In the Night of Time

13

LULLED TO SLEEP by the rhythm of the train, he saw his children vividly in the lightning flash of a dream. Perhaps he heard their voices too, because now he remembers that they were close, somewhat weakened, like voices in an open space, perhaps the garden of the house in the Sierra or the edge of the irrigation pond; voices heard in the late afternoon, with an echo of withdrawal and anticipated distance; the past and present collapsed, the recovered voices and the sound of the train filtering into his half-sleep, lit by an alloy of light from the Hudson and the Sierra de Madrid. A voice no longer heard fades away in memory, after a few years it’s forgotten, as, they say, people who lose their sight gradually forget colors. Ignacio Abel can no longer remember his father’s voice and doesn’t even know when he forgot it. His mother’s he can invoke in association with words or phrases peculiar to her: the way she shouted I’m coming when an impatient tenant called for her from the doorway, when someone knocked on the glass of the porter’s lodging. He does remember that: the vibration of the frosted glass, the ringing of the bell, and his mother’s footsteps, slower and slower as she aged and grew heavier and clumsier because of arthritis, yet she preserved a sharp, young tone and streetwise inflection in her voice. I’m coming, she shouted, adding, under her breath, We’re not airplanes.

He wonders whether his children will begin to forget his voice as well, his face gradually replaced by the frozen image in a photograph. Distance makes his return that much more difficult. Minutes, hours, days, kilometers, distance multiplied by time. Right now, immobile, leaning back in the train, his face next to the window, he continues to leave, to go away. Distance is not a fixed, stable measurement but an expansive wave that pulls him in its centrifugal current, its icy vacuum of unlimited space. Trains, ocean liners, cabs, subway cars, rambling steps to the end of unknown streets. Hotel room after hotel room always at the end of similar flights of steep stairs and narrow halls with identical smells, a universal geography of desolation. But his children, like Judith Biely, are also moving away at the same velocity in different directions, and each instant and each step added to the distance makes his return more improbable. There’s no way to undo the kind of destruction that can sweep away and overturn everything, no way to overcome the accelerated course of time. Doors closing behind him, rooms where he’ll never sleep again, corridors, customs barriers, nautical miles, kilometers traveled north by the train carrying him to another unknown place, just a name now, Rhineberg, a hill in a forest beside steep banks and a white building that doesn’t yet exist, whose initial sketches are in his briefcase: rough, essentially reluctant drafts of a project that might never be built. Constantly going forward, never going back, adding distances, geographical accidents, plains, mountain ranges, cities, battlefronts, countries, entire continents, oceans, modest hotel rooms.

Memory, like any construction material, has degrees or indices of resistance that in theory one should be able to calculate. How long does it take to forget a voice and not be able to invoke it at will, its unique, mysterious timbre, its tone when it says certain words, whispers in one’s ear or calls from a distance, at once intimate and remote in a telephone receiver, saying everything when it pronounces a name, sweet words it had not spoken to anyone until then. Or perhaps it has: perhaps others remember that same voice, unknown men who haunt like shadows the unexplored country of the past, the earlier lives of Judith Biely, the one she must be living now; eyes that also rested on her naked body, hands and lips that caressed her and to which she surrendered with abandon. To whom else had she said those words, even more singular and exciting because they belonged to another language, honey, my dear, my love. To whom was she saying them now, to whom had she said them in the three months she’d been away from Spain, back in America or perhaps wandering again through European cities, gradually forgetting him, not contaminated by the Spanish misfortune, free of it just by crossing the border, equally immune to the suffering of love and the mourning of a country that, after all, isn’t hers. As spontaneously as she’d decided to become his lover one early October afternoon in Madrid, she decided to break things off a little more than eight months later, toward the middle of July, with a determination that left no room for ambiguity or remorse, and perhaps has also made her immune to pain. So little time, if you stop to think about it. Ignacio Abel continues to see her in his dreams but doesn’t hear her voice. Perhaps it was Judith Biely’s voice he heard saying his name so clearly in Pennsylvania Station, and yet a moment later he couldn’t identify or remember it. Without the photographs, the voice fades before the face. The photo is absence, the voice is presence. The photo is the pain of the past, the fixed point left behind in time: the frozen image, invariable in appearance, yet more and more distant, more unfaithful, the semblance of a shadow vanishing almost as rapidly on photographic paper as in memory. Feeling his pockets, tormented by the thought of losing any of the few things he now possesses, Ignacio Abel finds his wallet and with his fingertips seeks the photo Judith Biely gave him shortly after they met. In it she smiles just as she’ll smile at him only a few weeks later, with confidence, not holding anything back, openly showing the plenitude of her expectations. The photo awakened Ignacio Abel’s jealousy of Judith’s earlier life in which he didn’t exist and about which he preferred not knowing, not asking, fearing the inevitable male shadows that were there. Perhaps what made her smile and turn, forgetting about the automatic click of the camera, was a man’s presence. What had excited him most about her from the start was what made him most afraid and what had eventually taken her away from him: the strength of her will, which he’d not seen in any other woman, manifested in each of her gestures as clearly as her physical beauty. The flash in the automatic photo booth gleamed on her curly hair, teeth, shining eyes; it rebounded off the line of her cheekbones. That photo was the same one Adela had held in her hands, bewildered, in a kind of fog that threw her features out of focus, and was about to tear up but merely dropped to the floor, along with two or three letters, leaning against the desk in his study whose drawers Ignacio Abel had forgotten to lock.

Unlike Judith’s voice, Adela’s remains intact in his memory. He’s often heard it calling to him, as she sometimes called to him when she had a bad dream and clung to him in bed, her eyes closed, to be certain he was near. He’s heard it coming from the end of the hall in the apartment in Madrid, as clear in wakefulness as in dreams, on summer nights when the noises of war were gradually becoming routine, waking him at times with the feeling that Adela had come back, crossed the front line, returned to claim him and demand an explanation. How dirty the house was, how disordered the rooms. (There were no longer maids who came in to clean, no cook to prepare food for the señor, soon there wouldn’t even be food.) Too bad he’d let the plants on the balcony die. What a shame he hadn’t made more of an effort to get in touch with his wife and children. The complaints written in the letter he should have torn up or at least left behind in the hotel room in New York, those remembered and the ones imagined, intertwine in the monotonous sound of a voice that belongs to Adela and to his own guilty conscience. How strange not to have felt in her voice that she suspected, that she knew. How could she not have known? How strange not to be able to see oneself from the outside, in the looks of others, those who are closest and suspect though they would have preferred not to find out, who discover without understanding. The boy so serious in the last few months, so withdrawn, observing, standing at the door of his room when his father lowered his voice to speak on the phone in the hall. Ignacio Abel turned to wave a last goodbye after the gate closed at the house in the Sierra, and Miguel, standing next to his mother and sister at the top of the steps, looked and didn’t look at him, as if not wanting to believe that gesture of farewell, as if wanting to let him know he wasn’t deceived, that he, his scorned twelve-year-old son, knew with incongruous lucidity about his father’s impatience, his desire to leave, the relief he felt getting into the car or quickening his pace on the way to the station so as not to miss the train that would take him back to Madrid. His mother, next to him, remained enveloped in a fog of sorrow that rarely lifted, and Miguel could not grasp her motives no matter how much he scrutinized her; Lita became quite emotional, uncharacteristically so, and perhaps somewhat superficially, just as she did when she saw her father arrive and ran out to embrace him and tell him right away the grades she’d received, the books she’d read.

With clarity Ignacio Abel now relives a scene, the paused image in a documentary film: night in the apartment, the white cloth on the dining room table illuminated by the chandelier, the gold-green light reflecting on place settings and white china plates, the crystal of glasses. The time is February, a few days before the elections. He sees it from the outside, from a distance, a domestic scene glimpsed by the solitary stranger on a street in a city where he doesn’t know anyone, where nothing awaits him but a hotel room. He’s at the head of the table and Adela faces him, the children at the sides in their assigned seats, holding a quiet, trivial conversation while the maid walks down the hall after serving the soup, the maid who was now putting on a white cap and apron, ordered to do so by the señora, who was becoming more and more strict about such details, who a short while before had reprimanded the cook for going out in a hat instead of the kerchief or beret appropriate to her position. Miguel moved his left leg nervously under the table and attempted with little success not to make noise eating his soup. He observed out of the corner of his eye, in a permanent state of alert, attentive to the smallest detail or hint of danger with a sensibility much more acute than his capacity to reason, and therefore more restless. He imagined himself transformed into an invisible man like the one in the movie he’d seen a few Saturdays before with Lita and the maids, behind the back of his father, who, like a distracted, arbitrary monarch, forbade excursions to the movies whenever he heard about an epidemic of something or other in Madrid. The Invisible Man! Miguel was easily overwhelmed when he liked a film a great deal. He couldn’t sit still; he leaned forward in his seat as if trying to be closer to the screen, to sink into it, convulsed with laughter or trembling with fear, pinching Lita, punching her, so enthralled by the film that when they left the theater he was lightheaded, agitated, and that night there was no way to keep him quiet when the lights were turned off; he wanted to keep talking to Lita about the scenes and characters, and when she fell asleep he was still too excited to close his eyes, and he relived the film, imagining variations in which he himself played a part. The chilling enigma of a scientific discovery that offers superhuman powers to the person who controls it! How marvelous to spy without anyone seeing you, to watch everything with no danger of being caught. On his way home from school he’d seen on the door of the shabby theater he was allowed to go to with Lita and the maids the ferocious poster for a film with a black silhouette holding a letter and a large magnifying glass. THE SEALED ENVELOPE (The Secret of the Dardanelles). COMING SOON. How fantastic that phrase was — coming soon — what excitement it unleashed in him when he simply thought about it, about the days left until the film opened, about the possibility of being sick or coming home from school with a failing grade and as punishment not being allowed to go to the movies. If his father became aware of his jiggling leg, he’d scold him, but Miguel hoped the tablecloth would hide it, and in any case he was incapable of sitting still or ordering his leg to stop. “You’re sewing on the Singer,” his father would say. “It seems the boy will have a tailor’s vocation after all.” They all acted in their predictable ways, repeated themselves, the same gestures, but Miguel was the one they all noticed — the scapegoat, he thought, feeling sorry for himself, the black sheep. He thought the Dardanelles in the title of the movie must be members of some secret society of spies or international traffickers, and Lita had laughed at him, calling him ignorant, and told him the Dardanelles was the name of a strait. “And why do you care if your son moves his leg, it’s not serious,” his mother would say, giving his father a look at once concerned and resigned, different from the one she gave the boy, with whom she had to be both indulgent and severe. Dinner became a series of increasingly difficult tests, a race of exasperating slowness, and as he weakened, tripping over obstacles, jiggling his leg without a moment’s rest under the table, unable to sit still in his chair, Lita sat across from him, gliding as if on a magic carpet, smiling and self-confident, eating her soup in silence, handling her knife and fork without leaning her elbows on the table, politely attentive to the adults’ conversation and at times asking a question or making an observation that didn’t provoke an ironic or condescending reply, the kind he’d become used to hearing from his father. He would have liked to run out, not leaving his napkin folded beside the plate, not asking permission to leave the table, just becoming invisible, floating along the hall toward the partially prohibited territory filled with promise at the back of the house, the kitchen and laundry room and tiny room the cook and the maid shared, where he could hear the sound of the radio, with Angelillo singing a song that brought tears to his eyes, the story of the gravedigger Juan Simón, who one day finds himself obliged to bury his own daughter, dead in the bloom of life:

I’m a gravedigger coming back

Oh, I’m a gravedigger coming back

From burying my own heart.

Miguel wanted to see that film at all costs. He wanted to see it because he liked the song and because the cook and maid had already seen it and told him about it in detail, both of them moved as they remembered it, pausing to recall some dramatic moment. He wanted to see it even more because his father, mother, and sister seemed to have agreed to dislike it without having seen it. His mother wouldn’t ridicule him or become angry if she caught him beside the radio, his eyes filled with tears. But she wouldn’t have defended him either. She was distressed by his lack of masculinity, by the possibility he would awaken his father’s distaste and contempt. But what hurt Miguel most was that Lita had taken the adults’ side. She, his accomplice in loving movies on the afternoons they laughed and laughed at the theater watching the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin, or shivered with fear as they watched Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, also disliked movies with flamenco songs and regional dancing, precisely the ones the maids and Miguel liked best. She’d refused to go with him to Juan Simón’s Daughter. She’d listened with an approving expression when their father said to their mother a few nights earlier during dinner:

“Look at Buñuel, who was so much a surrealist and so modern, and now he’s not embarrassed to earn a pile of money producing that piece of folkloric idiocy, Juan Simón’s Daughter.”

Folkloric idiocy. Miguel knew he was going to say or do something wrong, and precisely because he knew it, the transgression was inevitable. How hard would it have been for him to remain silent when his father made that scornful comment about Buñuel? But he couldn’t help it, he didn’t even think about it; he knew what he was going to say, and he said it, and as he did he became aware of the inevitable reprimand he’d receive and the fact that his mother and sister weren’t going to defend him:

“Well, Herminia says it’s a picture you cry over and it has pretty songs.”

“Herminia.” His father repeated the maid’s name with burlesque seriousness. “A great cinematic authority.”

Now the song was coming from the end of the hall, and they all acted as if they didn’t hear it. Or perhaps Miguel was the only one who did, nervously shaking his leg under the table, watching his father’s face out of the corner of his eye, noting that his mother, beneath her air of absent placidity, was becoming tense, and Lita, far removed from the possibility of disaster, was recounting a recent excursion with her classmates to the Prado. He admired her as unconditionally as he had when he was little; he admired her even when he resented and despised her because she fawned over their father, when he was tempted to spill ink on her impeccable exercise notebook, or step as if accidentally on one of those school albums in which Lita glued leaves and dried flowers. If she could concentrate on everything she did, and move with so much serenity and in a straight line, it was because she wasn’t distracted or alarmed by the sounds of danger, because she lacked the invisible antennae that detected the turmoil he always provoked. His father was going to be irritated because the music on the radio was too loud, because the maid, when she left the dining room, didn’t close the door behind her, and because the kitchen door was open. That’s why it was so difficult for him to concentrate: because he was mindful of too many things at the same time, because he guessed what the others were thinking or sensed changes in their states of mind, like those barometers in school with fast-moving needles that registered atmospheric disturbances.

Then the telephone rang, just as Miguel was swallowing a mouthful of water, so focused on not making noise that the first ring startled him and made him choke. Sitting across from him, Lita put her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. The telephone didn’t stop ringing, shrill in the silence that had fallen after his coughing had stopped. How was it possible that his father and sister didn’t hear it? His father, rigid with anger, concentrated meticulously on chewing. With an abrupt gesture his mother placed her fork and knife on her plate and left the dining room, and a moment later the ringing stopped and her voice was heard in the hall, uneasy because it was unusual for people to call so late: “Who’s calling? Who? One moment.” She returned to the dining room unhurriedly, seemed more serious and more tired than a moment earlier, looking at his father in a strange way when she gave him the message.

“It’s for you. From your office, a woman who sounds foreign.”

“Well, it’s a fine time for people to be calling,” said Lita, unaware of what Miguel’s eyes saw but his mind couldn’t decipher, innocent of all uncertainty, of any suspicion of danger, sure in the world.

Inside his apartment, Ignacio Abel crossed the invisible border to his other life, walking down the dark hallway to the phone on the wall, to the unexpected voice of Judith Biely, leaving behind the family scene in the dining room, interrupted and blurred on the other side of the glass that filtered light and voices. In a few seconds and in so small a space, his heart pounding in his chest, he took on his other identity; he stopped being a father and husband to become a lover; his movements became more secretive, less confident; his voice was changing to become the one Judith would hear — hoarse, anxious, altered by a mixture of bewilderment, happiness, and the sudden fear that it wasn’t she who called, breaking an unspoken agreement for a reason that must be serious. His hand trembled when he picked up the earpiece, still swaying against the wall; his voice sounded so low and rasping that Judith, equally anxious in the telephone booth in a café whose location she didn’t know, at first didn’t recognize it. She too spoke quietly, quickly, in English and a moment afterward in Spanish, short phrases, murmured so close to the mouthpiece that Ignacio Abel heard her breathing and could almost feel on his ear the brush of her lips. “Please come and rescue me. Casi no sé dónde estoy. Unos hombres venían siguiéndome. I want to see you right away.”

He’ll always long for that voice, even when he can no longer recall it at will and has stopped hearing it in the unpredictability of certain dreams or turning when he thinks he’s heard her saying his name. During the demented, bloody summer in Madrid, when he went about like a shadow, what he missed most was not the reasonable certainty of not being murdered, or the solid routine of a former life that had disintegrated overnight, but something more secret, more his own, more irretrievably lost: the possibility of dialing a certain number and hearing Judith Biely’s voice, the miracle that somewhere in Madrid, at the end of an automobile or streetcar ride, an impatient walk, Judith Biely would be waiting for him, much more desirable than in his imagination, surprising him with the joy of her presence, as if no matter how persistently he tried, he could never remember how much she meant to him.

“It was a secretary, a new girl,” he said, back in the dining room, not looking at anyone in particular, putting on his jacket, reckless, a liar, indifferent to the mediocrity of his performance. “There was an emergency at a construction site. A scaffold collapsed.”

“Call if you see you’ll be back late.”

“I don’t think it’s all that important.”

“Papá, are you going in the car? Will you take me with you?”

“What ideas you have, child,” Adela said. “You’re just what your papá needs now.”

“I’ll take a taxi and get there faster.”

Just a few minutes earlier the night had been closed off for him, the predictable, dull night of family routine: supper, conversation, the distant sounds of the street, the resignation to the details of tedium. The warmth from the heating system, the lethargic, enveloped life, lined in the felt of house slippers and pajamas, the tenaciously won comfort of a house protected against the winter cold. And now the unexpected happened, stillness was transformed into motion, warmth into the knife wound of cold when he stepped out of the building, resignation into temerity, Madrid at night opening like a limitless countryside he’d cross at top speed in a taxi to meet Judith Biely, so the promise would be kept, enunciated not in her words but in the tone of her voice: the desire, the urgency, the certainty of embracing her and kissing her a few minutes later. Through the taxi window he saw the city as if he were dreaming it. Light fog swaddled the lights and made the paving stones and trolley tracks glow with a damp luster. He looked at the solitary displays in store windows, lit in empty streets, the large windows of cafés, the electric light in dining rooms where family suppers were taking place, identical to the one he’d just left and that now seemed like a painful episode in a uniform servitude he’d escaped. Not forever, of course, and not for the whole night, but any measure of time was enough for him now, two hours, even just one hour. There was no currency of minutes his covetousness wouldn’t be thankful for, minutes and seconds that decreased with the clicking sound of the numbers as they changed on the meter, with the accelerating beat of his heart. Election posters covered the façades in the Puerta del Sol. In the drizzle, violent searchlights lit the gigantic round face of the candidate Gil Robles, occupying an entire building, crowned with involuntary absurdity by a neon advertisement for Anís del Mono: Grant Me Your Vote and I’ll Return a Great Spain to You. He recalled Philip Van Doren’s fixed stare and sarcastic tone amid the smoke and the noise of a jazz band: “Do you believe, Professor Abel, like your coreligionist Largo Caballero, that if the right wins the elections, the proletariat will start a civil war?” The icy wind shook the cables from which the streetlights were suspended, lengthening convulsive shadows on the sidewalk. The taxi moved slowly toward the Calle Mayor, making its way through a labyrinth of streetcars. His imagination anticipated illusions of what was now imminent: the arches and gardens of the Plaza Mayor, the lanterns at the corners of Calle Toledo, the café where Judith Biely waited for him, her profile standing out in spite of the smoke inside and the steam that covered the glass, the young woman, alone and foreign, whom the men looked at brazenly and approached, almost touching her, to say things in a low voice. In the city where one has always lived, ordinary trips can be equivalent to profound journeys in time: crossing Madrid to meet his lover one inauspicious night in February, Ignacio Abel traveled from his present life to the streets of his distant childhood, to which he almost never returned, along which he’d never walked with her. The impulse of the taxi in the direction of the future returned him to the past, and along the way he got rid of so many years to reach her with the truest part of himself. He erased what at this moment didn’t matter to him at all, what he would have given without hesitation for the time with Judith Biely: his career, his dignity, his bourgeois apartment in the Salamanca district, his wife, his children. Before the end of the trip he was searching his pockets for coins to pay the driver, leaning forward to see the exact corner and the café, the silhouette of Judith Biely. He was surprised to find himself moving his left leg as nervously as Miguel, who’d looked at him so seriously when he left the dining room, adjusting his tie, making sure the keys were in his pocket.

He said, “I won’t be back late,” and in Miguel’s neutral gaze was a disbelief all the more wounding because it was completely instinctive and revealed like an unexpected mirror the mediocre quality of his imposture, the gestures of an actor who convinces no one. But that sting of alarm and disgust with himself was quickly suppressed, wiped away by haste, by physical exaltation that carried him down the stairs, the road to the invigorating cold of the street that filled his lungs as he ran to the next corner, looking for a taxi. Standing next to the window of his room while Lita slept, Miguel was looking at the same deserted corner of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, lit by a street lamp, listening in silence to the beat of footsteps on the sidewalk, imagining they were his father’s when in fact they belonged to the watchman who checked the building entrances, striking the ground at regular intervals with the iron tip of his pike. He’d awakened in the dark, thinking he heard the elevator’s motor when it stopped, recalling something he’d read before he fell asleep, hiding the magazine under the pillow when their mother came in to say good night, an article on people buried alive, from which he learned a word that in itself frightened him — catalepsy — a word whose meaning Lita knew, of course. How many people have been buried alive? How many have consummated their agony — the most terrible one of all — in the place of their eternal rest? He was fascinated to discover that for attentive eyes and ears, there was no such thing as total darkness or total silence. As he looked at the room in shadows it became filled with light, just as when slow-moving clouds drift away from the face of the full moon. He’d read in one of the cheap magazines about crimes and wonders that the maids bought that in a secret laboratory in Moscow, scientists were developing x-ray glasses that allowed you to see in absolute darkness and a magnetic-wave pistol that killed silently. THE ENIGMA OF MYSTERIOUS RAYS THAT BRING LONG-DISTANCE DEATH. What had been at the moment he awoke an oppressive silence was transformed into a jungle of noises: Lita’s breathing, wood creaking, the vibration of the windowpane when a car passed on the street, the strikes of the sereno’s pike, the growl of the heating pipes, the muffled echo of the opposing forces that, according to his father’s explanation, kept the entire building standing, never at rest, expanding and contracting like a great animal breathing; and farther away, or at least in a space difficult for him to locate, another sound that Miguel couldn’t define, that stopped and then started again after a while, like the sound of his blood when he rested his ear on the pillow. He sat up in bed very quietly, making certain it wasn’t the elevator he heard. He stood up slowly, the cold of the wood floor on the soles of his feet, the annoying need to urinate that would force him to go out into the hall. His father and mother reproached him for not reading, but his head, when he couldn’t sleep, was full of disturbing things he’d read in the paper. SCOTLAND YARD INVESTIGATES A CASE OF CRIMES COMMITTED BY SLEEPWALKERS. The sound of labored, intermittent breathing returned, something that never changed into a voice but did contain a lament. When he left the room he was the Invisible Man, invisible and wrapped in silence, walking barefoot, turning cooperative doorknobs. It frightened him to be a sleepwalker and be dreaming as he walked toward a victim who’d be found dead at dawn, his face contorted in terror. The clock in the living room rumbled and struck five, one strike after the other, leaving a resonance that took a long time to disappear. From the end of the hall, as long and black as a tunnel, came the double snores of the maid and the cook, as methodical as a bellows machine, with interruptions of quiet in the midst of which he still heard the other sound, the intermittent breathing, the lament. Suspended like the Invisible Man at his parents’ bedroom door, free of the force of gravity by virtue of another invention no less decisive—an anti-gravitational injection will facilitate space travel—he leaned against the door to hear better, to be certain it was his mother’s voice he was hearing, familiar and at the same time unfamiliar, a high-pitched moan that suddenly became deep, as if it had come from someone else’s throat: a long moan muffled against a pillow, a lament that broke into weeping or isolated words it was impossible to decipher. Perhaps his mother would die if he didn’t go in and wake her. Perhaps she was suffering from a horrible disease and hadn’t told anyone. He wanted to stay and he wanted to run away. He wanted to save her from the disease or an affront he couldn’t imagine, and he wanted not to hear her, not to be awake with icy feet by the door, to enjoy the tranquility of his sister’s sleep right now, immune to uneasiness and danger. Suppose his father had come back and his mother was arguing with him? With a rush of panic he saw the landing light go on beneath the entrance door and heard the elevator start up. That would be the last straw: to have his father come back and find him in the hall, standing in the dark, at five in the morning. He’d have to hurry back to his room, but that would bring him to the front door, and his bad luck would turn his retreat into a trap. What he couldn’t afford to do was stand there, paralyzed. He rushed forward blindly and closed the door of his room behind him just as the elevator stopped at the landing. His heart pounded in his chest like the beats of a kettledrum in a scary movie. His father turned the key in the lock, walked slowly down the hall in the dark, leaving a long interval between steps as unfamiliar as those of a stranger. Motionless on the bed, his feet cold, his hands crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, Miguel achieved a state of perfect catalepsy.