In the Night of Time

20

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

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

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

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

“Where do you keep the letters?”

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

“At home or in the office?”

“Where I have them closest to me.”

“Your wife can find them.”

“I always lock the drawer with a key.”

“One day you’ll forget.”

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

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

“I didn’t realize I hadn’t said it.”

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

“You’re my wife.”

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

“You never say her name either.”

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

“Don’t call it my home.”

“There’s nothing else to call it.”

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

“You keep movie tickets too?”

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

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

“I always have the key with me.”

“When she suspects something, she’ll break the lock. Or she won’t have to. She’ll pull the drawer and that day you’ll have forgotten to lock it.”

“I know her very well — she doesn’t suspect anything.”

“You don’t know her. I ask you things about her and you can’t answer. You become uncomfortable.”

“She’s in her world and we’re in ours. We always said there was a barrier between the two.”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“What we had was enough.”

“Only for a while. Now it’s enough for you.”

“You know I want to live with you always.”

“I know that’s what you say. I also know what you don’t do.”

“I’m going to America with you after the summer.”

“You’ve really told your wife and children?”

“You know I have.”

“You’ve told me you have. What if you’re lying?”

“You don’t trust me anymore.”

“I’m getting to know your voice, the way you look when something makes you uneasy. I see your face right now. I see you don’t want to go on with this conversation.”

“I’m going to America with you.”

“What if I don’t want to go back so soon? What if I’d rather stay in Spain a little longer?”

“Spain is becoming a very dangerous place.”

“I still have some money left. I can keep traveling a while longer in Europe.”

“You don’t want to be with me anymore.”

“And will you hide me when you’re at Burton College too? Will I have to wait for you to come and see me in New York?”

“You wanted me to make that trip.”

“And you didn’t?”

“What I want is to be with you. I don’t care where or how.”

“But I do. I care where and how.”

“You said you wouldn’t ask me for anything.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Your feelings have changed.”

“I don’t want to see you in secret. I don’t want to share you with anybody else.”

“You don’t share me.”

“You sleep with Adela every night, not with me.”

“I can’t remember the last time I touched her.”

“It makes me ashamed. It makes me sad for her. Even if she doesn’t know, the sadness I feel for your wife humiliates her.”

“She doesn’t know you exist.”

“She looked at me that day at the Residence and realized something. As soon as she saw me, she didn’t trust me.”

“But we’d just met.”

“It doesn’t matter. A woman in love senses danger.”

“You thought she was in love?”

“I saw how she looked at you while you were giving your talk. I was sitting next to her. I think about it now and can’t believe it. Next to your wife and daughter.”

“She’s less suspicious than you imagine.”

“She saw how you were looking at me. Don’t keep the letters at home. Don’t call me from there.”

“You’ve called me.”

“With a good deal of embarrassment, because I was frightened. Only once.”

“You gave me life that night.”

“But then you went back to your home. We were in bed in Madame Mathilde’s house and I saw you in the mirror looking at your watch.”

“You didn’t say you wanted us to spend the whole night together.”

“I didn’t want you to say no.”

“I wish you’d asked.”

“She knows you’re with me. She’s watching you. Please, burn the letters, hide them somewhere else.”

“I don’t want to be away from them.”

“And what will you do when you finish the semester in America? Will you go back to Madrid, and will I have to wait for you to write to me?”

“There’s no reason to talk about what’s so far away.”

“I don’t want my entire life to depend on you.”

“You knew what mine was like when we met.”

“I didn’t know I’d fall so much in love.”

But before the shame and guilt emerged they knew that paradise was lost, that they’d left it, or stopped deserving a state of grace as remote from their wills as a favorable wind that would have lifted them above the daily accidents and limitations of their lives and now, like wine, had come to an end. Their desire was no less intense but now it had an edge of exasperation. As soon as it was satisfied, it dissolved into solitude, not gratitude, infected not with reluctance but with a secret disappointment, a kind of disrepute. The house of assignation no longer offered its usual sanctuary: like a remembered affront, they saw the bordello extravagance of Madame Mathilde’s room, the wounding vulgarity of the painted paper on the walls, the loose threads in the carpet; they smelled the cheap disinfectant, saw the unclean bathroom behind the Oriental screen partially covered by a manila shawl. They returned from the too-transient days in the house by the sea and Madrid’s June heat was unbreathable, its dry air like the breath of an oven, the immense weariness on suffocating cloudy days, the hostility in the glances of people on the street, sullen bodies sweating inside streetcars. For the first time they both could imagine a future when love would no longer illuminate them. In fleeting moments of lucidity and remorse, they saw each other again as if they’d never met, secretly ashamed of themselves, exhausted by the dejection of excitement sustained without pause for too long. Perhaps they should give themselves breathing space, free themselves for a while from their unhealthy obsession with being together, with writing so many letters and constantly waiting for them to arrive.

The ring of the phone startled him one burning night in June at the end of a day when he’d been overcome by an uneasiness that in retrospect would take on the dubious value of a premonition. The word “accident” was used from the start, but with a strange inflection, something indeterminate it would have been preferable not to say, a suggestion of accusation, of a slightly troubling enigma. “Come right away, Adela’s had an accident.” It was the hostile voice of her ever-vigilant brother, self-appointed guardian of the family honor, endangered by an upstart intruder, the lamentable husband needed to continue the line but always dubious for his ideas and behavior. “She’s out of danger, but it might’ve been very serious.” He didn’t say much more, at first not even what had happened or where he was being asked to go. What mattered was to suggest by his tone of voice and scant information that they, the family, had gathered to help their daughter and sister, and once again the husband not only was irrelevant but also suspect, and so it was advisable to tell him no more than the essentials. That Adela had tripped or slipped and might have died, and they’d taken her to the closest hospital, the tuberculosis sanatorium. The sanatorium where the sudden anguish, the guilt, the appearance of strength so precariously maintained, collapsed all at once because of the seismic jolt of fear. When the telephone rang Ignacio Abel was sitting in his study at the desk with the open drawers he’d forgotten to lock that morning before leaving for work, rushing because of an urgent call, the desk beside the balcony where not a hint of a breeze moved the curtains and through which heat unmoderated by nightfall entered in an unmoving gust. He arrived home when the street lamps were beginning to go on and his daughter, who got up from her desk to greet him when she heard his key in the lock, said she didn’t know where her mother was, but neither of them was alarmed because she might have gone to Mass or to pay a visit or to a meeting of her readers’ club. He went into the living room with Lita and she brought him the paper, which he’d have preferred not to read because of its daily dose of alarming headlines, and especially because of the blank spaces of censored information, the disastrous news, the incompetent opinions. The government denied that health clinics had experienced a rush of sick children, victims of poisoned candies that according to unfounded rumors nuns had been handing out at the doors of some churches in working-class neighborhoods. Men who wished to join construction crews could do so, but were advised that the authorities would not tolerate the slightest violation of the law on the part of armed elements. He took off his jacket and tie and unfastened his sticky shirt collar, reduced by heat and fatigue to an invincible ennui. The boy came from his room and kissed him with that touch of excessive formality he’d been acquiring recently as he grew away from childhood. Perhaps he still felt some rancor because of the slap after the incident with the pistol. He asked his father whether he could help him with his geometry homework. For Ignacio Abel it was a relief to assist his son in matters that involved no emotional tension, when he could be generous with no effort, when he didn’t project too large a shadow over him. Miguel easily felt fearful, incompetent, inferior to his sister, who obtained with ease what was so difficult for him: excellent grades and her father’s visible approval. He kissed the boy and passed a hand distractedly through his hair as he reluctantly opened the paper. “Give me a few minutes and then we’ll look at the notebook in my study.” The daily circle of habits, their comfortable, boring repetition, like the sight of the furniture in the living room, the pictures on the walls and the clock on the mantel; like the entrance of the maid, who came from the kitchen drying her hands on her apron to ask whether he wanted something to drink before supper, the greasy shine of sweat on her face. He’d never have told Judith Biely that in his heart of hearts the routine was not at all oppressive.

“Do you know where the señora has gone?”

“No, señor. She left and didn’t say anything. I didn’t even see her go out.”

“Did she leave a while ago?”

“Yes. The children hadn’t come back from school yet.”

Concern for Adela’s absence filtered weakly into his mind. He was tired, and in reality he was pleased she’d gone out because now he wouldn’t have to make an effort to engage in conversation or watch her for possible signs of unhappiness or suspicion. Through the open balcony came steamy air, heavy with the smell of geraniums and acacia blossoms, along with sounds from the street several floors below, the voices of men in a tavern doorway, car engines and horns, music from a radio, the sonorous texture of Madrid that he liked so much though he rarely heard it, muffled in this neighborhood that was still new, still growing, with wide, straight streets and rows of young trees.

It was nine o’clock and Adela hadn’t returned yet. His son was waiting with his geometry notebook, standing at the door, undecided about attracting his attention. On the way to his study he placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and realized how much he’d grown. He turned on the light and instantly understood why Adela had left without saying anything to anyone and was so late coming home. The desk drawer he usually locked was overturned on the floor. There were envelopes and letters scattered around it, blue sheets densely covered with Judith Biely’s slanted handwriting, photographs, a handful of the most recent, the ones they’d taken of each other on the trip to Cádiz. Brusquely he told the boy to wait outside but noticed he’d seen the same thing his father had and probably understood, with his intuition for the dark areas of his parents’ intimacy and his instinct for alarm and censure, which Ignacio Abel had seen so often in his eyes, attributing to him an astuteness a boy scarcely could possess and that was only a child’s panic at the indecipherable disturbances of adults. He closed the door and examined the details of the disaster, overwhelmed by the eruption of the irreparable. The letters, all of them, from the first, dated last summer; the postcards; the trivial, obscene, equally accusatory details; the envelopes ripped by impatience, the sheets filled with writing and notes and exclamations in the margins, the greedy use of all the space on the paper. And the photos of Judith in Madrid and New York and leaning against a white railing on the deck of a ship: one, on the floor, stepped on, with the mark of a shoe clearly visible on it; another face-down on the desk, among the papers; another two on the floor, near the drawer, as if Adela hadn’t seen them or didn’t consider it necessary to look at them. On the floor, torn in two, was the letter he’d begun to write the night before and quickly put away when Adela came in to say good night. He looked at her standing there and felt embarrassed by his ardor: suddenly it seemed insincere, forced; writing love letters could also be a debilitating task.

He touched his face; he’d turned red. Sweat made his shirt stick to his back; his hands were disagreeably damp. He gathered together the letters and photographs in a haphazard way, returned the drawer to its place, and locked it. In a flash of belated and totally irrelevant lucidity he relived a moment that morning when, as he prepared the papers he had to carry in his briefcase, he’d looked at the drawer and told himself to be sure to lock it before he left and put the tiny key where he always put it, in the small inside pocket of his jacket where he didn’t keep anything else. At times throughout the day he made certain he had the key by patting the lining with automatic caution. The telephone rang and he picked up the receiver with a start: it must be Adela, calling from her father’s house, and he’d have to make the effort to improvise an unlikely explanation, which would worsen the indignity without resolving anything. Before speaking he recognized the voice of his brother-in-law, greeted by the girl on the other telephone, and he said nothing. The guardian brother, knight-errant of the family honor, must be calling to demand an explanation of the affront. His daughter knocked on the door of the study without opening it. “Papá, Uncle Víctor wants to talk to you.”