In the Night of Time

18

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? You look rested,” said Negrín, laughing. “In the Madrid of consumptives, you look healthier than a mountain climber.”

But it wasn’t possible to look at someone in the same way when you knew he was carrying a pistol in a holster tight against his left side, glimpsed when his jacket opened after an abrupt gesture, or showing a bulge you might not have noticed if you weren’t certain this well-dressed, ordinary man had a firearm, or held by his belt, crudely thrust between trousers and shirt, or as bulky as a stone in the right pocket of the foreman Eutimio Gómez, next to his tobacco pouch and tinder lighter, or recklessly kept anywhere, the way Dr. Juan Negrín patted his pockets and vest to show Ignacio Abel the small pistol after using a napkin to wipe his broad fingers stained with the juice of langostinos and prawns.

“It’s Czech,” Negrín said, producing a metallic crack as he adjusted something on it with an expert gesture, “the latest model.”

Then he forgot about it, as if it were a cigarette lighter, leaving it on the wet marble table with the tray of shells, the steins of beer, the ashtray, the crumpled napkins; his bulk had quickly occupied all the space, as it did anywhere he happened to be, whether at an office desk or a laboratory counter. Dr. Juan Negrín lived in perpetual physical discord with a world whose meager dimensions didn’t correspond to his formidable breadth, whose rhythms were always unacceptably slow in contrast to his tireless energy. In Negrín’s presence Ignacio Abel always noticed errors of scale, as on a plan or drawing where the proportions of some element have been badly calculated. Enormous overcoats became skimpy if he put them on, well-cut suits were too tight for him, hats that seemed large enough in his hand or hanging on a rack became too small on his head. He stood to receive Ignacio Abel in a private dining room at the Café Lion, and the vaulted ceiling of the cellar became so low he had to stoop; beneath the marble table he had to keep his knees pressed together so his legs would fit. His voice thundered with rich acoustics that demanded more ample spaces. His fingers cracked the shells of prawns with ease. He crisscrossed Madrid — his old laboratory, the Café Lion, the Congress of Deputies, University City — turning vigorously against the reduced dimensions of things, against successive carapaces that limited his movement. He should have lived in a larger country with taller people, wider highways, faster trains, much shorter official ceremonies, more expeditious functionaries, fewer sluggish waiters. He traveled by air whenever he could, more often than not in the diminutive planes of the Spanish Postal Transport Airlines, which presented another challenge to his corpulence. He accumulated job titles and political responsibilities with the same Pantagruelian spirit he brought to ordering trays piled high with shellfish, plates of ham, bottles of wine, steins of beer running over with foam. He called the waiter with two resounding claps and ordered more beer for Ignacio Abel and himself and a platter of fried fish. When the waiter took away the tray of discarded shells and the empty steins, the pistol stood out more clearly on the table, as incongruous and toxic as a scorpion.

“So you want to go away to one of those opulent American universities,” he said, avoiding preambles, the languid waste of time of Spanish circumlocution. “I won’t be the one to stop you.”

“It’s only for a semester. And only with your authorization.”

“You don’t have to pretend with me, Abel. Don’t talk as if you didn’t think much of it. You want out, like anyone with a little common sense. Leave this place for a while, see things from a distance, have your family safe. If only I could. Doing your work well, with the current in your favor instead of having to fight against it. All that, not to mention the small advantage of going outside and not being afraid some visionary will shoot you in the name of the social revolution or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or that you’ll get in the way of a bullet aimed at somebody else.”

“Things will calm down, I imagine.”

“Or not. Or they’ll get worse. Did you hear Prieto’s speech in Cuenca on May 1 on the radio?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Didn’t you read it in the paper?” Negrín laughed out loud. “Abel, I’m afraid that even for an architect your stay in the ivory tower, or on the beach where you got that tan, has lasted too long. Are you sure you didn’t go to Biarritz for a few days with some girlfriend? What Don Indalecio said, aside from many sensible and fairly sad things, is that a country can tolerate everything, including revolution, but not permanent, senseless disorder. Of course, to say this he had to go to Cuenca, and me with him, as if I were his squire, because here in Madrid, as you know, our beloved comrades in the Bolshevik wing of the party would have lynched him. Do you still have your Socialist Party card, Abel?”

“And my dues are paid.”

“Aren’t you tempted to tear it up?”

“And replace it with what?”

“At heart you’re sentimental, just like me. Except you’re much more intelligent and haven’t allowed yourself to be dragged into the vortex where I find myself now and, frankly, don’t know how to get out of. In fact, I don’t know how I got into it. I’m even catching the oratorical fever, come to think of it. I’ve never said the word ‘vortex’ before.”

“You have a political vocation, Don Juan.”

“A political vocation? The only vocation I have is being a scientist, my dear friend. Politics, what they call politics, either exasperates me or bores me to death, no middle ground. Azaña has a political vocation, or Indalecio Prieto, or poor Don Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, whom we threw out of the presidency of the Republic with a kick that most certainly was indecorous. What I like is to see things accomplished—to get things done, as the Americans say, with that pragmatism they have. But here politics is nothing but words, forests of words, hectares of speeches with subordinate clauses. Have you seen how Azaña listens to himself, how he rounds off a paragraph as if he were making a long flourish of the cape in front of a bull? The only thing missing is that from the bleachers in Congress instead of ‘Bravo’ they shout ‘Olé,’ lengthening the vowels a good deal: Oooooleeeeeé. And even so, from time to time Azaña says things of some substance. But what did Don Niceto say in all his kilometric speeches, aside from quoting the classics with an Andalusian ‘s’ instead of a Castilian lisp? And the illustrious Don José Ortega y Gasset, how many afternoons did he put us to sleep in Congress with his flowery prose? Ultimately he became disenchanted with the Republic as well and didn’t offer his services as a deputy again, otherwise I’d have been tempted to go much farther away than you to avoid hearing him. Like Don Miguel de Unamuno, the worst defect Don José Ortega sees in the Republic is his not being named president for life. I watched him speaking in his seat as if he were explaining introductory philosophy to his students. Do you believe one should trust a philosopher who colors his gray hair with cheap dye and makes so great an effort to hide his baldness when he has no chance of success?”

“He also seems to wear lifts in his shoes.”

“As an architect, you notice the structural details! I’ll stay with the ornamentation.”

Negrín could eat and speak at top speed and at the same time guffaw, or acquire a serious frown when he imagined a gloomy future. But that apprehension never discouraged his activism or diminished his energy; instead it excited them. Beside him, Ignacio Abel easily felt guilty of passivity, languor. This man who was an internationally eminent scientist, and at some point would inherit a fortune, had chosen to dedicate his life and talent and his astonishing reserves of energy to improving a harsh, impoverished country where he may never receive any recompense, any show of gratitude. His generosity was undoubtedly mixed with a potent dose of pride, a kind of reagent without which he wouldn’t have acted. As for the vigor of his character, perhaps it was as hereditary and removed from his will as his colossal physical size or the unlimited sexual appetite about which rumors circulated throughout Madrid. Nevertheless, Ignacio Abel found in Negrín a moral conviction that he didn’t possess, a capacity that occasionally struck him as histrionic but essentially seemed much healthier than his own tendency to dissimulate and be reserved, to observe in silence and nourish rancorous irony, with no risk of being refuted and no effect on the reality of things.

“Believe me, what I want is to lock myself away and do research fourteen hours a day in a good laboratory. At the Residence I can’t get myself to go into my own lab for fear I’ll just break down. Or when I go to University City and see you behind the glass door of your office, bending over the drawing board, so absorbed that when I knock on the glass to attract your attention you don’t raise your head… How I envy you, my friend — what a privilege. To do one thing and do it well, with your five senses. Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal used to tell me, with that lugubrious face he had toward the end, shaking his skinny, dead man’s finger as yellow as a wax candle: ‘Negrín, you’re involved in too many things. The man who embraces too much holds very little close.’ He made me angry, of course, but he was absolutely right. Though I was involved in some of those things because of him!”

“But you’ll return to research sooner or later. I don’t think you’ll stay in politics forever.”

“A scientific researcher is like an athlete, Abel my friend. What’s the point of kidding ourselves? He has a few truly splendid years and then nothing, routine. He stops keeping up with the latest publications for a time and he’s out of the competition. Like the boxer who stops training, the athlete who doesn’t run. He gets a potbelly, just like the one I’m getting! Why don’t you finish your beer and we’ll order another round. Don’t you have any vices? It seems Hitler has absolutely none. Did you know he’s a vegetarian and it’s forbidden to smoke in his presence? Here, a politician who doesn’t smoke and have a rich deep cough is considered a fag. Speaking of Hitler, would you like to know the secret of his success, according to Madariaga, our only international expert? His secret is the airplane. Other candidates traveled by train, at most by car. The result was that in the election campaign they are nowhere to be seen. Hitler always traveled by plane, so he had time to be everywhere. The airplane, the radio, and the movie projector have achieved the miracle of omnipresence. Meanwhile our poor President Azaña turns pale and holds on to his seat if his official car goes faster than thirty kilometers an hour, and when he climbs the steps to an airplane, he begins to tremble so much his aide has to push him up. The speed of Spanish politics is that of a mule cart. So you tell me what’s to be done. Extend electrification, as suggested by Comrade Lenin, so admired now in broad sectors of our party!”

“Do you think the Leninism of Largo Caballero and his people is serious?”

“Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. The most frivolous, most absurd idea becomes real if a few fools believe it and are prepared to take action. Can anyone take seriously calling Largo Caballero the Spanish Lenin? He does. And the fifth-rate literati with sour café-con-leche breath who fill their heads with Marxist fantasies. And, of course, fearful Catholics who listen to the awful speeches he gives in bullrings about the impending proletarian revolution—”

“Written by individuals who are much more astute than he is.”

“And more sinister too, don’t forget. Think of the nonsense he said, or they had him say, during the campaign: if the right won, civil war would be inevitable… Largo has become a supporter of the dictatorship of the proletariat because they’ve made him believe that when it comes, he’ll be the dictator. All empty talk, of course. But empty talk that in no way favors our cause and serves only to further inflame our enemies. Believe me, they live in a delusion, a world of fantasy. They go to the Sierra on Sundays to shoot a few bullets with old pistols and sing ‘The Internationale,’ and they imagine they’ve formed the Red Army, and whenever they feel like it they’ll seize power by storm. The Winter Palace. Or El Pardo Palace, where the president of the Republic hasn’t had time to go for summer vacation, given how calm things are around here… They don’t learn anything. They didn’t learn anything from the disaster of the 1934 uprising. Their heads are filled with propaganda posters and Soviet films. And the few of us who dare contradict them and ask for a little good sense are viewed as worse than Fascists. Do you see this small pistol that inspires so little confidence? Last week I drove Prieto in my car to a meeting in Ecija. A horrible road, as you can imagine, African heat, lots of flies, Prieto and I so fat we barely fit in the car, and behind us an old bus with a gang of armed boys, just in case. The meeting began all right, but after a few minutes they were booing us.”

“In the bullring?”

“Where else, Abel? You’re a monomaniac about the bulls.”

“Architecture determines people’s moods, Don Juan. Look at those stadiums where Hitler gives his speeches. In a bullring the sun softens brains and the public develops its instinct for seeing blood and demanding that ears be cut off.”

“I see you’re a real determinist… The fact is, we had to stop the meeting and take refuge in the infirmary to keep our dear comrades from lynching us. When we were leaving, a mob with sticks and stones surrounded us, calling us all kinds of names and shouting ‘Long live’s for Russia and communism. A crowd of our young people mixed with members of the Communist Youth groups, whom they’ve joined now, to the great joy of the weakest minds in our party. Believe it or not, I had to fire into the air so our comrades would let us get away, fleeing for our lives along those roads. If the Civil Guard hadn’t helped us, they’d have finished us off. No need to stress the historic irony.”

Negrín drained his beer, wiping away the foam with a broad sweep of his arm, then banging the stein down on the marble tabletop, next to the tiny pistol. The mocking expression was still on his face when the look in his eyes changed abruptly, along with his conversation, or the thread of his monologue.

“They hate us, Abel my friend. I’m not surprised you want to leave. They hate you and me. They hate us inside and outside the party. The reactionaries who can’t get over losing the February elections hate us, and so do many we thought were our people because they supported the Popular Front. They hate those of us who don’t believe that demolishing the current world will make a better one possible, or that destruction and assassination can bring justice. It isn’t a question of ideas, as some think on our side and the other side. You and I know that abstract ideas don’t amount to much in practical life. In each case we face specific problems, and we don’t resolve them with fuzzy ideas but with knowledge and experience. I in my laboratory, you at your drawing board. If we come down from the stratosphere of ideas, things are fairly clear. What’s needed to keep a building from falling down? What do our compatriots need? You don’t have to do more than go out to the sidewalk and look at the people going by. They need to be better fed. They need better shoes. They need to drink more milk as children so they don’t lose their teeth. They need better hygiene, and they need to bring fewer children into the world. They need good schools and jobs with decent pay, and affordable heat in winter. Would it be so difficult to achieve a rational organization of the country to facilitate all that? Once everybody eats every day, and there’s electricity and clean running water, I say that would be the moment to begin talking about the classless society, or the glories of the Spanish race, or Esperanto, or eternal life, or whatever you like. Notice I’m not talking about socialism or emancipation or the end of man’s exploitation of man. I make no professions of faith, and I don’t believe you do either. I don’t see much difference between making a pilgrimage to Moscow or Mecca or the Vatican or Lourdes. What bothers the religious believer most is not the believer in another religion, not the atheist, but someone worse, the skeptic, the person who’s lukewarm. Have you noticed that in speeches and editorials, the word ‘neutral’ has been transformed into an insult? Well, of course I’m neutral, though from time to time the blood does rush to my head. I don’t want to be burned, and I don’t want anybody or anything burned either. We had enough bonfires with the Holy Inquisition. Now I see many people who say they’ve lost faith in the Republic. Faith in the Republic! As if they’d prayed to a saint or a virgin asking for a miracle that hasn’t been granted. They pray to the Popular Front to bring not only amnesty but agrarian reform, communism, happiness on earth, and because a few months have passed since the elections and there’s been no miracle, they lose faith and want to do away with the legality of the Republic, as if they wanted to throw the font at the saint who didn’t bring them rain after their prayers. Not to mention those others who are involved in something more than prayers and uprisings. Praying to God, not sparing the rod. There they are, conspiring more brazenly than ever, in the view of everyone except the government, which acts as if it hasn’t heard a thing. Rich young monarchists go to Rome for the pope’s blessing, pay their respects to His Majesty Don Alfonso XIII, then cash the check Mussolini gives them to buy weapons. Ready for the reconquest of Spain, as they put it. Insane. Furious because the Republic has expropriated a couple of barren estates or doesn’t let them preach in the public schools or permits a man and a woman who’ve spent their lives hating each other to go their separate ways. Enraged because this poor Republic that doesn’t have enough to pay teachers’ salaries has retired on full pay all the thousands of officers who lazed around their barracks and thought it a good idea to apply for a pension, and it asked for nothing in exchange, not even an oath of loyalty. Do you know why I had to buy this pistol and why that man you see there looking so bored and chewing on a toothpick has to accompany me? Let me guess what you’re thinking. It isn’t that the pistol and the bodyguard look as if they offer much security — why kid ourselves. Though Jiménez de Asúa’s escort saved his life… But this is the country we have, my friend, and it doesn’t give much of itself for good or for ill. Half of Spain hasn’t gone past feudalism, and our comrades who write for Claridad want to do away with a bourgeoisie that barely exists. Even the conspiracies are of little account, my dear Abel; they’re the hooliganism of rich boys who can’t keep a secret. There’s a girl, a student of mine, not brilliant but very diligent, who was doing research with me in the laboratory before I lost my head completely and left everything to get involved in politics. This girl, modern but a little awkward, had a fairly ordinary fiancé who came to pick her up every afternoon at the Residence and greeted me courteously, one of those men who aspire to being a registrar or a notary and out of sheer listlessness end up having to spend several years in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Sierra. Nothing to object to. As soon as they were formally engaged, she left the laboratory because it wouldn’t be proper if a señorita already spoken for, as they say in those families, were to continue working in a place filled with men. Instead of biochemistry, where she could have done something worthwhile over the years, she would no doubt dedicate her efforts to bearing children and saying rosaries in the stupor of the province where they’d send her husband when he finally regained enough strength to sit for his examinations. I saw her from time to time after that, and she never forgot to send a card for my saint’s day or greetings at Christmas. On this the day of your saint I wish you and your loved ones every happiness and include you in my prayers, the poor thing wrote to me last year. But not long ago she called one night, her voice shaking as if she were afraid someone might hear her. I asked if anything was wrong and she said no, not with her, but she had to see me urgently and please don’t tell anyone she’d called. She came to my house the next morning, Sunday, before Mass, with the little veil on her head, more awkward than when she wore the white coat in the laboratory, not daring to look me in the eye. I thought she must be pregnant and had come to ask for help in getting a secret abortion. And do you know what she wanted to tell me?”

Negrín took a long drink of beer, and this time he wiped away the foam with a handkerchief that he then passed over his broad, sweaty brow. The police escort, more erect now, nodded from a distance at his explanations, conscious of his role, chewing on the toothpick.

“That her fiancé, in addition to caring for his lungs and studying for the profession of notary or registrar, had formed a Falangist shock troop with some friends and they were planning to assassinate me. ‘Everything anticipated,’ the poor girl said to me with that thin little voice that barely left her body, like her voice when she had to answer a question on an examination: the day, the time, the place, the weapons they would use, the getaway car, just as they’d seen it in the movies. Political ideas are more dangerous when they’re mixed up with the foolishness of movies. They planned to kill me right here, at the door of the café, on the sidewalk of Calle de Alcalá. Then this detail: they intended to let me eat supper first.”

“Have they been arrested?”

“How could I accuse them without hurting her?” Negrín guffawed. “Perhaps they realized I carried a pistol or had begun to enjoy the company of this good friend who’s now my guardian angel. Or maybe they got bored or were afraid to move from words to deeds.”

“And what happened to your student?”

“You’re not going to believe this. The next day she called again, speaking in a thread of a voice, in tears, ‘torn between conflicting feelings,’ as they say in the women’s magazines. ‘My dear Dr. Negrín, for the sake of what you hold dear, forget what I told you yesterday. They’re nothing but boys’ childish fantasies.’ Her fiancé in reality was a good person, incapable of hurting a fly. He didn’t even have a pistol, and besides, he was sick, because it seems the examinations are at the beginning of the summer, and with so much memorization of a gigantic list of topics, he didn’t take care of himself and suffered a slight relapse, so he may have to go back to the sanatorium and not sit for examinations this year. A drama more Spanish than those of Calderón. Worse yet, than those of Don Jacinto Benavente.”

“You’re too trusting.”

“What shall I do? Not leave the house? Stay shut away like Azaña since he’s been president of the Republic, taking walks in the gardens of El Pardo and thinking about what he’ll write in the journal they say he’s keeping before he goes to bed? I need people and movement, my dear Abel. I need to walk to the café from the Congress, so I’m hungrier and thirstier and enjoy the food and beer all the more. I’ve already had another and you’ve barely tasted yours. Is it true you have no vices?”

Negrín leaned his elbows on the table, and extending the thick fingers of one hand, he counted with the index finger of the other, close to Ignacio Abel and looking at him with an ironic stare that made him uncomfortable.

“You don’t smoke. That seems fine. As a cardiologist, I have no objection. You practically don’t drink. You don’t like bullfights. Good food is not your downfall, as it is mine. You don’t look as if you ever go to whores… Don’t you have a voluptuous mistress hidden away somewhere?”

Perhaps Negrín did know, as irrepressibly fond of gossip about other people’s vices as he was of food or women or great political operations. Perhaps he’d heard rumors and therefore from the beginning had worn a half-smile, suspecting that beneath his intention to go to a foreign university, Ignacio Abel was hiding not only the urgency of fleeing the disasters of Spain but a less admissible desire, a passion that gave the lie to his honorable air, his sober appearance of bourgeois, rather puritanical dignity. For a moment Ignacio Abel, examined so intently by Negrín’s eyes, was afraid he’d blush, felt the heat rising from the base of his neck, oppressed by the knot in his tie. He imagined Negrín’s sonorous laugh, his pleasure in a human weakness that would make his less exceptional. But fortunately Negrín had finished his beer and suddenly was in a hurry. He put the pistol in his pocket, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, consulted his watch, and called the waiter with two loud claps.

“Count on me for whatever you need, Abel,” he said as they were saying goodbye at the café entrance, and he looked up and down the street with rapid caution. “If you like, I’ll make sure they give you the passport and your American visa right away. Leave as soon as you can, and don’t hurry back.”

He watched Negrín cross Calle de Alcalá, his broad shoulders standing out above the heads of other people, the light summer jacket tight at the sides, advancing with great strides through the traffic, not waiting for the officer’s signal to pedestrians, walking so fast that his police escort was left behind.