In the Night of Time (71 page)

Who has seen you and who sees you? Who are you tonight, suspended in a place too strange and distant to be grasped in this large empty house, in this ocean of silence, this dark forest where the light from your windows travels to the highway? In his sleep he heard trains passing, as they'd passed during siestas and on summer nights in the Sierra, going to and coming from Madrid, the express trains heading north at midnight and those approaching the capital close to dawn after a night in transit. And the slow, short-distance trains too, that didn't go beyond Segovia and Ávila, the ones the fathers took during the summer to go to work in Madrid and return to the Sierra on Saturday afternoon, so recognizable, in their light suits and straw hats and briefcases under their arm, among travelers from the villages, dark unshaven faces, women with black scarves and kerchiefs on their heads, rustic wares of traveling vendors, containers of honey they'd peddle on the streets of Madrid, canvas sacks filled with cheeses, cages of hens, recently weaned piglets. It seemed that everything had lasted forever and would always be that way, the passage and whistle of trains as regular as the course of the sun or the bells in the village church. Now trains don't pass close to the house, shaking the pavement and the windows every hour. Now the old, slow trains that summer people and campesinos rode leave Madrid crowded with noisy militiamen, slogans painted on the cars and banners hanging from the locomotives, and they travel only half their route, to the last stations on this side of the Sierra, almost at the front. It's only October and the militiamen are already shivering with cold when night falls. Not enough blankets, said Negrín, no wool clothing, or hats, or boots, not enough trucks to keep the front supplied with food and ammunition, and no guaranteed relief forces. The heavy pain of Spanish poverty: in the photos of staged heroism published in the newspapers, the men advance or drop to the ground, dressed in old jackets or helmets that seem the castoffs of different armies. They shiver at night in the shelter of shepherds' huts, in the hollows between large granite crags. How will it be if the war hasn't ended when winter comes? They don't light fires so as not to give their positions away to the enemy. They hear noise, and fire into the darkness, wasting scant ammunition; for no reason, the shooting spreads up and down the frontline. On the other side his children must hear it, the house is close to the lines, to the names of towns now the lexicon of war. No doubt the family has gone to Segovia: suddenly almost another country, an inverted image of the Bolshevik and Anarchist Madrid that sprang up overnight late in July; military men and priests on the streets, processions of saints, not parades with red flags, the open hands of the Fascist salute instead of clenched fists, the ecclesiastical severity of the Spanish provinces in the previous century. My children in that world, unavoidably swallowed up by a clerical darkness from which I won't be able to rescue them, by candles, novenas, scapulars, and cassocks into which their mother's family submerged them as soon as I became careless, or as soon as I desisted, too weak, lacking the necessary intransigence, compelled by Adela, by her obedience to her people, unless in her heart she shares it too and hasn't shown it openly in order not to oppose me, not to emphasize the abyss that separated us from the start, the misunderstanding that neither of us wanted to look at, two strangers who have children in common and share nothing but a bed, a resignation indistinguishable from boredom.
It's never mattered to you that I love you, and you've never shown gratitude for the affection my parents gave you and have felt only contempt for them—
the letter also on the desk now, within reach, almost memorized, hidden inside the envelope and distilling from so great a distance its constant complaint. In Segovia Don Francisco de Asís owns a house with a coat of arms carved in stone above the lintel of the street door; he calls it “my ancestral home,” though in reality it isn't very old and came into his possession many years ago at an auction, and the stone coat of arms with a shield crowned by a helmet and a cross of Santiago he bought at a demolition site. You leave and it's useless, you wear out the soles of your shoes walking through city after city, you spend a week nauseated in a cramped cabin on a ship that crosses the Atlantic, and it's as if you had lost your strength in one of those revolving tunnels at a carnival, the tube of laughter, you never manage to move from the same spot. You go away and one part of you remains torn by separation and guilt, and the other part suffers the oppression of not being able to leave, to create distance. Continents and oceans can't loosen the knots of captivity.
Because you must know that whatever you do you're still my husband and the father of your children. Those ties can never be broken. Not even animals abandon their young.
From so far away he sees them, like the photographs in which he never appears though he's hovering nearby, conferring in the familial circle around a table with built-in foot warmers in the house in Segovia, with gloomy paintings of saints on the walls, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela and his two children and perhaps the uncle who is a priest, and who gives religious pictures to the children and suggests they pray at night and go to Confession and take Communion, if only to make their dear grandparents happy. He sees them like a ghost, a soul in purgatory in whom Doña Cecilia says she believes and to whom she lights little oil lamps that according to her go out when touched by the passage of a soul, the wing of an angel.
The most sacred thing of all isn't the sacraments, but the love you and I have had, our children are the proof.
They all pray the rosary, murmuring, their heads lowered, Miguel and Lita kicking each other, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela offering fervent prayers for their son and brother, not knowing whether he's alive or dead, and perhaps also for him, the son-in-law, who disappeared on July 19, though with some misgivings, because it disconcerts them or they think it's unsuitable to pray for someone who has no faith, but they must set an example for the children, they who are severe in their mourning for the two who are absent and about whom they've heard nothing for months, the son and brother, the husband and son-in-law to whom Adela wrote the letter, run through with rancor, that's taken so long to reach its destination and yet hits its target with the accuracy of a poisoned arrow.
Why is it bad for your children, who are just as much mine as yours, or even more mine because I gave birth to them, I brought them up and have been there for them every day, every night when they were burning up with fever, what harm can it do them to be brought up in the Catholic faith?
Her family will indoctrinate the children, they'll fall again into the hands of priests and nuns, they'll be forced to confess and take Communion on Sundays and perhaps they'll be pointed at in the school where they've begun the new year as secular children, offspring of an enemy, who don't know how to chant prayers or sing church hymns, not to mention the Fascist anthems.

Ignacio Abel lies in bed, exhausted, silent, as memory acquires clarity in the midst of his loneliness and guilt. He travels with the lightness of dreams to the house in the Sierra, past which the trains no longer run and from which perhaps the gunfire on the front can be heard. Perhaps it's been abandoned or converted into a barracks, like the Student Residence, a barracks for the others, for that abstract and not completely human species the newspapers call the Enemy, a word, he realizes now, of theological inspiration. In his old school, transformed into a lot with burned ruins, the priests called the devil the Enemy and warned that the word must always be written with a capital letter. Now the Enemy must occupy the neglected garden that for his children was a forest where they staged adventures copied from novels and collected insects and plants for their biology classes; the garden with the rusted swing on which they were swinging on that Sunday three months ago when he saw them for the last time, though they were both too old for it. Lita with her well-formed chest, Miguel in short pants he won't wear again after this summer. He's changing so quickly that when I see him again I won't recognize him. He'll have the shadow of a mustache, he'll part his hair and brush back the bangs that would fall over his eyes, an adolescent who'll look more like his uncle Víctor, his features usurped along with his soul, distancing him from me into an adulthood in which perhaps I, his father, won't exist. If I haven't already ceased to exist, erased by distance, lack of news, the likely absence of the postcards I've been sending them since I left Madrid, just as when they were younger and I took trips: the Plaza de la República in Valencia, the beach at Malvarrosa, the Eiffel Tower, the recently inaugurated Trocadero, Notre-Dame from a bridge over the Seine, the Boulevard de Saint-Nazaire that ends at the port, the SS
Manhattan
sailing at night on the high seas with the portholes illuminated and garlands of bulbs over the deck, the Statue of Liberty, the arcades at Pennsylvania Station, the hotel in New York where I stayed, its vertical sign running along the side of the building and a small pencil mark over a window on the fourteenth floor,
this is my room,
the Empire State Building crowned by a dirigible (but he never managed to mail that postcard: he stamped it and forgot about it in his concern not to miss the train). Lita has a tin box filled with postcards and letters arranged by date. At the beginning of her vacation she took it to the Sierra along with her books and journals. Miguel brought with him the textbooks for the classes he'd failed in June and the notebooks with assignments he'd done at the last minute, covered with the teacher's red-pencil markings, his spelling mistakes underlined, his inkblots. But he couldn't have taken his examinations in September. In that regard the war has been a respite for him. He'll have to repeat the year, and Lita will too if the war doesn't end soon.

 

It's no longer possible to avoid the word: he saw it in the French papers, obscene in the red and black ink of the headlines:
GUERRE EN ESPAGNE.
He's seen it in the New York papers he sometimes worriedly looked for—and other times tried to avoid—at the stand outside his hotel:
LATEST NEWS ON THE WAR IN SPAIN
. Like a congenital illness he can't be cured of, and those who printed and delivered the papers were immune to, like our poverty and picturesque backwardness, our baroque Virgins with glass tears and silver hearts pierced by daggers, and that colorful, savage slaughterhouse that is our national pastime.
KILLINGS AT THE BULLFIGHT RING IN BADAJOZ
. Our names, so sonorous and exotic, standing out among the words of another language, thatched walls in ruins, barren lands, photographs of our poor people's war, our women with black shawls and bundles on their heads fleeing along roads, crossing the plains, shoved with rifle butts at the frontier by French gendarmes while I looked away and did nothing and felt the cruel privilege of my formal dress and my papers in order. That still didn't exempt me from the Spanish disease: the customs officials searched my suitcase with calculated rudeness, took their time examining my drawings and sketches, the passport they'd already gone over once, the photograph I was beginning not to resemble, the page with the U.S. visa. Who'd accept without suspicion that title,
Spanish Republic,
inscribed in gold letters on the cover above the shield with its mural crown, if at any moment that republic might cease to exist, and if a few steps away, on the Spanish side of the border, there were no uniformed guards and clerks but militiamen who'd hauled down the tricolor and hoisted a red-and-black banner on the flagpole. In spite of everything, while he waited, dignified and upright, for the gendarmes to return his passport and permit him to close his suitcase, there was his pride at being a citizen of the Spanish Republic and rage at the indifference of the French and British who watched it turn, awkward and defenseless, to face its attackers, but also the feeling of inferiority for belonging to such a country, and the desire to escape it, and guilt for having run away, for not having known how to be useful, for not having remedied anything.

 

He remembers being on the Plaza de Oriente one morning, the last one, when his escape was assured and he went to say goodbye to Moreno Villa. Lashed by wind and rain, the plaza looked larger, the National Palace more gray than white against the background of dark storm clouds coming out of the west over the sharp greens of the Campo del Moro, with the Casa de Campo dissolving in the fog. In the French gardens an encampment of refugees protected themselves from the rain under their carts or canvas cloths stretched between the hedges and trees. In the middle of October, winter announced its arrival in Madrid, as if brought there by the gradually approaching war along the southwest highway, the one to Extremadura. How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven't lived, what happened more than seventy years ago, the plaza with the encampment of tarpaulins and shanties among the hedges, around the equestrian statue of Felipe IV supported only by the hind legs, delicate against the gray sky and the rain, wielding a sodden red flag; Ignacio Abel walking by it, a solitary bourgeois silhouette under an umbrella, approaching the guardpost where soldiers in the impeccable uniforms of the presidential battalion—steel helmets, leather straps, shining boots, well-shaven faces—will let him pass with no more formality than checking his name on a typed list. Footsteps and orders echoed in the granite cavities of the foyer. In a porter's lodge behind a small glass door, one could hear a radio and a typewriter and smell the aroma of food. He climbed broad staircases of granite and then of marble that had no carpeting to muffle his steps. He crossed halls with tapestries and clocks and swirling mythological scenes painted on the ceilings, and bare corridors that led to courtyards with stone arches covered by glass domes on which the rain drummed. Moreno Villa was in an office behind a paneled door with a low lintel, a tiny office overrun by books and file folders in the middle of a magnificence of empty spaces. Ignacio Abel thought that throughout his life Moreno Villa had maintained an invariable model of a workroom, identical in the National Palace and the Student Residence, in any place where chance might lead him in a future that had suddenly become uncertain. The cold was insidious, slowly overpowering you, first your fingertips and the end of your nose, then the soles of your feet. In a corner of the office was a small electric heater. But the current was weak and the glow of the element as sickly as in the lamp on the desk where Moreno worked, absorbed in his files, his investigations into the buffoons and madmen who served the kings in the time of Velázquez. His white beard had grown pointed, like a figure by El Greco. He was thinner than in the summer, and wore reading glasses that made him look older.