In the Night of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

the postcard of the Empire State Building with a zeppelin moored to the top, which he forgot to slip into one of the letterboxes at the station, each bearing the name of a country in gold letters. He notices now, as he crosses his legs, how dirty and cracked his shoes are, the soles still carrying dust from the streets of Madrid, the hand-sewn soles that are wearing out, just like the crease in his trousers, and his shirt cuffs. The most interesting part of a construction begins when it is finished, said the smiling engineer Torroja, the man responsible for reviewing the structural calculations for the buildings at University City and who had designed a bridge with tall narrow arches like those in a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico. The action of time, the pull of gravity, the forces that continue to interact among themselves in the precarious equilibrium generally called stability or firmness, which in reality has no more substance than a house of cards and sooner or later will succumb to its own internal laws—Torroja would say, aiding the enumeration with his fingers, or a natural catastrophe, a flood or an earthquake, or the human enthusiasm for destruction. The door at the rear of the car opens and a young blond woman appears, slim, hatless, looking for someone, an expression of urgency on her face, as if she had to get off the train before it started moving in less than a minute. For a moment, barely the lapse between two heartbeats, Abel recognizes Judith Biely, re-creates with the precision of a drawing what he didn’t know had remained intact in his memory, what exists and is erased without a trace in the presence of an unknown woman who doesn’t resemble her at all: the oval of her face, her eyebrows, her lips, her curly hair, a light chestnut color, the red nail polish, her broad shoulders, like those of a swimmer or a mannequin in a display window.

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    T HE MIRACLE OF such a sight ends suddenly. That Judith Biely is in the world right now seems as improbable as her appearing in the car of a train about to depart, forcing him to invent the melodrama of her last-minute arrival at the station. He doesn’t remember exactly how long ago she left Madrid, but he has a precise count of the days that have passed since he last saw her. He has walked through the city for four days, traveled on streetcars, subways, and elevated trains, and has never stopped looking for her in each young woman who crossed paths with him or whom he saw from a distance, and the repeated disappointment hasn’t inoculated him against the hallucination of recognizing her. In Union Square he saw a poster announcing an act of solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the glorious struggle of the Spanish people against fascism, and he made his way through the crowd waving placards and banners and singing anthems only in the hope of running into her. From the deck of the ship he saw the towers of the city emerge from the fog like brightly lit cliffs, and aside from fear and vertigo, his only thought was that Judith Biely might be somewhere in that labyrinth. In the innumerable columns of names in the New York telephone directory, he found hers listed three times; he called two of them, annoyed voices he could barely understand telling him he had the wrong number, and the third rang a long time but no one answered. The mind, however, secretes images and fictions just as the glands in the mouth secrete saliva. Judith running past people in the great lobby of Pennsylvania Station, looking for him, thinking she saw him in any middle-aged man in a dark suit, descending the echoing iron steps with gymnastic agility in spite of her high heels and narrow skirt, and arriving on time. And so he looked for her among the passengers on the express trains about to leave Madrid on the night of July 19, a seemingly ordinary night and not a definitive threshold in time, despite the radios blasting at top volume on the lighted, wide-open balconies, and the