In the Night of Time (15 page)

“I want to work in that library,” said Judith, but Van Doren had no time to listen. He moved his large hands with their pink manicured nails and pushed up the sleeves of his sweater as if impatient to begin work on his imaginary library, to dig the foundation, level the uneven terrain, lay rows of red bricks or blocks carved from the gray stones found in the forest.

“I didn't invite you here today for you to say yes, to make a commitment to me,” Van Doren said. “You have many things to do, and so do I. Dr. Negrín has told me that this year will be particularly difficult for all of you, because he promised to inaugurate University City next October. Difficult, if you'll permit me. Almost impossible.”

“Have you visited the construction site?”

Before answering, Van Doren smiled to himself, like someone who hasn't decided to reveal completely what he knows, or who wants to give the impression that he knows more than he does.

“That's one of the reasons I came to Madrid in the first place. I've visited the site and consulted plans and models. A magnificent project, on a scale that has no equal in Europe, though its execution is slow and perhaps chaotic. I liked your building very much, of course, the one designed exclusively by you. The steam power plant, if I'm not mistaken.”

“It's almost not a building. It's a box for holding machinery and controls. It's not operating yet. Who showed it to you?”

“Phil isn't going to answer that question,” said Judith. Van Doren gave her a quick smile, a gesture, approving, not without flattery, what she'd said. He was a man who liked above all to know what others didn't know and to have privileged access to what was unavailable to the rest. Ignacio Abel didn't like Judith calling him “Phil” again.

“It's a cubic block and yet looks as if it emerged from the earth, was part of the earth,” Van Doren said. “It's a fortress but doesn't seem to weigh too much, this vigorous heart that pumps hot water and heat to the city of knowledge. One wants to knock on that gate in the wall and enter the castle. One sees immediately that you've worked with competent engineers. And that aside from your German teachers, you must admire some Scandinavian architects, I would assume. Was it difficult to have your project accepted?”

“Not too bad. It's a practical construction, so no one pays much attention to it. There was no need to add volutes or Plateresque eaves or to imitate El Escorial.”

“A terrible building, don't you agree? Compatriots of yours who are very proud of it took me to see it last week. It was like entering a sinister set for
Don Carlo.
One feels the weight of the granite as if it were the hand of Philip the Second in an iron glove. Or perhaps the hand of the statue of the Commendatore in
Don Giovanni.
”

Van Doren burst into laughter, looking for Judith's complicity, then turned to Abel, completely changing his tone.

“Are you a Communist?”

“Why do you ask?”

“
Checking up on me,
” Judith said quietly in English, visibly irritated. She stood and went to the window, uncomfortable because of what seemed to be the beginning of an interrogation for which she perhaps felt partially responsible.

“Some of your classmates and professors at the Bauhaus were. And I think you're a man who likes to get things done. Who has practical sense and at the same time a utopian imagination.”

“Do you have to be a Communist for that?”

“Communist or Fascist, I'm afraid. You have to love big projects and immediate, effective action, and have no patience for empty talk, for delays. In Moscow or Berlin your University City would be finished by now. Even in Rome.”

“But probably it would make no sense.” Ignacio Abel was aware of Judith's gaze and attention. “Unless it was like a barracks or a reeducation camp.”

“Don't repeat propagandistic vulgarities that are unworthy of you. German science is the best in the world.”

“It won't be for very long.”

“Now you're talking like a Communist.”

“Are you saying you have to be a Communist to be against Hitler?” Judith Biely said. She was standing by the window, angry, serious, agitated. Van Doren looked at her, not responding. The one he stared at intently was Ignacio Abel, who spoke without raising his voice, with the instinctive diffidence he felt when he expressed political opinions.

“I'm a Socialist.”

“Is there any difference?”

“When the Communists came to power in Russia, they sent the Socialists to prison.”

“The Socialists shot Rosa Luxemburg in Germany in 1919,” Judith said. The discussion produced a somewhat histrionic comic effect in Van Doren.

“And when the Fascists or the Nazis win, Communists and Socialists will end up together in the same prisons, after having fought so much with one another. You cannot deny there's a certain humor in that.”

“I hope that doesn't happen in my country, and we'll inaugurate University City on time with no need for a Fascist or Communist coup.” Ignacio Abel would have liked to end the conversation and leave, but if he left now, when would he see Judith again?

“I like your enthusiasm, Ignacio, if you'll permit me to use your first name. I've heard you ended your lecture eloquently, with a revolutionary declaration. Judith didn't tell me this, don't blame her. I'd be delighted if you called me Phil and if we used informal address with each other, though I know we just met and Spain is a more formal place than America. I like it that you don't seem to care about staying on the margins of the great modern currents, politically speaking.”

“They seem horribly primitive to me.”

“I visited the Soviet Union two years ago, and I've traveled extensively through Germany and Italy. I believe I'm a person without prejudices. An American open to the new things the world can offer. An innocent abroad, as Mark Twain, one of the great travelers of my country, put it. We're a new nation compared to you Europeans. We feel sympathy for everything that's a valiant break with the past. That's how we were born, breaking with old Europe, putting an end to kings and archbishops.”

“We did that in Spain just four years ago.”

“And with what results? What have you brought to completion in this time? I drive through the country and once I leave Madrid I see only miserable villages. Skinny peasants on burros, goatherds, barefoot children, women sitting in the sun picking lice out of each other's hair.”

“You're exaggerating, Phil,” Judith said. “Señor Abel's feelings may be hurt. You're talking about his country.”

“About a part of it,” Ignacio Abel said quietly, furious with himself for not leaving, for continuing to listen.

“You waste your energy on parliamentary battles, on speeches, on changes of government. You say you're a Socialist, but inside your own party you're fighting! Are you a Socialist in favor of the parliamentary system or a participant in the uprising last year to bring the Soviet revolution to Spain? I had the pleasure of meeting your coreligionist Don Julián Besteiro last year at a diplomatic dinner, and he seemed a perfect
gentleman,
but I also thought he was living in the clouds. Forgive me for speaking frankly: part of my work entails looking for information. We have a good deal of money invested in your country and wouldn't like to lose it. We want to know whether it's advisable for us to continue working and investing money here, or would it be more prudent to leave. Is it true that new elections will be held soon? I arrived in Madrid last month and the papers were full of photographs of the new government. Now I've read that a crisis has been announced and the government will change. Look at what Germany has accomplished in the same time. Look at the highways, the expansion of industry, the millions of new jobs. And it isn't a question of racial differences, of efficient Aryans and lazy Latins, as some people believe. Look at what Italy has become in ten years. Have you seen the highways, the new railroad stations, the strength of the army? I also don't have ideological prejudices, my dear Judith—it's simply a practical question. In the same way I admire the formidable advances of the Soviet five-year plans. I've seen the factories with my own eyes, the blast furnaces, the collective farms plowed with tractors. Ten, fifteen years ago, the countryside was more miserable and backward in Russia than in Spain. Just two years ago Germany was a humiliated nation. Now once again it's the leading power in Europe. In spite of the terrible, unjust sanctions the Allies imposed on it, especially the French, who wouldn't be so resented if they were not also incompetent and corrupt—”

“And the price doesn't matter?”

“Don't the democracies pay a horrifying price as well? Millions of men without work in my country, in England, in France. The breakdown of the Third Republic. Children with swollen bellies and eyes covered with flies right here on the outskirts of Madrid. Even our president has had to imitate the gigantic public works projects of Germany and Italy, the planning of the Soviet government.”

“I hope he doesn't also imitate the prison camps.”

“Or the racial laws.”

“Dear Judith, in that regard I'm afraid you have an insurmountable prejudice.”

It took Ignacio Abel a moment to understand what they were saying. He observed that Judith Biely had turned red, and that Van Doren was enjoying his own cold vehemence, the sense that he was controlling the conversation. He wasn't accustomed to the North American ease in combining courtesy with crudeness.

“Do you mean I despise Hitler because I'm a Jew?”

“I mean that things have to be considered in their exact proportions. I don't have prejudices, as you well know. If you wanted to leave the position you have now in a university that in my opinion is mediocre, I would recommend immediately that you be offered a contract at Burton College. How many Jews were there in Germany two years ago? Five hundred thousand? How many of them will have to leave? And if there's no place for all of them in Germany, why don't their coreligionists and friends in France, England, or the United States rush to take them in? How many Russian aristocrats and parasites had to leave the country, voluntarily or by force, when the Soviet Union began to be created in earnest? And the Spaniards, didn't they burn churches and expel the Jesuits when they started out? How many Germans found themselves forced to leave the land where they were born so that BeneÅ¡ and Masaryk could have their beloved Czech homeland complete? In America, we also expelled thousands of Britons, a great many colonists who were as American as Washington or Jefferson but preferred to continue as subjects of the English crown. It's a question of proportion, my dear, not individual cases. As we say in our country,
there's no free lunch.
Everything has a price.”

Van Doren had been glancing sideways at his watch as he spoke. He inspected in dry flashes of attention everything that happened around him, what he could deduce from the gaze, the gestures, the silence of his interlocutor. There was a suggestion of imposture in his conviction, as if he were capable of defending with the same intensity the opposite of what he was saying, laying a trap to find out their hidden thoughts. The servant in the short jacket and carrying a tray came in silently and leaned over to whisper in his ear. Ignacio Abel suspected he came in at a prearranged hour to interrupt a meeting that shouldn't be prolonged. In Judith's eyes he saw a complicity that hadn't existed when they entered the room: something that had been said there placed them on the same side. Her sharing with him something that excluded Van Doren not only flattered him, it produced an intense sexual desire, as if they'd dared an unexpected physical closeness that no one else saw. Van Doren looked at his watch again and spoke to the servant, detached from what was happening between them. Or perhaps not—nothing escaped his cynicism or his astuteness, his habit of controlling, subtly or rudely, the lives of others.

“You don't know how sorry I am, but I have to leave. An unexpected appointment at the Ministry of Information. The question is whether the minister will still be minister when I get there . . . Seriously,
my dear
Ignacio, I'm sorry we talked about politics. It's always a waste of time, especially when there are more serious things to be discussed. Judith, how do you say
to make a long story short
in Spanish?”

“
Ir al grano.
To get right to the point.”

“An admirable woman. To get right to the point, Ignacio, I'm authorized to offer you a position as visiting professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Architecture at Burton College next year, the fall semester if that's convenient, and if University City is inaugurated on time, which I hope with all my heart. And during that time I'd like you to study the possibility of designing the new library, the Van Doren Library. The project will have to be approved by the board, of course, but I can guarantee you'll be able to work with absolute freedom. You're a man of the future, and if the future, by your calculation, doesn't belong to Germany or Russia, perhaps the best thing for you is the future in America. Now I have to go, if you'll both forgive me. Make yourselves at home. This is your house. I'll be waiting for your reply, my dear Ignacio.
À bientôt,
my dear Judith.”

Van Doren stood, extended his arms, and with no effort put on the sports jacket the servant held for him. In the sharp, acute look of his eyes, in the movement of his depilated eyebrows, was a quick suggestion of obscenity, as if offering to Judith Biely and Ignacio Abel the room he was about to leave, as if he'd already guessed and taken as certain what they themselves still didn't dare to think.

J
UDITH BIELY SITS
at a piano, her face and hair lit by the late afternoon sun. It is September 29, 1935; she's a silhouette crossing the bluish light that emanates from a slide projector, the hurried handwriting on the envelope Ignacio Abel keeps in one of his pockets, in the luggage of one who possesses only what he carries with him, a fugitive or deserter, one who doesn't know how long his journey will take or even if he'll return to the country in ruins that he left only two weeks before. Judith Biely's is the explosive writing on the pages of that letter, which Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive, dated in Madrid, less than three months earlier, and not entrusted to the mail but left with somebody who handed it to him with the combined slyness and delight of one who knows she's offering the pain of a knife blade. He saw the hands offering it to him in the vestibule of the house of assignation where they'd agreed to meet one last time, the red nails and arthritic fingers like stains on the envelope where Judith's hand had written his name with a formality that did not bode well,
Sr. D.
Ignacio
Abel.
A letter can be a delayed curse; someone for whom it wasn't intended opens a drawer and sees it by mistake, and if that person dares to read it, it's as if her hand had been thrust into a scorpion's hole; the drawer can't be closed again; the letter can't not be removed from the envelope, it can't not be read, deciphering that writing, those words that will burn in her memory for a long time. Someone finds it many years later, in a suitcase covered with dust or in a university's archive, and the letter continues to preserve its ardor or its hurtfulness even though the one who wrote it and the one who received it are dead by then.
Sr. D. Ignacio Abel:
as if suddenly they no longer knew each other, as if the past nine months hadn't existed. Right now Judith Biely is a woman seen from behind who turned around, an irreparable absence haunting the man who leans his face against the train window looking at the breadth of the Hudson River, his eyes half closed, his mind dissolving in fatigue and contemplation. I see his black shoes wrinkled in the shape of his foot and by the way he walks. Traces of the dust of Madrid and mud from the construction at University City. In his hotel room in New York he found a needle and thread in a small box and attempted to darn a hole in his sock, discovering he didn't know how, that his hands were useless. He didn't know how to sew a button back on a shirt and had spotted with alarm that the right pocket of his jacket was beginning to shred. Materials deteriorate in a subtle way; the pockets of a man with no fixed address become misshapen because he keeps too many things in them; a few loose threads, like an almost invisible crack in a wall, are the first sign of the next phase of ruin. He remembers when clothing would appear miraculously clean and ironed in his closet, in the drawers of the dresser with an oval mirror in which the somber double bed was reflected, its headboard of wood carved in imitation Spanish Renaissance fashion, the time-honored style of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo family. You don't know how to do anything; you'd die of hunger if you had to earn a living with your hands or cook a meal. When he was a boy, his father would make fun of him when he saw his vertigo climbing even the lowest scaffold, his clumsiness in carrying out the simplest manual tasks. “Eutimio, either this son of mine becomes a rich kid or he'll die of hunger,” he'd say to the apprentice who looked after Ignacio like an older brother each time his father took the boy to a site. Professor Rossman at least was dexterous and managed to eke out a poor living during his worst times in Madrid by repairing pens, selling them on commission in the cafés, coming across them in his pockets or his bottomless briefcase as if by surprise, like a magician who keeps repeating old tricks. He hadn't carried the briefcase with him when they took him out of the pensión in a gruff but not violent or brutal way and put him in the back seat of a confiscated car, a Hispano-Suiza, his daughter recalled. With no political slogans painted on the doors or hood, no mattresses on the roof as a slapdash precaution against snipers or shrapnel from enemy planes. The doors still bore the noble coat of arms of the aristocrat from whom it had been confiscated and who probably had fled the country or was dead. Serious men who didn't waste time or make a fuss or imitate film gangsters, who had a signed search warrant with an official-looking purple stamp that Señorita Rossman couldn't make out. Professor Rossman's pockets were filled with things (as were Ignacio Abel's now on the train, bulging, fraying). The men had given Professor Rossman time to put on his jacket but not his vest or hard collar, which in any case he wouldn't need in the Madrid heat. Either they didn't allow him to put on his German boots with the worn-down heels, or he was so frightened he forgot to put them on, and left wearing his socks and old felt slippers. In the morgue on Calle Santa Isabel, one of Professor Rossman's feet still had a slipper on, and the big toe of his other foot, yellow, rigid, the nail like a contorted claw, jutted out of the sock. The morgue smelled of death and disinfectant, and all the bodies had numbered cards hung around their necks. The corpses' shoes were missing. Looters were up by daybreak to steal shoes and watches from the dead, tie pins, even gold teeth. Some were more difficult to identify because their faces had been blown away or their wallets stolen. “It's the people's justice,” said Bergamín, looking at Ignacio Abel with ecclesiastical misgiving from the other side of the desk in his office, a hall with a Gothic ceiling in the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, his hands together at the height of his mouth as he surreptitiously sniffed his nails. “A flood that levels everything, that washes away everything. But it was the others in their uprising who opened the sluice gates of the flood where they now perish. Even Señor Ossorio y Gallardo, who's as Catholic as I and much more conservative, has understood this and put it in writing: it's the logic of history.” Individual lives didn't count now, he said, and neither do ours. Perhaps he was protecting his own in an office instead of risking it closer to the front, Ignacio Abel wanted to say, though he had been close to dying too, interrogated a few times during the summer, the barrels of old rifles pointing at him, pushing into his chest. The rifles could have easily gone off, as the men who held them barely knew how to use them, and one night he'd been shoved in front of some headlights a few seconds before the voice that saved him pronounced his name. He still looked like a bourgeois, even if as a precaution he always went out not wearing a tie or hat, feeling as unprotected at first as when one dreams of going out on the street naked. When one has been on the verge of dying, the world acquires an impersonal quality: whatever one looks at would still exist even if a few minutes earlier a bullet had blown one's head or chest open. He thinks with detachment, with the objectivity of a camera with no eye behind it: I could be dead and not sitting on this train, next to the window where a view flashes by, a sight that overwhelms these Spanish eyes, accustomed to dry lands and shallow streams. “The uncontrollable flood of the people's just anger, Bergamín wrote,” he said aloud in a faint, muffled voice. Ignacio Abel knows beyond any doubt that he could have died at least four or five times that summer, and Judith and his children wouldn't have known. They might have thought or assumed he was dead; maybe he is dead in a way and doesn't know it. Erased into oblivion by others' forgetfulness while he imagines his identity remains intact.
The terror, to think that at this very instant, in some unknown place, memory is working against me, slowly fading away,
he has written to Judith, but he doesn't know if she will ever see those words. If I'd died in Madrid, this river, this horizon would speed past this window at this exact moment without anyone looking at it. I'd have been taken to a morgue inundated with nameless corpses piled in hallways and even in broom closets, beneath a buzzing cloud of flies, around my neck a crumpled card with a registration number. Whatever had not been stolen from my corpse by daybreak would have been placed in a filing cabinet by someone after he'd typed a list with several carbon copies.