Free In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina

building future ruins.”
    â€œYou’re lucky, Abel my friend. I like your things very much, the ones I’ve seen in architecture magazines, and the new market on Calle Toledo. Once I was passing by and decided to go in just to appreciate the interior. So new, and already so full of people, with the aromas of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, spices. The things you make are as beautiful as a sculpture and yet also practical and of use to people in their lives. Those vendors endlessly shouting and the women buying enjoy your work without thinking about it. I thought about writing to you that day, but you know sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In my case, you must be thinking, it certainly wasn’t for lack of time.”
    â€œI think you judge yourself too harshly, Moreno.”
    â€œI see things as they are. My eyes are well trained.”
    â€œPhysicists say that the things we think we see don’t resemble in any way the structure of matter. According to Dr. Negrín, Max Planck’s conclusions aren’t far from Plato’s or those of the mystics of our Golden Age. The reality you and I see is a deception of the senses.”
    â€œDo you see Negrín often? He never goes to his old laboratory anymore.”
    â€œDo I see him? Even in my dreams. In fact, my nightmares—the only Spaniard who performs his job to the letter. He’s informed about everything—the last brick we laid, the last tree planted. He calls me at any hour of the day or night, at the office or at home. My children make fun of me. They’ve made up a song about him:
Ring, ring, / Is he in? / Tell him it’s Dr. Negrín.
If he’s traveling and isn’t near a phone, he sends a telegram. Now that he’s discovered the airplane, he has no limits. He lectures me by underwater cable from the Canary Islands at eight in the morning, and at five he comes to my office straight from the airport. He’s always in motion, like one of those particles he talks about so much, because aside from everything else, he’s always reading German scientific journals, just as he did when he was dedicated only to the laboratory. You can know at any given moment where Dr. Negrín is, or his trajectory, but not both things at the same time.”
    Â 
    It was growing late. In the deepening shadow the two voices became increasingly inaudible and at the same time closer, now two silhouettes leaning each toward the other, separated by the table and the fruit bowl. The residual brightness, still beyond the reach of the dim light coming through the window, reflected off the white canvas on the easel, highlighting the few lines sketched in charcoal. Moreno Villa turns on the lamp next to his easy chair—the lamp and end table are relics of his parents’ old house in Málaga—and when the electric light illuminates their faces, it cancels the confidential, slightly ironic tone the voices had been slipping into. Now Ignacio Abel looks at his watch, which he had already furtively consulted once or twice. He has to go; he remembered again that today is San Miguel, and if he hurries he’ll have time to buy something for his son, one of those painted tin airplanes or ocean liners he still likes though he’s not a little boy anymore, perhaps a new electric train, not the kind that imitates the old coal trains but express trains with locomotives as stylized as the prow of a ship or the nose of a plane, or a complete American cowboy outfit, which would require him to buy his daughter an Indian girl’s dress, just to please the boy. She, unlike her brother, is in a hurry not to look like a little girl, but Miguel would like to hold her down hard and keep her from growing, keep her as long as possible in the space of their shared childhood. Ignacio Abel puts his papers and the photographs of traditional Spanish architecture back in his briefcase and shakes Moreno Villa’s hand,