In the Night of Time (66 page)

“I hear them every night from here, close by,” said Moreno Villa, aged, thinner, unshaven, looking like a beggar or a martyr in a painting by Ribera.

The Residence was now a barracks for militiamen and Assault Guards. Next to the reception desk was the guardroom, a mass of armed men who came and went with rifles on their shoulders, straw mattresses spread on the floor, smelling like a pigsty, tobacco smoke everywhere, the walls full of posters covered with handwritten slogans, the floor littered with cigarette butts. In the corridor leading to Moreno Villa's room were hospital beds occupied by wounded militiamen; the air reeked of disinfectant and blood. Yellowish, badly shaven faces turned incuriously as he passed, eyes possessed by a kind of fear unlike any other, the somber, hermetic fear of those who have seen death.

“I hear a car driving up the hill, the doors opening and closing, orders, sometimes laughter, as if it were a party. Then bursts of gunfire. By counting them I know how many they've killed. Sometimes they're sloppy or drunk, then it takes longer.”

Moreno Villa in his large, ascetic room, the cell of the anchorite he'd become after not seeing anyone for so long or not venturing out for days, not even to the garden at the Residence's entrance, now occupied by Assault Guard trucks and motorcycles. He went out only to go to work at the archives of the National Palace, with the punctuality of a dutiful official who didn't have to be asked. The president of the Republic, who had his office near Moreno Villa's, had suggested that he sleep at the palace. But he preferred to return every evening to the Residence, as incongruous among militiamen and the wounded as he would have been anywhere else in Madrid, in his old-fashioned suit, high shoes, and the bow tie he'd been in the habit of wearing since he came back from the United States, the trip he'd written about in a short, heartfelt book, as all of his were, a book by an author who enjoys some prestige but whom no one reads. He was just as Ignacio Abel had seen him a year earlier, surrounded by books, sitting near the window in front of a small, unfinished still life, perhaps the same one he'd started in late September, in the remote past of less than a year ago.

“By this time they've already taken away the bodies. A municipal crew comes in a slow garbage truck. I recognize it by the sound of the engine. They arrive a little after dawn. If your friend was here last night, he must be in the morgue by now. Rossman was his name, wasn't it? Or still is, poor man, who knows. I remember chatting with him once.”

“Last year, in October, he came to my lecture.”

“It's strange, isn't it? Remembering anything that happened before all this began. Things happen and they seem inevitable, as if anyone could have predicted them. But who could have told us our Residence would be turned into a barracks? A barracks and also a hospital, a few days ago. Now, aside from the shots at night we have to listen to the moans of those poor boys. You have no idea how they scream, Abel. No medicine, no sedatives, no anesthesia, no nothing. Not even good gauze to control hemorrhages. I leave my room and find puddles of blood on the floor. We didn't know how sticky blood is, how shocking it is, the quantity of blood a human body holds. We thought we were men with experience and judgment, but we were nothing and knew nothing. And the little we knew is ridiculous and serves no purpose. Don José Ortega stayed for a few weeks before he left Spain, like so many others. He was ill. It was painful to see him sitting in a hammock in the sun, an old man, his mouth hanging open, yellow, with that lock of hair he always carefully combed to hide his bald spot. Our great philosopher, the man who had an opinion on everything, silent, looking into the void, dying of fear, just like all of us, or more so, because he was afraid his fame would work against him and he would not be allowed to leave Spain. I don't know if you know that some people came to ask him to sign the manifesto of intellectuals in favor of the Republic. Bergamín, Alberti, someone else, all of them with boots and leather straps, with pistols. But Don José didn't sign. As sick as he was, feverish, scared. They left and he was much worse. I approached him to ask after his health, and he didn't answer.”

“And they didn't ask you to sign the manifesto?”

“I'm not famous enough. It's the advantage of being invisible.”

“Poor Lorca didn't have it.”

“He left Madrid because he was frightened. He took the express after they killed Lieutenant Castillo and Calvo Sotelo, July 13. I spoke with him a few days earlier. He was very frightened.”

“I saw him from a taxi. He was sitting on the terrace of a café on Recoletos, in a light suit, smoking a cigarette, as if waiting for someone. I waved to him but I don't think he saw me.”

“Now we spend our lives trying to remember the last time we did something or saw a friend. It frightens us to think it was the last time. Before, we would say goodbye as if we were going to live forever. How many times have you and I said goodbye, Abel my friend, or passed each other if we were in a hurry with no more than a tip of the hat. When we say goodbye this time, it's not unlikely we won't ever see each other again.”

“It's dangerous for you to be living here alone, so removed from everything. Come to my apartment. I'm there alone. One of the maids stayed with my family in the Sierra and the other disappeared. You'll be safer and we can keep each other company.”

“Don't worry about me, Abel my friend. Who'll want to do anything to an old man?”

“You're not that old and you aren't safe. No one is. I saved myself at the last moment almost by accident.”

What would happen to Moreno Villa, sedentary and stubborn, determined to live as if the world hadn't collapsed around him, alone in the Residence, wandering the hallways and classrooms where the foreign students who'd left toward the end of July wouldn't return, where the beautiful exotic voices he loved no longer sounded? He spent sleepless nights in the dark, listening to the gunfire, the car engines, the shouting, the laughter.

“Do you know what I've been thinking about a good deal lately, Moreno? An article you published last year about the desire everyone seemed to have to kill his adversary. I thought you were exaggerating.”

“I've been thinking about it too. ‘I Was Killing Them All' was the title. Then I saw it in
El Sol
and was almost ashamed to have used those words, though it was meant to be ironic. Some words shouldn't be written or pronounced. You say something without conviction or thinking, and once you've said it, it begins to be true.”

They said nothing else, uncomfortable in a silence they couldn't break. A bugle sounded from the garden in front of the Residence. On the athletic fields groups of militiamen were training to the beat of a drum.

“And you, Abel, do you plan to leave?”

He took a while to answer. How could Moreno Villa believe that if he was leaving, or trying to, it was because he'd planned the trip long before the war started, because in that earlier time, already as distant as a dream, he'd been invited to spend an academic year at an American university, to give classes and perhaps design a library? Others had already left, taking advantage of privileges, inventing international missions, diseases that required treatment abroad. There were rumors that Ortega himself hadn't really been gravely ill when he left, that at heart he sympathized with the Fascists or was in some way involved with them and feared reprisals. Ignacio Abel's words told the truth but sounded false, even to his own ears; they sounded like the lie of someone who's going to desert and repeats an explanation, an honorable alibi, especially when he heard himself saying that worst of all was not hearing anything from his wife and children on the other side of the front, so close and yet in another country, another world, the antithesis of this one but just as delirious. “I expected to take them with me,” he said, knowing it wasn't quite true, knowing the lie contaminated his sorrow over the absence of his children, imagining that perhaps Moreno Villa suspected other reasons, not just his possible cowardice and intention to flee Spain, but also what he'd probably learned or been told in a Madrid so rarefied and filled with gossip, especially because he lived in the Residence and had met Judith, witnessed with the astute eyes of an easily infatuated bachelor the first meetings between her and Ignacio Abel. Out of vanity or lack of imagination, you convince yourself that others pay attention to every little thing you do. Moreno Villa's sad, questioning eyes troubled Ignacio Abel, they probed his conscience, but as he spoke he noticed in his own voice a tone of imposture or guilt. Moreno Villa was thinking about something else, as much a prisoner of his ruminations and uncertainties as Abel was, just as perturbed by the eruption of all this madness, this bloody world he didn't understand and couldn't escape and couldn't ignore.

 

He said goodbye, promising he'd come back, and on the shaded side of the hill where the Residence stood like a tower keeping watch over the outskirts of Madrid, he looked for corpses, looked for Dr. Karl Ludwig Rossman. The scent of rockrose, thyme, and rosemary made him think of his children, the garden of the house in the Sierra, the path to the pond. He felt surrounded by death, days and nights haunted by an emptiness more powerful than the proximity of real people. Adela and his two children, their absence more real than his presence in the shadows of the house. And the thought of Judith Biely, invoked by his footsteps on dry grass, Judith coming toward him at nightfall through the grove of trees lit by paper lanterns while dance music from a radio played nearby, Judith still recently and secretly his, Judith seated with a group of foreign students, talking, looking at him with a complicity only he noticed. Behind the solitary dome of the Museum of Natural Sciences ran the irrigation ditch called the Canalillo. When the good weather came, metal tables and chairs were set up there, garlands of café lights hung among the tree branches. On the wall of the café kiosk, the whitewash was chipped by bullets and stained with blood. There were shoes in the summer's dry undergrowth, widowed shoes that had lost their mates, some women's, some men's, some worn down, and others still with the gleam of a recent shoeshine. He stepped on things that crunched: a shotgun cartridge, eyeglass lenses. He examined the frames but none resembled Professor Rossman's. In that cool morning at the end of August, the cicadas' chirping merged with the sound of running water in the irrigation ditch. Beyond the shade of the Lombardy poplars, the great expanse of Madrid, a city calmed by summer. From the hill of the Residence, not a trace of smoke, not a sign of war.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
he dreams a phone is ringing and he wakes too slowly, misses the call by a few seconds. The rings continue, each one more shrill than the last, and because he doesn't answer it, he won't know who's calling to ask for help, or to warn him of danger, or if it's Judith Biely, and, receiving no answer, she'll assume he's no longer in Madrid and they won't meet again, all because of a few moments' delay. In the dream he wakes: one ring, then another, and his body unresponsive to his will, wood or tiles or a rug under his bare feet, his bewilderment at not remembering where the phone is, then a rush to reach it, his hand stretching out and touching the receiver at the instant the vibration of the final ring dies down. Though her image now escapes his dreams, Judith Biely hovers over them like an oppressive absence, an unconquered void, a knife's edge present in the open wound, a footprint in damp sand. But if he had wakened more quickly and run unhesitatingly to the phone, she would have been there. If his fatigue hadn't been so profound, he'd have reached the phone in time to hear the voice of one of his children: a voice distant, altered by interference but recognizable, a little strange after not hearing it for so long.

In reality the phone call in his dream and the one when he is awake coincided only once. He opened his eyes knowing it had rung many times, and he was lying in the large, unmade bed. His body was heavy, slow, as in the dream. Light filtered through the closed shutters, but the house was so dark it was impossible to estimate the time. The hall seemed to lengthen as he walked down it. He brought the receiver to his ear and asked who was calling. At first he didn't recognize Bergamín's voice, weak and harsh at the same time, nasal.

“Abel, what took you so long? Come to the Alliance as fast as you can. I didn't wake you, did I?”

“Do you know where Professor Rossman is?”

“Come right away. I'm leaving town very soon.”

 

He understands now that there had been fear in Bergamín's voice, hidden behind the urgency, just as it was there later in his small eyes, tearing because of the cold that wet the tip of his nose, irritated by so much wiping with the wrinkled handkerchief he returned to his pocket as if hiding something indecent. Or perhaps not fear exactly but an uneasiness he wouldn't acknowledge, a disquiet because of a danger too varied or subtle to contemplate: the enemy might be advancing toward Madrid more quickly than anyone had foreseen; someone might doubt his orthodox loyalty to the cause in spite of his dedicated work at the Alliance and the articles he wrote blazing with a rage for justice; he might be compromised by having been seen with Ignacio Abel that morning in the courtyard of the Alliance, or making inquiries regarding the whereabouts of his German friend; he might be too late to board the plane at Barajas Airport that would take him to Paris and then on to Geneva to participate in the International Congress for Peace as a representative of Spanish intellectuals. He came out to the staircase of the Heredia Spinola Palace wearing a vaguely English formal suit for travel instead of the open shirt and aviator's leather jacket, and the morning sun made him blink, his eyes sunken beneath his eyebrows, not used to the light, fatigued by so much work in the gloomy office where he spent nights on end writing articles or ballads in his tiny, meticulous hand, correcting galleys of
The Blue Coverall.
After calling Ignacio Abel, he'd sat with both hands in front of his face, his thin fingertips brushing his damp nose. He'd consulted his watch, confirming that the large baroque clock hanging on the wall with the weapons of the marquises of Heredia Spinola was running slow—weapons repeated in all the palace's decorations, on the backs of chairs and fake-Renaissance carved credenzas, on ceiling frescoes and the chimneys of fireplaces. The plane to Paris was supposed to depart at eleven in the morning; it had the French flag clearly painted on the fuselage, so there was no danger of its being pursued by the enemy. He checked with his secretary that the car to the airport was ready in the courtyard and his briefcase with his passports, visas, and safe-conducts was already inside. With distracted pleasure he looked over the day's newspapers spread out on the enormous desk in his office, with their usual news that at no moment relieved the uneasiness, the disquiet that he shouldn't show even to himself, the fear that insinuated itself in his eyes, the drumming of fingers that reached for a cigarette or a match or counted the syllables of verses. He looked at the clock again and put on the tweed jacket suitable for travel, gathered up papers and put them in his portfolio and his pen in the breast pocket of his jacket, impatient, restless, irritated with Ignacio Abel, who sounded sleepy on the phone, who still hadn't arrived though he'd told him to hurry. “Mariana, I'm leaving. When the architect Abel arrives give him the instructions, tell him how important it is for him to complete the mission he's been entrusted with.” In a nearby hall the band was rehearsing for the masquerade ball the poet Alberti and his wife had been organizing for several days to honor the French writers visiting Madrid, taking advantage of the abundance of dress uniforms and carnival outfits in the wardrobes and trunks of the fugitive marquises. Bergamín was happy to miss the party. He avoided the collective festivities that Alberti and María Teresa León enjoyed so much, just as they relished poetry readings and speeches at the end of banquets honoring someone or other. Alberti had the slick profile of a film star; his wife, blond and buxom, her lips painted bright red, would put her hands on her hips and sway beside him, as if at any moment she might begin to sing a
jota
instead of reading a proclamation or reciting a war ballad. He heard her now, speaking loudly over the discord of the rehearsing instruments, giving instructions. When Bergamín spoke in public, he placed his lips too close to the microphone and hunched his shoulders instead of thrusting out his chest and lifting his chin; when anthems were sung and he raised his fist, he did so as if contracting rather than clenching it; and he was conscious of his own posture as well as his weak voice when singing “The Internationale.” He probably looked ridiculous now as he stepped out onto the palace stairs, his eyes squinting, frail among the militiamen and drivers going back and forth in the courtyard among the trucks that came and went, the workers gingerly moving paintings, sculptures, boxes of books, so many valuable objects rescued from churches in danger of being burned or palaces abandoned, subject to looting after the owners had been detained or executed.
The implacable surgery of the people's justice.
He'd written the sentence himself in his beautiful hand, so tiny it damaged his eyes. He thought of the line when he saw Ignacio Abel coming through the entrance gate, agitated, for once not wearing a tie, afraid Bergamín had left. He'd have preferred not to see Abel. One minute more and he'd have watched him through the window of the car now waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, a gleaming Hispano-Suiza that perhaps had also belonged to the owners of the palace, on which there were no painted slogans but a modern, discreet sign on the doors:
ALLIANCE OF ANTI-FASCIST INTELLECTUALS—PRESIDENT'S OFFICE.
Ignacio Abel had already seen him. Bergamín signaled that he should follow him into the vestibule, where the leaded stained glass diffused an opalescent light tinted with bright reds, yellows, blues.