In the Night of Time (9 page)

 

One by one, with the comic astonishment of a silent film, Professor Rossman would remove from his apparently bottomless briefcase perfectly ordinary objects that in his hands took on the miraculous quality of the newly invented. In his Weimar class in an unheated lecture hall, where the cold wind blew through broken windowpanes, Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, without removing his overcoat or scarf, examined as if they were pristine inventions or recently discovered treasures the most mundane tools, the kind that everyone uses every day and no one notices because their invisibility, he'd say, was the measure of their efficiency, the test of a form corresponding to a task—a form often shaped over centuries, even millennia, like the spiral of a shell or the almost flat curvature of a pebble polished by the friction of sand and water at the ocean's edge. No books, sketches, or architectural magazines came out of Professor Rossman's briefcase but the tools of carpenters, stonecutters, and masons, plumb lines, spinning tops, clay bowls, a spoon, a pencil, the handle of a coffee grinder, a black rubber ball that rebounded off the ceiling after popping up like a spring before the infantilized eyes of the students, an artist's brush, a paintbrush, an Italian vase of heavy green glass, a crank of corrugated brass, a packet of cigarette papers, a lightbulb, a baby's bottle, a pair of scissors. Reality was a labyrinth and a laboratory of objects that were prodigious but so common you easily forgot they didn't exist in nature but were products of the human imagination. A horizontal plane, he'd say, a staircase. In nature the only horizontal plane was motionless water, the distant horizon at sea. A natural cave or a treetop can suggest the idea of a roof, a column. But what mental process first produced the concept of a staircase? In the icy lecture hall, his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, not removing his overcoat or wool gloves, Professor Rossman, who was susceptible to the cold, could spend an entire class voluptuously concentrating on the form and function of a pair of scissors, the manner in which the two sharpened arms opened like a bird's beak or an alligator's jaws and cut a sheet of paper perfectly, cleanly, following a straight or curved line, the sinuous profiled lines of a caricature. His coat pockets were always stuffed with everyday objects, things he would pick up from the ground, and when he probed them with his glove-covered fingers, looking for something specific, he'd usually come across another unexpected object that demanded his attention and fired his enthusiasm. The six sides of a die, dots bored into each one of them, contained the infinite possibilities of chance. Nothing was more beautiful than a well-polished ball rolling on a smooth surface. A tiny match contained the marvelous solution to the millenarian problem of producing and transporting fire. He extracted the match from its box with care, as if he were removing a dried butterfly whose wings could be destroyed if handled too casually, held it between his thumb and index finger, showed it to the students, raising it in a somehow liturgical gesture. He pondered its qualities, the delicate, diminutive pear shape of the head, the body of wood or waxed paper. The box itself, with its complication of angles and the master stroke of intuition it had been to invent two parts that adjusted to each other so effortlessly and at the same time were easy to open. When he struck the match, the tiny sound of the match head running along the thin strip of sandpaper was heard with perfect clarity in the silence of the lecture hall, and the small burst of flame seemed like a miracle. Radiant, like someone who's successfully completed an experiment, Professor Rossman displayed the burning match. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it as naturally as if he were in a café, and only then, once he had put out the match, did those listening to his exposition emerge from the hypnotic trance they'd been led into without realizing it.

 

Professor Rossman was like a peddler of the most vulgar, most improbable things. He lectured as easily on the practical virtues of a spoon's curvature as on the exquisite visual rhythms of the radii of a bicycle wheel in motion. Other professors at the School proselytized for the new, while Professor Rossman revealed the innovation and sophistication that remain hidden and yet produce results in what has always existed. He would clear the middle of the table, place on it a top he'd bought on his way to the School from some children playing in the street, start it twirling with an abrupt, skilled gesture, and watch it spin, as dazzled as if he were witnessing the rotation of a heavenly body. “Invent something like this,” he challenged the students with a smile. “Invent the top, or the spoon, or the pencil. Invent the book that can be carried in a pocket and contains the
Iliad
or Goethe's
Faust.
Invent the match, the jug handle, the scale, the carpenter's folding ruler, the sewing needle, the scissors. Perfect the wheel or the fountain pen. Think of the time when some of these things didn't exist.” Then he looked at his wristwatch—he was enthusiastic about this new gadget, which had appeared, according to him, among British officers during the war—picked up his things, placed his lunatic inventor's or junkman's objects back in his briefcase, filled his pockets with them, and dismissed the class with a nod and a mock-military click of his heels.

“My dear friend, don't you remember me?”

But it hadn't been that long. In Barcelona, less than six years earlier, Professor Rossman, stouter and balder than in Weimar, in one of the suits probably cut by the same tailor who had made them for him before 1914, inspected the final details of the German pavilion at the International Exposition with bird-like gestures and an owl's pale eyes behind his glasses. He had to be sure everything would be just right when Mies van der Rohe made his grand appearance there, wearing the monocle of a Prussian officer, chewing the long ebony holder into which he inserted cigarettes with a surgical flourish. Professor Rossman took Ignacio Abel's arm, asked about his work in Spain, lamented that he hadn't returned to the School now that things had improved so much and there was a new, magnificent campus in Dessau. He passed his hand over a polished surface of dark green marble to check its cleanliness, studied the alignment of a piece of furniture or a sculpture, brought his eyes close to a sign as if to make certain the typography was exact. In the austere, limpid space no one had visited yet, Dr. Rossman seemed even more anachronistic with his stiff collar, high shoes in that 1900 style, and the aloof courtesy of an imperial functionary. But his hands touched objects with the same old avidity, confirming textures, angles, curvatures, and in his eyes was the same permanent mixture of interrogation and amazement, a brazen urgency to see everything, a childish joy at incessant discoveries. Now his jovial disposition had been strengthened along with his physical presence, and he recalled with relief the not so distant past of uncertainty, inflation, hunger, days when he carried a boiled potato, his only food for the day, in his bottomless briefcase or in a coat pocket, when in the unheated lecture halls of the School it was so cold he couldn't hold the chalk between his frostbitten fingers. “But you remember as well, my friend, you spent the winter of 1923 with us.” Now Professor Rossman looked at the future with a serenity tempered by the basic mistrust of someone who's already seen the world drown once. “You have to come back to Germany. You won't recognize Berlin. You can't imagine the number of new, beautiful buildings being built. You can see them in the magazines, of course, but you know it's not the same thing. Berlin resembles New York. You have to see the new neighborhoods with workers' housing, the big department stores, the lights at night. Things we dreamed about at the School in the middle of the disaster seem to have become reality. A few, not many. But you know how something well made, even if small, can make a difference.”

 

The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took one's breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that won't be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of Gaudí's buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.

 

“How are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isn't that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that he's so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think I'm the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that he's so anti-Communist.” Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years he'd developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. “But tell me what you're working on now, my friend, what projects you have. I'm happy to know you're completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.” Professor Rossman's oval head stopped moving, and his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, focused on him with an affectionate attention that made Ignacio Abel feel bewildered as someone much younger, a student not certain he can endure the scrutiny of the professor who knows him well. What had he done in those years that could measure up to what he'd learned in Germany, to the expectations he'd had for himself and his work? The nocturnal lights and strong colors of Berlin, the calm of Weimar, the libraries, the joy of finally penetrating a language he'd handled until then only laboriously and to which his ears suddenly opened up as naturally as if he'd removed plugs of wax, the lecture halls at Weimar, those rainy nightfalls of self-reflection, lamps lit behind curtains, bicycle bells echoing in the silence. The cold, too, and the scarcity of everything, but he didn't care or notice very much. The hooves of policemen's horses raising sparks on the paving stones, the solemn, angry demonstrations by unemployed workers in berets and leather jackets and red armbands, the placards and red flags lit by torches, the veterans with amputated limbs begging on the sidewalks, displaying stumps under the rags of their uniforms or faces doubly disfigured by war wounds and surgeries. The young women in short skirts, eyes and lips painted, chin-length hair, sitting on the terraces of Berlin cafés with their legs crossed, smoking cigarettes on which they left red lipstick marks, walking with determination along the sidewalks without male companions, jumping onto streetcars after the offices closed, heels clicking as they hurried down the metro steps.

 

He didn't think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadn't known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didn't count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didn't recognize him and took frightened refuge in her mother's arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what he'd done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruins—or, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because he'd mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where he'd been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madrid's University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europe—he'd read something in an international magazine. “Write to me,” he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. “Let me know how everything goes. I wish you could come sometime to teach a course at the School. Let me know how your ideal city of knowledge progresses.”