In the Night of Time (83 page)

 

He'll fall asleep, and when he wakes with the sensation of emerging from a very deep sleep—and with a brief shock of cold and alarm—it will already have begun very faintly to grow light and Judith won't be beside him in bed. He'll want to know the time, but last night, when Judith undressed him, she also took off his watch, and now it must be down among the clothes on the floor, probably stopped. He'll notice his aching bones, his muscles without strength, the chilled odor of their bodies strong in the air, on the sheets. He'll be afraid that Judith has left while he slept and he'll listen, the silence of the house increasing his alarm, the rain as steady on waking as when it filtered into his sleep or they heard it in the background last night as they talked, the unceasing American rain that feeds the oceanic breadth of these rivers and makes these forests of trees grow like cathedrals. Because of that first gray light weakened by a mist that floats above the treetops, the night that remains in the hollows of the room will still be the previous night. He'll get out of bed and go to the window, afraid Judith's car won't be in front of the house. On the fogged glass, isolated drops trace twisting paths. But he'll confirm that the car is still there, black and compact, shiny in the rain. Then, still standing naked by the window, touching the cold glass made more opaque by his warm breath, he'll hear like a confirmation that Judith hasn't left, a sound of plates and cups in the kitchen, and smell the aroma of coffee and toasted bread. Waking up beside Judith and sharing breakfast are gifts he's known very few times, a domestic expanse of love he tasted only during those four days in the house by the ocean, the anguished eve of their return to Madrid, to the heat and rage of the beginning of summer, to the discovery of the open drawer and photographs and letters thrown to the floor in his study and the ringing of the phone. Before dressing and going down to the kitchen, he'll wash his face before the mirror in the bathroom where Judith showered this morning without waking him. He ought to shave: last night she passed her hands over his rough face and told him to be careful not to scratch her. But he'll only run his fingers through his hair and go down, still unsure he'll find her, and when he sees her in the kitchen, Judith will turn toward him smiling, already dressed for her trip, with a rested, serene expression and full of energy though she won't have slept at all. He'll remember to respect the condition she imposed last night for staying: not to ask her not to leave. He'll have seen her packed suitcase in the foyer beside the door. He'll think, as Judith sets out the plates for breakfast and the cups of coffee and divides the toast and scrambled eggs, that he has needed each of the days he has known her and all the time of their separation and the fear of never seeing her again and the certainty that now she's about to leave without his being able to stop her, to appreciate the truth of this simple moment. Everything will have been a meticulous apprenticeship that began for him not when Moreno Villa introduced them at the Residence a year ago but a little earlier, the day he saw her from the back as she sat at the piano and then turned toward him, showing him her profile for a moment. As patiently as she'd repeated for him intimate words and turns of phrase in English, Judith had taught him how he had to kiss her on the mouth or caress her, holding his hand, pressing on his fingers, restraining his wrists, showing him the necessary precision for each caress, the rhythms of her desire. But she'd also taught him to converse passionately and to notice things with the esthetic intention, both premeditated and intuitive, that she brought to the way she dressed, chose shoes, a hat, a flower for a dress, and to the way she arranged the table now for breakfast, the plates and cups symmetrical, the knife, the fork, the coffee spoon, the pots of marmalade she found in the cupboards. Always fast and at the same time conscientious. Unhurriedly, she recalled her days in Madrid, her love for Spanish sayings. About to separate and not knowing whether they'll meet again, they'll resist the temptation to say definitive things, to show grief as minute by minute the line in time approaches, the irredeemable frontier of their parting. Their confessions will have remained in the sealed chamber of the previous night, in the wakeful light of the fire, when they still didn't dare touch each other, not even take a step or stretch out a hand so that each would stay within the physical space of solitude that surrounded the other. Now, as they have breakfast, they'll exchange pleasantries, not wanting to reduce with words the memory of what happened to them in the bedroom in complete darkness where gradually the window's rectangle of attenuated luminescence grew more precise, barely letting them see each other, conjured up in shadow as in silence, repeating each other's name. They'll ask each other how they've slept, ask for the sugar or milk, offer a little more coffee. He'll want to know how long it will take her to drive to New York and what time the ship sails and to which French port and in how many days the voyage will end. Judith will tell him that while he slept she's looked at his sketches for the library, the drawings he did yesterday afternoon on the slope overlooking the river. He'll tell her the building has to be visible from a distance but a surprise when entering its periphery: it must be seen from the river or from a passing train, but someone walking toward it will lose sight of it as he advances along a road through the trees, not only in summer when the trees are thick with leaves but in winter as well, because its exterior walls will be made of the local stone, whose color is between rusted iron and bronze, a tonality similar to bare trunks and the trunks covered with lichen. If anyone hears them, if anyone passing along the road sees them through the kitchen window, he'll think they were up early to enjoy peacefully a shared breakfast, that a long day of work and a tired, contented return home at nightfall awaits them, that they must have had many days like the one just beginning in this house or in another, accustomed to a passion that time and experience will have tempered to comradeship but that continues to join them in an intimate sexual fever they don't display before the eyes of anyone but that's revealed in their every gesture. Knowing each other so well, there's no part of the body of one that the other hasn't explored and enjoyed, no appetite they can't guess instantly; gradually noticing as the day brightens and the minutes pass that though they don't want it to, their separation weighs on them, as if the ground beneath their feet is shrinking or becoming more fragile, as if gravity were becoming more emphatic and it was difficult for them to raise the hand that holds a fork, bring the cup to their lips, then take the few steps on the brittle floor,
walking on thin ice,
toward the foyer, toward the solid wooden door. With her back to him at the large kitchen window, facing a neglected, shaded garden where shreds of fog are slowly lifting, Judith will watch the progress of the light revealing muffled colors, fallen leaves, red, yellow, and ocher, whirled around by the storm at the beginning of the night and shining now in the rain, wooden eaves rotted by the damp, dripping branches, corners of gleaming ferns, a toolshed, its roof caving in, a low wall covered by the wine-colored leaves of a Virginia creeper. Ignacio Abel will embrace her from behind and she'll shudder at his touch because she hasn't heard him approach. He'll kiss the back of her neck, bury his face in her hair, touch her lips, but he won't ask her to stay, not even a few hours more, or to write to him when she reaches Spain, or long before that. If only it's all over before she arrives, no matter who wins, he'll think, ashamed of himself, a venal lover who'd accept any price as long as Judith's in no danger and returns definitively settled, ready to stay in a place he knows she won't move away from, where she has work she likes that gives her enough time to discover what she was seeking when she left for Europe almost three years ago, the shape of her destiny, what she felt as imminent, about to happen when she sat in front of the typewriter, and then slipped out of her hands. He hopes the French gendarmes stop her when she tries to cross the border, and deport her as they have so many others, fulfilling the democratic watchword that the Spaniards have to be left alone to go on killing one another until they're sick and tired of their own blood, spilled with the help of the centurions of Mussolini and Hitler, German incendiary bombs and Italian machine guns that have already annihilated so successfully the people of Abyssinia. He'll attempt to drive away those negative thoughts, more disloyal because, while he harbors the hope that Judith won't accomplish her purpose of arriving in Spain and throwing herself into a war she can't imagine, he'll embrace her and delay releasing her when she wants to break free. Even if she doesn't come back to me, even if in New York or on the ship or on the clandestine trek through France she meets the other, younger man I've always been afraid will take her away from me. Judith will move his hands away from her waist, saying she really does have to leave, looking at her watch with a spontaneity that suddenly wounds him, as if she were leaving only to run an errand or spend the day in New York and return at nightfall. In the foyer she'll pick up the suitcase and he'll be the one who makes the effort to unbolt the lock. When she goes to the car the grass will wet her shoes, though it'll have been a while since it stopped raining. Now she will leave. Though she hasn't climbed into the car yet or started the engine, Ignacio Abel's already living in the country of daylight and obligations where Judith is not and where he is probably going to spend the rest of his life. I see the silent scene so clearly, the gray, damp start of the morning, Ignacio Abel—unshaven, in his white shirt, wearing shoes without socks—standing on the porch, dwarfed by the height of the columns, and Judith placing the suitcase in the back seat, not turning toward him, aware of his gaze, then opening the door on the driver's side as if ready to get in and drive away. But she closes it, like someone who realizes at the last moment that she's forgotten something, turns to him, and climbs the steps to the entrance. She'll take his face in her hands that are cold and give him a long kiss, putting her tongue in his mouth, greedily searching for his. He puts out his hand but doesn't touch her. If he did he wouldn't be able to avoid the instinctive gesture of holding on to her. He'll see the car drive away on the road through the woods. He'll notice the deep, damp cold that comes up from the earth but will lack the courage to enter the house and face the rooms made gigantic by the loneliness and strangeness that will envelop him as he closes the door, bringing the avalanche of obligations, the normality it will be so difficult for him to become accustomed to, though gradually he'll be drawn in by it, subjected to its charm, used to its daily doses of delay, expectation, and routine, one among so many displaced professors from Europe, speaking English with a heavy accent, timid and rather stiff, excessively ceremonious, eager to please, to gain a certain confidence that compensates for what they've lost, dressing with a formality impervious to the easy clothing of America, waiting for letters from relatives scattered around the world or disappeared without a trace, beyond the reach of any inquiry.

 

But that moment hasn't arrived yet, it belongs to a time that doesn't yet exist, the future of a few hours away. In the dark where Judith has brought her lips to his ear to whisper the syllables of his name, Ignacio Abel can't estimate the time, how long before the night ends. There are no pendulum clocks in the house, and no matter how attentive he is, he doesn't hear church bells. He dreamed about them in the unusual silence of the ship's cabin, and what he heard was the bell of a buoy. When he was a child he'd have sleepless nights, and at each hour he'd hear the metal of different bells in the churches of Madrid, and knew dawn was approaching when he heard on the paving stones the echoing hooves of the horses and mules on Calle Toledo, pulling carts loaded with produce. Under the blankets in his room, so small he could touch the cold stone ceiling with his hand, he'd hear his father, who got up long before dawn to go to construction sites. Wrapped in his cape, his cap pulled down over his face, a cigarette in his mouth, happy his son could stay in bed until daybreak, preparing his books and notebooks before leaving for school, dressed and combed like a rich man's son, his boy who wouldn't have to work as hard as he did or live when he was an adult in the unhealthy rooms of a porter's lodging. Miguel, when he was little, was frightened of the dark. So frightened he continued to wet the bed until he was six or seven years old, when he would stretch out his hand looking for Lita's and grasp it as he did in the first days of his life. His fever would shoot up, his scant hair glued to his forehead, and his chest, weak and convulsive, as agitated as a bird's, his ribs visible beneath his helpless flesh. How far away everything was, and how near. When Ignacio was a boy, he was afraid to go down to the cellar with the low vaulted ceiling in his apartment building on Calle Toledo. He'd open the door and from the first stone step begin the descent into a dense, damp darkness where he could hear the rats' scratching. On this night the building residents have gone down to take shelter in the cellar he hasn't visited for more than thirty years, and when the bombs fell close by, the floor and walls would reverberate and the dirty bulb hanging from the ceiling, its light reduced to the red glow of the filament, would tremble like a candle and go out, dissolving into darkness the silhouettes huddled together, whispering, moaning. The night is a bottomless well where everything seems lost and everything continues to live and endure, at least for a certain time, as long as the memory remains clear and the mind lucid in the person lying with eyes open, attentive to the sounds taking shape in what seemed to be silence, trying to guess by the breathing if the other person's still awake or has been carried away by the somnolence of satisfied desire. In the hospital room, beside her mother's bed, Judith would doze in spite of the uncomfortable chair, and at the very moment she fell asleep she would wake with a start, hearing slurred speech or a moan caused by the gradual tapering off of the effect of morphine, or worse, alarmed by the silence, missing her mother's ragged breathing, fearing she'd died alone while Judith was sleeping, that her mother had called or moaned and she hadn't awakened. The dead haven't yet left the house where they lived, and their slow disappearance into the dark has already begun; they're already strangers. Ignacio Abel approached the open coffin his father lay in, and when he looked he no longer knew him. In the light of the candles, his father's face was yellow and swollen, as if his mouth and nose had been lightly flattened under glass; the hands that emerged from the cuffs of his shirt and were crossed on his chest were those of another man: bloodless, an old man's hands, the nails prominent and the fingers curved and thin, the opposite of his father's hands, broad, blunt, solid, dark, his father who hasn't appeared in his dreams for many years, so distant, like the gas lamps that lit Calle Toledo and like the Madrid Ignacio Abel doesn't want to think about now and Judith won't recognize when she returns and finds no lights, all of Madrid in darkness and silence like the bottom of the sea, perhaps crossed by headlights and flashlights that pierce the thick blackness like divers' lamps. In the New York night, neon signs floated in the dark, pink or yellow or blue silhouettes of steaming cups of coffee, or spirals of cigarette smoke, or bubbles ascending from glasses of champagne. Between sleep and consciousness images dissolve without becoming completely formed, and the border between memory and imagination is as fluid as the one that joins and separates bodies wrapped in an embrace composed equally of weariness and desire. Judith's voice that said his name so clearly in his ear might also have sounded in a half-sleep or a dream, at the exact moment Ignacio Abel has fallen asleep, as if floating in the serene immobility of time. It's Judith who remains awake, watching over him, the man who's become more attentive and more fragile, who was almost murdered without her knowing it. I see her in profile, more clearly as dawn breaks, sitting against the back of the bed, restless now, fearful, anxious, impatient, resolved, as clearheaded as if she'd never feel the need to sleep, listening to the freight trains, the masculine breathing beside her, the wind in the trees, the call of a bird, discovering the first, still uncertain signs of dawn, the first gray light of the first day of her journey, of a tomorrow she can't make out and I can't imagine, her future unknown and lost in the great night of time.