In the Night of Time (43 page)

H
E'D ALSO BEEN ORGANIZING
an archive, almost from the time of their first meeting, collecting not only letters and photos but any physical object that alluded to Judith's presence in his life: the handbill announcing his talk at the Student Residence, the newspaper clipping with the date in a corner, a day like any other that still shone for them with a radiance invisible to others, a page of the calendar he would like to have rescued from the wastebasket in his office where he'd tossed it the following morning, not realizing yet what was happening to him. Every lover attempts to keep a genealogy of his love, afraid treasured memories will inevitably fade away. He wanted to keep everything, prevent one meeting from being confused with another, as he wanted not to forget any of the English words and expressions Judith had taught him. He wrote them down in a little oilskin notebook he kept in his jacket pocket, the same pocket where he kept the tiny key that locked the desk drawer. He could with no danger leave Judith's letters in his office, but that meant separating from them: letters and photographs, telegrams sent in moments of spontaneity or impatience, with their naughty expressions in English that the telegraph operator filled with errors, a telegram sent from Toledo one morning when she was visiting with a tour group of American students, or from the central mail and telegraph office on the Plaza de Cibeles that Judith had passed, unable to resist the temptation to send him an instant message: the marvel of electrical impulses along telegraph wires, the tiny strokes translated into words, printed on a blue sheet, delivered within an hour to the office where Ignacio Abel interrupted an important meeting because the unctuous clerk had opened the frosted-glass door, holding a telegram and wearing a somber expression, the face of someone perhaps delivering grave news—the clerk was young but already moved with the solemnity of many administrative years. But Ignacio already knew the telegram was from Judith. A busy man who had to attend to so many things at the same time, he made his excuses to the others, moved a short distance away, impatience in his fingertips. And the pleasure in finding her words was more intense because he was reading them in front of others, struggling to keep a smile from appearing on his face, to maintain a frown of concern, or at least of high responsibility.
I'll be waiting for you at Old Hag's 4 P.M.
please don't let me down please.

 

A short time before he wouldn't have known what
Old Hag
meant. Now it was written in a tiny hand in his notebook, a nuance of the language and also a password, because that's what Judith called the woman who said her name was Madame Mathilde, the owner or manager of the chalet at the back of a garden near the end of Calle O'Donnell, who always received them with a fiction of reserve and distinguished hospitality, as if instead of a house of assignation she managed a literary and artistic salon. In the notebook was the date and the place and in many cases the hour of each of the times he'd been with Judith, along with a key word that alluded to something specific about each meeting. On the same pages were notes of his work appointments, technical observations, sketches of architectural details he'd seen or imagined, but he distinguished among them, sole keeper of its secret code, tenacious archivist.
Leaving your little slips of paper everywhere and me finding them without wanting to when I went through the pockets of your trousers or jackets before sending them to the cleaner's.
Forgetting was wasteful, a luxury he couldn't allow himself. Forgetting was like not looking closely at Judith when he was with her, not making an effort to fix in his memory those details that inspired love in him and excited him so much and yet afterward he couldn't invoke, even with the help of photographs. What was the true color of her eyes, the exact shape of her chin, how did her voice sound, what were the two lines that formed at the sides of her mouth when she laughed? He didn't see her for a few days, and in spite of letters and phone calls the brief interval destroyed everything, so that seeing her again was always a revelation, and his expectation so filled with suspense, it didn't seem her real presence could live up to what he'd intensely desired. Seeing her naked took his breath away. Each time he kissed her open mouth, he was transfixed by the same lightning flash of desire and astonishment he'd felt on the first night in the bar at the Florida, her shameless tongue searching for his. But the thirsty man doesn't savor the first sips of water on dry lips, doesn't stop to appreciate the shape of the glass or how the light pierces it. He could be distracted by something, she might be nervous, badly affected by a sleepless night, dazed by the noise around them in a café, deeply affronted at having to meet her lover in a hired room, with a bidet half concealed behind a screen of faded vulgarity and an odor of disinfectant made worse by the rose perfume that attempted to disguise it. In Madame Mathilde's house you could hear the birds in the garden, the bells of streetcars, the sound or laugh or moan from an adjoining room. Other lovers must have looked into that slightly clouded mirror in the chipped gilt frame in front of the bed. The touch of the sheets on her naked skin produced an unpleasant sensation; the sheets were clean but rumpled, washed many times, dampened many times by sweat or bodily secretions identical to theirs in their anonymity.

 

Meetings reduced to cryptic scrawls—
M.Mat.Fr.7.6.30;
movie tickets kept between the pages of his notebook that alluded to a particular afternoon, Judith's delicate hand advancing toward his fly in the dark, Clark Gable in a sailboat on an ocean as fictitious as his sailor's undershirt; programs for films he didn't remember seeing; messages written on hotel letterheads, on paper from the Student Residence or the technical office of University City; the brief archeology of their common past, the chronological trail established by canceled postage stamps and the dates in headings of letters, the long winding river of words that was the reflection and prolongation of real conversations, the ones dissipated in air. The time of being together was always too short, too distressing for them to be fully aware of what they were experiencing; they restored it, gave it form, in memory and in letters. Narrow blue envelopes Judith had bought in a Paris stationery store; sheets of a fainter blue covered on both sides by handwriting roused by speed and a tendency to boldness, the lines curving like Chinese characters, preserving the impulse of the gesture that had traced them. A forthcoming letter had something of the magnetism of Judith's arrival, waiting for her with eyes fixed on the door of the café where her silhouette would appear, seeing her suddenly without having followed her approach on account of a blink, a momentary distraction. The fact that there was a new general strike when they returned from the coast of Cádiz, with vans of Assault Guards circulating on the empty streets, interfered with his receiving a letter from her. At the hour of the morning when he knew the clerk would be distributing mail, Ignacio Abel was alert, raising his eyes at times from the papers on his desk or drawing board, looking out at the corridor over the typewriters, the office of the utopian city, the large model of the future campus. How wonderful that among all the thousands of letters, Judith's wasn't lost but came to him hidden among the others, though visible to the eye skilled in distinguishing it, the blue edge, the clerk unaware of the precious gift he brought, holding the tray like a waiter at a banquet. If he was alone in his office, Ignacio Abel closed the frosted-glass door that only his secretary was authorized to open without knocking; if someone was with him or he had an urgent call, he put the letter in his pocket or in a desk drawer, saving it for later, having held it, felt its thickness, the pleasing touch of many folded sheets ceding to the pressure of his fingers with a promise of delight. The words they hadn't had time to say during their last conversation or the ones lost in the ephemeralness of voices on the phone he now possessed without uncertainty or haste, as he would have liked to be with her one day, taking pleasure in indolence, unbuttoning, untying, removing each article of her clothing just as he carefully opened the envelope and removed the folded sheets that smelled of her, not because she put a drop of her cologne on them but because the scent of that paper resembled no other and was associated only with her. But at times his impatience was too powerful: he ripped the envelope and then had to make an effort to repair it in order to keep that letter in it, which couldn't be in any other envelope and belonged to a specific day, visible in the cancellation stamp, to a certain hour, a particular state of mind that agitated or calmed the writing like a lively breeze on the surface of a lake. The minutes of their meeting passed, shortened by nervousness at the beginning, the speed with which the end imposed itself. But in a letter time was preserved; the phantom conversation of paper and ink evinced a tranquility that was the only sustenance for absence, an effective tranquilizer, when the letter had been read the first two times, folded and placed in the envelope so it would fit in the inside pocket of his jacket. The moment fled and was impossible to recover; the letter was always there, amenable to examination by his fingers, to the intensity of his eyes, capable of being committed to memory, with no effort, after a few readings.
I was going down the hall and without meaning to I saw the tip of the envelope peeking out of your jacket on the rack, how hard it must've been for you to leave her letters in the office if she sent them there. It was obvious you didn't want to be away from them even for a moment.
The sustenance was more like an addictive substance: ink like nicotine, words like opium, alcohol intoxicating slowly, dissolving the shapes of the external world. What would he do if the letters suddenly stopped? If Judith grew tired of what had taken both of them so long to find the courage to name (but it was she who had the courage, not he): being a married man's lover; if she found another man, younger and more accessible, with whom she wouldn't have to maintain a secrecy that Judith, at heart, thought shameful; if she decided it was time to return to America or to continue the European trip she hadn't completed, an education she hadn't thought included the skills needed to sustain a Spanish adulterous affair (but he never asked about her plans; it seemed he counted on her always being near, available, obliterating herself when away from him, existing again at the moment he walked in the door and found her there beside the bed, open, sensual as a magnificent flower).

 

From the time she was very young, her urge to express herself had been as powerful as her desire to learn. Writing letters was an exercise of talent that hadn't found its true channel until then, not in the literary attempts she showed no one, not in her journals, not in the articles she sent to the Brooklyn paper that asked her for more political analyses and fewer observations on the daily life of Spaniards. When she wrote letters she felt the new exaltation of having an interlocutor with whom there would be no misunderstandings, because his intelligence was a challenge and a complement to hers, and because basically they resembled each other a great deal, a fact they hadn't needed more than a few minutes to recognize. Everything was memorable and new and deserved to be celebrated; wandering through Madrid produced euphoria. Explaining in a letter to the man she hadn't known until a short time ago the most secret ambitions in her life and the nuances of the sexual passion it seemed they'd awakened to together was for her an unsurpassed experience: her hand flew over the paper, ink flowed from the pen, forming volutes of words in which her will almost didn't intervene, words erupting with the memory of something that had occurred barely a few hours earlier, desire reborn in its invocation as it was sometimes in a distracted caress that made them return unexpectedly from the edge of exhaustion. (The book was somehow also in those letters. The book was in everything she did, yet it slipped away when she began looking for it consciously, when she sat in front of the typewriter searching, hoping for a first word that would unleash everything.) They told each other what they'd done and what they'd felt, and anticipated what they'd do when they met again, all they hadn't dared to suggest or ask for aloud. A letter was a confession and an account of desire and also a brazen way of inciting passion in the other: as you're reading, do what I imagine doing to you, let your hand move, guided by mine; let it be my hand caressing you though you're not with me. How strange that it took them so long to become aware of the danger, to discover there was a price and damage and no remedy for the affront once it was committed. Each word an injury, the thread of ink a trail of poison.

 

“Where do you keep the letters?”

“You've asked me that before. In a desk drawer.”

“At home or in the office?”

“Where I have them closest to me.”

“Your wife can find them.”

“I always lock the drawer with a key.”

“One day you'll forget.”

“Adela never looks at my papers. She doesn't even come into my study.”

“How strange that you've said her name.”

“I didn't realize I hadn't said it.”

“You don't realize a lot of things. Tell me your wife's name again.”

“You're my wife.”

“When you divorce and marry me. Meanwhile your wife's Adela.”

“You never say her name either.”

“Promise me something—burn my letters, or keep them in your office, in your safe. But please don't have them at home.”

“Don't call it my home.”

“There's nothing else to call it.”

“I don't want to be away from your letters. I wouldn't burn a single one, or a postcard, or a movie ticket.”

“You keep movie tickets too?”

“Finally I'm seeing you laugh this afternoon.”

“I don't want her to read what I've written to you. It embarrasses me. It frightens me.”