In the Night of Time (50 page)

 

He turned off the twin lamps on the two desks and left the room stealthily, as he had in the days when he'd hope they had fallen asleep. Suddenly he felt suffocated by all the absences that filled the apartment, at once expelling him and blocking his path. With the caution of a thief he walked out, uneasy at having forgotten something important, closing the door slowly, not locking it, going down the marble stairs in the dark, fearful he might run into someone or be seen by the porter, who'd be surprised to see him going out at this hour with a suitcase and perhaps would inform one of the patrols that came from time to time to search the apartments, looking for suspects and snipers in a bourgeois district where most of the residents had been lucky enough to be away on vacation when the revolution broke out.

 

A solitary figure walking close to the buildings, under the moonlight, in the city with closed windows and street lamps turned off, wearing his hat, his travel raincoat, suitcase in hand, his steps resolute and at the same time full of caution, alert to the strokes of the clock in a tower indicating he had more than enough time to reach the Atocha Station, where a safe-conduct signed by Dr. Juan Negrín would allow Ignacio Abel to occupy a place in a truck leaving for Valencia and carrying an unspecified cargo of official documents guarded by men in uniform. At first it was difficult for him to get used to the permanent uncertainty, the discomfort of trying to sleep bundled against the cold, resting his head on the suitcase, his body subjected to vibrations and braking, or lying on a wooden bench, or on cold marble in the waiting room of a station; to opening his eyes at dawn and not knowing where he was; to not knowing whether his documents would be approved by the guard or police officer or gendarme or border official or customs clerk who scrutinized them interminably. Each departure was a relief, the end of a wait; each arrival, each approach to a new destination brought an uneasiness that gradually turned to anguish. Patience was pure physical inertia: lines of people waiting for a window to open, for a traveler's interrogation to end, for a guard to examine each item of clothing and each toilet article and each trivial memory contained in a suitcase. In waiting rooms, at control barriers and border posts, Ignacio Abel had joined a new variety of the human species: passengers in transit, people carrying scuffed suitcases and dubious credentials, nomads in shoes with rundown heels whose documents had many stamps and an air of falsification. The train that had taken him from Barcelona to the second or third day of his journey stopped in Port Bou at nightfall; the passengers advanced in silence and formed a line in front of a sentry box at the border crossing. On the other side a French gendarme paced, protected from the drizzle by a short oilskin cape. A few steps from the French flag, on this side, was the flag not of the Spanish Republic but an enormous red-and-black banner with the Anarchist initials in the center. What would Negrín think if he saw that usurpation, if he had to submit his deputy's identity card and his diplomatic passport to two militiamen armed with Mauser rifles, pistols at their waists, cartridge belts across their chests, red-and-black handkerchiefs tied around their necks, wearing the sideburns of bandits in romantic lithographs and interrogating the passengers one by one. As a precaution, Ignacio Abel had removed his tie before getting off the train and put his hat in the suitcase. He wasn't yet proficient in the new trade of waiting and patience. He presented his passport opened to the page with the photograph, looking for a moment into the small red eyes of a militiaman who chewed on a cigarette butt, so bored or so tired he didn't bother to relight it. Sitting on a bench against the wall, a woman who'd been denied passage was crying under a poster portraying a foot in a peasant espadrille flattening a serpent with three heads: Hitler, Mussolini, and a bishop. The other travelers glanced at her with no trace of sympathy, looking away when the woman raised her head, as if not wanting to be contaminated by her misfortune. The weary militiaman spat out the butt and turned the pages of Ignacio Abel's passport, wetting his thumb with the tip of his tongue. He couldn't imagine how many similar inspections he'd have to undergo in the next few weeks, how many times an inquisitorial gaze would look up from the photo in the passport to search his face, as if it were necessary to establish the veracity of each feature to eliminate the possibility of an imposture, or perhaps merely to cause a delay, so the suspect foreigner would miss the next train or be late or more exhausted in his flight.

The impassive, aggressive harshness of the Spanish militiamen was less wounding than the coldness of the French gendarmes in neat uniforms, shouting obscenities at the Spanish peasant women who feared them so much and didn't understand their orders. Taller than the people around him, better dressed, able to answer the gendarmes in French, Ignacio Abel knew he was included in the same contempt, and that awareness gave him a feeling of fraternity. He too was a
sale espagnol;
the only difference was that he could understand the insults, and the greatest of them didn't need to be formulated because it became clear as soon as one crossed the border: the tidy station; the clean-shaven gendarmes in their impeccable hard collars, the glow of good food on their cheeks; the posters showing beaches along the Côte d'Azur and transatlantic cruises, not revolutionary slogans; the large window of a restaurant; the neon sign of a hotel. By crossing the border he discovered the weight of the Spanish disease he might escape, but for which perhaps there was no cure, though it was possible for him to hide the symptoms, to distance himself from his compatriots, who couldn't elude the hostile looks or hide the stigmata of their foreignness and poverty: berets, unshaven faces, black shawls, funereal underskirts, bundles of clothing on their backs, infants nursing at sagging breasts, Spanish refugees leaving third-class cars and camping like Gypsies on station platforms. But he'd traveled first class; he could go into a restaurant on the square and have supper at the window and drink a bottle of excellent wine; behind the restaurant's curtains he could while away the time until the Paris train, savoring a glass of cognac, looking at his compatriots crowding the station steps as they shared pieces of bacon, dark bread, cans of sardines. Over the years he'd lost his instinct for frugality and his fear of tomorrow, lost the ability to measure out his money or renounce the privileges that had made his life comfortable for so long. Social distance still protected him. He began to realize it had been stripped away that same night, on the express to Paris, where no first-class tickets were available and he had to sit without a reservation in a second-class seat from which he was turned out at the first stop, when an irritated traveler entered the compartment and claimed the seat that wasn't his, by the intangible right of a French citizen. The train's corridors were also filled with people, and it took several hours before he could find a place to sit on the floor and doze off on his suitcase. He woke up to an indifferent kick from the gendarme, which continued to hurt his pride for many days, perhaps the first lesson of his new life, when he had not yet learned how to accept humiliation and be grateful to those who could otherwise harm him.

Judith Biely suddenly leaped from the sadness of memory to the imminence of the future, the one unfolding before him as well as a phantom parallel future, the trip to America they'd planned together, suspended now between memory and imagination with the radiance of a timeless illusion. And the desire for her fed his jealousy: which men had she been with before meeting him, a young, free woman dazzled by Europe, as forgetful of her own attractiveness as she was ignorant of the ideas men could have about her when they took her American self-assurance for sexual availability; which men had she met now that she'd left Madrid, relieved not only of love but of the guilt and indignity of their deception?
If your wife had died, if she'd drowned in that pond because of us, I'd never have forgiven myself.

 

In luminous, fitful dreams on the nights of his journey, Ignacio Abel was with her again in the innocence of their first times together. As he was losing everything, as his money ran out and his clothes deteriorated and he lost the most basic habits of hygiene, as he grew resigned to the idea that his journey would never end, Ignacio Abel recovered the phantom presence of Judith Biely with ever greater clarity. He'd wake from a few minutes of restless sleep in a station or in his berth on the ship with the gift of having heard her voice and touched her body; for a few seconds he saw her coming toward him, memory superimposed on the present like a double photographic plate. He woke one night certain he had been dreaming of her and didn't know where he was. The tenuous light from the porthole over his berth situated him in space but not in time. He could have awakened after several hours of sleep or dozed for just minutes. He wasn't sleepy and he wasn't tired. He put on his raincoat over his pajamas and went up on deck, following narrow, poorly lit corridors empty of people. A sensation of sharp lucidity and physical lightness was as intense as the dream-like air the silence and solitude imparted to things. He leaned on a railing and saw nothing except the strings of lights hung over the deck, dimmed in a thick fog, immobile in the windless night. From time to time he heard the faint splash of water against the hull, and in the distance the siren of another ship, revealing the breadth of invisible space. Close by, he also heard a sound identical to a church bell, a bell monotonously repeating a certain cadence, like the summons to Mass or the recitation of the rosary in the late afternoon in a Spanish provincial town. His ears were adjusting to distant sounds as his eyes adjusted to the slow arrival of the light. He heard nearby voices but couldn't see anyone. Then he began to distinguish forms leaning on the rail, overcoats thrown over nightgowns and pajamas, hands extended in a direction he couldn't make out. Gradually he became aware of a raucous sound that seemed to come from the deepest holds of the ship. But it faded and the silence returned, and with it voices and water lapping against the hull, the voices becoming clearer, like the faces illuminated by lighters that burned for an instant, familiar faces after a week at sea. On one side a long line of blinking lights, on the other a tall, compact shadow, like a basaltic cliff, barely visible in the fog, black against the dark gray into which it was dissolving, dotted now with constellations, as the sound became more powerful, gradually discordant. Those cliffs surging out of the water were the towers of a city; that sea of steel-colored water and shores lost in the distance was a river. He'd have to review his documents again, prepare for another examination, for scornful, hostile looks, for patience and indignity. In the faces ravaged by so short a night, Ignacio Abel recognized those who were now his brothers: the fugitives from Europe carrying suitcases bound with cords, nervously handling briefcases of documents. How did he distinguish them from the others, the travelers for pleasure and the businessmen, those who had solid passports, unquestionable credentials. Perhaps when you crossed the border with one group or the other it was no longer possible to return. Perhaps he himself, when he submitted his papers to the scrutiny of the American customs agents, would discover that during the time he'd been traveling the Spanish Republic had been defeated and he was, as a consequence, the citizen of a nonexistent country. He went down to his cabin to dress and pack his suitcase, and when he returned with it to the deck, the fog had lifted. He discovered the faint colors things were taking on, the bronzes of the cornices, the blues of the sky, the somber greens of the water at the docks, the reds and ochers of the bricks, the glossy tiles reflecting the first light of day from atop the tallest buildings, where sometimes he could also see green patches of trees, autumnal ivy in golds and scarlets. Judith Biely hadn't warned him and he hadn't been able to imagine that New York wasn't the black-and-white city of the movies.

T
HE CONDUCTOR IS
announcing the name of the next station in a solemn, powerful voice that rises above the noise of the train. Other passengers are already standing, putting on hats, raincoats, light topcoats, looking out the windows with an air of fatigue, men tired after a full day's work who return home at nightfall, picking up briefcases, folding newspapers, looking at a landscape so familiar they barely notice it, the immense width of the river, the bank the train runs along, so close to the water that small waves break against the tracks' incline, the landscape of daily life that never seems to change, or only to the extent that the seasons change, night falls earlier or later, reds and yellows replace the bright greens in the treetops. There's an end to each journey and to each flight, but where does desertion end, and when? The river's current has an oily texture stained red in the declining light. You can keep running from misfortune and fear, but there is no hiding from remorse. The hills on the opposite bank acquire a darker and denser rust color, interrupted by white splashes of houses where lights are being turned on, though it's not dark yet. Perfect places to take refuge, for two lovers to meet, for someone to come back to, tired and at peace, and not lock the door or fear noises in the night. With briefcases or small suitcases in hand and overcoat lapels raised against the damp cold of the woods and the river, the passengers will walk home along gravel paths. He too had walked from the small station in the Sierra, one afternoon in late September or early October, the vivid memory of an autumn that had just begun: early nightfall, the aroma of damp earth and pines, the smoke of an oak log rising from the chimney against the still blue sky, the creak of the gate and the cold iron on his hands, while from the house, at the end of the garden, came his children's voices. Back then he didn't have a car. He'd have returned by train, enjoying the trip, going over papers or letting his eyes linger on the stands of oak that had a gleam of dusty gold in the afternoon sun, the silhouette of a deer among the oaks, or the flash of a hare. He would walk on fallen leaves covering the gravel path that led to the house; as he got closer, the children's faces became visible, pressed against a window, Adela standing behind them. The train whistle always alerted them of his arrival.