In the Night of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

smugglers, and the strident voices that sang in them, irritated Ignacio Abel less than the fact that his son, Miguel, at the age of twelve, adored them too. The first time he saw her, her presence had been announced by the music that radiated from her as naturally as her voice or the shine of her hair or the fragrance, between sportive and rustic, of the cologne she wore. One afternoon at the end of September, Ignacio Abel entered the auditorium of the Student Residence looking for Moreno Villa, and a woman with her back to him was playing the piano and singing quietly to herself in the empty hall, flooded by the reddish-gold light of sunset that would remain intact in his memory like a drop of amber, the precise light of that late afternoon on September 29.
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    It feels like yesterday, but so much time has gone by. He knows now that personal identity is too fragile a tower to stand on its own without witnesses to certify it or glances to acknowledge it. The memories of what matters to him most are as distant as if they belonged to another man. The face in the passport is almost a stranger’s; the one he is used to seeing now in the mirror, Judith Biely or his children would barely recognize. In Madrid he saw the faces of people he thought he knew well transformed overnight into the faces of executioners or prophets or fugitives or cattle brought to the slaughter; faces entirely occupied by mouths shouting in euphoria or panic; faces of the dead barely recognizable, half converted into red pulp by a rifle bullet; waxen faces deciding on life and death behind a table lit by a lamp while rapid fingers type lists of names. Like the face of someone in the glare of headlights moments before being murdered, or falling gravely wounded, twisting in the throes of death until a pistol placed at the back of his neck ends the misery. Death in Madrid is sometimes a sudden explosion of gunfire and at other times a slow procedure requiring documents written in administrative prose and typed with several carbon copies and legalized with rubber stamps. As he reminisces about the day a little over a year ago when he first saw Judith there’s almost no feeling of loss, because what’s lost has ceased to exist as completely as the man who might have longed for it. There is instead a scrupulous striving for exactitude, the desire to leave a mark through the effort to imagine a world that’s been erased, leaving behind few material traces, so fragile they too are destined for a swift disappearance. But he isn’t satisfied with his attempts to restore that moment to its authenticity, stripping away the additions and superimpositions of memory, like the restorer who cleans a fresco with delicate patience to bring back the splendor of its original colors. He wants to relive the steps that led him to an encounter that might not have happened, to reconstruct step by step that entire afternoon, the prelude, the hours that brought him to this point in his life.
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    He sees himself as if in a snapshot, frozen in time, as I saw him appearing in the crowd in Pennsylvania Station, or as I see him now, easier to grasp because he’s motionless, leaning back in his seat as the train begins to move, exhausted, relieved, still wearing his raincoat, his hat on his lap, his suitcase on the seat beside him, the signs of deterioration visible to an attentive eye, the knot in his tie crooked, his shirt collar worn and a little dark because he perspired on the way to the station, more out of fear of missing the train than from the heat on a sunny October day, its clean golden light looking remarkably like the light in Madrid. When he reaches Rhineberg Station, Professor Stevens, who’ll be waiting for him on the platform and who met him the year before in his office in University City, will be amazed at the change he sees in him and will attribute it, out of compassion, to war, while also feeling a certain displeasure, an impulse of