sat beside the driver.

 

Perhaps Professor Rossman decided to try his luck in Spain because he trusted in the help of his former student Ignacio Abel, who could have saved his life yet did nothing, or almost nothing, for him. Who could have warned him at least, advised him not to talk so loud, or make himself so visible, or tell anyone what had happened in Germany, what he'd seen in Moscow. Abel could have supported him with more conviction and not merely arrange job interviews that led nowhere or hire his daughter to give Lita and Miguel German lessons. But the favors granted least frequently are those that would cost almost nothing: need that is too apparent provokes rejection; the vehemence of a request guarantees it will receive no response. Professor Rossman's eyes were more faded than he remembered, and his skin was whiter, a little viscous, the skin of someone who's grown accustomed to living in damp shadows, without the military luster his bald head once displayed, shining under the electric light of a lecture hall on the early nights of winter. Ignacio Abel raised tired eyes from the worktable covered by blueprints and documents in his University City office, and the pale man dressed with funereal severity who called him by name and held out his hand wore the uncertain smile of someone hoping to be recognized. But Dr. Rossman was not an older version of the man Ignacio Abel had met in Weimar in 1923 or to whom he'd said goodbye one day in September 1929 in Barcelona, at the France Station, after visiting the German pavilion at the International Exposition with him and spending hours talking passionately in a café; less than six years later, in April or May of 1935, he was another man, not changed or aged but transfigured, his skin pale as if his blood had been diluted or extracted, his eyes like slightly cloudy water, his gestures as frail and his voice as faint as a convalescent's, his suit as worn as if he hadn't taken it off, even to go to sleep, since leaving Barcelona in 1929. When one no longer has a bathroom, a clean bed, and running water, deterioration comes quickly. Very quickly, and at the same time very gradually. Your shirt collar turns darker even though you scrub it in a sink; your shoes stretch, crossed by cracks resembling the wrinkles in a face; the elbows of your jacket, the knees of your trousers, take on the shine of an old cassock or a fly's wing. Ever since he was a child, Ignacio Abel had instinctively spotted misfortune that afflicted impoverished decent people, respectable tenants late in paying rent in the building where his mother worked as porter: gentlemen with slicked-back hair and misshapen boots who would bend down rapidly to retrieve a cigarette butt from the ground or look furtively inside a garbage can; aging widows who went to Mass, leaving on the staircase a trail of unfathomable stench, their greasy chignons held by combs under mended veils; clerks wearing ties and celluloid collars, their nails dirty, their breath smelling of sour café con leche and ulcers. Seeing Professor Rossman appear without warning in his University City office as if he'd just returned from the land of the dead, Ignacio Abel felt the same mixture of pity and revulsion those people had inspired in him when he was a boy. Professor Rossman's smile seemed strange now that almost all his teeth were missing. The only thing that remained of his former presence, aside from his formality—the bow tie, hard collar, high shoes, the suit tailored before 1914—was the large briefcase he held with both hands against his chest, the same one he'd drop on his desk in a lecture hall at the Bauhaus, producing a metallic noise of random objects and junk, but more worn now, with the consistency of cracked parchment, as soft as his toothless mouth but still maintaining all the Germanic severity of a professor's briefcase with its metal buckles and clasps and reinforced corners, the briefcase from which the most unexpected objects would emerge during his classes, like the doves or rabbits or scarves that come out of a magician's top hat.