In the Night of Time

15

UNCLE VíCTOR STOOD behind him and grasped his wrists because the pistol was too heavy for the boy to hold level. With an instructor’s brusqueness, he had Miguel spread his legs, explaining that he had to have a firm stance so the recoil from firing didn’t throw him off balance, that he mustn’t believe the foolishness in movies — you don’t squeeze the trigger with the pistol next to your hip but keep it raised to eye level in order to aim, and you hold tight with both hands. Uncle Víctor, whom Miguel admired so much as he grew older and projected onto him a vaguely romantic masculinity — even more so now, since a change had recently become visible in Víctor that Ignacio Abel hadn’t noticed because he paid no attention to his brother-in-law. A general vagueness always surrounded his changing aspirations, which had almost nothing in common except a lack of practical substance and the indulgent, wishful spirit with which Adela received them. He was too precocious, but sooner or later he’d find his way. He’d been sickly as a boy, with weak lungs, spending time in a sanatorium in the Sierra, which had affected his character and held him back in primary and secondary school. Wasn’t it inevitable that his parents and older sister were sometimes more permissive or more protective than necessary? He studied law but apparently didn’t complete the course of study or had to extend it longer than usual because he decided to complement it with studies in philosophy — more appropriate, according to his sister, to his literary or artistic temperament; he undoubtedly would finish his studies with brilliant grades and perhaps sit for a competitive examination for a government position, which would give him the free time needed to cultivate his artistic tastes without fear of poverty. Slim volumes of verse with the austere typography of Índice or the Revista de Occidente occupied more space in the literary, smoke-filled disorder of his room than the numerous legal texts he’d once consulted so often that his mother, Doña Cecilia, had feared that so much studying of thousands of pages of tiny print would weaken his health and ruin his eyes, just as she feared that his immoderate fondness for cigarettes would eventually damage his lungs, forcing him to return to the sanatorium. It seemed he’d begun to write verses, though he was shy and very much a perfectionist and decided not to show them even to his older sister. A poem of his was accepted, but it took so long to appear in print that Víctor became discouraged with poetry and acquired a passionate interest in the theater. He withdrew to the house in the Sierra for several weeks during the winter to write a drama somewhere between symbolist and social realist. He submitted the first draft for Adela’s consideration, requesting two things: that she be sincere in her criticism and that she not show the writing to her husband, a man totally lacking in literary sensibility, and informing her in confidence of the possibility that Cipriano Rivas Cherif might offer to stage the work. The first draft wasn’t detailed, and the storm of theatrical inspiration didn’t last long, perhaps because the prospects for the drama’s premiere soon became uncertain, given the crudeness of the public and the blindness of the producers, interested only in the risk-free money provided by renowned authors. Hadn’t García Lorca made a fool of himself with that overly poetic work in which the actors came onstage dressed as butterflies, grasshoppers, and crickets, provoking the coarsest jokes in the parterre? Adela would look at her brother and wish she didn’t notice what she was sure her husband saw, a certain weakness of character, the fascination he felt for things he’d just discovered and soon forgot, no tangible occupation or project ever solidifying for him. In that regard, Don Francisco de Asís recognized with genealogical regret that his only son had turned out more Salcedo than Ponce-Cañizares. When it seemed that in spite of everything he was about to complete his two courses of study at the same time, after a period of prodigious seclusion with his books, it turned out that he’d temporarily abandoned the study of law, so enthralled by philosophy he forgot to let the family know of his decision; above all else he had to start earning a living — he was almost thirty and didn’t think it honorable to go on being supported by his father; he’d attend night classes while he worked in the patent company owned by a friend of his, owner or second in command, so close a friend he’d offered him, a newcomer, a high salary and a position of responsibility. At dinner, Ignacio Abel, his head lowered, listened to Adela’s rendition of her brother’s new prospects, and she, suddenly aware of Víctor’s untenable vagueness, defended him all the more vigorously. “Is Uncle Víctor really going to be an inventor?” Miguel’s innocent question provoked a subtle smile on his father’s lips, and fear in Adela that any comment from Ignacio would make her brother look ridiculous in front of the children. “Not an inventor,” Lita corrected him, intensifying without realizing it her mother’s humiliation. “Since Uncle Víctor’s almost a lawyer by now, he’s going to help inventors so nobody cheats them and steals their discoveries.”

The almost-lawyer had girlfriends to whom he nearly became engaged, and through one of them he had been working for a time or was about to work for the theater company La Barraca, its repertoire dominated by classical and poetic works, and for them his knowledge of staging and lighting was quite adequate; he’d acquired it by studying foreign theatrical magazines, written in languages Víctor seemed to have learned when taking informal lessons with native teachers — the lively spontaneity of conversation preferable to rote memorization or the dullness of grammar — overcoming the legendary slowness with languages that afflicted both sides of the family equally, as Don Francisco de Asís admitted openly. Busy as a set or lighting designer on tour with the company — his father wasn’t aware of its political significance, in part because of ignorant innocence, in part because he took it for granted that a theater company devoted to honor dramas and mystery plays would be composed of people as solidly reactionary as he was — Víctor hadn’t been able to appear for final examinations at one of the two schools where he was still matriculated, or perhaps at neither of them. But that didn’t really matter, for once he began working it wouldn’t be so urgent for him to obtain his degree to establish himself in a position. And in the unlikely event that the practically certain job in the patent office fell through — guided by his incorrigible good faith, Víctor sometimes trusted more than he should have in his friends’ promises and came away bitterly offended — couldn’t Ignacio Abel find something temporary for him in the offices of University City or the studio of one of his architect friends, or look into the matter with Dr. Juan Negrín or one of those high-ranking public officers whom he knew? Didn’t everything in Spain now depend more on political influence than on personal merit, no matter how high that might be, especially if you came from a family of monarchist importance, with “profound Spanish and Catholic roots,” as Don Francisco de Asís declaimed in his tremendous organ voice at the family table? But Adela knew her husband wouldn’t lift a finger for her brother. She would have to overcome her pride and appeal on his behalf. Ignacio Abel understood what Adela was suggesting, but he wasn’t about to give in, wasn’t going to spare her a single step or the humiliation of begging. He’d make some mild, irrelevant remark that he’d have prepared ahead of time. If Víctor had mastered so many languages and possessed such varied talents, why hadn’t he found any work, not even as a clerk? Couldn’t Don Francisco de Asís place him as a page in some provincial delegation?

Ignacio Abel didn’t see the changes, subtle at first, and not only in matters of wardrobe. His brother-in-law’s explanations, vague as always, were beginning to have a political tinge, an element of hysteria. The same people controlled everything in Spain. To accomplish anything, one had to submit to the political directives of a few intellectuals who meddled in magazines, newspapers, and the theater, and the teaching in university lecture halls was so dominated by Soviet agitators that classes were not worth attending. And women were renouncing their femininity. Some went to the university in berets and mannish jackets, and argued louder than men, never taking the cigarette out of their mouth. How long would it be before they shouted, “Children yes, husbands no,” the way they did in Russia? Once again, Víctor fell victim to his own idealism, unaware of the price he would have to pay if he fully embraced the ideas he was preaching, the doors that were already closing because of his life decisions. Disillusioned by the hostility he found in literary cliques, he’d stopped frequenting the gatherings in Altolaguirre’s printing house or those refined Sunday teas at the home of María y Araceli Zambrano, increasingly attended by suspicious-looking people. Others wanted it both ways: he gave himself body and soul to what he believed, especially since going to the founding meeting of the Falange at the Teatro de la Comedia, overwhelmed by the eloquence and gallantry of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. That man didn’t talk like a politician, he talked like a poet. Nations in their moments of crisis were moved not by political leaders but by poets and visionaries. That his brother-in-law sometimes appeared in a blue shirt seemed as inconsequential to Ignacio Abel as his former enthusiasms for the black cape and wild hair of a bohemian and the absurd workers’ coveralls worn by the young university gentlemen of La Barraca. The political manifestoes he now left behind after his visits were as florid and vacuous as the literary magazines he’d read with the same devotion a few years back. He stopped wearing rings on his fingers and reclining on the sofa smoking cigarettes. Now he’d become expert in motorcycles — as soon as he had a steady job he’d begin saving to buy one — and he brought his nephew Miguel photographs of soccer players and cycling stars, talking to him of sports about which he suddenly knew everything. He walked now striking his heels harder on the floor and combed his hair straight back, revealing the bony structure of his skull and the progress of the hair loss he inherited from his mother’s family, the bald Salcedo heads immortalized in oil portraits and daguerreotypes for over a century. He began to laugh in sonorous guffaws, to shake hands in a virile fashion, obliquely curving his palm downward. He sat at the table with his shirtsleeves rolled up, wielding his knife and fork with a soldier’s severity, forearms darker now, tanned by outdoor exercise, by the marches and sham military maneuvers he attended on Sundays in the Sierra, to which he promised Miguel he’d take him sometime, without his father knowing, he said, lowering his voice in a conspiratorial tone. When he came in and walked along the hallway the others could hear the heels of his boots resounding and smell the oiled leather. The children got up from the table without asking permission to run to greet him, and Adela got up too and followed them, containing the joy awakened in her by the surprise appearance of her brother, overcoming the silent censure of Ignacio Abel, who remained alone at the dining room table with the dishes served and the soup growing cold. Among the privileges of a brother was appearing unannounced at his sister’s house.

“Brother-in-law, you don’t need to pretend. I know you don’t like my ideas.”

“What ideas? It’s uniforms, isn’t it? Uniforms are more important than ideas, considering the love all of you have for them.”

“Who are ‘all of you,’ may I ask?”

“All of you. Red shirts, blue shirts, brown shirts, black shirts. Aren’t there some in Cataluña who wear green shirts? The golden age of the tailoring industry. Did you people make a pact with the Communists so they’d wear the light blue shirts and you’d wear the darker ones? Not to mention the boots, the leather straps, the neckerchiefs, the parades marching in step, the flags.”

“Papá, the uniforms are pretty.”

“You be quiet, girl, when adults are speaking. Do you play at wearing uniforms now in the schoolyard? Do you play at singing anthems and attacking one another with clubs and sticks when you meet on the street?”

“Ignacio, that’s no way to speak to your daughter.”

“You have to be retarded to put on a uniform for fun, for theater. To play at armies.”

“Brother-in-law, don’t say that, we’ll get angry.”

“I’ve said it and don’t take it back.”

“I’ll bet when you see the Socialist Pioneers marching down Calle de Argüelles on Sunday when you come back from the Sierra, you’re not quite so irritated.”

“I feel exactly the same shame. The same revulsion. Everyone the same, marching in time, clenching their fists, clenching their teeth. I don’t care about the color of the shirt. I don’t like children praying like parrots with their hands together, and I don’t like raising fists and singing ‘The Internationale’ in the same tone you’d use for ‘With Flowers for Mary.’ Decent people don’t hide behind a uniformed crowd.”

“When you get like this, it’s better to leave you alone.”

Adela, who feared his silence so much, was more frightened now of his cold rage, spoken with a conscious effort not to raise his voice and not to look in anyone’s eyes.

“I don’t think that’s a bad idea.”

“It’s a matter of generations, Adela.” The esthete suddenly became philosophical, speaking with an unfamiliar tone of equanimity, repeating the verbal food that nourished him. “Your husband’s a very intelligent man but he’s from another day. I know that and pay no attention. You have to be young to keep up with a time that struggles to be young, as José Antonio always says. You’re right about one thing, Ignacio, and it’s that ideas change just like clothes. There are people who still wear an old-fashioned frock coat, a beard, high shoes, a pince-nez. They’re still in the days of the horse and carriage and don’t know we’re in the age of the automobile and the airplane. I don’t blame you, you’re from a different time. We’re in the twentieth century—”

“Extraordinary.” Ignacio Abel stood, sending away with an authoritarian gesture the maid who was carrying in the dessert tray. “Now it’ll turn out I’m old-fashioned and you’re progressive. This is extraordinary.”

“Old-fashioned or progressive, left or right, they’re all anachronistic concepts, brother-in-law. You’re either with youth or with age, with what’s born or what dies, with strength or with weakness.”

“Uniforms are a fairly old-fashioned style.”

“What’s old are uniforms with decorations and crests, the ones used to indicate the privileges of powerful men! Now our uniform stresses equality, over and above individualistic stupidities and effeminacies. The worker’s shirt, the loose, practical clothing of the athlete, the pride of everyone beating with the same heart!”

“And the pistols?”

“To defend ourselves, brother-in-law, because we’d be peaceful people if they hadn’t declared war on us. We salute with an open hand, not with a clenched fist. An open hand for everyone, because we don’t believe in parties or classes. The boys who’d go out to sell our newspapers were shot down by the Communists until we learned to shoot too. This degenerate government attacks our headquarters and locks up Falangists while it lets the red militias do whatever they please.”

“The government of the Republic obeys the law and puts criminals and killers in prison.”

“The government of the Republic is a Marxist puppet.”

Suddenly Ignacio Abel saw the inanity of the conversation in which he’d made himself an accessory with unnecessary vehemence. Just listening to the gibberish was degrading. He saw his brother-in-law not as a Fascist but as what he’d always seemed, an idiot. An idiot in a blue shirt, black leather straps, and absurd riding boots, besotted by cheap newspaper lyricism, impassioned barracks harangues, and pieces of poetic prose badly translated from German or Italian. An idiot who perhaps at heart wasn’t a bad person, who felt real affection for his sister, his niece and nephew, for whom he always brought presents, comic books about war or cowboys for the boy, princesses for the girl, a ball, a doll that cried when you bent it, who’d sat them on his knees to tell them stories when they were little and been eager to help when one of them fell sick. Or perhaps he really was a thug, in which case Ignacio Abel made the mistake of not taking him seriously.

And now the great idiot or great thug was holding his son’s arms from behind and teaching him to aim with a pistol, bigger and more obscene in his delicate hands, almost translucent like the skin at his temples, hands that didn’t have the strength to hold a soccer ball or grasp the climbing rope in gym class, hands that when Miguel was born were as fragile and soft as a gecko’s feet. Watching his weak chest rise and fall on feverish nights, he’d feared his son had pneumonia or tuberculosis. Stronger boys hit him in the schoolyard of the Institute School when his sister wasn’t around to defend him. So awkward in sports, so likely to come home from excursions with sunstroke or bruises from falling, because he was clumsy or because other children pushed him and he didn’t know how to defend himself; living in the clouds, so dependent on Lita, with whom he shared games and movie magazines when he should have been with boys his own age, too fond of spending time with the maids, listening to the plebeian songs they sang at top volume. He didn’t acknowledge to himself the degree to which this disapproval tarnished his feelings for his son. He disliked the boy’s weakness and at the same time felt an urgent need to protect him; he watched him on the sly, alarmed by something he couldn’t define. Miguel felt his father’s presence, and knowing he was being observed made him all the more insecure and awkward, or produced in him an outburst of audacity or capriciousness that seemed calculated to make his father lose patience. And so instead of lowering the pistol when he saw him appear in the mirror or handing it to his uncle to avoid disaster, Miguel aimed it at his father, and a moment later took a step back and cowered, trembling, closed his eyes, feeling the blow of the slap that hadn’t yet struck his pale face, instantly red, burning as if in a sudden attack of fever.

Watching his son’s face and his brother-in-law’s so close together, Ignacio Abel saw a resemblance between them. Not just some features, sketched in the boy and crudely visible in the adult, but a deeper resemblance, perhaps the secret weakness that would explain their resentment of him, the demanding father and disdainful brother-in-law, mother’s spouse, sister’s spouse, an intruder who couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t want Miguel to grow up resembling his uncle, having the same aquiline curve in his nose, the same scant, curly down on his upper lip, the same stare between sly and myopic, as if a part of him had retreated deep inside. Víctor took the pistol from the boy and said to Ignacio Abel, “Come on, man, don’t be like that, we were only playing.” Ignacio felt the rage growing in him, uncontrolled and yet as cold as the palms of his hands. He was going to slap his son, and while part of him was ashamed, another part moved ahead, animated by the boy’s fear, offended by his instinctive gesture of seeking refuge in his uncle, turning to Víctor to feel protected from his own father. He was aware of the physical impulse that sustained and propelled his rage but did nothing to contain it, and his son’s evident weakness, the tremor of his wet lower lip, instead of dissuading him, angered him more. Miguel took a step or two back, looking at his uncle, who’d moved away after placing the pistol in his shoulder holster and buttoning his jacket, as if to make it more invisible, intimidated or perhaps sensing that the more the boy wanted to take refuge in him, the greater his father’s rage would be. “Come on, man,” he repeated, but with a curt gesture Ignacio Abel silenced him, and Víctor moved to one side, all his manliness gone, fearful, in spite of his boots and leather straps and the pistol in its leather holster, that the punishment would fall on him as well.

He looked Miguel in the eye as the boy backed into the closet mirror where a few seconds earlier he’d seen himself as a movie hero. At what moment does one reach the point of no return, the hateful thing that can no longer be erased? Towering over his son, he raised his right hand, thought about leaving the room, slamming the door, and joining the obnoxious family celebration, perhaps shouting at his brother-in-law, demanding that if he ever wanted to set foot in his house again it would have to be without a pistol and a blue shirt. But that’s not what he did. He didn’t spare himself the future shame or indignity of hiding from Judith Biely the kind of act she wouldn’t have forgiven, that would have made her see in him the shadow of someone she didn’t know. His hand came down, cutting through the air, open and violent, as heavy as a weapon, the palm much wider and harder than the boy’s face. He hit him noticing the sting on his palm and the flush of heat on his face. His son’s face turned to the wall. The boy’s eyes filled with tears, looked up at him from below, as if from the interior of a burrow, fear replaced by resentment, his cheek scarlet, a trickle of urine rolling down one of his thin legs. As Ignacio Abel turned to leave the room, he saw his daughter standing motionless by the door where she kept her school notebooks. She had seen it all.